industryterm:aerospace

Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers - Bloomberg
►https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iz16OoABF9HQ/v0/1200x800.jpg

In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.

The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”

Boeing’s cultivation of Indian companies appeared to pay other dividends. In recent years, it has won several orders for Indian military and commercial aircraft, such as a $22 billion one in January 2017 to supply SpiceJet Ltd. That order included 100 737-Max 8 jets and represented Boeing’s largest order ever from an Indian airline, a coup in a country dominated by Airbus.

Based on resumes posted on social media, HCL engineers helped develop and test the Max’s flight-display software, while employees from another Indian company, Cyient Ltd., handled software for flight-test equipment.

C’est beau comme tout la langue de bois des public relations :

Boeing said the company did not rely on engineers from HCL and Cyient for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which has been linked to the Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn’t rely on either firm for another software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that wasn’t working for most buyers.

“Boeing has many decades of experience working with supplier/partners around the world,” a company spokesman said. “Our primary focus is on always ensuring that our products and services are safe, of the highest quality and comply with all applicable regulations.”

In a statement, HCL said it “has a strong and long-standing business relationship with The Boeing Company, and we take pride in the work we do for all our customers. However, HCL does not comment on specific work we do for our customers. HCL is not associated with any ongoing issues with 737 Max.”

Starting with the 787 Dreamliner, launched in 2004, it sought to increase profits by instead providing high-level specifications and then asking suppliers to design more parts themselves. The thinking was “they’re the experts, you see, and they will take care of all of this stuff for us,” said Frank McCormick, a former Boeing flight-controls software engineer who later worked as a consultant to regulators and manufacturers. “This was just nonsense.”

Sales are another reason to send the work overseas. In exchange for an $11 billion order in 2005 from Air India, Boeing promised to invest $1.7 billion in Indian companies. That was a boon for HCL and other software developers from India, such as Cyient, whose engineers were widely used in computer-services industries but not yet prominent in aerospace.

La sous-traitance logicielle peut-elle suivre les modèles de la sous-traitance de l’industrie ?

HCL, once known as Hindustan Computers, was founded in 1976 by billionaire Shiv Nadar and now has more than $8.6 billion in annual sales. With 18,000 employees in the U.S. and 15,000 in Europe, HCL is a global company and has deep expertise in computing, said Sukamal Banerjee, a vice president. It has won business from Boeing on that basis, not on price, he said: “We came from a strong R&D background.”

Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered to extend to others in the industry.

The 787 entered service three years late and billions of dollars over budget in 2011, in part because of confusion introduced by the outsourcing strategy. Under Dennis Muilenburg, a longtime Boeing engineer who became chief executive in 2015, the company has said that it planned to bring more work back in-house for its newest planes.

#Boeing #Sous-traitance #Capitalisme #Sécurité #Logiciel

Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers - Bloomberg
►https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iz16OoABF9HQ/v0/1200x800.jpg

• Planemaker and suppliers used lower-paid temporary workers
• Engineers feared the practice meant code wasn’t done right

It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.

The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.

Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.

In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.
[…]
In one post, an HCL employee summarized his duties with a reference to the now-infamous model, which started flight tests in January 2016: “Provided quick workaround to resolve production issue which resulted in not delaying flight test of 737-Max (delay in each flight test will cost very big amount for Boeing).”

Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5d02f1bf3b55e23fee3bfe6d/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/190624_r34501.jpg

As the standoff has intensified, Liu has become wary of touting the geopolitical underpinnings of his work. In November, when I accompanied him on a trip to Washington, D.C.—he was picking up the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation’s Award for Imagination in Service to Society—he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said. Still, the kind of reader he attracts suggests otherwise: Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.

Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize. In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug. “I don’t begin with some conceit in mind. I’m just trying to tell a good story.”

The trilogy’s success has been credited with establishing sci-fi, once marginalized in China, as a mainstream taste. Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration. The trilogy commands a huge following among aerospace engineers and cosmologists; one scientist wrote an explanatory guide, “The Physics of Three Body.” Some years ago, China’s aerospace agency asked Liu, whose first career was as a computer engineer in the hydropower industry, to address technicians and engineers about ways that “sci-fi thinking” could be harnessed to produce more imaginative approaches to scientific problems. More recently, he was invited to inspect a colossal new radio dish, one of whose purposes is to detect extraterrestrial communications. Its engineers had been sending Liu updates on the project and effusive expressions of admiration.
“We’re looking for someone who can be very naughty when left alone, and your name kept popping up in our database.”

Earlier this year, soon after a Chinese lunar rover achieved the unprecedented feat of landing on the dark side of the moon, an adaptation of Liu’s short story “The Wandering Earth” earned nearly half a billion dollars in its first ten days of release, eventually becoming China’s second-highest-grossing film ever. A headline in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, jubilantly summed up the mood: “Only the Chinese Can Save the Planet!”

Liu was born in 1963 in Beijing, where his father was a manager at the Coal Mine Design Institute and his mother was an elementary-school teacher. His father’s family came from the plains of Henan Province, in the Yellow River Basin, a region that suffered particularly dire calamities in the twentieth century. After the Japanese invaded China, in 1937—interrupting a civil war between Nationalists and Communists that had been raging for a decade—Henan became a vital strategic point in the Nationalist government’s attempt to prevent them from sweeping south. Chinese forces breached dikes on the Yellow River to halt the Japanese advance, but the resulting flood destroyed thousands of villages and killed hundreds of thousands of people. It also ruined vast areas of farmland; the next harvest was a fraction of the expected yield. In 1942-43, after the government failed to respond to the shortage, some two million people starved to death.

When the civil war resumed, after the Second World War, both sides conscripted men. Liu’s paternal grandparents had two sons and no ideological allegiance to either side, and, in the hope of preserving the family line, they took a chilling but pragmatic gamble. One son joined the Nationalists and the other, Liu’s father, joined the Communists. He rose to the rank of company commander in the Eighth Route Army, and, after the Communist victory, he began his career in Beijing. To this day, Liu doesn’t know what became of his uncle.

Je comprends mieux, Lui a lu un de mes livres d’enfance préféré.

Meanwhile, his father had turned him on to speculative fiction, giving him a copy of Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” To the young Liu, reading Verne’s book was like walking through a door to another world. “Everything in it was described with such authority and scrupulous attention to detail that I thought it had to be real,” Liu told me.

The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre. As the British Empire expanded and the United States began to assert its power around the world, British and American writers invented tales of space travel as seen through a lens of imperial appropriation, in which technological superiority brought about territorial conquest. Extraterrestrials were often a proxy for human beings of different creeds or races.

Types are central to the way Liu thinks of people; he has a knack for quickly sketching the various classes that make up Chinese society. A scientist is described as “nothing more than a typical intellectual of the period: cautious, timid, seeking only to protect himself.” Another character, “a typical political cadre of the time,” had “an extremely keen sense for politics and saw everything through an ideological lens.” This characteristic endows his fiction with a sociopolitical specificity that has the texture of reality. At the same time, it doesn’t allow for much emotional complexity, and Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”

August Cole, a co-author of “Ghost Fleet,” a techno-thriller about a war between the U.S. and China, told me that, for him, Liu’s work was crucial to understanding contemporary China, “because it synthesizes multiple angles of looking at the country, from the anthropological to the political to the social.” Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good. In their pursuit of survival, men and women employ Machiavellian game theory and adopt a bleak consequentialism. In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.

#Science_fiction #Liu_Cixin

Dick Dale, the Inventor of Surf Rock, Was a Lebanese-American Kid from Boston
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/dick-dale-the-inventor-of-surf-rock-was-a-lebanese-american-kid-from-bost

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c8feaa2dec12c2d0eb9ea4e/master/pass/Petrusich-Dick-Dale.jpg

Dale died on Saturday, at age eighty-one. It’s perhaps curious, at first glance, that a Lebanese-American kid from Boston invented a genre known as surf rock, but such is Dale’s story. He was born Richard Monsour in 1937; several decades earlier, his paternal grandparents had immigrated to the U.S. from Beirut.

[...]

Dale’s work was directly and mightily informed by the Arabic music that he listened to as a child. “My music comes from the rhythm of Arab songs,” Dale told the journalist George Baramki Azar, in 1998. “The darbukkah, along with the wailing style of Arab singing, especially the way they use the throat, creates a very powerful force.”

Drone Surveillance Operations in the Mediterranean: The Central Role of the Portuguese Economy and State in EU Border Control

Much has been written in the past years about the dystopic vision of EU borders increasingly equipped with drone surveillance (see here: ▻http://www.europeanpublicaffairs.eu/high-tech-fortress-europe-frontex-and-the-dronization-of-borde, here: ▻http://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-next-phase-of-european-border-and.html, here: ▻https://www.heise.de/tp/features/EU-startet-Langstreckendrohnen-zur-Grenzueberwachung-4038306.html and here: ▻https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2018/11/role-technology). Yet, when the first joint drone surveillance operation of #Frontex, the #European_Maritime_Safety_Agency (#EMSA) and Portuguese authorities was launched on 25 September 2018, there was a lack of response both from the media and concerned activists or researchers. Yet, the EMSA offered details about the operation on its website, and Frontex as well. In addition, Frontex mentioned in its press statement parallel operations undertaken in Italy and Greece in the same period.

These operations were a crucial step for the setup of the joint European information system for border surveillance, #EUROSUR. The drone surveillance program in the context of Frontex operations is a major step in the operational setup of the EUROSUR program that aims to integrate databases and national coordination centres of 24 European countries. EUROSUR was officially introduced with a policy paper in 2008, and the system itself was launched on 1 December 2013 as a mechanism of information exchange among EU member states. But it is not yet fully operational, and drone surveillance is commonly seen as a central component for full operationability. Thus, the cooperation between the EMSA, Frontex and the Portuguese state in the recent operation is a crucial milestone to achieve the aim of EUROSUR to create a unified European border surveillance system.

This is why the operation launched in Portugal in September 2018 is of higher significance to the ones in Italy and Greece since it includes not only national authorities but also the EMSA, located in Lisbon, as a new key actor for border surveillance. EMSA was founded in 2002 as a response to various shipping disasters that lead to environmental pollution and originally focuses on monitoring the movement of ships, with a focus on the safety of shipping operations, environmental safety at sea and the trading of illegal goods via maritime transport.

In 2016 the EMSA was allocated 76 million Euros in a bid for the production of drones for the surveillance of the Mediterranenan in the context of Frontex missions. EMSA`s bid foresaw that drones would be hired by EMSA itself. EMSA would run the operation of drones and share real-time data with Frontex. The largest part of this bid, 66 million Euros, went to the Portuguese company #Tekever, while smaller portions went to the Italian defence company #Leonardo and to the Portuguese air force that will operate drones produced by the Portuguese company #UA_Vision. At the same time, the successful bid of Tekever and the integration of Portuguese authorities in surveillance operations catapults Portugal onto the map of the defence and surveillance industry that profits immensely from the recent technological craze around border surveillance (see here, here and here).

Lisbon-based Tekever set up a factory for the production of drones in the Portuguese mainland in #Ponte_de_Sor, an emerging new hub for the aerospace industry. Together with French #Collecte_Localisation_Service, which specialises in maritime surveillance, Tekever founded the consortium #REACT in order to produce those specific drones. Under the Portuguese operation, ground control, i.e. the technical coordination of the flight of the drones, was located in Portugal under the authority of the Portuguese air force, while the operation was coordinated remotely by Frontex experts and Portuguese authorities in the #Frontex_Situational_Centre in Poland where data were shared in real-time with EMSA. This first operation is a crucial step, testing the technical and administrative cooperation between EMSA and Frontex, and the functionality of the drones that were specifically produced for this purpose. These drones are lighter than the ones used in Greece and Italy, and they are equipped with special cameras and #radars that can detect ship movements and receive emergency calls from the sea. This allows to run data collected by the drones through an algorithm that is programmed to distinguish so-called ´#migrant_vessels´ from other ships and boats.

The Portuguese government has set up a number of initiatives to foster this industry. For example, a national strategy called #Space_2030 (#Estratégia_Portugal_Espaço_2030) was launched in 2018, and the newly founded #Portuguese_Space_Agency (#Agência_Espacial_Portuguesa) will begin to work in the first months of 2019. The fact that border surveillance is one of the larger European programs boosting the defence and surveillance industry financially has not generated any controversy in Portugal; neither the fact that a center-left government, supported by two radical left parties is propping up surveillance, aerospace and defence industries. The colonial continuities of this industrial strategy are all too visible since narratives like ‘from the discovery of the sea to the technology of space’ are used not only by industry actors, but also, for example, by the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in the UK on its website. In this way, social and political #domination of non-European territories and the control of the movement of racialized bodies are reduced to the fact of technological capability – in the colonial period the navigation of the seas with optical instruments, astronomic knowledge and ships, and today the electronic monitoring of movements on the sea with drones and integrated computer systems. The Portuguese aerospace industry is therefore presented as a cultural heritage that continues earlier technological achievements that became instruments to set up a global empire.

The lack of any mention about the start of the drone surveillance programme does not only demonstrate that border surveillance goes largely unquestioned in Europe, but also that the sums spent for surveillance and defence by EU agencies create incentives to engage more in the defence and surveillance industry. This goes all the more for countries that have been hit hard by austerity and deindustrialisation, such as Portugal. The recent increase of 9.3 billion Euros for the period 2021 to 2027 for border surveillance funding in the EU with the creation of the #Integrated_Border_Management_Fund focused on border protection, is a telling example of the focus of current EU industrial policies. For the same period, the European Commission has earmarked 2.2 billion Euro for Frontex in order to acquire, operate and maintain surveillance assets like drones, cameras, fences, and the like. In this situation, the political consensus among EU governments to restrict migration reinforces the economic interests of the defence industry and vice versa, and the interest of national governments to attract #high-tech investment adds to this. Those lock-in effects could probably only be dismantled through a public debate about the selective nature of the entrepreneurial state whose funding has decisive influence on which industries prosper.

While the Portuguese government does not currently have a single helicopter operating in order to control and fight forest fires that have caused more than 100 deaths in the past two years, much EU and national public funding goes into technology aimed at the control of racialized bodies and the observation of earth from space. At the same time, there is considerable concern among experts that surveillance technology used for military means and border security will be rolled out over the entire population in the future for general policing purposes. For this reason, it remains important to keep an eye on which technologies are receiving large public funds and what are its possible uses.

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ping @daphne @marty @albertocampiphoto @fil

Iran says it will send 2 satellites to orbit amid US concern
▻https://apnews.com/4f432f1f5c61456baf37de1fa784ab4b

Iran’s president said Thursday the Islamic Republic soon will send two new satellites into orbit using Iran-made rockets, despite U.S. concern the launch could help further develop its ballistic missiles.

President Hassan Rouhani’s comments, during a commemoration for the late President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, confirmed the rocket launches would take place.

Iran typically displays achievements in its space program in February, during the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This year will mark the 40th anniversary of the revolution, which saw the Persian monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi replaced by the Islamic Republic overseen by a Shiite cleric.

“Soon, in the coming weeks, we will send two satellites into space using our domestically-made rockets,” Rouhani said, without elaborating.

Previously, Iran has sent several short-lived satellites into orbit over the past decade, and in 2013 launched a monkey into space. The U.S. and its allies worry the same satellite-launching technology could be used to develop long-range missiles.

Raison de plus pour certains de penser qu’il est vraiment temps de s’occuper rapidement de ces enturbannés... #iran

Airbus Artificial Intelligence Challenges
AI Gym
▻https://aigym-v.airbus.com/contest/5bc834b8ba7add0027f3ac5a

https://aigym-prod-contest.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/contest-5bc834b8ba7add0027f3ac5a/contest-image-5bc834b8ba7add0027f3ac5a?1545735831238#.jpg

Open: 18 Oct 2018 | Closed: 01 Jun 2019
2 months ago

Interested parties ranging from established companies, start-ups, research labs, schools or individuals, can express their
interest to register to the challenge by email to timeserieschallenge.request@airbus.com anytime till end of 2018.

CONTEXT
Technologies at the intersection of #Artificial_Intelligence and #Internet_of_Things / #Big_Data are pushing the boundaries of the state of the art in #Time_Series_Analysis and #Predictive_Maintenance.

#AIRBUS is launching this scientific challenge on anomaly detection in time series data in order to:
● scout for top players in the field of Time Series Analysis
● encourage the research community to tackle the specific issues of related to the data generated by the aerospace industry during tests and in operations.

OVERVIEW
Data collected from our platforms is mostly considered normal. Due to the high quality of our products and of aerospace context, the occurrence of faults and failures is very rare, and we cannot afford to wait for reaching hundreds of new fault types to be able to identify and anticipate them. We are interested in unexpected changes in the behavior of the systems we monitor and have a rapid reaction time in analyzing suspect behavior.

TECHNICAL SCOPE
We set up a three stage challenge to benchmark unsupervised detection algorithms, based on three use cases:

1) Business Domain : Helicopters // number of input sensors : 1 // Sampling Frequency : 1000Hz // expected output : classify sequence as OK / KO

2) Business Domain : Satellites // number of input sensors : 30 // Sampling Frequency : 1000Hz // expected output : classify sequence as OK / KO

3) Business Domain : Commercial Aircraft // number of context sensors: 81 // number of sensors for anomaly detection: 9 // Sampling Frequency: 8Hz // expected output : identify anomalous time windows on sensors of interest

We welcome all and every working technical approaches, ranging from statistics (eg. SCP) to more
established machine learning techniques (eg. Isolation Forest) to modern AI (eg. Deep Learning LSTM).

TIMELINE
The challenge will officially start beginning 2019 with a first training phase on Q1 2019. The second phase will be a shorter evaluation on Q2 2019. A restitution workshop is going to be organised in June 2019.

#IA
#AI #IoT

Toux, fièvre, vomissements… une étrange épidémie dans un avion Emirates reliant Dubaï à New York
▻https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/transports/avion/toux-fievre-vomissements-une-etrange-epidemie-dans-un-avion-emirates-re

http://en-cdnmed.agilecontent.com//resources/jpg/6/5/1536159686256.jpg

À leur arrivée à New York, mercredi, plus 500 passagers d’un A380 de la compagnie Emirates ont été examinés. Une centaine d’entre eux présentaient de la fièvre, de la toux et certains étaient pris de nausées. Dix personnes ont été hospitalisées.

Dix personnes hospitalisées, plus de 100 passagers se plaignant de toux et de fièvre. Le rappeur Vanilla Ice, parmi les 521 personnes bloquées sur le tarmac à New York : l’aéroport John F. Kennedy, s’est mobilisé mercredi face à une alerte santé d’une rare ampleur, probablement due à un épisode grippal.

L’alerte a été donnée vers 09 h du matin (13 h GMT) à l’atterrissage du vol EK203 de la compagnie Emirates en provenance de Dubaï, assuré par un A380 avec 521 personnes à bord.

Toux, fièvre et vomissements
« On nous a informés qu’un grand nombre de passagers étaient malades : 106 présentaient des symptômes allant de la toux à de la fièvre et des vomissements », a expliqué Oxiris Barbot, responsable des services de santé de New York.

L’appareil a alors été conduit « à distance » des terminaux, et des équipes médicales, dont des spécialistes de l’agence fédérale des Centres de contrôle et de prévention des maladies (CDC), sont montées à bord pour examiner les 521 passagers.

Parmi eux, le rappeur Vanilla Ice, qui a informé ses fans qu’il était assis à l’étage supérieur de l’A380. « C’est dingue. Apparemment il y a plus de 100 personnes malades à l’étage inférieur, je suis content d’être en haut », a-t-il notamment tweeté.

CSIS-iLab/aerospace-viz: Home to data viz projects for the Aerospace Security website.
▻https://github.com/CSIS-iLab/aerospace-viz

#datasource #espace #spaceports #astronautes #missiles

Can the Manufacturer of Tasers Provide the Answer to Police Abuse ? | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/can-the-manufacturer-of-tasers-provide-the-answer-to-police-abuse

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b742d1654dc0a50659fa5b0/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/180827_r32572.jpg

Tasers are carried by some six hundred thousand law-enforcement officers around the world—a kind of market saturation that also presents a problem. “One of the challenges with Taser is: where do you go next, what’s Act II?” Smith said. “For us, luckily, Act II is cameras.” He began adding cameras to his company’s weapons in 2006, to defend against allegations of abuse, and in the process inadvertently opened a business line that may soon overshadow the Taser. In recent years, body cameras—the officer’s answer to bystander cell-phone video—have become ubiquitous, and Smith’s company, now worth four billion dollars, is their largest manufacturer, holding contracts with more than half the major police departments in the country.

The cameras have little intrinsic value, but the information they collect is worth a fortune to whoever can organize and safeguard it. Smith has what he calls an iPod/iTunes opportunity—a chance to pair a hardware business with an endlessly recurring and expanding data-storage subscription plan. In service of an intensifying surveillance state and the objectives of police as they battle the public for control of the story, Smith is building a network of electrical weapons, cameras, drones, and someday, possibly, robots, connected by a software platform called Evidence.com. In the process, he is trying to reposition his company in the public imagination, not as a dubious purveyor of stun guns but as a heroic seeker of truth.

A year ago, Smith changed Taser’s name to Axon Enterprise, referring to the conductive fibre of a nerve cell. Taser was founded in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Smith lives; to transform into Axon, he opened an office in Seattle, hiring designers and engineers from Uber, Google, and Apple. When I met him at the Seattle office this spring, he wore a company T-shirt that read “Expect Candor” and a pair of leather sneakers in caution yellow, the same color as Axon’s logo: a delta symbol—for change—which also resembles the lens of a surveillance camera.

Already, Axon’s servers, at Microsoft, store nearly thirty petabytes of video—a quarter-million DVDs’ worth—and add approximately two petabytes each month. When body-camera footage is released—say, in the case of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man killed by police in Sacramento, or of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, this past fall—Axon’s logo is often visible in the upper-right corner of the screen. The company’s stock is up a hundred and thirty per cent since January.

The original Taser was the invention of an aerospace engineer named Jack Cover, inspired by the sci-fi story “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle,” about a boy inventor whose long gun fires a five-thousand-volt charge. Early experiments were comical: Cover wired the family couch to shock his sister and her boyfriend as they were on the brink of making out. Later, he discovered that he could fell buffalo when he hit them with electrified darts. In 1974, Cover got a patent and began to manufacture an electric gun. That weapon was similar to today’s Taser: a Glock-shaped object that sends out two live wires, loaded with fifty thousand volts of electricity and ending in barbed darts that attach to a target. When the hooks connect, they create a charged circuit, which causes muscles to contract painfully, rendering the subject temporarily incapacitated. More inventor than entrepreneur, Cover designed the Taser to propel its darts with an explosive, leading the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to classify it a Title II weapon (a category that also includes sawed-off shotguns), which required an arduous registration process and narrowed its appeal.

A few years after Tasers went on the market, Rick Smith added a data port to track each trigger pull. The idea, he told me, came from the Baltimore Police Department, which was resisting Tasers out of a concern that officers would abuse people with them. In theory, with a data port, cops would use their Tasers more conscientiously, knowing that each deployment would be recorded and subject to review. But in Baltimore it didn’t work out that way. Recent reports in the Sun revealed that nearly sixty per cent of people Tased by police in Maryland between 2012 and 2014—primarily black and living in low-income neighborhoods—were “non-compliant and non-threatening.”

Act II begins in the nauseous summer of 2014, when Eric Garner died after being put in a choke hold by police in Staten Island and Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, of the Ferguson Police. After a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson—witness statements differed wildly, and no footage of the shooting came to light—Brown’s family released a statement calling on the public to “join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.”

In the fall of 2014, Taser débuted the Officer Safety Plan, which now costs a hundred and nine dollars a month and includes Tasers, cameras, and a sensor that wirelessly activates all the cameras in its range whenever a cop draws his sidearm. This feature is described on the Web site as a prudent hedge in chaotic times: “In today’s online culture where videos go viral in an instant, officers must capture the truth of a critical event. But the intensity of the moment can mean that hitting ‘record’ is an afterthought. Both officers and communities facing confusion and unrest have asked for a solution that turns cameras on reliably, leaving no room for dispute.” According to White’s review of current literature, half of the randomized controlled studies show a substantial or statistically significant reduction in use of force following the introduction of body cameras. The research into citizen complaints is more definitive: cameras clearly reduce the number of complaints from the public.

The practice of “testi-lying”—officers lying under oath—is made much more difficult by the presence of video.

Even without flagrant dissimulation, body-camera footage is often highly contentious. Michael White said, “The technology is the easy part. The human use of the technology really is making things very complex.” Policies on how and when cameras should be used, and how and when and by whom footage can be accessed, vary widely from region to region. Jay Stanley, who researches technology for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the value of a body camera to support democracy depends on those details. “When is it activated? When is it turned off? How vigorously are those rules enforced? What happens to the video footage, how long is it retained, is it released to the public?” he said. “These are the questions that shape the nature of the technology and decide whether it just furthers the police state.”

Increasingly, civil-liberties groups fear that body cameras will do more to amplify police officers’ power than to restrain their behavior. Black Lives Matter activists view body-camera programs with suspicion, arguing that communities of color need better educational and employment opportunities, environmental justice, and adequate housing, rather than souped-up robo-cops. They also argue that video has been ineffectual: many times, the public has watched the police abuse and kill black men without facing conviction. Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State Los Angeles, who is active in Black Lives Matter, told me, “Video surveillance, including body cameras, are being used to bolster police claims, to hide what police are doing, and engage in what we call the double murder of our people. They kill the body and use the footage to increase accusations around the character of the person they just killed.” In her view, police use video as a weapon: a black man shown in a liquor store in a rough neighborhood becomes a suspect in the public mind. Video generated by civilians, on the other hand, she sees as a potential check on abuses. She stops to record with her cell phone almost every time she witnesses a law-enforcement interaction with a civilian.

Bringing in talented engineers is crucial to Smith’s vision. The public-safety nervous system that he is building runs on artificial intelligence, software that can process and analyze an ever-expanding trove of video evidence. The L.A.P.D. alone has already made some five million videos, and adds more than eleven thousand every day. At the moment, A.I. is used for redaction, and Axon technicians at a special facility in Scottsdale are using data from police departments to train the software to detect and blur license plates and faces.

Facial recognition, which techno-pessimists see as the advent of the Orwellian state, is not far behind. Recently, Smith assembled an A.I. Ethics Board, to help steer Axon’s decisions. (His lead A.I. researcher, recruited from Uber, told him that he wouldn’t be able to hire the best engineers without an ethics board.) Smith told me, “I don’t want to wake up like the guy Nobel, who spent his life making things that kill people, and then, at the end of his life, it’s, like, ‘O.K., I have to buy my way out of this.’ ”

#Taser #Intelligence_artificielle #Caméras #Police #Stockage_données

Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected
▻https://www.fastcodesign.com/90168628/the-airplane-saddle-is-a-standing-seat-for-super-economy-flight

https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_auto:best,f_auto,fl_lossy/wp-cms/uploads/sites/4/2018/04/2-airplane-seat.jpg

There’s nothing inherently bad about the design of the Skyrider 2.0, a new compact seat that allows airlines to fit more passengers in less space with a hypothetical super-economy class. Engineered by Italian aerospace interior design company Aviointeriors and introduced at Hamburg’s Airplane Interiors Expo in earl April, the seat positions a willing passenger almost completely upright on a polyester saddle and back support. It seems well thought out, it’s reportedly very functional, and it even looks good. But I’ll still never sit on one.

The Skyrider 2.0 makes a lot of sense for airlines trying to squeeze as much value as they can from every pound of fuel and inch of cabin space. Decreasing seat space is an easy way to do so, and even major companies like Airbus have toyed with unconventional seat designs like this butt-destroying bike seat. The new saddle-style seat is a twist on the company’s previous high-capacity seat prototype, which came out in 2010 and was never installed by any airline–perhaps out of fear after the backlash Ryanair received for similar plans. This new version is an aesthetic improvement over the original (which looked like a squeezed version of a normal seat), but it seems to be more clever, as well: positioning a passenger almost upright, with a saddle and a foot panel to support part of their body weight, takes up only 23 inches of pitch (“the space between a point on one seat and the same point on the seat in front of it”).
[Photo: Avio Interiors]

Aviointeriors calls Skyrider 2.0 “the new frontier of low cost tickets and passenger experience” and claims that the design allows a 20% increase in passengers per flight. It also weighs 50% less than standard economy class seats–after all, it’s half the size–lowering the fuel cost per passenger. So it seems likely that such a design could lower the cost of travel for consumers–but at what price when it comes to the experience?

A reviewer at the travel review site The Points Guy tried one at the expo, spending 10 minutes in versions of the seat in both front and back rows. “The front row wasn’t bad, but at 5 foot 11 inch tall,” he says, “my knees were firmly planted against the seat back for the entire time in the rear row.” He claims that the saddle itself “didn’t seem to be bad.” The director general of Aviointeriors had an explanation for the saddle-style design decision back in 2010, pointing out to USA Today that, “cowboys ride eight hours on their horses during the day and still feel comfortable in the saddle.” True, though cowboys also enjoy total freedom of movement on a horse, and are not tightly sandwiched between other cowboys and their flatulence. Also, have you ever played The Oregon Trail? But I digress.

So how far are we from seeing the Skyrider 2.0 on real airplanes? Companies have been talking about these “high-capacity seats” for a while, but at this point, no airlines have announced plans to install this particular solution, though Aviointeriors says interest is “really strong.” If airlines truly believe that are willing to trade their suffering on an airborne inquisitorial torture device for a major airfare discount, it’s just a matter of time.

#design

The Oil Market is Bigger Than All Metal Markets Combined
▻http://www.visualcapitalist.com/size-oil-market

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/oil-market-size-2.jpg

Big Oil
The oil market is bigger than all metal markets combined

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Ever since the invention of the internal combustion engine, oil has been one of the most crucial commodities on Earth. Without it, modern transportation as we know it would not be possible. Industries such as aviation, aerospace, automobiles, shipping, and the military would look nothing like they do today.

Of course, as we now know, this has all come with some extreme drawbacks from an environmental perspective. And while new green technology and the lithium revolution will aid in eventually reducing the role of oil in transportation, the fact is we still use 94 million barrels per day of crude worldwide.

#économie #pétrole #énergie #Matière_première #infographie #visualisation

Obama to Israel: Our Tax Dollars Won’t Go to Your Defense Contractors | Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/18/obama-to-israel-our-tax-dollars-wont-go-to-your-defense-contractors

The United States and Israel are close to clinching a massive 10-year arms deal, but Washington is pushing to scrap a coveted provision that has allowed Israel to pump hundreds of millions of dollars directly into its defense industry.

If successful, the administration’s push to remove the clause would inflict some real pain on Israel’s growing security sector, which already exports more arms overseas than almost any other country apart from the United States.
[…]
The issue has been a sticking point in the talks over the new military aid package because it could deprive Israel’s security firms of roughly $10 billion over the next decade, a vast sum for a crucial sector of the country’s economy. The deal, which doesn’t involve the direct transfer of military hardware but instead a commitment from Washington to finance Israel’s weapons buying, illustrates how the two countries’ security ties remain strong enough to transcend the tensions that have plagued relations between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Under the change proposed by the White House, Israel would have to spend all the funds it receives in the arms package on U.S.-made weapons instead of being allowed to spend a portion of it on Israeli-manufactured arms and fuel. That would mean American aerospace giants such as Lockheed Martin, which builds the F-35 fighter jet, and Raytheon, which sells precision-guided missiles and sensors to U.S. partners worldwide, would stand to benefit.

Stock Prices of Weapons Manufacturers Soaring Since Paris Attack
►https://theintercept.com/2015/11/16/stock-prices-of-weapons-manufacturers-soaring-since-paris-attack

Note how immediate the increases are: The markets could barely wait to start buying. The Dow overall is up today only .12 percent, making these leaps quite pronounced. Reuters, as published on Fox Business, starkly noted the causal connection: “Shares of aerospace and defense rose sharply on Monday in reaction to the attacks in France.” The private-sector industrial prong of the Military and Surveillance State always wins, but especially when the media’s war juices start flowing.

Russia creates Aerospace Forces by merging military branches - Yahoo News
▻http://news.yahoo.com/russia-creates-aerospace-forces-merge-military-branches-102445783.html

Russia has merged several branches of its military into the Aerospace Forces — a reorganization aimed at enhancing coordination and efficiency, officials said Monday.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the decision offers “the optimal way of improving the system of the nation’s aerospace defense.”

The new branch will include the nation’s air force, air defense, anti-missile and space forces.

Shoigu said that its creation has been prompted by the increasing importance of air and space components in modern warfare.

Malaysia : Dutch report suggests MH-17 shot down from ground | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/09/us-ukraine-crisis-mh17-investigation-idUSKBN0H40LM20140909

“It’s consistent with a hit by a ground missile,” said Joris Melkert, a lecturer in aerospace engineering at the Technical University of Delft. “What could cause a pattern of high velocity particles 10 kilometers up in the sky? As far as I can see, the only thing that could do that is a rocket,” he said. “The report finds there were only three other aircraft in the vicinity: two Boeing 777s and one Airbus A330, so both civilian, which makes the surface-to-air missile more likely.”

Bien évidemment, le rapport préliminaire ▻http://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/uploads/phase-docs/701/b3923acad0ceprem-rapport-mh-17-en-interactief.pdf ne mentionne pas le mot missile, encore moins sol-air…

Et pour le sérieux du commentateur, le rapport ne dit absolument pas « il y avait uniquement trois autres avions dans le voisinage », mais ne parle que des autres avions commerciaux présents au-dessus de la zone d’interdiction de vol au moment de l’impact…

Voici l’intégralité du passage :

2.5.3 Other traffic
According to information received from the NBAAI, recorded ATC surveillance information revealed that three other commercial airliners overflew the same restricted airspace as flight MH17 around the time of the occurrence. Two of those aircraft were cruising eastbound and one was cruising westbound. All were under control of Dnipro Radar. At 13.20 hrs the distance between MH17 and the closes of the three aircraft was approximately 30 kilometers. Analyses is ongoing.

Airbus staff quizzed in SFO probe into alleged Saudi corruption - FT.com
▻http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c930e308-06ba-11e4-b0d3-00144feab7de.html?ftcamp=crm/email/201479/nbe/MiddleEast/product&siteedition=uk#axzz36zpbxOct

The UK Serious Fraud Office has made arrests and questioned six individuals in connection with its long-standing investigation into alleged corruption in Saudi Arabia by a subsidiary of Airbus, the European aerospace and defence group.

www.aol.it/1stCh6H

Un joli petit drone nord coréen

Crashed drones reveal state of North’s drone program | NK News - North Korea News

▻http://www.nknews.org/2014/04/crashed-drones-reveal-state-of-norths-drone-program

April 3rd, 2014

▻http://www.nknews.org/wp-content/themes/NKNews/timthumb.php?src=http://www.nknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/crashed-drones.jpg&w=657&h=360&q=100

Two North Korean unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) – commonly known as drones – crashed in South Korean territory in late March. Though neither design is very large or advanced, they demonstrate that Pyongyang is developing drone technology capable of conducting reconnaissance against the South.

#drones #corée_du_nord

#Qatar to buy 22 military helicopters from #France
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/qatar-buy-22-military-helicopters-france

Qatar will buy 22 NH90 military helicopters from a unit of European aerospace group Airbus worth nearly two billion euros ($2.8 billion), the French #defense ministry said Thursday. It said 12 of these would be transport helicopters and the other 10 would be the frigate version. Qatar will also acquire two Airbus-made refueling tankers. The decision was conveyed to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian by Qatari officials. Last week, Le Drian had taken his Qatari counterpart General Khaled Al Attiyah to Brest in northwestern France to show him the NH90 chopper. read more

#Top_News

Israel fears #Hezbollah, #Hamas drones: Air force chief
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/israel-fears-hezbollah-hamas-drones-air-force-chief

Israel fears Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza would deploy exploding drones against it in a future war, chief of the Israeli air force said on Monday. “We will have to cope with dozens of pilotless aerial vehicles, in both the northern and southern fronts,” Major-General Shachar Shohat, told a Tel Aviv “security conference.” Uzi Rabin, an Israeli aerospace expert, said Israel’s “Iron Dome” and Patriot missile interceptors were capable of shooting down most drones. read more

#Top_News

Defense outlook 2015: A global survey of defense-industry executives
Today’s leading defense executives offer their insights.
April 2013 | byJohn Dowdy and Melanie Taylor
▻http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/manufacturing/defense_outlook_2015

Les prévisions des #marchands_de_la_mort

In December 2012, we surveyed a small group of senior executives from leading aerospace and defense companies around the globe, 20 in total, to find the pulse point of the industry: what will the next three years hold? We invited executives to share their views on topics such as market outlook and overall trends, industry restructuring, and growth prospects. About three-quarters of the executives surveyed were C-level leaders at their organization—CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, or president—while the others were vice presidents or general managers. Our sample was geographically diverse, with two-thirds of executives from Europe and the Middle East; one-third were from the Americas. Most lead companies or divisions with at least $5 billion in revenues.

Respondents agreed on many topics, especially the somber outlook for global defense spending. With only one exception, executives see global spending declining over the next three years. They see the defense industry changing, and they are all taking measures to adapt. Leaders are preparing to meet the challenge of evolving customer needs, especially the quest for affordable products, and expect to be active in corporate restructuring. Companies intend to find growth in international markets such as India and the Middle East. Finally, executives see growth potential in commercial aerospace, services, unmanned systems, and cybersecurity, with interesting differences of opinion on the relative attractiveness of these opportunities.

A shrinking market
When asked about the outlook for the global market, the near-universal expectation is for a decline, but executives disagree on the extent of the slump. About two-fifths believe that global market revenues will decrease between 1 and 5 percent, and one-fifth see a decline of more than 20 percent. The rest expect something in between.

We also asked respondents about the outlook in the markets in which they are active, and found some clearly delineated differences. Asia-Pacific and the Middle East were seen by most as pockets of moderate growth, offsetting moderate to significant decreases in Europe and North America. South America and Africa were largely predicted to either remain the same or have slight increases.

#armement #moyen-orient

10 companies profiting the most from war
►http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/03/10/10-companies-profiting-most-from-war/1970997

10. United Technologies (UTX) — aircraft, electronics, engines
Arm sales: $11.6 billion, total sales: $58.2 billion
Gross profit: $5.3 billion, total workforce: 199,900
United Technologies makes a wide range of arms — notably military helicopters, including the Black Hawk helicopter for the U.S. Army and the Seahawk helicopter for the U.S. Navy. The company was the biggest employer in the top 10 though arms sales accounted for just 20% of revenue. UTX also produces elevators, escalators, air-conditioners and refrigerators. International sales comprised 60% of the company’s revenue in 2012.

9. L-3 Communications (LLL) — electronics
Arm sales: $12.5 billion, total sales: $15.2 billion
Gross profit: $956 million, total workforce: 61,000
Some 83% of L-3 Communications sales in 2011 came from arms sales, but this was down from what it sold the prior year. The company has four business segments: electronic systems; aircraft modernization and maintenance; national security solutions; and command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Among many products manufactured, the company has become a major provider of unmanned aircraft systems.

8. Finmeccanica — aircraft, artillery, engines, electronics, vehicles and missiles
Arms sales, $14.6 billion, total sales: $24.1 billion
Gross profit: $ -3.2 billion, total workforce: 70,470
Italian company Finmeccanica makes a wide range of arms, including helicopters and security electronics. Nearly 60% of the company’s sales in 2011 were in arms. Finmeccanica lost $3.2 billion in 2011. The Italian company is currently fending off allegation that it paid bribes to win an approximately $750 million contract to provide 12 military helicopters to the Indian government in 2010. The then-head of the company, Giuseppe Orsi, was arrested in February but has denied wrongdoing. Other executives, including the head of the company’s helicopter unit, have been replaced, and the company has delayed the release of recent financial results.

7. EADS — aircraft, electronics, missiles and space
Arm sales: $16.4 billion, total sales: $68.3 billion
Gross profit: $1.4 billion, total workforce: 133,120
The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS), based in the Netherlands, had sales in 2011 roughly in line with the prior year. Arms sales comprised just 24% of the company’s revenue. EADS and BAE Systems unsuccessfully attempted to merge for $45 billion in 2012, which would have created the world’s largest aerospace company. The deal collapsed in October after German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed concerns about the merger.

6. Northrop Grumman (NOC) — aircraft, electronics, missiles, ships, space
Arm sales: $21.4 billion, total sales: $26.4 billion
Gross profit: $2.1 billion, total workforce: 72,500
Northrop Grumman’s 2011 arms sales comprised about 81% of total sales even after a sharp decline in arms sales year over year. The company attributed the decline to reduced government spending on defense projects. Nevertheless, the company was more profitable than in the prior year.

5. Raytheon (RTN) — electronics, missiles
Arm sales: $22.5 billion, total sales: $24.9 billion
Gross profit: $1.9 billion, total workforce: 71,000
Raytheon, based in Waltham, Mass., is one of the largest defense contractors in the U.S. The company makes the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, among others. Arms sales comprised about 90% of the company’s sales in 2011 though they as a total they were lower than in the prior year. The slide hasn’t let up. Total sales in 2012 fell 1.5%, and Raytheon is expecting sales to fall 3% in 2013, a projection which doesn’t take into account the effects of mandated budget cuts. The company can rely on overseas customers to somewhat offset weak sales at home. As of January, approximately 40% of the company’s backlog was booked overseas. The company expects approximately a 5% increase in international sales in 2013.

4. General Dynamics (GD) — artillery, electronics, vehicles, small arms, ships
Arm sales: $23.8 billion, total sales: $32.7 billion
Gross profit: $2.5 billion, total workforce: 95,100
With 18,000 transactions in 2011, General Dynamics was the third-largest contractor to the U.S. government. Of those contracts, approximately $12.9 billion worth went to the Navy, while an additional $4.6 billion went to the Army. The company’s arms sales in 2011 comprised 73% of total sales. Arms sales in 2011 were slightly below 2010 levels. The company makes a host of products, including electric boats, tracked and wheeled military vehicles, and battle tanks. The company announced layoffs in early March, blaming mandated federal budget cuts.

3. BAE Systems — aircraft, artillery, electronics, vehicles, missiles, ships
Arm sales: $29.2 billion, total sales: $30.7 billion
Gross profit: $2.3 billion, total workforce: 93,500
BAE Systems was the largest non-U.S. company based on arms sales. Arms sales represented 95% of the company’s total sales in 2011 even though they were lower as a total of overall sales compared to the prior year. The products BAE sells include the L-ROD Bar Armor System that shields defense vehicles and the Hawk Advanced Jet Trainer that provides sophisticated simulation training for military pilots. In 2013, the company said its growth would likely come from outside the U.S. and Great Britain — its home market. BAE noted that its outlook for those two countries was “constrained,” likely due to the diminished presence in international conflicts and government budget cuts.

2. Boeing (BA) — aircraft, electronics, missiles, space
Arm sales: $31.8 billion, total sales: $68.7 billion
Gross profit: $4 billion, total workforce: 171,700
Boeing was the second-largest U.S. government contractor in 2011, with about $21.5 billion worth of goods contracted. The Chicago-based company makes a wide range of arms, including strategic missile systems, laser and electro-optical systems and global positioning systems. Despite all these technologies, just 46% of the company’s total sales of $68.7 billion in 2011 came from arms. Boeing is the largest commercial airplane manufacturer in the world, making planes such as the 747, 757 and recently, the 787 Dreamliner. The company is also known for its space technology — Boeing had $1 billion worth of contracts with NASA in 2011.

1. Lockheed Martin (LMT) — aircraft, electronics, missiles, space
Arm sales:$36.3 billion, total sales: $46.5 billion
Gross profit: $2.7 billion, total workforce, 123,000
Lockheed Martin notched $36.3 billion in sales in 2011, slightly higher than the $35.7 billion the company sold in 2010. The arms sales comprised 78% of the company’s total 2011 sales. Lockheed makes a wide range of products, including aircraft, missiles, unmanned systems and radar systems. The company and its employees have been concerned about the effects of the “fiscal cliff” and sequestration, the latter of which includes significant cuts to the U.S. Department of Defense. In the fall of 2012, the company planned on issuing layoff notices to all employees before backing down at the White House’s request.