The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) has placed language in the 1,600 pages of its draft of the National Defense Authorization Act that would fundamentally alter how standard acquisition policies apply to the Air Force’s B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber. The Air Force has meticulously followed all of the rules and regulations mandated by Congress… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: When Boeing really, truly and finally won the airborne tanker competition by underbidding what was then EADS North America (now Airbus) by at least 10 percent, the chairman of the losing company, Ralph Crosby, said he believed it important that Boeing be watched closely to make sure they delivered at that price and on… Keep reading →

When the Marine Corps developed the V-22 Osprey in the 1980s, the vision was pretty simple: fly troops ashore in amphibious assaults launched from beyond the range of anti-ship missiles. Now they’re turning the Osprey into a gas station. The Marines clearly envision the tiltrotor as a sort of flying Swiss Army knife. One clear example… Keep reading →

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.: The United Kingdom is following the U.S. Joint Multirole Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) project with “great interest” and might either get involved at some point or buy future aircraft the effort spawns, says a top British Defence Ministry rotorcraft engineer. “It’s a perfectly feasible outcome,” Bryan Finlay, the senior engineer at the… Keep reading →

The decline in V-22 Osprey orders from the U.S. military in coming years means the tiltrotor transport’s manufacturers are likely to spend a lot of time wooing foreign military officers at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition May 16-18 at National Harbor, Md. – especially Britain’s new First Sea Lord, Adm. Sir Philip Jones. Representatives from Bell Helicopter… Keep reading →

  A recent University of Michigan study found that poor families often pay higher prices for necessities because they lack enough cash on hand to make bulk purchases at lower unit prices. This “poverty penalty” could soon apply in defense acquisition. A potential case in point: The V-22 Osprey tiltrotor transport. After years of hesitation, the… Keep reading →

CORRECTED: 280 knots equals 322 mph, not 245. Spring has sprung and at the Bell Helicopter factory in Amarillo, Texas, it’s mating season, of a sort. If all goes well, by September of next year a bird of a different feather will take flight – the V-280 Valor, a medium-lift tiltrotor transport whose wing and… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: The Senate battle over Russian rockets keeps rocking. Senators Dick Durbin and Richard Shelby sent most of this morning’s defense appropriations hearing defending the Pentagon’s plan to keep using the cheap and technologically reliable but politically toxic RD-180 until an American-made replacement is ready, sometime around 2020-2021. Durbin and Shelby denounced the effort… Keep reading →

A London Daily Mail report that the V-22 is “the SAS’s deadly new weapon in the war against Islamic State terrorists threatening to bring murder and bloodshed to the streets of Britain” has Pentagon and Osprey fleet insiders giggling and Bell-Boeing executives doing some wishful thinking. The Daily Mail told us that the SAS (Special Air Service) was… Keep reading →

DARPA, whose mission is to develop cutting edge and even crazy edge technologies to make sure the U.S. military stays ahead of its competitors, did just that in choosing the winner of its Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experiment Aircraft project, aka VTOL X-Plane. Aurora Flight Sciences was awarded an $89.4 million contract Thursday to build its exotic LightningStrike entry… Keep reading →