After months of uncertainty, the U.S. Departments of Defense and Transportation have reached an agreement on civil use of corrected Global Positioning System signals. The deal, which follows two days of meetings this week in Washington, frees FAA to award up to $500 million in WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) development contracts. DOD will have up to a year to develop a technique to jam GPS L-1 signals-the basic frequency of GPS satellite transmissions and the frequency that will carry the WAAS corrections-on a local-theater basis.
ECC INTERNATIONAL CORP., Wayne, Pa., said yesterday it has received a $9.3 million U.S. Air Force contract for the design and manufacture of F-16 Simulated Aircraft Trainers for Taiwan. The company has developed F-16 simulators for the U.S. Air Force and for F-16 aircraft sold to other U.S. allies. It is now producing F-16 simulators for the Republic of Korea.
ARIANESPACE has nudged back the planned return to flight of its Ariane rocket by one day, to March 15, to enable it to get a better launch window. An Ariane 44LP is scheduled to launch two geostationary spacecraft-Europe's Hot Bird 1 direct broadcast satellite, and Brazil's Brasilsat B2-from Kourou, French Guiana. The Ariane has been down since a December launch failure.
Canada is set to reduce its defense spending by an additional C$2.8 billion over the next four years and force acquisitions to remain at a minimum, according to the Canadian government's new federal budget proposal. The 1995 reductions come on top of C$7 billion in cuts already mandated under the 1994 federal budget. The reductions will drop overall Canadian defense spending below 1.5% of gross domestic product. The new budget, which takes effect April 1, will result in more than C$15 billion reduction for capital programs over the next 15 years.
At the request of U.S. Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, the service's Scientific Advisory Board will look into the future to help the AF determine where it needs to be putting its resources now. According to Widnall, the board will look at: -- Rapidly changing technologies such as computers and information systems and try to forecast the implications of their development for the AF.
Westinghouse Electric Corp. said Francis J. Harvey has been named president of the company's Electronic Systems Group, Baltimore. Harvey, 51, is thus in line to replace the current president, Richard A. Linder, 63, who will retire in 1996. Harvey will be succeeded as president of Westinghouse's Government & Environmental Services Co. by James S. Moore, 58. Moore has been senior vice president of Human Resources.
The U.S. Army Communication and Electronics Command (CECOM), Ft. Monmouth, N.J., has issued its request for proposal for the U.S. side of the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS). The MEADS program is a joint French, German, Italian and U.S. effort to develop a multi-billion dollar air defense system (DAILY, Feb. 22, page 272). The five U.S. contractor teams-Loral, Hughes, Raytheon, Martin Marietta and Lockheed-received the classified RFP yesterday, a CECOM spokesman said.
The Russians would probably resist further reductions in ICBMs but would be willing to make cuts in submarine launched ballistic missiles in a round of strategic weapons reduction talks beyond START II, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John M. Shalikashvili told Congress yesterday. Asked by Sen.
The Clinton Administration is proposing a new set of procurement reforms designed to build on last year's Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (FASA). The proposed legislation is specifically aimed at extending streamlining to large-scale procurements, which weren't dealt with adequately in FASA, while seeking to reduce frivolous protests, Steven Kelman, administrator for federal procurement policy at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told a House panel Tuesday.
Loral Vought Systems has received a $7 million contract from the U.S. Army Missile Command to design and test a guidance control package for Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) rockets. The Army is planning to fabricate five MLRS rockets for flight testing at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. The Loral Vought packages will be installed to increase accuracy. Loral Vought said one of its guidance system concepts would include adding small canards to the nose of the rocket, a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a guidance processor.
The head of the Washington-based Aerospace Industries Association said yesterday that the organization is "disappointed" by the Pentagon's latest base closure recommendation list because it "does not go far enough." Don Fuqua said in a statement that AIA "is greatly disappointed" in the list, which calls for closing or realigning 146 bases, saving $18 billion over the next 20 years (DAILY, March 1, page 313).
A C-17 testbed aircraft will fly today at Edwards AFB, Calif., as part of a continuing evaluation of ways to solve problems with parachute drops from the airlifter, McDonnell Douglas C-17 Program Manager, Don Kozlowski, said yesterday. Many of the problems previously identified have already "gone away," Kozlowski told reporters during a Washington briefing. Some paratroopers had found themselves getting "snagged" on ragged parts, but "that went away" because the parts have been fixed, he said.
Deep cuts in Canada's space budget for the second year in a row won't have a significant impact on the International Space Station program, already reeling from even deeper cuts last year, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said yesterday after urging Congress to practice "flexibility" in dealing with international space partners.
NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin on Tuesday urged agency employees to take the buyout offer available until the end of March, citing "significant" job losses looming with little chance of "a better offer down the road." "Our buyout authority expires on March 31st," Goldin told agency workers in a speech broadcast on its internal television network. "It's the last one we'll have. There is no apparent support for more buyouts in Congress.
The high profile battle over the National Security Revitalization Act (NSRA), the defense portion of the GOP's "Contract With America," may be over in the House, but the fight over a National Missile Defense continues elsewhere in Congress. Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee are expected to try to enlarge modestly the fiscal 1996 request. The Administration requested $371.5 million for NMD, and congressional sources are talking about an increase of perhaps $250 million.
The Polish armed forces are gearing up for a comprehensive modernization program that will focus on the acquisition of command, control and communication (C3) systems that comply with NATO standards, but will also look at weapon systems such as fighter aircraft, Brig. Gen. Boleslaw Izydorczyk, Poland's defense attache in Washington, told The DAILY yesterday. Making Polish C3 systems interoperable with those of NATO countries is the "top priority" of the modernization plan, Izydorczyk said.
The U.S. Air Force is "worrying a lot" about high-cycle fatigue in engines, but doesn't expect to completely understand and resolve the problem for at least five years, Gen. Ronald Yates, head of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, said last week. Interim fixes for the latest high-cycle fatigue problems will be inserted into powerplants by this summer, Yates said Thursday at an Air Force Association symposium here.
An article in The DAILY of March 1 (page 310) referred to a "secret" panel that evaluated proposals for the latest Discovery scientific spacecraft competition. NASA released the membership of the evaluation panel when it announced the winner of the competition, and does not normally announce source selection panel membership prior to source selection, according to agency spokesmen.
The Hunter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system "may prove unsuitable for use by operational forces" and jeopardize the goal of developing a joint service system, the General Accounting Office said in a report yesterday that recommended delaying a second low-rate production contract pending satisfactory tests of the system.
The outlook for approval of the START II treaty by the Russian parliament is viewed by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as "uncertain at best," a Central Intelligence Agency official testified yesterday. Peter Celement, chief of the CIA's Russian Affairs Div., told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Russian pride in its conventional forces has been damaged across the political spectrum by the poor performance of its troops in Chechnya, which has caused many to question the wisdom of cutting its strategic forces by about two thirds as required under the treaty.
Fiscal year 1996 requests for the Army for research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) programs are listed in the following tables, included in the FY '96 "R-1" booklet released Feb 6. by the Dept. of Defense. Dollars figures are in thousands.
-- HUGHES AIRCRAFT CO. said the Finnish Air Force's receipt of an APG- 73 radar for the F-18 fighter during a recent ceremony in El Segundo, Calif., marked the first international delivery of the system. The radar will be installed in the first Hornet for Finland at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis. Finland ordered 64 Hornets in 1992. $end -- ROLLS-ROYCE said the first Trent-powered A330 airliner took off from Airbus Industrie headquarters in Toulouse, France, yesterday on its delivery flight Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong.
U.S. and British officials are considering merging the Pentagon's Tri-Service Stand-off Attack Missile (TSSAM) follow-on program and the U.K.'s Conventionally Armed Stand-off Missile (CASOM) development, but a difference in contracting approaches may prevent that from happening, according to U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogleman. "The only thing we're looking at [with doubt] is the type of contract," Fogleman said, noting that the British want to use a firm, fixed-price contract and "we're not sure how that would fit into the scheme for us." U.S.
Monday's release of a U.S. Air Force white paper, "Global Presence 1995," has taken the service another step closer to including information warfare (IW) in its doctrine. "Global presence" incorporates both traditional physical presence and the use of IW, the Air Force study says. "The ability to create, disseminate, access, and manipulate information for one's own ends and to control information available to competitors or adversaries produces a potential decisive advantage," the white paper says.
