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15 Mar 16. Cubic Global Defense (CGD), a business unit of Cubic Corporation (NYSE: CUB), announced the completion of its first live-flight demonstration of the Cubic Bandit Board with partner Draken International, operator of the largest privately-owned fleet of ex-military aircraft. The Cubic Bandit Board is an integrated low-cost tactical training capability that transmits the live P5 Combat Training System (P5 CTS) picture onto a kneeboard tablet of a pilot in an aggressor “Red Air” aircraft. During the demonstration, Cubic successfully relayed the high-fidelity, real-time picture from the P5 CTS pod to a kneeboard tablet in a Draken A-4 cockpit. The Cubic Miniature Encryptor (CME), which demonstrated its encryption capability in September 2015, was utilized with an added data guard functionality as part of the Bandit Board flight demonstration.
Training for today’s advanced threats to air combat operations requires adaptable, high-fidelity training tools. The P5 CTS is designed to provide secure, tailored and scalable instrumentation solutions to best support warfighter needs in air-to-air, air-to-ground and surface-to-air combat training missions. Cubic’s worldwide fielded system enhances real-time and post-mission training by displaying the live-air picture, recording mission data and relaying Time, Space and Positioning Information (TSPI) between participating aircraft during training sorties. Key components of the system include secure, GPS-enabled, aircraft-mounted airborne instrumentation pods plus ground stations, which help aircrew conduct, monitor and control air combat training and post-flight debriefing. Accurate scenario management and enhanced air combat training safety – especially for aircraft not equipped with Link-16 – ensures desired tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and learning objectives can be delivered in the most cost effective manner.
“Cubic’s addition of the Bandit Board capability provides another application to the P5 CTS, which significantly increases the return on investment (ROI) for air combat training events,” said Dave Buss, senior vice president of Cubic Global Defense and recently retired Commander, Naval Air Forces (the Navy’s “Air Boss”). “We look forward to the adoption of our recently demonstrated Bandit Board and encryption solutions in expanded applications for the fielded P5 CTS system.”
In the demonstration, two Draken fighter aircraft carried the CME encrypted P5 CTS pods and utilized their associated tablets to validate their positions and formations. Aircraft scalable location display, altitude, airspeed, vector and pairing data were part of the P5 CTS tablet’s software application. A P5 CTS Live Monitor ground station captured the sortie data and post flight validated the picture recorded on the tablets. The successful flight of the Bandit Board follows Cubic’s flight demonstration of the CME’s encryption capability as well as a P5 CTS integrated LVC air combat training demonstration at the 2015 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference.
15 Mar 16. NRL project would collect solar power in space. One way to amp up solar power is to get closer to the sun—as in space, where there are no atmospheric disturbances to get in the way and where spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit can stay within the sun’s rays.
The challenge is in being able to collect enough solar power to make it worth the expense of launching a large solar array into space and then efficiently getting that power transmitted down to Earth.
A government/industry team of scientists led by Dr. Paul Jaffe, a spacecraft engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, has been working on solving that challenge and say they hope to demonstrate an orbiting power station within 10 years. And they appear to be making some progress—the project recently wa