AMARILLO, TEX.: Bell Helicopter is so confident in their new V-280 tilt-rotor prototype that they want the Pentagon to accelerate the Future Vertical Lift program – which they think the V-280 will win – by “five to eight years.” [Click here for our head-to-head comparison of the V-280 and its rival, the Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1] That…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Modernizing military simulation with open systems architecture
Best-of-breed common models and architecture enable virtual training and testing with the same data in a cyber-resilient posture.
PENTAGON: It’s always difficult to tell when the military is covering its tuckus and when it’s just being careful. So when the outgoing head of the Air Force press desk, Col. Patrick Ryder, told reporters this afternoon that the service had not made any decision about whether to go ahead with a combat test of…
By Colin Clark
The Air Force has too few pilots. The Navy has too few planes. Textron has a solution: outsource to us. No, the defense contractor isn’t proposing privatized air wars. It’s suggesting that military training make greater use of privately owned aircraft as the “enemy” in mock dogfights. The leader in this field, at least in…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
The future of tilt rotor aviation is taking shape, quite literally, at the Bell Helicopter factory in Fort Worth, where the company attached the wing of its prototype V-280 Valor to the fuselage. Now we can see in real life, not just computer drawings, what one vision for the military’s Future Vertical Lift aircraft will look…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
What could justify the Air Force awarding a sole source contract for helicopters worth close to a billion – that’s a thousand millions – dollars? Pick an answer: A classified joint service military exercise called Mighty Guardian in which some of the 62 aging UH-1N Huey helicopters failed their assignment to carry security forces to…
By Richard Whittle
ROSSLYN, Va.: Air Combat Command’s intelligence director has her head in a cloud – the Combat Cloud — and she wants the defense industry and academia to join her there. Maj. Gen. VeraLinn “Dash” Jamieson, ACC’s intelligence director, wants industry and academia to help the Air Force figure out how to integrate the data that flows…
By Richard Whittle
CORRECTION: THE ARTICLE WAS WRONG IN SAYING THE OSPREY SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO HOVER ON ONE ENGINE WASHINGTON: Marine Corps leaders have issued a fleetwide order to MV-22 pilots to wave off any landing in a dust cloud they can’t complete within 30 seconds, Breaking Defense has learned, a reaction to a fatal accident in Hawaii on…
By Richard Whittle
Modernizing our supply chain is a national security imperative
Closing supply chain gaps in innovating technology will reposition the industrial base to be a strategic source of value.
WASHINGTON: Two major defense industry players have a suggestion for Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, whose Better Buying Power 3.0 plan includes a new requirement that companies get the Pentagon’s blessing for internal research and development (IRAD) spending. Back off. “I’m not sure there’s a lot of upside to a lot of DoD oversight of where…
By Richard Whittle
UPDATED: Adds Details On UK Demos; QinetiQ’s PIlots Will Fly PARIS AIR SHOW: When Textron unveiled the Scorpion I will admit I was a serious sceptic. Where was the market? Who were the likely customers? Why did they spend their own money on such a venture? The first crack in my skepticism occurred when Gen. Hawk…
By Colin Clark
Graduation season is ending, but some people are still waiting for final exam results. Take for example the Army offices that manage the General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle — that service’s version of the armed Predator drone – and Textron’s One System Remote Video Terminal, a laptop soldiers on the ground can use to see…
By Richard Whittle
WASHINGTON: When is a helicopter not a helicopter? The question arises because Sikorsky Aircraft’s new S-97 Raider got airborne for the first time the other day and company officials all but declared the dawn of a new age in aviation — or at least the birth of a new type of aircraft. “This was, we…
By Richard Whittle
In the 1934 film “It Happened One Night,” fictional slime ball “King” Westley shows off by floating to a landing on the lawn of his fiancée’s daddy’s estate in a newfangled autogiro – an airplane with a rotor to enable short take offs and landings. Today, two Defense Department programs are striving to meet the…
By Richard Whittle
Reports that Israel’s plan to buy a dozen V-22 Osprey tiltrotor troop transports is dead are — as Mark Twain said after reading his own incorrect obituary — greatly exaggerated. A U.S. Letter of Agreement offering a bargain price and early delivery of the first six of 12 Ospreys requested by Israel formally expired on Wednesday amid…
By Richard Whittle
AUSA: With a long border to protect from Russia and $116 million in non-lethal U.S. military aid burning a hole in their pockets, representatives of Ukraine’s defense industry conglomerate UkrObornProm –“The State Concern” — came to the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in Washington with a shopping list. Industry sources said the Ukrainians…
By Richard Whittle
