SLD visited Airbus Military during the third week of May 2010 as part of the Trade Media Briefings 2010. Senior Military Airbus officials provided the media with programmatic overviews and opportunities to visit final assembly lines. Recently we posted an overview of our visit to the CN-235 and C-295 Final…
6/20/2010 SLD visited the Fort Worth assembly plant for the F-35 in late April. During the visit, the focus was upon the transformation of the outer wing box assembly production approach. During the System Development and Demonstration (SDD) phase, wings have been built in the more traditional military aircraft assembly…
On May 18, 2010, SLD visited the factory in Spain where the CN-235 is built. The USCG variant is called the Ocean Sentry and two planes were being built on the 4 station line in Seville. Prudencio Escamilla, site manager as well as the Head of the Light and Medium…
UAV Lessons Learned: Coping With Disruptive Technologies By C.J. Pappas Constantine Pappas is starting a series on the development of the UAV environment in the Department of Defense as a new regular SLD contributor. *** This is the first of a series of anecdotal vignettes of the development of the…
The Challenges Facing the Supply Chain: An Interview With Bill Anderson The Honorable William C. (“Bill”) Anderson served as Assistant Secretary of the United States Air Force for Installations, Environment and Logistics as well as the Air Force Senior Energy Executive under President George W. Bush. Presently he serves as…
2010-05-22 Everyone knows that the F-35 is a stealth aircraft. This is one element of what makes it a fifth-generation aircraft. But what is not widely known is that the stealth or low observable (LO) character of the aircraft is significantly different from other stealth aircraft like the F-22. The…
By Mark J. Lewis Mark J. Lewis is chairman of Clark School’s Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, and president-elect of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was the chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force from 2004 to 2008. An earlier version…
The 308th Armament Systems Wing at Eglin Air Force Base: Weapons Development and the Case of the Small Diameter Bomb I Block 9 In mid-February SLD had a chance to interview Randy Brown, 308th Armament Systems Wing Director, and Lieutenant Colonel Amanda Kato, 681st Armament Systems Squadron Commander, 308th Armament…
