March 17, 2012 Military Aviation News
03/17/2012
As China starts to put together a modern, integrated air force, which could reach 1,000 fighters by 2020, it is developing the components of a future force of stealthier combat aircraft, new bombers and unmanned, hypersonic and possibly space-based combat platforms. These could emerge as soon as the early 2020s.
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03/17/2012
Australia's first Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft, the forerunner of as many as 100 advanced combat aircraft, is set to start down the production line in the next few weeks. Air Vice Marshal Kym Osley, head of defence's new air combat capability program, rejected criticism of the JSF by organisations such as Air Power Australia (APA) on grounds they had not seen all the classified US data on the aircraft's performance.
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03/17/2012
Rescuers have found the wreckage of a Norwegian military plane that crashed with five people on board during an exercise in northern Sweden. Rescue spokesman Mathias Hansson told The Associated Press that parts of the C-130 cargo aircraft were found early Saturday scattered over a glacier on mount Kebnekaise, Sweden's highest mountain.
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03/17/2012
Biplanes once ruled the skies in the pioneering days of aviation and World War I. Now the old aircraft design could make a comeback in the silent supersonic jets of tomorrow. A newer version of the biplane could reach supersonic cruising speeds without causing ear-splitting sonic booms, according to computer simulations by MIT and Stanford University researchers. They built upon the design of German engineer Adolf Busemann, who originally envisioned triangular wings connected at their tips.
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03/17/2012
With a primary source of funding for commercial satellite capacity drying up, the U.S. Department of Defense must find an alternative means to feed the tremendous appetite for bandwidth generated by unmanned aircraft, according to a U.S. Air Force official. For the past decade or so, the Pentagon has relied heavily on Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) accounts funded by wartime supplemental appropriations bills to pay for commercial satellite services.
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03/17/2012
The U.S. military has awarded contracts for UAVs to perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) services potentially worth nearly $1.5 billion. The main beneficiary appears to be AAI Unmanned Aircraft Systems, which proposed the Australian-built Aerosonde small unmanned aircraft system.
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03/17/2012
Filled with military deals harvested over the past few years, the Indian defense pie is getting bigger and sweeter, on land and in the air. But the country faces major hurdles in making those plans real. First, the good news: Over the next five years, India plans to renovate or replace its Soviet-era kit with $50 billion in new equipment, making Asia’s third largest economy a lucrative market for foreign companies such as Boeing and Dassault.
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03/17/2012
A Turkish military helicopter has crashed into a house near the Afghan capital, killing 12 Turkish soldiers on board and two young girls on the ground, Turkish and Afghan officials say. The helicopter, a Sikorsky, was on a mission for US-led NATO forces when it went down near Kabul on Friday, the Turkish military said in a statement. 'Twelve of our military personnel on board were martyred,' it said.
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03/17/2012
Modernization of the over 13-lakh strong armed forces will continue in a steady albeit sluggish manner, with the defence outlay being hiked to Rs 1,93,408 crore (around $39 billion) to cater for some major fighter, aircraft, helicopter and howitzer deals to be inked in the coming fiscal.
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03/17/2012
Iranian experts managed to produce a new type of drone which is capable of carrying out military and border patrol missions. The new remote-controlled aircraft, called Shaparak (Butterfly), has a maximum operational radius of 50 kilometers (31 miles), and a maximum flight ceiling of 15,000 feet (4,572 meters), Reza Danandeh Hakamabad, the aeronautics engineer in charge of the project, said on Friday.
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