In Pictures: Top Aerospace & Defense Stories, Oct. 27 2022

Credit: Cpl Tim Laurence, UK Ministry of Defense. Some of the most iconic U.S. military aircraft programs, like the CH-47 Chinook, are set to be export lead in terms of the value of deliveries over the next decade, according to preliminary findings from the Aviation Week Network 2023 Military Fleet & MRO Forecast.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Working with NASA’s long-running Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the agency’s soon-to-conclude Mars InSight Lander mission has made a potentially far-reaching discovery

Credit: NASA. Russia has formalized its decision to stay at the International Space Station (ISS) beyond 2024, the first nation to do so.

Credit: Hanwha Systems. South Korea’s SK Telecom has signed an agreement with Daegu Metropolitan City to integrate urban air taxis into the future mobility ecosystem of the country’s fourth largest city and its planned new airport.

Credit: Amazon. With its first two satellites set for launch in early 2023, Amazon on Oct. 27 unveiled plans for an additional, 172,000-sq.-ft. manufacturing plant in the Seattle area that will be dedicated to production of Kuiper satellites for an Amazon-owned high-speed broadband network.

Credit: U.S. Air Force. The Pentagon needs to develop and acquire more agile missile tracking sensors and defeat systems, with a specific focus on regional hypersonic threats and protecting the island of Guam, as adversaries.

Credit: Petty Officer 2nd Class Alexander Kubitza. The Biden administration, in its long-awaited outline of nuclear policy, describes its cancelation of the contentious Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N) and the retirement of the B83-1 gravity bomb as needed steps to free up resources for more critical modernization programs.

Credit: Sichuan Tengden Science & Technology. Another design has been added to the list of large uncrewed cargo aircraft under development in China, with Sichuan Tengden Science & Technology conducting the first flight of its Twin-Tailed Scorpion D on Oct. 25.

A prototype of the Russian Sukhoi Su-57 has flown with new upgrades that add new automated features and may enable in the future a re-engining and an expanded set of munitions, United Aircraft Corp. (UAC) says. 

Credit: Embraer. Embraer has signed agreements with three South Korean aerospace companies.

Credit: Leonardo. Italy’s military police force, the Carabinieri, has ordered 20 AW119Kx single-engine light helicopters from Leonardo.