Contracts for October 12, 2021

Sur le même sujet

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  9 décembre 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Northrop sells IT business to Veritas Capital for $3.4B

  WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman has struck a $3.4 billion deal to sell its federal IT and mission support business to Veritas Capital. The agreement, announced Dec. 7, is expected to close by June 2021. At that point, Veritas plans to incorporate the Northrop business units with Peraton, a Veritas subsidiary that supports government customers and specializes in technology products for the space, defense and intelligence markets. Northrop is expected to generate $2.3 billion in revenue, which will be funneled into share repurchases and debt retirement, the company said in a news release. “This divesture allows us to drive value and reflects our strategy of focus on growing core businesses where technology and innovation are the key differentiators,” said Kathy Warden, Northrop's CEO and president. “We expect to create compelling value to our shareholders through this transaction and execution of our capital allocation strategy.” Reports of the sale first surfaced in October. Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, said that the sale shows there is still isn't consensus within the defense industry on how to organize IT and services businesses alongside more traditional hardware business units for products like aircraft, vehicles or other weapons. Callan pointed to Lockheed Martin's sale of its information and global services business to Leidos in 2016; L-3′s sale of its IT solutions division to CACI in 2015; and Harris' sale of its IT business to Veritas in 2017, which later became Peraton. However, other major companies have acquired government IT companies, such as General Dynamics's purchase of CSRA in 2018. “We have believed that as DoD spending flattens in the 2020s, primes could seek to jettison ‘non-core' businesses that will still be profitable, but face declining sales or more intense competition,” Callan wrote in an email to investors. https://www.c4isrnet.com/industry/2020/12/08/northrop-sells-it-business-to-veritas-capital-for-34b/

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  21 janvier 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Watch the Defiant helicopter exceed 100 knots

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant coaxial demonstrator flew more than 100 knots in a Jan. 13 flight test as the aircraft — built for the U.S. Army's Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator program — continues to expand its flight envelope in weekly sorties. The aircraft also maneuvered at 30-degree bank turns during the flight in a test of its agility at the Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky's Development Flight Test Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Defiant has been flying for nearly a year. Its first flight was in March 2018 after a delay to the program to challenges mostly related to the manufacturing its rotor blades. The program seems to have picked up the pace. In October, Ken Eland, Boeing's director and manager of its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program, told reporters that the aircraft flew three times in March and April, but the company took a pause in flight operations after discovering an issue with the gearbox of the propulsion system test bed, or PSTB, which the team is using for extensive ground tests of the aircraft. Defiant was back up in the air by Sept. 24 when it flew in every direction at speeds of 20 knots. The company said last fall that it planned to push the aircraft to 40 knots and believed it would be able to hit top speeds of 250 knots, which is more than the 230-knot requirement set by the Army. The aircraft is one of two demonstrators flying as part of the Army's Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator, or JMR TD, program, which is meant to inform the service's Future Vertical Lift programs of record, specifically a future long-range assault aircraft the Army wants to field by 2030. The other demonstrator is Bell's V-280 Valor tilt-rotor demonstrator, which as been flying for more than two years and recently completed autonomous test flight series in December. While the official JMR TD phase has ended, according to the Army, both Valor and Defiant continue to fly as each team works to drive down risk related to technology development that would ultimately help a possible program of record move more quickly down the road. Even though the two demonstrators are in different places in their flight test plans, Maj. Gen. Thomas Todd, the program executive officer for Army aviation, said earlier this month that the service wasn't planning to wait for each competitor to reach the same goal posts before proceeding. The only advantage a vendor might have in meeting timelines is that it is able to burn down risk in technology development, he added. The Army is preparing to award an other transaction authority contract to begin a competitive demonstration and risk reduction, or CDRR, effort in March. An OTA is a type of contract that enables rapid prototyping. The CDRR will consist of two phases that last approximately one year each. “In the CDRR, we're really trying to develop a weapons system, not the tech demonstrator,” Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, who is in charge of the Army's aviation modernization, recently said. “So we're trying to take it to the next level.” https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/01/17/defiant-exceeds-100-knots

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  20 juin 2023 | International, Aérospatial

  Boeing wants to boost KC-46 defenses as Air Force weighs tanker path

  The Air Force wants its next tankers to be able to survive in the contested airspace likely in the nation's next war.