Under Contract

• The Department of Homeland Security hired 10 “role player personnel” to help with activities for the Air Force Special Investigations Academy. The role players must know how to speak Pashto or Dari, languages spoken in Afghanistan, and have a “secret” level security clearance. They must also know how to use guns, including the M4, the M16, the AK-47 and a Gatling gun-style weapon, all with blank ammunition. The role players must be available for six days, up to 10 hours per day, for two class sessions. Reservoir International won the $71,165 contract.

• The State Department spent $246,595 on “new technological equipment” from Project Services International Corporation. The only details provided are that the equipment will be “donated to the Government of Mexico.”

{mosads}• The Department of Transportation (DOT) issued more than $1.75 million in contracts to four different contractors to help in its “Forces to Flyers” program. The DOT’s Volpe Center in Massachusetts “has a requirement to provide flight training services to train military veterans without prior military pilot experience as part of a research initiative to study pathways for entering the pilot workforce, identify barriers to pilot training and employment, and implement a demonstration initiative that can provide flight training to veterans interested in becoming airline pilots.” CTI Professional Flight Training — one location in Tennessee and another in Florida — U.S. Aviation Group and Leading Edge Aviation each won a contract between $373,000 and $480,000.

• The Goddard Space Flight Center, within NASA, awarded a $31 million contract to Manhattan Construction Company to build “a state of the art facility for development of instruments and new technology for space flight mass spectroscopic scientific measurements to support in … analysis of extraterrestrial organic and mineral molecular chemistries.” The facility will be a combination of “laboratory and offices to support research and development of new technology and new instruments manufacturing.”