July 26, 2019 | International, Aerospace
WASHINGTON — The Air Force's No. 2 officer has a countdown on his iPhone for the first B-21 Raider flight, and it may happen sooner than you think: December 2021, to be exact.
“Don't hold me to it, but it's something like 863 days to first flight,” said Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Stephen Wilson, according to Air Force Magazine.
Wilson, who spoke July 24 at an AFA Mitchell Institute event, said he had recently visited B-21 prime contractor Northrop Grumman's facilities in Melbourne, Fla., and that the company was “moving out on that pretty fast.”
The 863-day countdown — if it is accurate — would peg the Raider's inaugural flight to Dec. 3, 2021. And while there's still ample time for design problems and budget setbacks to delay that schedule, analysts said the Air Force's disclosure of the first flight date means that the secretive bomber program is likely moving along smoothly.
“A lot can happen in two years. But if they feel that confident about the schedule it's a good sign that things are on course,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group.
The short timeline between the contract award to Northrop Grumman in 2015 — which withstood a Boeing-Lockheed protest in 2016 — and first flight in 2021 could be a sign the B-21's air vehicle design is a smaller version of the B-2 Spirit, he said.
“Which, of course, would mean a lot less risk and reasonably fast schedule,” Aboulafia said. “There's not a reason for the airframe itself to have to change radically. It's everything else about it that needs to be modernized, and it seems they think they can make do with a smaller system with less range. If you accept that thinking as the likely reality, then that would make for less risk and a relatively short development schedule. That all makes sense.”
However, it is possible that there have been major design changes, in which case it's likely that several sub-scale or even full-scale demonstrators will fly before 2021, he added.
Roman Schweizer, an analyst of Cowen Washington Research Group, said a 2021 first flight is a “significant new data point” that meshes well with the company's projected schedule of the program.
“We believe the next major milestone for the program will be a Production Readiness Review that will clear the way for manufacturing the first prototype aircraft. Based on the program's next R&D funding step-up, we expect this could happen sometime later this calendar year to allow manufacturing to begin in FY20,” he wrote in an email to investors on Wednesday.
In March, Bloomberg reported that procurement spending for the B-21 program would start in FY22 with $202 million in funding, shooting up to $2.4 billion the following year and $3.3 billion in FY24.
“That could mean Low-Rate Production in FY23,” Schweizer wrote. “That would also make sense after flight test evaluations of the prototype (and possibly several others).”
The Air Force has kept tight hold on details related to the Raiders development, keeping much of its budget in the “black” or classified portion of the funding request. The last major B-21 related disclosure was the December 2018 announcement that the program had completed its critical design review.
Wilson's statements follow Acting Secretary of the Air Force Matt Donovan's visit to Northrop's B-21 Design and Development Headquarters in Melbourne., on July 19. Donovan was accompanied by Randy Walden, director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, which is responsible for executing the program.
“We look forward to receiving the B-21 on time and incorporating it into our future force,” Donovan said after the visit. “The B-21 will be a significant component of our Air Force as we continue to modernize to meet the National Defense Strategy and is a game-changing capability to win the high-end fight.”
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/07/25/coming-in-2021-the-b-21-raiders-first-flight/
October 10, 2022 | International, Aerospace
Deliveries can resume for Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 jet under a waiver allowing Chinese-origin alloy to go into an engine part, the Pentagon said on Saturday.
December 13, 2019 | International, C4ISR
Andrew Eversden There will be 14 early adopters of the Pentagon's controversial new enterprisewide general-purpose cloud, Defense Department CIO Dana Deasy said Dec. 12. Deasy, speaking at the AFCEA NOVA Air Force IT Day, said parties eyeing a move to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud are U.S. Transportation Command, Special Operations Command, Joint Special Operations Command and the Navy. “What's really unique is the variety of the 14 early adopters allows us to test various principles on JEDI from the tactical edge all the way to the top secret — needing to use the cross-domain,” Deasy said. “So we're going to learn fairly quickly what it takes to actually now go from the strategic vision to the ability to stand it up and to bring it to life.” Federal Times asked the Department of Defense to provide the other 10 components among the first movers. A DoD spokesperson didn't immediately respond. Deasy reiterated what he told Defense News earlier in the week: that the unclassified JEDI environment will be ready in February, with the “secret” environment ready six months after that. There is also no specific timeline for the top-secret environment. He said that there are meetings every two weeks where the JEDI team discusses the “60 to 70 services” that must be ready to go when the unclassified environment kicks off. DoD awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft over Amazon Web Services, which recently filed a protest in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that relied heavily on interference allegations against President Donald Trump. The contract is potentially worth $10 billion over 10 years. Throughout the entirety of the JEDI procurement, DoD has struggled to dispel the notion that the Pentagon's only cloud would be JEDI, when in reality the JEDI cloud is just one in a multicloud environment. Deasy took aim at that characterization in his address, highlighting that there are “something like” 10 more cloud contracts out for bids next year. “The whole reason we started JEDI was we were not short on clouds,” Deasy said. “What we were short of was an enterprise capability ... all the way out to the tactical edge. ... There will always be a need for special-purpose clouds." Once the JEDI cloud is set up, Deasy said, the next step is to look across the department at the various siloed cloud and ask “do they serve a unique purpose that is truly distinctly different than JEDI? Or is there overlap?” The Pentagon has signaled that it will move 80 percent of its systems to the JEDI cloud. Consolidation is an option for overlapping clouds, but Deasy said the DoD won't know what to do specifically with the overlaps until the JEDI cloud is stood up. The JEDI cloud environment will allow the DoD to significantly reduce the number of clouds it has, which the Congressional Research Services has estimated sits at more than 500. With the JEDI cloud, Deasy's ready to reduce that number by hundreds. At the end of the day, “we sure in the heck don't need 100 clouds, we probably don't need 50 clouds, but we definitely need more than one or two clouds,” Deasy said. https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/cloud/2019/12/12/here-are-some-early-adopters-of-the-controversial-jedi-cloud/
September 15, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
Air & Cosmos consacre un article à l'action de la «task force» mise en place en mars dernier par le ministère des Armées pour soutenir les entreprises de la BITD (Base Industrielle et Technologique de Défense) face aux conséquences de la crise sanitaire. 47 entreprises, dont l'activité est stratégique ou critique pour la BITD française, ont déjà été soutenues gr'ce à la cellule mise en place par le ministère des Armées, ce qui représente presque la moitié des «92 chantiers ouverts», indique Vincent Imbert, ingénieur général de l'armement, qui dirige la «task force». Depuis le mois de mars, «nous avons recueilli auprès des différents organismes acheteurs du ministère des Armées, de la DGA et des services de soutien leurs listes d'industriels stratégiques ou critiques qui pouvaient se retrouver en position délicate. Des contacts ont aussi été pris avec les grands maîtres d'œuvre, les groupements industriels comme le GIFAS, le GICAT et le CIDEF, afin d'obtenir de leur part une liste de sous-traitants qu'ils jugeaient en situation à risque», explique-t-il. «Nous devons être attentifs à ce qu'il y ait une vraie solidarité au niveau national, au niveau des entreprises, afin que le tissu industriel soit alimenté de la meilleure façon possible par les engagements et les investissements que nous allons faire», conclut-il. Air & Cosmos du 11 septembre