23 novembre 2018 | International, Naval
Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has secured the protection of British home waters by announcing he will retain three of the Royal Navy's patrol ships.
The future of the Batch 1 Offshore Patrols Vessels (OPVs), HMS Tyne, HMS Mersey and HMS Severn, which currently support the Fishery Protection Squadron, have been secured by the Defence Secretary.
They will be retained for at least the next two years to bolster the UK's ability to protect our fishing fleet as well as our shores. The Royal Navy currently provide around 200 days of fishery protection a year. The Defence Secretary's announcement means that the Royal Navy will now have the capacity to deliver up to 600 days of fishery protection a year if needed.
Mr Williamson has announced that each ship will forward-operate from their namesake rivers – from Newcastle, Liverpool and the Cardiff area respectively – to boost rapid responses in British waters up and down the nation. The versatile ships are also vital to the Royal Navy's anti-smuggling and counter-terrorism work, and frequently escort foreign vessels, including those from Russia, through the English Channel.
Speaking on board patrol vessel HMS Tyne, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said:
Britain's patrol vessels are essential to protecting our waters, our fisheries and our national security. Safeguarding the future of these three ships in the Royal Navy will ensure we can respond quickly to incidents at any time, further protecting our waters as we exit the EU.
By forward-operating these ships from their affiliated locations across the country, including the Tyne, it will not only allow them to react quickly, but also strengthen the bonds between the Royal Navy and local communities.
Just last month, HMS Tyne monitored a Russian frigate as it passed through the English Channel, while last year, HMS Mersey returned from a 48,000 mile deployment where she played a key part in a £12million drugs bust off the coast of Nicaragua and helped combat the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.The ships also deter illegal pollution activity and provide emergency firefighting capabilities for ships in distress.
HMS Tyne, HMS Severn and HMS Mersey are each operationally available for 320 days a year. The ships are armed with a 20mm cannon, which can fire 700 rounds a minute at at a maximum effective range of 1300 yards, and can travel at up to 20 knots.
They will also be bolstered by five new-generation Batch 2 Offshore Patrol Vessels over the next two years. The Royal Navy is expected to have all the Batch 2 OPVs, named HMS Forth, HMS Medway, HMS Trent, HMS Tamar and HMS Spey, by the end of 2020. They will be able to enhance UK efforts to counter terrorism, combat people and drug smuggling and promote the interests of Global Britain around the world.
The announcement came during the Defence Secretary's visit to Newcastle, where he also revealed the name of the sixth frigate in Britain's Type 26 class of anti-submarine warships as HMS Newcastle.
Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said:
I am also delighted to be able to continue to strengthen the bond to Tyneside today, by announcing one of Britain's future world-beating Type 26 warships will be called HMS Newcastle.
HMS Newcastle, which will be built on the Clyde, is set to provide advanced protection for the UK's nuclear deterrent and Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers, and offer an unrivalled anti-submarine warfare capability across the globe.
HMS Newcastle will also be joined by her sister ship HMS Sheffield, which was also named by Defence Minister Stuart Andrew in the city this afternoon. The first Type 26 warship, HMS Glasgow, is expected in service in the mid-2020s.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/defence-secretary-secures-ships-to-protect-home-waters
10 juin 2022 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
La filière aéro voit le bout du tunnel. Enfin, elle veut l'espérer, même si le trafic aérien mondial n'a pas encore retrouvé son niveau...-aero-spatial
2 avril 2019 | International, Aérospatial
Author: Mike Rees The U.S. Air Force has announced that its Office of Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation at the Air Force Research Laboratory is working on fielding a prototype Autonomous Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle as an Early Operational Capability as early as 2023. The program, known as Skyborg, and the SDPE office have issued a request for information to industry to conduct market research and concept of operations analysis to learn what is commercially available now as high technology readiness level capabilities which can meet the requirements and timeline of the Skyborg program. Skyborg officially stood up as a fiscal year 2019 funded pathfinder program through SDPE in October 2018, according to Ben Tran, Skyborg program manager. “There was a lot of analysis that determined what was put into the CRFI,” Tran said. “We've been given the overall objective to have an early operational capability prototype fielded by the end of calendar year 2023, so this is our first step in determining what the current state of the art is from a technology perspective and from a systems engineering perspective to provide that EOC capability in 2023.” Low cost, attritable, unmanned air vehicles are one way to bring mass to the fight when it comes to addressing potential near-peer engagements in the future, according to Tran. “We also know there is heavy investment by our near-peer adversaries in artificial intelligence and autonomy in general. We know that when you couple autonomy and AI with systems like low-cost attritables, that can increase capability significantly and be a force multiplier for our Air Force and so the 2023 goal line is our attempt at bringing something to bear in a relatively quick time frame to show that we can bring that kind of capability to the fight.” Matt Duquette, an AFRL Aerospace Systems Directorate engineer, brings a background in UAV control, autonomy, and modeling and simulation of UAVs, especially teams of UAVs to the effort while assisting the Skyborg program with formulating its approach to the autonomy system and some of the behaviors that the UAVs will have. “Skyborg is a vessel for AI technologies that could range from rather simple algorithms to fly the aircraft and control them in airspace to the introduction of more complicated levels of AI to accomplish certain tasks or subtasks of the mission,” Duquette said. This builds on much of the AFRL foundational work with AI shown with programs such as Have Raider and the Auto Ground and Air Collision Avoidance systems, which prove that levels of autonomy in high performance aircraft are not only possible, but also practical. “Part of our autonomy development is building assurance into the system. You can either build assurance by using formal methods or approaches where at design time, as you develop these autonomous capabilities, you guarantee certain behaviors, or a more practical approach is to assess the capabilities of these behaviors at run time, meaning while they're running on the aircraft. So, those are the capabilities that we're interested in looking at from the experimentation level to see what type of assurance you need in the system so you can mix high and low criticality.” “We're looking at a range of vehicle performance parameters – mission analysis will help us determine what the final outcome is and the responses from the CRFI will help us understand what the performance is of currently available systems and whether those will meet the needs or not. Everything from keeping up with combat platforms to slower platforms for sensing. There will be a range of possibilities there,” said Patrick Berry, from AFRL's Sensors Directorate, who is supporting the Skyborg program by conducting modeling, simulation and analysis. Although Skyborg is not scheduled for any particular type of aircraft platform at this time, Tran said the CRFI emphasizes the importance of an open systems architecture, having modularity in the system, not only from a sensing capabilities standpoint, but overall mission systems, as well as the autonomy associated with the mission capability for the platform. “We've partnered with the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and specifically an organization called the Emerging Technologies Combined Test Force and we're working with them beginning with small, fast-moving UAVs to test the current state of the art in AI and autonomy in those airplanes and the ability for them to autonomously team and collaborate in flight,” Tran said. Machine learning has progressed greatly over the last few years and we're very inspired by those results and excited by things that are going on in the gaming industry for instance,” said Maj. Ryan Carr, from AFRL's Aerospace Systems Directorate. “We expect that technology will continue to mature fairly rapidly. What we really need to understand is, ‘How do you take that and do something like bring it to the real world and fly with it for example?' The thing we're trying to get at early on is how to do that safely. We're talking about run-time assurance, working hand-in-hand with the flight test community who have a very long record of safe flight testing. That's really what we want to focus our attention on in this early period,” Carr said. “We want to do this in a way that builds trust in the system as you go along so that when you get to that EOC, you will have established a baseline of trust so that operational youth will believe what the system will do or believe it's safe. It's not just that end-state capability, it's the trust as you go along,” he added. Before operational AI innovation can occur, the Air Force must field an autonomous system that meets an immediate operational need and can serve as an iterative platform to facilitate complex AI development, prototyping, experimentation and fielding, and that system is Skyborg, the CRFI says. https://www.unmannedsystemstechnology.com/2019/03/u-s-air-force-to-develop-ai-powered-combat-uav/
19 septembre 2022 | International, Aérospatial
L3Harris and Embraer to Develop New Agile Tanker.