LUCKY LUKE: Luke AFB , Ariz., will be the site of the U.S. Air Force’s F-35A Lightning II pilot training center, including for foreign militaries, the service says. The base will receive 72 Joint Strike Fighters to comprise three squadrons. The selection follows a hotly contested, three-year competition. Aircraft will begin to arrive from late 2013 to mid-2014, although the exact timing will depend on production schedules.
U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND GATR Technologies Inc., Huntsville, Ala., is being awarded a $37,000,000 single-award indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for the GATR inflatable antenna, components, technical support, and training in support of U.S. Special Operations Command. The anticipated period of performance is not to exceed five years. The place of performance is Huntsville. U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., is the contracting activity (H92222-12-D-0016).
NEW DELHI — The Indian navy has delayed by another six months a tender to buy 16 multi-role helicopters, even as it plans to issue another request for proposals to procure more than 75 similar aircraft, a senior defense ministry official says. The defense ministry official didn’t give any reasons for delaying the tender, which was initially released in September 2008. NH Industries (NHI) with its NH-90 and Sikorsky with its S-70 have bid for the program, which could expand by an additional 44 units and reach $1 billion.
Indonesia’s air force is aiming to take delivery of its first eight Embraer Super Tucano light attack aircraft by year’s end. Embraer held a delivery ceremony Aug. 6 at the Super Tucano assembly plant in Gaviao Peixoto, for the first four aircraft. Embraer already has delivered Super Tucanos to the Brazilian air force and other customers, but the Indonesian air force is the first customer for the type in the Asia-Pacific region.
As the proposed funding winds down for the counter-improvised explosive device (C-IED) efforts led by the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), questions linger about how the organization has conducted its business. The Pentagon will have spent an estimated $2.9 billion for Jieddo-related contracts between fiscal years 2011 to 2017, based on an analysis of data provided by Avascent050, an online market analysis toolkit for global defense programs.
British aerospace contractor Cobham is expanding its Latin American footprint with the opening of a subsidiary in Brazil to anchor operations in the region. Cobham this week acknowledged the startup of subsidiary Cobham do Brasil, based in Sao Paulo, to clear the way for new business for Cobham Tactical Communications and Surveillance.
U.S. Air Force guidance that told anyone connected to F-22 Raptor operations to report any hypoxia-like symptoms likely led to a number of those reports from ground workers for the aircraft, says Maj. Gen. Charlie Lyon, Air Combat Command’s director of operations.
The Senate quietly approved two last-minute changes to the defense spending bill for fiscal 2013 aimed at boosting space-launch industries in California and Alabama. The amendments were approved as part of a package and were not publicly debated, but neither involved government funding.
NEW DELHI — Boeing is preparing to test fly the first of the 10 C-17 heavy-lift aircraft it is building for the Indian air force (IAF) by January 2013. The major join ceremony — which integrates the forward, center and aft fuselages and the wing assembly — was held on July 31 at Boeing’s factory in Long Beach, Calif.
The increased use of helicopters in Afghanistan and other mountainous areas is changing the way the U.S. Army looks at mountain warfare. “The helicopter now allows access to terrain that was once unreachable, or that was only reachable by slow, methodical climbing,” says the most recently updated Army training guide, “Military Mountaineering,” released in July.
PUSHED OUT: The NROL-36 mission to launch a classified satellite from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., for the National Reconnaissance Office has been pushed back to no earlier than Aug. 14. Col. Nina Armagno, commander of the U.S. Air Force’s 30th Space Wing, says additional time is needed to address a range instrumentation issue that prompted a launch scrub on Aug. 2. Originally, the Air Force expected to be ready to launch as early as Aug. 4. There are no problems with either the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket or the NROL-36 payload.
Rolls-Royce and Snecma will study development of next-generation combat aircraft engines under an Anglo-French bilateral agreement led by the U.K. Defense Ministry and announced late last month. The contract calls for Rolls-Royce Snecma Ltd., a joint venture formed in 2001, to consider derivatives of existing military propulsion systems as well as the potential to develop novel engine concepts during the study, which are expected to require a little more than one year to complete.
When the 2008 recession engulfed the general aviation industry, Diamond Aircraft was hit particularly hard by the sales downturn in the light aircraft market. CEO Christian Dries wasted no time in finding new markets for Diamond's products. Soon, he had adapted or created several models for government and special missions use.
In April 2009, President Barack Obama laid out an ambitious vision in Prague about moving to a world without nuclear weapons. The speech won him friends among present and past heads of state and across the arms control community, and criticism from Republicans. But these days, the president's nuclear policy is under attack from all sides.
How do you fight off a swarm of small UAVs? Answer: With another swarm. That's the thinking behind the Aerial Battle Bots project masterminded by Timothy Chung, assistant professor of systems engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Chung is planning to stage an airborne gladiatorial contest between two fleets of 50 UAVs by 2015, to demonstrate how the swarm defense might work.
Lockheed Martin plans to conduct detailed studies of an advanced hybrid wing-body transport concept under a second phase of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) Revolutionary Configurations for Energy Efficiency (RCEE) program. The study is part of AFRL-led efforts to identify ways to radically reduce the amount of fuel used by the Air Force's air mobility fleet for “a severely energy-supply-constrained future scenario,” says AFRL. Reducing fuel burn has become a top priority for the U.S. Defense Department, which consumes almost 4 billion gal.
