Contratto negli Usa per l'aereo Super Tucano

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La replica dell'Amministratore Delegato di Beechcraft ....

 

In his recent Viewpoint ....

 

Not Even Close: The Better Choice for LAS

 

.... (AW&ST April 15, p. 58), Fred George identifies “significant differences” between Beechcraft’s AT-6 and Embraer’s Super Tucano aircraft, both competing for the hotly contested U.S. Air Force (USAF) Light Air Support (LAS) bid.

However, his opinion of those differences ignores significant facts and badly misuses others in an attempt to substantiate his view.

 

Fonte .... http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_04_25_2013_p0-573705.xml

 

Bill Boisture .... http://www.beechcraft.com/about_us/content_view.aspx?executives=1&id=23 ....

 

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Il "Super Tucano" sarà presente a Le Bourget ....

 

PARIS: Embraer Super Tucano to make debut Paris air show appearance ....

 

Embraer will display its A-29 Super Tucano at the Paris air show for the first time, a top company official says. The aircraft will not fly, but will be on static display.

"We are going to bring our Super Tucano to Le Bourget," says Luiz Carlos Aguiar, chief executive of Embraer Defense and Security. "This is the first time in history the airplane will be there."

 

Fonte .... http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/paris-embraer-super-tucano-to-make-debut-paris-air-show-appearance-386938/

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Anche AW&ST parla della prossima apparizione del "Super Tucano" all'ormai prossimo salone di Parigi ....

 

Super Tucano Nears Debut In Paris ....

 

Fresh off of a hard-fought win over rival Beechcraft for Pentagon work, Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer is for the first time displaying its Super Tucano light attack aircraft at the Paris air show next week.

The aircraft on display will be one of two delivered to Mauritania, the African nation that has ordered three of the A-29s.

 

Link .... http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/asd_06_12_2013_p04-01-587246.xml

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Il Salone è ormai alle porte .... e sta anche arrivando il "rivale" del "Super Tucano" ....

 

PARIS: New-look T-6C heads for Le Bourget ....

 

Beechcraft's T-6C Texan II demonstrator N3000B is heading to the Paris air show with a new corporate colour scheme.

 

The T-6C .... will be joined on static display by a demonstrator for the AT-6 counter-insurgency and light strike Aircraft.

 

Fonte .... http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/paris-new-look-t-6c-heads-for-le-bourget-387032/

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"Super Tucano" per le Forze Aeree Afghane .... il GAO dà ragione all'USAF ....

 

GAO Supports Super Tucano Pick for Afghanistan Air Force ....

 

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reaffirmed an Air Force decision to award the Afghan light air support (LAS) contract to contractors Sierra Nevada Corp and Embraer.

The decision, which could mark the end of a long-running legal saga, was announced Thursday afternoon, days before the Monday deadline when the agency would have to rule on competitor Beechcraft’s challenge of the contract.

 

Fonte .... http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130613/DEFREG02/306130014/GAO-Supports-Super-Tucano-Pick-Afghanistan-Air-Force

 

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Così scrisse Bill Sweetman ....

 

Commanders Intent

Time To Put A Brake on Protests

Aviation Week & Space Technology Apr15, 2013 , p. 18

Bill Sweetman

Hey hey, ho ho, protest culture has to go ....

Printed headline: What the Dickens

It has been a late, cold spring season in Washington, with fiscal panic in the air, and barely a single program, even the rare specimen that is based on a sound requirement and executed with a smattering of competence, is safe.

In such a climate, it may seem insane for Beechcraft to protest (for a second time around) the U.S. Air Force's choice of the Embraer/ Sierra Nevada Corp. Super Tucano for its Light Air Support program. A second protest will hose LAS with a smelly mix of fear, uncertainty and doubt and make it vulnerable to cancellation, even though it is part of the nation's out-of-Afghanistan strategy.

Protest happens because acquisition is governed by a tottering edifice of statute, oversight and reforms, so that the purchase of software for cyberwarfare is ruled by laws that prevented rascals from selling weevily flour to Grant's quartermasters. It makes Dickens 's Court of Chancery, the foggiest place in a fogbound and muddy London in Bleak House, look like a model of jurisprudence and wisdom; the Pentagon's Jarndyce & Jarndyce , the endlessly litigated case of the Navy's canceled A-12 stealth bomber, is unresolved after 20 years and an estimated half-billion dollars in costs.

But some things are simple, including the fact that the behavior that customers, regulators, lawmakers and other stakeholders receive from corporations is usually what they have incentivized.

Beechcraft is scraping its way out of bankruptcy after failing to sell itself to China. Its business jets, once its highest-value products, are all but extinct, the weakest contenders in a slack market. Three commercial products survive: the prehistoric Bonanza and Baron, and the pre-Beatles King Air, which occupies a niche market fattened, probably temporarily, by special-mission buyers.

Beechcraft's T-6 trainer line is winding down as planned. Derived from the 1980s-vintage Pilatus PC-9, it has gathered a handful of the export sales that were once expected. The armed AT-6 is Beechcraft's only immediate hope for growth. Nobody will buy it if the U.S. does not, but you will spend a long time searching for anyone who thinks the AT-6 is as much of a warplane as the Super Tucano , the combat-proven result of a much better funded development program .

You can hire some very good lawyers for less money than it takes to fix what customers appear to see as an inferior airplane.

The USAF has caught flak over the protests that have derailed not only LAS but also the KC-X tanker and the CSAR-X combat search-and-rescue helicopter. Every time a protest succeeds, the service leaders are under pressure to make the next request for proposals “protest-proof.” The next time a protest succeeds, they are accused of incompetence.

Protest-proofing is easier said than done. The shambles of acquisition law do have a few underlying principles, one of which is that the government is supposed to buy the least costly product that meets the specification. To keep weevils and horsemeat out of the cookhouse, the specification has to be defined to the smallest detail. The Defense Department brownie recipe covers 26 pages.

But writing a tight specification is a knotty problem when—like KC-X, LAS or CSAR-X—the requirement starts with a call for an existing airframe; the customer knows, plus or minus a few percent, what industry will propose. A closely defined requirement will be zinged for favoring one or another of the potential competitors. The protest lawyers will savage a broad requirement as leaving too much room for subjective judgment, not to mention weevils.

Another complication: Few people ever went to law school with the idea of working for the Air Force , so it's not surprising that government lawyers are outgunned.

Above all, what does the protesting contractor stand to lose, other than a paltry sum (by defense standards) in legal fees?

In most business transactions, a losing bidder who assails the customer's competence in public is torching his chances of selling anything ever again (I'm looking at you, M. Dassault.) In Washington , the customer is prohibited by law from applying such a remedy.

However much you may blame the mess of procurement regulations or the naivete of government officials for the protest mess, you will not solve the problem, inside a generation, until the protestor runs some risk of pain: a temporary bidding disqualification, perhaps, if the losing protest is found to be frivolous or ill-founded in law .

The alternative—as many defense contractors become as hungry and desperate as Beechcraft , which in these bleak times is more likely than not—is to add, as a routine matter, yet another costly and chilling mechanism of regulation to an enterprise that already has more than it can handle.

 

 

Così replica ora Bill Boisture (CEO della Beechcraft Corp.) ....

 

Striking Back

Aviation Week & Space Technology Jun17, 2013 , p. 12

Bill Boisture, CEO Beechcraft Corp.
Wichita, Kan.

Recently, Bill Sweetman started out writing a Commentary on his view of required reform in the acquisition and protest process (AW&ST April 15, p. 18). However, he ventured far outside his area of objective expertise to wrongfully discredit our company, our products and our people. He irresponsibly used Beechcraft Corp. as a vehicle to make his point, but did not bother to inform himself of publicly available information. Neither Sweetman nor anyone else at Aviation Week called us to fact-check the piece and it is apparent that no one referred to the public filings on the company.

Anyone who bothered to do so could have easily accessed Beechcraft's plan for reorganization. Had this been done, researchers would know that we reduced our debt by more than 80%, discontinued unprofitable jet manufacturing and are in a strong liquidity position with an undrawn line of credit.

If Sweetman understood the bankruptcy process, he would know the company had a responsibility to its creditors to seek the highest value for its assets via a strategic sale process. The public filings would have underscored that management actively terminated the sale process , exercised its legal right to retain the prospective buyer's deposit and proceeded shortly thereafter to emerge from the court's protection.

Since that time, Beechcraft has seen its highest booking rate in the past three years. As reported in the General Aviation Manufacturers Association's first-quarter results, King Air deliveries were up nearly 80% compared with first-quarter 2012; the product line captured 65% of worldwide business turboprop deliveries ; and Beechcraft ranked third in total billings among all companies in the business and general aviation market—hardly the performance of a “desperate” company that Sweetman portrays.

He and his colleague Fred George, who wrote a Viewpoint about the AT-6 in the same issue (page 58), both demonstrated a surprising seeming lack of knowledge about Beechcraft 's new light attack airplane—a superior-rated, established and renowned aircraft offered at a significant discount to that of a foreign competitor with no history in the U.S. Air Force system. The fact that Aviation Week ran both ill-informed articles in the same issue is a journalistic low point for what has been a well-regarded aerospace information institution.

Wichita, Kan.

 

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Bocciato il ricorso al GAO .... ora Beechcraft si appella al Congresso ....

 

Spurned On LAS by GAO, Beechcraft Turns To Congress ....

 

Beechcraft, which has lost its appeal to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to overturn the U.S. Air Force’s award of the Light Air Support (LAS) contract to a Sierra Nevada/Embraer team, is urging Congress to limit the scope of contract, worth up to nearly $1 billion, to the minimum requirements.

 

Fonte .... http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_06_13_2013_p0-588191.xml

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Faccia a faccia ....

 

PARIS 2013: Rivals Embraer and Beechcraft show off COIN Aircraft ....

 

Both the Embraer A-29 Super Tucano and its arch-rival the Beechcraft AT-6 are both here at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget ....

 

Fonte .... http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2013/06/paris-2013-rivals-embraer-and.html

 

Anche qui .... http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/paris-at-6-makes-paris-debut-387138/

 

E qui .... http://newsroom.hawkerbeechcraft.com/news/beechcraft-features-defense-special-mission-mission-support-capabilities-at-paris-air-show/

 

Peccato non recassero entrambi l'ormai immancabile dentatura di squalo ....

[mo-mo]

Chissà per chi "tifano" alla Pilatus di Stans...

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Chissà per chi "tifano" alla Pilatus di Stans...

 

Per lo AT-6 .... è ovvio ....

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Boisture mugugna ancora per la scelta dell'USAF .... ma pare abbia finalmente trovato un cliente ....

 

PARIS: Beechcraft AT-6 ready for international win ....

 

Beechcraft says it has a launch customer for its AT-6 light attack aircraft, and could announce an order for 24 examples of the type before the end of 2013.

The company has held "serious discussions" for 24 aircraft, says Beechcraft chief executive Bill Boisture, speaking at the company's chalet.

 

Fonte .... http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/paris-beechcraft-at-6-ready-for-international-win-387294/

 

Sorridi allora, Bill .... ma non come il tuo aereo ....

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Ennesima puntata della telenovela .... con colpo di scena ....

 

Senate strikes Super Tucanos, Mi-17s from appropriations bill ....

 

The US Senate appropriations committee has passed a $594 billion defence spending bill for fiscal year 2014 that eliminates funding to buy Sierra Nevada/Embraer Super Tucanos and Mil Mi-17 transport helicopters for Afghanistan's military.

 

Fonte .... http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/senate-strikes-super-tucanos-mi-17s-from-appropriations-bill-389041/

 

Anche qui .... http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_07_30_2013_p0-602380.xml

 

Arrivederci alla prossima ....

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Lo stato deplorevole in cui versano le Forze Aeree Afghane costituisce una minaccia al parere favorevole ai finanziamenti da parte del Senato USA ....

 

Afghan AF Disarray Threatens Senate Funding OK ....

 

The U.S. Air Force is planning to remain in Afghanistan until 2017 in an advisory role, but Congress's confidence in—and potential funding for—the young air force there is wavering.

The drastic funding cuts proposed by Senate appropriators—eliminating a second batch of 20 Super Tucanos and slicing money for more Mil Mi-17 helicopters—are a reaction to a lack of progress in maturing Afghanistan's air force.

 

Fonte .... http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_08_05_2013_p29-602538.xml

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Il concorrente del Super Tucano .... il Beechcraft AT-6 .... una sorta di "incrociatore volante" (almeno a giudicare dal carico trasportato) ....

 

 

.... ha effettuato il primo volo nella sua forma pressoché definitiva ....

 

Production AT-6 aircraft makes first flight ....

 

The first production Beechcraft AT-6 light attack aircraft made a ceremonial first flight on 20 August in Wichita, Kansas.

 

The aircraft was loaded with a pair of 66 gal (250 litres) drop tanks, two inert GBU-58 laser-guided bombs and two LAU-131 seven-shot rocket launchers.

The AT-6 was also carrying a L-3 Wescam Mx-15Di electro-optical infrared camera.

 

Fonte .... http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/production-at-6-aircraft-makes-first-flight-389704/

 

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Nonostante le passate polemiche ... i Super Tucano stanno entrando in servizio nelle Forze Aeree Afghane ...

 

Afghanistan has bolstered to a dozen its in-country fleet of Embraer/Sierra Nevada A-29 Super Tucano light-attack aircraft, with the arrival of its latest four examples in Kabul.

Flown from the US Air Force’s Moody AFB in Georgia, the A-29s arrived in Afghanistan on 20 March.

They will undergo “a brief reconfiguration, after which they will be ready for combat operations in the 2017 fighting season”, according to the USAF.

Their arrival takes to 12 the number of A-29s now in the country, with seven more continuing to support pilot and maintainer training activities in the USA.

Fonte: FlightGlobal ... PICTURES: Kabul welcomes latest batch of Super Tucanos ...