Kenneth Glass, chairman and chief executive officer of Cincinnati-based UCA Holdings, has been selected to receive the University of Cincinnati's College of Engineering & Applied Science Lifetime Achievement Award. The award recognizes Glass's work in scholastic, business and philanthropic endeavors.
Mark A. Caylor (see photo) has been named corporate vice president and treasurer of Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman. He was director of banking and capital markets and assistant treasurer.
One of the flagship programs underpinning the ambitious Franco-British effort to establish a 50-year strategic partnership in national security is several steps closer to being clarified.
With airliner orders rebounding, the focus of discussion at this year's Paris air show is expected to firmly center on orders and strategic directions for the big aircraft makers.
Controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will shift NASA's Deep Space Network and other assets to the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover mission, after giving up on the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover May 25. Spirit last communicated with Earth on March 22, 2010, and engineers say there is a low probability the hardy rover will revive after spending a Martian winter without adequate power for its survival heaters.
The main focus of attention on the Indian air force's high aircraft crash rate has been the Medium Multirole Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) modernization program to replace MiG-21s that have been lost. But perhaps more important to curing the safety ills that have plagued the service is the pending selection of a new basic trainer.
The Airline Intel column by Lee Ann Tegtmeier, “Engineering Driven” (AW&ST April 25/May 2, p. 20), correctly characterizes a current industry problem. As a reliability engineer for a major original equipment manufacture (OEM) component supplier I am acutely aware that there is a readily apparent disconnect between the reliability requirements that aircraft manufacturers flow down to OEM component suppliers and the lack of data coming back from the operators, which prevents the suppliers from supporting these requirements.
Managers on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program will spend the summer identifying sources of funds to finish the complex observatory, but they already know it will not fly before 2018—at least three years later than the best previous public guess.
June 6-9—White Eagle Aerospace's Short Courses: “Fundamentals of Electro-Optics and Infrared Sensors.” June 13-14—“Directed Infrared Counter Measures.” Both at Wingate by Wyndham Hotel, Oro Valley, Ariz. Call +1 (520) 219-0526 or see www.whiteeagleaerospace.com June 7—ATI Short Course: Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Applications. Hilton Garden Inn, Dayton, Ohio. See www.aticourses.com
In investigating the Nov. 4, 2010, inflight uncontained failure of a Rolls-Royce Trent 900 on a Qantas Airbus A380, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) isn't just trying to determine the cause of the incident. It also is looking at “missed opportunities” to have detected a manufacturing flaw that set in motion the events that led to failure.
Jamie Rose (see photo) has been appointed chief brand manager for Dallas-based Business Jet Center. She was executive flight solutions manager at sister company Business Jet Access.
Full-service airlines in the Asia-Pacific region will be creating off-shoot carriers, with completely different brands than the parent, in an effort to capture growing segments of the market. Thai Airways International will be launching a full-service short-haul carrier, tentatively named Thai Wings, that will be a business unit of the group. And it is working with Singapore's Tiger Airways to introduce a low-cost short-haul carrier, Thai Tiger.
KAI will deliver 16 T-50 Golden Eagle supersonic trainers to Indonesia in 2013 under a $400 million contract. The deal further deepens defense technology ties between the two countries. It is a breakthrough for KAI, whose previous attempts at exporting the T-50 have failed. In this case, it prevailed over the Russian Yakovlev Yak-130 and the Czech Aero L-159B. KAI will fully build the 16 aircraft and fly them in South Korea before dissembling them for dispatch to Indonesia, where they will be reassembled and undergo final acceptance trials, says an industry official.
A year after European air traffic management was thrown into chaos by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, a new volcanic ash cloud is demonstrating that regulators still have not determined how to respond most effectively.
Air Marshal N.A.K. Browne, India's vice chief of air staff, will be the next chief of air staff following the retirement of P.V. Naik on July 31. Browne is a fighter combat leader, who has also been an instructor at the Indian air force's Tactics and Air Combat Development Establishment.
The latest statistics from Airports Council International show that Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, headed by Aviation General Manager Louis Miller, has retained its crown as the world's busiest airport. Miller, former executive director of Tampa International Airport, has only been on the job six months, but he has worked hard to repair the relationship with its largest tenant, Delta Air Lines, and keep a $1.4 billion international terminal under construction on time and on budget. Miller spoke with AW&ST Online Managing Editor Benet J.
Boeing is battling perceptions that Airbus won some key points in the latest round of World Trade Organization disputes. The WTO's appeals ruling did reverse some aspects of a preliminary ruling in the U.S. case against European subsidies of Airbus and its parent company, EADS. But influential publications, including this one, missed some important distinctions (AW&ST May 23, p. 41). One failure was confusion over the WTO legal terms “prohibited” and “actionable,” says Robert T. Novick, Boeing's outside counsel.
Efforts continue to deploy the troublesome C-band antenna reflector on Intelsat's New Dawn satellite, although the spacecraft's Ku-band antenna has been deployed and is undergoing on-orbit testing, according to Intelsat. Ku-band antenna deployment had been on hold while Intelsat and spacecraft manufacturer Orbital Sciences Corp. diagnosed the C-band problem (AW&ST May 16, p. 14). If C-band capability can't be established, “we have over 20 other satellites covering Africa, so we have other resources upon which to draw,” the company says.
After battling instrument delays, NASA's National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System's (Npoess) Preparatory Project satellite has cleared its last major pre-launch hurdle—a two-month-long thermal vacuum test—and is on track for an Oct. 25 liftoff from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. Ball Aerospace, which based the 13.5-ft.-tall, 4,700-lb. satellite on its BCP 2000 bus, expects to ship it to Vandenberg in mid-August.
Development of the improved Mil Mi-34C1 light helicopter received a significant boost as Russia's largest rotorcraft operator, UTair, placed a launch order for 10 units during the HeliRussia 2011 exhibition held in Moscow last week. Deliveries should commence in 2012; the contract value was not disclosed. According to UTair CEO Andrey Martirosov, the company will use the Mi-34 for pilot training in a corporate flight school to be opened soon. The platform also will serve for monitoring and patrol missions for customers from the energy sector.
Masten Space Systems will fly a series of suborbital demonstration flights from Cape Canaveral, Fla., under a $400,000 contract from Space Florida, a state-backed economic development agency focused on space and related technologies. The contract will include multiple flights of Masten's vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing reusable suborbital vehicle, called Xaero, which also is one of two vehicles picked by NASA for suborbital research missions (see p. 17).
NASA will fund research payloads on test flights of a pair of commercial suborbital reusable launch vehicles later this year as its microgravity flight opportunity program moves beyond parabolic flights in aircraft. Vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles under development by Masten Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., and Armadillo Aerospace of Heath, Texas, will carry four payloads.
John Blatchley has joined Avantair, Clearwater, Fla., as Northeast U.S. sales director. He was responsible for Piper aircraft sales at Columbia Aircraft Sales.
