December 18, 2014 Military Aviation News
12/18/2014
Expecting initial delivery of FA-50 lead-in fighter jets late next year, the Philippine Air Force (PAF) is sending its fighter pilots to South Korea for a six-month training in handling the brand-new supersonic aircraft. PAF’s Air Defense Wing chief Col. Ernesto Okol said that aside from three fighter pilots, they are also sending 32 support personnel to South Korea in March for the much-needed flight and maintenance transition training.
(Read More...)
12/18/2014
The U.S. Air Force no longer plans another round of layoffs in fiscal 2015, the service's top civilian said. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James made the announcement on Tuesday during an online discussion with troops, marking a shift in personnel policy for the service, which had planned on involuntarily separating more airmen to further downsize the active-duty force.
(Read More...)
12/18/2014
AUSTRALIA and Japan will both offer regional support hubs for Joint Strike Fighter aircraft in the Asia-Pacific region. Workers at Queensland and NSW air force bases will offer engine and airframe maintenance and upgrade work for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning advanced combat aircraft. That way they don't need to be sent all the way back to the United States.
(Read More...)
12/18/2014
Russia intends to put more aircraft and helicopters on duty in Belarus, BelTA learned from Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Russia to Belarus Alexander Surikov during the press conference in Minsk on 17 December. The diplomat reminded that Russian jet fighters have been on duty in Belarus since December 2013. “Plans have been made to increase the amount of hardware on duty up to 12 combat aircraft and two trainer aircraft.
(Read More...)
12/18/2014
Like spaceships and sports stadiums, military strike jets typically aren’t the kind of things that companies build—much less sell—off the shelf. Take the Pentagon’s new F-35, for instance: Two decades and $400 billion in the making, the F-35 had nine committed customers lined up to buy thousands of aircraft (at between $80 million and $110 million per copy) before Lockheed Martin ever started bending metal in earnest. Rarely does a contractor fully develop a military jet on spec.
(Read More...)
12/18/2014
A top RAF commander doesn’t know how many combat planes the air force has, he admitted today. Air Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier, the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, made the embarrassing revelation during a grilling about Britain’s Top Gun jets. Asked to outline the numbers of Typhoon and Tornado combat squadrons, he replied: “At the moment we’ve got four Typhoon squadrons and three Tornado squadrons.”
(Read More...)
12/18/2014
As reported by Russian media outlets, in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio station, Vladislav Goncharenko, deputy head of the military aviation programmes department at UAC (the a Russian holding which encompasses Irkut, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, Ilyushin, Tupolev, Beriev and Yakovlev), Moscow has surpassed the U.S. in the number of produced combat aircraft.
(Read More...)
All Articles