June 2009 Archives

Northrop Grumman now has two flying prototypes for the MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned helicopter. The first, P6, flew a year ago and is dedicated to ship-based demonstrations. Meanwhile, a surprise Northrop press release issued about 15 minutes ago announced first flight of a second prototype, P7. (Sorry, the first flight photo won't be released until at least tomorrow.)

The latter prototype will be dedicated to the Fire Scout's land-based mission. It will demonstrate the range and capability of the surveillance mission, compliance with the US Army's AAI One ground control system and also emerging missions such as battlefield re-supply.

I also asked one of Northrop's Fire Scout executives in quick interview moments ago about competitive pressure. Boeing's A160 Hummingbird has been picked up by the US Special Operations Command and is being pitched to the US Marine Corps, among other operators. Does Northrop need P7 to keep the otherwise dormany army Fire Scout program competitive?

"If I told you it was independent [of competitive pressure] you'd say, 'You liar,' and there would be some truth to that," the Northrop executive said. "We're very pleased with the maturity and progress with the Fire Scout system. ... There's a maturity that's been achieved in the program others don't have."

Mandy Smithberger, an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, has posted the first summary of the F-22 stealth fraud lawsuit. She concludes: "If the allegations are true, the justification for the whole program may be in question."

Here's more:

This of course is not the first time that the real and practical capability of the stealth of the F-22 has come into question. Just last February, POGO reported that the maintenance requirements for the stealth capability significantly reduced the F-22's mission capability. As we said at the time, we believed that this may have been one of the primary reasons why then-Defense Department Acquisition Chief John Young said that the F-22's mission capable rate was too low to waste additional taxpayer dollars on further procurement.

Lockheed Martin has been sued by a former engineer who claims the company knowingly supplied defective stealth coatings for the F-22, according to the legal document posted below. I'm following up with the former engineer's attorney and Lockheed Martin for further comment.

[UPDATE 1: The lawsuit was filed by the attorney for Deepwater whistleblower Michael DeKort, who writes on CGreport.com that he helped Darrol Olsen file the lawsuit about the F-22.]

[UPDATE 2: I should note that Darrol Olsen and the attorney are seeking "all appropriate" damages. According to the whistleblower statute, that includes re-instatement and restored seniority, two times the amount of back pay lost plus interest and compensation for attorney's fees. Olsen says in the lawsuit he was dismissed by Lockheed in 1999 for "failure to follow instructions".]

[UPDATE 3: Olsen's attorney is traveling in Europe. I am holding off on a news story until I can speak with him. Check for updates here either later tonight or early tomorrow. So far, Lockheed Martin has no comment.]

[UPDATE 4: Click here to read Flight's news story. The document shown below is a draft copy of a lawsuit expected to be filed later this week. It was posted prematurely on the web by a consultant to Darrol Olsen's lawyer, Samuel Boyd.  
Olsen Complaint

This post is written by Will Horton, Flight's Washington, D.C. intern.

Sunday night the National Geographic channel premiers its documentary "Hitler's Stealth Fighter".

Hitler? Stealth? Fighter?

Modern stealth aircraft design did not start until the 1970s, but this documentary aims to find out if Nazis Germany developed stealth techniques three decades earlier.



In the Battle of Britain during the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe's advantage in numbers was matched only by Britain's use of radar technology. The Nazis knew of Britain's radar development, albeit not how far developed it was, and needed to re-gain their advantage.

Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Göring came into contact with aircraft builders and enthusiasts Walter and Reimar Horten. The Horten brothers, as they are known, wanted to build an aircraft that could fly with the "elegant efficiency of birds". They developed the 2-29 (also known as the HO IX), a tailless "wing flyer" that revolutionarily incorporated the engines within the fuselage, rather than have them protrude below wings.


This futuristic aircraft is described as being the "most exotic piece of machinery in Germany at the time" and having an "unearthly shape".

With the engines buried in the fuselage, exterior surfaces blended together, and plane constructed almost entirely out of wood (possibly to prevent radar from penetrating the skin, or possibly because Germany was facing a resource shortage), it's easy to look back on the 2-29 with hindsight and say the Horten brothers were developing a stealth fighter to subvert British radar, but we don't know for sure.

"Were they thinking of radar?" a Northrop Grumman employee asks. Northrop, best known for highly capable and ultra-modern defence products like its B-2 stealth bomber, decided to find out.

Teaming up with documentary producer Michael Jorgensen--who was fascinated by the 2-29--engineers in Northrop's model shop spent three months in 2008 building a full-scale model of the 2-29 to conduct the first ever radar deflection test. Of the two aircraft constructed during the war, one was never finished and the other crashed during a test flight.

At one hour with commercials, the documentary has a few repetitive moments. While the information and various interviews are excellent, it barely skims the surface of an aircraft it acknowledges could have had major consequences for the world. Those not aviation-inclined will likely find the program sufficient while others will want to know more.

The documentary follows the Northrop engineers build the model, almost entirely out of wood, true to the original. It is ironic to watch these engineers, who normally work on projects they "can't talk about", build a plane out of wood using primarily glue and nails to hold it together. You could be forgiven for starting the documentary mid-way and thinking it was about seventeenth-century shipbuilding.


But therein lies the fascinating part: this relatively unknown aircraft had the potential to change history. The Nazis planned to have an atomic bomb by 1946 and wanted to use it to strike America. Based on the 2-29's design, the Horten brothers developed the 18, an aircraft that would have six jet engines across its 142-foot wingspan (a 757's wingspan is only 124 feet). The 18 would presumably have been Germany's Enola Gay; the documentary's only farfetched moment is when it depicts a mushroom cloud erupting next to the Statue of Liberty.

The team finally takes the model to Northrop's radar cross-section test range in Tejon, California. Propped up on a five-story tall pole, the model is rotated while exposed to the same type of radar used by Britain during World War II.


The results (spoiler alert!) are scary. From the time most Luftwaffe planes appeared on British radar they could reach their target in 19 minutes. The 2-29, aided by its speed and stealth, could reach its target in only 8 minutes. "It would have been a game changer," one Northrop engineer says. The 2-29 would have permitted just 2.5 minutes to respond.

While the documentary's conclusion that the 2-29 pre-dated modern stealth capabilities by three decades is fascinating, equally so is the insight to so-called black programs and the people who work on them. "After 28 years working in the dark, it's nice to spend one day in the light," one engineer says of his time working on the 2-29 model. At the classified radar base, a man who tows the 2-29 model out of its hangar says without the slightest bit of laughter, "I've moved a lot of stuff, but I've never moved a German stealth fighter."

Presumably the "stuff" he has moved is top-secret and highly classified, the pride of the most sophisticated engineering programs in the world, the same programs that were thought to develop stealth technology.

"Hitler's Stealth Fighter" airs Sunday, June 28, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel in the US.

I've been calling around all day to find this out, but so far no luck. Maybe somebody reading the blog can help me. I am reliably informed that NAVAIR received six bids for the STUAS/Tier II contract when the solicitation period closed on 9 June. I know for a fact that bids came in from AAI Corp with the Aerosonde Mk 5, Boeing/Insitu with the Integrator and Raytheon/Swift Engineering with the KillerBee-4.

I strongly suspect bids were submitted from UAV Dynamics (a new General Dynamics/Elbit Systems joint venture) with an unknown aircraft and Aurora Flight Sciences (possibly partnered with Northrop Grumman) with the Golden-Eye 80.

So who is the mysterious sixth bidder? I have three guesses: BAE Systems with a recently acquired Advanced Ceramics Research aircraft, Lockheed Martin with a Skunk Works-developed vehicle or Stark Aerospace/Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI) with another aircraft.

Who wants to make a guess?

The Air Force Times' Sam LaGrone reports that a key Senate committee has authorized the Pentagon to spend $1.7 billion for 7 F-22s in Fiscal 2010.  A House committee last week authorized to Pentagon to spend $360 million to buy long-lead parts for 12. Both version still face a vote from the full House and Senate, then reconciled in a joint conference. The Senate's reported action comes a day after the Obama Administration threatened to veto the bill if more F-22s were added. Two Congressman from Massachusettes are also seeking to block F-22 funding in the House version of the bill.

READ THE FULL AIR FORCE TIMES ARTICLE HERE.

Canadian journalism students got access to Pentagon contract data after buying a possibly stolen Northrop Grumman hard drive in a market in Ghana, according to the CBC. Here's excerpts from the story below:

"You'd think a security contractor that constantly deals with very secret proprietary information would probably want to wipe their drives," [Blake] Sifton said Tuesday.

He visited Ghana for 10 days in February with classmates Heba Elasaad and Krysia Collyer and Prof. Dan McKinney while making the documentary Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground for an international reporting course.

...

Special skills or software weren't required to access the data, said Peter Klein, who teaches the international reporting course and supervised the documentary project.

"We plugged them in and started reading files .... They were just sitting there."

Northrop Grumman declined to be interviewed by the students, but said it was looking into how the hard drive got to the Ghanaian market, and asked the students to return it, which they did not.

The US Air Force today announced a $276 million contract that buys three Bombardier Global Express business jet and five powerful new communications relay systems.

The latter is the Northrop Grumman Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN). This payload is designed to translate data messages sent by radios with incompatible waveforms, perhaps alleviating one of the military's most persistently annoying problems. A BACN has even demonstrated the ability to link the F-22's exclusive intra-flight data link with non-stealthy aircraft, such as the E-3 AWACS.

Nothrop is required to install the payload on three Global Express jets and two RQ-4B Block 20 Global Hawks. This mini-fleet of communications relay aircraft must be ready for "sustained deployment through 2015".

The contract marks a major coup for Bombardier, which has previously sold the Global Express as a military aircraft only for the UK's R1 Sentinel ASTOR. Northrop had originally partnered with Gulfstream for BACN, but the partnership broke apart around the same time that Boeing and Gulfstream teamed up in a losing bid to win the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) deal.

The Obama Administration warned today in a memo to Congraess that the president could veto the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. The House Armed Services Committee has voted to extend F-22 production and keep the F136 engine in competition with the F135. But both of those issues could become deal-breakers for President Obama. The White House also objects to a previously unreported budget cut for the MQ-1C Sky Warrior (extended range/multipurpose) UAS, and raising the minimum strategic airlift fleet to 316 aircraft. But the veto threat is directly applied only to the F-22 and F136 programs. Stay tuned. 

READ WHITE HOUSE MEMO HERE.

(Hat tip to POGOBlog.)

Our beleaguered Flightglobal.com staffers have finally cleared a huge backlog of videos collected during the chaos of the Paris Air Show. Here's the interview I did with Lee Jackson, the design engineer for the Air Tractor AT-802U gunship.

Congressman Barney Frank will seek to overturn a narrow vote by the House Armed Services Committee to restore long-lead funding for 12 more F-22s in the Fiscal 2010 budget. In the recording above (courtesy of Think Progress), Franks says stopping the F-22 is a key test for controlling "excess" military spending. Says Franks: "If we can not hold the line on this then it's very bad news for trying to hold down any kind of excesses in military spending ... I guarantee you if they win this one they will be back for tens of billions more. It is a test." 

Two US Marine Corps officers, visibly frustrated, conferred on a live microphone only moments after Rep Edolphus Towns closed a 3hr hearing on the alleged failings of the MV-22 Osprey.

"This has been a waste of time," Col Karsten Heckl, recently returned from Iraqi duty, said. That drew a sharp response from Lt Gen George Trautman: "Calm down!"

But Heckl might be excused for his outburst.

Heckl was called to Capitol Hill to defend the V-22 before a panel of mostly hostile lawmakers, but this was a battle the combat pilot never had a chance to win.

The panel was armed with a recycled -- yet never completely refuted -- list of criticisms about the V-22's potential "idiosyncracies", a blistering attack on the tiltrotor by a former Pentagon insider, and a fresh Government Accountability Office (GAO) report unveiling new details about supply chain and parts reliability problems.

The GAO report listed 12 parts that expired within one-third of their promised lifetimes, driving the V-22's cost per flying hour up to $11,000. "That to us should be a major concern," Mike Sullivan, GAO's director of acquisition and sourcing management, told the panel. "They should be further down a design growth curve than they are today."

Except for the GAO report, the hearing could have happened 10 years ago.

That was when Rex Rivolo, formerly of the Institute for Defense Analysis, discovered the US Marine Corps lied about the V-22's ability to autorotate (it can't). Rivolo has spoken out publicly about his concerns only once -- Time magazine's infamous 2007 cover story about the V-22 -- but they haven't changed. If the FAA can't certify the airworthiness of the V-22 without an autorotation capability, marines shouldn't fly in it, Rivolo told the lawmakers.

Lack of autoration means that if there is a "power interruption everyone is guaranteed to die, and that is what we have in the V-22," said Rivolo, who also happens to be a premier art collector.

Both Trautman and Heckl steadfastly defended the V-22 operational performance, while acknowledging that parts reliability must improve.

After three years in Iraq, the USMC plans to deploy 12 V-22s -- armed with a new all-aspect, belly-mounted gun -- to the even harsher environment in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the $93 million MV-22 survived the first round of budget-cutting in the Pentagon earlier this year, but must hurdle the Quadrennial Defense Review next year.

The House Armed Services Committee is meeting again in a few minutes to reprise perhaps one of the shortest hearings on record. That event, shown above, ended within a few minutes of the call to order. It last just long enough for the committee chairman, Edolphus Towns, to accuse the Department of Defense of steam-rolling the committee's investigation on the BellBoeing V-22 program. More coverage to follow ...

US Joint Forces Command has emailed me a list of initiatives for next month's Empire Challenge exercise in China Lake. Empire Challenge is a proving ground for the latest US and allied spying (aka, ISR or recce) systems, with China Lake standing in for Afghanistan. Here are a few highlights of myterious code names from the list. Unfortunately, all they sent me were the code names. No descriptions. Can anybody help:

• Crosswave
• Cyberhawk
• FATCAT
• Liquid Fire
• PLUCKYROMP
• TWENTYGLOW
• Green Devil

As I reviewed my notebook from the Paris Air Show today, I can't believe I skipped over this tantalizing gem from Boeing's rotorcraft press conference.

The BellBoeing V-22 is in full-swing production, but Boeing's people at least are already looking beyond the Osprey configuration. In an answer to my question, Phil Dunford, Boeing's president for the rotorcraft division, even coined the 'V-23' designation for this theoretically improved tiltrotor.

Click on the jump below for the full transcript [courtesy of Boeing's Paris Air Show podcasts] of Dunford's comments about the 'V-23'.

Dave Majumdar's aerospace blog on examiner.com illuminates some stunning omissions in the US Air Force's upgrade plans for the Lockheed Martin F-22 fleet. My list of highlights from Dave's recent interview with the F-22 SPO:

 

1. The first 34 F-22s can not be upgraded with the Increment 3.1 air-to-ground and electronic attack and Increment 3.2 advanced air-to-air and networking upgrades.
2. The next batch of 63 F-22s will be upgraded to carry eight small diameter bombs, but they can only attack two targets at a time. These aircraft will never be able to fire high off bore sight missiles, which are swiftly becoming the standard for aerial combat.
3. The final batch of 91 aircraft are programmed to receive both the air-to-ground and advanced air-to-air hardware, but these do not include helmet-mounted cuing, also standard kit for latest-generation dogfighters.  

How do you know the KC-X tanker contract is back in competition? The Mobile Press-Register's editorial cartoonist is back on the case! As long as the tanker contract produces satirical art of this quality, may it never stop.

Witness my Paris Air Show web video reporting debut. It was recorded in a rush between a haze of interviews and deadlines late yesterday evening. Our web guru, Barbara Cockburn, and I recorded a few video interviews on the static line this morning, so look for video reports on the AT-802U, King Air 350ER and the PBY-5 Catalina a little bit later today.

Five random items from my notebook on a gloriously beautiful day at the Paris Air Show.

1. Boeing confirms the General Electric GEnx engine, among other GE and P&W products, is in the mix for both the its 767- and 777-based options for KC-X. The GEnx currently powers the 787 and 747-8.

2. Boeing has withheld go-ahead funding for the F-15 Silent Eagle, according to Tom Bell, VP for business development. First flight and the flight test phase remain unfunded pending a review of the business case for the F-15SE over the next four months, Bell says.

3. The P-3 has a g-limit of 3.6. Its replacement, the P-8A, has a g-limit of 2.1.

4. Raytheon has a new radar: It's called the APG-82. This is actually a very clever marketing maneuver. Raytheon is supplying the AESA for the F-15E. It's a repackaged front-end from an APG-79 and a back-end derived from the APG-63(V)3. But the US Air Force-supplied designation means Raytheon can boast a "newer" radar than the Northrop Grumman APG-81 flying on the Lockheed Martin F-35.

5. The core of the F136 alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is sized to grow from 43,000lb-thrust at first flight to 45,000lb-thrust. This is compared to the Pratt & Whitney F135, which recently demonstrated 41,000lb-thrust and is scheduled to grow to 43,000lb-thrust next year.

So many briefings, interviews and exhibits, so little time. Completely absorbing the fire hose of data coming at you every day is sometimes a futile struggle. I've filed about eight news stories today for the Flight Daily News, but only scratched the surface of my notebook. Here's a few random bits from today's news. (I snapped the photo above at daybreak on Sunday morning.)

1. Sukhoi is suddenly coy about the prospects for the first flight of the T-50 demonstrator by end-year. It was only a few months ago that Sukhoi CEO Mikhail Pogosyan confidently predicted the PAK-FA demonstrator would fly before 2010. Asked about that prediction today, he told reporters that Sukhoi would have more information about first flight at the Farnborough air show next July.

2. In a press briefing about Northrop Grumman's unmanned systems, a completely new aircraft design was pictured on one of the slides. I asked what it was. The Northrop executive identified the UAV as the "WildThing", a fan-in-wing-powered design aimed at the naval cargo market. That was interesting. A few hours later, Northrop notified reporters that it wasn't called "WildThing" after all. It is instead called the MUVR. Okay, so then what is WildThing? Northrop replies: "WildThing is a proprietary vertical-lift concept for fleet self-defense in small-deck shipboard operations".

3. Northrop Grumman is expecting a contract award for KC-X in March. So much for Secretary of Defense's Bob Gates' objective to sign a deal by the end of the year.

4. The next 90 days could be very interesting in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter flight test program. First, BF-1 and BF-2 return to flight. The first optimized conventional-takeoff-landing prototype, AF-1, will also fly within that timeframe. If Lockheed Martin can pull it off, the planned burst of activity would end a nearly 9-month-old lull in multi-aircraft flight test operations.

5. Two different companies -- Northrop Grumman and Raytheon -- are eyeing the concept of dramatically scaling-up same basic airframe design for the MQ-X role. Northrop calls it the Bat and Raytheon calls it the KillerBee, but both come from the same design by Swift Engineering. Raytheon's legal right to make this pursuit is a matter of dispute between the two companies.

Shooting cartoon rockets at an umbrella-wielding mime is a funny way to sell missile defenses, but that was clearly Rafael's concept for this Paris Air Show-themed marketing video. You can see this video playing on three screens outside their chalet. It is part of a running series of oddly-creative marketing stunts produced by Rafael for air show audiences. Few could ever forget this Bollywood ditty unveiled at Aero India earlier this year. Anticipating the Paris locale, I fretted that Rafael might stoop to can-can dancers or perhaps Les Miserables for inspiration. Instead, they took the unexpected Marcel Marceau route. 

This morning I interviewed Dennis Jarvi, head of military engine programs for Rolls-Royce. It was quite a newsy interview, as you'll see below. Here are 5 random data points from my notebook as I continue to write to report the news article.

1. The US Air Force is discussing changing the focus of the ADVENT engine program from the Next Generation Bomber to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Jarvi said. Introducing the variable-cycle ADVENT engine around 2020 with coincide with a potential mid-life upgrade for the F-35 airframe, he said. The 25% more fuel-efficient ADVENT engine is in competition between General Electric and Rolls-Royce, which are also partners on the F-35's current F136 alternate engine. The Air Force Research Laboratory rejected Pratt & Whitney's bid for the ADVENT contract in 2007.

2. Rolls-Royce is considering an all-new core in the 8,000shp-10,000shp thrust class to introduce after 2012, Jarvi said. Upgrading the 6,000shp AE2100/1107C also is being considered, he said. The timing in 2012 would support the Joint Future Theather Lift (JFTL) requirement and others around the world. "We have some time to work on it," he said.

3. The Lockheed Martin C-130H fleet is almost ready for a major engine upgrade, Jarvi said. The T56 3.5 upgrade program would reduce fuel consumption by 7% to 12%, or boost power for takeoff or lift, he said. The US Navy is also dicussing the upgrade for the T56 2.0-series powering the E-2C Hawkeye and P-3C Orion fleets.

4. Rolls-Royce is anticipating more than 100 orders for the RQ-4N Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) system, Jarvi said. The USN is buying from 48 to 68 aircraft, so the balance may come from foreign customers, including Australia and Japan, he said.

5. Rolls-Royce is eyeing a potential re-enginging need for the Boeing MH-47G delivered to US Special Operations Command, Jarvi said. 

The US Air Force has finalized the air-to-ground upgrade for the Lockheed Martin F-22, an historic milestone that makes the Raptor a truly multirole aircraft -- and perhaps does a bit more.

This tantalizing piece of news was buried deep inside a press release issued yesterday by the USAF, which focused on the award presented to the Increment 3.1 upgrade team.

The award-winning team finalized the 3.1 upgrade two months early, completing fit-checks on the new GBU-39 small diameter bomb and BRU-61 smart bomb rack, and installing the new air-to-ground mode on the Northrop Grumman APG-77 radar, the press release said.

Using fanstaticaly inscrutable language, the press release also discloses that the Increment 3.1 upgrade required 90,000 maintenance actions, which included installing 114 brackets, 167 wire harness assemblies and 418 pounds of  "replacement introduction package" for the AIM-120 missile's vertical ejection launcher.

Here's more interesting details:

Through their effort, the team modified 149 Raptors and performed 496 Increment 3.1 test points. They accomplished aircraft boom and rib structural upgrade, which extended the test aircraft's life, adding more than 5,000 flight hours. [Emphasis added].

The F-22 is designed to operate for 8,000 flight hours. I want to know if that structural life extension applies only to the test aircraft or the entire fleet.

[YouTube may still be processing the video. Please check back in a few minutes if the video is not available.]

Boeing's top tanker executive, Dave Bowman, briefed the news media today about his company's plans to compete for the KC-X tanker contract. Bowman's presentation was actually a preview of Boeing's tanker update next Tuesday for reporters at the Paris Air Show. This is Boeing's opening salvo in the marketing war between Boeing and the Northrop Grumman/EADS North America team in the third round of the KC-X competition. More details of Boeing's strategy will come out as the US Air Force and the Department of Defense refines its acquisition strategy for the tanker contract.

The US Army made noises last month about taking over the US Air Force's new MC-12W fleet. Yesterday, I interviewed Brig Gen Blair Hansen, director of ISR capabilities, about what's happening. Here's a few things I learned from the interview while I continue
to work on the news article. Below is a USAF briefing about the MC-12 from earlier this year.

1. The USAF is not giving up the 37 MC-12Ws, including 7 converted Hawker Beechcraft King Air 350s and 30 350ERs, currently in the program of record, Hansen said. Despite the army's interest, the MC-12Ws are an extension of the USAF's core mission of providing tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to troops on the ground, he said.

2. A USAF MC-12W will fly its first mission in a combat zone on Thursday, June 11, he said. (That's tomorrow if you're reading this today.)  The deployment progress has been slowed by the unexpected complexity of standardizing seven used aircraft into a single configuration.

3. Beyond the initial focus in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hansen said he believes the aircraft will also become useful in Africa and similar environments elsewhere in the world.

4. When the MC-12W capability is fully realized, Hansen said, the USAF anticipates having a trained corps of 1,000 pilots to conduct the mission. I asked Hansen if that implies a dramatic growth in the number of aircraft in the acquisition plan. He said the USAF needs to "test-drive" the MC-12Ws in combat before it makes any further budget decisions.

5. The joint ISR task force once considered -- but rejected -- leaving MC-12Ws in Afghanistan and transferring the surveillance fleet to Afghan forces. Hansen said the idea was shot down because it would be too expensive to remove the USAF's more sensitive communications and surveillance equipment installed on the aircraft.

Talk about your fishing stories!

Florida fisherman Solomon Rodney reeled in two apparently live AIM-9 missiles while fishing for grouper 785 feet below the surface about 50 miles south of Eglin AFB, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

One missile featured an active camera and appeared live, so Rodney let it go, the article says. The other one had a hole in the back and looked inert, so he tied it to the top of his boat and kept fishing for 10 days. It turns out that one was live, too.

It was 11 years ago when Insitu co-founder Tad McGeer received the telephone call that launched the unmanned air system that eventually became known as the ScanEagle.

Insitu had already demonstrated in 1998 that a low-altitude UAS could cross the Atlantic Ocean on a single flight. That one successful demonstration quickly attracted interest far beyond remote Bingen, Washington, the base for the then-small company of eight employees.

Insitu had traversed an ocean with an aircraft equipped to monitor weather data. But the flight raised what today may already seem a quaintly obvious question: instead of weather sensors, what if Insitu installed a camera in the nose of the air vehicle?

Pratt & Whitney is building capacity to produce a maximum of 120 F135 engines in 2016 to support the Lockheed Martin F-35 programme, Pratt & Whitney military executive Tom Farmer told my colleague John Croft last week.

I think that's an interesting data point as Congress debates the future of the F136, the General Electric and Rolls-Royce team's alternate engine.

We know that Lockheed plans to build about 240 F-35s in 2016.

This means P&W would need to dramatically increase production capacity if the F136 is canceled. This is a perhaps hidden cost if Congress fails to restore funding for the alternate engine.

On the other hand, if the F136 survives, P&W's projected output means the company is anticipating a 50-50 split at peak production levels. To me, that does not sound like a ringing endorsement of the competition strategy.

And the winner is ... The Philippine Star!

Air Force pounds MILF lairs with rockets

   

By James Mananghaya Updated June 08, 2009 12:00 AM

 

MANILA, Philippines - Air Force attack planes pounded yesterday the position of Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels in Guindulungan, Maguindanao, as fighting between government troops and guerrillas entered its fourth day, a military spokesman reported.

 

Lt. Col. Jonathan Ponce, spokesman for the Army's 6th Infantry Division, said SF 21 Marchetti planes conducted two bombing runs between 11 a.m. and 12 noon.

 

He said that scores of MILF rebels are believed dead because of the accuracy of the rockets fired from the Air Force planes.

(Thanks, 'Airpower'!)

The Air Tractor AT-802U is now en route from Olney, Texas, to Le Bourget, France, to be unveiled at the Paris Air Show, said Lee Jackson, design engineer.

Featuring an armoured fuselage, a 10hr loiter time and the ability to haul more than 8,000lb of payload, unarmed AT-802Us have been operated by the US State Department in South America since 2002 eradicating drug crops, Jackson said.

Air Tractor is now offering the weaponized AT-802U Air Truck to the US Air Force and other militaries to serve as a a trainer/light attack fighter. After its international debut in Paris, the PT6A-67F-powered turboprop will return to Olney for a series of wepaons and sensor integration trials, he said.

The AT-802U must overcome its stigma as an old-fashioned tail-dragger, but Jackson sees its lack of a tricycle landing gear as an advatange in the irregular warfare role. For lighly trained pilots forced to make hard landings on remote strips, the two main gears offer a great advantage, he said.

The aircraft may find its true niche in an operational setting like Afghanistan, he said. It's an interesting idea. The Afghans need a sturdy trainer and attack fighter. The ability to spray the Taliban's poppy fields might also come in handy.

Photos and promotional materials courtesy of Air Tractor

The US Air Force lost the F-22 and the Next-Generation Bomber in that last round of budget cut proposals, but not to worry! The USAF was quietly working on the Ford X-1 Super Car, which was unveiled earlier this week on AirForce.com. Really.

Wired.com's Autopia blog provides more insight:

Fighter jets and stealth bombers aren't the only things in the Air Force fleet that fly.

The Air Force enlisted Galpin Auto Sports to radically rework a Ford Mustang and Dodge Challenger to impress the kids. The cars are the stars of the "2009 Super Car Tour," a recruiting initiative that will hit high schools across the country to highlight career opportunities in the Air Force. Galpin is best known for the crazy customization antics on MTV's "Pimp My Ride," building KITT in the short-lived "Knight Rider" remake and creating that crazy Scythe scarab car awhile back.

This time around they've built a pair of wild machines that look more suited to aerial combat than dragstrip runs.

Well, at least the Swedes didn't succumb to cheap Bollywood theatrics to pitch a weapon system to India. Saab posted this video on their YouTube channel earlier today.

This is the third part of the transcript from yesterday's press conference with F-35 program chief Brig Gen Heinz. He had explained that his current models can not accurately project the benefits of a competitive engine war between the Pratt & Whitney F135 and the General Electric/Rolls-Royce F136. But I questioned his reasoning. Since the F135 and F136 are already funded, wouldn't the competitive benefits already be built into the baseline program? Click on the jump to read Heinz's reply.

ME: Is there anyway to calculate - and have you calculated - how those competitive benefits - you know, how it can improve that margin, and how many tails are you talking about, plus or minus?

 

HEINZ: There is no specific way. What happens is you have to make some number of assumptions. And the aussmptions are tha tcomep wil have some benefit. Now I think I will have some historic precedence, if you go back to the engines wars for the F-16. I think I can see from the timeframe of when there was no competition to the timeframe of the early years when it started there was almost a 20% price reduction. And so can I then translate that to what was the potential for f135 vs f136?  I don't know but at least we should some other assumptions. ... I do believe there will be a difference in benefits from competition. I can't tell you what that will be today.

This is part 2 of the transcript from the press conference yesterday with F-35 program chief Brig Gen David Heinz. This is what he has to say about the potential operational risk of eliminating the F136 alternate engine for the F-35 program.

HEINZ: In the future, should there be an engine incident on the F135, our ability to absorb an incident that may ground a large number of those motors, because I have type model series variance right now, is going to lessen.

 

I'm gong to replace a majority of the F/A-18s, F-16s [and] the Harriers with a single airplane. And so you don't have the operational flexibility with the various type model series that you enjoy today. So if the Harriers went down -- and they did for 11 months back in 2000 timeframe -- for an engine issue, you could absorb that with your F/A-18s. ... That becomes limited in the future with the F-35.

I'm posting the transcript of yesterday's press conference with Brig Gen David Heinz, the new head of the F-35 program. I'm breaking it up by issue. This part talks about a software glitch that arose during hover pit testing in April on BF-1, the first short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing prototype. Click on the jump to read this part in full .

HEINZ: Lockheed Martin is just starting to get back in the flight test program. BF-1 has just finished up a series -- it's going through a modification series right now. It's going to come out of that at end of this month.

 

And then we'll be in an eight-flight regression on the [inaudible] -- make sure the software on the flight controls is correct. That was a discovery from the pit that we actually had a correction factor for inlet - it's called the [inaudible] - that was off by 6%. In our flight control system, when you move the stick around, you're not commanding the airplane to just jiggle around in the air, you're actually commanding a rate and a position.

Brig Gen David Heinz, the F-35's new program executive, spoke to several reporters today about a wide range of program activities. Here are a few bits from my notebook while I continue to work on the news article.

1. Heinz said he believes that the benefits of an engine war may outweigh the $1 billion price tag to complete development of the GE/Rolls-Royce F136 engine. With the F-35 replacing the F-16, F/A-18C/D and AV-8B fleets, a safety-critical flaw in the F135 could pose an unacceptable operational risk. The 1980s engine war also produced a 20% price cut, and this could be repeated, he said. At the same time, Heinz also said that he "categorically supports" the DOD's FY10 budget request that eliminates funding for the F136.

2. The BF-1 prototype will fly in late June. It must complete eight check-out flights in Fort Worth to validate a software fix. Then it will qualify for aerial refuelling, and then ferry to NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, in August. There it will build down to its first pure vertical landing over 12 flgihts likely ending in late September or early October, Heinz said.

3. The flight test phase still has plenty of schedule margin. The 12-aircraft test fleet is budgeted to complete 12 sorties a month per aircraft. The flight test phase includes 5,000 flight test sorites and 10,000 flight hours, Heinz said. If test aircraft deliveries are further delayed, the program can add more sorties per month to complete testing on time, he said.

4. The BG-1 static test aircraft was delivered two months late, Heinz said. But BG-1's static tests are already back on schedule becauase modeling of the aircraft's expected performance exceeded predictions, he said. 

5. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' statement on 6 April that the F-35's FY10 request amounted to $11.2 billion was a mathematical error, Heinz said. The correct figure for the 30-aircraft buy is $10.4 billion, which was the number forwarded to Congress on 7 May. Heinz added that $800 million was not removed from the program. The $11.2 billion figure must simply have been the result of mistaken arithmatic by Gates' staff.

Rotor-heads, enjoy!

This is Lockheed Martin's latest patent filing for a new aircraft, and it completely stumps me. The patent document [see below] explains the "wings are directly driven by engines located at the wing tips. The aircraft incorporates large-span, high aspect ratio blades or wings that are joined at their outermost tips to improve the structural characteristics of the wings. ... The design enables vertical takeoff and landing capabilities, thus simplifying launch and recovery operations for the aircraft.

Interestingly, the publication of this patent filing on May 21 came only two weeks after a senior Bell Helicopter executive told me thinks Lockheed wants to jump back into the helicopter market (remember the Cheyenne?).

I don't say this very often, but I'm impressed.

It doesn't look like much, I admit. If the airframe looks familiar, then you recognize the CL-10A Snowgoose parafoil. The inventor -- Canadian-based MMist -- has replaced the parachute with a three-bladed gyro-head.

The renamed Sherpa, displayed at the Cansec trade exhibition in Ottawa last week, joins a field of far more sophisticated competitors for the emerging cargo re-supply mission using unmanned aircraft. Its rivals include the Lockheed Martin/Kaman K-Max, Northrop Grumman Fire Scout, Boeing Unmanned Little Bird and Boeing YMQ-18A (formerly A160) Hummingbird.

The Sherpa's lack of sophistication is what impresses me. It's a vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft that lacks a true engine, drive system and gearbox. Yet, the Sherpa might haul a 325-pound load of cargo up to 100km, and return to base. Any of its competitors easily costs $5 million per aircraft, but MMist is offering to sell two Sherpa's for $1.3 million total.

The US Army has been skeptical that the costs and complexity of routinely re-supplying troops using unmanned aircraft could out-weigh the potential benefits. I wonder if the Sherpa might change their minds.

But it's not clear the Sherpa will be a contender for even the US Marine Corps' ongoing competition for an "immediate cargo UAS". The USMC wants to start deploying the aircraft in February. The Naval Research Laboratory is funding MMist's development of the Sherpa, but it won't be ready for a first flight until at least early 2010.

Making the Lockheed Martin F-22 appear at the Paris Air Show can't be easy to pull-off. The show is a marketing opportunity. If the F-22 isn't for sale, apparently even in the United States, why put it on display? So it's not a huge surprise -- although it is truly a pity -- to read the US Air Force has withdrawn the F-22 from the show. (Nice reporting by Amy Butler on the Ares blog, by the way.)

However, I do wonder if other motivations may have been involved. A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about the F-22 making a debut international appearance at the 2007 Paris Air Show. That didn't happen either.

For decades, the Pentagon has been concerned about French espionage inside the US aerospace industry. These concerns reached a head after the landmark 1991 Paris Air Show, which featured an appearance by the Lockheed F-117 stealth fighter. Two years later, the Clinton Administration boycotted the appearance of any US military aircraft at the show apparently over concerns about French spying. [Read a New York Times article about the episode.]

There have been many rumors about what happened on that fateful F-117 trip. It was long before my time. If anybody here remembers or was there, please share.

This is Lockheed Martin chief test pilot Jon Beesley dissecting the Sukhoi Su-30's most jaw-dropping air show maneuver. Obviously, Beesley is paid by Lockheed to have a certain perspective on this issue, but his remarks ring true.

Incindentally, I'm finally back in the office after three weeks of near-non-stop travelling. I'm cleaning out a huge inbox, but I'll be getting back to regular posts and updates shortly.