Australia, Naval Group conclude sub negotiations

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  10 décembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  New Images Of The Tempest Sixth-Generation Aircraft Revealed During UK Industry Engagement Event

  Development for the new Tempest sixth-generation fighter is moving on with some revolutionary concepts. Team Tempest and the Royal Air Force recently held a virtual event to provide an update about the development opportunities of the new sixth generation aircraft to industry and government representatives from Northern Ireland, the first of a series of events to engage with industries across the UK. Within the press release there is also some new renderings of the aircraft which, we have to note, is not in its final shape as it's being designed “from the inside out” and the airframe's exterior design may change to reflect changes in the internal systems. According to the press release, “Delegates heard from Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Wigston and other RAF senior leaders who highlighted how Team Tempest is taking a revolutionary approach to partnership, engaging with a wide range of leading companies, SMEs and academia to bring leading innovators into the endeavour and ensure the UK remains at the leading edge of Combat Air systems development. The RAF Capability leadership team highlighted updates in emerging strategy and identified examples of innovation and future opportunities. Key members from the Team Tempest industry partner community also provided attendees with updates on the programme and explained how Tempest is working in radical ways to develop world-leading capability, with a focus on affordability and efficiency.” Team Tempest is currently made of the core industry partners BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Leonardo UK and MBDA UK, which were joined last year by Leonardo Italy, Elettronica, Avio Aero, MBDA Italy, Saab and GKN Aerospace Sweden and, more recently, by Thales UK, Bombardier Belfast, Collins Aerospace, GE Aviation UK, GKN Aerospace, Martin Baker and QinetiQ. A widespread industry participation is considered essential for the programme to bring the best expertise to work on the more than 60 technology demonstrations which are currently in progress. According to a statement shared by the UK Ministry of Defence and the core industry partners, “Tempest is one of the UK's most ambitious technological endeavours and designed to deliver a highly advanced, adaptable combat air system to come into service from the mid-2030s. This next generation combat aircraft, which forms part of a wider combat air system, will exploit new technologies as they evolve to respond to the changing nature of the battlespace, addressing increasingly high-tech and complex threats and conflict.” Back in October, engineers working on the project revealed some of the highly innovative systems that are being developed for Tempest as part of the Future Combat Air System Technology Initiative (FCAS TI) programme. Here is what has been disclosed to the public so far. Leonardo, which is the project lead for electronics, is developing a new radar technology called Multi-Function Radar Frequency System. The new sensor will reportedly collect and process 10'000 times more data than existing systems, or “equivalent to the internet traffic of a large city every second”, providing the operators with a clear view of the battlespace and of potential targets. According to the company, complete sub-systems have already been built and successfully tested, paving the way eventually to future airborne testing. BAE Systems if working on another revolutionary concept, the “wearable cockpit”. In this case, the cockpit as we know it, full of switches, gauges and screens, becomes completely digital and all physical controls are replaced by Augmented and Virtual Reality systems. The new cockpit would be projected inside the pilot's helmet and completely customizable according to the pilot's preference and mission's needs. As human-AI teaming, a virtual copilot is being developed to interact with the pilot and provide support during the flight. “Psycho-physiological” technologies are also being trialed to study the operator's physical and cognitive processes to better understand increasing exertion, stress, workload and fatigue. According to the company, some of these technologies are being tested controlled test flight conditions aboard the Typhoon to inform further development. MBDA UK is also working on the wearable cockpit concept to integrate weapons systems information and operations. Rolls-Royce is working on the advanced combustion system technology that will power Tempest. The next-generation system is being designed to be hotter than previous ones to increase the efficiency of the engine, its range and speed, while reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Together with the higher-temperature combustion, there will be a new thermal management system that will use the turbine as a heat sink to recycle thermal energy, removing the need for overboard venting and improving the efficiency, and an increased electrical power production, reportedly in the order of one megawatt, that will be used to power all the aircraft's subsystems. This follows the assessment by Rolls Royce that future fighter aircraft will have unprecedented levels of electrical power demand and thermal load that need to be managed accordingly to maintain the airframe's low observability. Being more specific, the company stated that they will integrate an Electrical Embedded Starter Generator that will function both as an APU and as an electrical generator after the engine is spooled up. The Tempest is expected to have also his own loyal wingman, currently being developed as the Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Aircraft (LANCA) concept. According to the MoD, LANCA will offer “increased protection, survivability and information for the manned aircraft – and could even provide an unmanned combat air ‘fleet' in the future.” A demonstration project, called “Moquito” and comparable to the Skyborg program of the U.S. Air Force, is currently in its first phase of evaluation. Three teams, Boeing Defence UK, Team Avenger (led by Blue Bear Systems Research), and Team Blackdawn (Callen-Lenz, Bombardier Belfast and Northrop Grumman UK), submitted designs for the flight demonstrations phase, which could begin in 2022-2023, after two finalists are selected during second phase of evaluation. LANCA will reportedly be a transonic aircraft costing one-tenth of a fighter aircraft, able to employ multi-role sensors, Electronic Warfare suites and both air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons. The unmanned aircraft project, led by the RAF Rapid Capabilities Office and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, originated in 2015, three years before the Tempest announcement. While a timeline for its entry into service has not been disclosed, the LANCA may be first deployed alongside the Typhoon and the F-35, before the entry into service of the new Tempest in 2035. https://theaviationist.com/2020/12/09/new-images-of-the-tempest-sixth-generation-aircraft-revealed-during-uk-industry-engagement-event/

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  18 novembre 2019 | International, C4ISR

  How Lockheed Martin Is Trying To Link Everything on the Battlefield

  BY PATRICK TUCKER Experiment by experiment, the company is weaving aircraft, ground vehicles, satellites, and the rest into a network that will someday give commanders unprecedented decision-support options. The Pentagon's efforts to digitally connect everything on the battlefield is has a big challenge to overcome: getting disparate vehicles and weapons to share data. “The interoperability of various, different systems, that's really where we are struggling. We don't have that machine to machine connection to begin with,” Air Force Brig. Gen. David Kumashiro recently told the audience at last week's Defense One Outlook 2020 conference. Over the past several years, Lockheed Martin officials say they've been working to build those connections, piece by piece and plane by plane. They started by asking, “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” and then working backwards, J.D. Hammond, vice president of C4ISR systems, told reporters at one of the company's offices. The company began by asking “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” They started with an idea of the state they wanted to reach and then worked backward. In 2013, the company launched a project, dubbed Missouri, to link the stealthy F-22 and F-35 combat jets. The Air Force has announced that they are to test a similar link next month, but the Air Force is establishing more complete linkages, including new forms of secure radio linkagages using software defined radio, and also including other assets such as Valkyrie drones. In 2015, they launched Project Iguana, extending the datalinks to the high-flying U-2 spy plane, fourth-generation combat aircraft such as the F-16, and satellites. In February 2018, they conducted an experiment under DARPA's SoSITE program that added other aircraft and a ground station. In April, their RIOT experiment connectngi jets to ground vehicles. Experiment by experiment, Lockheed tried to “systematically work” to build the components of a larger network of networks, said Hammond. There are four experiments projects planned for next year: Mayhem, focusing on links for satellites; Edison, datalinks for the Navy; Brennan, aircraft and Army units; and Project CASTL, satellites and a “space tactical layer”. Ultimately, Lockheed wants all this to add up to a “virtualized cloud-based architecture.” Think of it like the branches of a tree. A handful of ships and planes might form one network. That will, in turn, connect to a larger network that would, in turn, would be connected to the larger JEDI cloud. “You end up with virtual private clouds on the edge with a computing architecture you could have on an aircraft, on a ship, or any of the deployed nodes,” said John Clark, Lockheed's vice president of intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance and unmanned aerial systems. Most of the linked aircraft and ships in these experiments carry an Enterprise Mission Computer 2.0 — dubbed “Einstein box” after its abbreviation, EMC2 — that translates each platform's data into a shared protocol that can go out to the larger wireless network. Lockheed officials hope that bringing all these pieces together will enable a new sort of operating system for warfare. They showed journalists a new experimental battle management display to illustrate the concept. The system presents the operator with a list of effects, from devastating explosions to a quiet disabling of some enemy system; a list of available assets, including planes or drones; a map of targets; and recommendations for the best way to deliver effects to targets. As circumstances change — fuel gets low, ammunition is depleted, targets are destroyed, new enemy forces arrive, etc. — the system can send out alerts that a new plan is needed — or automatically update the plan with new instructions for pilots and drone operators. It all depends on how high the operator wants to set the autonomy. That vision is very different from the way mission tasking works today. Preston Dunlap, the chief architect of the Air Force, said at the Defense One Outlook 2020 conference, “Right now, our commanders are very limited in who they can assign to do certain” things. “More often than not, you have to assign someone because they happen to be in front of a specific place in front of a specific computer,” he said. Of course, realtime data sharing across platforms isn't a simple or clear-cut affair, even after successful experimentation. The years-long problems with Lockheed's Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, for the F-35 show how hard it can be simply to share data between operators and just one platform. The challenges of sharing data between multiple platforms, in the middle of battle in a highly contested airspace, are far larger. But commanders say they must try. “In terms of where our adversaries are,” Kumashiro said, U.S. forces have “a need to have this joint all-domain command-and-control system.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/11/how-lockheed-martin-trying-link-everything-battlefield/161355

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  2 mai 2022 | International, Aérospatial

  Boeing CEO regrets Air Force One deal amid big quarterly losses

  Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said the Air Force One deal was '€œa very unique moment, a very unique negotiation, a very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn't have taken. But we are where we are."