Military Aviation News Archive
05/04/2013
The U.S. Navy believes it has found a laser technology that is capable of being useful in combat. This is not a sudden development but has been going on for most of the last decade. Three years ago the navy successfully tested this new laser weapon (six solid state lasers acting in unison), using it to destroy a small UAV.
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05/04/2013
Marines at a far-flung base in southwest Afghanistan sent off an urgent request for mortar rounds, needing an air delivery made to a landing zone under enemy fire for days. The choice came down to two Connecticut-made helicopters. One option to deliver the pallet of 60mm rounds was a manned Sikorsky CH-53 helicopter. The other was an unmanned Lockheed Martin/Kaman K-MAX helicopter. The Sikorsky helicopter made in Stratford requires a crew of five.
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05/04/2013
Back in February the African country of Niger received its first jet combat aircraft in the form of two Su-25s. These were received from Ukraine, which has a lot of Cold War surplus weapons, and refurbished these two ground attack aircraft. It is believed that Ukraine also supplied pilots and ground crews, at least until some Niger personnel could be trained to do the work.
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05/04/2013
An aerial tanker jet reportedly flown by a Fairchild Air Force Base crew crashed today in the rugged mountains of Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian nation where the U.S. operates an air base key to the war in Afghanistan. A spokesman for U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Florida, told Reuters News Service that the congressman was advised the KC-135 Stratotanker was based out of McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas but that it was being operated by a Fairchild crew.
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05/04/2013
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said Israeli companies were behind 41 percent of all UAVs exported in 2001-11. Those Israeli exports went to 24 countries, including the United States. i-hls reports. That volume’s expected to expand as production costs are relatively low. Israeli industry officials boast that it’s significantly cheaper to buy an advanced UAV than it is to train an air force pilot.
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05/04/2013
Australian government officials restated their commitment to purchase 100 F-35 fifth-generation multirole fighters from Lockheed Martin to support the country’s Air Combat Capability Transition, with an Initial Operational Capability date of 2020 for the F-35 fleet.
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05/04/2013
U.S. officials say Israel has launched an airstrike into Syria, apparently targeting a suspected weapons site. The officials say the strike occurred overnight Thursday into Friday. They say it does not appear that a chemical weapons site was targeted. One official says the strike appeared to hit a warehouse.
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05/04/2013
A Boeing X-51A WaveRider unmanned hypersonic vehicle achieved the longest air-breathing, scramjet-powered hypersonic flight in history May 1, flying for three and a half minutes on scramjet power at a top speed of Mach 5.1. The vehicle flew for a total time of more than six minutes.
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05/04/2013
A US military Boeing KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in a mountainous area in Kyrgyzstan for unspecified reasons on Friday, the United States Air Force said. "A US Air Force KC-135 tanker aircraft crashed today in northern Kyrgyzstan," the US Air Force's 376th Air Expeditionary Wing based in the country said. The Boeing KC-135, also known as the Stratotanker, crashed into a mountain gorge about 60 kilometers (36 miles) west of the capital Bishkek.
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05/03/2013
In acknowledging the likely use of chemical weapons in Syria, US President Barack Obama is nonetheless seeking to pursue a cautious path. On the one hand he does not want to be stampeded into military action by more hawkish voices on Capitol Hill without conclusive and demonstrable evidence. But equally he wants to send a strong message to the Syrian government in Damascus.
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05/03/2013
The growing power of Islamist fighters in southern Syria is causing alarm in Jordan, which backs rebels battling President Bashar Assad but fears those linked to Al-Qaeda. Similar concerns among Syria’s other neighbors, including Turkey and Israel, are complicating an already disjointed world response to the bloody turmoil at the heart of the Middle East.
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05/03/2013
The Navy on Thursday inaugurated its first squadron with both manned and unmanned aircraft amid debate over the military’s burgeoning use of drones in warfare. Military officials launched the effort by reactivating the Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 35, known as the “Magicians,” which served for 19 years before being deactivated in 1992.
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05/03/2013
India has postponed the development of the homegrown Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) program, according to sources in the Indian Defence Ministry, because the MoD first wants to complete the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) program. The LCA is behind schedule by more than 15 years and the MoD has spent more than $1 billion in its development.
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05/03/2013
Australia said Friday it would buy 12 Boeing EA-18G Growler advanced electronic warfare technology aircraft because it can’t risk delivery delays in their replacement, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. The government announced last year that its air force will equip 12 of Australia’s F/A-18 Super Hornet jet fighters with Growler radar-jamming equipment and other gear to knock out a wide array of electronic devices from 2018.
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05/02/2013
China’s UAV development appears to have bypassed the cottage industry stage where many Western UAV programs find their roots and has emerged onto the high-tech stage as if it appeared out a fog. The staggering numbers of UAVs on display at the 2012 Zhuhai Airshow were too many to count. Just six years before, at the 2006 Zhuhai Airshow, you could count them with one hand.
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05/02/2013
The US Air Force is looking at equipping its Reaper unmanned aircraft with a British-developed, man-in-the-loop missile better able to reduce collateral damage than the current weapons carried by the machine, according to sources. Britain’s dual-mode Brimstone missile is being evaluated by the Air Force’s secretive Big Safari Group, British defense procurement minister Philip Dunne revealed in a speech at the offices of Washington law firm McKenna, Long and Aldridge on April 23.
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05/02/2013
After slipping by each other the narrow aisle of an E-8C Joint STARS aircraft, more than a dozen Airmen settle into their seats and begin to flip switches and work through checklists. Their olive-green headsets block out the roar of the jet engines and replace it with busy radio chatter as the crew prepares for the mission ahead.
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05/02/2013
Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency sent a recommendation to airlines not to use Syrian airspace for flights and it has banned its air carriers from flying over Syria to avoid an unspecified threat from Syrian ground forces.
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05/02/2013
The Obama administration is placing a large bet on the ability of a Syrian former professor of military engineering to build a coherent rebel army that can defeat the regime of Bashar al-Assad, combat Islamic radicals and help build a stable new Syria.
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05/02/2013
Early Tuesday morning, the United States delivered its first direct shipment of food and medical supplies to the rebel Free Syrian Army, with some help from its representatives in Washington. At about 5 a.m. Tuesday morning at an undisclosed location across Syria's northern border, a U.S. C-17 transport aircraft based out of Dover Air Force Base offloaded the first of what will be several shipments.
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05/02/2013
We've been hearing for years now that the U.S. military's crop of slow-moving spy planes fielded for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- ranging from MQ-9 Reaper drones to manned MC-12 Liberties -- will be totally useless in a fight against an adversary armed with sophisticated radars and anti-aircraft missiles (often labeled anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) weapons).
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05/02/2013
France’s announcement that it plans to cut 24,000 military jobs by 2019 is causing concern in the U.S. about commitments to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Europe’s only defense block. “This is very disappointing news,” ,” Nick Burns, former undersecretary of state for political affairs and former U.S. ambassador to NATO, said in an email. “NATO is still in Afghanistan and has major responsibilities in the Balkans.”
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05/02/2013
Reports of the use of chemical weapons in Syria have sparked talk of U.S. military intervention, but experts said stopping the bloodshed in the war-torn country could prove a gargantuan task. U.S. President Barack Obama has repeatedly said any use of chemical weapons would constitute a "red line" that could spur U. S. military involvement at some level, but Obama urged caution Tuesday, suggesting in a White House press briefing that more proof was needed.
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05/01/2013
Canada’s search-and-rescue network is in desperate need of rescue itself, with aging planes, a shortage of military personnel and an information system at the “breaking point” all threatening the ability to respond to emergencies, a new report warns. Auditor general Michael Ferguson paints a troubling picture of a network stretched to the limits, hampered by a lack of investment and a lack of coordination.
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05/01/2013
The United States plans to deploy later this year a dozen more Osprey military aircraft to Japan's Okinawa prefecture which hosts two major U.S. airbases. In spite of protests from residents, the U.S. military had already deployed a fleet of 12 Osprey aircraft at its Futenma Air Station in Okinawa, Japan's southernmost island.
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