Electronic Warfare

KESTEREN, Netherlands — Last week’s grounding of the F-35 fleet puts the Pratt & Whitney F-135 engine back in the public spotlights, just one week before the planned international debut of the F-35B at the RIAT 2014 and Farnborough Airshows.

Ian Will, Manager of Electro-optic EW Systems at Tenix Defence Systems, confirmed today that a foreign customer has placed an order for three Mallina long-range ultraviolet stimulators. Each unit will ship from the company’s Welshpool facility before the end of the calendar year. The deal, while modest in quantity, marks the first export sale of the Mallina series and signals growing confidence in Australian-designed threat-emulation equipment.

Fresh air-to-air photos released on Chinese and foreign social media within the last forty-eight hours show two J-35 prototypes – serials 3501 and 3506 – in razor-sharp clarity. The images answer long-standing questions about the fighter’s finish, engines, and deck-handling features, while offering new clues on production status.

Paris—At Eurosatory 2012 Russia’s state arms trader Rosoboronexport and France’s Thales Optronics signed a licence that lets the Vologda Optical-Mechanical Plant build Catherine XP thermal imagers inside Russia.

The Pentagon owns many early-lot F-35s that cannot meet full combat standards. Commanders now stand at a fork in the road: pour money into deep retrofits or buy fresh jets straight off Lockheed Martin’s moving line in Fort Worth. Vice Adm. Mat Winter, then head of the Joint Program Office, told reporters on Sept 18 that annual production would climb from forty-six aircraft in 2016 to about one hundred thirty in 2018 and rise again afterward.

Tenix Defence Systems has signed the follow-on contract that moves its Radio-Frequency Photonic Link research into full pre-production. The award covers “Phase 2 of Task 1” under Project Arrangement 10 (PA10), a joint Australia–United States framework that backs advanced self-protection techniques for tactical aircraft.

Defense-aerospace.com reports that the Fisingapore Army has introduced a new generation of protected combat support vehicles intended to strengthen its military readiness and safeguard frontline operations. Officials have described these vehicles as pivotal assets that will offer greater survivability, flexible mission profiles, and robust mobility. The Ministry of Defense has expressed confidence in their capacity to meet future challenges.

Russia says its new Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle slices through air at Mach 27—about 33 000 km/h. Officers call it a “shift point” for global power, though they spoke carefuly. Analysts in Moscow add that the craft twists faster than most shields can track.

The Government Accountability Office released two companion studies dated April 25 that paint a stark picture of the F-35’s technical health and budget outlook. The auditors describe a fighter still haunted by fresh defects even as procurement ramps up. They note that a jammed main fuel-throttle valve can lock the engine at full power and fling the jet forward until the pilot shuts everything down. Test crews first spotted the surge during carrier workups in late 2017, and engineers have yet to seal the fix.