18 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval
WASHINGTON — A rash of technical and safety problems has left the U.S. Navy's fleet short by about 90 fighter pilots. Fixing the issue is an uphill battle, a top aviator said last week.
The Navy has seen a slew of issues, including problems with the oxygen flow to the pilots causing negative and unsafe physiological responses in pilots and trainees, as well as readiness and engine trouble with aircraft. All of this has extended the time it takes to create a fighter pilot from three to four years, and the issues have created a gap in the number of pilots in the fleet, naval air training chief Rear Adm. Robert Westendorff said at a virtual Tailhook symposium on Saturday.
“We can't just snap our fingers and produce those immediately. The time to train of a strike fighter pilot is about three years; due to the bottlenecks we've had, its getting closer to four years,” Westendorff said. “We're doing everything we can to get that back down to the three-year mark. But the recovery plan is a three-year plan. And if we stay on track, it should take us about three years.”
An issue with the T-45′s engines “dramatically reduced” the availability of the aircraft this year, but the program is getting back on track, Westendorff said.
Additionally, the general shortfall of F/A-18 Super Hornets throughout the fleet has impacted training, but Naval Aviation has been focused on bringing those numbers back up in recent years by fixing jets unable to fly for mechanical reasons.
Naval air training has been beset in recent years with controversy over the so-called physiological episodes, the cause of which has been very hard to pin down.
The Navy now believes it's a complex issue involving air flow and air pressure related to the breathing apparatus, and measures have been put in place to mitigate it, USNI News reported in June.
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/09/17/the-us-navy-is-short-almost-100-fighter-pilots/
6 mai 2022 | International, Aérospatial
Invité de BFM Business, le directeur général d'Airbus a assuré que l'Europe avait besoin de développer son avion de combat "pour être compétitive sur le long terme".
25 mars 2020 | International, C4ISR
The Pentagon's request to reconsider narrow technical aspects of the award to Microsoft, Amazon argues, ignores a wide range of fundamental flaws. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: Amazon Web Services has publicly denounced the Defense Department's latest legal maneuver in the months-long public battle over the JEDI cloud computing contract, awarded to Microsoft last year. No, Amazon said in a statement this morning, the Pentagon should not get to redo a particular piece of the award process the judge found flawed, because that was just one flaw among many and fixing it is a distraction from the larger issues. “We're pleased to see the DoD recognize the need to take corrective action,” the Amazon statement began, “but we're concerned that the proposed approach is not designed to provide a complete, fair, and effective re-evaluation.” “Both earlier in the adjudication process when we submitted 265 questions to the DoD that they refused to answer, and in our protest where we outlined numerous significant flaws in the evaluation, it's been clear that there were many problems with the DoD's initial decision,” the statement continues. “Instead of addressing the breadth of problems in its proposed corrective action, the DoD's proposal focuses only on providing Microsoft a ‘do-over' on its fatally flawed bid while preventing AWS from adjusting its own pricing in response to the DoD's new storage criteria.” “This attempt to gerrymander the corrective action without fixing all of the serious flaws pointed out in our complaint raises significant questions,” the statement concludes. The Pentagon's plan to consolidate many — but not all — of its 500-plus cloud contracts into a single Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). Note the suggestion that the single “pathfinder” contract for JEDI might evolve into multiple JEDI contracts. An email circulated by Amazon went further: “DoD's proposed corrective action seeks to resurrect Microsoft's award eligibility and directly and unreasonably benefits Microsoft's deficient approach. DoD's proposed corrective action does not meaningfully address the numerous errors identified in AWS's protest. These errors were pervasive, impacting all six of the technical evaluation factors” — that is, not just the one the Pentagon is asking to redo. “From the President's order to ‘screw' Amazon out of the contract, to the Secretary halting the award for an 85-day ‘examination,' to the Secretary's bizarre recusal after an award decision had been made, to the numerous inexplicable evaluation errors, to the refusal to substantively address AWS's 265 post-award debriefing questions, to the blatant political interference which impacted the award decision – the history of this procurement casts serious doubt on the rationality and fairness of DoD's proposed correction action,” the email said bluntly. Some backstory might help in parsing all this. (Click here for more detail). On Feb. 13, the court had granted Amazon a preliminary injunction, saying the company would “likely” be able to prove the Department of Defense had erred in one particular portion of its process – an evaluation of the two companies called Price Scenario 6 – when it awarded the potentially $10 billion contract to Microsoft Azure. On March 12th, DoD responded by asking the judge to “remand” the case back to DoD so it could correct and redo Price Scenario 6, giving Microsoft and Amazon the opportunity to submit updated bids – albeit with very strict limits on those updates. “During the proposed remand,” DoD's motion said, “the agency potentially could make decisions that would moot this action, in whole or in part, and may obviate the need for further litigation in this Court.” In other words, the Pentagon is asking the judge: let us fix this one thing, and then there might be nothing left for Amazon to object to, and you can dismiss the case. Today, Amazon replied: We have plenty more to object to – and we think the judge will side with us. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/amazon-denounces-dod-jedi-do-over
4 février 2019 | International, C4ISR
By: Ben Werner Defense officials routinely tout the hypersonic weapons they hope to develop and field, but Raytheon's leadership sees anti-hypersonic defensive technology as the better long-term business bet. Raytheon is very interested in expanding its hypersonics business, especially hypersonics defense capabilities, Raytheon chief executive Tom Kennedy said during a Thursday conference call with Wall Street analysts. “We think the hypersonic defense market is larger than the hypersonic market,” Kennedy said. There is a market for creating an offensive hypersonic attack system, Kennedy said. However, developing a hypersonics defense system involves creating the sensors used to track incoming hypersonic weapons and creating a vehicle that can successfully intercept the incoming projectile. Raytheon considers developing hypersonic technology a crucial part of its Missile Systems business's ability to compete for future government contracts. With 2018 sales of $8.3 billion, Raytheon's Missile Systems business is the largest division by sales, representing about 30 percent of Raytheon's total $27.1 billion in sales for the year, according to the company's recently filed fourth quarter financial report. In 2019, Raytheon expects the Missile Systems business to record sales of between $8.9 billion and $9.1 billion. In the meantime, Kennedy said Raytheon is pleased with the rollout of its new Naval Strike Missile (NSM). The Navy awarded Raytheon a $14.8-million contract for the first order of NSM, which will be used by both the Freedom and Independence variants of the Littoral Combat Ship. The contract has options that would total $847.6 million. “Our goal with NSM is to replace the existing domestic and international inventory of Harpoon and other international surface-to-surface missiles, making this another multi-billion franchise opportunity for the company,” Kennedy said. Raytheon also is marketing its Standard Missile-3 Block IIA missiles, which Kennedy said are the only such missiles that can be fired from land or sea and intercept a missile in space. The SM-3 Block IIA was jointly developed by the U.S. and Japan. “The SM3 Block IIA is ready for production,” Kennedy said. https://news.usni.org/2019/02/01/40831