All Fixed-Wing news – Page 1299
-
News
Arming from the inside
CHALLENGING WEIGHT and cost goals have been met by the F-22's armament-system design team while ensuring that the aircraft ultimately will be able to perform missions other than air superiority. The first of those extra missions, near-precision strike using the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), already has been added to ...
-
News
Testing for combat
DEMONSTRATING THAT he F-22 is at least twice as effective in combat as the F-15, as required by contract, will require a combination of wargaming, simulation and flight testing. Computer modelling is being used to develop a statistical basis for the comparison, with almost 1 million simulated engagements already ...
-
News
Ten years after Lavi
Ovadia Harari has come a considerable distance in the decade since the Israeli Government dumped the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI)Lavi fighter project. Then project manager on the Lavi, Harari is now general manager of IAI's military aircraft group. Both Harari and IAIhave moved on since the decision was ...
-
News
Lockheed 'can claw back' Raptor cost
Lockheed Martin is confident that it can contain the price of the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor air-superiority fighter, despite warnings from the US Department of Defense (DoD) that the US Air Force faces additional costs running into billions of dollars. F-22 programme manager Tom Burbage says cost-cutting initiatives ...
-
News
KTX-II funding frozen as delays continue
Lockheed Martin has told South Korea that it intends to halt funding for the KTX-II advanced jet-trainer/ light-combat aircraft at the end of June, in the face of continuing Korean Government indecision on launching full-scale development of the programme. The US manufacturer is understood to have decided finally ...
-
News
Last of a breed
THE ROLL-OUT OF THE Lockheed Martin F-22 marks the end of an era. It is the last of the "cold-war" fighters; probably the last brand-new combat airframe with a brand-new engine to be flown this century; probably the last to embody "all the technology we could afford" instead of the ...
-
News
Arsenal upgrades Molniya R-60 missile
Ukrainian guided-weapons specialist Arsenal has unveiled an upgraded seeker for the Russian Molniya R-60 (AA-8 Aphid) infra-red (IR) short-range air-to-air missile, giving it the capability to engage frontal targets. Previous variants of the R-60 did not have an all-aspect engagement capability - the early models were restricted to ...
-
News
Allied near to completing F-22...
AlliedSignal is in "the final throes" of high-altitude testing of the auxiliary-power generating system (APGS) for the Lockheed Martin F-22, in a bid to clear the full envelope before the fighter has its first flight, planned for the end of May. Revealing details of the integrated APGS on ...
-
News
Turkish F-4s arrive in Israel...
The first of 54 Turkish air force McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms being upgraded by Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) were flown to Tel Aviv in March. The upgrade includes the installation of a new Elta radar. They first few aircraft will be modified by IAI in Israel, with the rest going ...
-
News
Australia impounds Papua New Guinea-bound Mi-24s
Australia has intervened in a pending dispute between a UK military consultancy and the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Government over ownership of an arms shipment, including four Russian military helicopters, now on Australian soil. Australian prime minister John Howard says that the diversion of the Antonov An-124, which ...
-
News
Apache scalped by Rooivalk in Malaysia
Malaysia and South Africa are finalising a deal covering the purchase of an initial eight Denel CSH-2 Rooivalk attack helicopters. If signed, it would mark the Rooivalk's first export order. Malaysia has given the clearest indication to date that it has opted to purchase the Rooivalk, rather than ...
-
News
A changing challenge
It is now a foregone conclusion that the aircraft the F-22 was designed to outperform will never enter service, with the West having seen the last of the big MiGs. With the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the USAir Force has begun to see potential threats to its air ...
-
News
Working together
THREE COMPANIES came together to develop the F-22 in the belief that their combined resources would be required to see the programme through to production. They are being proved right. So far, the F-22 industry team has invested about $2 billion on the programme, estimates programme ...
-
News
Common modules take control
ADVANCING THE STATE of the art in system design and integration has enabled the F-22 team to meet demanding weight and cost budgets "flowed down" to the subsystem level by the integrated product-team structure. Many of the traditional boundaries between systems have be blurred in a bid to ...
-
News
Human centred
PILOT-VEHICLE INTERFACE is a dry, but accurate, description of the centrepiece of the F-22's array of technologies. The F-22 cockpit is seen as a showcase of the team's achievement in integrating human potential into the aircraft. It is here, under the single-piece canopy, strapped into the modified ACES ...
-
News
Balancing act
BALANCE IS A term used repeatedly by the F-22's designers when describing what they have achieved, and balancing lethality, survivability, supportability and affordability - and several other 'ilities' - has proved a formidable task. Driving the design was the requirement to combine stealth with speed and agility, in ...
-
News
Fishbed facelift
A familiar, delta-winged dart descends to a smooth landing at Aerostar's Bacau base, with the Carpathian mountains forming a hazy backdrop to this once improbable scene. It would have been unthinkable as recently as seven years ago that a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 (NATO code-name "Fishbed") - the most widely-used fighter the ...
-
News
European commissions
European Aviation Air Charter (EAA) is one of the UK's youngest airlines, but it already employs more than 200 people and boasts a fleet of 15 100-seat aircraft. It has established European Joint Aviation Requirements (JAR)-145 approval for its maintenance operation, and, more recently, a pilot-training centre at its Bournemouth ...
-
News
Back from the brink
AN AIRFORCE is rarely satisfied with its allotted budget, and many military air wings have fine-tuned the art of pleading poverty into a way of lobbying for extra cash. The Philippine Air Force, however, has been forced to endure more hardships than most. Years of financial neglect have been compounded ...
-
News
Hawkeye shows the way to procurement savings
THE US NAVY'S E-2C Hawkeye airborne-early-warning (AEW) aircraft is being singled out by Paul Kaminski, the US Defense Department's acquisition chief, as a model for Pentagon acquisition reform. He says that application of new procurement practices will yield "billions of dollars in savings", including an estimated $375 million ...