7 décembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial
By: Valerie Insinna
BANGKOK — Over the past two years, Swedish aircraft manufacturer Saab has put its advertising muscle into promoting a maritime patrol aircraft it called Swordfish.
But in the absence of a launch customer and no immediate sales prospects, the company is ending its marketing campaign — at least for now, the head of its Asia-Pacific business said Thursday.
“From a product perspective, we are no longer marketing it. So it was a concept. It was an opportunity that we looked at on the back of GlobalEye, and we're just concentrating on GlobalEye,” Dean Rosenfield said in a roundtable with journalists in Saab's Bangkok office.
Defense News traveled to Thailand the week of Nov. 26 to learn more about the country's air warfare capabilities, accepting airfare and accommodations from Saab.
Swordfish was initially conceived as a derivative of Saab's GlobalEye airborne early warning aircraft. Both are based on Bombardier's Global 6000 airframe and contain a suite of cutting-edge sensors, with Swordfish also adding torpedoes, sonobuoys, anti-ship missiles, an acoustics processor and a magnetic anomaly detector.
But while GlobalEye has landed a launch customer in the United Arab Emirates, Swordfish is still looking for a buyer.
Saab hoped to position Swordfish as a lower-cost alternative to Boeing's P-8 Poseidon, which is used by the U.S. Navy to hunt submarines and conduct surveillance over open waters. The firm targeted a handful of international countries who had expressed interest in upgrading their legacy maritime surveillance inventories.
One such country was South Korea, which was looking for up to six additional aircraft to augment its fleet of Lockheed Martin P-3 Orions.
In March, one Saab official told Defense News that — should South Korea chose Swordfish as its future maritime patrol aircraft — the company was prepared to allow South Korea to have a hand in producing the aircraft, with the first few aircraft being produced in Sweden and the rest assembled in South Korea.
Saab had responded to South Korean requests for more information about Swordfish, Rosenfield said. But in June the country decided to award a sole-source contract valued at about $1.7 billion to Boeing for the P-8 Poseidon, eschewing the Swordfish and Airbus' C295.
In July, another sales opportunity for Swordfish was dashed, when New Zealand announced that it would buy up to four P-8s to replace its P-3s.
Rosenfield said that even if Saab wasn't successful in the Korean competition, the company's efforts may still prove fruitful as it goes forward marketing its GlobalEye early warning plane.
“But the good thing about what we did there is that it gave us great recognition — brand recognition — particularly as we were marketing a GlobalEye capability like what we are delivering to the UAE,” he said. “That's where we see it going.”
Rosenfield said there may be opportunities in the future to resurrect the Swordfish sales initiative.
“If there is a customer who has a need for a maritime patrol aircraft, like Singapore for example, and they are prepared to invest in the technology to take something that hasn't been delivered before to a first customer, then we're happy to entertain that discussion,” he said.
But currently, “the product, per se, doesn't exist in the Saab portfolio,” he added.
15 juillet 2022 | International, Aérospatial
The July 12 test marks the end of the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon's booster test phase and paves the way for all-up-round testing later this year.
7 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
BY PATRICK TUCKER DARPA's new research in brain-computer interfaces is allowing a pilot to control multiple simulated aircraft at once. A person with a brain chip can now pilot a swarm of drones — or even advanced fighter jets, thanks to research funded by the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The work builds on research from 2015, which allowed a paralyzed woman to steer a virtual F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with only a small, surgically-implantable microchip. On Thursday, agency officials announced that they had scaled up the technology to allow a user to steer multiple jets at once. “As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control ... not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” said Justin Sanchez, who directs DARPA's biological technology office, at the Agency's 60th-anniversary event in Maryland. More importantly, DARPA was able to improve the interaction between pilot and the simulated jet to allow the operator, a paralyzed man named Nathan, to not just send but receive signals from the craft. “The signals from those aircraft can be delivered directly back to the brain so that the brain of that user [or pilot] can also perceive the environment,” said Sanchez. “It's taken a number of years to try and figure this out.” In essence, it's the difference between having a brain joystick and having a real telepathic conversation with multiple jets or drones about what's going on, what threats might be flying over the horizon, and what to do about them. “We've scaled it to three [aircraft], and have full sensory [signals] coming back. So you can have those other planes out in the environment and then be detecting something and send that signal back into the brain,” said Sanchez. The experiment occured a “handful of months ago,” he said. It's another breakthrough in the rapidly advancing field of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for a variety of purposes. The military has been leading interesting research in the field since at least 2007,. And in 2012, DARPA issued a $4 million grant to build a non-invasive “synthetic telepathy” interface by placing sensors close to the brain's motor centers to pick up electrical signals — non-invasively, over the skin. But the science has advanced rapidly in recent years, allowing for breakthroughs in brain-based communication, control of prosthetic limbs, and even memory repair. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/09/its-now-possible-telepathically-communicate-drone-swarm/151068
31 août 2023 | International, Terrestre
The package is modest at only $80 million, but the implications of using the Foreign Military Financing program to provide it will likely infuriate China.