The Air Force has awarded a $35 billion contract to build the next generation of air refueling tankers to Boeing Co.
The U.S Department of the Air Force Thursday announced the award of an engineering and manufacturing development contract valued at more than $3.5 billion for the KC-46A aerial refueler to Boeing Co.
The first 18 aircraft will be delivered by 2017.
The Boeing Company submitted a protest to the Air Force’s decision on March 11, 2008. The protest was upheld by the GAO. The Government Accountability Office denied requests from Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Air Force to throw out Boeing’s protest the contract award to Northrup Grumman/EAD. The Northrop Grumman/EADS KC-45 was a proposed aerial refueling tanker aircraft based on the Airbus A330 MRTT (KC-30), a derivative of the civil A330-200, that originally was awarded the contract on February 29, 2008. The United States Air Force had ordered 179 KC-45As in the first stage of replacing the aging KC-135 tankers currently in service.
A first-of-its-kind hijacking exercise involving the U.S., Canadian and Russian militaries went “flawlessly,” and a similar drill is planned next year, an American officer said.
Russian Federated Air Force, the USAF and Candian Air Force worked a training exercise that simulated terrorists hijacking a Boeing 757 in the Alaskan region of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
Other aircraft involved in the exercise were F-22′s that were involved in interception and investigation. ON the Russian side the aircraft was intercepted and investigated by three SU-27 jet fighters, a MIG-31, and two more SU-27′s.
The three countries worked together on the air terrorism exercise.
Operation Vigilant Eagle is also an American law-enforcement effort headed by the FBI aimed at preventing political violence by “lone wolf” terrorists. The operation was first mentioned in the Wall Street Journal in April 2009.
In this case a “lone wolf” is a person who operates alone, outside of extremest organizations. Examples included Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Scott Roeder who killed a Kansas abortion doctor and James von Brunn who attacked the American United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Such attackers are hard to detect as they do not associate with other extremists.
Video of the launch of the X-37B on Thursday, April 22, 2010.
The X-37B spacecraft was launched as a United States Air Force mission, rather than a NASA mission, on April 22, 2010. The Boeing X-37 Advanced Technology Demonstrator is an unpiloted demonstration spaceplane that is intended to test future launch technologies while in orbit and during atmospheric reentry. The X-37B is a reusable robotic spacecraft that is a 120 percent–scaled derivative of the X-40A. The X-37 had its first flight as a drop test on April 7, 2006 at Edwards AFB.
Launch will occur from SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral. This was the first launch of the Atlas V 501 configuration, and the first flight of the X-37B.
