10 mai 2019 | Local, Aérospatial
David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen
The Canadian government is changing the terms of the $19-billion competition to replace its aging fleet of fighter jets to allow the U.S. to enter its F-35 stealth fighter.
The changes will allow for a more flexible approach in determining the value of the benefits bidders offer to Canadian defence firms, industry sources say, and come after a series of discussions with the U.S. government and threats by the Pentagon to withdraw the jet from consideration.
Under the current terms, bidders were required to offer industrial benefits to Canada as part of the competition. That system, which would have disadvantaged the F-35, will now be amended, sources say. But those companies that do guarantee work for Canadian firms will receive more consideration under the new rules.
U.S. officials had warned that the agreement Canada signed to be a partner nation in Lockheed Martin's development of the F-35 prohibits those partner nations from imposing requirements for industrial benefits in fighter jet competitions. “We cannot participate in an offer of the F-35 weapon system where requirements do not align with the F-35 Partnership,” U.S. Navy Vice-Adm. Mathias Winter told Canadian officials in a letter sent in December.
Under the agreement, companies from the partner nations are eligible to compete for work on the F-35s, and contracts are awarded on a best-value basis. Over the last 12 years, Canadian firms have earned more than $1.3 billion in contracts to build F-35 parts.
In a statement issued last week, Lockheed Martin Canada said that hundreds of Canadian jobs had been created by work on the jet. The firm noted that it continued to provide feedback to the U.S. government, which is involved with Canada in government-to-government discussions on the fighter jet program.
The competition to win the Canadian contract for a fleet of 88 new fighter jets was launched on Dec. 12, 2017 and at this point four fighter jets are expected to be considered. Those include the F-35, the Super Hornet, the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Gripen. The Canadian government expects to award the contract in 2022. A request for bids for the new jets was scheduled to be released in conjunction with the CANSEC defence trade show in Ottawa at the end of the month, with bids to be evaluated by 2021. However, the government now admits that schedule is risky.
In its latest update on major equipment projects the Department of National Defence said “The approved schedule is considered very aggressive,” and that “The project team is managing a number of risks which have the potential to impact schedule.”
The document doesn't outline the specific risks but DND officials have acknowledged that figuring out how to deal with industrial benefits linked to the project could cause delays.
The delivery of the first of the jets is expected in the mid-2020s, with the full capability available in the early 2030s, according to the DND document.
The plan to purchase used Australian F-18s in the interim, the first already delivered, is also outlined in the document. It noted the final delivery of those jets is set for the end of 2021.
2 novembre 2023 | Local, Terrestre
Approximately 180 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members hosted nearly 150 members from partner nations for Exercise ARDENT DEFENDER, an international counter explosive exercise held at 5 Canadian Division Support Base Gagetown, New Brunswick, from October 20 to November 2, 2023.
18 décembre 2019 | Local, Aérospatial
by Ken Pole Ever since French engineer Henri Giffard flew a hydrogen-filled dirigible 27 kilometres from Paris to Elancourt in September 1852, the propeller was for nearly a century the only way to sustain powered flight. It would be another 51 years before Orville and Wilbur Wright used this “airscrew” technology in the first flight of a powered fixed-wing aircraft at Kitty Hawk, N.C. The Wright brothers also came up with the idea of adding a twist to each blade, giving a more consistent angle of attack. Despite the advent and evolution of jets since the early 1940s, propellers have remained the preferred option for smaller aircraft. But, as with all things mechanical, they require maintenance and repair. That has enabled Winnipeg-based PropWorks Propeller Systems Inc. to become the largest company of its kind in Western Canada. “Winnipeg is where we started, on the fringe of James Richardson International Airport,” company president Jim Ross, one of the founding investors, told Skies. “The company was incorporated in October 1999 and we moved into our building in December 1999.” Winnipeg is home to about two-thirds of the total staff of 30 with the rest at its shop in Edmonton. PropWorks is now privately held by Ross along with a pair of Calgary-based investors, Lorne Gray, who owns the Aircraft Canada sales and appraisal firm, and AvMax Group Inc. “I'm the only constant,” he laughed, quickly adding that some of his employees also are long-term. Before the company was founded, Ross spent 15 years with Cessna Aircraft Co., doing finance and some marketing until it shut down its Winnipeg facility in 1992. So he began marketing for several aviation-related companies, one of which was Western Propeller. When Western decided to close the Winnipeg facility seven years later, to focus on their Edmonton and Vancouver centres, Ross and an original group of investors bought the equipment, moved it into a leased 6,500-square-foot building and began operations with just five employees. It relocated to a new 12,000-square-foot building in April 2015. The Edmonton shop, which opened in December 2006, was moved in December 2017 to a 14,000-square-foot building at Villeneuve Airport, the area's main general aviation and flight training hub. PropWorks' employees, whose experience tallies up to more than 150 years, provide services which “meet or exceed” original equipment manufacturers' specifications. “Sometimes we'll go an extra step with such things with non-destructive testing that we feel gives our customers a bit of added comfort,” Ross explained. “We have a dedicated non-destructive testing room” where blades, hubs and related components are tested before propellers are reassembled and balanced. NDT procedures include magnetic particle inspection, liquid penetrants, eddy current and ultrasonic inspection. In addition to being an Avia Propeller Service Centre, PropWorks overhauls and repairs most models of Hamilton Standard, Hamilton Sundstrand, McCauley, Dowty, MT, Sensenich and Hartzell propellers. (On a historical note, Ohio-based Hartzell dates to 1917 when Robert Hartzell, a pilot whose family owned a hardwood lumber factory and who had noticed a high failure rate in wood propellers, began producing hand-carved walnut units at the suggestion of longtime friend Orville Wright.) To this day, Hartzell prizes and cultivates customer loyalty in having built its global reputation, and so does PropWorks, which has customers in Canada, the U.S. and around the world. Ross said that as with most businesses, “it's about the people as much as the product.” One of his people is director of maintenance Mike Hudec, who had been with Western Propeller and now is his longest-term employee. Cliff Arntson, manager in Edmonton and Mike Wagner, assistant manager in Edmonton have a combined 84 years experience with propellers. Much of the U.S. business is with customers in the border markets of Minnesota and the Dakotas. PropWorks has three trucks which pick up the propellers for work in Winnipeg and Edmonton. “Our customers like that service,” said Ross. His most distant customer is AvMax, which has a base in Nairobi, Kenya, and he has other large customers primarily Canada and U.S. based. PropWorks draws on a variety of sources for its employees, including the Stevenson Campus of Red River College in Winnipeg. They come out of the aviation maintenance engineer (AME) stream but are not certified AMEs because they haven't gone through the requisite apprentice program when they join PropWorks. “They can't do that in a propeller shop because that wouldn't give them a broad enough base to qualify as AMEs,” said Ross. “There's no AME licence for propellers; there was at one time but not for many years now.” The general preference is “somebody with a good mechanical aptitude who we can put in our own training program,” he added. “It takes one to two years for them to become proficient.” Asked to explain the difference between overhaul and repair, Ross said the former involves disassembly, discarding parts mandated for replacement, installing new ones and then putting the entire assembly through NDT before it's painted, reassembled and balanced. That means it's a “zero time” propeller when it leaves the shop. Repairs, on the other hand, can involve a range of things such as dealing with blade nicks or leaking hub seals. If that's all that is done, the propeller leaves the shop as “time continued.” Like everything in aviation, propellers have long since evolved since those early fixed wood two-bladed configurations. “The simple ones nowadays are the fixed-pitch propellers that you'd see on your most basic flight training airplane,” said Ross, who is part-owner of a Cessna 172 and has about 1,000 hours logged. “Then it goes all the way up, through two-bladed constant-speed propellers to three-, four- and even five-bladed propellers.” The most complex ones are Hamilton Sundstrand propellers on the Dash 8 twin turboprop introduced by de Havilland Canada in 1984 and last built by Bombardier Aerospace in 2005. “They simply take more time,” said Ross. Then there are some which can justifiably called vintage, such as the Hamilton Standard three-bladed propellers on Second World War-era Douglas DC-3s but these are “fairly standard.” Ross noted that PropWorks donated one for the equally old North American Harvard Mark II in the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum in Brandon, Man. The company is doing more composites, a capacity which required “a substantial investment” in equipment, including an autoclave to heat the laminates. Asked what the future might hold, Ross replied that while “we've just had our best year ever,” he hesitated to predict the “hectic” growth of the past 10 years would continue. “The key to growth is not necessarily going out to find new customers. It's adding to our capabilities – that way more customers are likely to send their work to us.” While he could only guess at the number of corporate or private propeller-driven aircraft in Canada, he did venture that “it's not a dying market” which bodes well for the future. https://www.skiesmag.com/news/propworks-sustained-growth-over-2-decads
30 décembre 2019 | Local, Aérospatial
DAVID PUGLIESE, OTTAWA CITIZEN Canada's RADARSAT Constellation Mission is now operational and federal government departments will start receiving data from the surveillance and earth observation satellites. The RADARSAT Constellation Mission, or RCM, was launched June 12 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The constellation of three satellites will provide daily images of Canada's territory and maritime approaches, as well as images of the Arctic, up to four times a day, according to the Canadian Space Agency. It will have daily access to 90 per cent of the world's surface. The RCM is also equipped with an Automatic Identification System (AIS), allowing improved detection and tracking of ships, including those conducting illegal fishing, the CSA noted. The constellation is orbiting Earth at an altitude of 600 km. Each of the satellites has a life expectancy of seven years. The Canadian government owns the satellites. The three spacecraft were assembled in the Montreal area by the prime contractor MDA. Over a dozen federal government departments and agencies will use RCM images. It is estimated that the Canadian government will use approximately 250,000 images from the satellite constellation every year. That represents a fiftyfold increase from the days of the first RADARSAT-1 system, according to the Canadian government. The majority of the data transmitted from RCM is expected to be used by the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence. RCM follows the highly successful RADARSAT-1, launched by NASA in 1995, and RADARSAT-2, put into orbit by the Russians in 2007. Initial work on RCM began in 2005. The project cost an estimated $975 million. The RCM project was led by the Canadian Space Agency and supported by its principal users: the Department of National Defence, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada and Public Safety Canada. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/canadian-surveillance-satellite-system-now-operational