2017 will be a busy year for the Royal Australian Navy’s aircraft maintenance and flight trials unit which has seven first of class flight trials scheduled before September. The unit, along with Royal Australian Air Force’s aircraft research and development unit, and Army aviation test and evaluatio
The UK Ministry of Defence has contracted Amec Foster Wheeler to support its Naval Nuclear Propulsion Programme (NNPP) with research and technology (R&T) services. The work is worth approximately £35m over five years and will sustain about 70 jobs at Amec Foster Wheeler’s offices and laboratories in
A class of 12 new nuclear-powered ballistic submarines is ready to enter the detailed design phase after Pentagon’s procurement chief approved the Milestone B review. The Milestone B decision allows the U.S. Navy to appropriate $773 million to defense contractors, in this case it is General Dynamics
A DARPA program that seeks to ensure U.S. forces have connectivity even when traditional tactical networks are knocked offline has completed its initial phase. Named TUNA (short for Tactical Undersea Network Architecture), the program completed the concept phase and now transits to a demonstration o
The UK government is setting aside £30 milion for the development of a laser weapon prototype that is to be developed under the Laser Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) capability demonstrator. After several months of preparations, the UK Ministry of Defense on Wednesday officially awarded the contract t
UK’s BMT Defence Services (BMT) joined forces with the University of Bristol to work on the development of an UAV that would be the first ever to perform a perched landing on a ship’s flight deck. The 18-month research project was delivered as part of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s
The UK’s Maritime & Coastguard Agency (MCA) has contracted the maritime services company Ardent for emergency towage off the north and north-western coasts of Scotland. The new ship to be used – the Ievoli Black – is a 70 metre towing vessel of some 2283 gross tonnes and a bollard pull of 139 tonnes
Dutch system integrator Alewijnse Marine said it has opened a new service and maintenance facility in the port of Den Helder to support its activities at the Dutch Royal Naval dockyard and Damen Shipyards Den Helder. The company said this new facility will allow it to deliver its expertise in all ty
U.S. Navy shipbuilding projects have become a target of an oversight report released by U.S. Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Part of an ongoing series of reports dubbed America’s Most Wasted: Indefensible, the report identified $13 billion in wasteful spending a
The U.S. Navy has awarded Huntington Ingalls Industries a $51 million contract modification for the first year of life-cycle engineering and support services on the U.S. Navy’s San Antonio (LPD 17) class of amphibious transport docks. Services provided in the contract include post-delivery planning
The U.S. Office of Naval Research has recently tested autonomous unmanned swarming boats during a demonstration in the lower Chesapeake Bay. According to the service, the results have revealed ‘dramatic new possibilities’ for autonomy in future naval missions. Using a combination of software, radar
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will live-stream a dive on two Japanese mini submarines sunk during the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. 75 years later, a team of maritime archaeologists and scientists from NOAA’s office of national marine sanctuaries and office o
Bahrain was the stage for the 39th Shared Awareness and Deconfliction (SHADE) conference which was held November 30. The conference was a forum to discuss counter-piracy in the Gulf of Aden and in the Indian Ocean and the importance of cooperation between naval units in the region, industry and othe
The U.S. Navy’s unmanned aircraft Tern, under development by DARPA and the Office of Naval Research, has made another step towards its goal of performing an initial flight test by 2018. In mid-October, the Tern team completed a critical design review (CDR) of the air vehicle’s General Electric engin
