JOINT VENTURE: Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) and Ness Technologies recently signed a joint venture agreement to cooperate on command and control systems, Israel's Ness said Oct. 27. The new venture initially will develop new projects for foreign clients. Ness said the venture is expected to lead to new business connections with an annual volume of "tens of millions of dollars."
PANAMA CITY, Fla. - U.S. military services need to hold a more focused dialogue on how submarines can contribute to joint expeditionary warfare, according to Adm. Frank L. Bowman, director of naval nuclear propulsion. "The submarine is a necessary part of the Navy/Marine Corps team. After the Cold War, it became apparent that we needed to develop further submarine capability," Bowman told the National Defense Industrial Association's Expeditionary Warfare Conference here Oct. 23. Submarines now are being considered for:
Driven by strong sales from its aeronautics business, Lockheed Martin Corp. last week posted a 36 percent increase in net earnings for the third quarter. But losses on pension fund income may drive earnings down in 2003, officials said. Third-quarter net earnings rose from $213 million a year ago to $290 million this year. Sales for the quarter rose 5 percent over a year ago, from $6.2 billion in 2001 to $6.5 billion this year.
The Defense Department's missile defense experts believe they have overcome doubts about their ability to pick out an enemy ballistic missile from its exhaust plume in the boost phase of flight, according to a Pentagon official.
As the Defense Department's National Aerospace Initiative (NAI) moves forward, NASA is anticipating continued military involvement in its ongoing hypersonic aircraft projects, which may cause some of them to be accelerated. Spearheaded by Ron Sega, the Pentagon's director of defense research and engineering, the NAI has three major areas of emphasis - hypersonics (engines capable of speeds above Mach 5), access to space, and advanced space technology (DAILY, May 7).
Missile defense work will remain Orbital Science Corp.'s primary revenue driver, David Thompson, the chairman and CEO of the struggling space company, said Oct. 25 in a conference call with investors and analysts. "We see the demand coming from the science side of [the government business] being pretty flat but still very interesting to us," he said. "... We see the demand coming from the military and intelligence side as growing substantially and that's clearly an area where we're putting a lot more focus on than we were a couple of years ago."
MEADS PROBLEM: A "bureaucratic" problem is holding up an arms transfer item critical to the Medium Extended Air Defense System [MEADS], but corporate executives expect to settle the matter within a few weeks, says Klaus Reidel, executive vice president of the MEADS International joint venture. Reidel won't identify the item or the cause of the delay. MEADS, which relies on the United States Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile, has been plagued by transfer delays since the program's launch in 1996. But U.S.
FCS LASERS: Directed energy systems probably will be incorporated into future blocks of the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) to provide protection for FCS vehicles against anti-armor weapons, according to Michael Booen, Raytheon's vice president for directed energy. Although none of the broad industry announcements (BIAs) released so far by FCS lead systems integrator (LSI) Boeing-SAIC have dealt specifically with directed energy, Raytheon has discussed such systems with them, Booen says. "We've certainly talked about setting lasers on there," he says.
With full-rate production recently approved by the Army, Shadow 200 Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (TUAV) manufacturer AAI Corp. is planning enhancements in future production runs that will nearly triple the aircraft's payload volume and extend its operational range by 75 kilometers (47 miles).
PANAMA CITY, Fla. - A Marine Corps aviation official challenged contractors at the National Defense Industrial Association's 7th Annual Expeditionary Warfare Conference here to provide the military with more reliable weapon systems. Increased reliability would enable Marine Corps aviation assets to be more effective in expeditionary warfare operations, Lt. Gen. Michael Hough, the Marine Corps' deputy commandant for aviation, said Oct. 23.
DEEPWATER BACKUP: Although the Coast Guard still plans to use the Bell Eagle Eye unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as the tactical UAV (TUAV) for its Deepwater program, it still is considering Northrop Grumman's Fire Scout UAV as a backup, according to Tim Beard, the company's director for unmanned systems business development. "We keep being told, 'You're in reserve,' and [Deepwater prime contractor] Lockheed Martin sent a representative to the latest tests at China Lake to ensure that [they are] fully aware of everything that's going on with Fire Scout," he says.
LRIP RAPTOR READY: Lockheed Martin will fly the first low-rate initial production (LRIP) phase F/A-22 Raptor to Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in mid-November, the company said. Raptor 10, the first aircraft bought after last year's LRIP approval, will serve as a test vehicle for the program's Dedicated Initial Operational Test & Evaluation phase, which should begin next year. Meanwhile, Air Force and Boeing officials are set to begin operations at an F/A-22 maintenance training facility at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., which was unveiled Oct. 25.
With the Air Force trying to seal a deal to lease 100 767 air refuelers from the Boeing Co., Congress has provided the service with $3 million to set up a tanker program office and conduct related training and other activities , government and industry sources said Oct. 25. The money will "get things going" administratively, a congressional source told The DAILY.
PARTS: Goodrich Corp. has formed an alliance with Tracer, an aircraft aftermarket parts and services provider, to speed the sale of its Aviation Technical Services division's spare parts inventory, the company said Oct. 25. The three-year alliance will seek to sell the parts to airlines and providers of maintenance, repair and overhaul services.
NO NEW THREAT: EADS North America executives reject claims that its recent business moves present a new threat to the domestic U.S. helicopter industry. "We're already a big, substantial player in the U.S. market," says Sam Adcock, director of government and public affairs for EADS NA. "Relative to the U.S. military market, we have a full integrated product line that includes military products. We just don't sell any in the U.S. today.
DEFENSE BILL: Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) says he is determined to enact a fiscal 2003 defense authorization bill and will do his "very best" to finish the measure when Congress returns for a lame duck session after the Nov. 5 elections. A dispute over disability and retirement pay prevented House and Senate negotiators from completing a compromise bill before lawmakers left town in mid-October. "There is simply too much legislation critical to our national security in this bill ... for Congress not to complete action on it," Levin says.
ANTI-JAMMING: China plans to launch a TV satellite with anti-jamming capability, to guard against hijackings of its airwaves such as was recently done by the banned religious group Falun Gong. Falun Gong practitioners, possibly based in Taiwan, interrupted the normal transmissions of the Sinosat spacecraft last month, beaming their messages into China. The APSTAR VI, built by France's Alcatel, is slated to launch in 2004 for APT Satellite Co. of Hong Kong, aboard a Long March 3B booster.
SPENDING BENEFICIARIES: Japan and South Korea could increase defense spending in the wake of the terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, and North Korea's disclosure of its secret nuclear weapons program, says aerospace and defense analyst Byron Callan of Merrill Lynch. "For companies we follow, ballistic missile defense efforts could be the most probable beneficiaries of new security spending by these countries, assuming no diplomatic solution can be found," Callan says.
HYBRID ELECTRIC: The work that defense electronics maker Integrated Defense Technologies, of Huntsville, Ala., has done in hybrid-electric technology could lead to a big contract for work under the Army's Future Combat Systems program, according to senior aerospace and defense analyst Byron Callan of Merrill Lynch. The company displayed a hybrid-electric drive HUMVEE at last week's Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington.
CVNX-1, the Navy's future carrier design derived from its Nimitz-class fleet, fails to address the range of capabilities the service will need in the future but should be built while more futuristic designs mature, according to a Defense Department task force. The Navy immediately should "kick-start" a process to develop long-term options beyond CVNX-1, the Defense Science Board's Task Force on the Future of the Aircraft Carrier wrote in a report released Oct. 24.
LAM CONCERNS: There are at least two reasons that the recently completed fiscal 2003 defense appropriations conference report directs the Army to consider replacing the planned Loitering Attack Missile (LAM) with an unmanned aerial vehicle armed with a smart seeker munition, a congressional source says. First, lawmakers wonder whether LAM duplicates the Army's Brilliant Anti-Armor Submunition (BAT) program.
Oct. 28 - 29 -- IQPC presents its Semi-Annual Conference: Defense Partnering and Alliances. For registration information call (800) 882-8684 or visit www.iqpc.com. Oct. 28 - 30 -- Airports Council International presents ACI Airport Business 2002, Miami, Fla. For more information email [email protected].
Shareholders of TRW Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corp. will vote Dec. 11 on whether to approve the merger plan proposed by both companies. Kent Kresa, Northrop Grumman chairman and CEO, said in a statement his company "remains confident that this transaction provides tremendous value to both companies' shareholders." TRW Chairman Philip Odeen said, "The combined company's technology and talent will create a powerful and highly competitive enterprise with excellent growth prospects."
The Army is stocking up on the controls for a previously troublesome part on the AH-64 Apache helicopter. A $10.3 million contract to supply 122 swashplate controls for the Apache was awarded Oct. 21 to Fenn Manufacturing Co., of Newington, Conn., according to a contract announcement released Oct. 23. A swashplate assembly is designed to change a helicopter rotor blade's angle of attack.
