Bell Helicopter
Fort Worth, TX
817-280-2011
www.bellflight.com

During the thirty years since the V-22 Osprey first flew, the tiltrotor aircraft, built by Bell Helicopter, a Textron Inc. company, and Boeing, has fundamentally changed how the U.S. Marine Corps and Air Force operate in combat and support humanitarian operations. So far, more than 375 V-22 aircraft have accumulated more than 450,000 flight hours across a spectrum of missions. The aircraft has proven to be so versatile that the U.S. Navy now has plans to begin leveraging the Osprey’s unique capabilities by using a new V-22 variant to deliver personnel and cargo to its aircraft carriers.

ThermOmegaTech
Warminster, PA
877-379-8258
www.thermomegatech-adg.com

A system supplier to the U.S. Department of Defense recently approached ThermOmegaTech^® to obtain a custom thermal bypass valve. Installed into a military vehicle’s hydraulic system manifold, the valve bypasses cold hydraulic fluid to reduce system load and quickly bring it up to operating temperature.

On the battlefield, you need to know as much as possible.

The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has been working with Raytheon to design efficient, broadband, linear, high-power amplifiers and robust, broadband, low-noise amplifiers for future adaptive, multimodal radar systems. Raytheon has a high-performance, W-band, gallium nitride (GaN) fabrication process and a process design kit (PDK) that ARL used to design low-noise amplifiers, power amplifiers, and other circuits for future radar, communications, and sensor systems. After the first set of ARL and Raytheon designs was submitted for fabrication, test designs of broadband Class A/B power amplifiers were developed. While these designs did not get fabricated in the initial effort, they serve to demonstrate the performance, bandwidth, and capability of this GaN process and could potentially be fabricated in the future.

U.S. rival countries have been rapidly modernizing their militaries, with publicized advances that pose credible challenges to U.S. supremacy in all aspects of warfare: air, land, sea, space and cyberspace. On January 19, 2018 Secretary Mattis discussed the National Defense Strategy and emphasized the need to modernize key capabilities to address these threats. He stated: “To keep pace with our times, the department will transition to a culture of performance and affordability that operates at the speed of relevance. Success does not go to the country that develops a new technology first, but rather, to the one that better integrates it and more swiftly adapts its way of fighting. Our current bureaucratic processes are insufficiently responsive to the department's needs for new equipment. We will prioritize speed of delivery, continuous adaptation and frequent modular upgrades.”

Heat-seeking missiles have been in use against both rotorcraft and fixed wing aircraft since the mid-1950s, and countermeasures to deceive their guidance systems have been employed for nearly as long. Typically, countermeasures operate by generating a strong infrared signature which confuses the missile tracking system. At the heart of these systems is some form of powerful infrared emitting source. Often this source requires optical coating(s) to perform wavelength filtering needed for optimum operation. However, both the mechanical configuration of the thin film filter coatings used and the operating extremes to which they are subjected present challenges for the manufacturer.

A desirable interface between multi-agents is through over-the-air RF connections that include not only the intended direct RF communications paths but also highly variable multi-ray propagation, range attenuation, external RF influences, and near-earth influence. These influences are all difficult to predict, control, and repeat in an outdoor environment. This outdoor testing, as has traditionally been done, is extremely expensive while simultaneously providing fewer data points than more controlled events and the testing events are generally not repeatable.