The U.S. Department of Defense plans to convert operations and maintenance to a two-year spending cycle, DOD Comptroller Dov Zakheim told Senate lawmakers March 1. "This would preclude wasteful end-of-year scrambling, helping us cover emerging requirements, and enhance our ability to derive the very best value from every dollar," Zakheim told members of the Senate Appropri-ations Committee.
The U.S. Air Force is nearing completion of a formal assessment to determine whether the aging C-5A Galaxy fleet should be retired, a service representative said March 1. The Air Force Fleet Viability Board (AFFVB) began the review Oct. 1 (DAILY, Oct. 17, 2003) and hopes to finish it by the end of March, said Col. Francis Crowley, director of the board. Once the assessment is completed, the findings will be presented to the Air Force secretary and chief of staff for their consideration.
RETIREMENT: Lockheed Martin Chairman and CEO Vance Coffman is retiring, the company announced March 1. Robert J. Stevens, the company's president and chief operating officer, will succeed Coffman as of Aug. 6. Coffman will remain chairman until April 2005, Lockheed Martin said.
DRS Technologies Inc. will design, integrate and manufacture an Altitude Hold and Hover Stabilization (AHHS) system for U.S. Air Force MH-53M Pave Low Helicopters, the company announced March 1. The AHHS system is installed on Air Force HH-60G Pave Hawk Rescue Helicopters.
NEW DELHI - Indian air force sources say a trigger built by the state-owned Armament Research and Development Establishment (ARDE) could have played a role in the recent crashes of two fighter aircraft. A Jaguar crashed Feb. 26 and a MiG-23 crashed Feb. 6, both in the Pokhran region of Rajasthan, where India has tested its nuclear weapons. Sources said the events leading to the crashes were similar for both aircraft and suggest a problem occurred when the pilots tried to press triggers to release live ammunition. Both pilots were killed.
PRAGUE, Czech Republic - BAE Systems has been selected as avionic systems integrator for two prototype Mi-24 helicopter upgrades in Poland. Polish officials announced Feb. 26 that they had chosen Polish company WZL1 as the prime contractor for the modernization project, which marks the first time the Russian-built helicopter will have been brought up to NATO standards.
The U.S. Department of Defense will send Congress "relatively soon" a proposed budget amendment that would take money that had been allocated to the canceled RAH-66 Comanche helicopter program and use it to modernize and buy more than 2,000 military aircraft, the department's comptroller said March 1.
Raytheon Co. has won a $127 million contract for work on the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Surface Launched Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (SLAMRAAM) system. The contract, awarded Feb. 26 by the Army Aviation and Missile Command, calls for a team under Raytheon's Integrated Defense Systems unit to develop, fabricate, integrate and test SLAMRAAM.
The Mission Integration and Development (MIND) program, a secretive effort by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to integrate imagery from multiple aircraft and satellites, is now up and running, according to a Washington think-tank. In a Feb. 27 "issue brief" posted on its website, the Lexington Institute revealed that the MIND system quietly began operations on Dec. 15.
DD(X) FUTURE: If the U.S. Navy is forced to cut a big program, as the Army did with its RAH-66 Comanche helicopter, it likely would truncate its DD(X) next-generation destroyer program, says Congressional Budget Office naval analyst Eric Labs. "If this happens, the Navy is likely to get 12 hulls, rather than the planned 24," he says. Labs says that in the long run - beyond the next 15 years - he predicts a Navy fleet of fewer than 300 ships, not far from the current level of 294 ships.
AIRCRAFT SALES: Sliding orders for some big-ticket "transport" items, including warplanes, civilian aircraft and cars, dragged down the performance of the U.S. manufacturing sector in January. However, polls on business conditions and the general trend in manufacturing activity continue to suggest that manufacturing is rebounding rather quickly, says Daniel Meckstroth, the Manufacturers Alliance's chief economist.
FLAWED PROCESS: House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) says a new General Accounting Office report raises concerns about the U.S. Commerce Department's post-shipment verification (PSV) process. The system is meant to prevent overseas misuse of sensitive dual-use technologies, but the report found deficiencies in the system.
TEAM MEMBER: Smiths Aerospace of the United Kingdom has joined Boeing's 7E7 Dreamliner supplier team, Boeing said Feb. 27. Smiths will provide the aircraft's integrated avionics platform, or common core system, Boeing said. The companies will complete the terms of the agreement in the next few weeks.
The first critical design review (CDR) for the Defense Department's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been delayed from April 2004 to sometime in 2005 to give the program more time to fix the aircraft's weight problems, according to an industry source.
EUROPE'S CHALLENGE: The European Union's (EU) Vision 2020 plan for becoming the world leader in aviation by 2020 is bearing visible fruit, according to Clayton Jones, president and CEO of Rockwell Collins. "They put their money where their mouth was in the form of the EU's Sixth Framework program, which dedicated significant research and development dollars to all of the European Union countries to ... advance the state of the art in a number of R&D areas," Jones says.
MOSCOW - RSC Energia, Russia's lead manned space program contractor, said its proposed "Clipper" spacecraft would be a lifting body capable of carrying six crewmembers and 1,750 pounds of cargo to low-earth orbit. Yuri Koptev, the head of Russia's aviation and space agency, has said the proposal could be a replacement for Russia's venerable Soyuz spacecraft, which are used to carry crew to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and to serve as escape craft.
TANKER FATE: Although it may seem counterintuitive that the U.S. Air Force would go ahead with a plan to acquire 100 new Boeing KC-767A tankers now that it has been told by the acting Pentagon acquisition chief to conduct a broad, 18-month study of its need to modernize or replace several hundred KC-135 tankers (DAILY, Feb. 27), the 100-aircraft deal is still "pretty well-assured of going ahead" in the next few months, says Richard Aboulafia, an aviation consultant at the Teal Group.
THAAD RENAMED: What's in a name? Apparently something, at least when it comes to ballistic missile defense. The Missile Defense Agency is dropping the "Theater" in its Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and replacing it with "Terminal" to indicate that it is designed to intercept missiles in their terminal phase of flight. MDA has been moving away from referring to "theater" or "national" defenses on the grounds that anti-missile systems do not always fit neatly into such categories.
Intelsat Government Solutions (IGS) Corp., which was formed last year to focus Intelsat's government and military business, is poised to grow both organically and through acquisitions over the next few years, according to IGS President Susan Miller.
