Boeing has submitted its final KC-767 advanced tanker proposal for the KC-135 replacement—citing the use of half the ramp space, a requirement for fewer bases, less maintenance cost and use of 24% less fuel than the larger Northrop Grumman/EADS KC-30 competing design. Northrop Grumman says its design is newer and carries more fuel and cargo.
The formal signing by British Airways of a previously announced order for eight Boeing 787-8s and 16 787-9s raised the company’s total order book for the new 250-300-seat jet family to 790. The BA deal is valued at $4.4 billion at list prices. The airline holds 18 options at pre-arranged prices and 10 purchase rights, which reserve production placement. As 2007 ended, Boeing also recorded 31 737 orders from the Dublin-based leasing company Awas, plus 19 purchase rights.
For at least the second time, NASA has scrubbed a shuttle launch because of faulty fuel sensors (AW&ST Dec. 17, 2007, p. 24). The more I hear, the more I’m glad the folks who make them don’t make pacemakers.
When China shot down its own aging FY-1C weather satellite last January, demonstrating its anti-satellite capabilities, alarms sounded around the globe (AW&ST Jan. 22, 2007, p. 24). Political and Pentagon leaders, who largely had ignored warnings voiced by national security space professionals for many years, finally were paying attention.
Shuttle America will start receiving its Embraer 175 regional jets in July, now that parent Republic Airways has confirmed 11 options it held with the aircraft maker. The jets, which will operate under the Delta Connection name, add to the 44 Embraer 170s Shuttle America already operates (16 of those in the Delta livery). The 175s will be configured with 12 first-class seats and 64 economy seats.
Sukhoi has started manufacturing the prototype of its fifth-generation fighter, known as T-50 or PAK FA, at its manufacturing facility in Komsomolsk. First flight is planned for 2009. Prototypes will be fitted with Saturn Izdelie 117 engines, a major upgrade of the existing Al-31FP for Su-27/Su-30Fs, says Yury Lastochkin, general director of Saturn. The Russian defense ministry plans to select the engine for production standard T-50s in 2009. Saturn and Moscow-based Salyut engine designer and manufacturer are the competitors.
J. Christopher Reyes has been named to the board of directors of General Dynamics , Falls Church, Va. He is co-chairman and a founder of Reyes Holdings, Rosemont, Ill.
Saab is evaluating the sell-off or expansion of its space business. The move is part of a reassessment of non-core activities in which the Swedish aerospace and defense contractor may be too small to remain competitive, and to determine whether it is worth devoting scarce capital and research resources to maintain these activities. The company’s Bofors Dynamics weapons unit—like Saab Space, a part of the Systems and Products Div.—is also thought to be among the activities under review (AW&ST Sept. 10, 2007, p. 52).
Thales Alenia Space engineers are struggling to fix a helium leak that is jeopardizing the first indigenous pan-African fixed satellite service telecommunications mission.
Dara A. Panahy (see photo) has been promoted to partner from senior associate in law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy ’s Washington office, specializing in aerospace, communications and banking companies involved in space and communications ventures.
Officials at the U.S. State Dept. unit that reviews arms export licensing requests acknowledge that more work is falling on fewer experienced staff members. According to a congressional report, in summer 2006, about half of the licensing officers at State’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls had less than a year’s experience. Workforce challenges as well as shortcomings in electronic processing are taxing the system, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
An international task force is taking the first steps toward a joint Mars sample return mission in the coming decade, following a meeting in Washington late last year to lay the groundwork for cooperation. The task force, dubbed the International Mars Architecture for Return of Samples (IMARS) group, is a committee of the International Mars Exploration Working Group, which was formed in 1993.
German, Italian and Spanish offers are front-runners in NATO’s impending selection of a base for the all-Global-Hawk unmanned aircraft fleet that is proposed under the scaled-down Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) program. Poland and Romania may also have a chance, officers within NATO headquarters say.
U.S. astronauts on the International Space Station probably will be asked to fix two troublesome power-generating mechanisms without help from visiting shuttle crews, to simplify the complex spacewalks that will be required. Expedition 16 Commander Peggy Whitson and Flight Engineer Dan Tani could get the call to replace the failed unit that drove a beta gimbal at the base of one of the station’s starboard solar arrays before the space shuttle Atlantis arrives with Europe’s Columbus laboratory module.
Lee Demitry has become executive vice president of Bethesda, Md.-based Iridium Satellite ’s Iridium NEXT. He was vice president-engineering for GeoEye.
The European Commission has put airlines from Australia, to Asia, Latin America and Europe, on notice that they are the subject of an investigation about alleged anti-competitive practices in the freight business. The EC action parallels a U.S. Justice Dept. review, in which several airlines admitted wrongdoing. Airlines have two months to respond to the Dec. 21 “Statement of Objections” issued by the EC, although extensions can be requested.
James Ott (Tinker AFB, Okla.), Amy Butler (Washington)
The KC-135, its Air Force mission expanding after nearly five decades of service, is entering a new domain where engineers and mechanics seek out, in maintenance parlance, “unknown unknowns.”
AirTran Airways will build a hurricane-hardened Systems Operations Control center valued with equipment at $7 million at Orlando (Fla.) International Airport. Construction could begin in three months on a site adjacent to the current SOC, which sustained damage from Hurricane Charley in 2004. The state has provided $3 million in cash and other incentives related to job creation to keep AirTran in Florida.
A four-year, $11.3-million survey of 30,000 users of the National Airspace System might reasonably be expected to fulfill its goal of clearly identifying safety trends, right? Guess again. In October, NASA withheld the release of the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service (Naoms) survey for a data scrub of times, dates and places that would ensure the anonymity guaranteed to participants.
Japan’s Selene lunar probe will spend the next 10 months carrying out its baseline “official exploration” of the Moon from orbit, following completion of its checkout period on Dec. 21, 2007. The orbiter entered a 100-km. circular orbit Oct. 18, and controllers needed another two months to activate and verify its instrument suite. Although all of the instruments are working, minor problems have been found on two of them—the X-ray Spectrometer (XRS) and the Charged Particle Spectrometer (CPS).
Sukhoi hopes to fly its Superjet 100 regional jet this quarter. Despite indications several months ago that the program was falling further behind schedule, the aircraft maker was holding to a planned 2007 first-flight target, until late in December. Program officials then acknowledged that delays with starting flight trials of the PowerJet SaM146 engine made the schedule impossible.
Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Edmund (Kip) Hawley heads the agency that many say is the most public face of the department: the Transportation Security Administration. Since taking over TSA in July 2005, Hawley sent the long-delayed computerized passenger screening system known as Secure Flight back to the drawing board for technology tweaks and better privacy safeguards. Practically overnight, he oversaw a radical shift in airport screening procedures following the 2006 plot to blow up transatlantic airliners with liquid explosives.
At 15 sec. past 10 a.m. on Dec. 31, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) convened a pro forma session of the U.S. Senate. In an otherwise empty chamber, the legislative clerk read into the record a letter appointing Reed the acting president pro tem. Reed then declared the Senate adjourned until Jan. 3, when another pro forma session would be called. The Dec. 31 ritual lasted 25 sec.
