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  July 2, 2019 | International, Land

  Rheinmetall, BAE consummate armored-vehicles joint venture

  By: Andrew Chuter and Sebastian Sprenger LONDON and COLOGNE, Germany – Germany's Rheinmetall and Britain's BAE Systems on Monday launched their U.K.-based military vehicles joint venture, after British authorities approved the deal in mid-June, the companies announced. The new outfit is named RBSL, short for Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land, and it's based in Telford, West Midlands. Peter Hardisty, formerly of Rheinmetall UK, is the company's managing director. The joint venture sets out to “play a major role” in manufacturing the Boxer multirole fighting vehicle for the British Mechanised Infantry Vehicle program, according to a Rheinmetall statement. Official also have an eye on “other strategic combat vehicle programs” in addition to maintenance contracts for the British Army's bridging- and armored-vehicle fleets, according to the company. “This announcement is a clear vote of confidence in the UK's defence industry as a world-leader in designing, supplying and supporting military vehicles,” Defence Secretary Penny Mordaunt was quoted as saying in the statement. “This exciting venture clearly demonstrates how Defence sits at the heart of the prosperity agenda. Its benefits will be felt in the West Midlands and across the UK defence supply chain, creating jobs, boosting exports and guaranteeing our technical skills base into the future.” Some might think it was anything but. That's because the news also means Britain has lost its only big-name, armored-vehicle company in a joint venture where BAE is the junior partner. As a result, the country no longer has a domestically controlled mainstream vehicle supplier — although some would argue BAE forfeited that role a while ago. The British company retains significant armored-vehicle design and build activities in the United States and Sweden. General Dynamics UK, Lockheed Martin UK and Rheinmetall now have significant investments in Britain's armored-vehicle sector, with British involvement primarily led by specialist designers and builders like Supacat and Jankel and a still-vibrant sector supply chain. It's a far cry from 2004 when BAE acquired key domestic manufacturer Alvis, trumping an acquisition bid from General Dynamics with a last-minute offer of £355 million (U.S. $451 million) that was largely seen as a strategic move. At the time, most of the British Army's armored vehicle fleet was designed and supplied by Alvis. But that's dramatically changed. General Dynamics has recently started supplying its Ajax family of tracked reconnaissance vehicles to the Army in what is the biggest deal in the sector in three decades. Final assembly and testing takes place at company facilities in South Wales. Lockheed Martin is leading the program to update the Warrior infantry fighting vehicle as well as supply turrets for the Ajax program from a factory in southern England. Rheinmetall is a partner in the Artec consortium selected without competition to supply Britain with the eight-wheel drive Boxer vehicle. The vehicle was nominated as the preferred option last year but a final production deal between RBSL and the Ministry of Defence has yet to be announced. Rheinmetall and BAE have also been vying to supply a major upgrade of the Challenger 2 main battle tank for the British Army. Mordaunt recently labeled the Challenger as “obsolete” due to the ministry's failure to keep pace with technological advances in the sector. In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute think tank last month, she said Britain had fallen behind it's allies and rivals due to underinvestment in the armored vehicle sector. A decision on the Challenger update program is expected shortly. However, recent signals from the MoD suggest the Army may have got its wish to fall into line with other NATO members and go for the German company's solution of a new turret and 120mm smoothbore gun to replace the rifled weapon currently fitted to the Challenger 2. BAE's weapons and ammunition activities in the U.K. are excluded from the deal, as is the CTAI joint venture with Nexter to build a new 40mm cannon. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/07/01/rheinmetall-bae-consummate-armored-vehicles-joint-venture/

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  June 7, 2019 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  Satellite imagery startups to challenge Maxar for big government contracts

  by Sandra Erwin The NRO is ready to start buying products from new vendors and move beyond the single-supplier arrangement with Maxar Technologies. SAN ANTONIO — The talk of the industry at this week's geospatial intelligence symposium GEOINT 2019 was the National Reconnaissance Office's friendly outreach to commercial suppliers of satellite imagery that for years have felt shut out of the market. A year after taking over the responsibility for buying commercial satellite imagery from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the NRO is ready to start buying products from new vendors and move beyond the single-supplier arrangement that NGA signed nearly a decade ago with DigitalGlobe, which has recently been rebranded by its parent company as Maxar Technologies. Maxar is now the NRO's sole supplier of commercial satellite imagery under the EnhancedView contract, which NGA inked in 2010 with two companies — DigitalGlobe and GeoEye. By 2012, government spending cuts forced NGA to slash its imagery budget by half. EnhancedView subsequently was reduced from more than $7 billion to about $3.5 billion, which led to the merger of the two companies under DigitalGlobe. Now, the NRO pays $300 million a year for access to Maxar's WorldView-1, WorldView-2 and WorldView-3 satellites and its image library under the program it renamed EnhancedView Follow-On. EnhancedView was originally a 10-year deal set to expire in 2020. When the NRO took over the management of the contract, it added three yearly options worth about $300 million a year. NRO officials said extending Maxar's options until 2023 gives the agency sufficient time to transition to a new procurement while continuing to buy imagery from Maxar to ensure there is no disruption in supply. Troy Meink, director of the NRO's geospatial intelligence directorate, announced June 3 that the agency in 2020 will start a new procurement that will include multiple companies. To begin the process, it awarded one-year contracts to Maxar and two other suppliers — Planet and BlackSky — to allow the NRO to study the companies' products and gain insight into the projected size and capacity of their satellite constellations. The NRO calls these “study contracts” because the information they receive from vendors will be used by the agency to examine the companies' abilities to task, collect process and deliver satellite imagery. “These are major efforts to start working with vendors that traditionally we have not, to figure out how they can deliver product and best meet the requirements,” Meink told SpaceNews in a June 3 interview. “We are trying to understand how we can use their capability. Licensing is always a big deal. That's part of the study phase. How could we license that data?” Meink said the opportunities for new players will be significant because the NRO expects it will need more imagery than it currently acquires from Maxar, which means it is likely to spend more than $300 million annually. Meink declined to say how much more. A newly created Commercial Systems Program Office at the NRO will oversee the procurement of imagery. The office's director, Peter Muend, said that after the one-year study phase, the NRO will start planning large procurement awards in late 2020. “We see a dramatic increase in commercial requirements. That means we're going to be buying a lot more commercial imagery than we have in the past,” he said June 4 at GEOINT. While the NRO will acquire the imagery, the NGA will continue to buy the “value added” services and analytics after the imagery is purchased, Muend said. “We are just buying the pixels.” Muend said the NRO has an important relationship with Maxar but “no single provider can meet all of our needs. We'll be on contract with multiple providers in the future.” Maxar will remain a key provider, he said. “We're very much eager to continue to move forward with them but also add Planet and BlackSky, and others beyond that.” Planet and BlackSky were selected because they are able to provide products now whereas other companies have plans to offer imagery but can't yet, Muend said. As the industry matures, the NRO will be open to bringing in more vendors. The study contracts will be a chance for Planet and BlackSky to actually show they are viable competitors. “We want to make sure there's truth in advertising,” Muend said. Both companies have sold imagery and services to the government under narrowly scoped contracts, but the NRO needs to see whether they are able to satisfy the agency's more ambitious demands. The NRO will model the companies' capabilities and analyze how their imagery would be integrated into the agency's ground systems architecture that will combine commercial and government imagery. The NRO also will examine the companies' business plans “so we have confidence in their projections of what they're going to build in the future,” Muend said. In the first part of the study contract, the companies will demonstrate their imagery collection abilities. The second part is more complex and requires the companies to deliver imagery to “user specified downlinks.” This would show whether they are capable of providing imagery to military forces in war zones, for example, which operate tactical ground terminals. During a conflict, the military would need imagery quickly and would not want data to pass through the corporate enterprise architecture. The study contracts will “lay the groundwork for the future,” said Muend. The plan is to focus first on optical imagery. The NRO will consider procuring other data sources from commercial vendors such as synthetic aperture radar, he said, when those products are available. New competitors Both Planet and BlackSky are commercial players that have been eager for a shot at the biggest imagery buy from the U.S. government. When BlackSky was formed in 2015, several of its employees were GeoEye and DigitalGlobe alumni, including chief technology officer Scott Herman. “We're made up of people from the national security community that support national security missions,” Herman told SpaceNews. “We see that as our primary and first vertical that we really want to focus on.” At the same time, BlackSky is rapidly building a commercial business. “The government wants us to have a commercial business,” Herman said. “They don't want us to be solely dependent on the government.” Based in Seattle, BlackSky is owned by Spaceflight Industries, a space services firm. BlackSky has two Earth imaging satellites in operation and plans to have eight in service by year's end, Herman said. The company' long-term goals are to deploy 30 satellites by 2023, and possibly 60 in the years after, depending on the market demand. BlackSky supplies high-revisit imagery but primarily sees itself as a provider of global monitoring and alerting services that combine pictures — taken by its own satellites and other companies' satellites — with other sources of intelligence such as social media, news and other data feeds. “We are not just a satellite company,” said Herman. “We build satellites to support our global monitoring.” BlackSky's foreign military customers have described the company's service as “NGA in a box,” Herman said. San Francisco-based Planet has been making modest inroads into the defense and intelligence market. In March, the NGA renewed its third contract since 2016 with Planet, extending the agency's subscription access to daily imagery over select areas of the Earth. “We're excited” about the NRO contract, Robbie Schingler, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Planet, said in a statement. Schingler and other former NASA scientists founded Planet Labs in 2010 with the goal of providing universal access to satellite Earth imaging. It makes small, low-cost satellites and operates the world's largest constellation of commercial imaging satellites, with 140 currently in orbit. The head of Planet's federal business, Jen Marcus, told SpaceNews the company is developing new analytics products using artificial intelligence, and is upgrading satellites with new cameras to satisfy demand for higher resolution pictures. Marcus said the company will remain primarily a commercial business but does want to increase its footprint in defense and intelligence. In the future Planet is looking to become a vertically integrated imagery and analytics company, said Marcus. “We think there's a big value and efficiency in vertical integration.” Despite the competitive pressures from new players, Maxar executives said they are confident the company will remain a key provider of imagery to the U.S. government. “For nearly 20 years, Maxar has been a trusted partner of the U.S. government,” Maxar CEO Dan Jablonsky said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with the NRO as they increasingly adopt commercial imagery.” Tony Frazier, Maxar's executive vice president of global field operations, told SpaceNews the company has committed $600 million to building a new constellation of satellites, WorldView Legion, that would be smaller and image the Earth at faster rates than its legacy spacecraft. Legion will start launching in 2021 in anticipation of future government demands for high revisit imagery, Frazier said. The company has not yet revealed how many satellites it will build, although an FCC filing indicated it would be as many as 12. Culture change at NRO The commercial imagery procurement is viewed as a sign of a cultural shift at the secretive NRO. Meink said a desire to buy products from the market instead of developing government-owned systems is just common sense, given the massive investments made by the private sector in satellites and launch vehicles. Muend said the NRO is changing but not radically. “When we first assumed responsibility for commercial imagery some folks worried that we wouldn't do it justice,” he commented. “I feel we have done the right things. We are having a deliberate discussion to make sure we buy commercial imagery everywhere we can, and only build national systems where commercial systems don't exist.” There is a real effort to increase openness in “how we interact with providers,” said Muend. The agency will be watching developments in the industry as it figures out a procurement strategy for commercial imagery and other types of data. “We're operating on the information that we have now,” said Muend. “We recognize that what we're setting up now is not the final answer.” https://spacenews.com/satellite-imagery-startups-to-challenge-maxar-for-big-government-contracts/

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  May 22, 2020 | International, Security

  Coulson’s CU-47 is ready for the fire fight

  Posted on May 22, 2020 by Howard Slutsken Leveraging its experience with fixed-wing air tankers, Coulson Aviation has unveiled its latest aerial firefighting conversion, based on the Boeing CH-47D Chinook heavy-lift helicopter. In early March, the first Coulson-Unical CU-47 was flown from the company's Port Alberni, B.C., base to the Aerial Firefighting North American 2020 conference in Sacramento, Calif. Featuring a 3,000 gallon roll-on/roll-off internal tank and an advanced Garmin avionics suite, up to 12 CH-47Ds will be converted into next-generation heli-tankers, in a partnership with Unical Aviation that was announced a year ago. “Unical provides us with the aircraft and a vast supply of parts,” explained Britt Coulson, president and COO, in an interview with Skies. “They bought the entire Canadian Forces CH-47 parts inventory and were the largest purchaser of CH-47Ds from the U.S. Army.” The twin-rotor Chinook is well known for its speed, size and payload. While the helicopter is often deployed on fire attack missions carrying a water bucket as an external load, Coulson wanted to give the CU-47 more flexibility and capability. The company's engineers had already developed a 4,000 gallon Retardant Aerial Delivery System RADS-XXL for its Lockheed C-130 Hercules tanker conversions, and that tank was shrunk to create a 3,000 gallon RADS-L for the CH-47D conversion. “It's the same overall design as the C-130. It shares most of the same hydraulic components, the same doors and the same design of a roll-in, roll-out tank,” said Coulson. Other CH-47 internal tank systems utilize the small hook well in the centre of the helicopter as the water and retardant delivery port, but according to Coulson, that has its limitations. “The other tank designs are plagued with flow rate issues, which means they don't pack enough punch to really get through [forest] canopies or drop in heavy timber – the hook well opening just isn't big enough. “The lower the flow rate you have out of your tank, the slower and lower you have to fly. The problem with a big helicopter like a Chinook is if you fly too slow and low, your downwash is going to negatively affect the ground fire conditions and your drop is going to be ineffective.” To increase and optimize the flow rate for the RADS-L, the belly of the CH-47D was modified by cutting the helicopter's lower skin and adding structure below the floor to accommodate the tank installation and a pair of drop doors, controlled by the pilots through a state-of-the-art touchscreen controller. From the same touch panel, the pilots also control the CU-47's newly-developed retractable snorkel system to refill the RADS-L tank from water sources close to a fire's location. Installed internally, the snorkel head sits flush with the belly when retracted, so that with no additional external drag, the helicopter can maintain its fast 140-knot cruise speed. In a hover, the snorkel takes just four seconds to deploy and six seconds to retract, and the pilots and flight engineer can monitor the system's operation via a high-definition belly-mounted camera feed, displayed on the touchscreen controller. “The snorkel system has exceeded our expectations and we're filling the entire tank in under two minutes,” said Coulson. With the advanced capabilities of the Garmin avionics, the relocation of the flight engineer's panel, and the new RADS-L tank, Coulson originally believed that the CU-47 could be crewed solely by two pilots, without a flight engineer. But recent operational experience led the company to rethink that strategy. “We realized that with a helicopter of this size, going into some of the smaller dip sites, to have an additional set of eyes looking out the side or back is valuable to the pilots. So we've de-modified the helicopter and gone back to a full-time flight engineer to provide that increased safety and situational awareness.” Like Coulson's C-130 conversions, the CU-47 can also be tasked with night-time firefighting missions, thanks to the Night Vision System (NVS) certification of the helicopter's avionics suite. Wearing NVS googles, the CU-47's crew work in tandem with a fire attack “Intel” helicopter's pilots. The Intel crew uses a thermal camera to evaluate the behaviour of a fire, and if a drop is required, they take a page from military ground-attack operations. Using a laser, the Intel crew designates the target for the tanker. “With a geo-referenced lock, the Intel helicopter can orbit, and the laser beam will stay on the same spot. It illuminates an area on the ground about the size of a car,” said Coulson. The first CU-47 will soon be joined by a second RADS-L equipped helicopter, two CU-47's with upgraded avionics that will fly “bucket” missions, and a fifth, tank-equipped CU-47 that will deploy as a spare. “All of our FAA testing [on RADS-L] has finished, we're just waiting for the final Supplemental Type Certificate signature,” said Coulson. “We're doing some minor cleanup to the helicopter to make sure that it's ready to go fight fires this summer.” Howard Slutsken's lifelong passion for aviation began when he was a kid, watching TCA Super Connies, Viscounts, and early jets at Montreal's Dorval Airport. He's a pilot who loves to fly gliders and pretty much anything else with wings. Howard is based in Vancouver, B.C. https://www.skiesmag.com/features/coulsons-cu-47-fire-fight