Nato accepts delivery of fourth remotely piloted aircraft in Italy

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  1 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Farnborough International launches FIA Connect, a digital aerospace event

  Farnborough International has launched FIA Connect: a platform to connect the global aerospace industry. Taking place during what would have been the 2020 airshow week, FIA Connect will run from July 20-24. Over five days, there will be a series of free-to-attend digital aerospace events, including a full virtual conference program focussed on topics leading industry and featuring high profile speakers, as well as range of business growth opportunities. Speaking about the launch of FIA Connect, Gareth Rogers, chief executive of Farnborough International said: “The cancellation of the airshow in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a major shock, however the team is determined to create something that brings as many aspects of the show to the global aerospace industry as possible. “Through our biennial airshow, we have been privileged to serve as a platform for connecting industry, facilitating business growth, and showcasing the very latest in innovation and technology. “The Farnborough International team is working hard to deliver a week of world-class content and thought leadership in order to provide some support to industry at a time when we cannot meet.” Registration for FIA Connect is set to go live in the middle of June. The schedule of events includes: The FINN Sessions – a comprehensive webinar program of insight and analysis featuring leading figures and focussed on the topics that matter: MRO, defence, airlines, space, urban aviation and future workforce. Meet the Buyer is to run free-of charge on Tuesday July 21. This is a strategic opportunity, connecting suppliers with buying decision makers at pre-arranged, private and secure virtual meetings. Farnborough Friday a day developed to help address the skills gap, this virtual hub will include careers advice, inspirational speaker videos, downloads and workshops. ADS Partnership – FIA Connect is partnering with ADS Group, the U.K. trade association for aerospace, defence and security, to provide support, guidance and topical sessions of analysis, giving the best of insight and resource to help business keep up to date, informed and connected. All content for FIA is being created in-house by the team at Farnborough International with the technological capability being delivered by Eventscase: a platform designed to facilitate all key areas of live, hybrid and virtual events. https://www.skiesmag.com/press-releases/farnborough-international-has-launched-fia-connect-a-digital-aerospace-event/

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  12 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin Complete Another Successful Hypersonics Test

  Orlando, Fla., Aug. 10, 2020 – The U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] successfully flight tested the second AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) on the service's B-52 Stratofortress out of Edwards Air Force Base, California, on Aug. 8, 2020. This captive carry flight was conducted with tactical hardware and fully instrumented to collect thermal, mechanical and digital data from the flight vehicle. This is the first time a tactical ARRW missile has been assembled. Additional ground and flight testing will follow over the next two years. “The team overcame significant challenges driven by the COVID-19 pandemic to achieve this significant milestone for the program,” said Dave Berganini, ARRW program director at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. “This captive carry mission is the pre-cursor for our first booster test flight planned for early 2020s.” Hypersonic weapons provide rapid response, time critical capability that will overcome distance in contested environments using high speed, altitude and maneuverability. An operational hypersonic air-launched weapon enables the U.S. to hold fixed, high value, time-sensitive targets at risk in contested environments from stand-off distances. Lockheed Martin has played a significant role in the research, development and demonstration of hypersonic technologies for more than 30 years. The corporation has made significant investments in key technology and capability development. We have developed deep expertise in the engineering of hypersonic systems and associated challenges through our work with maneuvering reentry vehicles, air-breathing engine design, avionics, and aero/thermal flight sciences. About Lockheed Martin Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 110,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. For additional information, visit our website: www.lockheedmartin.com. Please follow @LMNews on Twitter for the latest announcements and news across the corporation. View source version on Lockheed Martin: https://news.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases?item=128963

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  4 septembre 2018 | International, Terrestre, C4ISR

  New military drone roadmap ambivalent on killer robots

  By: Kelsey Atherton Drones are everywhere in the Pentagon today. While unpeopled vehicles are most closely associated with the Air Force and targeted killing campaigns, remotely controlled robots are in every branch of the military and used across all combatant commands. The fiscal year 2018 defense authorization contained the largest budget for drones and robots across the services ever, a sign of just how much of modern warfare involves these machines. Which is perhaps why, when the Department of Defense released its latest roadmap for unmanned systems, the map came in at a punchy 60 pages, far shy of the 160-page tome released in 2013. This is a document less about a military imagining a future of flying robots and more about managing a present that includes them. The normalization of battlefield robots Promised since at least spring 2017, the new roadmap focuses on interoperability, autonomy, network security and human-machine collaboration. The future of drones, and of unpeopled ground vehicles or water vehicles, is as tools that anyone can use, that can do most of what is asked of them on their own, that communicate without giving away the information they are sharing, and that will work to make the humans using the machines function as more-than-human. This is about a normalization of battlefield robots, the same way that mechanized warfare moved from a theoretical approach to the standard style of fighting by nations a few generations ago. Network security isn't as flashy a highlight as “unprecedented battlefield surveillance by flying robot,” but it's part of making sure that those flying cameras don't, say, transmit easily intercepted data over an open channel. “Future warfare will hinge on critical and efficient interactions between war-fighting systems,” states the roadmap. “This interoperable foundation will transmit timely information between information gatherers, decision makers, planners and war fighters.” A network is nothing without its nodes, and the nodes that need to be interoperable here are a vast web of sensors and weapons, distributed among people and machines, that will have to work in concert in order to be worth the networking at all. The very nature of war trends toward pulling apart networks, toward isolation. Those nodes each become a point at which a network can be broken, unless they are redundant or autonomous. Where will the lethal decision lie? Nestled in the section on autonomy, the other signpost feature of the Pentagon's roadmap, is a small chart about the way forward. In that chart is a little box labeled “weaponization,” and in that box it says the near-term goals are DoD strategy assessment and lethal autonomous weapon systems assessment. Lethal autonomous weapon systems are of such international concern that there is a meeting of state dignitaries and humanitarian officials in Geneva happening at the exact moment this roadmap was released. That intergovernmental body is hoping to decide whether or not militaries will develop robots that can kill of their own volition, according to however they've been programmed. The Pentagon, at least in the roadmap, seems content to wait for its own assessment and the verdict of the international community before developing thinking weapons. Hedging on this, the same chart lists “Armed Wingman/Teammate (Human decision to engage)” as the goal for somewhere between 2029 and 2042. “Unmanned systems with integrated AI, acting as a wingman or teammate with lethal armament could perform the vast majority of the actions associated with target identification,tracking, threat prioritization, and post-attack assessment," reads the report. "This level of automation will alleviate the human operator of task-level activities associated with the engagement of a target, allowing the operator to focus on the identified threat and the decision to engage.” The roadmap sketches out a vision of future war that hands off many decisions to autonomous machines, everything from detection to targeting, then loops the lethal decision back to a human responsible for making the call on whether or not the robot should use its weapons on the targets it selected. Humans as battlefield bot-shepards, guiding autonomous machines into combat and signing off on the exact attacks, is a possible future for robots in war, one that likely skirts within the boundaries of still-unsettled international law. Like its predecessor, this drone roadmap is plotting a rough path through newly charted territory. While it leans heavily on the lessons of the present, the roadmap doesn't attempt to answer on its own the biggest questions of what robots will be doing on the battlefields of tomorrow. That is, fundamentally, a political question, and one that much of the American public itself doesn't yet have strong feelings about. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2018/08/31/new-military-drone-roadmap-ambivalent-on-killer-robots