Thanks To Russia, Canada Mulls Joining The 'American Defense Shield' After Approving F-35 Fighter Jet Deal

On the same subject

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  July 24, 2023 | International, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence

  ‘It’s all about logistics’: US Marines test Force Design in Pacific

  The 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit spent seven months in the vast region experimenting with different technologies and platforms.

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  May 6, 2019 | International, Naval

  Robots and Lasers Are Bringing Shipbuilding into the Digital Age

  BY MARCUS WEISGERBER Even decades-old aircraft carriers are being mapped onto digital models at Newport News Shipbuilding. NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — When the USS George Washington took shape here in the late 1980s, endless paper blueprints guided the welders and shipfitters of Newport News Shipbuilding. Now, with the aircraft carrier back in a drydock for its midlife overhaul, shipyard workers are laser-scanning its spaces and bulkheads. They're compiling a digital model of the 104,000-ton carrier, which will allow subsequent Nimitz-class projects to be designed and planned on computers. That will help bring the shipyard's carrier-overhaul work in line with its digital design-and-manufacturing processes that are already speeding up construction and maintenance on newer vessels. Newport News executives say these digital shipbuilding concepts are revolutionizing the way ships are designed and built. “We want to leverage technology, learn by doing and really drive it to the deckplates,” Chris Miner, vice president of in-service carriers, said during a tour of the shipyard. This is the future. This isn't about if. This is where we need to go.” This storied shipyard, now a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, has been building warships for the U.S. Navy for more than 120 years. Some of its buildings are nearly that old, and some of its employees are fifth-generation shipbuilders. But the technology they use to design, build, and overhaul submarines and mammoth aircraft carriers is rapidly changing. Paper schematics are quickly becoming a thing of the past, being replaced by digital blueprints easily accessible to employees on handheld tablets. “The new shipbuilders coming in, they're not looking for you to hand them a 30-page or a 200-page drawing,” Miner said. “We're really transitioning how we train folks and how we do things as far as getting them proficient.” This digital data will “transform the business,” said Miner. The technology is spreading beyond the shipbuilding sector. Boeing used digital tools to design a new pilot training jet for the Air Force and an aerial refueling drone from the Navy. The Air Force is planning to evaluate new engines for its B-52 bombers, nearly six-decade-old planes, using digital tools. The technology is allowing companies to build weapons faster than traditional manufacturing techniques. Engineers here at Newport News Shipbuilding are already using digital blueprints to design ships, but they plan to expand the use of the technology into manufacturing in the coming years. “We want to be able to leverage off all that data and use it,” Miner said. “There's lots of things we can do with that [data].” The USS Gerald Ford — the Navy's newest aircraft carrier and first in its class — was designed using digital data. The Navy's new Columbia-class nuclear submarines are being digitally designed as well. Parts for the future USS Enterprise (CVN 80) — the third Ford-class carrier — are being built digitally. Data from the ship's computerized blueprints are being fed into machines that fabricate parts. “We're seeing over 20 percent improvement in performance,” Miner said. When the Navy announced it would buy two aircraft carriers at the same time, something not done since the 1980s, James Geurts, the head Navy acquisition, said digital design would contribute to “about an 82 percent learning from CVN79 through to CVN 81” — the second through fourth Ford ships. Geurts called the savings “a pretty remarkable accomplishment for the team.” In the future, even more of that data will be pumped directly into the manufacturing robots that cut and weld more and more of a ship's steel parts. “That's the future,” Miner said. “No drawings. They get a tablet. They can visualize it. They can manipulate it, see what it looks like before they even build it.” As shipyard workers here give the George Washington a thorough working-over, they are using laser scanners to create digital blueprints of the ship. These digital blueprints are creating a more efficient workforce and reducing cutting as many as six months from a three-year overhaul, Miner said. The top of its massive island — where sailors drive the ship and control aircraft — has been sliced off. It will be rebuilt in the coming months with a new design that will give the crew a better view of the flight deck. The island already sports a new, sturdier mast that can hold larger antennas and sensors. Shipyard workers lowered it into place in early March. The yard is also combining its digital ship designs with augmented reality gear to allow its designers and production crews to virtually “walk through” the Ford class's spaces. This helped the yard figure out, for example, whether the ship's sections were designed efficiently for maintenance. In addition to robots, the additive manufacturing techniques, like 3D printing, could speed shipbuilding even more and reduce the Navy's need for carrying spare parts on ships. The Navy is testing a valve 3D-printed here. Right now, at a time when the Navy is planning to drastically expand its fleet size, shipyards like Newport News are expanding, but not yet to the levels of the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s. Despite the technology advantages, Miner said people still play essential roles in the manufacturing process. “It's really not about reducing our workforce as much it is about doing more with the workforce we have,” he said. “We're still going to hire people. We still have to ramp up. There's still hands-on things that are always going to have to be done. But it definitely helps us with cycle time to be able to build things quicker” and “enable our workforce to be more efficient.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/05/robots-and-lasers-are-bringing-shipbuilding-digital-age/156763/

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  January 21, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Watch the Defiant helicopter exceed 100 knots

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant coaxial demonstrator flew more than 100 knots in a Jan. 13 flight test as the aircraft — built for the U.S. Army's Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator program — continues to expand its flight envelope in weekly sorties. The aircraft also maneuvered at 30-degree bank turns during the flight in a test of its agility at the Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky's Development Flight Test Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Defiant has been flying for nearly a year. Its first flight was in March 2018 after a delay to the program to challenges mostly related to the manufacturing its rotor blades. The program seems to have picked up the pace. In October, Ken Eland, Boeing's director and manager of its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program, told reporters that the aircraft flew three times in March and April, but the company took a pause in flight operations after discovering an issue with the gearbox of the propulsion system test bed, or PSTB, which the team is using for extensive ground tests of the aircraft. Defiant was back up in the air by Sept. 24 when it flew in every direction at speeds of 20 knots. The company said last fall that it planned to push the aircraft to 40 knots and believed it would be able to hit top speeds of 250 knots, which is more than the 230-knot requirement set by the Army. The aircraft is one of two demonstrators flying as part of the Army's Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator, or JMR TD, program, which is meant to inform the service's Future Vertical Lift programs of record, specifically a future long-range assault aircraft the Army wants to field by 2030. The other demonstrator is Bell's V-280 Valor tilt-rotor demonstrator, which as been flying for more than two years and recently completed autonomous test flight series in December. While the official JMR TD phase has ended, according to the Army, both Valor and Defiant continue to fly as each team works to drive down risk related to technology development that would ultimately help a possible program of record move more quickly down the road. Even though the two demonstrators are in different places in their flight test plans, Maj. Gen. Thomas Todd, the program executive officer for Army aviation, said earlier this month that the service wasn't planning to wait for each competitor to reach the same goal posts before proceeding. The only advantage a vendor might have in meeting timelines is that it is able to burn down risk in technology development, he added. The Army is preparing to award an other transaction authority contract to begin a competitive demonstration and risk reduction, or CDRR, effort in March. An OTA is a type of contract that enables rapid prototyping. The CDRR will consist of two phases that last approximately one year each. “In the CDRR, we're really trying to develop a weapons system, not the tech demonstrator,” Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, who is in charge of the Army's aviation modernization, recently said. “So we're trying to take it to the next level.” https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/01/17/defiant-exceeds-100-knots