BEIJING — Avic says it will put its highest priority in coming years on aero-engine technology, a field of aerospace in which China has conspicuously lagged. The group has set a budget of 10 billion yuan ($1.56 billion) for aero-engine work for the next five years, says Avic President Lin Zuoming.
LONDON — Researchers at Germany’s DLR aerospace center hope to complete final ground tests of the Shefex 2 (Sharp-Edged Flight Experiment) hypersonics demonstrator in the next two to three weeks in preparation for a June launch. The mission initially was due to take place last year, but was delayed so different issues discovered during ground testing could be resolved. The new launch date being eyed is June 18.
Budget cuts not only put pressure on the scope of defense research, but also emphasize the speed with which results can be fielded to improve today's weapon systems. The Office of Naval Research (ONR)—responsible for science and technology (S&T) across sea, air, land and space realms for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps—is looking to field technologies faster to meet the objectives of the Defense Department's new strategic guidance.
SENDAI, Japan — Knocked out by the great tsunami on March 11 last year, the Sendai Maintenance Center of Japanese aerospace group Jamco is nearing full recovery.
The beginning of a major downturn is not the best time to launch a new company. But the executives who run ITT Exelis didn't have much choice. The 20,000-employee defense and information technology operation was spun off last October as part of a breakup of multi-industry ITT Corp. designed to appease restless shareholders. And Exelis, which draws nearly 70% of its sales from defense, clearly was not the piece of ITT that investors saw as a growth play.
HANDED OVER: Three months after its launch, the U.S. Air Force has accepted control of WGS-4 following Boeing’s in-orbit testing of the spacecraft, which is based on the 702HP commercial satellite bus. WGS-4 will be the first Block II in operation following USAF acceptance testing. Block II spacecraft feature three times faster data rate transmissions of airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance imagery as compared to Block I. WGS-5 is in production and due for launch in 2013. The WGS is the successor to the Defense Satellite Communications System.
The ability of the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey tiltrotor to fly farther, as well as faster, than helicopters has been a key factor in its fight for survival for more than a decade.
UNMANNED PRESSURE: Military operations will be a significant contributor to the coming wave of unmanned aircraft in the national airspace system (NAS), according to John Langford, president and CEO of Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. Langford offers this measure of the pressure unmanned aircraft will bring to the NAS: Around 1999, there were about 100,000 unmanned flight hours yearly. It now approaches one million. Almost all those flight hours occurred outside U.S. airspace, in military vehicles on military missions.
Aerospace executives' skepticism about the prospects for implementing the NextGen air traffic control system is fading. With Congress finally having passed an FAA reauthorization bill that allows for new methods of financing the overhaul of air traffic management—the primary hurdle to persuading the airline industry to invest in NextGen equipment—execs are increasingly pointing to the potential payoff. In fact, the campaign now has so much momentum that it will be difficult to block implementation, says Fedex President and CEO David Bronzcek.
If there is one Pentagon program decision for fiscal 2013 that lawmakers are likely to reject, it is the decision to mothball Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk Block 30. Plans to make 18 of the high-altitude UAVs and immediately lock them in storage, when they have been already used both on the battlefield and for disaster relief, have not gone over well with House lawmakers.
Corporate raider Paul Bilzerian may have ended up in prison after his takeover and break-up of diversified manufacturer Singer in the late 1980s, but he set in motion a chain of events that shaped and reshaped the flight-simulation market—and which may only now reaching their conclusion. Always technology-driven and highly competitive, the simulation industry has been wracked by waves of consolidation that have seen the some players change hands several times.
Canada's government has stripped its Department of National Defense of the lead role in the country's planned acquisition of the Lockheed Martin F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, placed a cap on the program's cost and directed the DND to evaluate alternative ways to sustain Canada's fighter force, in the wake of a scathing report from the country's auditor-general, Michael Ferguson.
Industry leaders are optimistic about the technology and promise of the commercial space, pointing to advances made by private companies leveraging government investment and finding more efficient ways to contract, buy and build. Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president at Sierra Nevada Space Systems, touted the outlook of his company’s Dream Chaser orbital transit, now in development with 12 industrial partners, during the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 11th Annual Aviation Summit on April 12.
More than a decade after the bottom dropped out of the prospective U.S. commercial launch market, the U.S. Air Force is struggling to deal with the continued financial ramifications of that unrealized opportunity. Those challenges are compounded by NASA's decision to rely on Russian rockets for its cargo missions in the near future, so the burden of shepherding the bloated U.S. launch infrastructure has now fallen into the lap of the Air Force.
The U.S. Air Force plans to release a draft of its amended request for proposals (RFP) for the troubled Light Air Support (LAS) program on April 17, with a source selection eyed in early 2013. If this schedule holds, the first aircraft will not reach Afghanistan until the third quarter of 2014, a slip of 15 months. The program was originally crafted to quickly field light-attack aircraft for use by the Afghan air force as Washington begins to withdraw its soldiers.
LightSquared, a company that sought to build an advanced 4G telecommunications network, is considering bankruptcy, and several lawmakers are wondering why the Obama administration paid for testing of its system and gave it a waiver to operate in the first place. The tests on LightSquared's network resulted in the determination that it could interfere with GPS receivers.
Moving quickly to get its Robotics Challenge disaster-response competition off the ground, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) plans to award Boston Dynamics a contract to supply eight humanoid robots for use by competing teams.
As military procurements go, the U.S. Air Force's competition to supply 20 turboprop light-attack/advanced training aircraft to the Afghan air force is hardly on the cutting edge of technology. Yet a battle for the modest contract has become a political hot potato between the U.S. and one of the world's rising economic powers, Brazil. Last week, it served as a backdrop to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's visit to the White House.
Winglets and a lift-distribution control system are next on the agenda as Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Air Force pursue fuel-burn improvements on the large fleet of C-130s. Although principally aimed at the C-130J, with more than 250 now in operation, some of the features could also find use on older models. The effort fits in with a larger USAF effort to reduce fuel-burn fleetwide.
PARIS — The Yahsat 1B (Y1B) telecom satellite owned by United Arab Emirates-based Al Yah Satellite Communications Co. is slated to launch April 24 aboard an International Launch Services Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. When Y1B enters service, it will complete the two-spacecraft Yahsat system built by EADS-Astrium and Thales Alenia Space. Al Yah, however, is now considering ordering a third satellite and is soliciting interest from numerous manufacturers, according to industry officials.
The beginning of a major downturn is not the best time to launch a new company. But the executives who run ITT Exelis didn’t have much choice. The 20,000-employee defense and information systems operation was spun off last October as part of a breakup of multi-industry ITT Corp. designed to appease restless shareholders. And Exelis, which draws nearly 70% of its sales from defense, clearly was not the piece of ITT that investors saw as a growth play.
Boeing may have clashed recently with commercial air carriers over the issue of export financing. But the head of the company’s defense division reached out to the commercial side of the industry in an April 12 speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, saying that America needs a “game plan” for aviation. Other countries are investing in the commercial and defense industries with the idea that both are integral, Dennis Muilenburg, president of Boeing’s defense, space and security division, says.
