16 décembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial
SpearUAV Announces $20 Million Contract for Advanced VIPER 300 AI-Based Loitering Munition Systems
The company is expected to deliver the systems as early as 2025.
7 avril 2020 | International, Aérospatial
With the commercial aviation industry in a nosedive, the Defense Department offers airlines a lifeline
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — As the coronavirus pandemic roils the commercial airline industry, U.S. Transportation Command is becoming increasingly concerned about the impact to the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a program where U.S. airlines like United and Delta can fly transport missions on behalf of the Defense Department in an emergency.
The White House has not officially activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, or CRAF, to support of COVID-19 prevention operations. However, as travel restrictions force airlines to cancel flights and make cuts to their aircraft fleets, the military is looking for opportunities where it can offload work to its CRAF partners in the hopes of softening the financial blow, said Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, who leads TRANSCOM.
“On a cargo side, the civil aviation fleet is going pretty strong. On a passenger side, it has dropped off significantly,” Lyons told reporters Tuesday.
“We're talking to [commercial airline companies] regularly. I am concerned, to some degree, about impacts on the passenger segment of the aviation industry, so any opportunity we have to push workload in their direction, we're doing that.”
According to the Air Force, 25 airlines and a total 433 aircraft are involved in the CRAF program as of April 2019 — though those numbers often change on a monthly basis, the service notes.
So far, no commercial airline companies have notified the Defense Department that they will not be able to meet their contractual commitments for the CRAF program, said Air Mobility Command spokeswoman Capt. Nicole Ferrara.
But while the churn of the commercial airline industry hasn't immediately resulted in a reduction of assets for the CRAF program, it remains to be seen whether there could be long term impact, especially as companies whittle down the size of their fleets and number of types of aircraft.
For instance, Delta Airlines in March announced it would speed up the retirements of its McDonnell Douglas MD-88 and MD-90 aircraft, as well as some older Boeing 767s.
Meanwhile, American Airlines announced it would accelerate the retirements of a number of aircraft fleets. Instead of retiring in 2025, its Boeing 757s will be phased out by mid-2021, while its Boeing 767s will leave the fleet this May instead of next year. The airline will also phase out all 20 of its Embraer E190s and all nine of its A330-300s over the next year.
To help companies build up revenue, the U.S. government issued contract awards to a number of commercial airlines to perform “repatriation flights” that transport American citizens and U.S. permanent residents, who are stranded in foreign countries, back to U.S. soil. On March 27, TRANSCOM was tapped to assist the Department of State Repatriation Task Force by managing contracts with the U.S. airline industry for commercial aircraft used to return Americans to the United States.
So far, TRANSCOM has been responsible for scheduling commercial flights for about 1,200 people since the command took over contracting efforts, Dave Dunn, a spokesman for the command, told Defense News last week.
During the first mission, planned for April 4, National Airlines transported U.S. citizens and permanent residents from Nigeria to Washington. TRANSCOM has also awarded contracts to Delta Air Lines and Omni Air for repatriation missions, with total value of $2.5 million across all three vendors.
There have still been some limited challenges to scheduling repatriation flights on commercial airlines, noted Dunn. For instance, travel restrictions caused by the coronavirus outbreak have made it difficult to route stopovers for crew rest and fuel, as many normal locations are not available.
However, Lyons said he expects the number of repatriation flights performed by commercial vendors to grow “significantly.”
“There will still be small numbers that move on a space available basis [via military aircraft] but the main effort is through our Civil Reserve Aviation Fleet partners that we use on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
Sur le même sujet
-
-
4 février 2020 | International, Naval
With laser weapons coming, the US Navy’s newest super carrier has space and power to spare
By: David B. Larter ABOARD THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER GERALD R. FORD IN THE VIRGINIA CAPES — The U.S. Navy is trying to find an alternative to shooting down anti-ship missiles with other missiles, and the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford could prove useful in this pursuit. A major difference with Ford over its Nimitz-class predecessors is its twin A1B nuclear reactors that produce more than three times the electrical power of the reactors on Nimitz — more than 100 megawatts. That means Ford, with survivability questions looming over aircraft carriers, can support large, power-sucking equipment such as lasers, according to Capt. J.J. Cummings, the Ford' commanding officer. “When you talk about innovation in the Navy, this is where it lives,” Cummings said, referring to his ship. “We're lighter — designed lighter — than Nimitz class. “Nimitz class, she's barreling down pretty good now with a lot of stuff on her, and her electric plant is almost at maximum capacity. We're light and designed to have excess capacity in our electrical system to bring future systems on board.” That's a big advantage for the class, and it's one of the reasons the Navy has pursued the Ford class despite the controversies over buggy new technology and cost overruns. The Ford class is essential for the survivability of carriers, said James Geurts, the Navy's top acquisition official. “Part of the reason Ford is so important is that it gives you the flexibility to generate the next generation of systems you'll need to ensure the carrier can continue to stay survivable,” Geurts said. Killing missiles with missiles Bryan Clark, a retired naval officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Ford could use a boost in the survivability department and the Ford's powerful reactors could help them get there. “To improve the self-defense on carriers, you could put lasers on there to support that short-range, self-defense capacity,” Clark said. “Because the big problem with lasers right now is power management. You can build a three or four hundred-kilowatt laser, but for one, it's a big footprint so you have to find a ship big enough to put it on; and two, you have to have the power to actually supply it. So you're going to need a capacitor bank somewhere on the ship or you need a generator big enough to provide it continuously. On the Ford, you'd get that." Clark has argued for years that the Navy needs to get away from trying to shoot down missiles with missiles because a saturation attack from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or anyone else who might have cause to attack a U.S. Navy ship could force a cruiser or destroyer to expend all its missiles and still not have defeated the threat. That's where shorter-range missiles such as the Evolved Seasparrow Missile, which can be packed four per cell in a vertical launch system, and lasers can have a big impact, even if it means the ship has to let missiles get uncomfortably close to the ship before it's taken down. “I think lasers could make a difference for Ford because the technology is pretty mature, you could fit it on the ship and it would address a big challenge for carriers, which is air defense,” Clark said. “You could put several lasers on there and really give a boost to your air defense capacity.” However, it's unlikely lasers could address all threats faced by carriers, Clark said. “It would be effective for cruise missiles up to maybe the supersonic cruise missiles,” Clark said. “Of course, it would also work against small boats and things like that. It may not work that well against hypersonic missiles or ballistic missiles.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/01/31/with-laser-weapons-coming-the-us-navys-newest-super-carrier-has-space-and-power-to-spare/
-
26 juin 2018 | International, Naval
Future US Navy weapons will need lots of power. That’s a huge engineering challenge.
David B. Larter WASHINGTON ― The U.S. Navy is convinced that the next generation of ships will need to integrate lasers, electromagnetic rail guns and other power-hungry weapons and sensors to take on peer competitors in the coming decades. However, integrating futuristic technologies onto existing platforms, even on some of the newer ships with plenty of excess power capacity, will still be an incredibly difficult engineering challenge, experts say. Capt. Mark Vandroff, the current commanding officer of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center and the former Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program manager who worked on the DDG Flight III, told the audience at last week's American Society of Naval Engineers symposium that adding extra electric-power capacity in ships currently in design was a good idea, but that the weapons and systems of tomorrow will pose a significant challenge to naval engineers when it comes time to back-fit them to existing platforms. “Electrical architecture on ships is hard,” Vandroff said. Vandroff considered adding a several-megawatt system to a ship with plenty of power to spare, comparing it with simultaneously turning on everything in a house. “When you turn everything on in your house that you can think of, you don't make a significant change to the load for [the power company],” Vandroff explained. “On a ship, if you have single loads that are [a] major part of the ship's total load, [it can be a challenge]. This is something we had to look at for DDG Flight III where the air and missile defense radar was going to be a major percentage of the total electric load ― greater than anything that we had experienced in the previous ships in the class. That's a real technical challenge. “We worked long and hard at that in order to get ourselves to a place with Flight III where we were confident that when you turned things on and off the way you wanted to in combat, you weren't going to light any of your switchboards on fire. That was not a back-of-the-envelope problem, that was a lot of folks in the Navy technical community ... doing a lot of work to make sure we could get to that place, and eventually we did.” In order to get AMDR, or SPY-6, installed on the DDG design, Vandroff and the team at the DDG-51 program had to redesign nearly half the ship — about 45 percent all told. Even on ships with the extra electric-power capacity, major modifications might be necessary, he warned. “We're going to say that in the future we are going to be flexible, we are going to have a lot of extra power,” Vandroff said. “That will not automatically solve the problem going forward. If you have a big enough load that comes along for a war-fighting application or any other application you might want, it is going to take technical work and potential future modification in order to get there.” Even the powerhouse Zumwalt class will struggle with new systems that take up a large percentage of the ship's power load, Vandroff said. “Take DDG-1000 ― potentially has 80-odd megawatts of power. If you have a 5- or 6-megawatt load that goes on or off, that is a big enough percentage of total load that it's going to be accounted for. Electrical architecture in the future is still an area that is going to require a lot of effort and a lot of tailoring, whatever your platform is, to accommodate those large loads,” he said. In 2016, when the Navy was planning to install a rail gun on an expeditionary fast transport vessel as a demonstration, service officials viewed the electric-power puzzle as the reason the service has not moved more aggressively to field rail gun on the Zumwalt class. Then-director of surface warfare Rear Adm. Pete Fanta told Defense News that he wanted to move ahead with a rail gun demonstration on the JHSV because of issues with the load. “I would rather get an operational unit out there faster than do a demonstration that just does a demonstration,” Fanta said, “primarily because it will slow the engineering work that I have to do to get that power transference that I need to get multiple repeatable shots that I can now install in a ship.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/06/24/future-navy-weapons-will-need-lots-power-thats-a-huge-engineering-challenge/