8 décembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial
By Greg Waldron7 December 2020
Taiwan has upgraded 18 Lockheed Martin F-16A/Bs to the new F-16V standard, and hopes to complete all 141 planned upgrades by 2023.
In addition, 66 new F-16Vs from a 2019 deal with the US government will be completed by 2026, according to a recent report by Taiwan's Central News Agency, quoting the Taiwanese military.
The work is being undertaken by local airframer AIDC with support from Lockheed. Taipei hopes to complete the upgrade work by 2023, a year later than originally planned.
The report adds that the Taiwan F-16V fleet will feature the Raytheon ALQ-184 electronic countermeasures pod, which is consistent with US Air Force equipment.
The upgrade affects the mission computer, airframe, cockpit instruments, and electronic warfare system. The jets will also receive an active electronically scanned array radar in the form of Northrop Grumman's Scalable Agile Beam Radar.
The project involves AIDC essentially installing a kit originally developed by Lockheed.
Taipei has an urgent need to upgrade its defence capabilities owing to increasing military pressure from China, which views the democratic island as a province.
Beijing, which has rapidly developed its military over the last decade, regularly mounts probing flights to test Taiwan's air defences.
21 décembre 2023 | International, Terrestre
The five-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract, valued at $92 million, was awarded by the U.S. Navy Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD).
21 juin 2018 | International, Sécurité
Ian Sample Report warns that swift progress in our ability to manufacture viruses is making us vulnerable to biological attacks The rapid rise of synthetic biology, a futuristic field of science that seeks to master the machinery of life, has raised the risk of a new generation of bioweapons, according a major US report into the state of the art. Advances in the area mean that scientists now have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body. The three scenarios are picked out as threats of highest concern in a review of the field published on Tuesday by the US National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Department of Defense. The report was commissioned to flag up ways in which the powerful technology might be abused, and to focus minds on how best to prepare. Michael Imperiale, chair of the report committee, and professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan, said the review used only unclassified information and so has no assessment of which groups, if any, might be pursuing novel biological weapons. “We can't say how likely any of these scenarios are,” he said. “But we can talk about how feasible they are.” In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, “enhances and expands” opportunities to create bioweapons. “As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinise where harms could come from,” said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT's Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More than 20 years ago, Eckard Wimmer, a geneticist at Stony Brook University in New York, highlighted the potential dangers of synthetic biology in dramatic style when he recreated poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horsepox virus. The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century. Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesised. “The technology to do this is available now,” said Imperiale. “It requires some expertise, but it's something that's relatively easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.” Other fairly simple procedures can be used to tweak the genes of dangerous bacteria and make them resistant to antibiotics, so that people infected with them would be untreatable. A more exotic bioweapon might come in the form of a genetically-altered microbe that colonises the gut and churns out poisons. “While that is technically more difficult, it is a concern because it may not look like anything you normally watch out for in public health,” Imperiale said. The report calls on the US government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect novel bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defences, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible. One bioweapon that is not considered an immediate threat is a so-called gene drive that spreads through a population, rewriting human DNA as it goes. “It's important to recognise that it's easy to come up with a scary-sounding idea, but it's far more difficult to do something practical with it,” said Carr. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/19/urgent-need-to-prepare-for-manmade-virus-attacks-says-us-government-report
28 juin 2021 | International, Naval
The U.S. Navy has awarded Sikorsky a contract to build nine more CH-53K King Stallion heavy lift helicopters, with language added into the contract to continue bringing down the cost of the aircraft.