Wanda M. Austin, president and chief executive of The Aerospace Corp., has been elected to the University of Southern California board of trustees. She served on President Barack Obama’s Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee in 2009, and in 2010 was appointed to the Defense Science Board.
Advanced displays that improve situational awareness without swamping the crew with data are under test in the NASA Langley Flight Research Center’s Integrated Flight Deck simulator in Virginia as part of the Integrated Intelligent Flight Deck (IIFD) program, one of four initiatives in NASA’s evolving Aviation Safety Program. Updates on IIFD, a parallel European advanced flight deck research effort, new integrated visual systems and the challenges posed by NextGen and Sesar air traffic systems are reviewed beginning on page 44. NASA photo.
Mary Case (see photo) was named general manager of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport . She had been general manager of Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport since July 2005. Case also held the top post for seven years at Houston’s oldest airfield, Ellington Airport. Case is the first person to head all three Houston airports.
Oct. 26-28—Certification Together International Conference. Toulouse. Nov. 1-3—A&D Programs Conference. Phoenix. Nov. 2-3—A&D Supply Chain Conference. Phoenix. Nov. 2-4—MRO Asia Conference and Exhibition. Singapore. You can now register ONLINEfor Aviation Week Events. Go to www.aviationweek.com/events or call Lydia Janow at+1 (212) 904-3225/+1 (800) 240-7645 ext. 5 (U.S. and Canada Only)
Chinese missile and space group Casic is pushing into civil aircraft manufacturing, announcing that it plans to set up a factory to make composite parts, including some for the Comac C919 airliner. The move presents the world’s composites suppliers with an important new competitor, and it is part of the group’s wider strategy to move into civil markets. That strategy is itself part of a national policy requiring defense manufacturers to diversify.
Guido Casanova (see photo) has joined Sener ’s engineering and construction division as head of its Brazilian operations. He was responsible for the business management of the Brazilian divisions of Pirelli Cabos S.A. and Pirelli Cables in Mexico, as well as managing the Brazilian division of Pirelli Telecommunicaciones.
Bombardier Aerospace’s three newest line maintenance facilities underscore a significant, ongoing change in the business aviation world by virtue of their locations: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Monterrey, Mexico; and Riga, Latvia. Long a North American-centric industry in terms of manufacturing and ownership, business aviation is expanding across the globe in all facets. While the majority of aircraft are in the U.S. and Canada, new machines are going to owners elsewhere in nearly equal numbers.
Asia-Pacific-based carriers saw passenger counts increase 13.4% in September, passenger revenues grow 9.3% and international air cargo increase 18.5% over 2009, the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines reports. “Over the past nine months, we have seen a 14.6% increase in international passenger numbers, and an even more dramatic 30.2% growth in international air cargo traffic, compared to the same period last year,” said AAPA Director General Andrew Herdman.
New findings from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (Lcross) confirm the presence of water ice in both the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions as well as areas that receive occasional sunlight. Analysis of data captured by LRO and Lcross, when the latter mission purposely crashed its spent Centaur upper stage into the Moon’s Cabeus crater, show that volatiles including methane, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and monoxide made up more than 20% of the resulting impact plume.
I admired your Green Aerospace issue (AW&ST Sept. 20/27, pp. 56-69), but caution that the environmental footprint of any biomass production process is directly connected with the area of land required, primarily because of emissions problems associated with land use change plus the loss of biodiversity. Terrestrial plants are, at best, 1% efficient at transforming solar energy into biomass (chemical energy). That is what Brazil is getting out of its sugarcane crop, a C4 vegetable that is among the most efficient in hot climates.
Carriers around the Persian Gulf are angrily rejecting European and U.S. airlines’ complaints that they receive unfair export credit financing, and they are venting their frustration over the looming implementation of the European Union’s emissions trading scheme (ETS).
The Pentagon push to cut costs and rely on existing assets is forcing the Army to focus on recapitalizing and upgrading its stalwart rotorcraft fleet, ravaged by years of rough service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army rotorcraft plan includes major overhauls and upgrades of its CH-47 Chinooks, AH-64 Apaches and OH-58 Kiowa Warriors. “It’s been more than just a remanufacturing,” says Raymond Haddad, Boeing’s worldwide Chinook programs director.
France’s Thales is developing a new product policy that it hopes will give it a leg up in the competition to provide cockpits for the next-generation Airbus and Boeing narrowbody airliners, and improve its ability to compete against such rivals as Honeywell and Rockwell Collins.
Boeing and a Lockheed Martin/Kaman team have submitted bids to provide cargo resupply services to the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan using unmanned helicopters. Boeing has proposed new-build A160T Hummingbirds, while Lockheed and Kaman have offered the K-Max.
Britain is increasingly looking to France to help sustain its ability to remain a player on the global stage in the face of big spending cuts emerging from the newly unveiled Strategic Defense and Security Review (SDSR).
Russian technicians are running electrical checks on the Soyuz TMA-20 capsule at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, after replacing its descent module as a precaution against damage it may have sustained in a rail mishap en route to the launch site.
A concept for combining fixed- and rotary-wing aviation almost as old as powered flight is being revisited under the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s DiscRotor program.
The next big air-launched weapons battle is about to heat up with the U.S. Army’s expected solicitation to replace Hellfire, Maverick and TOW missiles in one fell swoop with the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM). JAGM will be worth billions of dollars and consolidate the markets for three workhorse weapons into a single manufacturing house. It will also be integrated onto six platforms—including fixed- and rotary-wing—for the Army and Navy: the F/A-18E/F, AH-1Z and MH-60R/S, Apache Block III, MQ-1C Gray Eagle and OH-58D.
NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft will hurtle past comet 103P/Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, the second comet flyby in its extended mission. The flyby is part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory-directedEpoxi (Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization/Deep Impact Extended Investigation of comets) mission. The mission team is using the Deep Impact spacecraft that fired a copper-tipped projectile into the comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, to image comets and study extrasolar planets. Deep Impact began to approach Hartley 2 on Sept. 5.
Uncertainty will continue to hang over parts of Britain’s military spending plan after a sweeping review left several important program and defense industrial issues unaddressed. But what’s already clear is that the Strategic Defense and Security Review (SDSR), which recommends cutting defense spending by 8% over four years, will leave the country’s military facing a future bereft of several key capabilities.
Much remains to be done on the regulatory and technical side of achieving performance-based navigation, but airlines are discovering that they need to pay attention to the basics, especially local sensitivity to jet noise, when they implement it.
The latest update to Aviation Week’s Top-Performing Airlines (TPA) rankings reveals the remarkable improvement the industry has seen in the six months since the last report. The brightening demand environment is lifting all carriers, but some are faring better than others. The theme from the previous update still holds true—smaller and independent airlines remain a significant presence among the leaders, and their models work just as well in recovery as in recession.
Many of the avionics advances required for future-generation U.S. and European air traffic systems already exist or are in development, but equipment and system manufacturers warn that the battle for timely implementation has barely begun.
Leland D. Melvin has been selected by NASA as the agency’s new associate administrator for education, effective immediately. He succeeds James L. Stofan, who has served in an acting capacity since the spring.
Inflight entertainment equipment manufacturers are consolidating in an effort to replicate in the executive aviation industry the spread of high-speed broadband among the airlines. ViaSat, which will equip JetBlue Airways aircraft with Ka-band onboard Internet service, will acquire Skylink, a bizjet airborne broadband service owned by Arinc. The service will be combined with ViaSat’s Yonder Ku-band bizjet Internet offering.
