General Electric Aircraft Engines (GEAE) and Pratt&Whitney are joining forces to compete for a new engine to succeed the GE T700 for future use on the Black Hawk, Apache and Seahawk helicopters. "Our unique teaming arrangement will ensure one face to the customer throughout the ... life cycle" of the engine, said Steve Finger, president of Pratt&Whitney Military Engines.
Several planned Royal Air Force unit moves, including shifts in the Red Arrows aerobatic display team and initial Eurofighter deployments, were announced yesterday by U.K. Armed Forces Minister John Spellar. Most of the moves are associated with RAF bases in Lincolnshire, in east/central England, where the red-painted BAe Hawk jet trainers of the Red Arrows are to be returned from their present base at Cranwell, alongside the RAF College and flying-training school, to their earlier home at Scampton.
LOCKHEED MARTIN began radar cross section testing last month of a full-scale Joint Strike Fighter pole model at its Helendale Measurement Facility in California. The testing not only measures RCS, but the performance of various antennas on the aircraft and the robustness of supportable low observable materials.
In the wake of findings from an independent team's assessment of last year's failures in the Mars Program, NASA is restructuring the program and naming a new point of contact for oversight at headquarters, Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA Assistant Administrator for Space Science, told reporters yesterday. The Mars Program Independent Assessment Team, headed by Thomas Young, concluded coordination between NASA headquarters, the Jet Propulsion Lab and contractor Lockheed Martin was inadequate and a leading contributor to Mars program failures.
The Defense Dept. is urging Congress to pass President Clinton's fiscal year 2000 Kosovo supplemental appropriations request, warning U.S. military force readiness is at stake. The House is supposed to act on the supplemental today, and the request then goes to the Senate. "We hope the Senate will pass it as quickly as possible," Pentagon Spokesman Ken Bacon told reporters.
Boeing launched a NASA satellite Saturday that is designed to collect images of the earth's magnetic field during a two-year mission. A Boeing Delta II lifted off from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., at 5:34 p.m. EST Saturday carrying the Imager Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft. After almost 56 minutes of flight the spacecraft separated from the Delta upper stage and inserted itself into an eliptical orbit with a 621-mile perigee and an apogee of 28,503 miles, Boeing said.
FAA program officials declined to guarantee that contractor Raytheon will be able to provide a Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) that provides Category 1 approach and landing capability. "I really do not know when or if we are going to get to Cat 1" with the system, Carl McCullough, FAA's director of communications, navigation and surveillance systems, told reporters in Washington Monday. "There is uncertainty about the technical difficulties in cost and time in getting to Cat 1."
The European Union's Transport Ministers yesterday confirmed a proposal to shield non-EU countries from the effects of the EU hushkit rule, due to enter into force next month. The rule, by April 2002, would ban hushkitted aircraft that are not registered in Europe by May 4. Washington regards the rule as a unilateral measure that damages U.S. interests.
TRW Aeronautical Systems (Lucas Aerospace) said it has launched a new Web site, TRWAEROSPARES.COM, that hooks directly to the company's spares inventory to give customers spare parts at anytime. Customers will be able to price, order and track delivery status online, TRW said yesterday, citing its desire to reach customers "anywhere in the world."
SPACE IMAGING has entered an agreement to acquire Pacific Meridian Resources, an Emeryville, Calif.-based geographic information systems (GIS) house, for an undisclosed sum. Pacific Meridian has experience in image classification, applications development and Web technology that will allow Space Imaging to expand its products in the areas of land use mapping, growth monitoring, fire modeling, change detection, toxic waste site management, pipeline siting and other applications, the companies said.
RAYTHEON will provide all ground infrastructure for the FAISAT "Little LEO" satellite message and data network being developed by Final Analysis, under a contract from General Dynamics Information Systems, the FAISAT system engineering and integration partner. Final Analysis said Raytheon has made a "significant" cash equity investment in Final Analysis, and will design and build a global network control center, network operations centers, RF ground stations, satellite control centers and the terrestrial backbone infrastructure.
INTEGRAL SYSTEMS has sold a TNX/4 satellite ground terminal system to Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., for use by the university's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences in advanced studies of ocean color and other data generated by NASA's new Terra Earth-observing satellite. The system will include a high-precision four-meter antenna, baseband equipment and a data processing system optimized for Terra.
ECHOSTAR COMMUNICATIONS will build a new customer service center near Christianburg, Va., in the Shenandoah Valley, using a $750,000 grant from the Governor's Opportunity Fund as seed money, Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore reported. The Colorado-based direct broadcast satellite company will employ some 1,400 workers at the $16 million facility, where inbound sales and customer service representatives will be available around the clock to help with programming, billing and technical questions from DISH network customers.
If "frictionless commerce" works out for the aerospace and defense industry, investors will probably be able to buy a piece of the new global trading network about to be launched by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems and Raytheon.
The Pentagon's fiscal 2000 budget was written with the Defense Logistics Agency selling oil to the military services at $26.04 per barrel, when it has been buying it at $31 a barrel, leaving a large gap the Defense Dept. hopes to fill with supplemental funding, Pentagon Spokesman Ken Bacon reported yesterday. The supplemental appropriations bill now before Congress includes $1.56 billion to cover an increase in oil prices for three years -- 1999, 2000 and 2001 -- Bacon told reporters.
GLOBAL BROADBAND demand will exceed $580 billion by 2010, with the market in Europe and Asia outstripping growth in the U.S., according to a new report by Comsys, a telecommunications consultancy based in St. Albans, U.K. Comsys predicted that the roughly 14 million small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the U.S. will be surpassed in Europe by 2005 and in Asia by 2010, "through a combination of market size, greater dependence on high-speed networks and increased economic growth."
The Joint Strike Fighter program office needs to make sure critical technologies are more mature before it enters the engineering and manufacturing development phase of the program, the General Accounting Office says in a draft report. The draft urges the Secretary of Defense to "direct the JSF program office to adjust the currently planned March 2001 engineering and manufacturing development date, without the penalty of withdrawal of funding support, to allow adequate time to mature critical technologies to acceptable maturity levels."
GLOBALSTAR has won type approval from the European Telecommunications Standards International (ESTI) for its Ericsson-manufactured mobile satellite telephones. Globalstar said Ericsson would begin shipping the telephones "immediately." The Ericsson R290 phone is a dual-mode handset that offers both cellular and satellite connections, as warranted. It weighs about 12 ounces and can handle satellite-level talk without a recharge for about an hour and a half, while it will work on GSM cellular networks for about five hours, Globalstar said.
The Navy's F/A-18E/F strike fighter has 25 to 30 "major deficiencies" that could degrade its operational effectiveness or suitability, Philip E. Coyle, Pentagon director of operational test and evaluation, told the Senate Armed Services Committee's airland forces subcommittee.
Lockheed Martin inked a Marine Corps Simulator Master Plan contract worth as much as $300 million. Under the contract, Lockheed Martin Information Systems will provide simulator training for all Marine Corps aircraft, including the EA-6B, AH-1W, UH-1N, CH-46E, CH-53E, F/A-18C/D, AV-8B and KC-130.
CORRECTION: An article in The DAILY of March 9 incorrectly stated the position of the U.S. Space Command chief regarding a Kinetic energy Anti-Satellite (KE-ASAT) weapon. While Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart told Congress his command would like to keep a KE-ASAT "on the shelf," destruction of enemy satellites is viewed as a "last-ditch" approach, not the preferred option as reported in The DAILY.
Coalescent Technologies Corp., Winter Park, Fla., is being awarded a $9,461,324 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for engineering, analytical and technical services to support the development of weapon system/subsystem concept of operations, perform combat systems operations analysis, conduct mission weapon systems effectiveness evaluations, perform financial analysis, and develop mathematical models and simulation development for military weapon systems and subsystems for the Navy.
Raytheon Co., Electronic Systems, Bedford, Mass., is being awarded a $7,861,005 modification as part of cost-plus-award-fee contract DAAH01-99-C-0028, for PATRIOT engineering services. Work will be performed in Burlington, Mass. (6%); Huntsville, Ala. (6%); Andover, Mass. (2%); Tewksbury, Mass. (66%); El Paso, Texas (1%); Bedford, Mass. (18%), and Orlando, Fla. (1%), and is expected to be completed by Jan. 31, 2001. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This is a sole source contract initiated on Sept. 21, 1998. The U.S.
DRS TECHNOLOGIES signed a three-year contract with the U.S. Army worth an estimated $67 million for the base contract and up to $118 million if additional options are exercised. It was the company's largest win thus far in 2000. "The receipt of this award is affirmation of DRS's position as a leading U.S. defense industry supplier of advanced military ground vehicle sighting and weapons systems -- and is one of the most important received by DRS from the U.S. Army," said Mark S. Newman chairman, president and CEO of DRS Technologies.
