BRAZILIAN CONCERN: The conservative Hudson Institute on May 10 warned against potential U.S. Air Force contracting with Brazil’s Embraer for the armed service’s proposed light-attack and armed reconnaissance aircraft effort. Hudson analysts assert that Brazil’s foreign policy has become more anti-U.S. over the last decade and that any award to Embraer would give the burgeoning South American giant leverage in future U.S. national security concerns. Embraer is pitching its Super Tucano to supply 20 Light Support Aircraft to Afghanistan via the U.S.
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Boeing remains confident of bolstering its C-17 backlog with additional international sales on top of the expected order from India, despite the challenges of maintaining unit cost in the face of reduced production rates, possible gaps in the delivery stream and no new U.S. Air Force orders.
TIED UP: Washington watchdogs at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) are trying to call attention to purported conflicts of interest by the director of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) is hoping the White House will withdraw a draft executive order (EO) that would require contractors to disclose certain political donations made in the two years before they bid for U.S. contracting work. The requirement drafted in April would infringe on the contracting process and inhibit free speech, AIA President Marion Blakey said in a May 5 letter to President Barack Obama.
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Air Force has officially accepted the first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) from Lockheed Martin at the company’s Fort Worth facility. The milestone, which occurred with the formal acceptance of F-35A AF-7 on May 5, comes almost 10 years after the F-35 System Development and Demonstration contract was awarded to Lockheed, and more than 14 years after the signing of the original JSF development contract.
As the first major Pentagon program to undergo the more stringent Defense Department reviews for cost estimates, the U.S. Navy’s Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) is getting a good financial scrubbing by service officials. “We are the first program to have cost affordability targets in our Milestone A ADM [Acquisition Decision Memorandum],” says Capt. Doug Small, program official for Naval Sea Systems Command (Navsea).
Controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are using 12-in. ion thrusters to ease NASA’s Dawn spacecraft into orbit around Vesta, a protoplanet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that may have one of the oldest planetary surfaces in the Solar System.
NEW DELHI — The Indian Ordnance Factories board has begun augmentation projects to meet the increasing demand for armored vehicles, spare parts and other equipment for the armed forces. “Augmentation projects worth about 10 billion rupees ($224 million) [for] mine-protected vehicles, armored vehicle engines, T-72 tank variants [and] spares for T-72 overhauls are being executed,” a defense ministry official says.
BEIJING — The fall of the U.S. dollar is helping Australia to lop A$4.3 billion ($4 billion) from its defense spending over the next four years. Capital spending, determined by the timing of acquisitions as well as the lower price resulting from changes in exchange rates, will be A$2.4 billion lower than previously planned, says Defense Minister Stephen Smith. Because some spending has only been delayed, some of the money will return to the defense department in future budgets.
LONDON — Iran says it is eyeing development of long-range air defenses but disavows that the effort aims to replace S-300 surface-to-air missiles that Russia has so far refused to deliver to Tehran.
LONDON — In a renewed bid to restructure France’s aerospace and defense market, Safran and Thales have begun talks about an asset swap. It is not the first such effort, although competing industrial and political interests caused prior discussions to fail. But Safran said May 10 that it “believes there are obviously opportunities and means to optimize French defense industrial and technological capabilities,” and confirmed talks with Thales are again under way.
ARMY Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., Stratford, Conn., was awarded on April 28 an $84,599,548 firm-fixed-price contract. The award will provide for the conversion of seven aircraft to the Colombian Ministry of Defense to include publications and aircraft warranty. The work will be performed in Stratford, Conn., with an estimated completion date of Nov. 30, 2014. The U.S. Army Aviation & Missile Command, Army Contracting Center, Redstone Arsenal, Ala., is the contracting activity (DAAH23-02-C-0006).
NASA crews are starting work this week on simulating underwater what it might take to send astronauts to land on an asteroid. The U.S. space agency says engineers and “aquanauts” will begin diving on the Aquarius Underwater Laboratory near Key Largo, Fla., to set up an asteroid-landing experiment there in October. The long lead time is necessary because so little work has been done on the idea of sending humans to asteroids, a target set by President Barack Obama for NASA’s human-exploration efforts beyond low Earth orbit.
NEW DELHI — India is slowly shifting its allegiance from its traditional arms suppliers in Russia toward other European firms. The country last month rejected Russia’s bid to sell India its MiG-35 fighter jets in the largest arms tender of this century. India also declined Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s bids for the $11 billion Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft contract. The final contenders to deliver 126 jets are the Rafale, made by France’s Dassault Aviation, and the Eurofighter Typhoon.
Northrop Grumman’s Firebird is a new approach to a market segment that has been dominated, up to now, by the General Atomics Predator/Reaper family and the Israel Aerospace Industry (IAI) Heron/Eitan. The biggest advantage of the new design could be easier integration of payloads. Firebird (Aerospace DAILY, May 9) has a payload architecture designed for “plug and play,” with a payload bay located on the center of gravity, making it less sensitive to payload mass.
ARMY Contrack International Inc., McLean, Va., was awarded on April 29 a $34,109,701 firm-fixed-price contract. The award will provide for the design and construction of an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance complex in Shindand, Afghanistan. The work will be performed in Shindand, Afghanistan, with an estimated completion date of March 12, 2012. Forty-one bids were solicited, with 11 bids received. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Middle East District, Winchester, Va., is the contracting activity (W912ER-11-C-0038).
GENOA, Italy — Finmeccanica is entering a new phase in the Italian aerospace and defense giant’s existence, aimed at generating stronger financial returns. Just how that will happen is something newly appointed CEO Guiseppe Orsi will try to devise in the coming three months.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Kennedy Space Center workers have installed and retested a new Loads Control Assembly-2 (LCA-2) box in space shuttle Endeavour, as well as replaced potentially faulty wiring between the electronics box and the auxiliary power unit (APU) heater that scrubbed the shuttle’s initial launch attempt on April 29.
The Dutch armed forces stopped operating a range of equipment May 9 under defense cuts announced a month ago. Nineteen of the Royal Netherlands Air Force’s 87 F-16s and all 14 Cougar transport helicopters were grounded, while 60 Leopard 2 tanks and four out of a total of 10 minehunting vessels were phased out. The Dutch chief of defense staff, Gen. Peter van Uhm, described the occasion as “a very sad day for Dutch Defense.”
The Pentagon may have terminated the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s alternate F136 engine made by General Electric and Rolls-Royce, but the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is making sure that the U.S. government keeps what it bought during the program, to allow for its future resurrection. The language appears to be one more step by HASC Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) to keep the GE engine program alive – even through a period of dormancy.
