Pratt & Whitney was awarded the contract modification by the U.S. Air Force Life Cycle Management Center for the Adaptive Engine Transition Program. Through AETP, Pratt & Whitney was tasked with designing, fabricating, integrating, and testing complete, flight-weight adaptive engines – the contract modification allocates funding for “risk reduction” activities related to adaptive engine development.
Boeing in Everett, Wash., won a $2.9 billion U.S. Air Force contract to deliver 18 additional KC-46A tanker aircraft, spares, support equipment, spare engines, and wing air refueling pod kits. Boeing is now on contract for 52 KC-46 Pegasus military aerial refueling and strategic military transport aircraft, based on the company’s 767 jet airliner, with the addition of this fourth production lot.
DARPA will invest more than $2 billion in over 20 new and existing programs collectively called the “AI Next” campaign. Through AI Next, DARPA is exploring ways to advance the state-of-the-art in AI, pushing beyond second-wave machine learning techniques and toward “contextual reasoning and adaptation” capabilities.
With software making it easier to create digital twins, automakers are moving beyond geometric models to provide parameters such as behavioral and business info.
A new “AI Innovation Challenge” tasks United Kingdom and Canadian startups and researchers to pitch ideas for how AI could improve aircraft efficiency in extreme weather.
Lockheed Martin and the Drone Racing League (DRL) is challenging the engineering community with a new twist on drone enthusiast racing competition: develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology that will enable an autonomous UAS to race a pilot-operated drone and win against human first-person view (FPV) operators. The call for advanced autonomy, dubbed the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge, came during the TechCrunch Disrupt technology startup conference in San Francisco.
Northrop Grumman has successfully completed casting, or filling with solid propellant, the first live motor segment for its new OmegA rocket. The segment, developed as a part of the Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems’ Common Boost Segment (CBS) program, is specifically designed to support the needs of the OmegA intermediate- to heavy-lift rocket, soon to be the largest and most capable in the company’s line-up.
GKN Aerospace in Trollhättan, Sweden, are developing and manufacturing the first additive-manufactured, or 3D-printed, rocket engine turbines in Europe, officials say. The tier 1 aerospace supplier is harnessing cutting-edge additive manufacturing (AM) technology to produce two full-scale turbines for the Prometheus reusable rocket engine demonstrator on liquid oxygen and methane propellants, while reducing the number of parts from more than 100 to 2 and cutting costs by 90 percent.
More than 300 aerospace professionals are expected at SAE International’s Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) Users Forum, hosted by Inmarsat at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Heathrow Hotel in London November 13 through 15, 2018. Registration is now open for the world's largest conference dedicated to EFBs which boasts a supplier exhibition area and will focus on the latest regulatory developments, aircraft interface devices (AIDs), security and connectivity progress, advances in mobile applications, and airline operator experiences.