LONDON — AgustaWestland has flown the first production AW189 helicopter in Italy. The eight-ton aircraft — ultimately destined for launch customer Bristow — took to the air at the company’s Vergiate facility on Oct. 10. The aircraft is still pending type certification, which is expected soon following what the company called a “milestone” AW189 board meeting held in Germany in late September.
The Afghan Air Force (AAF) has taken delivery of its first two C-130 Hercules aircraft as the fledgling air arm rebuilds its airlift capability. Afghanistan becomes the 70th country to operate the C-130 following the formal delivery of the two former U.S. Air Force aircraft on Oct. 9 at Kabul International Airport. The air arm is due to take delivery of another two C-130Hs in 2014.
Engineers at Lockheed Martin and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are downloading data from NASA’s Juno probe after the $1.1 billion spacecraft put itself into safe mode during a close Earth flyby designed to sling it toward Jupiter.
The head of Boeing’s defense and space unit thinks the true negative effects of sequestration on the aerospace and defense industry have yet to be felt, and will only get worse over time.
In what senior Obama administration officials call a “recalibration” of the relationship between Washington and Cairo, the White House is halting deliveries of Boeing Apache attack helicopters and Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Egypt and maintaining an earlier hold on the country’s orders of Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 52s. Also on hold are deliveries of M1A1 tanks made by General Dynamics.
PARIS — Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has announced the appointment of Deputy Defense Minister Oleg Ostapenko to replace Vladimir Popovkin as head of Russian space agency Roscosmos. The Oct. 10 announcement comes as Moscow reviews proposals to centralize oversight of its space industry in an effort to curb government waste and restore confidence in the nation’s space program following a spate of spacecraft and launch vehicle failures in recent years (AWIN First, Oct. 9).
CARTER DEPARTS: Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter will step down on Dec. 4, leaving the Pentagon after four and a half years. Carter left Harvard at the start of President Barack Obama’s first term to serve as the Pentagon’s top acquisition official under Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In 2011, he was promoted to become the second-highest ranking civilian in the Defense Department under Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In a statement, his third boss, Chuck Hagel, says Carter will help ensure a smooth transition: “The Department will miss him. I will miss him.”
YOUNG RETIRING: Rep. Bill Young (R-Fla.), a powerhouse on military spending issues in Congress, will not seek re-election in 2014, he told the Tampa Bay Times. Young, 82, now the chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, led the full committee from 1999 to 2005. As a leader on defense spending in the post-9/11 era, he helped pay to equip troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan while trying to modernize the military. But the environment changed dramatically in 2010, when Congress passed bans on earmarks. Budgets have only tightened since then.
As the U.S. Navy gets ready to christen the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer on Oct. 19, the service and contractors are scrutinizing the program for lessons they can use to help shape other vessel programs. The futuristic Zumwalt has been a complex shipbuilding effort, requiring the choreography of the Navy and three different major contractors: Raytheon for many of the ship systems and integration; General Dynamics Bath Iron Works for the hull; and Huntington Ingalls Industries for the composite deckhouse.
As the U.S. Navy prepares to christen its newly designed DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer, questions continue to haunt the service’s long-term destroyer strategy. As a recent Congressional Research Service report highlights, the most immediate threat to the Navy destroyer appears to be sequestration.
TEL AVIV — With advanced avionics and mission systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) claims its 1970s-era delta-winged fighter, the Kfir, could rank in the same class of contemporary “fourth generation” fighter jets. The company can deliver up to 50 of the Mach 2+ Kfirs, configured to the newest “Block 60” standard, using airframes retired from IAF service in the 1990s, according to IAI officials. These aircraft were mothballed in the southern Negev desert and are in good condition for refurbishment.
MARS SIM: The Mars Society is looking for six volunteers to participate as members of the crew of the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) during a year-long simulation of a human Mars expedition set to take place in northern Canada starting in August 2014. The crew will conduct a sustained program of field exploration on Devon Island, 900 mi. from the North Pole, while operating under many of the same constraints that will be faced by explorers on an actual human Mars mission, according to the Mars Society.
LONDON — With ScanEagle chosen for its anti-piracy mission, the U.K. is now examining unmanned rotary-wing options. The U.K. Royal Navy is widening its focus on the potential of shipborne UAVs. While much of its attention has been on the development of a carrier strike capability with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and two new aircraft carriers, commanders are eager to broaden the intelligence-gathering capability of their surface fleet.
PARIS — Moscow is reviewing a proposal to centralize its space industry in an effort to curb government waste and restore confidence in Russia’s space program following a spate of launch vehicle failures in recent years. The proposal was unveiled by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin in a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, during which Rogozin said a new state entity will be formed to centralize oversight of Russian production plants, leaving Russian space agency Roscosmos to serve as system integrator and procurement authority.
Swiss Space Systems (S3), a new commercial space company based in Payerne, Switzerland, will use the planned Colorado spaceport near Denver as the North American base for its air-launched Soar suborbital spaceplane. Under a preliminary agreement announced Oct. 8, Spaceport Colorado will be the U.S. home to S3’s converted A300, which will conduct dorsal launches of the Soar to deliver small satellites to orbit.
Just as the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence community and their panoply of contractors were beginning to figure out how to live under long-term budget cuts known as sequestration, now come growing fears that sequestration spending levels will be the ceiling, and not floor, for future spending.
