The Mission Integration and Development (MIND) program, a secretive effort by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to integrate imagery from multiple aircraft and satellites, is now up and running, according to a Washington think-tank. In a Feb. 27 "issue brief" posted on its website, the Lexington Institute revealed that the MIND system quietly began operations on Dec. 15.
The U.S. Air Force is nearing completion of a formal assessment to determine whether the aging C-5A Galaxy fleet should be retired, a service representative said March 1. The Air Force Fleet Viability Board (AFFVB) began the review Oct. 1 (DAILY, Oct. 17, 2003) and hopes to finish it by the end of March, said Col. Francis Crowley, director of the board. Once the assessment is completed, the findings will be presented to the Air Force secretary and chief of staff for their consideration.
CenGen, a consulting company for satellites and wireless networks, will provide a real-time tracking system for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Grand Challenge, a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas race of autonomous unmanned ground vehicles. Six to eight communications support contractors are working under CenGen on the March 13 race.
The Department of Defense (DOD) has awarded Boeing two contracts for the production and integration of the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) that total about $857 million, the company announced March 1. The first contract, worth $642 million, is for the production of 32,000 JDAM Lot 8 guidance kits for the U.S. Air Force and Navy. To be delivered by February 2006, the kits will convert 500-, 1000-, and 2000-pound unguided bombs from the military inventory into GPS-guided "smart weapons," according to Boeing.
The U.S. Department of Defense will send Congress "relatively soon" a proposed budget amendment that would take money that had been allocated to the canceled RAH-66 Comanche helicopter program and use it to modernize and buy more than 2,000 military aircraft, the department's comptroller said March 1.
DRS Technologies Inc. will design, integrate and manufacture an Altitude Hold and Hover Stabilization (AHHS) system for U.S. Air Force MH-53M Pave Low Helicopters, the company announced March 1. The AHHS system is installed on Air Force HH-60G Pave Hawk Rescue Helicopters.
PRAGUE, Czech Republic - BAE Systems has been selected as avionic systems integrator for two prototype Mi-24 helicopter upgrades in Poland. Polish officials announced Feb. 26 that they had chosen Polish company WZL1 as the prime contractor for the modernization project, which marks the first time the Russian-built helicopter will have been brought up to NATO standards.
NEW DELHI - Indian air force sources say a trigger built by the state-owned Armament Research and Development Establishment (ARDE) could have played a role in the recent crashes of two fighter aircraft. A Jaguar crashed Feb. 26 and a MiG-23 crashed Feb. 6, both in the Pokhran region of Rajasthan, where India has tested its nuclear weapons. Sources said the events leading to the crashes were similar for both aircraft and suggest a problem occurred when the pilots tried to press triggers to release live ammunition. Both pilots were killed.
The first critical design review (CDR) for the Defense Department's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been delayed from April 2004 to sometime in 2005 to give the program more time to fix the aircraft's weight problems, according to an industry source.
FLAWED PROCESS: House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) says a new General Accounting Office report raises concerns about the U.S. Commerce Department's post-shipment verification (PSV) process. The system is meant to prevent overseas misuse of sensitive dual-use technologies, but the report found deficiencies in the system.
GRIPEN SPECULATION: The Czech defense ministry has described as "speculation" a newspaper report claiming that talks with Sweden over the lease of 14 new JAS-39 Gripen fighters have run into trouble, mainly over the issue of offsets. The daily Pravo, quoting unnamed sources close to the negotiations, reported last week that the Swedish side has demanded that an agreement on offsets remain separate from any lease agreement.
EUROPE'S CHALLENGE: The European Union's (EU) Vision 2020 plan for becoming the world leader in aviation by 2020 is bearing visible fruit, according to Clayton Jones, president and CEO of Rockwell Collins. "They put their money where their mouth was in the form of the EU's Sixth Framework program, which dedicated significant research and development dollars to all of the European Union countries to ... advance the state of the art in a number of R&D areas," Jones says.
TANKER FATE: Although it may seem counterintuitive that the U.S. Air Force would go ahead with a plan to acquire 100 new Boeing KC-767A tankers now that it has been told by the acting Pentagon acquisition chief to conduct a broad, 18-month study of its need to modernize or replace several hundred KC-135 tankers (DAILY, Feb. 27), the 100-aircraft deal is still "pretty well-assured of going ahead" in the next few months, says Richard Aboulafia, an aviation consultant at the Teal Group.
Intelsat Government Solutions (IGS) Corp., which was formed last year to focus Intelsat's government and military business, is poised to grow both organically and through acquisitions over the next few years, according to IGS President Susan Miller.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) expressed concern last week that not enough U.S. Air Force communications systems have been available to determine where and when Iraqi insurgents have been placing improvised explosive devices (IEDS) along roadways to injure or kill U.S. and coalition forces. "The point of damage to American forces right now resides in these IEDS that are going off in the roadways. It's become the weapon of choice for the bad guys," Hunter said at a House Armed Services hearing on the Air Force's $98.5 billion fiscal 2005 budget request.
March 2 - 5 -- Via Satellite presents Satellite 2004, "New Momentum, New Opportunities, New Profits," the new Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C. To register, go to http://www.satellite2004.com/. March 8 - 9 -- Aviation Week presents European Transport Leaders Conference. Merrill Lynch Headquarters, London. To register go to http://www.aviationweek.com/conferences. March 10 - 11 -- Aviation Week presents Toulouse Symposium, Toulouse Congress Center, France. To register go to http://www.aviationweek.com/conferences.
A U.S. military center charged with studying lessons learned from recent operations is developing a "mechanism" for ensuring those lessons are implemented. The Joint Center for Lessons Learned, which is located at Suffolk, Va., and is part of U.S. Joint Forces Command, is drafting a document that would set up a process for "translating lessons learned into lessons acted upon," said Army Brig. Gen. Robert Cone, the center's director, who spoke Feb. 27 at a Heritage Foundation conference on defense transformation.
GALILEO AGREEMENT: The United States and the European Commission (EC) have reached agreement on "most of the overall principles of GPS/Galileo cooperation" and now have only a few legal and procedural issues left to resolve, according to a joint statement. Among other issues, the U.S.
