Forum: General F-35 Forum

Adacel to supply fighter software

http://www.ferret.com.au/articles/a9/0c01e7a9.asp

Melbourne-based Adacel Technologies will supply speech recognition software systems for the $US200bn global Joint Strike Fighter program.

"This is a significant achievement for Adacel, with the potential to generate work during the production phases of the program in which more than 4500 of the multi-role stealth fighters are expected to be manufactured" Defence Minister Robert Hill and Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said on Friday.

Under a Memorandum of Agreement signed with JSF prime contractor Lockheed Martin, Adacel will develop a speech-enabled cockpit control system as part of the 10-year system development and demonstration phase of the JSF program.

"Speech-controlled cockpit functions are a new feature for fighter aircraft and are expected to give pilots the ability to control critical mission systems such as radars and radios without having to move their hands from the controls" the Ministers said.

Adacel is headquartered in Melbourne, with offices in Sydney, Canberra, and Albury-Wodonga. It employs over 430 staff, primarily software and systems engineering professionals. Adacel established an office in the US in 1988 and has since expanded with operations in Montreal, Orlando, Los Angeles, Washington and the UK. The JSF work will be undertaken in Melbourne and Sydney.

To date 11 Australian companies have won work on the JSF program.

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Looking at the huge number of international foreign suppliers, I sometimes wonder how the JSF will succeed on being on schedule and planned costs. History proved that coordinating so complex programs is already difficult on a national-only scale Confused

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Singapore Signs On To JSF Program

Aviation already has some experience with multi-national participation. F-16s have parts made from a variety of countries.

Quote:

F-16s have parts made from a variety of countries.

As have F-15s, F-4s, F-104s, AV-8s...

Right, I should have been more specific in my post. I should sometimes take more time to explain my point, because it ends up not being very clear... Confused

Every modern fighter is obviously made with some foreign parts, sometimes a lot (French journalists often make me laugh when they speak so proudly about the Rafale because it has been designed and built with "French means only" (their words Very Happy

)). However, in most previous cases, foreign indutries were merely suppliers, whereas the JSF program is said to be a "cooperation" of different countries led by US and UK, on various scales depending on the involvement of each nation. The "cooperation" is supposed to go farther than before, and some foreign governments have already spent a lot of money or are about to do it (even if it does not look very impressive compared to the American budgets). It means, theorically, that the opinions of these countries about the program have to be taken into account, WHICH is not to make things simpler, I guess.

Quote:

As have F-15s, F-4s, F-104s, AV-8s...

What I meant is that, not only do these aircraft have 'foreign' part content, they are also assembled/built abroad:

F-104 - California and Europe (I think, much like F-16 program)
F-4 and F-15 - St Louis MO and Japan
AV-8/Harrier - St Louis MO and Great Britian

Of course F-16s have been built in Texas, Europe, Turkey, Korea and, if you count the FS-X/F-2, Japan

Be interesting to see how the JSF "partnerships" / contributions from those partners holds up. Right now if I were some of those countries I would want a F-16 / UCAV X-45 combo.

The Two big programs I look at that make me cringe with the "Joint Manufacturing" idea are Jaguar and EF2000. Both started out as great Ideas with great intentions in making it affordable for smaller countries such as the EF2000 for Italy. And both programs ran into serious problems from all partners with the whole cooperation aspect. Problems which made the aircraft cost alot more and come out alot later then originally invisioned.

F-35 HMDS - Joint Strike Fighter Helmet Mounted Display System

VSI is now under contract to develop the Helmet Mounted Display System (HMDS) for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. Some of the features that will be provided by this next generation helmet system include:

Binocular Wide Field-of-View
Integrated day/night capability with sensor fusion
Highly accurate head tracking hardware and software
Digital image source for helmet vision displayed symbology
Custom helmet shell, liner and suspension system for lightest weight, optimal C.G. and maximum pilot comfort.

http://www.vsi-hmcs.com/pages_hmcs/03b_f35nite.html

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