20 juin 2023 | International, Autre défense
The Biden administration is seeking to figure out how to regulate the emergent field of AI.
16 novembre 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Boeing Co said on Thursday it will partner with the U.S. government in a project aimed at addressing challenges faced by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) member countries in developing and scaling use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
20 avril 2020 | International, Aérospatial
WICHITA, Kan. — A major aircraft parts supplier in Kansas is expected to bring about 2,100 furloughed workers back to work next week as Boeing prepares to resume production of its commercial airplanes. Spirit AeroSystems also is planning resume work for more than 1,700 other workers in Wichita over the next three weeks, The Wichita Eagle reported. “As our customer, Boeing, begins to resume production, Spirit AeroSystems will work with our employees, customers and suppliers to begin a phased-in return to work for some furloughed employees," Spirit spokeswoman Keturah Austin said. She added that “this will be a slow process as we work to continue to support our customer's operations in a manner that is safe for all involved.” Boeing said Thursday it will restart production of its commercial airplanes next week in the Seattle area, putting about 27,000 people back to work at its facilities in the Seattle area after operations were suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Boeing employees for the 737, 747, 767 and 777 airplanes will return as early as Monday with most returning to work by Tuesday, Boeing is Spirit AeroSystem's biggest customer, and the impact has rippled to its suppliers. About 2,100 workers, hourly and salaried, are scheduled to return to various production lines at the Spirit plant in Wichita on Monday, according to a union officials and numbers obtained by the newspaper. They'll be joined by another 200 workers on April 27; an additional 1,100 on April 29; and nearly 400 on May 4. Cornell Beard, president of Machinists District Lodge 70, said the returning union workers are still a fraction of the plant's full workforce, “but anything's better than nothing.” The coronavirus has exacerbated Boeing's crisis surrounding the 737 Max, which remains grounded after two deadly crashes. Boeing said Thursday its 737 program “”will resume working toward restarting production"" of the 737 MAX. Spirit produces about 70 percent of the 737 Max, including the fuselage. Contracts with Boeing for the Max represents more than half of Spirit's annual income. Future callbacks at Spirit will be largely dependent on Boeing's performance in getting the 737 Max back in the air, Beard said. “If another mistake is found, or another defect, or if we just encounter another problem, those projections will change again (and) we're going to be right back in this pickle,” Beard said. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/04/17/spirit-aerosystems-bringing-back-some-furloughed-workers
7 mai 2020 | International, Naval
"We need to find a balance of vehicle designs that enables the cost to be cheap enough that we can afford them, but it's not so highly optimized towards the purely unmanned spectrum that it's cost prohibitive to maintain them." By PAUL MCLEARYon May 06, 2020 at 3:27 PM WASHINGTON: The Navy needs to comb through a host of thorny issues before deploying a new fleet of unmanned ships to confront China, Russia, and Iran. “You don't hear me talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning and things like that just yet,” said Capt. Pete Small, the Navy's program manager for Unmanned Maritime Systems at a C4ISRnet conference this morning. “Those aren't my first concerns. My first concerns are about the field stability and sustainability of these systems right now.” The Navy just isn't equipped to deploy or sustain a new fleet of unmanned vessels yet. “Our infrastructure right now is optimized around manned warships,” Small said. “We're gonna have to shift that infrastructure for how we prepare, deploy, and transit” over large bodies of water before large numbers of unmanned vessels can be effective, he said. It's not clear where that planning stands, but the service has already invested tens of millions in the early work of developing a family of large and medium unmanned vessels, and is looking to vastly ramp that up in the 2021 budget, asking for $580 million for research and development. In 2019 an unmanned Sea Hunter prototype autonomous vessel sailed from San Diego to Hawaii, but it needed to repair several broken systems along the way, forcing sailors to board the ship. It was the first experiment of its kind, one the Navy has not repeated. Those mechanical problems point to work the Navy must do to reconfigure its logistics tail to meet the needs of a new class of ship. “We're going to have to transition from a [system] more optimized around our manned fleet infrastructure to a more distributed mix of these large manned platforms to smaller platforms,” Small said, “we're gonna need to talk about things like, tenders for heavy lift ships, or forward operating bases, things like that.” The early thinking is the service will use the ships as sensors deployed well forward of manned ships and carrier strike groups, which could be at risk if they maneuvered too close to contested waters. But the Navy isn't going to pin everything on a nascent fleet of robot boats — a new class of manned frigates is also being built to operate inside the range of enemy precision weapons. The frigates are going to be smaller and faster than current destroyers, with the ability to generate much more power so they can use lasers and other weapons for both offensive and defensive missions. The Navy is considering several sizes of USVs, including a large variant between 200 and 300 feet in length and having full load displacements of 1,000 tons to 2,000 tons. The ships should be low-cost, and reconfigurable with lots of room capacity for carrying various payloads, including mine hunting and anti-surface warfare. The 2021 budget submission proposes using research and development funding to acquire two more prototypes and another in 2022. Plans then call for buying deployable LUSVs at a rate of two per year. Medium unmanned ships will likely come in at between 45 to 190 feet long, with displacements of roughly 500 tons. The medium ships are thought to skew more toward mission modules revolving around intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance payloads and electronic warfare systems. The first MUSV prototype was funded in 2019, and the Navy wants to fund a second prototype in 2023. Fundamental issues need to be sorted out before the Navy buys one of these ships. “We need to find a balance of vehicle designs that enables the cost to be cheap enough that we can afford them, but it's not so highly optimized towards the purely unmanned spectrum that it's cost prohibitive to maintain them,” Small said. If the maintenance is too complicated and time consuming, and “we have to take the whole vehicle out of the water and take it apart in some explicit manner to replace the parts, it's not gonna really support what we need in the field. So really, the sustainability of the technology is as important — if not more important — in the near-term than the technology itself.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/navy-wants-robot-boats-but-will-still-need-sailors-to-fix-them/