The pandemic driven decline in commercial aerospace had a dramatic impact on Safran’s operations and financial performance. The pandemic and delivery suspension of the 737 MAX cut revenues by almost one-third in 2020. By the close of 2021 total company revenues declined even further, resulting in a 38% drop from pre-pandemic 2019 to end of year 2021.

Teal Group Corp.’s Senior Analyst Dr. David L. Rockwell has updated all F-35 JSF (Joint Strike Fighter) sensor programs in Teal’s Military Electronics Briefing, including detailed analysis based on the most recent DoD sources and documents: January 2022’s Director of OT&E report, the FY23 DoD budget released in April 2022, the GAO’s annual F-35 report publicly released on 25 April 2022, and the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report updated on 2 May 2022. The MEB includes three reports discussing the major F-35 sensor systems for EO/IR, Radar, and Electronic Warfare/SIGINT.

These three major programs will each be the largest military electronics program ever in their respective areas. The F-35 APG-81 radar and MIRFS avionics systems may also be the largest military electronics program of all time. Combined, these three reports in the MEB will account for a total of at least $67.4 billion of RDT&E and procurement funding over the next ten years – worth more than $7.5 billion annually beginning in the middle of this decade. And the subcontracting opportunities will be huge.

Since January 2019, CACI has completed nine acquisitions valued at more than $1.9 billion. Acquisitions remain the company’s highest priority for capital deployment. The recent acquisition of Six3Systems enables the company to offer more complex solutions in areas such as signals intelligence, precious geo-location services.

Starlink and OneWeb satellites continue to be launched in large batches. During January-March alone, 369 Starlinks and 34 OneWebs were launched to low Earth orbits. In 2021, a total 989 Starlinks and 284 OneWebs went up. So far, these are the two “mega-constellation” programs that are leading the way to an era of cheap and ultra-fast Internet access for just about everybody on the planet. Thousands of Starlinks and hundreds or OneWebs will be launched over the next few years.