ASAP Aerospace Blog - By Page 14

Back in October 2014, Gulfstream unveiled that they intend to produce a new business jet called the G600. Fast forward to 2016 and Gulfstream is now hard at work assembling the first G600 flight test airplane at their Savannah Georgia production facility.

In March 2016 Boeing Co. announced that they struck a deal worth $922.6 million with the United States Army. Boeing will provide 117 remanufactured AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopters.

The Israel Defense Force (IDF) has expressed their interest in acquiring a fleet of suicide drones that are equipped with cameras and/or explosives and designed to emulate the Japanese Kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers such as those involved in the terrorist campaigns during the 9/11 attacks. These suicide drones are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and are being developed by weapons manufacturer Israel Aerospace Industries (IA). Although there are no official plans for the Israel Defense Force (IDF) to act upon, there is significant interest and where there’s smoke there’s usually fire.

On April 8th, 2016 Bombardier has a press release that will display three of their leading business aircrafts during this year’s Asian Business Aviation Conference & Exhibition (ABACE) which is going to be located at Hongqiao airport in China from April 12-14 2016. There aircrafts that will be shown at this exhibition are the Global 6000, Challenger 650, and Challenger 350.

The U.S. Navy has extended the original contract with Orbital ATK for their production of the AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM) multi-mode seekers by adding 556 more units expected to be delivered by 2023. According to the latest acquisition report by Pentagon, the extended contract is for an increase in planned production quantities for the AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM) multi-mode seekers from the original 2003 objective of 1879 units to the now proposed 2435 units in addition to the 40 test units with the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet among the aircrafts testing the AGM-88E.

A Chinese state-owned aerospace manufacturer, Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd. (COMAC), is starting to utilize cloud technology and big data in order to build safer airplanes. The Chinese aircraft manufacturer is shifting their focus on to how to effectively minimize safety risks which are often caused by abnormal human error. They are also investigating ways on how to completely recover crucial data necessary for analyzing an air crash.

Two professors at the University of Toronto are currently developing an airplane design that is aimed at increasing fuel economy/efficiency. This breakthrough could literally save hundreds of millions of liters of fuel which in turn will save exponentially more in terms of the amount of money we will save. This development will also greatly reduce the environmental impact of operating an aircraft by making it more green-friendly.

NASA has a big project of launching an aircraft to Mars this month, but that was put on hold because they found a leak in one of the aircraft instruments. So now they next mission is supposed to be pushed towards May of 2018 which would be sending an aircraft to the Red Planet. They are still 100% sure if they will be sending the aircraft but that’s what NASA is currently aiming for their next project of launching an aircraft to Mars. They plan on sending an aircraft to Mars to study the planets interior and learn more about how the rocky world formed. The project was on track to being launched but everything came to halt in December when a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered a problem in one of the landers two main instruments.

Airbus has been focusing on the loading of airplanes in order to achieve faster boarding. They have recently had an idea patented in which there would be a redesign to its airplane which would allow for passengers to be preloaded into a cabin. Once the passengers are preloaded into the cabin, the cabin is then lowered into the bed of a plane.

Rich McCormick released an article from The Verge, talking about how Jeff Bezos is planning to have tourist in space in the beginning of 2018. Jeff Bezos founded the privately owned space travel company, Blue Origin. According to journalists from the New York Times, Jeff Bezos mentioned groups over of six tourists will be able to take short trips into space in about two years so they can experience weightlessness.