Jacques Desclaux (see photo) has become CEO of the Roxel subsidiary of France-based Safran. He was chairman/CEO of Snecma and NPO Saturn joint venture PowerJet and had been executive vice president of Europrop International.
USAF Brig. Gen. Mark C. Nowland has been selected for promotion to major general and appointment as chief of staff of Headquarters U.S. Southern Command in Miami. He has been the command's director of strategy, policy and plans. Brig. Gen. Christopher J. Bence has been named director, U.S. Air Forces in Europe-U.K./U.S. Air Forces in Europe at RAF Mildenhall. He has been deputy director for operations at the National Joint Operations and Intelligence Center, Operations Team Two, at the Pentagon. Bence will be succeeded by Col. Ronald D.
Airbus has put the A350 prototype into scheduled lay-up in readiness for a second flight-test phase starting in August following the opening up of the initial flight envelope over 92 flight hours. The manufacturer says MSN1 has performed well during the initial sorties conducted since its maiden flight on June 14, just prior to the Paris air show. Overall, the A350 flight-test campaign will total around 2,500 flight hours with five development aircraft. The second test aircraft, MSN2, is undergoing final assembly in Toulouse following fuselage section joining in mid-June.
Paul Meyer has been appointed senior vice president-advanced programs and business development for Aerojet Rocketdyne, Sacramento, Calif. He was sector vice president/general manager of the Aerospace Systems Advanced Programs and Technology Div. of the Northrop Grumman Corp. and was an executive at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works.
Vincent Caro (see photo) has been appointed as executive vice president-programs for the Landing Gear and Systems Integration Div. of Safran subsidiary Messier-Bugatti-Dowty, Velizy, France. He succeeds Helene Moreau-Leroy, who has been reassigned. Caro has been vice president-purchasing of another Safran subsidiary, Snecma.
More encouraging words for the U.S. Army's Armed Aerial Scout program, aimed at replacing the aging OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, were heard in Washington June 18. Earlier this year, Army leaders said company-funded demonstrations had not shown any candidate capable of meeting its needs. Last week, Lt. Gen. William Phillips, military deputy and director of the Army Acquisition Corps for the assistant Army secretary for acquisition, sounded a different tone at an Association of the U.S. Army meeting.
Honeywell is also studying potential new engine developments to compete with Pratt & Whitney Canada's ubiquitous PT6 and its planned successor. “In the downturn we saw that the strongest small-airplane market was turboprops and we were fascinated by that,” says Honeywell's director of engineering propulsion systems, Jim Kroeger. “There is keen interest in the marketplace in turboprops and particularly in the utility market. We think it is driven by the fundamental low operating costs of the airplane,” he adds.
In the North Sea, the Eurocopter EC225 has been a workhorse, plying routes between bases in Norway and Scotland oil and gas platforms. But for 10 months, the helicopter has been missing from such operations, grounded as engineers searched for the root cause of the failure in its bevel gear vertical shaft. For the major operators in the North Sea region such as Bond Offshore Helicopters, Bristow Helicopters and CHC Scotia, the loss of the type from their fleets had a dramatic impact on their capacity to fly for customers.
ATR estimates airlines will buy 1,340 turboprop airliners with 90 seats during the next 20 years, which sounds like a good market. But it could be a cramped one. If all five of the aircraft proposed for the segment go ahead, each will average a production run of fewer than 300.
“Warming Trend” (AW&ST July 8, p. 26) reports that the U.S. Navy is starting work on a Block III AIM-9X missile to gain increased range. Wouldn't it be easier (and cheaper) to start with the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile and just replace its radar seeker with the AIM-9X IR seeker? Asheville N.C.
While Aviation Week's annual Top-Performing Airlines (TPA) study is the most extensive comparison of global airline strength, there is still one type of carrier that it does not include. The study only covers publicly traded companies, which means the TPA rankings exclude the large Middle Eastern carriers such as Emirates. So Aviation Week has run a separate analysis of Emirates to estimate where it might fit in the rankings if it did meet our criteria.
Earl L. Wiener, known to many as a founding father of aviation human factors, died on June 14 at his home in Menlo Park, Calif., after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. He was 80.
NASA is undertaking an aggressive investigation of a spacesuit leak that allowed an estimated 1-1.5 liters of water to seep into the helmet and spacesuit of European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano during a July 16 spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The planned 6-7-hr. excursion was cut short after roughly 90 min.
Swelling aircraft orderbooks are prompting questions about whether deliveries could inflate airline capacity too much in coming years. But Boeing maintains that a supply overload is unlikely to occur, and it has identified a set of metrics it says proves that market conditions justify the size of the current backlog.
Five years after General Electric launched its initiative to penetrate the small turboprop market with the acquisition of Czech engine maker Walter and the development of the H80, the company is midway through its first full year of production and poised to bolster its line-up with studies of additional variants.
Actually, the historical landing of an unmanned aircraft on a carrier deck is no big deal (AW&ST July 15, p. 25). U.S. Navy aircraft land routinely on carriers with no control input from the pilot on board. Automated landings have been around for quite a few years. And other military and commercial aircraft have had automated landing systems for decades in which the pilot on board merely monitors things “just in case.”
Carbon in its many forms is transforming manufacturing, from electronics to structures. Aerospace uses carbon in fiber form, but new nano-structured materials are emerging that promise improved properties and expanded applications.
Greg Raiff, CEO Private Jet Services (Seabrook, N.H. )
There is not a great deal of difference between the recent Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash in San Francisco (AW&ST July 15, p. 22) and the 2009 Air France AF447 crash in the Atlantic other than the death toll. Both may have been caused by a lack of basic airmanship skills. In the case of the AF447 crash, when you pull the nose up and the airplane keeps going down, it is time to put the nose down and firewall it, no matter what the computer says.
Investigators looking into the July 12 Boeing 787 fire are now focusing on what caused an emergency locator transmitter (ELT) device to combust, and devising modifications to prevent any recurrence.
The U.S. will help Panama and the U.N. examine a load of missiles, MiG fighters and other weapons systems found aboard a ship in the Panama Canal sailing from Cuba to North Korea, U.S. State Department officials said last week. Deputy spokesperson Marie Harf would not specify whether the U.S. will take possession of the ship for the U.N. as a Council committee looks into possible sanction violations. A U.N.
Eight years ago, Southeast Asian-based airlines had just 29 turboprop airliners in the 70-seat class. Since then the fleet has more than tripled to 106, with ongoing orders making the region one of the most important for the turboprop sector. More remarkably, this growth has happened, and is continuing, amid powerful expansion by budget airlines, the classic enemy of the turboprop operator.
