EADS Innovation Works — the European giant’s research and technology arm — is exploring a concept for a twin-hulled tropospheric airship capable of staying aloft for 40 days. EADS says it has completed initial definition of the Tropospheric Airship, and is “now seeking partners for follow-on work that could lead to flight test of a first (manned) demonstrator in three years.”
ICBM REPORT: With nuclear warhead reductions now clearly up for discussion in Washington and Moscow after President Barack Obama’s Brandenburg Gate speech last week, contractors and supporters of delivery platforms will be increasingly trying to glean the fallout for their favorite bombers, submarines or intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). And a pending report from congressional auditors may feed the conversation.
One of the biggest challenges facing the U.S. in its Asia-Pacific military resources shift is gaining safer entry into undersea realms ruled by enemy submarines. The Pentagon and its regional allies honed their antisubmarine warfare (ASW) skills earlier this month during the exercise Pacific Bond 2013 near the Marianas Island chain.
While most of the recent focus in the Asia-Pacific has centered on China’s aircraft carrier development or the deployment of the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) to Singapore, some of the real regional investment is in the more midrange amphibious ship fleets and their mobile ability to launch fixed-wing aircraft.
The Defense Department says it plans to take steps to better employ the under-used Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) as the nation transitions from a wartime mind-set.
The U.S. Army has conducted a series of flights with a fly-by-wire helicopter testbed to demonstrate autonomous operation using a scanning laser radar (ladar) to detect and avoid terrain and obstacles. The flights demonstrated the helicopter’s ability to navigate and exit canyons, detect and avoid aircraft and wires, and select a safe landing area using a capability called terrain-aware autonomy.
Even as the U.S. Navy looks to mate its first full-fledged mission module payload with an operationally deployed Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) hull, the service is looking to develop an assortment of other packages to further enhance the ships’ capabilities. LCS is designed to deploy with replaceable modules tailored to specific missions that are meant to be switched out with relative ease as needed. The three main planned LCS mission modules cover countermine, antisubmarine and surface-warfare missions.
The U.S. Army’s aviation brigades are spared in the service’s initial force structure reductions of 80,000 soldiers. The reductions would allow the Army to meet the current national security strategy and do not account for across-the-board budget cuts, says Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno. “If full sequestration continues, we’ll have to take a look at aviation brigades,” Odierno says. “They’ll probably reduce.”
LONDON — The U.K. is claiming second place in the league of defense exporters after achieving £8.8 billion in exports in 2012. Figures released by U.K. Trade & Investment’s Defense and Security Organization (UKTI DSO) show that exports rose in 2012 by 62% from 2011. The agency says that the U.K. is maintaining its position as the second largest defense exporter after the U.S. Combined defense and security exports rose to £11.5 billion ($18 billion) in 2012, up from £8 billion in 2011.
HOUSTON — Celestis, Inc., the post-cremation memorial spaceflight company, is offering to send a small sample of a loved one’s ashes into deep space in November 2014, accompanying a solar-sail mission flying as a secondary payload to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Deep Space Climate Observatory (Dscovr). Planned for launch from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Dscovr will head for the Earth-Sun L-1 Lagrangian point, where the NOAA spacecraft will serve as a solar weather sentry.
NEW DELHI — India is expected to expedite the purchase of six additional C-130J airlifters and 15 Boeing Chinook CH-47F tandem-rotor helicopters, in the wake of flooding and landslides that have highlighted the need for such assets. “The ongoing rescue efforts in northern India, where at least 9,400 people remain stranded following floods and landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains, have emphasized the need for more of such aircraft and heavy-lift helos,” an Indian air force official says.
FIGHT BREWING: Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), a leading minority member of the Armed Services and Budget committees, among others, is forecasting a Senate floor battle over whether President Barack Obama can or should be allowed to pursue his call for further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal and negotiations with Russia. “We’ll have a dispute when we talk about Russia over the power of the president to reduce nuclear weapons,” he said June 20.
The second Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-2) had to cut short a June 21 underway because of a “minor engineering disruption,” U.S. Navy officials say, but was able to get back to sea June 24. The disruption occurred very shortly after the USS Independence started to get under way in San Diego, officials say. The ship dropped anchor for a short period of time before returning to the naval base. “The ship had a seawater cooling casualty resulting in one of the two online diesel generators tripping,” Navy officials say.
NEW DELHI — India’s Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) has joined with French aerospace company Sagem to manufacture automatic flight-control systems and sensors. HAL entered into a contract with Sagem, a unit of the Safran Group, at the Paris air show. The pact involves technology transfer to set up the production facility for the systems and sensors at its Hyderabad division in southern India, a HAL spokesman says.
PARIS — Concerns over the intellectual property (IP) rights of its X3 high-speed technology helped to sway Eurocopter and EADS North America (EADS NA) to withdraw from the U.S. Army’s Joint Multi-Role advanced-rotorcraft technology demonstration program.
