Saab receives order for Arexis sensor suite for German Eurofighters

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  14 janvier 2019 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR

  Air Force wants startups to answer the call for $40M

  The Air Force will hold its first Air Force Pitch Day on Mar. 6 in New York City, offering startups the chance to win small awards for their innovative ideas that same day. The service has allocated up to $40 million for the event. Startup companies and small businesses will have the chance to win up to $158,000 each. “Many mind-blowing ideas are being birthed in U.S. startup companies, but the Pentagon largely misses out on them,” Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in a statement. Pitch Day will mirror private sector pitch competitions, allowing for a smarter and faster delivery of awards during the event. Roper's further commentary on the event clearly reflects that he wants to avoid the sluggish contracting process of the federal government. “For our big bureaucracy, awarding a contract in months is a flash. The Pentagon must do business at the speed of ideas: inspiring and accelerating startup creativity toward national security challenges,” Roper said. The Air Force posted topics online Nov. 29. They are the subjects and problems that the Air Force is using to guide the pitches. The service also released further criteria to help guide those who wish to submit their ideas. The ideas must have the primary task of advancing national security in the air, space and cyberspace. To make this as clear as possible for contestants, the Air Force outlined three areas of particular interest: Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence and Network Technologies Battlefield Air Operations Family of Systems Technologies Digital Technologies Submissions for pitches opened Jan. 8 and will continue through Feb. 6. Then the Air Force will take a week review the submissions and invite finalists. On Pitch Day, the Air Force will select same-day winners and award payments via credit card. Any award will be a nondilutive, meaning startups won't have to give up any ownership stake for the investment. Participant companies must be U.S.-based and more than half of its owners must be U.S. citizens or legally reside in the country. In 2018, the Air Force hosted a similar type of pitch event called Spark Tank, during which airmen were “able to compete and pitch their ideas to increase the lethality of the force, and to reduce the cost of bringing power to the fight,” as Secretary Heather Wilson said. Of course, that event differed in that it was limited to only Air Force service members pitching. https://www.fedscoop.com/air-force-wants-startups-answer-call-40m/

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  1 août 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Air Force begins in-house JSTARS maintenance amid Northrop Grumman’s shortfalls

  By: Kyle Rempfer The Air Force began conducting its own depot maintenance for JSTARS July 17 at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, in an effort to field the Air Force's primary ground surveillance and battle management aircraft quicker, despite contractor shortfalls. Maintenance for the E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System aircraft was previously done exclusively by Northrop Grumman at a facility in Louisiana, but the service has said the maintenance was too slow. Now, Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex will supplement the contractors to speed up the process. “Historically, the contractor has averaged about 400 days per aircraft,” Air Force Material Command spokesman Derek Kaufman told Air Force Times. “The driver has been to increase the number of aircraft available for operations and training. The Air Force intends to fly JSTARS into the mid-to-late 2020s, while the follow-on Advanced Battle Management System [ABMS] is developed," Kaufman said. The Air Force has not released exactly what the ABMS entails, but it will fuse information from satellites, drones, ground sensors and manned ISR aircraft. Because Robbins AFB is also playing host to the initial elements of the ABMS program, Kaufman said the base will continue to play a role in the command and control mission. In the meantime, maintenance delays for existing JSTARS must be streamlined, according to the press release announcing the push. “We've been focusing intensely for a couple of years on improving contractor-led depot performance, but aircraft are still remaining in depot too long,” said Steven Wert, the Air Force's program executive officer for battle management, who oversees these efforts. “We have to find ways to increase throughput and overall depot capacity, and we believe this option is well worth exploring.” The work done at the new facility will help the Air Force better understand the costs of performing JSTARS depot maintenance on its own. “Should this first organic induction prove successful, we currently plan two more JSTARS aircraft to be inducted, one per year,” Kaufman said. It's important to note that this maintenance plan is separate from efforts to retire the Air Force's fleet of 17 JSTARS. The 2019 defense authorization bill allocates funds for the ABMS program, but the Air Force will not be able to retire any of these planes until the second phase of that program is declared operational, according to Congress' bill. As a result, service officials are anxious to get more JSTARS into the air for operations and training while waiting to bring the ABMS program online. In addition to slow delivery, Northrop Grumman has had some issues with their maintenance in the past. An Air Force investigation released in March 2017 showed that contract maintainers left drainage holes covered on the bottom of a JSTARS' radome during depot maintenance between March 2015 and July 2016. This caused the radome to collect water and inflicted $7.35 million worth of damage to the aircraft. That damage was discovered on July 28, 2016, when the JSTARS aircraft assigned to the 116th Air Control Wing at Robins experienced radar failures during checks conducted by Air Force radar specialists. “When the specialists opened the radome for the radar, they discovered portions of the radar immersed in standing water with visible corrosion damage,” the report states. In the future, inducting more aircraft into the Air Force's own depot maintenance facility could offer some advantages, according to the service. The program office, operational wings, functional check flight crews and Air Combat Command's flight test detachment are all co-located at Robins. These locality benefits could help cut down on transportation costs. Additionally, start-up costs should be minimal because Robins already hosts the E-8C operational wings, according to the Air Force. “Our dedicated professionals and mission partners have extensive experience in overhauling and modifying large aircraft like the C-130, C-17 and C-5 fleet. I'm confident our team can leverage this experience and help the JSTARS community improve aircraft availability,” said Brig. Gen. John Kubinec, commander of Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex, in another press release. “Our team is excited about this opportunity and we stand ready to support this effort by working closely with the PEO and Northrop Grumman.” The Air Force still has an agreement with Northrop Grumman that runs through 2022, called a Total System Support Responsibility contract. The depot maintenance at Robins “would supplement, not supplant," the work being done by the existing contract, the Air Force clarified. “In fact, the Air Force will need Northrop's help to successfully execute this proof of concept,” according to the release. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/07/31/air-force-begins-in-house-jstars-maintenance-amid-northrop-grummans-shortfalls/

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  18 mars 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  FVL: Bell, Sikorsky-Boeing Split $181M To Finalize FLRAA Designs

  After two years of intensive digital engineering, in 2020 the Army will pick either a Bell tiltrotor or a Sikorsky-Boeing compound helicopter to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: A Sikorsky-Boeing team won a $97 million award to refine their SB>1 Defiant high-speed helicopter over the next two years, the Army announced today, while Bell Textron won $84 million for its V-280 Valor tiltrotor. The two designs are vying to replace the Reagan-era UH-60 Black Hawk, the Army's workhorse air assault and medevac transport. The difference in amounts purely reflects the different approaches the two teams proposed for what's called Competitive Demonstration & Risk Reduction, Army officials told reporters. It doesn't imply either team has an advantage going into 2022, when the service will choose one design as its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), with the first operational units flying in 2030. FLRAA is just part of the flying “ecosystem” of manned and unmanned aircraft that the Army is developing under its Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, which in turn is just one of eight CFTs working on 31 high-priority projects. But FLRAA has been unusually visible, literally, because – as part of a program called the Joint Multi-Role Tech Demonstration – both companies have prototype aircraft actually flying. As we've reported previously, the SB>1 Defiant started flight tests a year later than the V-280 Valor, but Army officials reasserted today they'll have enough test data on both aircraft. “The flight envelope continues to expand for Sikorsky-Boeing, so they're flying a bit more aggressively now than the V-280,” said Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, head of the FVL CFT. “Towards the end of this fiscal year, maybe August, we're going to see very comparable data on both.” “Flight time is only one of the inputs that goes into a multivariable non-linear calculation,” added the Army's aviation acquisition chief, Program Executive Officer Pat Mason. Not all flight hours are equally valuable, he told reporters, and flight hours alone are not enough. “[It's] what you did in flight, what you've done in modeling and simulation, how you're administering model design, how you [set up] your digital engineering development environment, what you've done in your component test, lab test, SIL [System Integration Lab] test. Taking the totality of those elements into consideration, what we see is a good competition between two vendors.” So while the two aircraft will continue flying to provide more performance data, the lion's share of the work over the next two years will be digital, explained the Army's program manager for FLRAA. “The preponderance of this effort is associated with digital engineering and model-based systems engineering,” Col. David Philips said. That means taking the real-world data from physical tests and rigorously refining every aspect of the design to meet the Army's needs from flight performance, combat survivability, affordability, sustainability, safety and more. The program's reached the phase of design refinement that's traditionally handled by engineers with slide rules on “reams of paper,” Mason explained, but which will now be accomplished in painstakingly precise virtual models and simulations of every aspect of the aircraft. “That is the future of design,” Mason said. “The key is that digital environment.... digital engineering and model-based engineering.” The flight tests of physical aircraft are proving out their novel configurations – designed to achieve high speed and long range that are aerodynamically unattainable for conventional helicopters. But the digital design phase is especially suited for working out the software that's essential to everything from flight controls to navigation to evading incoming anti-aircraft missiles. Rather than have each vendor fit the electronic jigsaw together in their own unique, proprietary way, the Army insists that FLRAA, its sister design the FARA scout, and a whole family of drones all use the same Modular Open Systems Architecture. MOSA is meant to ensure that all the aircraft can easily share data on everything from maintenance diagnostics to enemy targets, and that the Army can easily replace specific components (hence “modular”) using whatever vendor offers the best technology (hence “open”). To ensure different vendors' products plug and play together, Mason said, “we specify what we need in those interfaces, and we flow those out in models.” Those models will include simulations of the aircrafts' physical characteristics, but, since they're software themselves, they can contain the actual prototype code for the Modular Open Systems Architecture. In other words — let's get digital. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/fvl-bell-sikorsky-boeing-split-181m-to-finalize-flraa-designs