13 décembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
By: Burak Ege Bekdil
ANKARA, Turkey — The Turkish government is keen to revive talks with Rolls-Royce for the design and production of its first indigenous fighter jet, the TF-X, a top cabinet minister has said.
Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said the government wants to move forward with its planned cooperation with Britain for the production of the new-generation aircraft. But Turkey must first select an engine for the TF-X and then finalize the aircraft's full design — a process that has has lagged behind schedule.
Its aerospace and procurement officials now aim to fly the TF-X in the 2025-2026 time frame, despite an original target of 2023.
A £100 million (U.S. $132 million) deal between Rolls-Royce and Turkish manufacturer Kale Group was effectively put on hold amid uncertainties over technology transfer.
In October 2016, Rolls-Royce offered a joint production partnership to Turkey to power Turkey's planned platforms. The offer also involved potential sales to third parties. The British company's proposal also included a production unit in Turkey to manufacture engines for the TF-X, as well as for helicopters, tanks and missiles.
A year before that, in October 2015, a memorandum of understanding was signed between Turkey and Rolls-Royce for technological know-how and a production unit. Under the plan, Rolls-Royce would launch an advanced manufacturing and technology center in Turkey ― the company's eighth such unit worldwide.
Also in 2017, BAE Systems and Turkish Aerospace Industries, the prime contractor of TF-X, signed a $125 million heads of agreement to collaborate on the first development phase of the planned fifth-generation fighter jet.
After its membership in the U.S.-led, multinational Joint Strike Fighter program was suspended, Turkey started to look for alternatives for an off-the-shelf bridge gap solution until its own fighter jet can be built. Talks with Russia are underway for a potential Su-35 or Su-57 deal, according to officials in Ankara and Moscow.
1 octobre 2021 | International, Naval
The Greek ministry of defense has committed to buying three frigates from France's Naval Group with weaponry supplied by MBDA in a potential $3.5 billion deal, the companies announced on Sept. 28.
24 avril 2022 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
The ulterior aim of critics' inflation focus is not economics but the strategic choices the Pentagon's budget request implements.
18 mars 2020 | International, Aérospatial
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