Bernard Bot has been named chief financial officer and Federico Balzola chief people and change officer for Aer Lingus Group. Bot was group CFO for Netherlands-based TNT Express. Balzola was human resources director for Southern Europe for Reckitt Benckiser and a senior HR officer for the Gillette Co.
Dave Davis has been appointed CEO of Los Angeles-based Global Eagle Entertainment. He was chief financial officer/chief operating officer and succeeds John LaValle, who will continue as a consultant.
Shai Lustgarten has become CEO of Micronet Ltd., Montvale, New Jersey. He was executive vice president-business development for Micronet Enertec Technologies.
In “Extensible Exploration” ( AW&ST June 23, p. 44), NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems Director Jason Crusan is quoted as saying low Earth Orbit (LEO) is not an efficient place to assemble deep-space vehicles. While I understand his premise, I don’t see the logic. Any deep-space probe is no more than the sum of its parts. The velocity change required to lift a vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well is the same whether it is an assembled vehicle or a flock of components.
Shaunta Hyde has been named managing director of community relations, Veresh Sita vice president/chief information officer, and Lavanya Sareen managing director of investor relations, all for Alaska Airlines. Hyde was director of global aviation policy for Boeing. Sita was CIO for Seattle-based Colliers International, and Sareen was director of corporate strategy and business development for United Airlines.
The unmanned aerial system (UAS) air traffic management work sponsored by NASA discussed in “Managing Unmanned” ( AW&ST June 16, p. 26) is essential to creating safe access to low-altitude airspace by UAS, but if it is conceived in the paradigm of conventional air traffic control, it will snuff out those operations before they even begin.
Giorgio Moreni (see photo) has been appointed chief financial officer of Toulouse-based ATR. He succeeds Eric Baravian, whose four-year term expired in June 2014. Moreni was chief of staff to the CFO and had been vice president-strategic collaborations for Alenia North America.
Abracadabra, about a flight-control system for carrier landings that goes by the tortured acronym “Magic Carpet,” describes the system as new technology “developed by the U.S. Navy and British researchers.” The essence is that “the flaps are not fully deflected, and the flight-control system uses them to add or reduce lift.” Thus, the aircraft can maintain a constant pitch angle on the glidepath.
“Arbracadabra” was fascinating to read ( AW&ST June 30, p. 62). The U.S. Navy has a goal to reduce the cost of shore training for carrier qualifications and the at-sea time spent keeping pilots “current”—all of which involve overhead costs not productive to combat readiness. The flight-control and guidance technology Bill Sweetman writes about supports the goal. He may have taken literary license with his reversal of how Navy pilots fly the ball: Power controls glideslope; nose attitude controls airspeed.
I was shocked to read in “Bolivar Blues” ( AW&ST June 23, p. 36) that the Venezuelan government owes American Airlines $750 million related to earned revenue in that country. If I owned stock or was a high-ranking executive of American, I would urge the board of directors to cancel flights to Venezuela for at least 30 days and try to enlist the rest of the airlines who are owed money to participate in the boycott.
“Change Agent” was informative ( AW&ST June 30, p. 41), but the NTSB’s conclusion that pilot error was the primary cause of the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214—and that Boeing and the airline also bore some responsibility due to the autothrottle design and to inadequate training, respectively—does not fully explain away the incident.
The focus of debate over rechartering the U.S. Export-Import Bank has turned to the Senate this month. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) are pushing a proposal to extend the bank another five years, but only if existing restrictions on supporting coal-fired power plants overseas are lifted.
Like a bad wedding gift that cannot be offloaded, the FAA indicated last week it is investigating whether a photographer’s UAV-borne video of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney’s recent nuptials violated current restrictions on unmanned aircraft in domestic airspace. Maloney, an upstate New York Democrat, is a minority member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure aviation subcommittee that oversees the FAA.
Last week saw a slew of defense-related developments on Capitol Hill. While none of them alone was definitive for military programs, they continue to weave a narrative of tougher decisions to come over the defense budget starting next year and beyond. That is because Senate appropriators put their imprimatur on fiscal 2015 defense spending plans that—like other key legislative branch defense committees—overwhelmingly rebuffs the Pentagon’s first hard proposals to meet congressionally mandated sequestration-level spending caps.
Airbus marked its best Farnborough air show ever in terms of new business, trumping Boeing by announcing 496 orders and commitments valued at $75 billion compared to the U.S. airframer’s tally of 106 orders and 95 commitments. Despite picking up 50 additional firm orders for the 777X, Boeing’s total of 201 is valued at just over half that for Airbus. Its bonanza included orders for more than 300 A320/A321neos and was boosted by the launch of the A330neo on the back of 121 orders and commitments.
The delayed and controversial request for proposals (RFP) in the U.S. Navy’s Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance and Strike (Uclass) air vehicle competition should be out “within a couple of weeks,” Rear Adm. Mat Winter, the service’s program executive officer for unmanned aircraft and strike systems, said at the Farnborough air show on July 14. The Navy is in the final stages of dialogue with senior Pentagon leadership regarding the specifications in the RFP.
NASA will spend $25 million on instruments development for an unmanned mission to Europa, the moon of Jupiter where scientists believe a liquid-water ocean lies beneath the frozen surface. The agency plans to select about 20 proposals in April 2015, and provide about $25 million to those selected for Phase A concept studies, to include advancing instrument formulation and development.
Engineers have installed a surplus space shuttle main engine on Test Stand A-1 at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, preparing for ground tests of the old reusable engine and its new controller as the throw-away main-stage propulsion system for the planned heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS). “This test series is a major milestone because it will be our first opportunity to operate the engine with a new controller and to test propellant inlet conditions for SLS that are different than the space shuttle,” says Steve Wofford, SLS liquid engines element manager.
In-space testing of a U.S.-developed “green” hydrazine replacement as a propellant for spacecraft thrusters is a step closer, with the completion of hot-fire testing at Aerojet Rocketdyne’s Redmond, Washington, facility. Designated AF-M315E, the propellant is destined for the Green Propellant Infusion Mission, which will carry four 1N thrusters like the one tested in Redmond, and one 22N thruster. A flightlike version of that unit is scheduled for testing later this year.
Airbus Defense and Space plans to design and build a telecom satellite for Luxembourg-based fleet operator SES that will use electric propulsion for initial orbit-raising and all on-orbit maneuvers when it launches in 2017. Based on the Eurostar E3000 spacecraft bus in an all-new Electric Orbit Raising configuration, SES-12 is to be the most powerful satellite ever built for SES. Airbus says using all-electric propulsion will mean the satellite will take 3-6 months to reach its final operating position at 95 deg.
Coming on the heels of previous financial struggles and the disappearance of MH370 in March, the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine late last week was adding to doubts about the airline’s grim prospects of survival (see page 42). For the latest on the crash, go to AviationWeek.com/MH17.
The winners of the 2014 Top-Performing Companies (TPC) rankings were honored at the Farnborough air show last week during a ceremony at Aviation Week’s chalet. The annual study, whose results were published in May, evaluated and ranked the operational performance of 59 publicly traded aerospace and defense companies worldwide.
New space companies will take prominent roles in the first phase of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (Darpa) XS-1 experimental spaceplane program. Masten Space Systems, teamed with XCOR Aerospace, has won one of three contracts to design a demonstrator for a reusable launch-vehicle first stage. Blue Origin is part of the Boeing team while Northrop Grumman is working with Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites.
