The House yesterday passed the fiscal year 1999 intelligence authorization bill, which hits high costs of the Joint STARS program, bolsters an effort to improve the U-2 aircraft's radar, and continues work on a number of unmanned aerial vehicle programs. The House Intelligence Committee, in a report accompanying the bill, criticizes the National Reconnaissance Office for moving too slowly on acquisition reform and small satellites.
United flew its 100,000th over-water flight last week with an airplane certified for extended twin-engine operations (ETOPS) up to 180 minutes. Since it began ETOPS flights in the spring of 1990, United's eight Boeing 767-200s have made 21,622 ETOPS flights, while the -300s - which entered the fleet in May 1991 - had racked up 47,918 ETOPS flights by the end of 1997.
NASA said that flight verification of a Digital Flight Control System on its F-16XL-1 research aircraft has been completed at Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif. It said the upgrade gives it a testbed plane with a flexible system that simplifies experiments requiring major new flight control functions or capabilities.
House National Security Committee actions on top Defense Dept. programs in the fiscal year 1999 budget request are detailed in the following table, released yesterday by the panel. Dollar figures are in millions. MAJOR ARMY PROGRAMS FY'99 Bdgt Request H.R. 3616 R&D Qnty Procrmt R&D Qnty Procrmt M1A2 Abrams $6.4 120 $675.6 $6.4 120 $675.6
A federal judge in Washington yesterday gave the Dept. of Justice until May 13 to explain its reasoning why documents related to its opposition of the Lockheed Martin - Northrop Grumman merger should be privileged. Judge Emmet Sullivan also said that he would personally review a random sample, roughly 25%, of the documents to determine how much privileged information they contain. He said he didn't want to release all the documents to Lockheed Martin, which he said was not appropriate at this time.
Computer Sciences Corp., El Segundo, Calif., received an estimated $500 million option to its outsourcing contract from General Dynamics. CSC said the original ten-year, $3 billion agreement, signed in 1991, was scheduled to expire in 2001. GD agreed to a new seven-year contract, extending from 1998 through 2004. The contract covers three GD business units - Electric Boat, Land Systems and the General Dynamics Corp.
Delays in flight testing of the prototype Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle have resulted in the dropping of payload demonstrations that could have led to upgrades in the production version, according to Maj. Gen. Gregory Martin, the U.S. Air Force's requirements chief.
President Clinton may raise the thorny issue of Russia's failure to fulfill its commitments as an International Space Station partner when he meets President Boris Yeltsin in two weeks, with NASA holding open the possibility of downgrading Russia's role to that of a Station subcontractor, Administration officials told Congress yesterday.
AEROFLOT Russian International Airlines has taken delivery of its first Boeing 737-400 airliner. Boeing said the jet is the first of 10 Boeing planes scheduled to be delivered to Aeroflot by February of 1999. It is also the first Boeing airplane purchased by Aeroflot, although it has been operating leased 767-300ERs since 1994, Boeing said.
Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., Savannah, Ga., introduced Gulfstream Management Services, a service designed to simplify aircraft ownership by offering buyers day-to-day flight operations and maintenance. Gulfstream teamed with Chrysler Pentastar Aviation Inc., Waterford, Mich., to provide the turnkey aircraft operation service. Aircraft scheduling, crew and the management of maintenance requirements will be provided by Chrysler, including hangar facilities if needed.
While the U.S. government has some acquisition reform success stories, plenty of improvement can still be made, a panel of government and industry officials said. But they disagreed on how to proceed.
The U.S. Army needs to add about $65 million to the Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite (KE-ASAT) program to conduct flight demonstrations, according to Richard Fisher, head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command's Technology Center. The KE-ASAT program is currently running on fiscal year 1996 and '97 funds, Fisher said. The Administration has included no funding for continuation of KE-ASAT in the FY '99 budget request. The program has survived solely on congressional increases over the past several years.
The Japanese transport ministry's Civil Aviation Bureau plans to buy three aircraft to replace YS-11 low- and medium-altitude navaids flight check aircraft. The bureau originally intended to replace its six YS-11s with five Saab 2000s, but it had ordered only two when Saab ended the production program. For the remaining three, the bureau seeks a twin turboprop that can use runways less than 1,800 meters long.
HOUSE MEMBER yesterday voted 403-16 to approve a bill amending the 1962 Communications Satellite Act to promote competition and privatization in satellite communications (DAILY, May 6). An amendment that would have granted Comsat, the U.S. signatory to the Intelsat consortium, relief from some of the bill's provisions, failed 304-111.
The U.S. Navy next fiscal year plans to launch a program to show it can double the kill radius of a warhead slated for use in air defense, cruise missile and ship self-defense, and air-to-air missiles.
After indicating it is interested in pursuing the U.S. Air Force's Space-Based Infrared Laser Low (SBIRS) program, Spectrum Astro has now definitely decided to put in a bid for the program definition phase of the program. "We have a final bid decision and it is a go," Dave Thompson, president of the Gilbert, Ariz.-based company, told The DAILY during a brief telephone interview yesterday.
The Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization faces a $4.5 billion shortfall over the fiscal year 2000-'05 budget period, BMDO Director Lt. Gen. Lester Lyles told reporters here. He said the shortage is due in part to cost overruns on the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) program and increased costs from slips in the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program.
Sonaca SA, the Belgian aeronautics company based in Charleroi, said its total sales volume in 1997 jumped 68%. It attributed the increase to strong customer demand from Europe's Airbus and Brazil's Embraer. Sonaca, which manufactures wing components for the Airbus family of aircraft and the fuselage for Embraer's regional jet, said sales turnover, compared to 1996, rose 68% to 5.3 billion Belgian francs ($145 million) in 1997. Productivity was twice as high as that of 1995.
The House National Security procurement subcommittee added $78 million to the U.S. Navy's $714.7 million V-22 tiltrotor request to increase the fiscal 1999 buy to nine at the same time that it chopped three aircraft and $213 million from the service's $3.015 million request for 30 F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, HNSC members said yesterday. In procurement, funds were added for Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, the Air Force's Joint STARS program and three separate C-130J programs for the National Guard and Reserve, House sources said.
The U.S. government could recapitalize millions of dollars for commercial use of government launch facilities if it had a better grasp on launch cost and got an okay from Congress to do so, according to Gil Klinger, the Pentagon's acting deputy under secretary of defense for space. The government is grappling with a massive policy problem, seeking a way to recapitalize the costs for non-government use of launch facilities which are rapidly breaking down, Klinger told reporters here Monday at the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command.
New regulations issued by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will forbid the use of data from its weather satellites when comparable commercial space-based data are available, a move intended to prevent the U.S. government from competing with the growing commercial remote sensing industry.
The U.S. Air Force is launching an effort to reduce the costs of maintaining installations and sustaining weapons systems after realizing that past reduction efforts have yielded results predominantly in the procurement of weapons systems.
