01 Nov 04. Alliant Techsystems Inc. received an $8.8m contract for research, development, testing and evaluation of a modified MK44 30mm automatic cannon on the Air Force’s AC-130U gunships. The AC-130U uses side-firing cannons to provide firepower or area saturation against targets like armored vehicles.This is the first time the MK44 will be flown on board a fixed-wing aircraft.

03 Nov 04. BAE Systems Mission Solutions, San Diego, Calif.; TYBRIN Corp., Fort Walton Beach, Fla., Northrop Grumman Defense Mission Systems, Reston, Va; The Boeing Co., Wichita, Kan.; and Lockheed Martin Corp., Colorado Springs, Colo., are being awarded a $2,000,000,000 indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contracts. These contractors will participate in the Mission Planning Enterprise Contract to deliver mission planning capability to joint service warfighters. The contractors will develop and evolve mission planning systems to meet user requirements. Further funds will be awarded as individual delivery orders are issued. Delivery order requirements will be competed among the participants in this effort. The Air Force can issue delivery orders totaling up to the program maximum indicated above, though actual requirements may necessitate less than this amount. BAE systems will perform its effort in San Diego, Calif. (50 percent), and Nashua, N.H. (50 percent). Northrop Grumman will perform its effort at San Pedro, Calif., and Lockheed Martin will perform their efforts at the locations listed above. This work will be complete by November 2009. Solicitation began February 2004 and negotiations were completed September 2004. The Headquarters Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., is the contracting activity (FA8720-04-D-0002 – 0006).

04 Nov 04. EADS is participating in the modernization of NATO’s AWACS early warning fleet. As announced on Thursday, Boeing has awarded EADS Defence Electronics an order for the delivery of AWACS mission computers and Multi-Sensor Integration (MSI) computers for NATO’s E-3A AWACS aircraft following successful development. EADS developed the MSI software in the run-up to the NATO E-3A modernization program. This software permits the automatic identification and tracking of targets as well as the generation of correlated target flight paths by including a variety of reconnaissance data on board the AWACS platform. This technology ensures a marked improvement in automatic target tracking and identification and significantly assists flight officers and their teams in airborne air surveillance.

01 Nov 04. General Electric Rolls-Royce Fighter Engine Team (FET), LLC,
Cincinnati, Ohio, is being awarded a $122,155,880 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the Joint Strike Fighter F136 Propulsion Risk Reduction/Transition Effort. This effort will establish a bridge between the pre-System Development and Demonstration (SDD) Program and the SDD Program, which will protect SDD program milestones and mitigate technical, schedule, and cost risk. Specific activities include preliminary design and development of technical requirements and interface control documents; design effort for, and placement of, schedule-critical long-lead hardware procurement material orders with vendors; and continued risk reduction systems demonstrations, systems engineering, and program management. Work will be performed in Evandale, Ohio (60 percent); Indianapolis, Ind. (25 percent); and Bristol, United Kingdom (15 percent), and is expected to be completed in July 2005. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Md., is the contracting activity (N00019-04-C-0102).

Nov 04. Roush is to benefit from the recent MAN Support Vehicle requirement placed with MAN of germany. The company is to integrate the BOWMAN system into the vehicles. Roush engineers will work closely with MAN’s R&D operaytion in Munich