U.S. Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall presented a $2.74 million check to the state of Florida yesterday to help enable modifications that will open Cape Canaveral to a new class of small commercial launch vehicles that currently do not have access there.
Rep. Pete Geren (D-Tex.) has lent his expected support to a campaign to get the United Arab Emirates to purchase Lockheed F-16 fighters, and is offering to push for inclusion of the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM).
Diagnostic Retrieval Systems Inc., Parsippany, N.J., said it is shifting from the engineering development phase to the production phase of the U.S. Navy's AN/UYQ-65 Data Processing and Display Set program. The set is the Navy's first totally Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS)- based workstation. The systems will be used to support testing workstation applications on an operational destroyer, DRS said.
AERONAUTICAL SYSTEMS CENTER's Weapons, Air Base and Range Systems office, Eglin AFB, Fla., is issuing a request for information for "decoy concepts for fighter and helicopter aircraft and ground support equipment such as trucks and vans." The U.S. Air Force center said in an April 6 Commerce Business Daily notice that replies are due by May 30. Fighters and helicopters for which decoys are planned, the notice said, include AV-8B and F-18, AH-1, CH-46, CH-53 and UH-1N.
Members of the International Affairs Committee in the State Duma have stressed the importance of clearly defining the difference between strategic ballistic missile systems and theater BMDs, reiterating a warning that the Duma should not ratify the START-2 arms reduction treaty if any modifications to the 1972 ABM Treaty are envisioned. Panel members said during a hearing Tuesday that any U.S. moves to proceed with testing such ambiguous systems as the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) would be considered very negative (DAILY, April 13, page 70).
The Defense Dept. today will take ownership of the first of seven Hunter Joint Tactical unmanned aerial vehicle systems at prime contractor TRW's facility in Sierra Vista, Ariz., the UAV Joint Program Office said yesterday.
WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC CO. is in line for a sole source contract from Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Div. to transition AN/AAR-54 Missile Approach Warning System (MAWS) technology to government personnel so the Navy can develop and organic capability to support additional MAWS efforts planned for the next fiscal year. One of Westinghouse's tasks, according to an April 10 Commerce Business Daily notice, will be to install, integrate and calibrate the AAR-54 in the QF-4 aircraft.
Everyone saw it coming, and now it's here in spades-if you can't grow with new sales, you can grow by buying someone else's sales. Acquisitions, either of whole companies or of major operating chunks, are in virtually every aerospace CEO's strategy book this year. "We are now allowing ourselves to think about strategic acquisitions," says TRW chief Joseph T. Gorman at a recent McGraw-Hill/Aviation Week Group finance conference. "Acquisitions remain a key element in our growth" strategy, says AlliedSignal Aerospace boss Daniel Burnham.
NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND plans a competition for production of additional AN/AAR-47 missile warning sets. "The procurement will include a requirement for 179 systems in the basic contract, and three production options for up to 150, 400 and 400 systems respectively," the command said in an April 12 Commerce Business Daily notice. A pre-solicitation conference is tentatively scheduled for May 25, and the proposal due date is currently scheduled for June 30, NavAir said.
ALLIANT TECHSYSTEMS' Kilgore Operations, Kilgore, Tex., received a $3.7 million contract on May 27 from the U.S. Army's Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command for MJU-8A/B decoy flares.
Raytheon Co. logged record sales and earnings in the first quarter of 1995, but its defense electronics operations continued to struggle, the company reported yesterday. Raytheon registered earnings of $173.9 million on sales of $2.38 billion as its commercial operations continued to offset lower defense- related sales in the quarter, which ended April 3. Raytheon Aircraft had record first quarter sales and profits and continued to receive strong orders, the company said.
The U.S. isn't likely to lose its overwhelming air power advantage anytime soon, but adversaries may try to offset it through development of more lethal surface-based defenses or weapons of mass destruction, a Rand study prepared for the Air Force concludes. The size of the U.S. economy and massive investments made in the 1970s and 1980s should make it relatively easy for the nation to maintain and improve its superior fixed-wing aircraft, according to the newly released study.
The Bell-Boeing team making the V-22 Osprey believes that it can build the tiltrotor at a unit flyaway cost of at least $29.4 million through a series of cost-cutting measures, according to the Bell-Boeing program director. The contracting team's current unit flyaway cost estimate runs about $33.7 million for 523 aircraft built at a maximum rate of 2.5 a month, Stuart Dodge told reporters during an industry briefing yesterday in Washington.
U.S. Navy Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jeremy M. Boorda said yesterday that the service soon has to get its own theater missile defense capability. Boorda, speaking at the Navy League's annual conference in Washington, emphasized the near term requirement for a theater missile defense (TMD) system and warned that without such as capability the U.S. could lose or pay a large price in a future conflict. "We really need to solve that problem," he said.
Hughes Aircraft Co. is merging its four Navy-related businesses into a single $400 million operating unit, which will move from Fullerton, Calif., offices into a new headquarters in Long Beach by the end of the year, Hughes said. Hughes Naval and Marine Systems will include the former Hughes anti- submarine warfare and surface ship systems divisions, naval combat systems product lines bought from Honeywell in 1989, and portions of the missile business Hughes bought from General Dynamics three years ago.
Eastman Kodak is pitching a new electro-optical camera system to the Tier II Plus and Tier III Minus unmanned aerial vehicle program offices. The company, which is showing the system this week at the Navy League convention in Washington, is working with the three of the five Tier II Plus contractor teams-Northrop Grumman, Teledyne Ryan, and Raytheon- according to a Kodak representative. The high altitude endurance Tier II Plus is designed to reach altitudes exceeding 60,000 feet.
Kaman Aerospace will qualify and build structural components for weapons bay doors on the F-22 Advanced Tactical Fighter under a new $2.5 million subcontract from Lockheed Fort Worth Co., one of the two F-22 prime contractors, Kaman reported yesterday. Kaman's Bloomfield, Conn., facility will qualify and fabricate three families of composite resin transfer-molded structural parts-more commonly called hat stiffeners-for the F-22, and first deliveries should start this year.
Computervision will provide United Defense L.P. with software, training and technical and process consulting as part of a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract that seeks to integrate three of UDLP's remotely located divisions to form a "virtual enterprise."
Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and other senior Republicans have introduced a measure that would limit the ABM Treaty to systems tested in the anti-ballistic missile mode. Warner, explaining the proposed amendment to the missile defense act on the floor of the Senate last Thursday, said that if a missile defense system has not been field tested in an ABM mode-and has therefore not demonstrated a field tested capability to counter intercontinental ballistic missiles-it should not be limited by the ABM Treaty.
There's a slight chance that another defense giant-perhaps Loral or Lockheed Martin-could try to top Raytheon's premium $2.3 billion bid for E- Systems, says Oppenheimer&Co. analyst Lior Bregman. Even some of E-Systems' biggest fans on Wall Street had valued its shares at only about $60, against the $45 level at which E-Systems had been trading when Raytheon made its $64-a-share offer (DAILY, April 4, page 90). So Raytheon's high bid was widely expected on Wall Street to just about rule out any rival bidders.
Northrop Grumman is looking for one more major E-2C upgrade before the U.S. Navy selects a new early-warning platform. The upgraded Hawkeye would incorporate many of the systems that could easily transition to the follow- on platform, Ken Tripp, head of Northrop Grumman's E-2C business development group said yesterday. Technology developments that will make it onto the E-2C Group II+, the designation for the E-2C Group II in production now, could be used for an E-2C follow-on around the year 2015, Tripp said.
Allison Engine Co. is buying back $110 million worth of debt it acquired when management borrowed it two years ago to buy the company from General Motors, paying a 10% premium to investors in exchange for redeeming the debt as much as eight years early. Allison opened its offer Wednesday and will keep it open through May 11, driven partly by Allison's recent acquisition by Rolls-Royce.
The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and U.S. Space Command have asked for an updated national intelligence estimate to "take a harder look" at proliferation and to help them better determine what weapon systems they should develop on what timeline, BMDO Deputy Director Bill Evers told The DAILY in an interview. "The whole world situation and the perception of stability, of ownership and intent, suggest that we have to take a very hard look about the possibility of proliferation of some of these systems," Evers explained.
Loral Federal Systems Co. has beaten three other competitors for a $36.5 million contract to further develop the Advanced Deployable System (ADS), a network of rapidly deployable sensors that would monitor shallow coastal waters during joint operations of U.S. forces.
Loral Conic, San Diego, has acquired Microcom Corp., Warminster, Pa., for $7 million in cash. Microcom, which employs about 250 people and had sales of over $20 million in 1994, designs and manufactures airborne communications and telemetry components and systems used by the Dept. of Defense and the aerospace industry, Loral Corp., the parent of Loral Conic, said yesterday. It said the products are used mostly for training and test and evaluation.
