Aerospace sector prepares for growth amidst currents of change

The aerospace and defense market, as a whole, is in the midst of some profound changes. According to the Deloitte 2017 Global Aerospace and Defense Sector Outlook,¹ “On the defense side, resurgence of global security threats, expected increases in U.S. defense budgets, as well as higher defense spending from other major regional powers such as Japan and India will likely promote global defense subsector revenue growth in the near future,” the authors noted.

In concrete terms, the authors said they expect commercial aerospace to remain nearly flat in terms of revenues while the defense sector is likely to grow at a much faster 3.2% rate after multiyear declines in defense budgets in the United States.

Providing a window into one aspect of that market is AUTOTESTCON, which bills itself as the world’s premier conference for the military/aerospace automatic test industry and as a forum to share new technologies and discuss innovative applications. Sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), this year’s event, which includes exhibits of products and services, will be held Sept. 11-14 in Schaumburg, IL. The keynote presentation will be made by John Johns, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for maintenance plans and now policy director, global relations, at Northrop Grumman Technology Services.

With his experience overseeing the U.S. Department of Defense’s $80 billion military equipment and weapons maintenance program, Johns’ insights are being targeted at those seeking to discern directions for the industry with a new administration in Washington.
Those in industry, mindful of military and political developments as well as technology trends, offered a spectrum of opinions regarding the state of the industry and the issues likely to be top-of-mind at AUTOTESTCON.

“Effective support is key to mission readiness and success, and we continue to see a great interest in test solutions that provide commonality of support equipment across aircraft platforms and at all maintenance levels,” said Stephen T. Sargeant, Major General, USAF (Ret.) and chief executive officer at Marvin Test Solutions. However, extended product lifecycles make support increasingly challenging as well, he noted. “Even if acquisition budgets increase, it makes sense to streamline logistics in order to direct resources as efficiently as possible,” he said.

Another broad consideration is standardization. “Most engineers have recognized the benefits of standardizing hardware in your test system, but often that thought process ends with instrumentation,” noted Ben Robinson, product marketing manager for modular instruments at National Instruments. That same line of thought should extend to the rack and power infrastructure considering that the pieces of a test system need to work together, be safe, and adequately support the instrumentation, he said. “We’ve heard anecdotes that it can sometimes take more than a dozen purchase orders to put together a rack-based test system, and in many cases, that complexity is not warranted or valuable,” Robinson added.

Organizations need to focus within their operations on developing strategies for complying with Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) clause 225.204-7012, according to Rob Mixer, chief engineer—software security, also at National Instruments. DFARS requires contractors to implement NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-171 standards not later than Dec. 31, 2017. “The DFARS requirement for defense contractor compliance with NIST SP 800-171 applies to test systems, not just traditional IT systems,” noted Mixer. Compliance can be a challenge, he added.

The changing technology landscape also will demand new and different responses. For instance, Herman vanEijkelenburg, director of marketing, Pacific Power Source, noted that growing adoption of Ethernet and LXI for new ATE systems is leading to a replacement of GPIB and other older technology.

And, interestingly, at least one observer sees a re-emergence of customers wanting to build their own test solutions. According to Brian Price, executive vice president at
Astronics Test Systems, there is a growing segment of customers that want to build their own specific test solutions, typically where a COTS solution doesn’t meet their specific test requirements. “In some cases, this is due to having specific product requirements, cost considerations, or proprietary product information that needs to be kept in-house,” noted Price. In addition, as mature test systems begin to be refreshed, “We see more customers interested in moving their solutions to a new PXIe format,” Price said. He said PXIe offers customers a smaller footprint, a more flexible form factor, and new modern instruments with longer support.

Meanwhile, “Requirements from commercial technologies like 5G and automotive radar are driving RF test equipment like NI’s second-generation vector signal transceiver to support RF bandwidths of up to 1 GHz or more,” said Charles Schroeder, vice president for RF and wireless communications at NI. “With wider bandwidth RF instrumentation, engineers in the aerospace and defense industry are better able to address applications like radar prototyping, spectrum monitoring, electronic warfare, and more,” said Schroeder.

Given the extensive amount of research on autonomous vehicles and deployment of drones in many aspects of warfare, testing of these systems and the line-replaceable units in these devices will be increasingly important, too, explained Bob Stasonis, sales and marketing director at Pickering Interfaces.

Companies also offered a preview of what they will be bringing to the event.

Open platforms

“In discussions with our customers, we see that the military/aerospace market is in the beginning of a transition to modern, open, and growth-oriented test platforms,” explained Price. Indeed, he noted, Astronics is focused on developing solutions in these specific areas including modern radio test solutions. “While radio test is not in itself new, customers are putting emphasis on being able to test new multiwaveform radios while maintaining support for their legacy equipment,” Price said. For example, he said, test solutions need to support legacy SINCGARS radios, new multiwaveform protocols, and future battlefield requirements, such as LTE.

Among the items the company plans to showcase are the ATS-3100 RTS (Radio Test Solution), a PXIe-based radio test solution built on Astronics Test Systems’ newest platform, the ATS-3100, providing the functionality of multiple instruments on a single, software-defined platform. The company also will highlight its CTS-6010 Tactical Radio Test Set (Figure 1). The flexibility of the software-defined CTS-6010 allows for rapid addition of capabilities as new test requirements arise. The company’s newest software release has added capabilities for transmit EVM and receive sensitivity (BER) testing of wideband digital radios including the Harris PRC-117G and PRC-152A over their full frequency range.