Q&A: Defense Business Board chair Deborah Lee James, on helping Pentagon see 'forest for the trees'

Sur le même sujet

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  9 avril 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  How stealthy is Boeing’s new Super Hornet?

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — The Block III Super Hornet is getting a marginal increase in stealth capability, but if you're expecting the invisible aircraft of President Donald Trump's dreams, think again. Building a “stealthy” Super Hornet has been one of Trump's talking points since he was elected to the presidency. During a March trip to Boeing's plant in St. Louis, he claimed the U.S. military would buy Super Hornets with “the latest and the greatest stealth and a lot of things on that plane that people don't even know about.” Trump was referring to one of the Super Hornet's Block III upgrades slated to be incorporated on jets rolling off the production line in 2020: the application of radar absorbent materials or RAM, also known as stealth coating. But far from being “the latest and greatest,” the company has already used the exact same materials on the on the Block II Super Hornet to help decrease the chances of radar detection, said Dan Gillian, who manages Boeing's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and E/A-18G Growler programs. Block III jets will get “a little more” of that coating applied to them, “and in a few different areas to buy a little bit more performance,” Gillian told Defense News in a March interview. All in all, those improvements will reduce the aircraft's radar cross section by about 10 percent, and with very low risk, he said. Although the general public tends to think of stealth like the invisibility cloak from Harry Potter or Wonder Woman's invisible plane, stealth is more of a continuum that is enabled and affected by many factors, experts told Defense News. “It's not a Romulan cloaking device,” said Richard Aboulafia, a Teal Group aviation analyst, referencing a technology from Star Trek that allowed spaceships to be invisible to the naked eye and electro-optical sensors. “It's about reducing the likelihood that an adversary will see you first. And seconds count, so if it buys a little extra time, then it helps.” The most important contributors to low observability are the aircraft's shape and the use of LO coatings, with airframe shape commonly seen as twice as important as the coatings, he said. Stealth fighters from the oddly angled F-117 to the F-22 and F-35, with their rounded edges, were all designed to bounce radar waves away from an aircraft, sometimes at the expense of aerodynamic performance or other attributes, said Brian Laslie, an Air Force historian and author. That being said, the Super Hornet, with it's external stores and pylons, is not going to replicate the low observability of the joint strike fighter, which was designed from the beginning with stealth in mind. “But just because it's not a pure LO aircraft doesn't mean that the designers weren't concerned with the radar return,” said Laslie, who added that it's “reasonable” to expect a 10 percent decrease to the aircraft's signature by augmenting Block III jets with additional RAM coating. Shining a spotlight on the Super Hornet's low observable attributes may have helped sell Trump on future orders, Aboulafia speculated. “It might be useful in the real world too, but in a much more marginal way,” he said. One of those benefits, according to Laslie, is that the LO performance upgrade could also enable the Navy to be more flexible in its mission planning. An aircraft can be more or less easily detected by radar depending on how it is positioned or the route used by the plane, so having more radar-absorbing materials on the Super Hornet could give the pilot more options. “I think what the Navy is doing is trying to maybe reduce enough of the cross section of the F-18 in high intensity combat scenarios,” Laslie said. “I don't think they're trying to make the F/A-18 a stealth aircraft,” he continued. “But if they can reduce the radar cross section enough that in certain scenarios it is more difficult to pick the Super Hornet up, that would be of benefit to the Navy.” While the president has done much to focus public attention on the Super Hornet's upcoming LO upgrade, the Block III actually offers a relatively modest increase in stealth compared to earlier concepts floated by Boeing. In 2013, when the company began evaluating how to attract future sales from the Navy as production slowed, it started promoting an “Advanced Super Hornet” configuration that would have improved the aircraft's signature by 50 percent. That version of the jet included structural enhancements and an enclosed weapons pod, but Boeing ultimately stepped away from that concept. “Those big compromises you have to make to get the higher levels of stealth like putting your weapons in a bay, we don't think that's a necessary part of the Block III story for the Super Hornet,” Gillian said. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/navy-league/2018/04/09/how-stealthy-is-boeings-new-super-hornet/

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  4 novembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  USAF Sees Five-Year Window To Invent A New Fighter Aircraft Industry

  By Steve Trimble and Lee Hudson The U.S. Air Force's vision to rapidly produce multiple fleets of advanced fighters the way Apple makes iPhones begins with an important change in plans for the secretive Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. For three years, the Air Force analyzed how to replace the Lockheed Martin F-22 by 2030. The original plan—defined as the Penetrating Counter-Air capability in the Air Superiority Flight Plan released in 2017—called for developing a conventional replacement for the F-22, with a next-generation F-X fighter featuring a dazzling array of new technologies, ranging from adaptive cycle propulsion to advanced weapons and new sensors. As an extended, two-year-long analysis of alternatives neared a conclusion in mid-2018, the Air Force decided to shift to a new approach. The new strategy led Air Force leaders to drain about half of the $13.2 billion budget previously allocated to the NGAD program through fiscal 2024 in the Defense Department's five-year spending plan sent to Congress in March. Instead of launching full development of the F-X within that five-year window, the Air Force is developing a radical new aircraft design process—even as spending continues on deliveries of Lockheed F-35As, Boeing F-15EXs and a host of fighter upgrade programs. “We're at a good point to attempt something new because we have hot production lines for fifth [generation fighters]. [And] fourth-gen fighters [are] going through major multibillion dollar modernizations,” says Will Roper, the assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics. “So it's a good time to try something new for a five-year window and see if we can create a new way to build airplanes for us that [is] between the building of one or two X-planes and the building of 1,000 units in a major defense acquisition program,” Roper, who is leading the new NGAD strategy, tells Aviation Week in an interview. Roper's comments on the sidelines of Aviation Week's DefenseChain Conference on Oct. 22, help clarify the dramatic shifts within the classified NGAD program over the last year. The U.S. Air Force essentially has delayed F-X development beyond the five-year spending plan to provide a window of time to invent a new business model for the combat aircraft industry, one ideally suited for a new era of air warfare with peer adversaries. The initiative will be supported by the new Program Executive Office for Advanced Aircraft that was established on Oct. 2. The office will be led by Col. Dale White, formerly the senior program director for the Northrop Grumman B-21 bomber development program at the Rapid Capabilities Office. Roper's vision for NGAD calls for a sharp break from the conventional acquisition approach adopted for the B-21, with a single prime contractor responsible for the full aircraft lifecycle, including at least a 10- to 15-year period between an initial contract award and delivering an operational capability. To Roper, the ideal model for NGAD is not another Western fighter program, but rather a consumer electronic device. Apple's customers buy an iPhone model that is designed to become obsolete within a few years, and replace it with a more advanced device, he says. The equivalent in the fighter business are aircraft designed to last perhaps 3,500 flight hours, which the U.S. Air Force buys in batches of hundreds and replaces in intervals of 10 years or less. “We want to retire airplanes when the next one is ready to be brought out—very similar to the iPhone model. So there's no reason to keep that old iPhone once you have the new one,” Roper says. Over the next five years, the Air Force wants to define the digital engineering-based approach to the hardware and common operating system approach to the software for the NGAD aircraft family. The goal is to attract new companies besides traditional defense firms to be involved in production, along with the specialized design units of the prime contractors such as Lockheed's Skunk Works, Boeing's Phantom Works and Northrop Grumman's Scaled Composites. “I could imagine companies that could build a few airplanes per month eventually breaking in and wanting to do it because there's an opportunity to do it frequently. And let's face it, design and cutting-edge airplanes [are] just wicked cool,” Roper says. https://aviationweek.com/defense/usaf-sees-five-year-window-invent-new-fighter-aircraft-industry

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  3 février 2022 | International, C4ISR

  Inuit company wins 7-year maintenance contract for Canadian Arctic radars

  Nasittuq Corporation, an Inuit majority-owned corporation, has been awarded a Government of Canada contract to operate and maintain the North Warning System (NWS). The NWS is a joint U.S.-Canadian air defence early warning radar system for North America, managed by the North American Aerospace De