Someone thinks that there is a need, because someine is aggressively marketing Morocco’s Errachidia Airport for long term desert storage (i.e. boneyard).
Because thinks that there is a need to have a place to park hundreds, or perhaps thousands of aircraft.
Someone is betting on recession here.
So Boeing will not be hit by an engineers strike this year.
How the frack they got engineers to strike the last time, I’ll never know.
There are so many Randroid engineers out there.
It looks like Rolls Plans ‘is looking hard at a “puller configuration” for it’s advanced propfan. (paid subscription required)
They believe that the issues involved in mounting the fan in the immediate vicinity of hot exhaust from the core are challenging, so they are looking at a more conventional “turboprop like” layout.
Of course, it’s all tradeoffs, as the “puller” configuration has issues of the interaction between the prop wash and the pylons and inlets too, which need to be carefully managed to handle noise, which is generally considered to be the Achilles heel of propfans.
The Mistral Engines G-300 (paid subscription required) is a multi fuel Wankel rotary engine.
Though the term “multi-fuel” means that it can run on both aviation (100LL) and automotive (87 Octane) gasoline, it’s spark ignited, though their web site states that they are working on Jet fuel capable engines.
Obviously there are fewer parts than a conventional piston engine, there are no conventional valves in a Wankel, but it still has a reduction gear, which was the major maintenance headache in the Thielert engine.
Well, first they missed a payroll, and noe Eclipse Aviation has filed for reorg under Chapter 11, but it also, “simultaneously announced an offer for the sale of its assets for a combination of cash, equity and debt to an affiliate of Etirc Aviation, its largest shareholder.”
It looks like there may be an auction, and they filed in Delaware (where else) to get Debtor in Possession funding.
Like I said, put a fork in them, they are done.
Well, the numbers that the Israelis are seeing :
“Defense News” reports that Ministry of Defense and Israel Air Force officials are “stunned by projected program costs for their Israel-unique version of the F-35” Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE: LMT). IAF and Ministry of Defense officials are struggling to pare a hefty list of customized subsystems and add-ons that threaten to ground the aircraft as unaffordable.
“Defense News” states that, in September, US F-35 program officials gave rough price and availability data to their Israeli counterparts, who reacted with sticker shock to the price tag of $200 million per plane. Since then, both sides have been seeking a new configuration that can meet IAF performance and budget requirements. The IDF had expected to pay about $2 billion – $80 million per plane – for the first 25 aircraft.
My money is on the Israeli numbers being closer to the truth than the Norwegian ones.
Doubtless, there costs with integrating Israeli systems into the airframe, but it’s increasingly clear that the high end estimates for cost are accurate, and largely unaffordable.
Are they unducted fans, are they high tech propellers, or are they, as one wag put it, a bunch of bananas whirling around.
I don’t know, and it appears that regulatory authorities are in a similar conundrum.
The regulations if they are classed as turbofan blades are stricter, and thus the would add more weight, and the regulations if they were classed as a propeller.
It’s a non-trivial issue that needs to be resolved.
Last week, I noted that the Chinese showed a carrier in drydock in a mockup of a new port facility, and this week, we have a senior official in the Chinese Defense Ministry, Major General Quan Lihua, suggesting that China is looking at acquiring a carrier, though not to, “use it to pursue global deployment or global reach.”
Yeah, right.
So, we have the statement by the Prime Minister that Norway has settled on the F-35 as its F-16 replacement.
What I find interesting is this article, which says Norway will pay $2.54 billion for 48 aircraft, because that figureds to $52 million per aircraft, which is less than half the unit costs I’ve been seeing.
Something is seriously whack with those numbers, which, as the Norwegian PM notes in his statement, is less than the Gripen, which is half it’s weight, and you pay for aircraft like you pay for ground beef, by the pound.
It may be that the money already put into the program by Norway as a JSF partner is being counted, but there have to be some seriously heavy duty “Jedi mind tricks” in the accounting too.
And specifically on how SAAB will ensure that the upgraded Gripen NG will remain cost effective: (paid subscription required)
Moreover, Gripen NG embodies a new business model that aims to cut costs even with low production rates. “The market is extremely price-sensitive,” and the build approach for the new version reflects this, says Bob Kemp, marketing director for Gripen International.
In the past, Gripen embraced technologies that designers modified to fit specific needs—as was the case with the General Electric F404 engine that Volvo turned into the fighter’s RM12 powerplant. For the Gripen NG, Saab went directly to GE and asked for an F414, the latest version of the F/A-18E/F’s engine with minimal changes. The F414G features some adjustments to the full-authority digital engine control and power supply, largely because Gripen is a single-engine fighter (whereas the F/A-18E/F has two engines). This seemingly innocuous change allows Saab to reduce engine costs 20%, even though the F414 is a higher thrust engine with a greater sticker price than the F404.
(emphasis mine)
Another possibility in this model is the use of some commercial systems, with even greater cost/performance advantages.
It’s why I think that it will be see a successful export market. even though it just lost in Norway, because these aircraft, and pretty much all of the high end military systems out there, have gotten too damn expensive.
BTW, here is a nice bit of video from Aviation Week:
Despite the best efforts of the Pentagon, which has determined that further F-22s are not necessary, the US air force is still trying to buy more of the gold plated fighters. (paid subscription required)
Of course, the USAF has said for years that they need 381, but now because they see that this number is impossible, they are trying to go for about 100 aircraft less, specifically something in the 250-275 range.
There is a word for this behavior, insubordination, and the civilians who are constitutionally in charge need to put a stop to this.
That is the unintended message from Pentagon acquisition executive John Young, who is asking for $8 Billion to upgrade the first 100 or so jets.
And it’s not just upgrades, the operational costs are spiking too:
But that’s not all the next Pentagon leaders will have to debate about the super-secret Raptor, he said. He said operational tests have showed the plane is “proving very expensive to operate.”
Those tests have shown what he called a negative trend, meaning the “maintenance man-hours per flying hour has increased through those tests. The last one was a substantial increase.”
Young also expressed concerns about the plane’s mission-capable rates, saying recent marks in the “62 percent kind of range” are “troubling.” He also said data shows the plane “meets some but not all” of its key performance parameters.”
Seriously, the Airforce won’t take budgeting and maintenance issues seriously until we take an entire generation of the Air Force’s latest and greatest to the Boneyard, Davis-Monthan AFB and chop them to bits while the UASF Chief of Staff is forced to watch.
This crap is absolutely out of control.
In this Aviation Week article on research into more making electronic systems on aircraft more efficient: (paid subscription required)
Goals of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Integrated Vehicle Energy Technology (Invent) program include extending range and endurance 10-15%, increasing power and thermal capacity by 10-30%, overcoming cooling challenges in low-observable platforms, and reducing life-cycle costs.
Because the stealthy F-22 and F-35 dump their heat into the fuel, they are “flying Thermos bottles,” says Steven Iden, AFRL’s Invent program manager. The heat loads in the F-35 are up to five times what they are in the F-16, he says, and could increase by another factor of four in a future laser-armed fighter
…The Invent power and thermal management system will extract, store and reuse electrical power and adaptively use the heat sinks available, including fuel, low-observable ram air, and heat exchangers in the engine fan duct and the “third stream” provided by the Advent engine. This is a third flowpath introduced on Advent to vary the bypass ratio.
….
In the F-35, regenerative energy from the power-by-wire flight-control actuators is dumped into heavy resistor banks, which produces heat. For Invent, AFRL is looking to develop an “electrical accumulator” that would store the energy and use it to meet peak power demands from the systems, similar to a hydraulic accumulator.
(emphasis mine)
On further thought, this is not surprising, as a cooling scoop for external air is typically a non-stealthy feature, though the degree of the problem surprises me.
It restricts time spent on the ground at idle, and increases the unusable fuel in the tanks, as it has to be used for component cooling .
Well, here is an interesting nugget buried in an an otherwise run of the mill article on how an upgrade to an AESA radar will boost the Rafale’s export sales prospect
Meanwhile, the Rafale’s ability to shoot down an enemy aircraft using only passive detection was demonstrated for the first time in October, says Chaltiel. Two aircraft flew ‘several miles apart’, the first using electronic support measures to monitor the target and communicate its track via Link 16 datalink to the second Rafale.
The second aircraft also passively tracked the target using its infrared search and track system and was able to achieve a lock-on by sending ‘a few pulses’ from its laser rangefinder. The enemy aircraft was then ‘shot down’ using an MBDA ‘Mica-type’ air-to-air missile with an active seeker that became effective at a range of around 18km (10nm), says Chaltiel.
It will keep the line open into the beginning of the year, but the interesting thing is that they had budget authorization to purchase 20 plane sets, but only signed a memo for 4.
But only parts for 4 aircraft, not the 20 that they could have.
This is an interesting because it recognizes the reality that the line is likely to be shut down.
It was a talk given by a Colonel Fornof, the Director of the Requirements and Testing office at Nellis AFB and an F-15 pilot.
There is nothing here that is particularly sensitive, though it is very interesting.
The bullet points, or at least the ones that surprised me:
Links here, here, here, and here, and the videos are below.
Part 2
A compare/contrast airshow demonstrations Su-30 vs F-22
The F-35, aircraft AA-1, exceed Mach 1 on a flight yesterday.
Specifically, it hit Mach 1.05 for 8 minutes carrying 2 AMRAAMS and 2 JDAMS, which is the first for the program, unless you count the demonstration flight in 2001 for the STOVL demonstrator.
Still, given that AA-1 rolled out in 2006, one has to wonder what took so bloody long.
It looks like advances in Chinese guided missile technology were prominently on display at Airshow China. (paid subscription required)
The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (Casic) showed off new missles, including new versions of its C704 cruise missiles with IIR and TV guidance, both intended for air launch, and the smaller C705 (look at the wheels and display easels on both pictures for scale).
I think that it has a 9 or 10 inch body diamerter, as vs the 12-14 inch for the C704.
C705
US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has begun purchases of the Boeing Hummingbird helicopter UAV. They expect to take delivery of at least 10 units this month.
Considering the fact that it was still in test and demonstration earlier this year, this is a blindingly fast fielding, at least by US military standards, which implies that there is some sort of immediate application:
US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has begun purchasing a new unmanned helicopter, Boeing’s A160T Hummingbird, which can be used for resupply and surveillance missions and will soon be equipped with a new radar that can identify enemy targets hiding beneath dense tree cover.
Note that the bar under the fuselage is not a wing, it’s the foliage penetrating radar.
Russia’s United Aircraft (OAK), the conglomerate controlling almost all Russian aviation industry, has decided to merge its combat aircraft bureaus into one unit, so MiG and Sukhoi will be merged into one bureau under Sukhoi boss Mikhail Pogosyan.
If I am reading this right, MiG will cease to exist as an entity.