Military Aviation News Archive
09/29/2013
The Department of Defense announced a mind-boggling 113 separate contract awards on Friday, worth $10.92 billion in total. Amazing as this number is, however, three other numbers are even more impressive: One single company won nine of these contracts -- and more than 40% of the Pentagon's money.
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09/29/2013
IAF fighter jets were scrambled into Israel's skies twice Saturday, for reasons that are unknown. Such events usually occur when it is believed that a foreign aircraft is invading Israeli airspace. The IDF has refused to say why the jets were scrambled.
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09/29/2013
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel criticized Congress on Saturday as "astoundingly irresponsible" and said that using threats to shut down the government to satisfy a political whim is dangerously shortsighted.
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09/29/2013
According to the Iranian Press TV, the Iranian Army unveiled Saturday, a new indigenously manufactured combat drone, the Yasir, at a ceremony attended by senior military officials, including the Commander of the Iranian Army's Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan.
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09/29/2013
After it was dropped from consideration in South Korea’s fighter competition, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter appears to be back in the running after a Defense Ministry source cited the need to counter North Korea with a fifth-generation fighter.
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09/28/2013
To provide Air Combat Command the best assessment of Maritime Strike Operations, the 53rd Wing partnered with other members of the Team Eglin test community to deliver increased combat capability for the warfighter. The final phase of the two-year evaluation was a month-long test over the Gulf of Mexico that ended Sept. 6.
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09/28/2013
As the sunshine and blue sky lay above the warm waves on Pensacola Beach, a pair of high performance jets soar high over the northern gulf waters in a aerobatic display which captures the attention of the sunbathers below. The twin U.S. Navy jets quickly break away in a planned maneuver and begin to soar higher into the cloudless sky. Suddenly, the jets ignite a white smoke trail which begins to trace their flight path of twin circles.
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09/28/2013
Ace Combat Infinity is Namco Bandai’s upcoming free to play aerial combat game for the PlayStation 3. Project leader Kazutoki Kono says that for this game, they’re going back to the roots and standards of the Ace Combat series.
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09/28/2013
The uniformed chiefs of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps got another shot Wednesday at describing the deepening readiness crisis that Congress has inflicted on the armed forces.
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09/28/2013
Flight trials of the MiG-29K on the INS Vikramaditya (formerly Admiral Gorshkov) in the Barents Sea have been completed. Deliveries of the naval version of the fighter to India continue, with the carrier to follow on November 15, and the Russian Navy will soon receive its first MiG-29K. The Russian defense ministry confirmed this month that its only remaining carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, will be modernized to accept MiG-29Ks as well as the Sukhoi Su-25UTG light attack and Su-33 combat aircraft.
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09/28/2013
The F-16 was one of the iconic fighter jets of the twentieth century, but, like all military hardware, it was eventually replaced by something else and retired to a stately desert to quietly rust away. At least until Boeing decided they could totally turn them into awesome robots.
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09/28/2013
CBC News has learned the Conservative government intends to reform Canada's troubled system of military procurement and could announce its plans as early as next month's speech from the throne. Those plans could see the formation of a new agency under a single minister to manage all military procurement, or a secretariat of bureaucrats from each of the departments currently involved in sourcing Canada's military equipment.
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09/28/2013
After South Korea decided this week that Boeing’s F-15 Silent Eagle was not good enough for its next generation of fighter jets, the country returned to the quandary it has been grappling with for the past two years. On one hand, the F-15SE may not be sophisticated enough, but it is cheap enough to meet the South Korean military’s budget cap of 8.3 trillion won, or $7.7 billion.
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09/28/2013
Since its introduction to the Air Force in 1986, the B-1B Lancer has been the backbone of the bomber fleet because of its speed, payload and continuously upgraded capabilities. On Sept. 4, a single B-1 from the 337th Test and Evaluation Squadron took off from Dyess Air Force Base, with the Gulf of Mexico as its destination.
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09/27/2013
Recent comments by the Air Force chief of staff were cause for excitement for those who work in the J-STARS mission at Robins Air Force Base. The Air Force has previously listed its top three acquisition priorities as the KC-46A refueling tanker, a long-range strike bomber and the F-35 fighter. However, while speaking at an Air Force Association conference, Gen. Mark Welsh added a fourth priority, which is new planes for J-STARS, or Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System.
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09/27/2013
A U.S. Air Force crew ferried an MC-130J Commando II Special Operations Forces tanker from the Lockheed Martin facilities here yesterday. The Super Hercules aircraft is assigned to Air Force Special Operations Command and will be based at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England. The Commando II supports such missions as in-flight refueling, infiltration/exfiltration, and aerial delivery and resupply of special operations forces.
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09/27/2013
Indonesia has received the last delivery of Sukhoi fighter jets it ordered from a Russian producer, thus turning its Sukhoi Flanker air superiority fighter jet fleet into one full squadron. The delivery of the last two Su-30 Mk2 planes took place on Wednesday in Indonesian air forces base of Hasanuddin, located in the capital city of South Sulawesi province, Makassar where the air forces' 11th squadron wing 5 is based.
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09/27/2013
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., has placed a hold on the White House’s nominee for Air Force secretary, blocking the confirmation process of Deborah Lee James until questions are answered regarding potential cuts to the A-10 Thunderbolt attack aircraft, according to an Ayotte aide.
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09/27/2013
Those intellectual swashbucklers from the Center for a New American Security are at it again, this time with an essay over at Foreign Policy detailing the dangers likely to accompany drone operations in Asia. Precipitating their commentary was China's first deployment of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) over the Senkaku Islands. The overflight took place earlier this month, timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Tokyo's nationalization of the archipelago. (So much for Chinese subtlet
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09/26/2013
British defense company BAE Systems PLC, one of the world’s largest, may be unique within the global defense industry as a company well prepared for reduced U.S. military spending, wrote UBS AG analysts on Wednesday. “BAE Systems is unique in our defense coverage in that it has a large enough growth market in the Middle East (mainly Saudi Arabia) to offset the decline in the U.S. defense,” wrote defense analyst Charles Armitage in a research note.
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09/26/2013
India is set to buy American defence equipment worth five billion US dollars and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who left for the United States today, is carrying a long shopping list. Among the hardware that India is looking to purchase are six additional C-130 J Hercules Medium Lift Aircraft, 22 Apache Attack Helicopters, 15 Chinook Heavy Lift Helicopters and about 140 M-777 ultra-light towed Howitzers.
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09/26/2013
South Korea's decision to reject a bid by Boeing to supply 60 warplanes and to re-issue a tender was made in the interests of better technology but may not be justified given North Korea's weak air capabilities, experts said on Wednesday.
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09/26/2013
Pratt & Whitney and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have begun testing of Pratt & Whitney's unique, adaptive supersonic fighter engine fan rig based on a full-scale F135 development fan to advance the next generation of military fighter engine technology.
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09/26/2013
South Korea's government bowed to public pressure on Tuesday and voted down a bid by Boeing to supply 60 warplanes, saying it would restart the multi-billion tender process to get a more advanced, radar-evading fighter. Lockheed Martin's F-35A, previously considered too expensive, has shot to the front of the line in the race for the contract after the defence ministry singled out a fifth-generation fighter as the preferred option.
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09/25/2013
As shown in the first section of this paper, Buzan and Waever emphasise that South Africa holds the regional unipolarity in Southern Africa RSC by its economic dominance over neighbours and the predisposition of regional states to accept its leadership. This section attempts to validate this proposition in the 2000s and to include, based on methodological guidelines of neorealist theory of International Relations, indicators related to material capabilities to evaluate the polarity of the region
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