Textron arm, General Atomics join $499M Air Force vehicle research contract

The Air Force has added a Textron subsidiary and General Atomics to a potential eight-year, $499 million contract to help the Air Force Research research new technologies for use in the development of future air vehicles.

Textron's AAI Corp. and General Atomics increase the number of identified awardees on the Aerospace Systems Air Platform Technology Research contract to five so far. The $499 million shared ceiling is for six companies, the same number of offers the Air Force received for the contract.

Northrop Grumman and Aurora Flight Sciences received the first two spots earlier this month and were joined days later by Lockheed Martin. A January broad agency announcement for the ASAPTR program says the contract is for a five-year ordering period with performance over seven years.

ASAPTR awardees will work with the Air Force to research how to develop, demonstrate, integrate and transition new air vehicle technologies and systems to deliver weapons, payloads and cargo.

Research-and-development work by contractors will encompass areas such as configurations, aeromechanics, propulsion, structures, computational fluid dynamics and computational structural mechanics.

All work will take place at contractor facilities through Aug. 31, 2025.