As it continues to cement its place as an “American” gas turbine engine manufacturer, Rolls-Royce is enlarging its advanced manufacturing capacity in Virginia while tapping automation and evolved machine tooling at its industrial base here in Indianapolis.
As the Boeing 787 fleet remains grounded due to safety issues with its lithium-ion batteries, the Joint Strike Fighter program office is not saying whether the issue will prompt any review of the F-35's electrical system, which incorporates a lithium-ion battery that is larger and higher-voltage than the 787's and has a once-per-sortie charge/discharge cycle. Made by a U.S. subsidiary of France's Saft, the JSF battery is the only onboard means of starting the fighter's integrated power pack, which starts the engine.
Rome was not built in a day. So why should anyone expect Lockheed Martin, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) project office, the U.S. Air Force and Navy to be able to agree on a date by which the money spent so far might actually translate into a tested product usable for national defense? Is that too much to ask, even though the program has been on contract for 11 years and has consumed $50 billion or so?
India's first C-17 has entered flight acceptance testing by the U.S. Air Force at Edwards AFB, Calif., as part of a fast-track foreign military sales (FMS) program that will see four other deliveries to India's Hindon Air Force Station near New Delhi this year.
ARLINGTON, Va. — As the production line looks to ramp down for the LPD-17 San Antonio-class amphibious dock ship, Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Ingalls Shipbuilding unit is eyeing other possible variants for the ship that could perform such missions as ballistic missile defense (BMD), hospital work or sub tending.
The U.S. Navy can keep a competitive edge between contractors—even in programs ruled by duopolies—with the right kind of negotiations, says Secretary Ray Mabus. During a Jan. 17 keynote address at the 2013 Surface Navy Association National Symposium, Mabus outlined how the Navy was able to whittle away at pricing on the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer restart, even though both of those efforts are dominated by two contractor teams.
PARIS — Eurocopter has begun design work on a new helicopter that will incorporate the high-speed technology used in its X3 demonstrator. CEO Lutz Bertling told journalists at the company’s annual press conference in Paris Jan. 24 that the first designs are now on the drawing board, but he would not offer a timeline for when or in what form the hybrid rotorcraft would appear. “This concept is not about high speed, but high productivity and it delivers additional productivity to the operator,” he said.
As the Pentagon prepares for across-the-board cuts to government spending, the competition for scarcer dollars is already beginning. A union representing 270,000 Pentagon civilians worries that the Pentagon could wind up converting civilian jobs to contract ones as the civilian workforce shrinks but the workload remains. Last year, the Pentagon issued guidance against that practice, known as direct conversions, and the head of the American Federation of Government Employees has asked the Pentagon to repeat the message.
Lockheed Martin executives are expecting to finalize negotiations for multibillion-dollar contracts with the Pentagon for the next two lots of F-35s in the first half of 2013, after the last two thorny sets of production discussions each took a year or more to close.
The U.S. Air Force is studying how to gain better insight into the true cost of weapon systems produced year over year, with an eye toward reducing “windfall profit” for companies at the tail end of a production cycle, says Lt. Gen. C.R. Davis, The ultimate goal is to allow the government to share in the benefits when production processes and personnel become most efficient in building a weapon system and prices tend to substantially drop.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) plans to show that a robotic vehicle can remove the antenna from a retired spacecraft in graveyard orbit, and attach systems to it to rebuild a functioning geostationary communications satellite, in an orbital demonstration planned for 2016.
The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (Speea) has pushed back a vote on a new four-year contact with Boeing until Feb. 18 at the earliest, about two weeks later than originally planned. The 10-member Speea negotiating panel, however, still is expected to recommend a “no” vote on the contract and ask its 22,900 engineer and technical members at Boeing Commercial Airplanes factories in California, Oregon, Utah and Washington to authorize a strike.
Nearly two dozen former top U.S. Coast Guard officials received compensation from contractors who did work with the Coast Guard after those officials left the service, a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report says. “A total of 22 of the 39 former high-ranking officials (admiral-level and SES Senior Executive Service officials) who separated from the Coast Guard from 2006 through 2010 were compensated at some point from 2006 through 2011 by contractors that received obligations from the Coast Guard in calendar year 2011,” GAO reports.
ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. Navy brass is on a quest to find out why it costs so much more money to buy military equipment than it does to buy similar commercial equipment or systems. For example, it costs about three times more to buy a military-grade generator offering the same rate of power, says Rear Adm. Dave Lewis, program executive officer for Navy ships.
LINTHICUM, Md. — The U.S. Navy’s choice of which contractor to develop and build its Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) very likely will come down to which company team offers the best price, according to officials from Northrop Grumman, one of the competitors for the prized program. The Navy has made it clear what kinds of capabilities it wants for AMDR, Northrop officials say. Now it becomes a matter of which contractor can meet those needs at the lowest price.
NEW DELHI — More than 600 defense and civil aircraft makers from across the globe are expected to display their products at the ninth edition of Aero India, which begins Feb. 6 in Bengaluru in southern India. “The five-day biennial air show provides an ideal window of opportunity to companies to not only network with Indian industries but also benefit from the sharing of expertise in research and development and product support with other global players,” says Indian Defense Production Secretary R.K. Mathur.
In a Jan. 21 brief, a U.S. Marine Corps official misstated the name of the program that is expected to achieve $1 billion in cost avoidance once Congress approves a multiyear procurement. The Bell/Boeing V-22 Osprey is the program expected to garner these savings. Negotiations for the deal, expected to cost $1 billion over five years, wrapped up late last year but the contract cannot be signed without congressional approval.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is reinvigorating the debate over providing military assistance to Syrian rebels, saying it is running out of time to intervene in the ongoing civil war.
