March 08, 2014 Military Aviation News
03/08/2014
Sikorsky Aircraft will build the next-generation Combat Rescue Helicopter for the U.S. Air Force under a contract that could be worth as much as $15 billion. The Air Force is rearranging its budget to get the program started, Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James said.
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03/08/2014
Amid a surge of Islamic militancy in North Africa, a team of fewer than 50 U.S. special operations troops with a single helicopter arrived at a remote base in western Tunisia last month. Their mission: train Tunisian troops in counter-terrorism tactics. The operation was one of dozens of U.S. military deployments in Africa over the last year, often to tiny and temporary outposts. The goal is to leverage American military expertise against an arc of growing instability in North Africa and many su
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03/08/2014
Israeli air force fighters have been scrambled four times on 7 March so far, when Syrian combat aircraft approached the border with Israel on the Golan Heights. Syrian opposition sources reported that the Syrian air force bombed the village of Rdir El - Bustan using so-called "bomb barrels", and approached the Israeli border on their way to and from their targets.
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03/08/2014
Royal Air Force pilots are currently undergoing training on the UK's next generation stealth combat aircraft at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Squadron Leader Hugh Nichols is the first UK instructor pilot to perform a vertical landing in the F-35B Lightning II - the UK’s next generation stealth combat aircraft.
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03/08/2014
The commander of a US military air transit center in Kyrgyzstan said Thursday that the facility has performed its final mission, well ahead of its scheduled closure later this year. Colonel John Millard said flights from the base for in-flight refueling and cargo and personnel transport in support of operations in Afghanistan had been completed. Remaining work will focus on clean-up and transferring the facility over to the Central Asian nation’s authorities by a July 11 deadline, Millard said.
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03/08/2014
New questions are being raised about whether the F-35 stealth fighter is the right aircraft for Canada after a U.S. general acknowledged the jet is limited in what it can do and needs to be accompanied on its missions by another multi-million-dollar aircraft. The issue for Canada and other potential F-35 buyers is that the other aircraft referred to by the general – the F-22 – isn’t available for foreign sales because of its sophisticated technology.
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03/08/2014
Lawmakers criticized the Pentagon’s fiscal 2015 defense budget today, arguing that it will strip the National Guard of two key combat aircraft – the AH-64 Apache helicopter and the venerable A-10 Warthog. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s defense spending plan proposes to retire the entire fleet of A-10 aircraft, a close air support platform designed to kill Soviet tanks during the Cold War. The A-10 is operated by the Air National Guard and has been highly effective against ground targets during
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03/08/2014
Russia’s Western Military District has begun large-scale air defense drills at its southern testing range of Kapustin Yar on the backdrop of further escalation of tensions with the West over Ukraine. Kapustin Yar, located some 450 kilometers (280 miles) east of the Ukrainian border, will host about 3,500 troops and over 1,000 units of military hardware for about a month. The exercise will culminate with live-firing drills, involving S-300, Buk-M1 and other air defense systems.
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