Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

Brief news items of interest to aerospace & defense professionals.

French startup VoltAero has begun flight testing its electric regional-aircraft testbed equipped with motors supplied by Safran Electric & Power.

Canada’s Longview Aviation Services has flown the first Canadair CL-215 amphibious aircraft upgraded to CL-415EAF Enhanced Aerial Firefighter configuration.

The British government plans to create a DARPA-like agency to fund “high-risk, high-reward” science capabilities.

A series of requests for information to industry since last fall has generated proposals to accelerate the current, 10-year schedule.

China’s EHang is to begin non-passenger test flights of its EHang 216 autonomous air taxi with a customer in Norway after receiving an operational permit from that country’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAA).

Exercise Cold Response 2020, planned for March 2-18, was to involve some 14,000 troops from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, UK and U.S

The first change to the aircraft removes the skin and structural material in lower lobes of the forward and aft fuselage, the Air Force said.

Italian aerospace and defense company Leonardo says operations are continuing normally despite the national lockdown.

The Blue-Ribbon Future Carrier 2030 Task Force is seen as complementary to a broad review of shipbuilding requirements being led by Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist.

The project, initiated by Safran, involves regional companies working in agricultural chemicals and energy that plan to work together to produce and distribute sustainable biofuels.

Japanese suborbital spaceflight startup PD AeroSpace plans to fly the latest in a series of the subscale company’s first suborbital test vehicles.

The strategy aims to correct a longstanding problem for the Pentagon—that its communication networks use thousands of disparate terminals that are not compatible with each other.

Aireon and Searidge Technologies have announced a partnership to integrate satellite-routed position data from aircraft into Searidge’s “digital tower” platform for large airports.

The U.S. Marine Corps now is pursuing an unmanned family of systems for its Marine Air-Ground Task Force Unmanned Aircraft Expeditionary (MUX) effort.

The U.S. Marine Corps is joining the U.S. Air Force’s Agility Prime program to accelerate commercial development eVTOL vehicles, with a view to using them for logistics.

The F-15 fleet is expected to enter qualifications by the end of 2021, to be followed by the F-16, F-22, A-10 and B-1.

Boeing has started delivering a new version of the Joint Direct Attack Munition tail kit with improved resistance to GPS jamming.

Record deliveries of the Rafale fighter helped Dassault Aviation’s revenues reach unprecedented heights last year.

Startup vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft developer Transcend Air is poised to start flight tests of a revised scaled version of its tiltwing Vy 400 intercity transport vehicle

The Russian private military company used a “sophisticated Russian air defense system,” according to U.S. Africa Command chief Gen. Stephen Townsend's testimony to the HASC.

Battery thermal-management company Kulr Technology Group has developed a design for lithium-ion batteries that prevents cell-to-cell propagation of a thermal runaway.

“Soon we will release an inaugural doctrine” for the Space Force, Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett said March 10 in Washington.

"Unless we improve our rate of innovation dramatically, then there is no chance of a base on the Moon or a city on Mars,” SpaceX Founder Elon Musk says.

Finnair will work with Finnish oil company Neste to increase the airline’s use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and boost production capacity in Finland.