Amidst the gloom about 787 production, there’s some good news for Vought Aircraft Industries, Alenia Aeronautica and their partnership in Charleston, S.C. The Design-Build Institute of America has selected the Vought/Global Aeronautica manufacturing complex for its 2007 Design-Build Award of Excellence. Vought builds 787 aft fuselage sections in a 342,000-sq.-ft. plant, and Global Aeronautica integrates them and other fuselage assemblies next door in a 334,000-sq.-ft. facility.
The economic equivalent of a tsunami, fueled by the politics and growing public concerns surrounding global warming, is gaining force and will slam into civil aviation within the next few years, certainly no later than 2011. That’s when the European Union (EU) will require airlines to get on board with its emissions trading scheme (ETS) for intra-EU flights; the requirement for all flights operating in EU air space is expected to kick in a year later.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada, with assistance from its U.S. counterpart, continues to investigate what caused an Air Canada Airbus A319 to encounter in-flight control problems. Flight 190 was at 35,000 ft. en route to Toronto from Victoria, British Columbia, on Jan. 10 when the upset occurred, injuring 10 of the 88 people on board. Theories on the cause include encountering an atmospheric bore, which is comparable to a tidal wave, or the wake vortices of another airliner.
Carl A. Marchetto has been appointed president of Minneapolis-based ATK Space Systems , which will be formed from ATK Mission Systems and the Information Systems and Geospatial businesses of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates, which have been acquired. Marchetto has been executive vice president of the Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Space Systems Group.
The U.K.’s Joint Test and Evaluation Group and Qinetiq, which together comprise Aircraft Test and Evaluation Center (ATEC), have completed a 12-month £5.25-million ($10.3-million) project to boost the capability of Royal Navy Sea King HC MK 4 helicopters. Carson composite blades have replaced the main rotor blades and an AgustaWestland five-blade tail rotor system replaced the original tail rotor system. Performance evaluation and flight testing confirmed predictions that the system generates up to a 2,000-lb.
USN Capt. (ret.) Fred Cleveland has been named vice president-base maintenance for American Airlines , effective Jan. 28. He was commanding officer of Naval Aviation Enterprise Fleet Readiness Center in San Diego. Kurt Stache has been named vice president/general sales manager. He was president of the airline’s AAdvantage marketing programs.
The U.S. Army has received five BAE Systems-built, target-detection systems for use on Shadow unmanned aircraft. The Aurora Generation-5 hyperspectral remote sensing system weighs as little as 35 lb. and allows wide-area surveillance with high-resolution electro-optics and an airborne processing system to automatically detect and identify threats.
Two F/A-18s, a single-seat E model from VFA-105 and a two-seat F from VFA-11, collided over the Persian Gulf and crashed Jan. 7 while returning from a close-air-support mission in Iraq. The three crewmen, from NAS Oceana and currently stationed on the USS Truman, were recovered safely by helicopters. The crash came a day after a 20-min. confrontation between five small Iranian attack boats and three U.S. warships.
Controllers at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) have lost touch with the Arirang 1 (Kompsat-1) Earth-observation spacecraft, apparently as a result of failure of the satellite to maintain a lock on the Sun for power generation. “Our efforts to restore communication with the Arirang 1 satellite have been unsuccessful,” says a KARI official, according to press reports from Seoul. Launched in 1999, the spacecraft carries a 6.6-meter (22-ft.) resolution camera. Arirang 2 (Kompsat-2), launched in 2006, continues to function with its 1-meter-resolution camera.
Korea Aerospace Industries has delivered to Boeing the first forward fuselage of the F-15SG for the Singapore air force. Delivery of the first F-15SG wing set was scheduled for Jan 10.
Robert Wall (Donauwoerth, Germany), Michael A. Taverna (Donauwoerth, Germany)
EADS is renewing its effort to become less-Airbus dependent, with a goal of deriving 50% of revenue from non-Airbus activities and boosting the services business to 25% from 10% by 2020. The financial targets are part of a new company strategy, Vision 2020, put forward by EADS CEO Louis Gallois. It also calls for reaching a mid-term target of 10% earnings margin before 2015 and a longer-term goal of sourcing 40% of supplies from outside Europe. “The core of Vision 2020 is a better-balanced EADS,” Gallois asserts.
Michael Mecham (San Francisco), Robert Wall (Paris)
Aircraft order intake in 2008 is expected to taper off after Boeing, Airbus and engine makers enjoyed record-setting years. But just how much is an open question. A third year of record orders swelled Boeing’s intake past the 1,400 mark in 2007, including engine makers General Electric Aviation, CFM International and International Aero Engines in the bonanza. Airbus was a similar powerhouse and was neck-and-neck with Boeing, although the European aircraft maker’s final figures won’t appear until this week.
Northrop Grumman says it will lead a team to again compete for the U.S. Army’s Aerial Common Sensor reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence-gathering aircraft. The team includes AAI Corp. (which builds UAVs), General Dynamics C4 Systems and L-3 Communications.
Jan. 22—Midlands Aerospace Alliance’s Reach Information Event: “Complying With Chemical Regulations.” Rolls-Royce Learning & Career Development Center, Derby, England. Also, Jan. 30—“Diversifying Into Defense Markets.” Oaktree Conference Center, Coventry, England. Call +44 (845) 225-0503, fax +44 (845) 225-0504 or see www.midlandaerospace.org.uk Jan. 23—Precision Strike Winter Roundtable and William J. Perry Award Luncheon. Crystal City Marriott, Arlington, Va. Call +1 (703) 247-2590, fax +1 (703) 522-1885 or see www.precisionstrike.org
The State of Florida has given AirTran Airways $3 million in cash, along with additional incentives, to keep the airline’s headquarters in Orlando (AW&ST Jan. 7, p. 16). The carrier met with state and local government officials, says AirTran official David Hirschman, “And they asked us not to shop the deal around, and to wait to hear their proposal before starting a bidding war and making a final decision.” Gov.
William E. Harrison, 3rd, chief of the fuel branch at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s propulsion directorate at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, has spearheaded the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Assured Fuels Initiative to develop domestic fuel sources for U.S. air and ground forces. In 2007, the Air Force certificated a synthetic fuel—produced from coal and natural gas through the Fischer-Tropsch process—that is being used in a 50-50 blend with a petroleum-based fuel in B-52 aircraft.
Britain is one of several nations heading toward the NATO summit in Bucharest with ambitious agendas for reform at the strategic and organizational levels. London wants to see the Apr. 2-4 summit in the Romanian capital used to begin to revisit the fundamental tenets of NATO’s role in the post-Cold War environment, the so-called Strategic Concept, agreed at the Washington Summit in 1999. It is also pushing an agenda for the internal reorganization of some NATO structures to reduce bureaucracy and improve and expedite decision-making.
The air traffic delay situation at New York John F. Kennedy International Airport is the result of misguided business planning by one domestic airline: JetBlue Airways.
Southwest will be making Denver a more important player in its route network on May 10, when it adds many flights to the city as part of a larger route reorganization. At Denver, the airline will go to 79 daily flights from 56, including new services to St. Louis, Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif. Meanwhile, embattled Frontier Airlines, based in Denver, has revised upward its expected losses for 2007 because of weak demand and winter storms.
A few minutes after reading the letter “Lights Out, Brains in Neutral” (AW&ST Oct. 1, 2007, p. 10), I went online and discovered the following National Transportation Safety Board e-mail:
China plans the launch of 14 unmanned space missions in 2008, in addition to its third manned Shenzhou flight. The 15 total launches are to orbit 17 spacecraft. The new unmanned spacecraft will reap dividends from years of Chinese remote-sensing and military satellite development. The 2008 manifest also marks a revitalization of China’s commercial launch program. Three large communications spacecraft are planned for launch: ChinaSat 9, APStar 6B and a Venezuelan spacecraft.
UPS will soon begin using advanced automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) procedures at Louisville, Ky., now that the FAA has approved its application for the first satellite-guided merging and spacing operations the U.S.
Scientists will get their first close look at the planet Mercury in almost 33 years on Jan. 14 as NASA’s Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (Messenger) probe flies within 124 mi. of previously uncharted terrain.
Sea Launch will try again Jan. 15 to orbit the Thuraya-3 telecom spacecraft, after strong currents at the equatorial launch site in the Pacific forced the two-vessel launch fleet to return to port in Long Beach, Calif., in November 2007. The Odyssey launch platform and the Sea Launch Commander mother ship are en route to the launch site at 154 deg. W. Long. The Boeing-built satellite’s liftoff is set for a 44-min. window that opens 6:46 a.m. EST.
Lisa Porter, NASA associate administrator for aeronautical research, is leaving her post to lead the newly established Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Iarpa). Fashioned after the model of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which has been in the forefront of many of the major military innovations in the U.S. in the past 50 years, Iarpa’s goal is to pursue groundbreaking advances to improve intelligence collection and analysis.
