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July 3, 2019 | International, Aerospace

Northrop to upgrade aircraft mission computers for US and Bahrain

Northrop Grumman has secured a contract to perform the technical upgrade of UH-1Y, AH-1Z and UH-60V mission computers for the US and Bahrain.

The $104m indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) award will see Northrop Grumman deliver production, retrofit and spare units.

Under the Foreign Military Sales Act, these units will be supplied for the US Marine Corps, the Defense Logistics Agency, and Bahrain's military.

The company noted that by bringing together several mission computer customers, the contract will help deliver greater cost-efficiency while lowering the logistics footprint.

The contract has the potential for placing task or delivery order awards up to the ceiling amount. Northrop Grumman is expected to complete the contract work in December 2023.

Northrop Grumman land and avionics C4ISR vice-president James Conroy said: “Northrop Grumman's mission computer delivers mission-critical capability to the warfighter. The system provides improved situational understanding in the rapidly changing threat environment.”

The mission computer manufactured by the firm can integrate advanced mission, weapons and video processing capabilities into a high-performance airborne computer.

The computer's open architecture enables the centralised display and control of all integrated avionics system functions. These include aircraft performance and flight instruments, on-board sensor and survivability displays, in addition to improved situational awareness and health monitoring information.

Furthermore, the mission computer is capable of providing improved capability, commonality, reliability and maintainability to the warfighter.

Northrop Grumman will supply up to 503 technical refresh mission computers for the three helicopter models.

In 2017, The US Marine Corps fielded the Northrop Grumman's Tech Refresh Mission Computer (TRMC) for the first time on the UH‑1Y and AH-1Z helicopters.

Equipment was deployed under the H-1 Upgrade programme that involved replacing the UH-1N and AH-1W helicopters with revamped aircraft.

https://www.naval-technology.com/news/northrop-to-upgrade-aircraft-mission-computers-for-us-and-bahrain/

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  • The U.S. Navy Is Unbalanced. It's Time to Fix It.

    May 3, 2019 | International, Naval

    The U.S. Navy Is Unbalanced. It's Time to Fix It.

    by John S. Van Oudenaren From a shortage of ships to munitions and carrier-based fighters which lack range, the U.S. Navy is ill-equipped to contend with a new era of great-power conflict. In the decades after the Cold War, the U.S. Navy absorbed sustained budget cuts resulting in large force reductions. The total size of the fleet dwindled from nearly 600 active ships in 1987 to around 285 today. During this period, naval planners focused their substantial, yet shrinking, budgetary resources on large, costly, high-end platforms such as aircraft carriers at the expense of smaller surface warfare combatants such as frigates. This approach perhaps suited the range of global expeditionary missions that the navy was called upon to support in the 1990s (e.g. Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo), a time when the United States faced no proximate military competitors. However, its lack of platforms currently leaves the sea service in a parlous state as it faces intensifying major power competition from China and Russia. At a recent Center for the National Interest event, two leading authorities on naval strategy, operations and force structure, explained how the navy can take steps to create a more balanced force that will adequately prepare the fleet for a new era of great power naval competition. According to Milan Vego, Professor of Operations at the U.S. Naval War College, “lack of understanding of naval theory” makes it difficult for the navy to develop “sound doctrine”, and as a result, to determine force requirements. For example, Vego notes that the navy has an ingrained offensive mindset, which contributes to neglect of the defensive elements of naval combat such as mine warfare and protecting maritime trade. At the strategic level, this conditions a preoccupation with sea control (offensive), as opposed to sea denial (defensive). However, per Vego, it is not inconceivable, especially as capable competitors emerge, that the U.S. Navy might be put on the defensive and forced to shift its focus from sea control to sea denial. For example, if “Russia and China combined in the Western Pacific,” the U.S. Navy would probably be on the defensive, a position it has not occupied since the early days (1941–1942) of the Pacific War against Japan. The challenge is that the navy faces different, conceivable scenarios that could require it to implement sea control or sea denial strategies. This makes planning difficult, because, per Vego, “in thinking about what kind of ships you have, what number of ships you have is all based on whether you are going to conduct sea control or sea denial; what focus will be on protection of shipping versus attack on shipping.” Furthermore, the efficacy of naval strategic planning is hampered by “a lack of joint approach to warfare at sea” said Vego, citing a need for working with “the other services to help the navy carry out its missions.” A repeated issue raised by both panelists is the imbalance in naval force structure between large, highly capable surface combatants, and smaller, cheaper platforms. This is the result of a series of budgetary and planning choices made in the two decades following the Cold War's end. During this period, the “navy was satisfied to ride its Cold War inventory of ships and weapons down, always believing that it could turn the spigot back on in a crisis. It also believed that if it had limited dollars, it should strategically spend them on high-capability ships rather than maintaining the previous Cold War balance of small numbers of high-capability ships and a larger capacity of less capable ships” observed Jerry Hendrix, a retired U.S. Navy Captain and vice president with the Telemus Group, a national-security consultancy. With regards to surface warfare combatants, this approach fostered an emphasis on cruisers and destroyers, while frigates were eliminated entirely from the fleet. The drastic reduction in ship numbers is only part of the navy's current problem. According to Hendrix, the navy employs many of the same missiles (with the same ranges and lethality, albeit with improved targeting technology) that it has used for over three decades. Furthermore, Hendrix lamented that the retirement of longer-range carrier wing aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat and S-3 Viking, has, since 1988, slashed the “average unrefueled range of the air wing . . . from 900 miles to just under 500 nautical miles.” The static range of the navy's standoff munitions and reduced carrier wing range is particularly detrimental in the current strategic context. China and Russia have, notes Hendrix, “invested in a new generation of anti-access, air-denial weapons that have sought to push the U.S. and its allies farther from their shores, establishing sea-control from land, and redefining territorial sovereignty over the seas.” This combined with the limited ability of U.S. munitions and aircraft to strike targets in potential adversaries' homelands, means that in the event of a naval conflict with China or Russia, the United States will face tremendous difficulty projecting conventional firepower ashore into the enemy's homeland. As a result, the navy could be forced to fight a bloody battle at sea in order to get within range of its enemies (the closest historical analogy would be World War II in the Pacific where the United States fought ferociously to acquire territory from which its long-range bombers could strike the Japanese homeland). China and Russia have been so successful at creating anti-access, area denial bubbles that it has forced the U.S. Navy to alter how it thinks about the nature of sea warfare. According to Hendrix, naval strategic thought has shifted from focusing on “power projection and sea control to an ephemeral concept called ‘distributed lethality,' which roughly equates to a long campaign of attrition at sea rather than short power projection campaigns that had characterized modern strategic planning.” A major issue in re-orienting the force around distributed lethality, which calls for dispersing combat firepower across a host of platforms, is the shortage of ships in the navy. As Vego observes, the current “battle force is unbalanced” lacking “less capable, less costly platforms.” Hendrix too, calls for a “series of investments” that re-establish a “high-low mix in our day-to-day force with an emphasis on the new frigate to [undertake the role] to preserve the peace presence, and submarines to provide penetrating, high-end power projection.” The current unbalanced force structure could put the navy at a disadvantage in a conflict with China or Russia. “The need for smaller ships is always shown in any major conflict. That does not change. If you have to protect maritime trade for example, you need smaller ships, you need frigates and corvettes,” said Vego. Unfortunately, he observed, due to the potentially, short, intense, contracted nature of modern naval warfare, the United States will probably lack the luxury, which it enjoyed in World War II, of having time to retool its industrial base to build up an armada of smaller combatants. In addition to building frigates again (Hendrix calls for upping the current U.S. inventory from zero to between fifty to seventy hulls) and scaling up submarine production, the navy should be investing in “unmanned aerial, surface, and subsurface platforms” that can enhance the range and accuracy of naval weaponry. Finally, the navy requires a new generation of weapons that have “increased range, speed and lethality” and to ensure that surface warfare ships are capable of mounting these platforms. In recent years, increasing the fleet to 355 ships has become something of a totemic target for American navalists, who argue that the failure to make the right investments will result in the diminution, or even, elimination, of American naval preeminence. While 355 ships is no panacea, a move in that direction stemming from an increase both in ship numbers, and from restoring a more balanced mix between high and lower end surface combatants across the fleet, would certainly constitute a move in the right direction. As leading proponents of American sea power, such as former Virginia congressman Randy Forbes, have emphasizedrepeatedly, the purpose of naval preeminence is not ultimately to wage war, but to ensure the free flow of trade and commerce, safeguard the rule of law across the maritime commons, and most critically, to preserve peace through strength. John S. Van Oudenaren is assistant director at the Center for the National Interest. Previously, he was a program officer at the Asia Society Policy Institute and a research assistant at the U.S. National Defense University. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-navy-unbalanced-its-time-fix-it-55447

  • Sikorsky ratchets up robotic control of Black Hawk in runup to pilotless flight

    October 11, 2019 | International, Aerospace

    Sikorsky ratchets up robotic control of Black Hawk in runup to pilotless flight

    Sikorsky has dialed up the autonomous flight control system on an experimental UH-60A Black Hawk to where a pilot can “set it and forget it” during long surveillance missions, another step toward flying the aircraft remotely from the cabin or from the ground without pilots on board. To date, Sikorsky has put 54.5 flight hours on its optionally piloted vehicle (OPV) flight control system, which is designed as a kit that replaces all legacy mechanical controls in existing aircraft with its MATRIX autonomous fly-by-wire controls. It has also run about 30 hours on the ground in the UH-60A, one of the oldest Black Hawks in the Army's inventory, according to chief test pilot Mark Ward. During the first of MATRIX in a Black Hawk in May, Sikorsky focused on the direct mode control scheme, which means the fly-by-wire controls should fly and respond to pilot input like a conventional UH-60 Black Hawk, Ward said. Technically, the mode is “direct stick-to-head with stability augmentation in the loop.” “Direct mode is supposed to be, more-or-less the service mode or an emergency mode, but we found the aircraft behaved quite well throughout all the speed regimes in that mode,” he said. Sikorsky briefly paused the flight test program to “fine tune” some of the pilot control augmentation modes, “so that when we go to autonomy we're going to have a very mature system that goes from full-spectrum of pilot 100 percent in the loop, to autonomy 100 percent in the loop and everywhere in between,” he said. Test pilots have since ratcheted up computer control of the aircraft and expanded the flight envelope out to 150 knots indicated airspeed. Most interestingly, the test team is beginning to increase the level of flight control augmentation beginning with “direct mode.” In “rate command attitude hold” mode, the fly-by-wire system takes over more control of the aircraft, Ward said. That mode was tested through low-speed hover maneuvers out to 150 knots. “When you put a control input, you're controlling a rate or an attitude change and when you release the control, you're capturing that attitude,” he said. From there, test pilots increased autonomous control of the aircraft to the full authority control scheme, or FACS, in which “rather than commanding a rate, you're actually commanding a parameter, such as airspeed or altitude or heading using the control stick,” Ward said. “To change from one mode to the next is simply a button push away to go from direct to rate command, up to FACS and back down,” he said. “Think of full authority as being an ultra-stable ISR platform that is going to be holding flight parameters for very long periods of time,” he said. “You kind of want to set it and forget it. You're not turning knobs on a flight director. You are actually flying the aircraft with the control stick.” “Rate command is when you kind of want to . . . throw it around a little bit, you want to do some low-and-slow or low-and-fast maneuvering where you're going from stop to stop to complete a mission.” Sikorsky uses the phrase “optimally piloted vehicle” as well as “optionally piloted vehicle” when discussing OPV and MATRIX because the ultimate goal is to develop a system that can act as an autonomous co-pilot quietly but constantly aiding human operators during specific missions. The OPV kit is tailored to the UH-60, but is retrofittable onto the Army's entire helicopter fleet and Sikorsky's commercial S-92 and S-97 rotorcraft, according to Igor Cherepinsky, the company's director of autonomy. Sometime in 2020, Sikorsky will demonstrate that the system can be remotely piloted from both inside and outside the aircraft, he said. “We will show the world this system is capable of being operated from the ground,” he said. Sikorsky continues to demonstrate MATRIX on a modified S-76B called the Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA). The aircraft, which has been in test since 2013, has more than 300 hours of autonomous flight. The company announced in March that its S-92 helicopter fleet update will include the introduction of phase one MATRIX technology, which will allow for autonomous landing. The U.S. Army has plans to outfit a UH-60M with the system but is about six months behind Sikorsky's OPV test program. “Our vision is, obviously, not to replace the pilots, but to augment the pilots,” Cherepinsky said. “Once we field the technology, we never want to see another controlled flight into terrain or degraded visual environment issue accident ever happen with any of our aircraft.” https://www.verticalmag.com/news/sikorsky-ratchets-up-robotic-control-of-black-hawk-in-runup-to-pilotless-flight/

  • New KC-46 Charge Highlights Rift Between Boeing, USAF

    February 1, 2022 | International, Aerospace

    New KC-46 Charge Highlights Rift Between Boeing, USAF

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