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.
21 juin 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Belgian aerospace company Sabca has signed a framework agreement with American arms giant Lockheed Martin, which could lead to a contract worth 500
29 octobre 2018 | International, C4ISR
By Aaron Gregg Microsoft executives launched a spirited defense of their work with the U.S. military on Friday in a blog post written by company president Brad Smith, who pledged to work with Pentagon as it embarks on a multibillion-dollar effort to build advanced artificial intelligence capabilities into its operations. Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos offered a similar statement last week at a conference in San Francisco hosted by Wired Magazine. “If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” Bezos said at the conference. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The two companies are responding to a broader wave of discontent that has complicated the efforts of Silicon Valley tech companies to work with the military. Search giant Google recently announced it would disallow its advanced algorithms to be used in weapons systems, and separately said it would decline to bid on a $10 billion opportunity to build the Pentagon's departmentwide cloud computing infrastructure. That contract, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or “JEDI” for short, is designed to give the Pentagon access to new weapons capabilities that are enabled by artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle submitted bids by the Oct. 12 deadline, company spokespeople confirmed this week, and the Defense Department is expected to award a contract next year. Amazon is seen as a front-runner because of its earlier work handling classified data for the CIA. The retorts by the executives followed a pair of anonymously written posts on the website Medium over the past month — both of which the site said had been verified by its editorial staff — in which self-described employees of Amazon and Microsoft raised concerns over the tech companies' relationship with the Defense Department. The Post could not independently verify the authenticity of the two Medium posts. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company could not verify the Medium post's authenticity, and an Amazon spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a blog post titled “Technology and the U.S. military” that was published Friday on Microsoft's website, Smith wrote that the company would continue to work with the U.S. military while looking for ways to ensure its technology is used responsibly. “To withdraw from this market is to reduce our opportunity to engage in the public debate about how new technologies can best be used in a responsible way,” Smith wrote. "We are not going to withdraw from the future.” Full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/26/microsoft-amazon-pledge-work-with-pentagon-following-anonymous-online-rebukes
2 mai 2023 | International, Aérospatial
By the end of the year, a new and unusual deal for the F-35 fighter′s spare parts could be in place — one that would upend the current supply model.