Morning Coffee: Gen-3 JSF Helmet on Track

Morning Coffee is a robust blend of links to news around the internet concerning the Naval Air Station Patuxent River economic community. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Leader’s owners or staff.

AIN Online reports growing confidence  with the helmet mounted display system for pilots of the F-35. Test pilots will be using the Gen-3 version this year. The confidence in fixes to the Gen-2 gained credence last summer during a test involving a surrogate aircraft flying from St. Mary’s County Regional Airport in Maryland, close to NAS Patuxent River. Marine Lt. Col. Matthew Kelly, government flight test director at the F-35 integrated training center at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland called the Gen-3 on track.

The recently passed federal budget is only a reprieve for the Pentagon, says National Defense Magazine reporting Pentagon officials analyzing defense spending after 2015.  By 2016 sequestration cuts DoD funding to 2007 levels and remains flat through FY2021.  The reduction would cut military spending by about $500 billion through 2021.

A quartet of think tanks painted bleak losses of force if projected cuts of $300 billion remain in place, reports Seapower Magazine. While not identical, all four reports show substantial reductions of personnel, units and equipment in all of the armed services with the Army taking the biggest hit in all four projections. No team scrapped the entire F-35 program.

The White House and Pentagon are poised to expand DoD’s budget to $535 billion in 2016, about $36 billion more than the sequester cap. Defense News reports White House officials resist some reductions proposed by the Pentagon, including the Navy’s plan to cut an aircraft carrier and slow manpower cuts.

“Sequestration is here to stay, and war supplementals are going away.” So Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, an industry analyst, told Defense News, agreeing with a report of DoD skepticism of any bright future industry is painting for shareholders. The Pentagon sees  defense budgets not bottoming out in the coming years as some industry officials have projected, but continuing to shrink.

Touted as the pinnacle of UAS engineering, BAE Systems’ Taranis underwent secret testing said to have demonstrated a perfect take-off, rotation, “climb-out” and landing, reports Defence Talk. The test pilot said it flew at least “twice as fast” as any other drone he has operated remotely, reportedly faster than the speed of sound. As allocation and policies regarding US airspace begin, Aviation Week reports Europe’s defense and space agencies are integrating UAS into civil airspace to demonstrate that UAS can be controlled via satellite communications. (Paywall.)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency also wants hypersonic speeds in an unmanned spacecraft and able to  enter low Earth orbit once a day for 10 days in a row, according to the DARPA federal contract proposal sheet. Other requirements include that it must be reusable, carry 3,000- to 5,000-pound payloads at less than $5M per launch. Another listed requirement is “Mach 10+” speed, meaning 10 times the speed of sound and faster than 7,680 mph.

Not a bird, not a plane, not an earthquake caused the booms that  shook-up Ocean City, Maryland and reported by the Baltimore Sun.  NAS:Pax River confirmed the booms were the supersonic speeds required by routine tests of an F-35C and an F/A-18 off the coast of Maryland and Virginia last Thursday, reports  The Navy Times.