U.S. Navy Secretary John H. Dalton said a change in the relationship between the Navy and its contractors is paying big dividends, specifically in the F/A-18E/F strike fighter program. The shift reflects a DOD-wide move to be more cooperative with industry. "Our goal is to do our business in a smarter, more efficient, more cost effective way," Dalton said. "To do that we are trying to learn from industry. We are less adversarial, more efficient, more innovative, and more productive as a team. These are win-win improvements for all of us."
HUGHES TRAINING INC., Arlington, Tex., won a $16.7 million contract modification from Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill AFB, Utah, calling for fiscal year 1997 operation, maintenance and services for the C-130 Aircrew Training System. Hughes also won an $8.9 million contract from the U.S. Navy to design and build simulation equipment to train P-3C aircraft crews.
Sen. John Warner (Va.) is the only member of the Republican majority on the Senate Armed Services Committee who is on all three of the panel's hardware intensive subcommittees. He chairs the seapower subcommittee, and is a member of the airland and strategic forces subcommittees. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.) is the only Democrat with this distinction, being a member of the same three subcommittees.
SOUTH KOREA will pay about $100 million for the AN/ALQ-165 Airborne Self- Protection Jammer it is buying. ASPJ contractors ITT Avionics and Northrop Grumman on Friday confirmed the early January deal (DAILY, Jan. 8). Korea is buying an undisclosed number of ASPJs for its F-16 fighters.
CACI INTERNATIONAL INC., Arlington, Va., was one of eight contractors receiving awards under a program, valued at about $165 million, to provide mission support services to the San Antonio Air Logistics Center of the U.S. Air Force Materiel Command. Work under the five-year contracts will be performed at Kelly AFB, Tex., and McClellan AFB, Calif., and is expected to begin later this month.
Spacefaring nations attempted 77 space launches during 1996, with four launch failures and four failures in orbit, as outlined in the table that follows. Of a total of 107 spacecraft launched, 95 were successful, seven failed to orbit and five were lost in orbit due to launch vehicle failures (Raduga, Mars-96, SAC/HETE and Zhongxing). For the first time in many years the U.S. led the world in terms of number of launches, with Russia lagging because of unsettled conditions in its space launch industry.
RAYTHEON CO. won a $206 million contract from the U.S. Army Missile Command, on behalf of the government of Egypt, to upgrade eight Hawk missile fire units, Raytheon said Friday. The units were provided to Egypt by the U.S. government as excess defense articles. Raytheon will make modification kits to upgrade Hawk to the latest Phase III configuration.
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) has quietly introduced a National Missile Defense bill that seeks to stake out a middle ground between the Clinton Administration's plan to put off a deployment decision for three years and a Senate GOP leadership proposal which could have the U.S. renouncing the ABM Treaty within a year if the Russians don't agree to negotiated changes necessary for an NMD.
A U.S. Navy missile intercepted a ballistic missile target for the first time Friday in a test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., speeding the service's theater ballistic missile defense program. The Navy said the intercept, in which a modified Standard Missile 2 Block IVA destroyed a Lance missile target, moved it "into a new era where [it] will play an increasingly vital role in the defense of forces ashore....This new mission for the Navy...is to defeat the growing Theater Ballistic Missile (TBM) threat."
EVANS&SUTHERLAND COMPUTER CORP., Salt Lake City, Utah, will supply visual systems for the AH-IS Cobra and the UH-60P Blackhawk full-mission helicopter simulators for the Korean military. Under the contract, worth more than $10 million, E&S will supply prime contractor Reflectone Inc. with a EGIG-4530 image generator, partial-dome display, five E&S raster/calligraphic generators and a telescopic unit display for each simulator. E&S will also develop a database covering 90,000 square nautical miles of the Korean peninsula.
The U.S. Air Force today plans to announce the winner of the competition to built the Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser. Alliant Techsystems and Lockheed Martin are competing for the $1.2 billion award. The Air Force is expecting unit prices of less than $15,000.
NASA and the Russian Space Agency are in a delicate pas de deux in the runup to next month's planned meeting between Vice President Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin over the course of the International Space Station project. NASA is worried that Russia's lack of performance on the critical Service Module, now about a year behind schedule because of laggard funding, will give opponents of the project new ammo on Capitol Hill.
Boeing Co. will absorb a very healthy McDonnell Douglas Corp., according to earnings reports released by the companies yesterday. Boeing's planned takeover is expected to be completed this summer, McDonnell Douglas earned $788 million in 1996, up 11% over 1995's $707 million, a figure that excludes the effect of a 1995 fourth quarter accounting charge related to the MD-11 trijet. Revenues slipped from $14.3 billion in 1995 to $13.8 billion, but McDonnell Douglas' operating earnings for 1996 were a record $1.359 billion.
After years in which the McDonnell Douglas Standoff Land-Attack Missile wasn't readily accepted by some of its users, U.S. Navy aviators are becoming more comfortable with the system, a Navy official said. "There's been a real turn around in the fleet on SLAM," Capt. Robert N. Freedman, the Navy's anti-ship weapon systems program manager, told The DAILY in an interview. "SLAM had been - particularly for an F/A-18 squadron -extremely difficult to use," he said.
Initial carrier qualification tests of the McDonnell Douglas F/A- 18E/F have been completed a week ahead of schedule, a U.S. Navy spokesman said yesterday. One of a pair of two-seat F/A-18Fs returned to NAS Patuxent River, Md., yesterday following six days aboard the USS John C. Stennis, the spokesman said. Testing was supposed to run two weeks.
Amphenol Corp., which manufactures connectors, cables and interconnect systems for the aerospace, electronics, transportation and telecommunications industries, has signed a merger agreement with Kravis Roberts&Co., a private investment firm.
ANDREW W. ALLEN, an astronaut and Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who has served as Space Station requirements director at NASA headquarters since April 1996, has resigned from the military and will leave his Station job, the U.S. space agency announced yesterday. He will be replaced on an acting basis by Gretchen W. McClain, previously chief, Space Station, Headquarters Office.
The U.S. Air Force is requesting information for alternative imaging sensors to be used in its Air National Guard airborne reconnaissance pods. The request is in response to congressional language included in the fiscal 1997 defense appropriation, the AF said in a Jan. 24 Commerce Business Daily notice. The alternative sensor would complement the electro- optical payload carried by the Lockheed Martin Theater Airborne Reconnaissance System (TARS) and can be electro-optical, infrared or a synthetic aperture radar.
A BRITISH TELECOM TEAM that includes Lockheed Martin has won a contract to provide an advanced national fixed telecommunications network for the U.K.'s armed forces.
Waters off the U.S. Marine Corps' Camp Schwab on Okinawa are seen as the likely spot for an offshore American base, Japanese government officials say. Japan's chief cabinet secretary Seiroku Kajiyama told reporters here last week that Camp Schwab is the only adequate site for the new facility. Yukio Okamoto, an aide to Japan's prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, also said it's the only realistic choice.
Taiwan has plans for a new air-to-air missile that would arm the island nation's Indigenous Defense Fighter, according to a broadcast on state television in Taipei. An official of the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, Taiwan's state weapons research organization, said on the state television outlet that the radar-guided Sky Sword II missile would be the primary armament on the fighter. The medium-range missile will supplant Taiwan's Sky Bow and Sky Sword I air-to-air missiles if Taiwan's air force decides to move to production, the official said.
The Australian Dept. of Defense has chosen Kaman's SH-2G Super Seasprite over GKN Westland's Super Lynx as the Royal Australian Navy's new helicopter. But the U.S. and U.K. helicopters remain in competition in New Zealand, which will make a decision "within the next few weeks," Paul East, the country's minister of defense, said in a prepared statement. He said "The coalition government will take into consideration Australia's decision to purchase Seasprite helicopters when deciding which type of helicopters to buy for our navy."
BRITISH AEROSPACE Military Aircraft has selected Dunlop Aviation to provide new technology brakes and braking systems for Nimrod 2000, the U.K.'s Replacement Maritime Patrol Aircraft. The system, using technology developed for civil aircraft, provides automatic dual processing capability, the companies said.
Air Littoral of France has ordered seven more Canadair Regional Jets from Bombardier Regional Aircraft for service between its new hub in Nice and Italy, Spain and domestic French destinations. Total value of the seven-aircraft firm order was C$178 million (U.S. $133 million). Delivery is to be completed by the fourth quarter of this year, Bombardier Regional Aircraft said in a press release yesterday. The new aircraft will be used on the French airline's longer flights as it adds a total of 35 new routes by mid-1998.
