Defense

Snowstorm shuts down Washington but fails to halt Aviation Week’s 58th annual Laureate awards ceremony, which salutes aerospace sector’s high achievers.

Carlos Kingston was awarded Aviation Week’s 2015 Defense Laureate for spearheading the MDA’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense team’s dogged pursuit to identify the cause and to ultimately cure an anomaly in the U.S. ballistic missile defense system.

Two winners took home Aviation Week’s Innovation Laureate for 2015—Raytheon and Saab pursued different routes to achieve the same outcome—introducing gallium nitride power electronics to military radar and electronic-warfare systems.

With the F-35 development program 60% complete and two years to go, the test program is operating at a high pace.

Testers say a software patch gets F-35 closer to promise of multi-ship data fusion.

The Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” came in handy for the pilots of a Boeing 757 flying scientists from Christchurch to Pegasus Field in Antarctica when fog forced a landing at well below instrument minimums.

Dassault Aviation, long noted for both its civil and military aircraft offerings, may eventually have to opt for a purely civil product line due to diverse market and political influences.

South Korea’s LCH-LAH is supposed to become the leading 5-ton helicopter. But the base type chosen by Korean Aerospace Industries, the Airbus H155, has not been a strong seller. And there is not a lot of time to make big improvements before the targeted 2020 entry into service.

Despite political headwinds, the U.S. Army is pushing ahead with a restructuring designed to protect investment in future rotorcraft.

Sikorsky has a full plate of helicopter programs, but they are just not profitable enough for parent United Technologies.

Reasons for the surge in mergers and acquisitions vary with the motivations of the involved companises.

The U.S. has little to show for the millions of dollars it has invested over nearly a decade for training and equipping Yemeni counterterror forces.

AgustaWestland and Boeing battle it out to upgrade the U.K.’s Apache fleet.

Bell Helicopter sees a chance that Japan will buy more MV-22 Ospreys than the 17 budgeted for the coming financial year.

There used to be stealth aircraft and non-stealth aircraft, but new detection technology is making that distinction more complicated.

Helicopter manufacturers may be closing in on a long-sought goal: eliminating rotor-blade vibration.

Based on the Russian Kh-55, the Soumar is believed to have a range of at least 2,000 km. “This missile represents a significant leap in the Middle East arms race,” says Col. Aviram Hasson of Israel’s Missile Defense Organization.

Take China’s 10.1% rise in defense spending and make two adjustments: reduce for the effect of inflation, then increase for the effect of officers now being less able to embezzle the people’s money

“The future is bright for Sikorsky,” says the CEO of the rotorcraft maker’s parent company, United Technologies Corp. (UTC) – but it is not bright enough to keep it inside UTC.

Short-term thinking seems to have become the strategy of choice for many publicly traded companies.

“The deal highlights another exit by private equity of a multiyear defense services investment,” says analyst Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners.

Common modules with digital beam-forming will reduce development expense and timescale, increase capability and flexibility for AESA radars and jammers.

Marine leaders believe that their JSF will be a war-winner. They should be given a chance to show how their plans will work.

Under pressure from slower-than-expected F-35 fielding, USAF is embarking on a pricey upgrade to keep the F-15 relevant into the 2040s.

The tremendous margin of technological superiority that the U.S. has typically enjoyed since end of World War II is eroding.