What's Canada Buying? October 17, 2012

• Some local media on the latest developments in the Fixed Wing Search & Rescue plane project  “Response times for search and rescue operations in the North could be drastically reduced under a new proposal that would add a Canadian Forces search and rescue aircraft base to Yellowknife.  The long-awaited Northern search and rescue base is being proposed under a joint bid between Yellowknife-based speciality aviation company Discovery Air Inc. and manufacturer Airbus Military. The plan is to replace Canada’s aging fixed-wing search and rescue program fleet with three or four C295 military aircraft.  “Today, there are four bases in Canada that perform search and rescue, so if something happens in the North, somebody is dispatched from either Winnipeg or Trenton, Ont., to handle the North. From Discovery Air’s point of view, we think that we should be closer to the North,” said Brian Semkowski, president and CEO of Discovery Air, Wednesday at the Air Tindi hangar. “If we want to search and rescue somebody, we should be closer to where the action is happening. The people of Canada in the North deserve to have the same rights they do down south.”  Within the next year, Canada’s fixed-wing search and rescue secretariat is slated to release a request for proposals to replace the search and rescue program’s aging CC-115 Buffalo and CC-130 Hercules aircraft.  While requirements for the contract have not yet been released, Premier Bob McLeod, who was present at the announcement of the Discovery Air-Airbus Military plan, said he is hopeful that one of the requirements will be to have dedicated search and rescue resources in the NWT ….”
• “…. The objectives of the work are to provide DRDC Valcartier, Precision Weapons Section with spe-cialized technical services in the area of whole effect chain concept development and analysis. This includes development of weapons models (small arms, guns, bombs and missiles) and sub-models development (guidance, control, fuzing, fire control, propulsion, airframe), launch plat-forms, tactical data links, navigation, process modelling, tool development, engagement model-ling and simulation analysis (option analysis and trade-off studies) ….”  My fave part of this MERX posting (also available here if link above doesn’t work) – “The nature of the services required will advise technology demonstrator projects (Alfred, What do you mean by this?)”  A bit more detail from part of the Statement of Work:  “…. DRDC Valcartier has developed a conceptual framework for hard-kill effectiveness assessment in response to a requirement for an integrated capability to evaluate Canadian Forces hard-kill weapon effectiveness in current and future mission scenarios against current and evolving threats. The BAE Australia Ship Air Defence Model (SADM) provides models in the area of sensors, command and control, environment, soft-kill, hard-kill (weapon), and threat for self and area defence (single ship and task group). SADM permits a complete analysis of the engagement kill chain, from detection, identification and designation to engagement and outcome (a “System of Systems” evaluation of effectiveness). SADM users can employ default or user defined system models within SADM (sensors, weapons) ….”
  
• “…. Range Control requires a single (1 X) 50cm Color Imagery (Including 4-band (R, G, B, NIR)) multispectral product, Orthorectified with mosaic applied, of all lands within the boundary of Canadian Forces Base Suffield ….”

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