Navy awards Lockheed Martin $1.2B contract for hypersonic missiles

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  29 décembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial

  Ukraine says it struck drone depot in Russia's Oryol region

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  1 mai 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  How The Pentagon Is Reaching Small Suppliers

  Jen DiMascio The Pentagon is employing new ways to track and funnel dollars to small- and medium-sized aviation suppliers hit hard by a drop-off in their commercial business since the novel coronavirus took hold. One way has been to accelerate up-front progress payments to prime contractors. Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's acquisition chief, announced April 30 that in this week alone, the Defense Department processed more than $1.2 billion out of $3 billion to defense contractors in accelerated payments. The acceleration was enabled by a March 20 memo which lifted the amount that large contractors could receive before delivering a contracted item from 80%-90% and for small contractors from 90%-95%. Lord singled out Lockheed Martin for praise for committing to speed $450 million to its supply chain. As those payments are being released, the U.S. Air Force is studying the needs of small suppliers and charting the flow of those progress payments through the industrial base, service officials said during an April 29 Aviation Week MRO webinar. After the first COVID-19 stimulus package was released, Col. Kevin Nalette, vice director, 448th Supply Chain Management Wing, Air Force Sustainment Center, said his office was asked to find out how much money small companies would need to maintain a constant flow of work to continue to support the defense sector. They had two days to ask contractors–the third- and fourth-tier “mom-and-pop shops” whose work becomes an end item purchased somewhere up the stream. The majority of defense vendors do more work–55% or more–for commercial aviation businesses. “As soon as the commercial sector shut down, we had an amazing ability. We now had their full attention,” Nalette said. “When you come to their attention with basically free cash, it's amazing what you can get done.” Tony Baumann, director of contracting for the Air Force Support Center, is capturing data about where the money and progress payments are going. And he is tracking some 2,700 contracts to find out the COVID-related constraints they are operating under. “My guys talked to all of them,” Baumann said, and they stay in contact so that the Air Force knows when a supplier needs to shut down to clean a business. Then Nalette's group is looking at whether that closure might impact deliveries of critical supplies or inventory. That has caused the Air Force to rewrite service contracts using new authorities granted by the CARES Act COVID-relief bill passed by Congress to keep multiple teams of service personnel on contract so that one group can work and another can be ready to backfill so that no group would experience a 14-day interruption, Baumann said. All of those changes are being tracked and coded based on COVID-19, he added. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/how-pentagon-reaching-small-suppliers

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  6 février 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  U.S. Army selects GE’s T901 engine for Improved Turbine Engine Program

  The U.S. Army has selected GE Aviation's T901-GE-900 engine for the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase of the Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP), the U.S. Army's endeavor to re-engine its Boeing AH-64 Apaches and Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks. “We are honored to be chosen by the Army to continue powering their Black Hawks and Apaches for decades to come,” said Tony Mathis, president and CEO of GE Aviation's military business. “We've invested in the resources and infrastructure to execute immediately, and our team is ready to get to work on delivering the improved capabilities of the T901 to the warfighter.” GE has powered Black Hawks and Apaches for the past four decades with its T700 engine, racking up more than 100 million flight hours of combat-proven experience. Through continuous upgrades and technology advancements, GE has doubled the power of derivative engines in the T700 family over its lifetime and reduced its cost to the government by 50 percent. GE carried over the benefits of the T700 engine's single-spool core architecture, ensuring that the T901 engine is ready to continue delivering combat readiness to the warfighter over the next four decades. The T901's single-spool core design is the key to its low cost, growth, reliability, maintainability and reduced life-cycle costs. The full modularity of the T901's single-spool core provides the Army with superior fix-forward maintainability. Combat units can swap out modular parts of the engine in the field and travel with fewer full-sized spare engines, simplifying logistical footprints and supply lines. The fully modular design also offers superior growth potential at a lower cost through incremental improvements to engine modules, a significant advantage to meet the Army's FVL requirements. The U.S. Army is also expecting the ITEP engine to meet Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft requirements for Future Vertical Lift (FVL). GE has invested $9 billion in maturing technologies applicable to the T901 and more than $300 million to develop and test turboshaft-specific technologies. Additionally, GE has invested more than $10 billion in their supply chain over the past decade, including eight new facilities, ten plant expansions and one-and-a-half million square feet of new, advanced manufacturing space in the U.S. This robust, first-in-class supply chain stands ready to deliver T901 engines to the Army. https://www.verticalmag.com/press-releases/u-s-army-selects-ges-t901-engine-for-itep/