What was the news about Lockheed and the US Airforce?

Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $276M contract by the U.S. Air Force Advanced Range Threat System Variant 3 (ARTS-V3) program office to develop and produce the Variable Aperture Digital Radar (VADR) system. VADR will leverage both X-band and C-band radars to train aircrew for engagements against advanced adversarial threats. This contract includes production options and will be built using Distributed Digital Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA), leveraging commonality with other key radars in the Lockheed Martin portfolio.

In addition, Lockheed Martin's open systems architecture is advancing the future of AI-enabled autonomous flight with human oversight, as demonstrated by the X-62A Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft (VISTA) project. This project involves the installation of initial live AI agents into the X-62A's systems, the demonstration of the first AI versus human dogfight, and the completion of over 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes across 21 test flights. This work is essential to realizing distributed teaming and establishing AI certification standards that will revolutionize the future of aerospace.