The Department of Defense announced a series of small (in defense contracting terms) contract awards to a series of publicly traded companies Thursday. Among them:
- United Technologies (UTX 0.80%) subsidiary Sikorsky won the largest award, a $26.9 million firm-fixed-price foreign military sales contract to convert an unspecified number of UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters for use by the Royal Thailand Army. This contract should be completed by April 30, 2016.
- In other helicopter news, Boeing (BA 1.10%) won a $17.9 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to perform design and engineering work on the CH-47 Advanced Chinook Rotor Blade. This contract funds work through March 18, 2017.
- One contract that sounds like it involves helicopters -- but doesn't -- is the $7.6 million DARPA contract that UTC subsidiary Goodrich just won. In this cost-plus-fixed-fee award, Goodrich will work on Phase 3 of the "Hybrid Multi-Material Rotor (HMMR) program" -- a DARPA project to develop new hi-performance rotors for submarine screws. Goodrich's expected completion date on this work is Sept. 30, 2014.
- Raytheon (RTN +0.00%) was awarded $8.8 million in a firm-fixed-price contract to replace obsolete Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) Encoders in Tomahawk missiles. The PCM Encoder samples flight test missile guidance and avionics telemetry data stream, encodes and formats the data, and provides telemetry information to ground monitoring stations. Raytheon should complete work on this task by March 2015.
- In the day's smallest award, International Business Machines (IBM 2.72%) won an $8.1 million firm-fixed-price, incrementally-funded contract to support of the Army Learning Management System through March 21, 2014.
- And finally, Sanofi (SNY 0.68%) subsidiary Sanofi Pasteur VaxDesign Corporation was awarded $15.1 million to perform research and development work on an in vitro biomimetic immune system for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The objective here is to find better ways to test immune responses to difference agents in the lab, to facilitate development of vaccines and immunotherapeutics. Completion date on the work: March 24, 2017.
