An Italian Air Force ATR 72 maritime surveillance aircraft takes off from Malaysia in 2017. In Italian service, this aircraft is known as the P-72A. (Leonardo)

The Malaysian government has ordered two Leonardo ATR 72-600 maritime patrol aircraft (MPA).

In an announcement during the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace (LIMA) Exhibition 2023, on 25 May, the Malaysian Ministry of Defense (MINDEF) said that the two aircraft represented “Phase 1” of the aircraft's acquisition.

According to MINDEF, the contract has a value of MYR789.6 million (USD171.9 million). The contract partly fulfils a long-standing Malaysian requirement to improve its manned maritime surveillance and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities.

According to Leonardo, the contract follows the selection of a proposal offered by the company and announced in October 2022. The selection covers “the supply of two ATR Special Mission aircraft in maritime patrol configuration plus the related integrated logistic support and training services”, Leonardo said in a press statement.

US marines filing into an MV-22 on USS Kearsarge off the coast of North Carolina during Exercise ‘Bold Alligator' in 2012. (Janes/Mike Fabey)

Boeing's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania V-22 factory, which produces the fuselage and other major equipment for the joint Bell-Boeing tiltrotor aircraft, may close as soon as 2025, according to a Boeing official.

Discussions have begun about closing the assembly line, said Shane Openshaw, Boeing's programme manager for the V-22, on 23 May. “We're starting to have those conversations subject to additional orders coming in the pipeline,” he said. “I would project probably two more years [of assembly].”

The assembly line also converts Block B V-22s to Block C, upgrading processors, wiring harnesses, and electrical components and reducing subvariants from about 72 to 5, according to Openshaw.

The US Navy (USN) in February released a solicitation for “non-recurring engineering to support the V-22 production line shut down,” disclosing that the Bell-Boeing joint venture that produced the tiltrotor would be awarded the contract. The solicitation did not include a public timeframe for the closure.

The UK has reopened the HMT programme to new suppliers. Pictured is DefendTex D40 nUAS, which was involved in one of the frameworks projects. (Crown Copyright)

The UK Ministry of Defence's (MoD's) Human Machine Teaming (HMT) programme reopened to new suppliers on 22 May.

Initially announced in May 2022, the three-year GBP300 million (USD372.4 million) HMT project seeks to collate lessons from the British Army's experimentation activity in Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) and enable rapid iterations across the full spectrum of potential capabilities.

An MoD spokesperson informed Janes that the framework aims to reopen every six months to allow new vendors to join and be privy to future competitions expected to run in the next six to 12 months.

HMT will be delivered through a multisupplier framework agreement, with multiple competitions completed across different ‘Lots'. These ‘Lots' are segregated into four different components – hardware, such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), and payloads and consumables; software , ranging from external, internal, platform, reliability, and maintenance analysis; professional and technical services ,