Dana Skaddan joins Grimes Aerospace Co. as senior vice president -marketing and strategic business development. Most recently,Skaddan served as president, Clarostat Sensors and Controls Unit, BTR Corp.
AIRBUS INDUSTRIE bristles at FAA Administrator David Hinson's comment last week that the Boeing 777 is the first aircraft to receive simultaneous certification from FAA and Europe's Joint Airworthiness Authorities. Actually, the first one was its own A330, in October 1993, the European manufacturing consortium observes.
Stephen L. Key, previously executive vice president and chief financial officer of ConAgra, Inc., has been named executive vice president and chief financial officer at Textron Inc. Richard F. Smith, who most recently served as director, government affairs, has been promoted to staff vice president, government affairs, of Textron Inc.
Dennis G. Ganzak has been appointed to the newly created position of chief financial officer of Westinghouse Electric Corp.'s Electronic Systems business unit.
Lt. Gen. Richard Hawley, the AF principal deputy for acquisition, denies rumors that the F-22 won't be a dogfighter. "This airplane is going to be the dominant dogfight airplane when it is fielded in 2005," he says in an interview.
The U.S. is negotiating to put advanced sensors on European satellites as part of its plans to merge military and civil meteorological satellite efforts. The sensors would be placed on two mid-morning polar-orbiting environmental satellites that Europe is planning to launch in 2001 and 2006 and would complement the future National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental System (NPOESS), a three-satellite follow-on to the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) that will blend military and civil efforts.
When Dunbar went into anaphylactic shock at JSC last fall, she was training as backup to astronaut/physician Norman Thagard for the first U.S. visit to Russia's Mir space station. As it turned out, Thagard was able to make the trip and is aboard Mir, while Dunbar was assigned to the first Shuttle/Mir docking mission early this summer. That mission aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis will deliver two cosmonauts to Mir and retrieve Thagard and his two Russian colleagues.
Parker S. Stafford, previously vice president of technical operations at Lockheed Martin Astro Space, East Windsor, N.J., was appointed vice president and chief engineer. Stafford also will serve as Mars Surveyor program manager.
The Pentagon may temporarily fall short of being able to fill a requirement to airlift 49-52 million ton miles a day in the early days of a war once the C-141 is retired, Gen. Robert Rutherford, U.S. Transportation Command chief, said Friday.
An Ariane 40 rocket operating without strap-on boosters successfully launched the European Space Agency's second remote sensing satellite into a sunsynchronous Thursday evening from Kourou, French Guiana, the Arianespace launch consortium reported. The ERS-2 satellite is designed to provide space-based observation of ocean environments, ice caps, coastal and land areas. The 5,535-pound spacecraft was built in Germany by Daimler-Benz Aerospace and is based on the multimission platform developed for France's Spot observation program.
BRITAIN's Defense Research Agency, Farnborough, U.K., has ordered the three-processor 200 megahertz version of Concurrent Computer Corp.'s Maxion multiprocessor, Concurrent said. It will be used to evaluate missile system tests and aide in the R&D of advanced systems. The agency will link the processor to a missile simulator to provide the real-time responses that are required in missile simulations.
Richard Hyman, formerly vice president for Noise Cancellation Technologies, Inc. in Stamford, Conn., has been named to the newly created position vice president, corporate accounts.
The Navy is eager to replace Joint Advanced Strike Technology Director Air Force Brig. Gen. George Muellner, who is expected to become the Air Force principal acquisition deputy by the end of the summer, with another Air Force official, industry sources say.
The U.S. Navy is launching a study to determine the real cost per flight hour of the aircraft it operates, according to a Naval Air Systems Command official. Lou Fusco, NavAir's director of Business Operations Logistics Competency, said the Air Force's figure of about $12,000 per flight hour is probably more accurate than the figure of about $4,300 used by the Navy today. The study will try to assess the "true cost," Fusco said Thursday at a conference in Arlington, Va.
NASA and the Chicago Fire Dept. have signed an agreement that will transfer technology developed for space exploration to firefighting applications. Potential emergency devices that could result include a personnel locator to keep track of firefighters during operations; sensors to read the vibration "signature" of damaged structures to warn if collapse is imminent, and possibly a portable breathing device based on liquid oxygen.
Hawley also denies that the AF is worried about the F- 22's energy maneuverability, saying he expects this performance characteristic to improve throughout development because the engine produces more thrust that the specification requires. "We can trade that [thrust] off with other things like specific fuel consumption and weight," Hawley said. Last week, he defended the aircraft's weight growth and said the AF was thinking about relaxing subsonic range and sustain turn performance requirements (DAILY, April 20, page 106).
Donald E. Scott was appointed vice president of government relations for the government sector organization of GTE Government Systems Corp. Scott succeeds Richard W. "Corky" Smartt who retired in February.
If the U.S. Navy decides to develop an advanced precision-guided cruise missile based on salvaged Tri-Service Standoff Attack Missile technologies, the resulting weapon will be just one candidate in the Air Force/Navy TSSAM follow-on program, AF and Navy officials told The DAILY. "It will feed into this joint development," Lt. Gen. Richard Hawley, AF principal deputy for acquisition, said during an interview Wednesday. "It will provide some information that we will jointly use to proceed with a joint JASSM [Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile] program."
In early 1990, Hughes Communications, Inc. was part of a team of telecommunications heavy-hitters that announced plans to establish a pioneer direct broadcast satellite (DBS) service. Known as Sky Cable, the $1 billion venture included media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., NBC, and Cablevision Systems Corp. But within a year Sky Cable was dead, a victim of a recession-racked economy and jittery financial markets that wouldn't finance the project.
