Here are a few of the experiments hitching a ride on the Air Force’s secret space plane

Sur le même sujet

• 

  17 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Safran Helicopter Engines extends contract with RUAG

  June 15, 2020 - RUAG carries out regular maintenance work on the Super Puma helicopters and its components. In addition to the Swiss Air Force, customers include foreign military units and civilian clients. The twin-engine Super Puma is powered by the Makila 1A1, manufactured by Safran Helicopter Engines, the world's leading manufacturer of helicopter engines. It offers the widest range of helicopter turboshafts in the world and has more than 2,500 customers in 155 countries. In order to ensure the reliability of the engines, regular maintenance work is essential. RUAG is one of the world's leading service providers for the Super Puma helicopter type. With over 60 years of experience, RUAG delivers added value to the safety and performance of selected civil and military helicopters. The close cooperation between RUAG and Safran Helicopter Engines has existed for many years. As an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) approved service centre, RUAG's Lodrino site regularly processes fuel control units for Makila 1A1 engines. The contract between the engine manufacturer and RUAG has now been extended for the existing year and the upcoming year 2021. RUAG maintains close and long-term relationships with various OEMs. This enables RUAG to guarantee a constant availability of resources to provide high-quality services. «We appreciate the reliable and transparent cooperation with Safran Helicopter Engines», explains Max Grob, Business Development Manager Propeller Aircraft & UAV, RUAG Ltd. «Such partnerships help us to continuously expand our know-how and ensure our performance and reliability towards the Swiss Air Force and other customers». For more information about the product, contact Ercole Minieri, Teamleader Commercial Propeller Aircraft & UAV, e-mail Ercole.minieri@ruag.ch / mobile +41 76 380 93 31 For more information about RUAG, contact Kirsten Hammerich, Senior Media Relations Manager, e-mail Kirsten.hammerich@ruag.ch / mobile +41 79 770 81 18 View source version on RUAG : https://www.ruag.com/en/news/safran-helicopter-engines-extends-contract-ruag

• 

  15 juillet 2019 | International, Autre défense

  Army to Receive 7.62mm Squad Marksman Rifles as Early as Next Year

  By Matthew Cox Heckler & Koch Defense Inc. will soon begin delivering thousands of 7.62mm squad-designated marksman rifles to the Army to give infantry and other close-combat units a better chance of penetrating enemy body armor. H&K will deliver "between 5,000 and 6,000" variants of the G28 rifle, which the Army plans to issue as its new squad designated marksman rifle (SDMR), according to a July 12 H&K news release. Under the agreement, the rifles will be manufactured by H&K in Oberndorf, Germany, and will begin to arrive in the H&K-USA facility in Columbus, Georgia, early next year, according to the release. Once there, H&K-USA workers will install scopes and mounts purchased by the Army under a separate agreement. "This is a significant achievement for Heckler & Koch," H&K-USA's chief operating officer, Michael Holley, said in the release. "The HK SDMR system will add much-needed capabilities to virtually every squad in the Army. We are honored by this opportunity." The new SDMRs are part of an interim effort to make squads more lethal ahead of the Army's fielding of the Next-Generation Squad Weapon system sometime in 2022, service officials have said. In May 2017, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Senate Armed Services Committee members that the service's current M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round will not defeat enemy body armor plates similar to the U.S. military-issue rifle plates such as the Enhanced Small Arms Protective Insert, or ESAPI. As a short-term fix, the Army selected the G28 as its M110A1 Compact Semi-Automatic Sniper System in 2016, to be used with the service's new 7.62mm enhanced performance round to give squads more penetrating power. In the past, the Army relied on the Enhanced Battle Rifle, or EBR, 14 -- a modernized M14 equipped with an adjustable aluminum stock with pistol grip, scope and bipod legs -- to fill the growing need by infantry squads operating in Afghanistan to engage enemy fighters at longer ranges. But the EBR is heavy, weighing just under 15 pounds unloaded. The M110A1 weighs about 11 pounds. In the long term, the Army is working with gunmakers to develop the new Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) that is slated to fire a special, government-produced 6.8mm projectile that promises higher velocities at greater ranges, service officials say. The program is being designed to produce an automatic rifle version to replace the M249 squad automatic weapon and a carbine version to replace the M4 carbine. Army officials said recently that they expect to begin receiving prototypes of the NGSW in July and August and that the weapon could be fielded to units beginning in late fiscal 2020. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/07/12/army-receive-762mm-squad-marksman-rifles-early-next-year.html

• 

  5 septembre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Next-gen RFID could improve how vehicles get to the battlefield

  By: Adam Stone With incredible volumes of material on the move – think: arms and munitions, supplies, vehicles – the military quite simply needs a better way to track its stuff. “We hear a lot of concerns about getting in-transit visibility in the last tactical mile, from the supply point to the end user,” said Jim Alexander, product lead for automated movement and identification solutions in PEO EIS – Enterprise Information Systems. “We are working with our partners and with transportation command to gather up the requirements for the next generation of in-transit visibility for DoD.” At the heart of transit tracking today is radio-frequency identification (RFID), which allows logisticians to tag and track goods on the move. But RFID has its limitations: It's infrastructure intensive and not globally available. Military planners are looking to do better. Falling short RFID technology took a big step forward about 20 years ago with the widespread adoption of “active RFID.” Rather than scan individual items by hand, active RFID uses a fixed scanner to monitor entire lots. You'll see this equipment at airports and at the gates of military installations. But active RFID isn't an ideal solution. “It consists of a dome-shaped reader on a pole, connected to power and ethernet. So you are running power lines and communication lines, and if the reader goes down someone has to go out and physically service it,” said Rosemary Johnston, senior vice president of government at solutions provider Savi. The company is sole provider for the DoD's RFID-IV contract, which has a $102 million ceiling. “Each reader costs a couple of thousand dollars, plus the cost of hooking it up, running wires via trenches. It becomes a major construction investment project,” said Johnston, a former chief master sergeant with the U.S. Air Force. In addition, active RFID equipment isn't necessarily well-suited to today's highly agile expeditionary fighting style. “The military doesn't know where the next fight is going to be, so they use portable deployment kits rather than do this massive construction, but even those are heavy ― the lightest weighs 25 pounds ― and they require good satellite coverage. It becomes very resource constrained,” she said. With the next-gen RFID contract, the military envisions a better way of doing business. A cellular solution Satellite-readable RFID tags offer some relief, as they expand the military's reach without requiring extensive additional overhead. But satellite time is costly. Savi's emerging solution would leverage widely available cellular signals as a new means to capture and communicate RFID information. Johnston describes early trials of cellular RFID in Africa, where materials tracking has been a perennial problem. U.S. and European forces have just six fixed RFID readers on the entire continent, making supplemental coverage an urgent need, she said. “We have used cellular technology in Africa with a commercial company very successfully for the past three or four years. The networks we would use on the military side would be very similar to what this commercial customer uses, so we believe that represents a great opportunity for Africa Command,” she said. The switch to cellular isn't technically complicated: military planners would need to add a cellular module to the existing RFID tag. That module could then be programmed to automatically report location status to the military's in-transit visibility server. High-value cargo might report hourly, whereas more mundane supplies could be set to check in daily or every couple of days, in order to conserve battery life in the RFID tag. At PEO-EIS, Alexander said he sees strong potential in the technology. With a cellular system, “you could get a much more granular look, a more detailed look at where my stuff is,” as compared to relying on fixed checkpoints, he said. “If you have sensitive cargo you can know where it is every hour on the hour, as opposed to waiting for that cargo to pass by a fixed site.” Some technical details still need to be worked out in order to implement a commercial-grade cellular solution within the military. For example, “you don't want to have anything in the device that would trigger a static charge if you are working around ammunition,” Johnston noted. “We are working through that process right now.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/09/04/next-gen-rfid-could-improve-how-vehicles-get-to-the-battlefield