Boeing's decision to make radial tires standard for main and nose landing gear on the 737 MAX is a welcome upgrade for airlines that have compared radials' performance with the alternative—the bias-ply tires that have been an industry standard for decades.

The deal has been in the making for more than a year, and now—after this lengthy process—the Lufthansa board of directors has finally approved what is a pretty dramatic breakthrough for the carrier's modus operandi: The group is setting up a subsidiary for European direct services, operating a fleet of around 90 aircraft. The unit will be headquartered at Cologne/Bonn Airport in Germany.

It's official: President Barack Obama last week signed into law a measure that confirms full ownership rights to artifacts received by Apollo-era astronauts from their missions. According to the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, NASA managers routinely allowed astronauts to keep mementos, pieces of hardware and personal equipment from the spacecraft during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. But beginning in the mid-2000s, NASA began to challenge the ownership of these artifacts.

Dean Foley has become sales manager of the aerospace division of West Springfield, Mass.-based Atlantic Fasteners. He has more than 25 years of experience in aerospace metals distribution.

Sir Martin Sweeting, executive chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. and director of the Surrey Space Center at the University of Surrey, England, has received the International von Karman Wings Award for his contributions to aerospace, presented by the Aerospace Historical Society and the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

When asked about the future of the low-fare airline industry, Vueling CEO Alex Cruz has a simple answer: “We will grow and the legacy carriers will shrink.” But that is only the short version of a more complex story.

NASA's Langley Research Center, Mitre and several partners have completed the first in a series of inflight evaluations of cooperative automatic sense-and-avoid (SAA) algorithms for unmanned air systems (UAS), in large part to validate a new testbed that will be used for more advanced trials next year.

The changes are modest, but the airframer is cautious.