John Garrison, president and CEO of Bell Helicopter said: “We are deeply proud to be the marine corp’s partner in these aircraft. They are among the most advanced, capable and affordable attack and utility helicopters serving today.”

The UH-1 Helicopters have a strong lineage of military service that started in the Army back in 1958. Popularly known as the “Huey,” the Marines Corps first use these during the Vietnam War in 1963, as the UH-1E. The Huey helicopters are also the foundation for the AH-1Z Cobra attack helicopters.

Bell Helicopters has the help of major supplier to make the H-1 helicopters. Northrop Grumman supplies the integrated avionics suite while Thales provides the helmet mounted sight and display system. Lockheed Martin Orlando supplies the AH-1Z target sight system (TSS), FLIR Inc. with the UH-1Y BRITE Star II forward-looking infrared sensor, the UH-1Y cabin structure is provided by L-3 Crestview Aerospace, and the T700 engines are from General Electric Aviation.

Apart from the U.S. Marine Corps, Bell Helicopter is also planning to supply their helicopters to foreign military.

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News Source: www.verticalmag.com

The program is called the VXX, it aims to acquire up to 23 helicopters for the presidential fleet, with the first unit expected to enter service in 2020. The U.S. Navy is looking for a proven design as the basis for the VXX.

An old VXX program was cancelled in 2009 because of massive cost and schedule overruns. Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin were the foremost competitors in the old program. But Lockheed will not compete in the new program, but will collaborate with Sikorsky instead.

Sikorsky intending to offer a helicopter based on S-92 model. Interested bidders include Boeing, which is basing a design on its H-47 twin rotor helicopter, Agusta Westland who is partnering with Northrop Grumman, which is proposing a variant of its AW101 helo.

The current fleet of presidential helicopters is composed of Sikorsky made VH-60N “Night Hawks” and VH-3D “Sea Kings.” Most of the helicopters have been in service since the 1940s.

The presidential helicopter is under the service of the U.S. Marine Corps, giving the chopper that carries the president the popular call sign “Marine One,” but the procurement and handling of the aircraft falls under the jurisdiction of the Navy.

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News Source: www.defensenews.com

The Multi-Mission Combatant is a modular vessel that can be very fast and exceed the speed of 40 knots. It is a powerful vessel that can be ran by a smaller crew compare to the similar ship models the U.S. Navy currently have on its fleet. It can be the next generation surface warship for international navies as it can deliver maximum firepower that are capable of meeting current as well as future operational requirements.

“The resurgence of piracy, and threats to open trade and commerce, along with the need for nations to protect sovereign shorelines, requires a ship class capable of multitasking without compromising mission effectiveness in complex security environments,” said Joe North, vice president of Littoral Ship Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Mission Systems & Sensors business. “Our proven multi-mission design offers a formidable combatant with less cost, less risk and lower manning requirements, resulting in a ship that can be efficiently and affordably adapted for a variety of combat and humanitarian missions.”

The ship is designed to adapt to different missions such as anti-air, mine countermeasures, anti-surface, anti-submarine and electronic warfare. It is capable for counter-terrorism activities, anti-piracy missions, special operations missions, maritime interdiction and humanitarian relief operations.

The Multi-Mission Combatant ship is a promising follow-up to Littoral Combat Ship program. So far, two LCS are in the Navy fleet, two more are in production, and another pair will be made under the contract.

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News source: www.stockhouse.com

The F-16 is considered the best combat airplane of the jet age. It is the foremost warplane of the United States Air Force and 25 other nations. The 4500^th plane is bound for Morocco. Almost half of all the F-16 that was built was ordered by foreign nations.

“It’s the best air-to-air fighter. Then it proved to be the most adaptable plane for ground attack missions as well,” said Pierre Sprey, a former civilian weapons analyst in the Pentagon.

Apart from its capabilities, the F-16 stands out for being a low-cost and problem-free program. Unlike other jet programs like F-35 jet fighter, the F-16 was designed and built quickly, passed performance test readily and did not suffer from technical delays or cost overruns. It is a simple and inexpensive plane that was very capable of doing its job.

The F-16 is also very significant to the economy of the community around Fort Worth. The plant employs thousands of employees who had built their career and raised their families thanks to F-16. Small business have thrived by supplying components and services to Lockheed and General Dynamics.

The success of the F-16 program is a source of great pride from the men who first conceptualized it and to every hand that worked on an F-16 jet plane.

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News source: www.star-telegram.com

For this mission, the F-35A carried an air-to-air AIM-9X missiles on the outboard wing stations. It also flew with two internal 2,000 pounds guided bombs (GBU-31) and two advanced medium range air-to-air missiles (AIM-120) located in the two internal weapon bays of fighter jet. Four external pylons that can carry 2,000 pounds air-to-ground weapons were additionally mounted to the F-35. However, no weapons were launched during the mission.

The F-35 is a 5^th generational multi-role fighter by Lockheed Martin and part of the Joint Strike Fighter family. It is part of the US Air Force most expensive defensive program.

The F-35 was designed to carry up to a maximum of 18,000 pounds load. It has ten weapon stations – four of them are in two internal weapons bay and the other six are located on the wings.

source: www.defensetalk.com, www.dailytech.com

The AESA radar will allow the F-16V to broadcast radio signals that are spread out among different frequencies that will make it difficult to detect over background noise. It allows the fighter jet to send powerful signals while remaining stealthy. Lockheed Martin has also developed a process to install AESA radars on existing F-16s on lesser costs.

F-16V is latest evolution of the F-16 Fighting Falcon. The “V” stands for viper, the nickname that pilots from the US Air Force gave the Fighting Falcon for its resemblance to TV show Battlestar Galactica’s Colonial Viper Starfighter. It had come a long way from the earlier incarnations of F-16. The first versions were F-16A (one seat) and F-16-B (two seat). Enhancements like improved cockpit avionics and all-weather capability were made in F-16C/D. Other versions like F-16IN and F-16IQ is also in operation.

The US Airforce had been using the F-16 since 1978 and over 4,450 units have been built. The F-16 will remain in service until 2025. The US Air Force no longer order units of F-16, but Lockheed Martin continues to produce the aircraft for other countries that operate the Fighting Falcon like Italy, Denmark, South Korea, Israel and Pakistan.

Source: www.gizmag.com

“It should not have been done,” Kendall told an audience Feb. 6 hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But we did it.”

Then-procurement chief Kenneth Krieg approved the first lot of production in 2006. The contract for long-lead articles came in April 2006 for low-rate initial production Lot 1, and that aircraft rolled off of the production line in 2008.

At the time, program executives, including the incoming director of the program, Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Davis, argued that swift entry into production was of paramount importance to aggressively ramp up production numbers quickly, thereby attaining a low per-unit cost as quickly as possible.

Davis, now a three-star general, commands the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Center, which has oversight of such key programs as the Multi-Platform Radar Technology Insertion Program and the next-generation space surveillance fence. He and Lockheed Martin executives also contended that the use of new modeling and design tools dramatically diminished the likelihood of major problems being discovered in flight testing that could prompt a costly redesign.

Kendall, who is the acting procurement czar awaiting Senate approval, takes issue with that view.

“What we are seeing is that the optimistic predictions when we started the production of the F-35—that we now have good enough design tools and good enough simulation and modeling that we wouldn’t have to worry about finding things in test—were wrong,” Kendall said. “We are finding problems in all three of the variants that are the types of things, historically in a state-of-the-art, next-generation fighter aircraft, you are going to find, where our design tools are not perfect.”

These include so-called structural hot spots on all three F-35 variants that have yet to be fully understood or addressed. Today, the program has achieved only 20% of its flight-test program, and Pentagon procurement officials have sharply reduced the purchase numbers in recent years to curtail the potential of discovering major problems in testing that would cause a redesign and retrofit of a growing fleet.

This problem, dubbed “concurrency,” is frustrating senior Pentagon leaders because of its unknown scope. During an interview last year with Aviation Week, JSF program executive Vice Adm. David Venlet said the real risk of encountering major concurrency cost is retired around 2015 if testing goes as planned.

Meanwhile, after contentious discussions last year, he and Lockheed Martin executives agreed to equally split the cost of any concurrency modifications for low-rate-initial-production Lot 5 aircraft. This was the first such arrangement in the program and sets the precedent for burden sharing moving forward.

Despite institutional frustration at the Pentagon over the concurrency problem, Kendall says, “We don’t, at this point, see anything that would preclude continuing production at a reasonable rate.”

Testing, however, is not without its hiccups. After a grounding of six F-35 test aircraft at Edwards AFB, Calif., owing to poorly packed ejection seat parachutes, the Joint Program Office (JPO) announced that AF-1 resumed flying Feb. 3.

The aircraft were grounded because personnel at seat-maker Martin Baker installed some parachutes backward. The “head-box assembly” for AF-1 was installed the morning of Feb. 3 and a crew flew later in the day, JPO spokesman Joe Dellavedova says.

Three more head-box assemblies were expected to be delivered over the weekend and are slated for installation. The F-35 test jets are the first slated to undergo the fix, with the nine training aircraft at Eglin AFB, Fla., next in line. Training operations there have not been affected as the Air Force has not yet given the nod to conduct those flights yet.

-aviationweek.com

With large-scale wind tunnel testing completed, Lockheed is fabricating a shipset of winglets for flight testing on a C-130 in 2012. The modification could be available for both retrofit and forward-fit by early 2014.

Computational analysis and small-scale tunnel tests have been completed on the C-5 winglets. Large-scale tunnel tests are planned for 2012, leading to flight tests in 2014 “if the customer is interested,” says Jack O’Banion, director of advanced development programs at Lockheed’s Marietta, Ga., plant.

The 5-ft.-tall winglets are projected to reduce cruise fuel flow by 170 lb./hr. on the C-130J and “probably more” on older versions of the Hercules, he says. They are designed to be fitted to any C-130 with the beefed-up “enhanced service life” center wingbox. This has the extra structural margin to accommodate winglet-induced bending loads.

Winglets for the C-5M are 6 ft. tall and projected to reduce cruise fuel flow by 1,100 lb./hr. This is on top of the 8-20% improvement in fuel efficiency that comes with re-engining of the C-5 with General Electric CF6-80C2 high-bypass turbofans, O’Banion says, adding that the wing already has sufficient margin to accommodate the winglet loads.

Lockheed Martin in August flight tested an aft-body drag-reduction modification on the C-130. This comprises a series of 36 vortex generators mounted on the aft fuselage. These “microvanes” alter the aft-body flowfield to pull the underbody vortex closer in and reduce base drag, he says.

Results are still being analyzed, but indications are the microvanes will reduce total drag by up to 3.7%, O’Banion says, for a fuel-consumption reduction of 2-3%. No significant changes in aircraft handling have been observed, he says.

The vortex generators, mounted in rows on the aft fuselage on either side of the rear loading ramp, are planned to be available by the end of 2012 for forward-fit and retrofit to the C-130J and earlier Hercules.

Another fuel-saving modification being studied for older C-130s is an upgrade to the latest Series 3.5 version of Rolls-Royce’s T56 turboprop, coupled with Hamilton Sundstrand’s NP2000 eight-blade propeller.

For the C-5, Lockheed also is working on a drag cleanup that is expected to improve fuel efficiency by 2-3%. This would include new seals on the flight controls to minimize aerodynamic leaks that cause drag; and new seals in the pressurization system to reduce bleed-air demand on the engines and thus improve their fuel efficiency.

In addition, equipment installed on the C-5s over time — such as defensive systems — would be cleaned up to reduce parasitic drag. “We are in the process of laying out a detailed program for the Air Force, including the business case and potential benefits,” O’Banion says.

The C-130 and C-5 drag reductions are part of an initiative by the U.S. Air Force to cut its fuel consumption. Other elements include drag cleanups on the Boeing C-17 and KC-10 and engine upgrades on the KC-135.

-aviationweek.com

Iraq has signed a contract to buy 18 Lockheed Martin F-16 warplanes to bolster its air force, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday.

The value of the F-16 deal was not immediately known, but a senior U.S. military official said recently the offer on the table for the Iraqi government was valued at “roughly $3 billion.”Lockheed said in a statement it looked forward to a partnership with Baghdad and was “pleased with the confidence Iraq places in our products.” It declined to comment on the specifics of the deal, referring questions to the Iraqi and U.S. governments.

“The F-16 contract was signed … and a part of the contract cost was sent to the bank account of the company,” said Maliki’s media adviser, Ali al-Moussawi.

Iraq has long sought F-16 combat jet for its rebuilt air force. The government delayed a planned purchase of F-16s in February to divert a $900 million down payment to its national food ration program to help quell street protests.

Maliki said on July 30 Iraq would buy 36 F-16s, double the number it had originally planned, to shore up its weak air defenses. The OPEC producer has found itself flush with cash this year, reaping windfall profits as world oil prices have remained above budget projections.

Iraq is relying on the U.S. military for air support as it rebuilds its forces and battles a stubborn Islamist insurgency. Washington and Baghdad are discussing whether to keep some U.S. troops or military trainers in Iraq beyond the year-end deadline for U.S. departure.

Source: Reuters

The Obama administration has committed to deciding by Oct. 1 whether to allow the sale of 66 Lockheed Martin Corp. F-16 jets to Taiwan, according to an aide to Sen. John Cornyn.

China opposes U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province, and has tried to block sales of the F-16 airplanes to the island. Taiwan President Ma Ying-Jeou has pressed the U.S. to speed up decision on the jets.

Taiwan’s request for F-16 C/D model jets has been pending since 2006 and upgrades of its older F-16 A/B models have been on hold.

The U.S.-Taiwan Business Council said the timing of the decision “suggests that the Obama administration has no intention” of approving the sale of new F-16 jets. The date is sandwiched between Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to China in August and Chinese President Hu’s expected trip to Hawaii, the group said.

“It doesn’t seem plausible that the Obama administration would stand up for Taiwan policy in the face of two such senior visits from China,” the group said in a news release.

Source: Bloomberg