Allegiant Air achieved the highest score overall in Aviation Week's annual Top-Performing Airlines study, which ranks 71 airlines from around the world. A wide range of raw data is fed into complex formulas to provide a nuanced assessment of carriers' financial performance. The nine-page TPA feature begins on page 40. The Allegiant MD-80 photo on the cover was taken by Erik Simonsen.
Ed Senen has become president of L-3 Aviation Recorders, Sarasota, Fla. He succeeds Michael Smith, who is retiring. Senen has been vice president and general manager for the Americas for Thales Avionics. Pedro Forte has become sales manager for new business development, covering Latin America and repair management programs. He was an account executive at Pan Am Academy in Miami.
The new Pacific scenario, as outlined in “Pacific Punch,” fails to mention the obvious possible inclusion of the past-testing-stage Landing Pad Dock vessels such as the USS New York (LPD-21) and her sister ships. This would probably be a far more definitive first step in this strategy. New York, N.Y.
If an airline could mix the petabytes of performance data that aircraft generate with Big Data analysis—and control the weather—that could be operational nirvana. Then fuse that with maximizing the customer experience—and save millions or billions of dollars—and you have near-utopia.
Recently, conditions at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) were: visibility 10 mi., 56F, broken clouds at 1,100 ft., and the wind down the runway about 12 kt. In other words, near perfect. And yet, arriving flights were delayed more than 2 hr. because the two main runways at SFO are too close together for parallel IFR (instrument flight rule) approaches. Essentially SFO is a visual-flight-rule-(VFR)-only airport for parallel arrivals. Under easy instrument conditions, arrival capacity is halved.
In “Balance of Risk” (AW&ST May 27, p. 24) Boeing Vice President Mike Gibbons says that the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is now low-observable. Does the U.S. Defense Department have a new definition of low observable that is different than the one that has been used for low-observable aircraft and missile programs for the past three decades?
Steve Walters has become general manager of GE Aviation's mechanical systems business. He was product leader for GE Aviation's nacelle and aerostructures activities and had been president of Nexcelle.
Changes have been made to methodology and categories, and prior year results have been restated to reflect this. Scores represent the composite of six performance categories. The categories and their contributions to total score are: Liquidity (15%), scored from metrics measuring cash and equivalents; implicit borrowing capacity computed from a percentage estimate of unencumbered asset collateral to debt; and unrestricted cash reserves per available seat-mile.
At its Peebles Training Operation in Ohio, GE Aviation has begun certification testing of its 16,500-lb.-thrust Passport engine for the Bombardier Global 7000/8000 series of executive jets. An initial run of more than 3 hr. reached 18,000 lb. of standard-day, sea-level takeoff thrust. Testing is to include 4,000 ground hours and 8,000 cycles and will involve eight engines and one core, leading to flight tests next year and certification planned for 2015.
New aircraft with new engines may be the news after the Paris air show, but low-cost carriers are still bargain-hunting for leases. Boeing Capital Corp. says more than 150 of the 169 717s sold between the 110-seater's service entry in 1999 and the end of its production in 2005 are still operating. In a new round of leases, Boeing placed five aircraft each with Australian regional carrier QantasLink, which already flies 13, and with Spain's Volotea, which started flying in spring 2012 with a network built around the 717. It now flies 10.
Across Eastern Europe, governments are trying to modernize their militaries in the face of the economic downturn afflicting their trading partners to the west. For years, countries like Romania and Bulgaria have remained heavily reliant on the Soviet era-built fighters and aircraft handed to them during the 1970s and '80s. And while most were keen to join NATO, the real focus has been on entering the European Union to benefit from the investment that membership brings. Air arm modernization has been put on the back burner, at least until now.
Philip F. Milazzo (see photos) has been appointed CEO and Rick Rosenjack COO of HM Dunn Aerospace, Euless, Texas. Milazzo was president/CEO of PAS Technologies and had been senior vice president-operations. Rosenjack was vice president/general manager of PCC Aerostructures.
The Army will return to the size it was prior to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, for now, critical capabilities such as helicopters, UAVs and airlift will be retained. And there ends the good-news portion of last week's announcement from the chief of staff, Gen. Raymond Odierno. The bad news? The 80,000-soldier active-force reduction has nothing to do with sequestration, but rather the first half of the 2011 Budget Control Act—and it will take an act of Congress, literally, to keep from hollowing out the military over the next few years.
Jim Albaugh, retired president/CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and corporate executive vice president and previously president/CEO of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, has been named to receive the 2013 Distinguished Achievement Award of the New York-based Wings Club on Oct. 25.
The University of Maryland's Gamera human-powered helicopter team completed its latest flights on June 26 without, in one flight, meeting the duration, altitude and control requirements required to win the American Helicopter Society (AHS) International's $250,000 Sikorsky Prize—the longest-standing award for human-powered flight. Canada's AeroVelo team believes it may have met the requirements, with its Atlas quadrotor flying for 65 sec., reaching an altitude of 3.3 meters (10 ft.) and drifting no more than 10 meters on a June 14 flight.
As a retired Air National Guardsman (ANG) and former active-duty type, there is a lot of truth to the what was said about ANG members not wanting to go to war, as mentioned in the recent commentary “The Ghost of Vietnam” (AW&ST June 10, p. 23). You cannot blame the active-duty senior leadership for feeling the way they do with regard to the ANG. Many of them have friends listed on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.
European space agencies will spend the rest of the summer evaluating whether there is a role for them in NASA's proposed asteroid-capture mission. Jean Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency, tells NASA Administrator Charles Bolden he has set up a multi-agency working group headed by ESA human-spaceflight chief Thomas Reiter “tasked to elaborate a coherent approach with regard to your new initiative.” Representatives of the space agencies of France, Germany, Italy and the U.K.
Thomas W. Kirchmaier has been named vice president of General Dynamics, Falls Church, Va., and president of General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems. He succeeds Lewis F. Von Thaer, who has resigned. Kirchmaier has been the senior vice president and general manager of the Intelligence Solutions Div. of General Dynamics Information Technology.
