BENGALURU, India — India’s largest defense manufacturer, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL), is in talks with the U.K.’s BAE Systems on various projects related to Hawk Advanced Jet Trainers. HAL is currently licensed by BAE to produce the Hawk in India for the Indian military. Possible future projects include establishing a maintenance, repair and overhaul base for Hawks worldwide, building a worldwide supply chain and making India the center for exporting the Hawk in the long term, Aviation Week has learned.
Waleed Abdalati will become NASA’s next chief scientist, a post that has gone unfilled since 2005. Abdalati currently serves as director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He will retain that position when he begins his duties at NASA, according to an agency spokesman. The appointment is effective Jan. 3, NASA said Dec. 13.
LONDON — The Netherlands expects to ramp up production spending for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter significantly in 2014, according to budget projections submitted to parliament.
LONDON — The Russian government still hopes to launch the first in a new generation of Glonass precision navigation and timing satellites this year. The initial Glonass-K arrived Dec. 12 at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, where it will undergo checkout before being mated with a Soyuz-2 launcher. The spacecraft is designed for longer in-orbit life and enhanced performance, the Russian defense ministry says. It will be the first launch of a Glonass from Plesetsk.
LONDON — The British Defense Ministry should include in its budget an unallocated amount of funding that could be used to cover unexpected bills and thereby limit disruptions throughout the spending plan. In its latest review of defense financial management, Parliament’s public accounts committee again laments the lack of discipline in how budget decisions are made.
ACCEPTED: The Pakistan air force completed acceptance of 18 Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 52s on Dec. 13. Deliveries to the Shahbaz Air Base began in June. Precision attack is one of the key capabilities of the new fighters. “The F-16s have proved to be a game-changer in our fight against extremism and terrorism,” Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman says. The fighter has enabled precision strikes “with negligible or no collateral damage when employed in South Waziristan, Swat, Bajaur, Orakzai and Kurram agencies of [the federally administered tribal areas].”
StandardAero “is not on the auction block, per se,” according to a company spokesman, despite a Reuters report that set off a flurry of speculation that Dubai Aerospace Enterprise (DAE) might sell the engine MRO provider. Mike Turner, StandardAero’s director of marketing and corporate communications, says DAE has not told the company it plans to sell the large, independent MRO, which generated revenues of around $1.4 billion in 2008 and 2009.
BENGALURU, India — Bengaluru-headquartered Bharat Electronics Ltd. (BEL) and Danish company Terma have signed a strategic memorandum of agreement (MoA) to cooperate in various fields of defense technology. BEL Design Director I.V. Sarma confirms to Aviation Week that the MoA primarily will focus on offsets and other general business in electronics. “It is a very general MoA and we would want Terma to pass on their offset works to us,” Sarma says. “Both companies also are eager to work together in the fields of advanced electronics.”
The first launch of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy from the reconfigured Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., is set for Jan. 11 carrying the classified L-49 payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. The liftoff time is not expected to be announced until five days before the launch.
PARIS — Eumetsat officials say the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has signaled its intention to play a role in the next follow-on mission in the Jason/Topex-Poseidon altimeter satellite program. This mission, known as Jason CS, will use a satellite bus based on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cryosat, instead of the French Proteus bus used in previous flights, marking the transformation of the French part of the Franco-U.S. program into a European initiative.
As the U.S. Army briefs defense firms on why they lost a lucrative intelligence collection aircraft program, industry executives are weighing whether to protest Boeing’s win. Boeing’s acquisition of Digital Receiver Technology (DRT), a small Maryland firm focusing on building signals intelligence (sigint) equipment, was a discriminator in the company’s recent win of a U.S. Army intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) collector for use in Afghanistan, says Roger Krone, who leads the company’s Network and Space Systems sector.
GSAT LAUNCH: The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) plans to loft GSAT-5 on its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-F06) powered by a Russian cryogenic engine on Dec. 20. Also known as Insat 4D, the 2,400-kg. (5,300-lb.) satellite features 24 regular C-band and 12 extended C-band transponders, and a design life of 12 years. It will be launched from India’s spaceport at Sriharikota. Earlier this year, GSAT-4, the 19th geostationary satellite built by ISRO and the fourth in the GSAT series, failed to reach orbit because the GSLV-D3 malfunctioned.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program has passed its 394-flight-test target for 2010, although testing of the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (Stovl) variant continues to lag behind plans. Lockheed Martin logged the 394th flight of the year on Dec. 6, taking the program total to 531 since the initial flight on Dec. 15, 2006. JSF development will involve more than 5,000 test flights.
CARGO HANDLING: NASA has selected Lockheed Martin for a potential seven-year, $171 million contract to prepare and pack personal items and small equipment for astronauts, including clothing and laptop computers, for transport to the International Space Station aboard Russian, European, Japanese and U.S. commercial spacecraft. Announced Dec. 10, the three-year, $85 million base agreement with a three-month phase-in period begins Jan. 1. The agreement includes an option for four one-year extensions beginning on April 1, 2014.
As the Pentagon continues to hone its irregular warfighting capabilities, lawmakers must consider how best to split U.S. Navy budgetary and other resources for those conflicts with future service military needs, the Congressional Research Service advises. “The Department of Defense (DOD) is placing an increased planning and budgeting emphasis on irregular warfare (IW) operations, such as counterinsurgency operations,” noted the CRS report, titled “Navy Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism Operations: Background and Issues for Congress.”
ARMY Caterpillar Inc., Defense and Federal Products., Mossville, Ill., was awarded on Dec. 3, 2010, an $18,031,049 firm-fixed-price contract for a total of 84 924H light loaders with a kit and 26 forklift attachments. The work is to be performed in Clayton, N.C., with an estimated completion date of Dec. 4, 2015. Bids were solicited via FedBizOpps/World Wide Web with five bids received. U.S. Army TACOM, Warren, Mich., is the contracting activity (W56HZV-05-D-L242).
AIR FORCE DCG Systems Inc., Fremont, Calif., was awarded a $13,259,716 contract which will provide a logic analysis tool program to investigate new methods for the functional testing of a circuit to include logic states and timing of individual transistors and internal nodes of an integrated circuit. At this time, $3,554,000 has been obligated. AFRL/PKDA, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (FA8650-11-C-7105).
The U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the U.S. Navy’s plan to split its Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) acquisition between contractors could cost more than the service says it will, although service officials say the strategy is the best way to buy the ships. Further, Navy officials point out, CBO’s estimates fail to take into account the lower costs cited by contractors in their most recent offerings.
PARIS — A Russian state commission investigating the Dec. 5 Proton M Block DM launch failure has ruled out the Proton M launch vehicle as the cause of the incident, which destroyed three Glonass navigation satellites. The interim report — issued on Dec. 10, five days after the commission was convened — found that the three lower Proton M launcher stages, supplied by Proton prime contractor Khrunichev, performed nominally, and that the functioning of launch vehicle systems and assemblies raised “no issues.”
HURST and ARLINGTON, Texas, and LOS ANGELES — The Northrop Grumman/Bell Helicopter Fire-X demonstrator achieved first flight Dec. 10 in Yuma, Ariz., just days after arriving there for flight testing, according to officials on the program team. This is a major step toward the two teammates entering the evolving and potentially lucrative market of unmanned rotorcraft for cargo carriage or intelligence collection. Northrop approached Bell and crafted the jointly funded project in early 2010 with the goal of flying within a year.
