When the 2008 recession engulfed the general aviation industry, Diamond Aircraft was hit particularly hard by the sales downturn in the light aircraft market. CEO Christian Dries wasted no time in finding new markets for Diamond's products. Soon, he had adapted or created several models for government and special missions use.
In April 2009, President Barack Obama laid out an ambitious vision in Prague about moving to a world without nuclear weapons. The speech won him friends among present and past heads of state and across the arms control community, and criticism from Republicans. But these days, the president's nuclear policy is under attack from all sides.
How do you fight off a swarm of small UAVs? Answer: With another swarm. That's the thinking behind the Aerial Battle Bots project masterminded by Timothy Chung, assistant professor of systems engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Chung is planning to stage an airborne gladiatorial contest between two fleets of 50 UAVs by 2015, to demonstrate how the swarm defense might work.
Lockheed Martin plans to conduct detailed studies of an advanced hybrid wing-body transport concept under a second phase of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) Revolutionary Configurations for Energy Efficiency (RCEE) program. The study is part of AFRL-led efforts to identify ways to radically reduce the amount of fuel used by the Air Force's air mobility fleet for “a severely energy-supply-constrained future scenario,” says AFRL. Reducing fuel burn has become a top priority for the U.S. Defense Department, which consumes almost 4 billion gal.
As any military planner hoping to introduce new capabilities knows, breaking the cost paradigm in these days of tight budgets is every bit as important as proving the technology itself.
Centaur was conceived for scientific missions, but as the possibilities for optionally piloted aircraft (OPA) technology become more apparent, “we are actively thinking of what the next steps are,” says John Langford, president of Aurora Flight Sciences. In addition to enabling new types of missions that combine unmanned persistence with certified platforms, optional piloting could act as a bridge to the future by helping build trust in flying autonomous aircraft in the national airspace system (NAS).
Insitu has begun flight tests of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps' RQ-21A small tactical unmanned aircraft (Stuas). Developed from the company's Integrator commercial unmanned aircraft system, the RQ-21A made the 1-hr flight late last month from an Insitu facility in Boardman, Ore. With six months left to run in its 27-month engineering and manufacturing development contract, the program is on track, says Boeing subsidiary Insitu. Development and operational testing are scheduled to begin this month at NAS China Lake, Calif.
Avideo of a small unmanned helicopter dropping from hover like a stone, its operator unaware control has been hijacked, threatens plans to open civil airspace to UAS (unmanned aerial systems) by exposing the vulnerability of GPS to counterfeit signals, or spoofing. Although the weaknesses of civil GPS have implications beyond aviation—threatening the energy, financial and telecommunications sectors—they have come into sharp focus since Congress directed the FAA to open national airspace to UAS by 2015 (see p. 52).
In February, when Congress directed the FAA to open national airspace to civil unmanned aerial systems (UAS) by the end of 2015, it unleashed a flurry of regulatory and industry activity—and unlocked a closet of public and political concerns over how these systems could be used domestically.
After months of sharpening their bids and building teams, a U.S.-wide competition for the FAA to designate six sites to test UAS (unmanned aerial system) technologies in civilian airspace is about to begin. Across the country, governors, lawmakers, business development organizations, airports and companies are sharpening bid proposals that the FAA expects to issue “soon,” with an eye toward choosing the winning teams by year-end. Recent legislation requires the FAA to integrate UAS into the civilian airspace by Sept. 30, 2015.
Key portions of the U.S. Navy's most sophisticated electronic attack weapon are emerging from the laboratories. At least two candidate elements—a reduced-signature pod and an advanced power generating system from Northrop Grumman—are flying. The $2 billion Next Generation Jammer (NGJ) program—that would allow combat aircraft to penetrate sophisticated air defenses—is expected to be awarded to a single contractor almost exactly a year from now.
Frustrated by years of false starts, high-speed-propulsion researchers no longer find humor in the old joke that hypersonics is the future and always will be. Yet, just as shrinking budgets and moribund projects threaten the U.S. hypersonics community with that familiar feeling of deja vu, a newly announced Air Force high-speed-strike weapon offers an unexpected beacon of hope.
JSF HONCHO: The Joint Strike Fighter program will get a new leader. U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan has been nominated for a third star and will be assigned as director of the Joint Strike Fighter program office, replacing Vice Adm. David Venlet, who has headed the program since 2010. Bogdan, previously in charge of the KC-46A project, stepped into the deputy leader position on JSF in July. He replaced Maj. Gen. John Thompson, who had been with JSF for less than a year, in an unusual job swap announced in May, with Thompson taking over the tanker effort.
NEW DELHI — India hopes to develop the next version of its joint hypersonic cruise missile project with Russia, the BrahMos II, in the next five years. “Having developed the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile at Mach 2.8, it is logical that we proceed to hypersonic missile with speed of more than Mach 5,” says A. Sivathanu Pillai, missile scientist and chief executive officer at BrahMos Aerospace. “With storable fuel, it is possible to achieve up to Mach 8,” he tells Aviation Week.
The U.S. Navy has established a new program office to manage the planning and procurement of the proposed next-generation aircraft carrier CVN-79 John F. Kennedy, a Gerald R. Ford-class ship. The new program office will also handle the planning and procurement for other future carriers of the Ford-class. Those ships will “move into modified repeat production of CVN-79 and -80 through the new program office,” the Navy says.
NAS PATUXENT RIVER, Md. — Testing of the Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton will relocate to the U.S. Navy’s NAS Patuxent River, Md., test center after the unmanned aircraft completes envelope-expansion flights from Palmdale, Calif. The first Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) derivative of the RQ-4B Global Hawk is being prepared for flight at Palmdale and is planned to relocate to Pax River early next year, after “eight or nine flights,” says Capt. James Hoke, program manager for persistent maritime unmanned aircraft systems.
A classified National Reconnaissance Office mission due for launch from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., just after midnight Aug. 2 has been scrubbed until at least Aug. 4 because of a downrange calibration issue. NROL-36 is to be lifted into orbit by a United Launch Alliance Atlas V flying in its simplest configuration, with a 4-meter payload fairing, a single-motor Centaur upper stage and no boosters. That suggests a relatively small payload. Launch officials said there are no issues with either the rocket or the payload.
