Load Factor

Defense

The week to 16 August 2026

28 entries reached Defense in the seven days to 16 August 2026, from nine sources. The largest group was news items, at fourteen. 27 companies were named, one of them more than once, 21 of them in this segment for the first time in this record. The week before carried six, 22 fewer.

The editor's note

Nine of this week's thirteen contract awards are Department of Homeland Security procurements against United States Coast Guard airframes, and they run through nine different suppliers. Airbus Helicopters and Safran are on the MH-65, spare parts and a tail rotor servo overhaul. Sikorsky, Ontic, Parker Aerospace, Specmat Technologies and Hornet Acquisitionco are on the MH-60T, between components, struts, tail rotor servo assemblies, logic units and antennas, and rescue hoist overhaul. GE Aerospace and Mission Systems Davenport are on the HC-130J, a propeller assembly and oxygen regulators. The nine come to about $10.5 million together, and the largest of them is $2.9 million.

Set that beside the other four awards of the same week. Raytheon, an RTX business, took $745 million for SM-3 Block IIA interceptors. Agile Defense was selected for $250 million of Navy logistics IT modernisation. Space Kinetic was awarded $50 million by the Space Force. CodeMettle took an IDIQ on the Army's tactical network operations solution after exercise testing by the 4th and 25th Infantry Divisions.

One week of the record therefore carries both ends of the defence buy at once: four programme awards in the hundreds of millions, and a tail of sustainment orders in the hundreds of thousands. If you sell into rotorcraft sustainment, the Coast Guard tail is the part of this week to read. It names nine suppliers across three airframes, and each award record states the part or the work it covers.

Reuben Mann, Editor. Signed by Reuben Mann on 19 August 2026.

Contract award

13

Product launch

1

News item

14

Where the week came from

nine sources supplied the 28 entries. Every row above links the original, and its entry page carries the terms it is quoted under.

SourceEntries
USAspending.gov award data9
PR Newswire, Aerospace and Defense7
Aviation International News3
Corporate Jet Investor2
Lockheed Martin newsroom2
RTX newsroom2
FlightGlobal1
L3Harris newsroom1
Rolls-Royce press releases1

How this edition was put together

Every row is an entry in the record, fetched again at its source on the day the record was read and confirmed to carry its excerpt. The groups are the record's own event classes, ordered as a reader of this segment reads them rather than by score alone, and within a group by the record's score and then by date.

The counts on this page are arithmetic over those rows and nothing else. Nothing is added about a company that its own entry does not carry, and the edition is assembled by software, so no line here is an opinion about anyone. What gets in, and what does not is the standard the entries are held to.

Corrections go to reuben@loadfactor.agency.