KENDALL: USAF'S NGAD CONTRACTOR SELECTION IS DRAWING NEAR

LONDON:

The Air Force has yet to pick a winner among the companies still vying to build the service’s sixth generation jet, but a final down-select is “not all that far away,” the service’s top leader told Breaking Defense this weekend. While Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall declined to say when the service will choose a manufacturer for the fighter jet that will be the cornerstone of the Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems, he offered a small clue about the trajectory of the highly-classified program. “It’s not imminent but it’s not all that far away,” Kendall said in an exclusive interview at the Royal International Air Tattoo. “There’s a little hint I’ll drop for you.” The Air Force has confirmed three elements of the NGAD program so far: a manned, sixth-generation fighter, the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile currently under development, and a suite of drones — what Kendall calls “collaborative combat aircraft” — that will augment the manned fighter in battle.

In June, Kendall announced that the NGAD fighter had progressed to the engineering, manufacturing and development stage, prompting speculation about whether the Air Force had chosen a prime contractor for the program. However, later that month Kendall said there was still ongoing competition for NGAD, raising further questions about the status of the program.

Although Kendall declined to answer most of Breaking Defense’s questions about NGAD, he stated that the program will not have a single prime in the “systems integrator” that oversees the makeup of the family of systems, and that the Air Force has separate acquisition efforts for each of the elements.

“The overarching integrator will probably be the government, with probably some industry help,” he said. “The NGAD platform itself will have a traditional prime [contractor].”

The Air Force has been unwilling to discuss which aerospace companies are involved in NGAD. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman could potentially manufacture the sixth-gen fighter, but it is unclear whether all three are currently still participating in the ongoing competition.

At least one full-scale NGAD fighter demonstrator made its inaugural flight in 2020. Air Force officials have declined to give further details about the maker of the aircraft or its capabilities, although they have made clear that digital engineering has been a critical technology that has allowed the service to develop it much more quickly than onlookers had expected.

“What we did was an experimental prototype,” Kendall said in June. “We basically had an X-plane program which was designed to reduce the risk of some of the key technologies that we would need for a production program.”

Kendall has said the Air Force plans to field NGAD “by the end of the decade.” How many the service will ultimately buy is still yet to be disclosed.

Artist illustration of what looks like an unmanned version of the B-21 posted by General Atomics,

 What looks like a unmanned version of the B-21 raider popped up online posted by General Atomics. 

The illustration accompanies an article titled "How AI And Supervised Autonomy Will Change Combat."

LINK

A recent Freedom of Information Act request revealed the B-21 Raider could be operated in a manned or unmanned configuration.


To date, the Air Force has confirmed that the B-21 will be manned — that is, it will carry aircrew — when it enters service around 2025 and that it will be
nuclear-certified about two years later. 

The service has also said no nuclear missions will take place without crew aboard. However, the service has not given a definitive answer on when the aircraft is expected to feature an uninhabited capability. It is reportedly “not a short-term priority” for the Air Force, and thus unlikely to be incorporated into early production models.

The B-21 Raider is currently under construction at the company’s Air Force Plant 42 facility in Palmdale, Calif., and look set to make its first flight in December 2021, after which it will enter flight test at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

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New Bell Invictus photos leak online

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Bell’s 360 Invictus advanced helicopter is now 90 percent complete and has had its new open tail rotor system attached at the company’s facility in Amarillo, Texas. Originally designed with a canted, ducted tail rotor, Invictus’ entire tail boom structure was reconfigured to simplify the design and speed building Bell’s pitch for the U.S. Army’s Future Attack Recon Aircraft.

New photos of the Invictus (sans engine) began showing up on Twitter and other social media platforms, most likely taken outside the Bell Amarillo Assembly plant.

"One of the things we looked at is as we were doing a competitive prototype, and at the same time are iterating on a weapon system of what the [engineering and manufacturing development] aircraft is going to be — the increment one aircraft — and the way we’re organized is to maintain the connective tissue between those two so that we can keep them as close as possible in terms of what we’re doing on the CP and what the weapon system will be,” Flail recently told reporters on a media trip to Texas." 

As per U.S. Army speed requirements, the tandem-cockpit, single-main-rotor Bell 360 Invictus is designed to fly at least 180 knots. The aircraft’s main rotor system is based on Bell’s 525 Relentless helicopter — which has flown at speeds beyond 200 knots in test flights — but will be scaled to fit the Invictus. While the Bell 525 has five rotor blades, the 360 Invictus will have four.

Bell is competing against Sikorsky and its Raider X helicopter in the FARA contest. The Raider X is a compound-coaxial helicopter with counter-spinning main rotors and a pusher propeller.

Lockheed Martin reveals it's testing lasers on tactical aircraft

WASHINGTON: Lockheed Martin today revealed that it delivered a compact directed energy weapon to the Air Force Research Lab in February, a key milestone in the service’s effort to equip a tactical fighter jet with a laser capable of shooting down anti-aircraft missiles.

“It is the smallest, lightest, high energy laser of its power class that Lockheed Martin has built to date,” Tyler Griffin, a company executive, told reporters earlier this month in the run up to the Farnborough Air Show. “It is a critical benchmark in developing an operational laser weapon system in the airborne domain.”

While the Pentagon has pushed forward a number of different directed energy weapons in recent years, the value of this one, dubbed LANCE, is its minimal space, weight and power requirements. “It’s one-sixth the size of what we produced for the Army going back to just 2017,” Griffin added, referring to the Robust Electric laser Initiative program.

The LANCE acronym stands for “Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments.” Lockheed got the initial contract to design, develop and produce LANCE in November 2017 as part of the Air Force’s Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) program.

That effort has three components: in addition to LANCE, there is a beam control system, built by Northrop Grumman, which directs the laser on its target, as well as a pod that is mounted on the aircraft. Boeing is responsible for that pod subsystem, which the Air Force said it received in February 2021.

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China hints B-2- lookalike stealth bomber may be flying soon

By
Ashish Dangwal Eurasia Times 

July 8, 2022

A top Chinese official recently announced plans to perform a test flight for an ‘essential aircraft’ with critical strategic and historical significance, fueling speculation that the long-rumored H-20 strategic stealth bomber could make its maiden flight soon.

Ge Heping, the Party chief of the Chinese Flight Test Establishment, a division of the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), made the statement during a rally meeting on Tuesday.

The statement was issued to mobilize personnel involved in the test, State-run Global Times reported, citing the press release. Ge urged everyone involved in the aircraft’s development to realize how crucial it is to complete this mission fully.

The Chinese Flight Test Establishment, also known as the AVIC Flight Test Center, was established in 1959. China’s only national body authorized to carry out validations and flight tests for aviation products, such as military and commercial aircraft, aero engines, and airborne equipment.

However, the aircraft’s designation and type were not made public in either the report or the press release.

The widely expected H-20 strategic stealth bomber was a common assumption among internet users. Some claimed that only H-20 is befitting the description of having strategic and historical significance.

The Chinese military has occasionally offered a few updates on H-20. In January 2021, a scene from the service’s recruitment video featured the flying wing design of the next-generation, long-range strategic stealth bomber being developed for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force.