MiG is saying that it will be MiG-29K carrier variant to the Indian Navy shortly.
Unfortunately, the ship that they are to serve on, the Admiral Gorshkov, is still in refit in Russia, and it will be at least two years late.
Of interest is that the MiG-29K’s avionics will operate on a MIL STD 1553B bus, a western standard.
I think that this is targeted at the specialized “Beluga” bloated variants used by Boeing and Airbus to transport sub assemblies of their aircraft.
Since the AN-124 is designed from the get go as a freighter, there are some advantages, such as a lower deck allowing for freight to be driven directly on.
It ain’t pretty, but it’s less ugly than the Airbus/Boeing “bloat planes”:
I’ve been posting a lot on the insolvency of innovative aircraft diesel manufacture and the conflict with it’s primary customer, Diamond Aircraft.
Well, it appears that their divorce is now final, with Diamond washing its hands of a bid for the engine manufacturer, and hoping for certification of its aircraft diesel in the next few months, followed by swapping out the old Thielert diesels.
Seeing as how much of the purchase price of the Thielert engine included scheduled maintenance, and now that it is in bankruptcy, it’s no longer covered, this is probably the best course of action for Diamond.
Background here.
Well, the GE-SNECMA joint venture CFM gas announced that they will be working on an advanced engine for the next generation of narrow body airliner (A320 and B-737) replacements using what they call Leap-X technologies.
In addition they are teaming with NASA to apply these technoligies involved in this engine to an advanced open rotor concept (Paid Subscription Required):
It’s clearly the same no-gearbox path that GE took in the late 1980s with its “un-ducted fan”, which was killed by lower oil costs and noise concerns regarding the counter-rotating fan interaction.
The research, at least for now is about keeping the pressure ratio low on the fans to minimize noise levels.
Rolls Royce is also working on open rotor studies (Paid Subscription Required), though it’s concept is more conventional, with a gearbox.
It’s applying the EU funded DREAM research program, and will probably borrow quite a lot from the 10,000+ hp TP400 turboprop used on the A400 military transport.
One of the interesting things here is that both concepts show the same number of blades front and rear, which I think will change, because you get simultaneous interaction pulses from all the blades at once then, which means lots o’ noise.
Basically, it comes down to the alternatives being too damn expensive or too politically restricted, and the additional payload/range/performance of the upgraded Gripen making it quite competitive, particularly with the option of an AESA radar.
This quote is intertesting to me:
[Robert] Kemp [senior vice president for international sales & marketing at Gripen International] says many potential F-35 customers were uncomfortable with the “You’re either with us or against us” approach to fighter sales. He claimed that growing dissatisfaction with technology transfer, workshare and offsets, coupled with F-35 cost escalation and slipping timescales have led “more and more JSF customers coming to talk to us about a replacement for JSF”.
It’s one of the concerns I have about the F-35 is that it appears to have a closed nature, and if a competitor to Lockheed-Martin’s weapons systems wants to get certified, I think that there are doubts about how cooperative LM will be.
I would also direct you toward Bill Sweetman’s snippets of an interview with Mr. Kemp:
“Schedule. So many governments have been grossly embarrassed by programs that run years late.” (Consider the Australian Seasprites and Canada’s CH-148 Cyclone.) Kemp points out that the last major Gripen program, the C/D update, came in on time and cost.
“Price.” Kemp continues. “If it works and you can deliver it, the price – including operational cost – is extremely important.” International politics are less important than they used to be, Kemp says, but domestic issues are more so. (It was the activism of coalition partners that forced the Netherlands government to re-evaluate its choice of the JSF.)
Close air support (CAS) missions are becoming more crucial as time goes on, particularly in countries which have supported operations in the Middle East. “The guys commanding those operational units were the ones who got promoted, and their influence and experience will be more important.”
I still think that the sales folks at SAAB are delusional about having a shot at winning in the Netherlands, because the Cloggies have spent too much money on the JSF already, but the basic sales strategy of, “On time and on budget,” seems to me very sound.
More specifically, they will be terminating production after their already-committed total of 124, and upgrading the remainder of their tank corps with some 1,657 1,657 T-90S Bhishma tanks of Russian origin.
Note that the design and development of this tank began in 1974, so after 34 years of development, it finally appears dead.
Not even US defense procurement programs are this screwed up.
It flew for the first time on July 11, on P&W’s 747SP, and they now are calling it the PW1000G.
Picture pron:
Only, what two years late (Paid Subscription Required).
That being said, they are hitting new milestones:
They are still addressing a weight issue though.
Aviation Week discusses possible issues involved in integrating new weapons into the JSF (Paid Subscription Required).
Because of the limited space in the weapons bays, and the highly integrated nature of the fire control systems, it’s beginning to look like integrating home grown weapons into the airframe will be an expensive and difficult proposition.
The article specifically mentions the UK concerns regarding integrating their Meteor air to air missile.
Commercial bankruptcies up 47% year over year.
Not surprising, considering the state of the economy.
It’s not surprising that Boeing will stick with the 767 for the rebid of the tanker program. They have only a few months to respond, and going with, for example, a shortened 777 would be a very difficult thing.
The problem is that the A330 is a better plain, and the A330 MRTT, which is the airframe that Airbus is using, is flying now, even while Boeing is struggling to deliver its 767 tanker to Italy, which is not the same airframe as is proposed for the US tanker.
Airbus is clearly the better choice, even the GAO review said that while faulting the selection process, but politics being what it is, I would give Airbus a no better than 50/50 chance of winning this if it ends up a soul source bid.
Well, it looks like the Navy is coming to its senses, and that it will be trying to terminate its DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyer at just two ships.
I think that this is a good thing. They are too damn expensive to build many, and whatever capabilities you add, you lose too much coverage. A large ship (14,500 tons) simply can not be in two places at once, while two (or three) smaller Burke class destroyers can.
It’s the sensible decision, but I agree with Galrahn that there is a risk that Congress may overrule the Navy, because there are prominent people who want the defense pork, which would be a damn shame.
It’s not an ironclad commitment to purchasing the aircraft, but I think that some sort or series production is almost a certainty for the upgraded Gripen, which is now being referred to as the E/F models.
Below are pictures of the F-22 dropping the 250 lb Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) drop at supersonic speed. This is actually a unique and valuable capability.
It’s a guided weapon, so there is some body lift generated, so if they drop the weapon at above 60,000 feet and supersonic speed, you could strike something 50+ miles away.
There are, however standoff weapons that equal this capability, though the round would be more expensive, but the plane cheaper.
H/t World Wide War Pigs.
This GE-Rolls Royce competitor to the Pratt & Whitney F135 in the JSF has completed a round of tests in STOVL mode, which is generally considered the most demanding part of the engine envelope.
My guess would be the GE/RR want to get as far as possible as quickly as possible, because the Pentagon has repeatedly tried to kill the program, and it’s been Congress keeping it alive.
I have mixed emotions on the F-136. It’s clear that the F-100/F110 competition was a success in the F-15 and F-16, lowering cost and getting increased performance, but the F-110 was a derivative of the F-101 developed for the B-1 bomber, and as such the start up costs were much smaller.
First, it appears that Lockheed-Martin and Boeing will collaborate on the USAF/DARPA Blackswift technology demonstrator. (see below for notational configuration)
Additionally, we are increasingly seeing developments world wide in hypersonics. (Paid Subscription Required)
We have had a number of relatively successful tests in Australia and the USA, and the EU is funding Lapcat II and Atllas concepts (see below), in addition to efforts by France, Italy, the UK, and Germany.
The Russians are working on plasma concepts to manage the shockwave and examining their potential as control surfaces, with, “tests on a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) plasma generator in a simulated Mach 5.15”, being conducted, while the Japanese are looking at a combined cycle turbine with a cooled intake called the “S-Engine”
In terms of meaningful applications, I think that some sort of storable fuel, not the LH2 currently used for demonstrators, will have to be a part of the equation.
Only 12 years after a fuel tank explosion killed 230 on TWA flight 800.
Thank you for your prompt and timely response, guys.
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:
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.
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.