Boeing Co. said that its Defense&Space Group will make a series of executive reassignments, and that its International Space Station program will now report directly to the office of the group president to give it more emphasis.
HUGHES AND RAYTHEON yesterday won contracts for Lot 11 production of Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles. Hughes will build 433 AMRAAMs for $133 mmillion and Raytheon will build 385 of the missiles for $122 million. About 70% of the effort, or 276 missiles, will be for foreign military sales to Belgium, Greece, The Netherlands, Norway and Spain, the Dept. of Defense said in announcing the contracts.
Government subsidies and tax code loopholes that make it profitable for defense companies to merge into huge entities have come under intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill, and lawmakers from across the political spectrum are warning that this is only the beginning.
Sales of Computer Sciences Corp., El Segundo, Calif., rose 15% over last year's third quarter. CSC said it earned $57.4 million on sales of $1.4 billion. A year ago, the company reported profits of $19.7 million, after a $26 million special charge, on sales of $1.2 billion. President and CEO Van B. Honeycutt said CSC announced about $6 billion in new orders during the quarter, more than any previous full year of operations. In other company news:
Lockheed Martin plans a low cost replacement of the FLIR sensor and laser designator on the Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared at Night (LANTIRN) system to keep it operational until around 2025.
The U.S. Army, taking a lesson from the Air Force, is looking to increase its reliance on Guard and Reserve units. Maj. Gen. Daniel J. Petrosky, commanding general of the Army Aviation Center at Ft. Rucker, Ala., said "there are active duty missions the Guards can do for us [and] the Reserve can too." He told an Association of the United States Army (AUSA) symposium in Arlington, Va., on Tuesday that he is "envious of the Air Force's ability to use their Guard and Reserve" forces.
More than 300 factories, institutes and design bureaus of the Russian military-industrial complex may soon be merged into 30 big corporations, with the rest either reprogrammed to other work, liquidated or at least deprived of state support. Such a scenario has been discussed in the State Duma by representatives of the industry, ministries and military services, according to the Finansovye Izvestia newspaper here.
KOLLSMAN INC., Merrimack, N.H., will supply 13 telescopic sight units for the AH-1W Cobra helicopter's Night Targeting System under terms of an $8 million contract from the U.S. Naval Inventory Control Point, Philadelphia. The Dept. of Defense, announcing the contract Jan. 24, said the work will be carried out in Nashua, N.H.
HUGHES INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS said it completed the last in a series of contracted Factory Acceptance Tests for the Jakarta Automated Air Traffic Control System (JAATS). The company integrated the Hughes Guardian Flight and Radar Data Processing system with five subsystems, including existing and new radars. The work was done at the HITS site in Richmond, B.C. JAATS is part of an advanced centralized air traffic control capability for the Jakarta Flight Information Region.
Wisconsin's two senators have introduced a bill that would terminate Project ELF, the extremely low frequency system developed during the Cold War for communicating with submerged Trident missile submarines. Sen. Russell Feingold (D), who offered the bill in the Senate on Jan. 21 on behalf of himself and Sen. Herb Kohl (D), said as the Dept. of Defense "continues to struggle to meet a tighter budget, it is clear that Project ELF should be closed down." If enacted, Feingold said, his bill would save $9 million to $20 million a year.
Lockheed Martin Corp. has won a $27.9 million contract modification fro the U.S. Navy for three datalinks to support reconnaissance and surveillance data collection on aircraft carriers. The contract, from the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, follows a 1991 initial development award for the Common High Bandwidth Data Link Shipboard Terminal (CHBDL-ST), which Lockheed Martin said was successfully tested on the USS Kennedy in April.
Interstate Electronics Corp., Anaheim, Calif., received a sole-source contract from the U.S. Navy's Strategic Systems Program to develop a Global Positioning System (GPS) Translator Processor for the Flight Test Support System Missile Tracking System (FTSS III) and five modification kits to upgrade the existing FTSS III systems. The Dept. of Defense announced the award on Jan. 28.
Boeing Co. and United Technologies' Sikorsky Aircraft are jointly competing for a contract to support some of the U.S. Special Operations Command's helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and maritime systems, the companies said. SOCOM plans to announce the winner of the contract in mid-June, and work under the award is slated to begin July 1. Only the first year of the five-year contract will be firm, with four option years, Boeing and Sikorsky said. Work would be performed at the Bluegrass Depot in Lexington, Ky., and in Richmond, Ky.
Donovan Hicks, former chief executive officer of Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., plans to return to the Boulder Technology Incubator (BTI) and serve as chairman of its board of directors, Ball said. Hicks helped found BTI in 1989 when Ball Aerospace provided space to technology start-ups in its Longmont, Colo., offices. BTI, of Boulder, specializes in development of technology-driven businesses.
Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) has scheduled the first launch of its new M-5 solid-propellant booster for Feb. 7. Liftoff of the new launch vehicle, which was developed and built by Nissan Motors and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, will be from the Uchinoura Space Center at Kagoshima. It will carry the MUSES-B orbiting radio telescope.
ORBITAL SCIENCES CORP.'S Fairchild Defense Division won an $18.9 million contract from the Republic of China for mission planning and data transfer system products, OSC reported. Over the next two years, OSC said it intends to equip Taiwan's Indigenous Defense Fighter aircraft with the state-of- the-art systems. It said the mission planning system provides an integrated flight planning and threat analysis capability that allows a fighter pilot to rehearse a mission prior to the actual flight.
Delta Air Lines on Monday suffered its fourth Pratt&Whitney engine failure in a year on Boeing 727s when a JT8D-15A came apart shortly after one of the planes departed New Orleans. The first turbine stage of the No. 2 engine failed during climbout, but a return to New Orleans was made without incident, the National Transportation Safety Board said yesterday. "There was minor damage to the airframe," it said.
Russia has begun delivery of the new Buk-M1 (SA-17) air defense missile system to Finland, where they will protect the Finnish capital of Helsinki. According to the Russian state arms trade company Rosvooruzhenie, the first of three batteries of Buk-M1 surface-to-air missiles has arrived in Finland, with delivery of the other two scheduled for February-March and April-May.
AN ANOMALY has plagued the Ocean Color and Temperature Scanner (OCTS) on Japan's Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS) since January, the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) reports. The anomaly, which manifests as dark colored stripes on OCTS image, has no impact on water color observation, but it does hamper the ability to read water surface temperature. NASDA said it was analyzing the data in an effort to find its cause, and to develop workarounds for temperature readings.
Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) was named yesterday to fill the Democratic vacancy on the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, according to a Dorgan aide. Dorgan, who has concentrated on economic issues in his four years in the Senate, presumably will pay close attention to the upcoming decision on National Missile Defense development and deployment. Under the Air Force early deployment option, 20 Minuteman missiles equipped with kinetic energy kill vehicles would be deployed in existing silos at Grand Forks, N.D.
The U.S. government has offered the Czech Republic the option to lease F/A-18 strike fighters from the U.S. Navy for five years at no cost, McDonnell Douglas announced yesterday. The deal involves six F/A-18A single-seat fighters and one F/A-18B two-seater. The Hornets would be delivered 18 months after acceptance, and the offer carries a one-year extension.
CROATIA AIRLINES has ordered six A319s from Airbus and taken options on six more airliners in the single-aisle family. Deliveries will begin early next year but the carrier plans to begin operations with a leased A320 later this year, citing strong development of the Croatian economy and tourism.
British Aerospace Royal Ordnance and Thomson Thorn Missile Electronics have joined forces with the U.K. government's Defense Evaluation and Research Agency to cooperate on warhead programs. The team will jointly design, develop, build, market and sell multiwarhead systems intended to defeat hardened targets, British Aerospace said yesterday. The agreement includes existing warheads, such as the Broach and Lancer, and technologies from DERA's Drastic program.
The U.S. Air Force will issue a request for proposals in early March to convert Minuteman II ICBMs into low-cost launchers for small satellites, according to AF officials. "We're ready to go out with a request for proposals around the first of March," Lt. Col. Ronald Miller, the AF's launch test program manager for the Space and Missile Center, told The DAILY in a telephone interview from his office at Kirtland AFB, N.M.
