COVID-19 Stimulus Includes Aerospace And Defense Industry Assistance

On the same subject

• 

  May 10, 2021 | International, Naval

  Collins Aerospace Upgrades US Navy C-130 Fleet

  --Upgrading fleet with long-lasting wheels and carbon brakes --With proprietary DURACARB carbon heat sink material, Collins Aerospace brakes can last eight tim

• 

  April 6, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  Daily Memo: Emergency Funding For Suppliers, Aftermarket Providers

  Sean Broderick The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act sets up several new programs and adjusts some existing ones—each aimed at pumping much-needed cash into specific sized organizations or industry sectors. Large portions of the U.S. commercial aviation industry got specific carve-outs in the $2 trillion economic relief package enacted March 27. While these loans and grants will help air carriers and other key industry players offset some financial strife caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, most suppliers will be looking elsewhere for money. Thankfully, CARES gives even the smallest companies options. Topping the list is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a $349 billion pot of money designed to enable the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) to provide “expeditious” relief to eligible businesses, an interim final rule published late April 2 said. PPP provides SBA-guaranteed loans equal to up to 2.5 times monthly payroll costs, with a $10 million cap, that businesses can use to keep the lights on for two months. Eligible expenses include payroll, health care benefits, rent and utility payments, as well as some interest expenses. The loans come with a 1% interest rate, maximum two-year terms, and require no collateral or personal guarantees. But they will be forgiven if 75% or more of the funds are used to cover payroll. Among the PPP's wrinkles: only the first $100,000 in an employee's salary can be counted when calculating payroll expenses. Contractors are eligible to apply for their own relief, so their costs can't be counted at all. Also ineligible for counting in the payroll expenses: salaries of employees that live outside the U.S. Businesses can only apply for one PPP loan, so the SBA advises applying for the maximum eligible amount. Determining eligibility is straightforward: a business must find its North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code, check the maximum employee size for its business category, and compare it to its staff size. While the general small-business benchmark is 500 or fewer employees, aerospace has many exceptions. The threshold for aircraft engine and engine parts manufacturing/maintenance (NAICS code 336412) is 1,500 employees. For aeronautical instruments manufacturing (334511), it's 1,250. If your business falls into multiple codes, the one that generates the most work determines your NAICS code. SBA has an online tool that walks through the process at www.sba.gov/size-standards. The PPP application window opened on April 3. The program's sheer size—SBA's cornerstone 7(a) loan program issued about $20 billion in loans in all of 2019—and its first-come, first-served basis triggered a massive, front-loaded surge of applications. The interim final rule contained key guidance that banks needed to service the program, which meant not all lenders were ready to start processing applications right away. But the situation was improving hourly throughout the day April 3 as more lenders came onboard. Another SBA program that CARES leans on is the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL). Capped at $2 million with a 3.75% interest rate, EIDLs can be used for a wider variety of expenses than the PPP. Unlike the PPP, however, they are not eligible for forgiveness. CARES also gives the U.S. Treasury Department the authority to make special loan allowances for medium-sized businesses, generally those that are too large for an SBA program and have up to 10,000 employees. Among the caveats: maintaining or restoring 90% of its equivalent workforce as of Feb. 1, 2020 within four months of the official U.S. declaration that the COVID-19 public health emergency is over. Further guidance from Treasury, including basics such as how to apply, are in the works. Some suppliers are eligible to apply for shares of the aviation-specific funds set aside in CARES. FAA-certificated repair stations are mentioned as being eligible for some of the $29 billion in CARES loans, specifically from the $25 billion pot allocated for passenger airlines. But the law says they should exhaust other available CARES funding options first. There is another pot of $17 billion in loans set aside for companies critical to national security. Neither the law nor Treasury defines the term, however, so eligibility remains unclear. If Treasury looks to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Critical Infrastructure guidance, aircraft and engine supply-chains would qualify, as would repair stations. Payroll grants for suppliers are murkier. CARES language has a $3 billion set-aside for contractors that both work for airlines and are on-airport. Many maintenance providers would seem to fit here, though Treasury will have the final say. Industry trade associations and legal experts working the issue are learning more by the hour. Their one common piece of advice for businesses: consult with an attorney or tax expert, determine what your business qualifies for, and weigh your options. Many businesses will qualify for multiple programs that cannot be mixed, creating an either/or choice that comes down to the various strings attached to each. https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/aircraft-propulsion/daily-memo-emergency-funding-suppliers-aftermarket-providers

• 

  May 6, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  The Key To All-Domain Warfare Is ‘Predictive Analysis:’ Gen. O’Shaughnessy

  By THERESA HITCHENS on May 05, 2020 at 3:23 PM WASHINGTON: Northern Command head Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy says the key to winning tomorrow's all-domain wars is predicting an adversary's actions — as well as the impacts of US military responses — hours and even days in advance. The capability to perform such “predictive analysis” will be enabled by the US military's Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative for managing high-speed battle across the air, land, sea, space and cyber domains,” he told the Mitchell Institute yesterday evening in a webinar. “We see JADC2 is absolutely core to the way we're gonna defend the homeland,” O'Shaughnessy enthused. “And the part that I think is going to be so incredibly game-changing is the ability for us to really use predictive analysis and inform our decisions going into the future.” “That's, to me, what JADC2 is going to do: it's going to inform our decision-makers, it's going to help them make decisions that, like playing chess, are thinking about two or three moves downstream,” he added. “It's going to give the decision-makers, at the speed of relevance, the ability to make really complex decisions.” NORTHCOM was a key player in the Air Force's first “On Ramp” demonstration in December of technologies being developed under its Advanced Battle Management System effort, which the service sees as a foundation for JADC2. O'Shaughnessy said he is excited that NORTHCOM will be expanding its participation in the next demonstration, now slated for late August or early September having been pushed back from its original April data due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. O'Shaughnessy said JADC2 also will be critical for providing much-needed improvements to domain awareness in the Arctic. The US military has to “put together a bigger ecosystem for sensing” rather than relying on “traditional stovepiped systems” in the High North, he explained. That ecosystem needs to fuse information from as many systems as possible — from submarines patrolling beneath the icy waters to ground-based radar to long-endurance unmanned drones to future sensors based on large constellations of Low Earth Orbit satellites — which is exactly the goal of JADC2. “We have to continue to work on our ability to see the approaches to our homeland and understand what what is there and be able to react to it,” said O'Shaughnessy, who also is the commander of NORAD. As Breaking D readers know, the US military is turning an increasingly worried eye toward the Arctic where Russia and China both have begun to covet as a future zone of economic wealth as the Earth's climate opens shipping routes and expands access to undersea oil. O'Shaughnessy said he sees three areas where more investment is required to up the US military's game in the Arctic: communications, training, and infrastructure. Communications at northern latitudes is a particular struggle due to the difficulties of laying fiber optic cable in the harsh terrain, and the paucity of satellite coverage in the region. This, he said, is why NORTHCOM is extremely interested in the potential for so-called proliferated LEO satellite constellations. — both those currently being built by commercial firms and any future military networks. As Breaking D readers are well aware, DoD's Space Development Agency is planning a multi-tiered network of satellites in LEO that includes “data transport” satellites to allow faster communications between satellites and air-, land- and sea-based receivers that Director Derek Tournear sees as integral to JADC2. DARPA also is experimenting with proliferated LEO architectures under its Blackjack program, which plans 20 satellites using various buses and payloads to test their capabilities by the end of third-quarter 2022. DARPA late last month selected Lockheed Martin to undertake Phase 1 satellite integration of satellite buses with payloads and the central Pit Boss C2 system under a $5.8 million contract. SEAKR Engineering announced on April 28 that it had been granted a sole source Phase I, Option 2 contract (under a three-phased program plan) to develop a Pit Boss demonstrator, beating out two other teams led, respectively, by BAE and Scientific Systems. “One of the things we find is after you get above about 65 degrees or so north, some of our traditional means of communications really start breaking down,” he said, “and once you get closer to 70, almost all except for our most exquisite communications capability really starts to break down. And so we see a need to relook our ability to communicate in the Arctic” — with proliferated LEO “one of the best approaches.” “If you look at some of the companies out there doing incredible things, we see that as a solution set to allow us to communicate in the Arctic in the relatively near future, and that will be critical,” he added. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/the-key-to-all-domain-warfare-is-predictive-analysis-gen-oshaughnessy