As contractors make greater use of composites and high-strength metals in aircraft structures, attention is focusing on ways of improving manufacturing productivity and reducing per-part cost. One technique to emerge for the machining of parts is cryogenic cooling, which can increase machining speed, reduce cutting force, extend cutting tool life, and lower the time and cost required to finish components.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, can do many things, but high-g maneuvers to evade obstacles are not among them. This could change, however, as researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, New York and Stanford universities work to achieve “fast (35 mph.), accurate and repeatable flight” with a small UAV. The team, led by Associate Professor Russ Tedrake of MIT, built a trial UAV with a wingspan of 28 in.
The U.S. Army is exploring whether a short-range missile defense target, designed to be one-third the price of using Patriot missiles in such a role, can feasibly be added to its arsenal to reduce the cost of flight testing. The Economical Target makes use of surplus rocket motors, coupled with a rudimentary rocket body to effectively form a sounding rocket suitable for some missile defense tests, says Thomas Webber, acting director for rapid transition at Army Strategic Command. Lt. Gen.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has successfully tested an imaging device at 0.96 and 1.4 gigapixels of resolution (see photo), developed for its Aware—Advanced Wide FOV(field of view) Architectures for Image Reconstruction and Exploitation—program. One goal of the effort is to produce an imaging system with as many as 150 parallel micro-scale cameras behind a spherical objective lens, which will eventually generate ultra-wide FOV images of up to 50 gigapixels.
U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command (Marsoc) will soon get a new version of its signature .45-caliber M45 handgun. The Marine Corps Systems Command announced on July 18 that it had awarded Colt Defense of West Hartford, Conn., a $22.5 million contract to supply up to 12,000 Close Quarter Battle Pistols (Model O1070CQBP) and spare parts to Marsoc through July 2017. The Colt sidearm reportedly outperformed competitive .45-caliber weapons from Springfield Armory and Smith & Wesson in accuracy and other areas, notably durability.
U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard units are fielding a helmet-mounted cueing system (HMCS) from Gentex Corp. of Carbondale, Pa., in A-10s, F-16s (Batch 30 and 32) and C-130 gunships flown by Air Force Special Operations Command. The Scorpion HMCS was tested by the Air Force and originally selected in 2010. Nine A-10 Thunderbolt II pilots from the 47th Fighter Sqdn. of Barksdale AFB, La., are the first to trial the system in an operational exercise. They tested Scorpion during the Rim of the Pacific exercise June 29-Aug. 3, in Hawaii.
Israeli intelligence sources say highly lethal Russian weapons have appeared during fighting in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Israeli analysts tell news media they believe that these were recently delivered from Russia. Among the weapons identified or captured were thermobarics, also known as “fuel-air” devices, which explode above a target with a massive blast that sucks in air, creating a dangerous vacuum. When such a weapon is detonated it produces a long-duration-effect blast, causing significant damage and extremely painful casualties.
The Pentagon's newest missile range instrumentation ship—the T-AGM-25 USNS Howard O. Lorenzen, which includes the Cobra Judy Replacement (CJR) radar system—recently started at-sea testing off Port Canaveral, Fla., as part of its yearlong integration and test phase. Lorenzen will replace USNS Observation Island (T-AGM 23) in 2014, whose mission is to provide dual-band radar data in support of ballistic missile treaty verification.
With a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report questioning U.S. Navy shipbuilding cost and operational assumptions, the service is again defending its plan and estimates. The Navy projects that buying the new ships in the 2013 plan will cost a total of $505 billion over 30 years, or an average of $16.8 billion per year, CBO notes. CBO estimates that the cost for new-ship construction under the 2013 plan will total $599 billion through 2042, or an average of $20 billion per year.
The U.S. Army plans to issue a request for proposals by the end of 2013 for a battle management and planning tool for electronic warfare (EW). The service will be seeking plans or initial operational capability in fiscal 2015 for a software-and-equipment package that will provide the proper tools for EW battle management and planning, says Col. Jim Ekvall, Army EW Div. chief. Developing that type of tool and accompanying EW training is vital for future Army success, he notes.
About 13% of the $6.7 billion the Pentagon is slated to spend between fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2017 for fighting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) is still up for grabs, with no contractor chosen yet, according to an Aviation Week Intelligence Network analysis of data provided by Avascent 050, an online market analysis toolkit for global defense programs. Countering IEDs had become a major thrust for the Pentagon in 2001-05, after the U.S. began operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Enemy forces started to attack the road convoys and ground logistics chains of U.S.
The Michigan lab that introduced the notion of beetle-generated power for remote-controlled, insect-borne reconnaissance sensors is back—this time with an idea to generate energy from low-frequency ambient sound.
A U.S. Air Force detachment will be sent to Poland this year, marking the first time that U.S. forces will be based on Polish soil. The detachment, which will consist of a dozen airmen, will assist Poland with training for its C-130s and F-16s. The agreement on stationing troops came out of a meeting in late July between Poland's minister of national defense, Tomasz Siemoniak, and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
