Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

Mark Cherry, Aurora Flight Sciences' president and COO, is joining Boeing as leader of the Phantom Works advanced technology organization.

The U.S. Air Force is steadily ramping up production of precision-guided weapons.

A local partner is likely to be heavily involved in a proposed upgrade of half of the Lynx helicopters in service with the Republic of Korea Navy.

Project Wing, the drone delivery service under development by Google parent Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” has returned to Australia for wider trials of deliveries to real-world customers.

Spain will bury another combat pilot after Lt. Fernando Pérez Serrano died in a Spanish Air Force EF-18 Hornet crash at Torrejón Air Base.

SAAB will provide 9LV Combat Management System for Royal Australian Navy’s fleet of nine Future Frigates.

In an attempt to avoid a patchwork of different local ordinances regulating how UAVs can be flown, a coalition of 29 companies and organizations is appealing to President Donald Trump for help.

View the Fleet Snapshot: Worldwide Leonardo AW101 Fleets chart in PDF format.

Oct. 17-19—Airline Engineering & Maintenance: North America, Miami, Florida. For more information go to www.asidiconference.org

Despite the urgency of the replacement effort, the T-X contract award is now delayed until after the new year, the U.S. Air Force says.

BAE Systems says it has a “robust roadmap” for its distributed aperture semi-active laser seeker (Dasals) technology beyond the widely used Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System guided rocket.

The first flight of NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, slated to put an unmanned Orion capsule into orbit around the Moon for Exploration Mission 1, is now targeted for launch in late 2019.

The U.S. Army plans to instrument a tandem-rotor Dragonfly Pictures DP-14 to assess whether a UAV can be built to support human life while airborne.

The U.S. Navy says its fighter squadrons have been fully equipped with the service’s first-ever networked-enabled air-to-ground glide bomb, the Raytheon AGM-154C-1 Joint Standoff Weapon.

The Apollo 11 command module, Columbia, has left its Smithsonian home for a new mission—a traveling exhibit commemorating the upcoming 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s touchdown on the Moon.

Russia’s automated Progress MS-07 successfully docked with the six-person International Space Station early Oct. 16.

Transport Canada has confirmed that a SkyJet Beechcraft King Air A100 collided with a drone on Oct. 12 while on approach to Quebec City’s Jean Lesage International Airport.

Aerovel’s Flexrotor long-endurance vertical-takeoff-and-landing unmanned aircraft has completed a 32-hr., 8-min. flight, landing with more than 3 hr. worth of fuel remaining.

Florida is to establish a biofuel supply chain based around brassica carinata, a non-edible plant that has already been used to produce 100% bio-derived jet fuel.

AIRBUS has taken full ownership of SEPANG AIRCRAFT ENGINEERING, an MRO center based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

How much better is a computer at finding surface-to-air missiles compared to trained, human analysts?

View the U.S. Defense Department Fighter Aircraft Spending FY16-FY18 ($K) chart in PDF format.

Latvia ordered three of the long-range air surveillance radars in 2015, and the first two are now fully built.

The Indonesian Navy’s chief of staff, Adm. Ade Supandi, accepted delivery of the three aircraft at a ceremony at the Juanda naval airbase in Surabaya on Oct. 13.

About 30 gigabytes of sensitive data were stolen from a small Australian defense contractor, including details on Lockheed Martin’s F-35 and C-130 transport aircraft, and Boeing’s P-8 and Joint Direct Attack Munition smart bomb.