September 17, 2023 | International, Land
As Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met this week to discuss what analysts believe will be a deal for an exchange of weapons, the West's leading companies were descending on Europe's biggest arms show in London.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-arms-fair-global-war-fears-good-business-2023-09-15/
June 3, 2024 | International, Naval
Terma was awarded a contract to supply four SCANTER 6002 naval surveillance radars for the 2 Belgian and 2 Netherlands Navy Anti-Submarine Warfare frigates.
July 26, 2018 | International, Aerospace
By: Valerie Insinna LONDON — In 2016, the Air Force opened a new office to evaluate the airworthiness of military aircraft it didn't plan to buy, thus making it easier for those U.S. companies to sell internationally. Now its flagship effort with Textron's Scorpion jet has been suspended. After moving through the first phase of the airworthiness assessment, Textron decided to step away from the process, Bill Harris, Textron's vice president for Scorpion sales, confirmed in a July 14 interview. The reason, he said, is that the company opted to pool its financial resources in support of its AT-6 Wolverine turboprop that the Air Force is evaluating as part of the light attack experiment. If turned into a program of record, that opportunity could be worth several hundred planes. “AT-6 is a very important program,” Harris told Defense News at the Royal International Air Tattoo. “Any smart company moves their resources where they need to go, and all of our efforts with the Scorpion are privately funded.” The Air Force announced in July 2016 that it had signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, or CRADA, with Textron. The agreement was the first of its kind, aimed at allowing the Air Force to gain insight into technologies they aren't purchasing and to clear away some of the evaluations that must be done before a sale to a foreign nation. That agreement — along with the opening of a new Non-DoD Military Aircraft Office (NDMAO)— garnered much media attention in the months following. In an August 2016 interview, the head of the NDMA office said that a CRADA to assess the Lockheed Martin-Korean Aerospace Industries F/A-50 was soon to be signed, and that another agreement for a different aircraft could be on its heels. However, no such agreement on the F/A-50 or any other aircraft ever surfaced, and the work of the NDMAO faded into obscurity. Textron may have suspended its efforts to assess the Scorpion jet, but the NDMAO is working on two active projects, said Robert FitzHarris, the deputy director of the service's airworthiness office, in a statement. One involves the an agreement between the Air Force and General Atomics to conduct an airworthiness assessment of the MQ-9B SkyGuardian drone and the SeaGuardian, its maritime variant, he said. The CRADA is the first between the office an a maker of unmanned aircraft. In essence, SkyGuardian is a version of the MQ-9 Reaper that will be certified to fly in any airspace safely. The drone has already found its first customer: the United Kingdom, which could buy anywhere from 21 to 26 copies. Beyond that, the airworthiness assessment could raise the confidence levels of other countries interested in buying SkyGuardian. And, importantly, it gives the U.S. Air Force a window into the MQ-9B's capabilities — which could help SkyGuardian break into the U.S. market. IOMAX is also engaged in a CRADA with the Air Force for an assessment of its Archangel turboprop aircraft, FitzHarris said. Like General Atomics, IOMAX has sold the Archangel internationally, but the addition of an airworthiness assessment from the Air Force may help attract new customers or pave the way for speedier sales. Both the General Atomics and Iomax efforts are still in Phase 1, where the Air Force and company lay out an “airworthiness assessment basis” that establishes a common understanding of how the airworthiness of a given aircraft would have been evaluated and graded. Phase 2 revolves around submitting test reports, risk assessments and engineering data to the Air Force, who then conducts a technical assessment based on that data. “We don't do flight testing. We simply rely upon the data provided by the collaborator," FitzHarris told Defense News in 2016, when he was leading the NDMA office. "There's testing, analysis, all of these things that typically feed into an assessment,” he said. “We have the technical expertise to take that [...] and give an assessment of compliance. Where there is compliance lacking or data lacking, we're going to assess risk and then we provide that information in an assessment package back to the collaborator." Textron is open to restarting the airworthiness assessment effort for Scorpion in the future, provided it's able to nail down a first customer to help offset the expense of doing the evaluations, Harris said. "[Once] we that launch customer, then we'll re-initiate that program,” he said. “Until we get that, being privately funded and not a program of record with the air force, that continues to be all on our nickel.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/riat/2018/07/25/textron-is-no-longer-working-with-the-air-force-on-an-airworthiness-assessment-for-the-scorpion-jet-but-these-two-companies-are/
March 1, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Land
By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany — Switzerland's new defense chief, Viola Amherd, has intervened in the course of the multibillion-dollar “Air 2030” program, tasking a former Swiss astronaut with critiquing its underlying premises. Claude Nicollier, an astrophysicist and former military pilot, has until the end of April to review a 2017 expert report on the $8 billion project to buy a new fleet of fighter aircraft and ground-based air-defense gear. The second opinion is expected to delay the political process for the program. Technical evaluations of contractor offerings will proceed as planned this spring and summer, the defense ministry said in a statement. Former defense chief Guy Parmelin had planned to present a full program and investment plan for Air 2030 to parliament in February. Government officials still want to subject the proposal to a referendum in 2020. Replacing the country's decades-old F/A-18 and F-5 jets will eat up the lion's share of the program, at roughly $6 billion. The rest will go to new, ground-based, air and missile defense weapons. The envisioned concept of operations dictates that a fleet of 30 or 40 aircraft will intercept those targets outside of the ground weapons' range. Officials want enough capacity to have four planes in the air at any given time during crises. Defense ministry spokesman Renato Kalbermatten told Defense News that Nicollier's scope for critiquing the 2017 expert report is wide open, which means anything from aircraft numbers to cost is open for scrutiny. It is not expected, however, that the review will question the overall need for the program, he said. Notably, a reassessment of the threats expected to be countered by the modernization program is part of Nicollier's mandate. Swiss officials received offers from five aircraft makers on Jan. 25: Airbus with its Eurofighter, Boeing's F/18 Super Hornet, Dassault's Rafale, Lockheed Martin's F-35A and Saab's Gripen E. In the ground-based interceptor portion of the program, the Eurosam consortium is expected to offer its SAMP/T; Israel's Rafael is pitching David's Sling; and Raytheon wants to sell its Patriot system. The three vendors met with Swiss industry representatives earlier this month in preparation for a requirement to offer offset deals worth 100 percent of the eventual contract. Those deals are meant to benefit a broad section of Swiss industries, including the country's famed watchmakers, according to Armasuisse, the country's defense acquisition office. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/02/28/new-swiss-defense-chief-orders-second-opinion-on-huge-air-defense-revamp