Orders for 186 airliners worth nearly $10.8 billion were announced yesterday at the Farnborough air show, with most of the firm orders going to Boeing and Embraer. Boeing is expected to announce more orders today. The largest order, for $2 billion, was American Eagle's buy of 75 firm, along with 75 options, for the Embraer ERJ-135, the 37-seat regional jet. The order doubled the ERJ-135's orderbook, and was one of four billion-dollar-plus orders placed yesterday.
The U.S. Navy has awarded Raytheon an $11 million contract to work on the low-cost Direct Attack Munition Affordable Seeker intended as a terminal guidance unit for Global Positioning System, inertial navigation system-guided weapons. DAMASK is being developed by the Naval Air Warfare Center weapons div. at China Lake, Calif. Raytheon, under the new contract, will provide uncooled focal plane array technology to the program through April 2003.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has approved Teledyne Ryan to replace the passive flapper fuel control system with active flappers on the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle. DARPA and TRA have been aware of a possible asymmetric fuel distribution problem for some time and instrumented the fourth flight of Global Hawk to observe fuel distribution. Once enough data were gathered the flight was stopped five hours and 48 minutes into the eight hour 18 minute mission.
Eurofighter has defined a series of improvements to its Typhoon fighter that are aimed at making it more attractive to export customers and improving its capability for the partner nations. The "continuous technology insertion" (CTI) program will start early in the 2000s, according to David Hamilton, Eurofighter marketing executive for British Aerospace.
In last few months, The Pentagon has witnessed some big changes - Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests and the launching of new missiles by Iran and North Korea, for instance - but there has been no change in the lengthy time to acquire new systems. As Paul J. Hoeper, the U.S. Army's acquisition chief, puts it, "The time between surprises is now shorter than the time between decisions."
The close-range unmanned aerial vehicle the U.S. Marine Corps is looking to develop should cost no more than $200,000 in production and have a shrouded rotor system for safety reasons, according to Lt. Col. Jim McMain, section head for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab's technology div.
The U.S. Marine Corps will conduct an urban warfare demonstration as the last East Coast experiment in the two-year Urban Warrior program. The experiment will take place at Camp Lejeune, N.C., between Sept. 12 and 16, and at Charleston, S.C., on Sept. 19. U.S., British and Dutch marines will be inserted into an area to find a simulated biological weapon. An urban warfare advanced warfighting experiment is planned for next March on the West Coast.
Thiokol has developed a 2.75-inch rocket motor for use on the Hydra 70 air-to-ground rocket and other applications, the company announced yesterday at the Farnborough air show. The motor already has been tested in a ground-launched application with the Hydra M255 flechettes warhead. Six rockets were fired from an Avenger ground vehicle in an Army demonstration earlier this year, Thiokol said. Later this year the Army will fire the 2.75-inch motor from an Apache helicopter. The motor is to be fully qualified in 1999.
Disregarding the economic crisis in Russia, China is negotiating a deal to purchase advanced Su-30 multi-purpose fighters. The deal, which could reportedly include more than 20 Su-30s valued at $30-$35 million apiece, could give Russia more money than the $540 million just transferred by China via the International Monetary Fund. Purchase of two-seat Su-30 fighters could further boost the combat capabilities of China's air force, which would become the third in Southeast Asia (after Japan and India) to possess heavy two-seat fighters.
The Army, however, is making a push for its own Fast Track acquisition authority. To accelerate the process of getting programs from advanced technology demonstration into engineering and manufacturing development, the service is looking to do more risk reduction early on and forgo the program definition and risk reduction phase, Hoeper says. In the future scout vehicle program, this is expected to save four years.
Wind tunnel tests at NASA Marshall suggest that two separate flyback boosters operating independently would work better as a Space Shuttle upgrade than a single "catamaran" structure holding the two liquid-fueled boosters together during liftoff and flyback. The U.S. space agency is working with Boeing to study the Liquid Flyback Booster (LFBB) concept as an alternative road to space if the Lockheed Martin single-stage VentureStar reusable launch vehicle doesn't pan out.
The Australian army will lease for one year four of the U.S. Marine Corps' Dragon Drone unmanned aerial vehicles to assess the utility of the close-range system. The Marine Corps will take the four Dragon Drones - derivatives of the Exdrone UAV - to Australia for a two-week demonstration. Those vehicles will then remain in Australia for the year-long demonstration, according to Lt. Col. Jim McMain, section head for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab's technology div.
Lockheed Martin and Israel's Rafael are close to finalizing an agreement on working together in the air-to-air missile market, primarily with the Python 4 short-range missile, following several months of negotiations.
About 1,400 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Div. will jump at Duke Field, Fla., around midnight, Sept. 14, to kick off the U.S. Air Force's Expeditionary Air Force Experiment (EFX '98). The 82nd's job will be to simulate securing of an airfield to allow other forces to arrive. EFX '98 will run through Sept. 26.
North Korea claimed Friday it had launched a domestic satellite earlier in the week aboard the first Taepo Dong I missile, a two-stage vehicle that drew sharp protests from Tokyo and elsewhere after it overflew Japanese territory. The official Korean Central News Agency said the Aug. 31 launch placed a satellite that was "a product of 100% local technology" in orbit four minutes and 53 seconds after liftoff.
OFFICIALS SCRUBBED Friday's planned launch of a Boeing Delta II rocket with five Iridium replenishment satellites aboard. The final countdown had begun at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., when a lightning strike at NAS Point Mugu, Calif., took down the range. A new launch attempt is set for today at 5:13 p.m. EDT. The launch was delayed after failure of the new Delta III launch vehicle last month to give engineers time to ensure the failure was not caused by a Delta II system.
After several years of running Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations, the Pentagon should stop assuming they won't work, says Pentagon acquisition chief Jacques Gansler. Results of ACTDs have been generally positive and therefore, he says, "we need to start making the assumption they will work." In fact, Gansler is rather enamored with the fast pace of these demonstrations, saying that "If I had my way, I'd say, 'use the ACTD model for all our weapons.'"
NASA has picked five space launch companies to conduct space transportation architecture studies that address how the U.S. space agency will place humans and their cargo in space after the Space Shuttle era ends in 2010.
The U.S. Defense Dept. is developing an architecture for Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) as part of a larger effort started after the Persian Gulf war to more efficiently manage the collection of sensitive information. MASINT data are gathered by a variety of platforms to give insight into threats, signature and countermeasure requirements, and thereby to support military operations and development and modernization programs, and to help monitor proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, arms control efforts and treaties.
