For a second year, American-built fighter jet engines have been stolen from an Israeli air base.
Reports out of Israel on Thursday say that several F-16 engines have been stolen from a base in a central part of the country. Israel Defense Forces officials suspect the engines were stolen with inside help, though by whom and for what purpose they do not know.
The IDF speculates the engines may have been stolen to be sold for scrap. [Continue reading…]
U.S. Navy combat ships equipped with 5-inch guns are about to get more lethal. Next fall, ATK will begin delivering the new Multi-Option Fuze, Navy, or MOFN, for ammunition fired from MK 45 weapon systems.
Army Contracting Command just awarded ATK a five-year contract worth $84 million to produce the MK 437 MOFN for the Navy. The Army’s Joint Products Office manages the program for the Navy.
These specialized fuzes provide proximity, precision time, delay and point detonating impact options in a single fuze, ATK officials maintain. The inductive fuze setting feature also optimizes MOFN for use with automated ammunition handling equipment. MOFN will be used on projectiles fired in the MK 45 Single Lightweight Gun Mount on Navy cruisers and destroyers. [Continue reading…]
Popularly known as Area 51, the U.S. Air Force’s secret flight-test base at Groom Lake, Nev., was rebuilt and expanded in the late 1980s. The frequency of the “Janet” Boeing 737 commuter service that connects the base with Las Vegas shows that the facility has continued to operate at a healthy rate since then. Exactly one program known to have been conducted at Groom Lake since 1985, Boeing’s Bird of Prey stealth demonstrator, has been unveiled. Add to that Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 Sentinel, which most likely was tested there, and Groom Lake has brought forth a couple of mice, as far as the public knows.
The Air Force lists $11.2 billion in classified research and development funding for fiscal 2013, much greater than most nations’ total defense R&D. About $8 billion of this is what the service calls “non-blue” — that is, funds transferred in kind or as cash to the intelligence community. That leaves $3.2 billion in classified, Air Force-only R&D. The service’s procurement budget includes $17 billion for classified programs in a single line item that is equal to its entire “white” budget for aircraft, missiles and spacecraft. Although the service is the main money conduit into the intelligence community, that does not mean that such funds do not involve Air Force personnel or things that fly or go into space. [Continue reading…]
The U.S. Army recently awarded General Dynamics C4 Systems and Rockwell Collins with a $306 million contract for 3,726 Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit (HMS) AN/PRC-155 Manpack radios. The two-channel PRC-155 radios, along with vehicle integration kits and related accessories, are part of the Army’s Capability Set 13 networking and communications gear deploying with brigade combat teams next year.
“With the game-changing PRC-155 networking radio, soldiers can be confident they will have access to lifesaving voice and data communications,” said Chris Marzilli, president of General Dynamics C4 Systems, in a recent GD press release. “The AN/PRC-155 Manpack is the most rigorously tested radio in the Army’s arsenal. This order, along with the 19,000 AN/PRC-154 Rifleman radios already under contract, moves the Army one step closer to achieving its brigade modernization strategy.”
The two-channel PRC-155, part of the Joint Tactical Radio System, completes the Army’s tactical network by connecting upper to lower tiers, legacy to future waveforms and terrestrial to over-the-horizon links, said Chris Brady, vice president of Assured Communications for General Dynamics C4 Systems.
PRC-155s weigh 14 pounds with battery and can be mounted in a vehicle or carried in a pack.
The X-47B successfully completed it’s first shore-based tests of whether the aircraft is structurally sound and aeromechanically capable of getting airborne using the U.S. Navy’s current steam catapult system. The drone cat shot took place at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Southern Maryland.
“The X-47B shore-based catapult launch we witnessed here today will leave a mark in history,” said Vice Adm. David Dunaway, NAVAIR commander. “We are working toward the future integration of unmanned aircraft on the carrier deck, something we didn’t envision 60 years ago when the steam catapult was first built here.”
Here’s a video of what the Navy called “the start of a new era for Naval Aviation”:
