LE BOURGET, France - NATO's Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) program intends to reassess the numerical mix of manned and unmanned aircraft it is slated to buy, according to industry officials.
TURBOPUMP: General Corp. will continue to research the Upper State Engine Technology effort under a $5 million contract from the Air Force. The objective of the program is to enable the rapid design, development and testing of a liquid rocket propulsion turbopump, the Defense Department said June 17.
LE BOURGET, France - In the two years that it has existed as a separate unit within the reorganized Saab Aerospace, Saab Aerostructures has strengthened its position as an important supplier to key military and civil programs on both sides of the Atlantic. At home in Sweden, Aerostructures maintains its natural power base as the main source of structural components for the Gripen fighter. Also for Sweden, Aerostructures is taking on an important role in the NH90 helicopter program.
LE BOURGET, France - Greece's air force has ordered four Embraer EMB 145 AEW&C (airborne early warning and control) aircraft and holds another two options.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved the fiscal 2006 appropriation bill that includes NASA by a vote of 418 to 7 on June 16, fully funding the agency at $16.5 billion and reversing the Bush Administration's proposed cuts to its aeronautics budget. Lawmakers approved the House Appropriations Committee's version of NASA's budget appropriation without any changes, according to a HAC spokesman. The approved $16.5 billion level is $275 million more than was enacted in the FY '05 bill and $15 million above the president's request.
LE BOURGET, France - Six months since the victory of the so-called "Orange Revolution" in the Ukraine, the new government has announced its intention to consolidate its aerospace companies - Antonov Design Bureau, the Kiev-based Aviant plant, Kharkov State Aircraft Manufacturing Co. and the Ukrainian Research Institute of Aviation Technologies - into a single corporation. News of the possible merger already has split key players into two warlike camps, according to Aviation Week's ShowNews.
STUDYING T-50: Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), Hellenic Aerospace Industry (HAI) and Lockheed Martin will evaluate the jet-training needs of the Greek air force and "the potential contribution each could make" if Greece buys the T-50, the companies say. Executives from the companies signed a memorandum of understanding for a one-year study at the Paris Air Show.
OVERHAUL: "The final answer to past problems may lie in a complete restructuring of the way the [Defense] Department accomplishes acquisition for all of its goods and services," says Gordon England, the acting deputy secretary of defense. England told senators this month that the infamous Boeing tanker lease proposal already has led to "many individual corrective actions in our acquisition processes," but Pentagon officials are willing to go much further. A high-level review, including re-examining the Goldwater-Nichols Act, is under way, he says.
BUYING WEIGHTLESSNESS: NASA researchers will conduct experiments later this year on two low-gravity flights operated by the Zero Gravity Corp., the aerospace agency says. The flights will allow NASA to evaluate the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company's ability to provide parabolic research flight services, which use special maneuvers to temporarily mimic weightlessness. The flights, set for mid-September, will be similar to those NASA has performed for years with its own specially equipped research aircraft.
LE BOURGET, France - Inventors of the FanWing technology, which uses "squirrel cage" fans mounted across the length of an aircraft's wings, have shown a prototype here at the Paris Air Show and are developing a version they hope could fly for up to 10 hours. The fans are driven by a motor connected to a belt drive. As they rotate, they pull in air from the front and project it over the rear of the wing, creating a lot of lift with little power.
COSMOS 1: The Cosmos-1 solar sail spacecraft is set to launch atop a converted ICBM from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea on June 21. A joint effort by the Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios, Cosmos-1 will attempt the first controlled flight of a solar sail in orbit. The spacecraft was mated to its Volna ICBM on June 15 and soon will be placed inside the Russian Delta III sub. After Cosmos-1 is checked out in orbit, it will begin deploying its windmill-shaped sail panels on June 26.
United Defense Industries Inc. of Arlington, Va., has been awarded a $44.1 million contract modification to produce three Mk 45 Mod 4 Naval Gun systems, the company said June 17. The 5-inch, 62-caliber Mk 45 Mod 4 is a fully-automated naval gun that can support anti-surface, strike, fire support and anti-air warfare missions. The guns will be installed aboard the Navy's DDG 110 through DDG 112 guided missile destroyers. Production work will be done in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., and is expected to be finished during 2007.
PRAGUE - The Czech defense minister asked U.S. representatives in Prague for help in a failed attempt to get Switzerland-based American subsidiary Mowag involved in a tender to supply armored personnel carriers to the Czech military. Czech defense minister Karel Kuehnl wrote to U.S. Ambassador William Cabaniss recently requesting him to ask Mowag owner General Dynamics to enter the Swiss company in a new multimillion dollar tender for at least 199 vehicles.
SITE SELECTION: EADS North America plans to announce this week its selection of a U.S. site for building tankers for the Air Force, should it win any new competition for such aircraft. Even if it doesn't, the new site will be used as an engineering center to support Airbus aircraft, the company has said (DAILY, Feb. 15).
France's Thales has been selected by prime contractor Dassault Aviation to develop the data link system for the Neuron unmanned combat aerial vehicle technology demonstrator.
LE BOURGET, France - A new vacuum assisted process (VAP) to make carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic structures without the use of an autoclave has been developed by EADS Military Aircraft-Augsburg, already the largest external supplier to Airbus of aerostructures for the A380 airliner.
READY TO DETECT: Mars Express, Europe's first spacecraft sent to the red planet, has deployed the second 20-meter (65.6-foot) boom of its Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument and should be ready to begin both searching for water beneath the planet's surface and studying its upper atmosphere, says the European Space Agency. A third boom has yet to deploy, but it mainly will correct radio waves and is not considered critical.
LE BOURGET, France - General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. said it is negotiating to sell five more Predator B unmanned aerial vehicles to the U.S. Air Force. The company already is under contract to supply the Air Force with 15 Predator Bs, which are being delivered. Meanwhile, GA-ASI continues to say little about the latest version of the Predator it is developing, other than that the new UAV, tentatively named Predator C, will take its first flight by year's end and will fly higher and faster and be stealthier than Predator B.
MARS DESCENT: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is seeking proposals for the sensor that will guide the final descent of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, which is to land a rover on the red planet in October 2010. Proposals for the Ku-band Doppler velocimeter/altimeter are due to JPL on July 29. The full request for proposals can be found on the Web at http://acquisition.jpl.nasa.gov.
NO NUKE: The U.S. Air Force has not found a missing nuclear weapon in the Wassaw Sound, near Savannah, Ga., the service says. In 1958, a B-47 bomber dropped a Mk15 Mod 0 nuclear bomb in the water after colliding with an F-86 fighter. The Air Force tried to find it but couldn't, and in 2001 a study said the bomb should be left alone and categorized as "irretrievably lost." In 2004, a citizens group discovered elevated radiation levels in the area that they said could have been from the bomb.
PRAGUE - Czech Republic aircraft maker Aero Vodochody has taken the radical step of offering to license foreign countries to produce its L-159 light combat aircraft, the company's spokesman has told the DAILY.
United Defense Industries Inc. has been awarded a contract modification worth up to $33.3 million to overhaul 101 Bradley Combat System vehicles for a return to combat in Iraq, the company said June 17. A total of 61 Bradley A3 and 40 Bradley A2 Operation Desert Storm vehicles will be returned to combat-ready status by United Defense and the Army's Red River Army Depot.
EUROFIGHTER: The United Kingdom's Smiths Aerospace recently reported orders for Eurofighter Tranche 2 equipment worth more than $180 million - part of some $500 million worth of new business described at the Paris Air Show this week. Smiths equipment for Eurofighter includes the multifunction head down display, right-hand glareshield, mission data loader/recorder, bulk storage device, direct voice input module and electrical connectors.
