QinetiQ Target Systems to supply over 40 Hammerhead targets to Canadian Navy

On the same subject

• 

  September 11, 2019 | Local, Aerospace

  MDA Selected to Design, Manufacture Advanced Navigation Antennas for Airbus Defence and Space

  September 11, 2019 12:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MDA, a Maxar company (NYSE:MAXR) (TSX:MAXR), today announced that it will design and manufacture advanced space-based L-band navigation antennas as part of a hosted payload on the MEASAT-3d satellite, which is currently being built by Airbus. The MDA-built navigation antennas will be integrated on a hosted payload for South Korean KTSAT that will support the Korea Augmentation Satellite System (KASS). Scheduled for launch in 2021, the KASS navigation payload will deliver L-band regional civil navigation services over South Korea to enhance aviation safety and airplane navigation capability through improved accuracy, reliability and availability of GPS positioning signals. MDA and its parent company Maxar have successfully hosted more than 10 payloads on the company's highly flexible 1300-class satellite platform since 2001, covering a wide variety of essential customer missions. In 2012, the company delivered a powerful multi-mission satellite for SES, which included an L-band payload for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS). “We appreciate the confidence that Airbus has in MDA's innovative satellite technologies, having worked on over 30 programs,” said Mike Greenley, group president of MDA. “We look forward to continuing our close, collaborative relationship with Airbus on this contract.” About Maxar Technologies As a global leader of advanced space technology solutions, Maxar is at the nexus of the new space economy, developing and sustaining the infrastructure and delivering the information, services, systems that unlock the promise of space for commercial and government markets. The operations of DigitalGlobe, SSL and Radiant Solutions were unified under the Maxar brand in February; MDA continues to operate as an independent business unit within the Maxar organization. As a trusted partner with 5,900 employees in over 30 global locations, Maxar provides vertically integrated capabilities and expertise including satellites, Earth imagery, robotics, geospatial data and analytics to help customers anticipate and address their most complex mission-critical challenges with confidence. Every day, billions of people rely on Maxar to communicate, share information and data, and deliver insights that Build a Better World. Maxar trades on the New York Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange as MAXR. For more information, visit www.maxar.com. About MDA MDA is an internationally recognized leader in space robotics, space sensors, satellite payloads, antennas and subsystems, surveillance and intelligence systems, defense and maritime systems, and geospatial radar imagery. MDA's extensive space expertise and heritage translates into mission-critical defence and commercial applications that include multi-platform command, control and surveillance systems, aeronautical information systems, land administration systems and terrestrial robotics. MDA is also a leading supplier of actionable mission-critical information and insights derived from multiple data sources. Founded in 1969, MDA is recognized as one of Canada's most successful technology ventures with locations in Richmond, Ottawa, Brampton, Montreal, Halifax and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit www.mdacorporation.com. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements and other information included in this release constitute "forward-looking information" or "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") under applicable securities laws. Statements including words such as "may," "will," "could," "should," "would," "plan," "potential," "intend," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate" or "expect" and other words, terms and phrases of similar meaning are often intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Forward-looking statements involve estimates, expectations, projections, goals, forecasts, assumptions, risks and uncertainties, as well as other statements referring to or including forward-looking information included in this presentation. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results or expectations expressed in this presentation. As a result, although management of the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which such forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. The risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations include, but are not limited to, the risk factors and other disclosures about the Company and its business included in the Company's continuous disclosure materials filed from time to time with U.S. securities and Canadian regulatory authorities, which are available online under the Company's EDGAR profile at www.sec.gov, under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com or on the Company's website at www.maxar.com. The forward-looking statements contained in this release are expressly qualified in their entirety by the foregoing cautionary statements. All such forward-looking statements are based upon data available as of the date of this presentation or other specified date and speak only as of such date. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements in this presentation as a result of new information or future events, except as may be required under applicable securities legislation. Contacts MDA Media Contact Leslie Swartman, 1-613-736-6917 leslie.swartman@mdacorporation.com Maxar Investor Relations Jason Gursky, 1-303-684-2207 jason.gursky@maxar.com https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190910006157/en/

• 

  August 5, 2019 | Local, Security

  Hacker Community to Take on DARPA Hardware Defenses at DEF CON 2019

  This month, DARPA will bring a demonstration version of a secure voting ballot box equipped with hardware defenses in development on the System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program to the DEF CON 2019 Voting Machine Hacking Village (Voting Village). The SSITH program is developing methodologies and design tools that enable the use of hardware advances to protect systems against software exploitation of hardware vulnerabilities. To evaluate progress on the program, DARPA is incorporating the secure processors researchers are developing into a secure voting ballot box and turning the system loose for public assessment by thousands of hackers and DEF CON community members. Many of today's hardware defenses cover very specific instances or vulnerabilities, leaving much open to attack or compromise. Instead of tackling individual instances, SSITH researchers are building defenses that address classes of vulnerabilities. In particular, SSITH is tackling seven vulnerabilities classes identified by the NIST Common Weakness Enumeration Specification (CWE), which span exploitation of permissions and privilege in the system architectures, memory errors, information leakage, and code injection. “There are a whole set of cyber vulnerabilities that happen in electronic systems that are at their core due to hardware vulnerabilities – or vulnerabilities that hardware could block,” said Dr. Linton Salmon, the program manager leading SSITH. “Current efforts to provide electronic security largely rely on robust software development and integration, utilizing an endless cycle of developing and deploying patches to the software firewall without addressing the underlying hardware vulnerability. The basic concept around SSITH is to make hardware a more significant participant in cybersecurity, rather than relegating system security only to software.” Under the SSITH program, researchers are exploring a number of different design approaches that go well beyond patching. These include using metadata tagging to detect unauthorized system access; employing formal methods to reason about integrated circuit systems and guarantee the accuracy of security characteristics; and combining hardware performance counters (HPCs) with machine learning to detect attacks and establish protective fences within the hardware. One team from the University of Michigan is developing a novel security approach that changes the unspecified semantics of a system every 50 milliseconds. Currently, attackers continuously probe a system to locate these undefined sections and, over time, are able to create a system map to identify possible hacks. By changing the construct every 50 milliseconds, attackers do not have enough time to find those weaknesses or develop an accurate representation of the system as a whole. To evaluate the hardware security concepts in development on the SSITH program, DARPA – working with Galois – is pursuing a voting system evaluation effort to provide a demonstration system that facilitates open challenges. The program elected to use a voting system as its demonstration platform to provide researchers with an accessible application that can be evaluated in an open forum. Further, the topic of election system security has become an increasingly critical area of concern for the hacker and security community, as well as the United States more broadly. “DARPA focuses on creating technologies to enhance national defense, and election system security falls within that remit. Eroding trust in the election process is a threat to the very fabric of our democracy,” noted Salmon. While protecting democracy is a critical national defense issue, SSITH is not trying to solve all issues with election system security nor is it working to provide a specific solution to use during elections. “We expect the voting booth demonstrator to provide tools, concepts, and ideas that the election enterprise can use to increase security, however, our true aim is to improve security for all electronic systems. This includes election equipment, but also defense systems, commercial devices, and beyond,” said Salmon. During DEF CON 2019, the SSITH voting system demonstrator will consist of a set of RISC-V processors that the research teams will modify to include their SSITH security features. These processors will be mounted on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and incorporated into a secure ballot box. Hackers will have access to the system via an Ethernet port as well as a USB port, through which they can load software or other attacks to challenge the SSITH hardware. Since SSITH's research is still in the early stages, only two prototype versions of the 15 processors in development will be available for evaluation. “At this year's Voting Village, hackers may find issues with the processors and quite frankly we would consider that a success. We want to be transparent about the technologies we are creating and find any problems in these venues before the technology is placed in another venue where a compromise could be more dangerous,” said Salmon. Following DEF CON 2019, the voting system evaluation effort will go on a university roadshow where additional cybersecurity experts will have an opportunity to further analyze and hack the technology. In 2020, DARPA plans to return to DEF CON with an entire voting system, which will incorporate fixes to the issues discovered during the previous year's evaluation efforts. The 2020 demonstrator will use the STAR-Vote system architecture, which is a documented, open source architecture that includes a system of microprocessors for the voting booth, ballot box, and other components. It also includes a verifiable paper ballot, providing both digital and physical representations of the votes cast within the booth. “While the 2020 demonstrator will provide a better representation of the full attack surface, the exercise will not result in a deployable voting system. To aid in the advancement of secure election equipment as well as electronic systems more broadly, the hardware design approaches and techniques developed during the SSITH program will be made available to the community as open-source items,” concluded Salmon. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-08-01

• 

  December 18, 2019 | Local, Aerospace

  PropWorks: Sustained growth over 2 decades

  by Ken Pole Ever since French engineer Henri Giffard flew a hydrogen-filled dirigible 27 kilometres from Paris to Elancourt in September 1852, the propeller was for nearly a century the only way to sustain powered flight. It would be another 51 years before Orville and Wilbur Wright used this “airscrew” technology in the first flight of a powered fixed-wing aircraft at Kitty Hawk, N.C. The Wright brothers also came up with the idea of adding a twist to each blade, giving a more consistent angle of attack. Despite the advent and evolution of jets since the early 1940s, propellers have remained the preferred option for smaller aircraft. But, as with all things mechanical, they require maintenance and repair. That has enabled Winnipeg-based PropWorks Propeller Systems Inc. to become the largest company of its kind in Western Canada. “Winnipeg is where we started, on the fringe of James Richardson International Airport,” company president Jim Ross, one of the founding investors, told Skies. “The company was incorporated in October 1999 and we moved into our building in December 1999.” Winnipeg is home to about two-thirds of the total staff of 30 with the rest at its shop in Edmonton. PropWorks is now privately held by Ross along with a pair of Calgary-based investors, Lorne Gray, who owns the Aircraft Canada sales and appraisal firm, and AvMax Group Inc. “I'm the only constant,” he laughed, quickly adding that some of his employees also are long-term. Before the company was founded, Ross spent 15 years with Cessna Aircraft Co., doing finance and some marketing until it shut down its Winnipeg facility in 1992. So he began marketing for several aviation-related companies, one of which was Western Propeller. When Western decided to close the Winnipeg facility seven years later, to focus on their Edmonton and Vancouver centres, Ross and an original group of investors bought the equipment, moved it into a leased 6,500-square-foot building and began operations with just five employees. It relocated to a new 12,000-square-foot building in April 2015. The Edmonton shop, which opened in December 2006, was moved in December 2017 to a 14,000-square-foot building at Villeneuve Airport, the area's main general aviation and flight training hub. PropWorks' employees, whose experience tallies up to more than 150 years, provide services which “meet or exceed” original equipment manufacturers' specifications. “Sometimes we'll go an extra step with such things with non-destructive testing that we feel gives our customers a bit of added comfort,” Ross explained. “We have a dedicated non-destructive testing room” where blades, hubs and related components are tested before propellers are reassembled and balanced. NDT procedures include magnetic particle inspection, liquid penetrants, eddy current and ultrasonic inspection. In addition to being an Avia Propeller Service Centre, PropWorks overhauls and repairs most models of Hamilton Standard, Hamilton Sundstrand, McCauley, Dowty, MT, Sensenich and Hartzell propellers. (On a historical note, Ohio-based Hartzell dates to 1917 when Robert Hartzell, a pilot whose family owned a hardwood lumber factory and who had noticed a high failure rate in wood propellers, began producing hand-carved walnut units at the suggestion of longtime friend Orville Wright.) To this day, Hartzell prizes and cultivates customer loyalty in having built its global reputation, and so does PropWorks, which has customers in Canada, the U.S. and around the world. Ross said that as with most businesses, “it's about the people as much as the product.” One of his people is director of maintenance Mike Hudec, who had been with Western Propeller and now is his longest-term employee. Cliff Arntson, manager in Edmonton and Mike Wagner, assistant manager in Edmonton have a combined 84 years experience with propellers. Much of the U.S. business is with customers in the border markets of Minnesota and the Dakotas. PropWorks has three trucks which pick up the propellers for work in Winnipeg and Edmonton. “Our customers like that service,” said Ross. His most distant customer is AvMax, which has a base in Nairobi, Kenya, and he has other large customers primarily Canada and U.S. based. PropWorks draws on a variety of sources for its employees, including the Stevenson Campus of Red River College in Winnipeg. They come out of the aviation maintenance engineer (AME) stream but are not certified AMEs because they haven't gone through the requisite apprentice program when they join PropWorks. “They can't do that in a propeller shop because that wouldn't give them a broad enough base to qualify as AMEs,” said Ross. “There's no AME licence for propellers; there was at one time but not for many years now.” The general preference is “somebody with a good mechanical aptitude who we can put in our own training program,” he added. “It takes one to two years for them to become proficient.” Asked to explain the difference between overhaul and repair, Ross said the former involves disassembly, discarding parts mandated for replacement, installing new ones and then putting the entire assembly through NDT before it's painted, reassembled and balanced. That means it's a “zero time” propeller when it leaves the shop. Repairs, on the other hand, can involve a range of things such as dealing with blade nicks or leaking hub seals. If that's all that is done, the propeller leaves the shop as “time continued.” Like everything in aviation, propellers have long since evolved since those early fixed wood two-bladed configurations. “The simple ones nowadays are the fixed-pitch propellers that you'd see on your most basic flight training airplane,” said Ross, who is part-owner of a Cessna 172 and has about 1,000 hours logged. “Then it goes all the way up, through two-bladed constant-speed propellers to three-, four- and even five-bladed propellers.” The most complex ones are Hamilton Sundstrand propellers on the Dash 8 twin turboprop introduced by de Havilland Canada in 1984 and last built by Bombardier Aerospace in 2005. “They simply take more time,” said Ross. Then there are some which can justifiably called vintage, such as the Hamilton Standard three-bladed propellers on Second World War-era Douglas DC-3s but these are “fairly standard.” Ross noted that PropWorks donated one for the equally old North American Harvard Mark II in the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum in Brandon, Man. The company is doing more composites, a capacity which required “a substantial investment” in equipment, including an autoclave to heat the laminates. Asked what the future might hold, Ross replied that while “we've just had our best year ever,” he hesitated to predict the “hectic” growth of the past 10 years would continue. “The key to growth is not necessarily going out to find new customers. It's adding to our capabilities – that way more customers are likely to send their work to us.” While he could only guess at the number of corporate or private propeller-driven aircraft in Canada, he did venture that “it's not a dying market” which bodes well for the future. https://www.skiesmag.com/news/propworks-sustained-growth-over-2-decads