October 16, 2015 Military Aviation News
10/16/2015
On Oct. 10, a Russian Su-30SM belonging to the contingent deployed to Latakia, in Syria, had a close encounter with a unspecified U.S. combat plane supporting Operation Inherent Resolve. According to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, the Flanker-derivative 4++ Gen aircraft was providing air escort for a package of attack planes in Syria when it approached the American plane, to perform a VID (Visual Identification).
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10/16/2015
Base officials and the Top of Utah community officially welcomed the F-35 Lightning II at a ceremony here Oct. 14, an event that formally marked the beginning of F-35 operations for the 388th and 419th Fighter Wings. Members of the Utah congressional delegation, Lockheed Martin and the Air Force addressed a crowd of more than 500 people, which included Airmen and their families, local civic leaders and the media.
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10/16/2015
Burning OilfieldsDARPA issued a Broad Agency Announcement solicitation for a new program called Dynamic Network Adaptation for Mission Optimization (DyNAMO) which aims to keep America's manned (and unmanned) combat aircraft connected even if enemy forces attempt to jam their communications. But that's not as straightforward as it sounds. US aircraft are additionally hindered by the fact that many of the platforms operate on incompatible radio networks using different encryption schemes.
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10/16/2015
The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and the Boeing F/A-18E/F are both aging platforms and will need to be replaced in the mid-2030s. Moreover, for the U.S. Air Force, it needs to replace the venerable F-15C Eagle—which was supposed to have been replaced by the Raptor until that program was prematurely terminated.
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10/16/2015
‘India doubles down on crappy homemade jets‘, proclaims one analyst. ‘Modi pushes ‘obsolete’ made-in-India plane on reluctant military‘, a newspaper headline asserts. A third suggests that the jet ‘could hurt [the] Indian Air Force‘. With the Indian government deciding this September to limit the purchase of French Rafale multi-role fighters to just 36 airframes and acquire 120 Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) instead, criticisms of the Tejas seem to have surfaced with renewed vigour.
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10/16/2015
President Obama's long dream of concluding the war in Afghanistan before he departs the White House officially ended Thursday with the announcement that the U.S. will leave up to 5,500 troops there into 2017. The announcement came after months of bad news from Afghanistan: The Taliban has scored a series of battlefield victories, the Afghan army's casualties are soaring and there are mounting worries that the Islamic State is gaining a foothold in rural areas.
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10/16/2015
Lockheed Martin has received a $305.4 million contract from the U.S. Air Force for continued production of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) and its Extended Range (ER) version. The Lot 13 contract includes 140 baseline JASSMs for U.S. and international partners, 140 JASSM-ER missiles, data, tooling and test equipment. The Lot 13 award represents the largest JASSM-ER order to date and brings total missiles under contract to more than 2,300.
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10/16/2015
Airstrikes of the US-led international coalition destroyed on Thursday an Islamic State (ISIL) coordination headquarters, killing one of the group's northern Iraq military commanders, local media reported, citing a military source.
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10/16/2015
Over the past 24 hours, Russian warplanes completed 33 sorties in Syria, striking ISIL facilities in the provinces of Idlib, Hama, Damascus, Aleppo, and Deir az-Zor, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.
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