ASAP Aerospace Blog - By Page 15

U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has awarded Aurora Flight Sciences with a contract worth up to $90 million to build a prototype hybrid electric-powered aircraft. This will be carried out under the VTOL X-Plane project which is the designated Aurora Flight Sciences vertical takeoff and landing experimental plane which Aurora is planning on flight testing in 2018.

Britain and France are planning to spend over $2 billion in order to plan and develop a FCAS or Future Combat Air System. This Future Combat Air System could replace the current-generation European fighters. The current-generation European fighters have a time frame of 2030. The agreement between Britain and France was made in March 3, 2016.

NASA’s super plan is being referred to as “X-plane” or “experimental supersonic”.  This plane will be able to move passengers 2 times faster than the speed of sound, Mach 2.04. Back in 2003, super planes have been taken out of service. The last super plane serviced was the Concorde. These new super planes will allow traveling across the Atlantic Ocean duration times to be cut in half, compared to original conventional jets.

CEO of Samson Motors, Sam Bousfield has produced something astonishing in the advancements of flying sports cars. The Switchblade is a flying car that has aerial and everyday driving capabilities.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has recently unveiled their plans for development of a repurposed arsenal plane which would be capable of carrying large amounts of missiles as well as bombs into battle. This arsenal plane is hoped to fly alongside modern combat aircrafts such as the Lockheed Martin F-35. The DOD also plans on investing in resilient and fast micro drones which can deploy from fighter jets while travelling at Mach 0.9, while having the capabilities of flying through strong crosswinds.

Another barrier has been broken through in the aerospace engineering field. SpaceX announced that they have successful implemented a way to reignite the first-stage booster stage and bring it back down to Earth after having launched it. Sounds confusing? That’s because it is. Not only is it complicated, it’s also incredibly difficult to accomplish as well.

The first details and information on the unmade air vehicle, coined the Impact, has been given to Flightglobal to release to the public. This unmanned air vehicle has been developed on Meteor Aerospace. Meteor Aerospace is a privately owned Israeli company that was formed in central Israel in 2013.

The Boeing Company has recently awarded ViaSat Inc., a global provider of secure networking services and high-speed satellite broadband services covering commercial and military markets, a contract for the production of around 90 Link 16 Small Tactical Terminals (STT). These Small Tactical Terminals will be used for the Lots 5 and 6 on the production line for the AH-64E Apache Guardian Attach Helicopter.

European regulators for aviation have plans of doing inspection on many of the AS 350s and other helicopters manufactured by the Airbus Group SE. Some of the inspections are done to test whether or not a replacement for specific parts are needed due to their nature of commonly cracking.

Boeing and the United States Air Force recently completed the first successful refueling over the state of Washington with a KC-46A tanker.