Boeing to deliver first T-7 to US Air Force, outlines testing plans

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  17 avril 2024 | International, Terrestre

  U.S Army awards L3Harris ENVG-B production order

  This is the first order for the ENVG-B’s Program of Record full-scale production IDIQ, which will total nearly $1 billion over 10 years.

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  3 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial

  Boeing’s F-15EX jet makes its first flight

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — Boeing's first F-15EX took to the skies for its inaugural flight on Feb. 2, a milestone that will allow the company to deliver the first two planes to the U.S. Air Force by the end of March. After a couple of hours of delays due to weather — which also held up plans to conduct a first flight on Feb. 1 — Boeing test pilot Matt “Phat” Giese took off from Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, Missouri, at approximately 1:57 p.m. EST. The flight lasted approximately 90 minutes, and the plane performed as expected, Boeing said in a news release. “Today's successful flight proves the jet's safety and readiness to join our nation's fighter fleet,” said Prat Kumar, Boeing vice president and F-15 program manager. “Our workforce is excited to build a modern fighter aircraft for the U.S. Air Force. Our customer can feel confident in its decision to invest in this platform that is capable of incorporating the latest advanced battle management systems, sensors and weapons due to the jet's digital airframe design and open mission systems architecture.” The Air Force first added the F-15EX to its fiscal 2020 budget at the behest of the Defense Department's Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, or CAPE. With the Air Force and Air National Guard's fleet of 1970s-era F-15C/D jets showing signs of age, the service needed to either conduct an expensive life extension or buy new planes to replace them. But with F-35 operations and sustainment costs still financially burdensome, CAPE officials argued that buying an upgraded version of the F-15E Strike Eagle — with new features developed primarily at the cost of foreign customers like Qatar and Saudi Arabia — would be a more cost-conscious option. The Air Force placed its first order for the F-15EX in July 2020, awarding a contract for the first lot of eight jets with a value not to exceed about $1.2 billion. The entire program has a ceiling value of $23 billion. The new jets come with a host of modern features, including Honeywell's ADCP-II mission computer, the Eagle Passive/Active Warning and Survivability System electronic warfare system made by BAE Systems, the Raytheon Technologies' AN/APG-82 radar, fly-by-wire flight controls, and a digital cockpit. The service expects to buy at least 144 F-15EX aircraft, but the contract includes options to allow the Air Force to purchase up to 200 jets. Congress first included funds in December to purchase eight F-15EXs through the fiscal 2020 spending bill, and lawmakers approved spending $1.2 billion to buy 12 F-15EXs in fiscal 2021. According to the Air Force's FY21 budget request, the service plans to buy another dozen planes in FY22, procuring 14 F-15EXs in FY23, and ramping up to 19 jets per year in both FY24 and FY25. Once delivered to the Air Force, the first two F-15EXs will go Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, for testing, with the remaining six aircraft set to be delivered to the base in FY23. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/02/02/the-f-15ex-just-made-its-first-flight

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  27 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  U.S. Army Upgrades Vision For Future Vertical Lift Programs

  Steve Trimble In piecing together a delicate plan to field two advanced rotorcraft simultaneously within a decade, the U.S. Army chose its priorities carefully. The Army could load the first Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) and Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) with advanced new systems and weapons needed for operations in the 2030s or keep to existing or highly mature technologies and field both aircraft years earlier. Ultimately, the Army selected an acquisition strategy based on the latter. Increment 1 versions of the FLRAA and FARA are now scheduled to enter service together in the third quarter of fiscal 2030. More advanced Increment 2 versions of both should enter service in 2034 and 2035, respectively. U.S. Army FVL Vision: Competition, open systems and incremental upgrades Empty weight and costs emerge as early concerns But the key to fielding both increments for each new type on time may depend less on rotor systems and drivetrains than on software architecture and resolving industry concerns about government demands for data rights. In a series of briefings to defense contractors the week of July 13, Army leaders laid out a vision for using the FLRAA and FARA contracts to change the aviation branch's relationship with suppliers. The Army is seeking to make the aircraft and mission systems installed on both as common as possible, with a modular open-systems architecture (MOSA) allowing the service to rapidly upgrade payloads, subsystems and design rights, thereby enabling a perpetual cycle of competitive bidding. Although the Army's commitment to the new industrial model was clear, the service's acquisition leaders acknowledged that such a strategy will force companies at all levels of the supply chain to adopt a new, unproven business model. “Most of you are thinking, ‘OK, a modular systems approach is a nice buzz term, but how do I sell that to a board of directors; how do I sell it to the [company] leadership?' Because I can potentially give up all of the future revenue streams,” says Pat Mason, the program executive officer for Army aviation. “So we owe you greater answers on that, because it's the question that you're asking, and we have to understand your perspective. From that, we then have to develop a clear business case that allows you to move forward.” In purely aircraft performance terms, the FLRAA and FARA requirements do not compromise on performance. Any of the four candidates selected by the Army in March to compete for both contracts—Bell's V-280 and Boeing/Sikorsky's SB-1 for the FLRAA; Bell's 360 Invictus and Sikorsky's Raider X for the FARA—would enter service in 2030 exceeding the 170-kt. speed limit for most conventional helicopters. But despite appearances, speed is not everything in the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program that spawned the FLRAA and FARA contract competitions. The FVL initiative is seeking to introduce a revolutionary leap in how the Army acquires the evolving array of software, electronics, sensors and weapons that come with an aircraft and represent an increasingly important share of its overall capability. With schedule and cost driving the acquisition strategy, the Army will seek to deliver the FARA and FLRAA with as many common electronic systems and payloads as possible, along with a MOSA for software. To minimize schedule and cost risk, FARA and FLRAA aircraft entering service in 2030 will be designed with electronics and systems already available or due to reach a high level of maturity by 2024. More advanced systems capabilities still at the laboratory stage mid-decade will be considered for Increment 2 versions of both types. The Increment 2 version of the FLRAA is scheduled for delivery in fiscal 2034. A year later, the FARA program plans to field an Increment 2 version. Limiting development activity during Increment 1 to the airframe is the Army's goal. “One of the key things we're trying to do with Increment 1 is get the ‘truck' right—the vehicle,” says Jason Lucas, the Army's FLRAA technical division chief. “We need to get us an air vehicle platform that can take us into the future. The other thing that we absolutely have to get right is our architecture, and our modular open-system approach to enable us to integrate advanced technologies [and] keep up with the pace of threats. “One of the things you didn't hear me say is that we need to develop a lot of advanced mission system equipment, a lot of new development” in Increment 1, Lucas adds. “We are going to take existing mission equipment.” The Army's risk-averse approach comes after decades of frustration over new aircraft development. Three failed attempts to field a scout helicopter to perform a mission similar to FARA's weigh on current program leaders. Col. Gregory Fortier, FARA project manager, notes that as a younger officer he had been told to expect an assignment in a Sikorsky/Boeing RAH-66 squadron, a Bell ARH-70 squadron and an Armed Aerial Scout test squadron. “As we know, those three did not come to fruition,” Fortier says, adding that avoiding a fourth program failure requires having “critical and difficult conversations” with industry up front. Such discussions came up during the industry day event. As a possible consequence of relying on existing maturing systems and payloads for the Increment 1 versions of the FARA and FLRAA, Army program managers are growing concerned about aircraft weight estimates. “I'm still seeing very heavy empty weights across our air vehicles, which I don't enjoy,” says Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, director of the Army's FVL cross-functional team. FLRAA and FARA technology “should be lighter and lower-cost,” he says. “You all may say I'm asking for the impossible, but I think it's nuanced. At the end of the day, we're in a hypercompetitive environment with budgets, and if we don't bring things in that are leap-ahead and fully capture the deflationary nature of the technology and get lighter and cheaper, I think we may find ourselves on the outside looking in.” Another difficult conversation inside the programs concerns the Army's plan to demand ownership of more of the intellectual property and data rights for technologies installed in the aircraft. As each of the armed services seeks a greater share of the ownership rights on future weapon systems, the defense industry is being forced to adapt to a new paradigm in the government-industry relationship. “We realize this runs contrary to some of the legacy business models, such as, ‘Here's a box. We want to integrate it and then we want to sustain it for 30 years,' ” says Michael “Ski” Horrocks, integration project manager for FLRAA and FARA mission systems. “So we do have teams working right now brainstorming how to create new collaborative and sustainable business models.” The in-service date for the FLRAA and FARA may be a decade away, but the Army is already facing critical decision points by year-end. The most important is creation of the FVL Architecture Framework (FAF) to define the interfaces and standards for the common mission systems architecture of both. Last year, the Army stood up a body composed of military, industry and academic experts called the Architecture Control Working Group to deliver the FAF by November 2020 for scheduled approval the following month. “We see Increment 2 as an opportunity to provide advanced mission system solutions to help tackle some of the most significant threats and integrate some innovation,” Lucas says. The Army's schedule calls for selecting the FLRAA developer in fiscal 2023 and the FARA prime contractor in fiscal 2024, with limited user tests of production aircraft beginning for each program four years later. But a lesson from the Army's painful experience with new aircraft development suggests little tolerance for costly technology, even if the contractors can deliver better performance. “We can develop and design and deliver this tremendous capability at the end of this fiscal 2028 timeframe,” Fortier says. “But if it's not affordable, they're walking away from it.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/us-army-upgrades-vision-future-vertical-lift-programs