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  7 janvier 2019 | International, Naval

  Pentagon Approves Two-Carrier Buy As Fixes Continue to Navy’s Most Expensive Ship

  By PAUL MCLEARY Congress is evaluating the proposal to issue a $24 billion contract for the Navy's next two carriers, as the service looks at months of work to fix ongoing problems with the Ford-class's first ship. WASHINGTON: The Navy's coming request for the 2020 fiscal year is still under wraps, but one important piece of the Navy's future plans appears increasingly certain: the service will commit billions to buy two new Ford-class aircraft carriers under the same contract. While most of that money won't be spent in '20, it's still a tremendous long-term commitment that, advocates say, should save 5 to 10 percentover buying each carrier separately. The Navy says that the long-troubled Ford program has turned a corner, and it is pushing ahead with remaining fixes while planning to save up to $4 billion by buying the next two flattops on a single massive contract. That mega-deal would remove uncertainty for the builder, HII's Newport News Shipbuilding, and help keep production lines humming with no expensive stop-and-start in construction or ramping up and down of supply chains, which spreads across dozens of states. Congress first has to review the plan over the next 30 days before Navy can award the contract. News of the potential buy — which was expected by the end of the year — camefrom Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, who put out a statement on New Year's Eve saying he was “thrilled the Navy has decided to pursue a block buy for aircraft carriers, something I've been advocating to save billions in taxpayer dollars and offer more certainty to the Hampton Roads defense community.” Kaine, a longtime proponent of the block buy, also represents the state where the work will be done. “This smart move will save taxpayer dollars and help ensure the shipyards can maintain a skilled workforce to get the job done,” he said. Virginia Congressman Rob Wittman, outgoing chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, said he's “thrilled” about the notification which will allow the Navy “to build to a fleet of 12 aircraft carriers and 355 ships.” Wittman attached an amendment to the FY 2019 DoD appropriations bill calling for the dual buy, which he says “will not only save the taxpayers $4 billion, it provides important certainty to our defense industrial base that build and maintain these ships.” Wittman was the author of the “Securing the Homeland by Increasing our Power on the Seas Act,” which transformed the Navy's goal of 355 ships into official government policy. President Trump signed the bill into law in 2017. Both senators said the contract will keep the ships at or under the construction cap set by Congress of $12.9 billion each. Last May, however, the first ship of the class, USS Gerald R. Ford, blew past that cap by $120 million thanks to a litany of fixes identified by shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries., including replacing propulsion components damaged in a previous failure, extending the repair schedule to 12 months from the original eight, and correcting problems with the ship's eleven Advanced Weapons Elevators. The elevators, used to bring munitions from below deck up top for installation on aircraft, are powered by magnets as opposed to cables, and were supposed to be installed by the ship's delivery date in May 2017, but issues have delayed their completion. Navy spokesman Capt. Danny Hernandez told me that the eleven elevators remain “in varying levels of construction, testing and operations,” and the first one was turned over to the crew in December. The plan is to complete installation and testing of the elevators before the ship's scheduled “sail away date” in July. Hernandez added that “there will be some remaining certification documentation that will be performed for 5 of the 11 elevators after” July, and “a dedicated team is engaged on these efforts and will accelerate this certification work and schedule where feasible.” James Geurts, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, promised a Congressional panel in November that the Ford would leave HII's Newport News shipyard with all systems in working order. “I would say of all of the technologies on the CVN 78, of which there were many we proved out on this lead ship, the weapons elevator is the last one that we need to get tied up and work our way through,” Geurts said. “We are making progress,” he said. The second ship of the class, CVN 79, USS John F. Kennedy, is currently under construction. Huntington spokesperson Beci Brenton said in a statement the company is “pleased to have come to an agreement with the Navy regarding a two-ship acquisition approach for CVN 80 and 81, a significant step toward building these ships more affordably. Although there is more work to be done it is important to note that the multi-ship purchase of aircraft carriers helps stabilize the Newport News Shipbuilding workforce, enables the purchase of material in quantity, and permits a fragile supplier base of more than 2,000 in 46 states to phase work more efficiently.” After decades of dominance however, the Ford-class carriers might be the last of the line for US nuclear-powered supercarriers, given the increasing threat being presented by land-based “ship-killer” standoff weapons being fielded by China and Russia. Speaking at a Heritage Foundation event last month, Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that optimistically, a carrier strike group could likely knock down 450 incoming missiles, but “that is not enough. You are looking at a threat that is at least 600, and maybe more weapons” that the Chinese can launch from their coast on short notice. Jerry Hendrix, vice president of the Telemus Group, added that the threat could be somewhat mitigated by keeping ships father from shore and putting more drones in the air both as scouts and attack aircraft. The “carrier air wing must increase its range by investing in an unmanned, air combat strike platform,” Hendrix said. Any moves to increase range must first fight for primacy with the navy's other massive investment in hulls, from new aircraft carriers to Columbia-class submarinesto a new frigate. When the 2020 budget comes out next month, we'll likely have a better idea of what the Navy is planning. https://breakingdefense.com/2019/01/navy-going-for-two-carrier-buy-as-value-of-flattops-debated

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  29 avril 2021 | International, C4ISR

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  SAFR from RealNetworks has received the third Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the US Air Force (USAF).

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  20 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  To get more female pilots, the Air Force is changing the way it designs weapons

  Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — In 2022, the U.S. Air Force will take delivery of the F-15EX, a new and improved version of the nearly 40-year-old F-15E Strike Eagle. But for all of the modern advances of the new jet, only 9 percent of women in the Air Force currently meet the body-size standards for piloting the legacy F-15 and possibly also the new EX variant, potentially blocking highly qualified pilots from flying a platform that will be in operation for decades to come. Like the vast majority of the Air Force's aircraft and aircrew equipment, the F-15 was designed to meet the anthropometric specifications of a male pilot in 1967. But in an Aug. 4 memo, the Air Force mandated that future weapons programs use current body size data that reflects the central 95 percent of the U.S. recruitment population — a move meant to make pilot and aircrew jobs more accessible to women and people of color. Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper, who signed off on the changes, said there is a strategic imperative for opening the door to a more diverse pool of pilots and aircrew. During a war with a near-peer, technologically advanced nation like China, the U.S. military will have to contend with a well-trained, highly educated force that might outnumber its own, he said. By fielding weapon systems that can only be used by a smaller portion of the U.S. population, the Air Force could be shutting out some of its most promising potential pilots or aircrew. “The human factor is a delineator and it likely will be against an adversary like China, where I believe we will have a greater propensity to trust the operator in the seat, to delegate more, to empower more and take greater risk in that delegation,” Roper told Defense News in an exclusive Aug. 6 interview. “All well and good when you're a country that's going to face a country with a population that's four times your own by the end of this decade,” he said. “But if we begin with a recruitment population that we've artificially halved because of how we design our cockpits and workstations, we've just doubled our work, and now we make every operator in the seat have to be eight times better than the counterpart they will face in a nation like China.” The new guidance directs the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center to conduct a study that will solidify a more inclusive anthropometric standard that would include 95 percent of the U.S. population eligible for recruitment in the U.S. Air Force. But until that wraps up, all new-start Air Force programs must be designed with cockpits, aircrew operating stations and aircrew equipment that accommodates eight anthropometric data sets. These eight cases use measurement data from the Centers for Disease Control and represent a range of body types including individuals who are short in stature, have short limbs or have a long torso. AFLCMC's Airman's Accommodations Laboratory will also run a three-year study that will develop separate anthropometric standards for career enlisted aviators, who perform specialized jobs onboard military aircraft including flight engineers, flight attendants and loadmasters. Currently, career enlisted aviators also must meet the 1967 anthropometric standards. ‘A hidden barrier' The legacy design parameters — which stem from a 1967 survey of male pilots and measure everything from a pilot's standing height, eye height while sitting, and reach — have effectively barred 44 percent of women from being able to fly aircraft unless they receive a waiver, with women of color disproportionately affected, the Air Force stated. Even after a waiver is granted, the pilot will remain disqualified from certain platforms regardless of his or her aptitude. Then, when future requirements are defined for new platforms or equipment, the systems are usually designed to meet the existing pool of pilots, creating a self-perpetuating problem. “It is a hidden barrier with multiple layers,” said Lt. Col. Jessica Ruttenber, an Air Force mobility planner and a leader of the Women's Initiative Team that advocated for the change in anthropometric standards. “People are trying to do the right thing, but the barriers are baked into legacy policy. And without even knowing it, they're kind of cut and pasting the same standard.” Ruttenber said the new guidance addresses the root of the problem by establishing new design specifications — ensuring platforms are engineered to accommodate a wide range of body sizes from the start of the development process, rather than papering over the problem with waivers after the fact. “[For] the next inter-theater airlift that is going to replace the C-130 or C-17, we can't get the anthropometric data wrong or women are still going to be eliminated 30 years from now. The C-130 and C-17 still eliminate one out of three women from flying it,” she said. For more than a year, the Women's Initiative Group worked with Chief Master Sgt. Chris Dawson, the career field manager for the Air National Guard's career enlisted aviators, on trying to garner funding for an anthropometric study for CEAs. “There were so many communities we had to coordinate with that we realized really quickly that this has to come from the top down or we're not going to be as successful,” Ruttenber said. After meeting with Roper, the Women's Initiative group was granted $4 million for the study. Ruttenber, a KC-135 pilot, remembers being pulled out of her first pilot training class in 2005 because her physical examination indicated that she didn't meet the standing height requirement of 5-foot-4 by a fraction of an inch. She then sought a waiver that would allow her to fly. “The process was different back then. I had to drive from base to base and get measured in each cockpit in an attempt to get an exception to policy. I went to Charleston and I got measured in a C-17, and then I went to Little Rock and got measured in a C-130,” she said. “I got measured in the KC-135 and so on and so on and so on.” Since then, the Air Force has made the process to obtain a waiver less arduous, and it recently removed the initial height requirement — although some platforms still require pilots to meet the 5-foot-4 standard. Newer aircraft such as the F-35 joint strike fighter and the T-7 trainer currently under development will also accommodate a wider height and weight range. However, Ruttenber pointed out that the specifications for legacy aircraft will remain a hurdle for the progression of female pilots. “Even if the F-35 is 97 percent accommodating for women, I still can't get there because the T-38,” which is used for fighter pilot training, “has a 41 percent accommodation envelope for women,” she said. Roper said he is working with defense contractors to see whether there can be modifications made to legacy platforms — or upgraded versions like the F-15EX — that will accommodate operators with a wider range of body sizes. But whether those changes are ultimately made will depend on if they are technically feasible and funding is available for design changes. At the time of the Aug. 6 interview, Roper had already spoken to some defense industry executives — including those from Lockheed Martin — about the new guidance and planned similar phone calls with Boeing and Northrop Grumman officials over the coming days. The reaction from industry so far has been “very positive” but “very surprised” that such bias still exists, he said. However, Roper acknowledged that more work has yet to be done. “Changing the policy is one thing. Changing the platforms is another. And that's going to require cost to do. My next job, aside from designing future systems differently — which we'll do — is to find options to bring systems into greater compliance with the new policy and then to advocate tooth and nail for the funding needed to do it,” he said. “The litmus test for the Air Force long term has got to be balancing accommodation with the technology for future platforms.” https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2020/08/19/to-get-more-female-pilots-the-air-force-is-changing-the-way-it-designs-weapons/