SINGAPORE — Malaysia has become a key market for Swiss aerospace and defense conglomerate Ruag Aviation. Industry executives familiar with the situation say Ruag has just established a Kuala Lumpur office headed by David Jones, previously Southeast Asia sales director for commercial aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul firm SR Technics, which also is headquartered in Switzerland. Jones officially started with Ruag on April 1.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian and South African naval officials plan to define requirements for a cooperative surface-to-air missile program. The move would be the latest in an expanding relationship between the two countries in the guided-missile sector. The project would be built on the Denel Dynamics Umkhonto-IR short-range air defense system. But the new missile would have a much longer range and effectively represent an entirely new class of weapon, an industry official said during the LAAD Defense & Security exhibition.
RETIREMENT HOMES: NASA has chosen to place the three retiring space shuttles on permanent display at museums in Florida, California and Virginia. Atlantis, which will perform the fleet’s final mission, will remain in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center. Endeavour, which is slated for its final liftoff on April 29, is slated to go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The oldest orbiter, Discovery, will go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.
POSEIDON’S ADVENTURE: The U.S. Navy’s P-8A Poseidon multimission patrol aircraft will be the first of the service’s airborne weapons systems to undergo a new Support System Design Review Initiative. The Navy is trying to develop and implement a formal design review construct “to ensure that all aspects of the support system are appropriately designed, integrated, testable and sustainable.” says Rear Adm. Timothy Matthews, commander of the service’s Fleet Readiness Centers, speaking at Aviation Week’s MRO Military conference in Miami.
LONDON — The Norwegian government is asking parliament to approve additional funding for the Joint Strike Missile (JSM) that would see the project through its critical design review. The stealthy JSM is an evolution of the Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile, now in production with design changes to allow internal carriage in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s bomb bay.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Pentagon’s newly crafted Defense Weather Satellite System (DWSS) is moving forward after a tumultuous year since its predecessor, the tri-agency National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (Npoess), was canceled.
TORNADO UPGRADE: With the Tornado GR4 fleet now forming the backbone of the Royal Air Force’s ground attack capability, the U.K. Defense Ministry has decided to fund an urgent operational need for a helmet-mounted cueing system. The device is being adapted from the Harrier GR9, which should help to limit development time and effort. BAE Systems says it has received an £8 million ($13 million) contract for the urgent operational requirement, and the system should be operationally ready this year
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The new Air Force Space Command chief has “laid his soul bare” to ask industry for help in crafting more resilient, affordable and — perhaps — simple satellite constellations for the future.
With a different coastal mission, the U.S. Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) fleet needed a set of radars with requirements much different than those developed domestically over the years. To fulfill this need, the Navy and prime contractors for the new ships turned to international radars that had already been developed for littoral missions in other parts of the globe, opening markets for international companies.
RIO DE JANEIRO — With several massive defense and security systems integration projects pending, Embraer has bought a stake in Atech to bolster its capacity in the field. The 36 million real ($23 million) deal sees Embraer take 50% of Atech, which was heavily involved in the Amazon surveillance Sivam program.
FORT WASHINGTON, Md. — For future acquisitions, the U.S. Marine Corps plans to be lean, green and very stingy with its money. Current and potential Marine Corps contracts should focus on three questions, says Gen. Joseph Dunford, assistant commandant: How much does it cost? How much does it weigh? How energy-efficient is it?
JSF SOFTWARE: In response to the recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report that calls F-35 Joint Strike Fighter software development “significantly behind schedule,” Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin says that the JSF Joint Program Office (JPO) “is continuing to refine the software development schedule for inclusion into a program-wide Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) later this year.
ARMY Jorge Scientific Corp., Arlington, Va., was awarded on April 5 a $54,932,051 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the operation and maintenance of Constant Hawk intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The work will be performed in Iraq with an estimated completion date of Aug. 31, 2011. One bid was solicited with one bid received. The U.S. Army Contracting Command, Adelphi, Md., is the contracting authority (W911QX-10-C-0082). MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY
Global defense spending last year would have been largely flat if not for continued increases in U.S. military outlays, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) reports. The organization estimates that the $1.6 trillion spent on defense last year marked a 1.3% real-term increase; excluding U.S. figures, growth would have been a mere 0.1%. The slowdown reflects cuts in Europe, but also in other regions. “The slower increases in 2010 represent, to some extent, a ‘rebalancing’ with economic growth,” the think tank reports.
NEW DELHI — Private utility Tata Power has won a contract to modernize the capabilities of India’s airfields, giving a boost to private sector participation in the country’s defense sector.
The first Boeing F/A-18 to undergo a six-year Planned Maintenance Interval (PMI) at Fleet Readiness Center Southeast in Jacksonville, Fla., has been delivered back to operators in a strike fighter training squadron in Virginia. Jacksonville is establishing the “fly-in, fly-out” PMI capability to handle overflow workload from Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., according to the center. The additional PMI site expands maintenance capability at a time when large numbers of Super Hornets near their required six-year inspection and maintenance period.
EXPORTING RAPTORS: Though Defense Secretary Robert Gates made the decision to kill the F-22 two years ago, lawmakers are still second-guessing the call. Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), co-chairman of the House China Caucus, says he wonders whether it is smart to stop production of the Lockheed Martin-made Raptor when the Chinese are developing the J-20 and the Russians have stepped up production of their own fighter aircraft.
China’s answer to the U.S. Global Positioning System is ready to begin providing time and position data with the April 10 launch of the eighth Beidou (Compass) navigation satellite. Liftoff from the Xichang launch site came at 4:47 a.m. local time on a Long March 3A rocket, placing the new satellite in an inclined elliptical orbit designed to increase coverage over China, according to Chinese press reports.
