The U.S. Air Force plans to award Honeywell [HON] a contract for bi-annual sofware updates for the company’s Terrain Awareness and Warning System (TAWS) for up to 431 Lockheed Martin [LMT] C-130J Super Hercules airlifters-363 in the Air Force, 54 in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps and 14 in the U.S. Coast Guard.
“The TAWS Tactical Database will be updated every six months in order to maintain flight safety and mission capability,” the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio said in a pre-solicitation notice on May 5th.
The Air Force plans to issue a request for proposals on May 21st in advance of a contract by June 30. The period of the performance is one-year from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022 with three optional years until 2025.
“Each plane will receive two updates per year,” AFLCMC said. “Each update will be received via a designated secure website for the purpose of downloading the TAWS Tactical database. Currently, the United States Government’s minimum needs can only be satisfied by Honeywell. This is due to the use of the Honeywell proprietary algorithm compression tool used to compact or compress the combined database.”
Lockheed Martin has said that TAWS, a forward-looking awareness and warning system, improves in-flight situational awareness and operates with the existing ground collision avoidance system as independent complementary systems providing visual and obstacle voice warning alerts to C-130J crews.
The Air Force has also planned to retrofit older C-130H transports with TAWS (Defense Daily, Feb. 6, 2020).
The Air Force has undertaken a number of avionics upgrades for the the older C-130Hs and Boeing [BA] C-17 transport aircraft, as the supplier base for legacy avionics systems falls, according to AFLCMC.