Curtiss-Wright Awarded $24 Million Contract to Provide Flight Test Instrumentation Equipment for the F-35 Technology Refresh 3 Program.

Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE: CW) announced that it had been awarded a $24 million contract from Nellis Air Force Base to provide Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) equipment in support of the F-35 Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) program. Technology Refresh 3 represents a series of critical upgrades to the F-35′s hardware and software to improve its displays, memory, and computer processing capability and support future modernization capabilities.

“We are proud to have been selected by Nellis Air Force Base to provide our aerospace instrumentation technology for use on critical flight tests of the F-35 TR-3 program,” said Lynn M. Bamford, Chair and CEO of Curtiss-Wright Corporation. “The receipt of this contract reflects our long-standing relationships and ongoing collaboration with the F-35 Joint Program Office and U.S. Flight Test Range engineers and personnel and demonstrates the trust and confidence that customers place in Curtiss-Wright’s advanced and reliable integrated high-speed flight test instrumentation systems.”

Curtiss-Wright has worked closely over the past three years with U.S. Flight Test Ranges, including Nellis AFB and the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, as well as the F 35 Joint Program Office, to define and architect the Distributed Flight Test Instrumentation (DFTI) system that enables the test and evaluation of F-35 TR-3 configured aircraft. Curtiss-Wright’s FTI technology forms part of the DFTI system, where products and subsystems that allow the acquisition, collation, processing, recording, and telemetry of flight test data support the seamless transport of that data. Because it is networked, DFTI enables the distribution of flight test instrumentation equipment closer to the measured parameters, resulting in increased test accuracy.