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  July 25, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  JSTARS Recap is officially dead

  By: Valerie Insinna LONDON — The Air Force scored a major win in the 2019 defense authorization bill: Not only will it be able to cancel the JSTARS recap program, it is getting additional funds for its alternative effort called Advanced Battle Management System. However, the service will have to make some concessions in terms of its plans to retire the existing E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System fleet, which is used for ground surveillance and command and control missions. The Air Force had planned to retire three E-8Cs in 2019 that had become “hangar queens” cannibalized for spare parts for the rest of the fleet, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said earlier this year. However, according to the new defense policy bill unveiled Monday, it will not be able to retire any of the 17 planes until “increment 2” of the ABMS system is declared operational, although Congress will allow the Air Force secretary to phase out planes on a case-by-case basis if an aircraft is no longer mission capable. While the Air Force has not spelled out to the public exactly what comprises its ABMS plan, it involves a host of different upgrades for existing platforms —for instance the MQ-9 Reaper and E-3 AWACS early warning aircraft — that will allow them to network together in new ways. A congressional aide told Defense News on July 24 that the Air Force have three ABMS increments in a series of classified briefings to members of Congress' defense committees. Phase one, which lasts from now until about 2023, involves upgrades to datalinks and some space-based technologies, as well as linking sensors from several stealth platforms and drones together, the aide said. Increments 2 and 3 quickly get into more classified territory, said the aide, who declined to provide greater specifics. The defense authorization bill would accelerate ABMS by adding $120 million for six MQ-9 Reapers, which the aide said could be used to help boost the architecture's ability to prosecute targets during a low-end conflict. It also included $30 million to continue development of the ground moving target indicator radar developed by Northrop Grumman for the JSTARS recap program. In addition, Congress levied a number of other restrictions and reporting requirements on the Air Force as part of the FY2019 National Defense Authorization Act, including: The Air Force's plan for modernizing and sustaining the current JSTARS fleet, including how it will increase the availability of the E-8Cs to support demands worldwide. Quarterly reports from the Air Force secretary on the progress of ABMS. Certification by the defense secretary that the Air Force has a long term funding plan that will allow it to retain JSTARS and that the ABMS acquisition strategy is executable. A report on ABMS from the Government Accountability Office, which provides independent oversight to Congress. The report will review the maturity of the plan and any risk associated with fielding or funding it. A directive to the Pentagon's Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office to reexamine the cost and schedule for restarting a re-engine effort of the E-8C, which had begun in 2008 but was since abandoned. The Air Force “procured three ship-sets of engines, after investing $450.0 million, and the engines remain unused,” even though “the legacy E-8C engines are the number one issue driving excessive non-mission capable maintenance metrics for the E-8C fleet,” the bill stated. The end of the JSTARS recap program is bad news for Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, who were each vying for the prime contractor spot and the $6.9 billion contract for engineering, manufacturing and development. A total of 17 new planes were planned to be built throughout the program. Over the past year, Air Force leaders grew disenchanted with JSTARS recap, saying that new battle management planes would not be survivable in future, contested battlespaces. But while the Senate defense committees leaned in to support ABMS, House lawmakers sought to force the service to keep going with JSTARS recap. Will Roper, the Air Force's top acquisition official, told Defense News on July 17 that he was hopeful that Congress would move forward with ABMS. However, he still acknowledged that the Air Force had never modernized a “system of systems” like ABMS before. “It definitely needs to be a program where we embrace failure up front and prototype, because there's going to be a lot of learning to do about how do you make things work together as a team,” Roper said. “We get a sense of how commercial industry is solving it and I imagine we can use a lot of their lessons learned, but probably not all of them.” Infighting in Georgia What was once a disagreement between the House and Senate seems to have turned into a fight among the members of the Georgia delegation. In a surprising move, Republican Rep. Austin Scott pointed the finger at Sen. David Perdue, a fellow Georgia Republican, for allowing the recap program to be cancelled. Georgia's Robins Air Force Base is home to the 461st Air Control Wing, the joint Air Force-Army unit that operates JSTARS. “When Senator Perdue [...] withdrew his support of this program which the Georgia Congressional Delegation – including Senator Perdue – has overwhelmingly supported throughout the last seven years, it effectively ended the program,” said Scott. “Unfortunately [...] the replacement aircraft will not be fielded, forcing a higher risk to our men and women in uniform by continuing to fly the 48 year old legacy JSTARS aircraft which are in need of recapitalization.” Perdue hit back in his own statement, saying that ABMS is a better long term solution for Robins. “The Advanced Battlefield Management System will give us the capability to access both restricted and non-restricted airspace. This is a necessity in supporting our troops in harm's way as well as our overall intelligence gathering,” Perdue said. “With the solution I support, we save JSTARS jobs, maintain the JSTARS fleet into the next decade, accelerate the implementation of ABMS, and gain a new mission for Robins. All of this guarantees a very bright future for my hometown base.” https://www.defensenews.com/air/2018/07/24/jstars-recap-is-officially-dead/

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  April 26, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  US Army picks 5 teams to design new attack recon helicopter

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — AVX Aircraft Co. partnered with L-3 Communications Integrated Systems, Bell Helicopter, Boeing, Karem Aircraft and Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky have won awards to design a new Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) for the U.S. Army over the next year, the service announced April 23. Only two teams will move forward, at the end of the design phase, to build flyable prototypes of the future helicopter in a head-to-head competition. The Army laid out a handful of mandatory requirements that the vendors had to meet and also a list of desired requirements for initial designs, Col. Craig Alia, the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team chief of staff, told a select group of reporters just ahead of the contract awards. The service also looked at the vendors' execution plans and evaluated timing as well as funding profile requirements. “The ones that were selected were clearly meeting the mandatory requirements and were in the acceptable risk level of the execution plan and the desired requirements," Dan Bailey, who is the FARA competitive prototype program manager, added. The prototype program falls under the purview of the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation and Missile Center's Aviation Development Directorate. AVX and L3 unveiled its design for the FARA competition at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual summit in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this month. The design uses AVX's compound coaxial and ducted fans technology. The companies said its single-engine design meets 100 percent of the Army's mandatory requirements and 70 percent of its desired attributes. The CEO of Textron, Bell's parent company, said during a recent earnings call, that its FARA design will be based on its 525 technology rather than its tiltrotor technology. Bell has built and flown a tiltrotor prototype — the V-280 Valor — for the Army's Future Vertical Lift program. Karem has been working to develop technology under a small contract to help build requirements for FVL aircraft focused on a medium-lift helicopter. Sikorsky's offering will be based off of its X2 coaxial technology seen in its S-97 Raider and the Sikorsky-Boeing developed SB-1 Defiant, which are now both flying. “This is the culmination of years of investment in the X2 Technology Demonstrator and the S-97 RAIDER aircraft that have proven the advanced technology and shown its ability to change the future battlefield,” Tim Malia, Sikorsky's director of Future Vertical Lift Light, told Defense News in an emailed statement shortly after the announcement. “We continue to fly the S-97 RAIDER to inform the design for FARA, which provides significant risk reduction to the program schedule and technical objectives. We are eager to continue to support the US Army, and we are excited that the Sikorsky FARA X2 will be ready for this critical mission," he said. A total of eight teams submitted data and potential designs for FARA, but upon evaluation, three of those did not meet mandatory requirements, according to Bailey. It is not publicly stated who the losing teams were, but MD Helicopters had previously protested the Army's decision to not enter into a first phase agreement with the company to develop a FARA prototype, arguing to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the Army “unreasonably” evaluated its proposal and failed to promote small business participation. The GAO denied the protest earlier this month on the grounds it did not have authority to review protests of contracting mechanisms like Other Transaction Authorities (OTA) which the Army used in this case. The awards were made two months ahead of an already ambitious schedule to get FARA prototypes flying by 2023. A production decision could happen in 2028, but the service is looking at any way possible to speed up that timeline. The Army has to move quickly, Alia said. Echoing his boss, Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, the FVL CFT director, he said the Army is “at an inflection point. We can't afford not to modernize. We know the current fleet is fantastic, but we can't indefinitely continue to incrementally improve 1970s to 1980s technology.” FARA is intended to fill a critical capability gap currently being filled by AH-64E Apache attack helicopters teamed with Shadow unmanned aircraft following the retirement of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters. The service has tried and failed three times to fill the gap with an aircraft. The Army is also planning to procure another helicopter to fill the long-range assault mission, replacing some UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters in the fleet, simultaneously. With the advent of the new Army Futures Command — that is focused on six major modernization priorities of which FVL is third — the service is moving faster on prototyping capability to ultimately procure major weapon systems at a somewhat unprecedented speed. Through the AFC and the use of contracting mechanisms like OTAs, the Army has found a way to compress parts of the acquisition process that previously took three to five years into periods of time often amounting to less than a year. “What is exciting about the new process the Army has put in place,” Bailey said, “in basically a year's period of time, we've gone through concept, through an approved set of requirements, to developing an innovative approach to contracting, to building industry partnerships to have industry propose to us a plan and a solution.” And the Army rigorously evaluated those FARA proposals, Bailey said, all within that year. The teams have until January or February next year to provide design plans and an approach to executing the build of the prototypes followed by potential larger-scale manufacturing, Bailey said. The second phase of the program will be to build prototypes, and “only two will make it into phase 2 and they all know that now,” Bailey added. According to Rugen, when the request for proposals was released, the Army did not want to get locked into keeping inflexible requirements, but the request did state that the aircraft should have a maximum 40-foot rotor diameter. The Army also asked for the aircraft to be able to accept some government furnished equipment including an engine, a gun and a rocket launcher, Alia said. When it comes to some of the desirable attributes for a new aircraft, the Army is considering speed, range and payload possibilities, Alia said, but the service “wanted to encourage innovation by industry to come to us with their ideas and unique ways of meeting both mandatory and desirable characteristics and that is where we got some great feedback from industry and some innovative designs.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/aaaa/2019/04/23/us-army-picks-5-teams-to-design-new-us-army-attack-recon-helicopter/

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  July 31, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Northrop Grumman to Provide Key Electronic Warfare Capabilities for AC/MC-130J Aircraft

  Rolling Meadows, Ill. – July 29, 2020 – Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) has been selected to provide the prime mission equipment for the Sierra Nevada Corporation-led AC/MC-130J Radio Frequency Countermeasure (RFCM) program. Northrop Grumman's RFCM system utilizes the latest in antenna, amplifier and electronics technology. This technology provides superior situational awareness and better enables aircraft survivability in operationally relevant environments. “With the radio frequency threat growing, modern electromagnetic spectrum protection for AC/MC-130J operators worldwide is essential,” said Jim Conroy, vice president, navigation, targeting and survivability, Northrop Grumman. “Our product line approach to the RFCM program is mature and in use throughout our electronic warfare systems.” The modular, open systems approach to the suite is designed to provide radar warning, threat identification and countermeasure capabilities today, while allowing for the flexibility to adapt to future threats. The system is applicable to both U.S. and international customers and represents the latest upgrade to Northrop Grumman's RFCM product line. Northrop Grumman has deep expertise in electronic warfare systems for land, sea and air. Covering the full spectrum of operations from self-protection to electronic attack, the company's systems are preparing warfighters for multi-domain operations. Among these systems are the F-16 electronic warfare suite, AN/APR-39 family of radar warning receivers and pod-based self-protection. Northrop Grumman solves the toughest problems in space, aeronautics, defense and cyberspace to meet the ever evolving needs of our customers worldwide. Our 90,000 employees define possible every day using science, technology and engineering to create and deliver advanced systems, products and services. Media Contact Ellen Hamilton Director, Navigation, Targeting & Survivability Mission Systems 847-815-0753 ellen.hamilton@ngc.com View source version on Northrop Grumman: https://news.northropgrumman.com/news/releases/northrop-grumman-to-provide-key-electronic-warfare-capabilities-for-acmc-130j-aircraft