Lockheed awarded AFSOC contract

Lockheed Martin has received a contract from the USAF to provide training support services for Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), the company announced on 15 March.

The contract will see Lockheed Martin support schoolhouse training for various crew positions across multiple mission design series aircraft, aircrew training and support for AFSOC SOF aircrews and assets.

The company will also provide engineering and cybersecurity support that will ensure AFSOC's training devices remain concurrent with their aircraft.

The Air Commando Training and Support (ACTS) contract has the potential to continue for up to eight years, with an overall value of over $200 million and replaces the earlier Aircrew Training and Rehearsal Support (ATARS ll) programme.

The AFSOC ACTS programme will provide air force special operations with aircrew instruction and distributed fully-networked mission rehearsal and training capabilities, as well as logistics support for numerous AFSOC weapon systems, including the special mission C-130J and CV-22, and a wide variety of other training systems.

Training equipment for the C-130J and CV-22 has been provided by CAE and FlightSafety International respectively.

Tom Gordon, VP of training and simulation solutions at Lockheed Martin, said: ‘Through the ACTS programme, we offer a realistic, concurrent, resilient and cost-effective training solution to meet the rapidly changing requirements and needs of the modern warfighter.

‘Lockheed Martin has been supporting AFSOC for over 27 years [through ATARS], and we are proud to continue this partnership by delivering innovative solutions to prepare them for their most critical missions.’

Closely allied with the new ACTS contract is the Kirtland/Davis-MonthanJoint Base Andrews/Moody (KDAM) in support of the KDAM ATARS programme that was awarded to Alpha Omega Change Engineering (AOCE) in August 2016.

Under the KDAM ATARS contract, AOCE provides aircrew initial, mission qualification, refresher, upgrade and currency training; contractor logistics support, training courseware; support for distributed mission operations; as well as providing concurrency between the aircraft and training devices.