Month: July 2008

X2 Advancing Blade Helo Proceeds Toward First Flight

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Basically, the folks at Sikorski think that technological advances have made the advancing blade helicopter viable, most notably composites, active fly by wire control systems to reduce vibration, and improved propulsion (the late 1970s version X-59A ABC used two turbojets for forward thrust) (see also here)

By offloading the retreating blade, they hope to achieve cruise speeds in excess of 250 kts, and improved range.

I’m rather more sanguine on this than I am on the tilt rotor concept myself, because the tilt-rotor is really a plane that can take off vertically, while this is a helicopter that can fly faster.

It appears to have fewer compromises, and should have superior performance in the hover and low speed flight regime, which is the helicopter’s raison d’etre.

As Sikorski is self-funding this, I expect progress to be slow, they can’t afford a crash.

They’ve already pushed back first flight a couple of years from 2006, and now there is talk of pushing it back to 2009.

Also, Av Week‘s Bill Sweetman noticed a special ops mockup model of the concept at Farnborough:

Stealth Ain’t Rocket Science

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The basic physics behind it was discovered by a Russian mathemetician in the 1960s, and now we see Dassault completing a completely autonomous flight of a stealthy UAV, the AVE-D (D for discretion, stealth in French).

It’s actually a fairly impressive feat. It taxied to the runway, took off, executed a series of aerial maneuvers, landed, and taxied back to its parking space without human intervention.

Yeah, they all look pretty much the same….It’s the laws of physics that do this.

JSF Pricing

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And you thought that hedge funds and derivatives were complex.

So Lockheed-Martin is trying to set realistic prices for the F-35 (paid subscription required), so that it can finalize deals, particularly with countries on board the program who have not yet made official decisions to purchase the fighter.

The most recent estimates are the CTOL at $49.5 million, STVOL at $69.3 million, and the carrier variant at $64.5 million, and I don’t believe any of that. I would be surprised if the CTOL variant is less than €50m and the STOVL and CV versions were under €65 million, and I expect the dollar to fall against the Euro a lot over the next 5-8 years.

In any case, L-M is looking for a “consortium buy”, where the partners in the program lock in the price by paying for jets in 2011 that are delivered after 2014, think of it as a stealthy Brooklyn bridge purchase.

Of course LM officials maintain that their cost models are “more reliable” than of past fighter programs…which honestly is not saying all that much.

The idea is to lock the partners into multiyear procurement when the US Congress won’t allow the US military to do so until the aircraft is certified for full rate production.

Only that certification comes in 2014 at the earliest, so they want to have multi year pre-paid contracts to buy in 2011, for delivery in 2014, even though that is the earliest date one can expect to have the aircraft certified for full rate production.

When you add to this the fact that the system will be highly integrated, and customers will find it very difficult to install their own upgrades (the Israelis are already in talks on this), I think that this will be much more expensive than they are claiming here.

I could be wrong, but it’s tough to be wrong when you expect cost overruns and schedule slips in a major defense contract.

JSF: It’s All About the Benjamins

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It’s the Dutch, so it would actually be Guilder, or Euro, Meijer, or Snip, or Geeltje, but in any case, the the kickback scheme that has the Netherlands as a JSF customer is now up for negotiation.

Basically, Dutch industry got a lot of offsets as a part of the F-35 deal, and the Dutch government is supposed to get a percentage of that revenue back from the defense contractors.

The problem is that the deal is not fully fleshed out, and the government is now asking for 10.3% of all revenue JSF related orders through 2053 as opposed to their original figure of 3.5%, because the falling US dollar will reduce public revenues in this scheme.

This may explain why the government is going through the charade of reexamining the procurement decision on the JSF, asking to look at the Eurofighter Typhoon (refused to respond with proposal), Dassault Rafale (Refused to respond with proposal), and SAAB Gripen.

They are using it as a lever to get more money out of their private defense contractors.

Finally Found a DoD Project That’s On Budget and On Schedule

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It’s the AH-64 Apache Block III Upgrade.

This is actually a non trivial upgrade:

The Block 3 improvements are pretty fundamental, requiring a new airframe, more than 1 million lines of code, a new transmission system, longer range and automatic recognition radar, UAV connectivity, the ability to communicate with a much wider range of platforms (but not stealthy aircraft), software that will help the air crew make rapid decisions and a host maintenance management systems that are expected to reduce the average flight hours lost to fixing and maintaining things by 30 percent.

And it appears that it’s working because of the basics, keeping up good lines of communications and avoiding requirement creep.

That last one seems to be the biggie in defense procurement fiascoes, which is why the entire spiral development model is problematic.

Moore’s Law* Hits AESA Radars

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It looks like manufacturers are starting to offer relatively inexpensive and low cost active, electronically-scanned array (AESA) radars as retrofits to existing aircraft. (Paid Subscription Required)

Basically, you have hundreds of solid state radars on a chip working together, and these chips are following the same trajectory as did processors and memory in the early days of the integrated circuit.

Raytheon is exhibiting its X-band Raytheon Advanced Combat Radar(RACR) at Farnborough†, which is designed to be lighter, cheaper, and require less power (and thus less cooling is required).

These radars are not up to the performance of, for example the F-22’s APG-77 radar, but they still provide a significant improvement in capability, including increased range, better resolution (with perhaps some anti-stealth capability), and the possibility of the radar being used for electronic warfare.

*Moore’s Law says that computer chips will double in power every 18 months (or 2 years depending on how you define power).
†If anyone knows of a way for me to get an all-expense-paid trip to either the Farnborough or the Paris air show, and they need a kidney….

Tanker Saga Update

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Northrop Grumman is now saying that it will complete all 4 system design and development (SDD) tanker airframes by the end of 2009, even with the hold for the rebid.

This is in stark contrast to Boeing, where they are so far behind schedule for their 767 tanker for the Italian Air Force, that hief of the defense staff, Gen. Vincenzo Camporin, will refuse to meet with Boeing executives at the Farnborough air show.

The tankers are already over 3 years late.

More evidence as to why EADS should be the winner on this.

F-35 Sound Check

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About a month ago, I blogged about how the noise levels of the F-35 might be an issue for the Norwegian Air Force.

Well, Lockheed Martin is now saying that, in violation of the laws of physics, the noise level in the “far field” areas will be less than the F-16, which has about 60% the installed thrust.

I inclined to believe that this is Lockheed speak for “we’ll cook the books with a test we design, and you’ll like it.”

Economics Update

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Well, the Europeans, or at least the Germans promise to be in major freak out mode for a while, as producer prices are increasing at 6.7%, and this means that the Germans, the largest economy in Europe, will be screaming for rate hikes, because it was only 80 years ago that you needed a wheelbarrow or marks to buy a loaf of bread.

Unsurprisingly, this drove the dollar down too, though a contributing factor may be a report published in the financial times that sovereign wealth funds are looking to reduce exposure to the dollar.

There is no stampede, but people are tiptoeing toward the exits on the dollar.

I’m not sure how related it is, sovereign wealth funds hold a big chunk of GSE debt, but Freddie Mac has filed with the SEC to sell stock in order to raise new capital.

In energy, dribbled down a bit* to settle at $128.88/bbl, and retail gasoline fell about a penny.

In investment banking, Merrill Lynch lost $4.9 billion, and Citi lost $2.5 billion, though the latter was better than expected, and Citi will continue paying a dividend, which strikes me as foolish.

In real estate, evidence, in Orange County at least, that commercial real estate is comatose. A 91% drop in building, a 62% increase in vacancy, and a 2.5% decrease in rents.

It’s grim in the UK too, with mortgage lending falling 32% year over year, with near certainty of the central bank increasing rates.

The UK is beginning to look like the San Diego of Europe.

*No Apology for the pun.

Bush Has a New Political Scandal to Cover Up

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I don’t know what it is, though I predict that it will come out some time between 8:00pm on Friday and Monday morning.

How do I know this? I know this because Homeland Security Secretary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin* Michael Chertoff is issuing a warning that European Terrorists are attempting to enter the US.

We know what this means: Breaking scandal in the Bush admin.

*Sorry about the confusion, for some reason, I always mix up the two of them.

Abolish the US Air Force: Comfort Capsule Edition

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I don’t mean junk the planes, just fold it back into the US Army Air Corps.

Case in point, the Air Force Top Brass is spending some $20 million counter-terrorism funds to build “comfort capsules” to be used by senior generals when traveling.

And these people were very involved in this project:

One request was that the color of the leather for the seats and seat belts in the mobile pallets be changed from brown to Air Force blue and that seat pockets be added; another was that the color of the table’s wood be darkened.

Changing the seat color and pockets alone was estimated in a March 12 internal document to cost at least $68,240.

(emphasis mine)

I understand the need of these guys to stay connected, but that would be a large screen laptop with secure network connections and a satcom link, not this.

Apparrently General Robert McMahon, Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for logistics, installations and mission support, who appears to be the prime mover behind this, and claims that it is, “not opulent”, and that he wanted the change to blue because “it would not show as much dirt” as brown, the color of dirt.