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Magazine Issue

Aviation Week & Space Technology July 21, 2014

VOL. 176 NO. 25 July 21, 2014

Farnborough 2014

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AESA Could Make Typhoon More Competitive

Jul 23, 2014
Eurofighter hopes adding AESA radar will improve Typhoon sales, export prospects
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Rolls Details Trent 7000 Plans For A330neo

Jul 21, 2014
Latest 787 and XWB engine technology provides jumping-off point for seventh Trent variant
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USAF Requests Funds To Launch DMSP-20

Jul 23, 2014
After the SpaceX protest, U.S. Air Force seeks more-competitive launch opportunities
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Stealth Trials Push Taranis Project Forward

Jul 21, 2014
Latest U.K. UCAV trials test Taranis’s stealthy configuration
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F-35 To Royal Air Tattoo: Wait Till Next Year

Jul 21, 2014
After F135 fire prevents the F-35B’s U.K. debut, officials hope it will fly at the next RIAT
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U.K. Space Stimulus Begins To Show Results

Jul 21, 2014
Britain’s 25% boost in space spending attracts foreign investment
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Airbus: More Than 1,000 Orders Coming For A330neo

Jul 21, 2014
A decade after proposing it, Airbus launches the A330neo
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Pratt Validating Engine Fix For CSeries

Jul 23, 2014
Bombardier hopes engine mod ends CSeries grounding
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Russian CEOs Brush Off Diplomatic Tension

Jul 24, 2014
A&D business proceeds despite visa snub and sanctions

Feedback

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Back To Basics

Jul 21, 2014
“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.
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Flex That Boycott

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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‘Carpet’ Has Some Snags

Jul 21, 2014
“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.
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Lockheed’s Earlier ‘Magic’

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Reexamine UAS Road Rules

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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LEO Viability

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Time-Traveling

Jul 21, 2014
In response to a letter to the editor from reader Jeremiah Farmer concerning a flight to Alpha Centauri (a star) (AW&ST June 30, p. 8), I believe his estimate of the roundtrip travel time is much too short. Consider the following simple mathematical calculation. Travel time (T)—the time required to go from one place to another—can be calculated using the following formula. (Note the numbers are approximate and thus the calculated answers may be in error by about 10%.)

Who's Where

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Aer Lingus Group

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Northrop Grumman Corp.

Jul 21, 2014
Bobby Lentz (see photos) has become vice president-strategy for the McLean, Virginia-based Information Systems sector of the Northrop Grumman Corp. He was director of strategy for the sector’s Defense Systems Div. Other recent appointments are: Tom Afferton, vice president-operations, and Michael King, vice president-business development, both for the Civil Div.; and Jay Grove, vice president-business development for the Communications Div.
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JetBlue Airways

Jul 21, 2014
Nancy Elder has been appointed vice president-communications for JetBlue Airways. She was was a founding partner and chief strategy officer of Matter Unlimited of New York.
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Fibreform Precision Machining Inc.

Jul 21, 2014
Ashley Nicholls has been named vice president-operations and engineering for Fibreform Precision Machining Inc., Huntington Beach, California. He was aerospace product manager at Hoffman Engineering in Australia.
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AerSale

Jul 21, 2014
Christopher Olds has become Dallas-based director of airframe material sales for AerSale. He was a strategic marketing manager for Parker Hannifin.
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Odyssey Aerospace Components

Jul 21, 2014
Randy Kempf (see photo) has been appointed senior director of operations for Odyssey Aerospace Components, Denton, Texas.
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USAF

Jul 21, 2014
USAF Brig. Gen. John T. Rauch, Jr., has become director of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for strategy, plans, doctrine and force development/deputy chief of staff for ISR at USAF Headquarters at the Pentagon. He was chief of concepts, strategy and wargaming/deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and requirements at USAF Headquarters. Brig. Gen James C. Vechery has been named director of logistics at U.S. Africa Command Headquarters, Stuttgart, Germany. He has been director of the U.S.
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ATR

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Alaska Airlines

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Micronet Ltd.

Jul 21, 2014
Shai Lustgarten has become CEO of Micronet Ltd., Montvale, New Jersey. He was executive vice president-business development for Micronet Enertec Technologies.
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Global Eagle Entertainment

Jul 21, 2014
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.

Who's Where: Honors and Elections

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Hegan, the Basque Aerospace Cluster

Jul 21, 2014
Inaki Lopez Gandasegui (see photo), president of Aernnova, has been elected president of Hegan, the Basque Aerospace Cluster based in Bilbao, Spain. He succeeds Ignacio Mataix, CEO of the ITP Group, who is now vice president of Hegan. Elected secretary was Jorge Unda, managing director of Sener Engineering.
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American Airlines Group

Jul 21, 2014
Four American Airlines Group employees have received the company’s 2014 Earl G. Graves Award for Leadership in Diversity for “influencing positive change, setting an example and leaving a lasting impact on those around them.” Boeing 737 Fleet Capt. Kathi Durst is American’s first female pilot in a management leadership role. She is active with Women in Aviation International, leads career improvement presentations and mentors young pilots.

The World

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Sending Sentinel

Jul 21, 2014
Commercial launch services provider Arianespace will orbit the second Sentinel-1 radar satellite built for Europe’s flagship Copernicus Earth-observation program atop a Soyuz rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, in 2016. Jointly funded by the EU and the European Space Agency, the Sentinel-1B is a C-band Earth-observation satellite equipped with a synthetic aperture radar instrument.
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U.S. Green Propulsion

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Power Trip

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Malaysian 777 Shoot-Down Another Big Blow

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Aviation Week Honors Top Performers

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Aviation Week Writers Honored

Jul 21, 2014
Aviation Week’s team took home five of the 10 awards at the 2014 Aerospace Media Awards dinner in London last week. Aviation Week won the awards for Best Defense Publication, Best International Publication and Best Integrated Social Media. In addition, Senior Defense Editors Amy Butler and Bill Sweetman won the Best In-Depth Feature honor for their revelation last December of the classified U.S.
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Suborbital Players Win Roles on Darpa’s XS-1

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Uclass Contest To Start

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Farnborough Boosts Airbus

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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RS-25 Ground Tests

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Europa Instruments

Jul 21, 2014
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.

Up Front

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Opinion: F-35 Absent, And Stuck In Second Gear

Jul 22, 2014
Grounding could jeopardize export orders

Leading Edge

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Area-I Builds Unmanned Research Testbed

Jul 23, 2014
Unmanned aircraft developed as bridge between wind-tunnel and manned-flight testing

Reality Check

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Opinion: Can The Boeing 747 Remain A Flagship?

Jul 21, 2014
Is there still a future for airliners with more than 400 seats?

Airline Intel

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Opinion: Let Market Decide If NAI Succeeds

Jul 22, 2014
Norwegian Air International faces an unprecedented delay to serve the U.S.

In Orbit

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Space Historian Examines Public-Private Partnerships

Jul 22, 2014
Commercial space is the wave of the past

Washington Outlook

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U.S. Ex-Im Bank Debate Spreading In New Ways

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Congressional Overseer of FAA Uses UAV In Wedding

Jul 21, 2014
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.
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Senate Defense Spending Bill Undoes Several Cuts

Jul 21, 2014
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.

Defense

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ATD-X Emerges Amid Japanese Fighter Choices

Jul 24, 2014
Considering a cooperative fighter program, Japan ground-tests its demonstrator
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Israel Adding Eighth Iron Dome Battery

Jul 24, 2014
Israel bolsters Iron Dome system in current conflict

Space

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What Awaits Human Mars Explorers?

Jul 22, 2014
The surface of Mars is the most ambitious target for human explorers in the foreseeable future, given the state of technology, funding and political will today, according to a U.S. National Research Council study team that examined the issue over the past year and a half.
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Cygnus Seen As Deep-Space Cargo Vehicle

Jul 22, 2014
Commercial cargo-carrier upgrade could ship supplies to deep space

Air Transport

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'False glideslope' Incidents Prompt 737 Software Mods

Jul 21, 2014
Boeing fix targets ‘false glideslope’ upsets
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Boeing Updates Its Fuselage Assembly Process

Jul 21, 2014
Boeing reveals its first major change to the civil fuselage assembly process since the 707
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Japanese Majors Want More Growth At Tokyo Airports

Jul 21, 2014
ANA highlights need for long-term airport moves in Tokyo
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Advanced Weather Radar Can Make Pilots Smarter

Jul 21, 2014
Honeywell and Rockwell Collins push the meteorological threat envelope
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WestJet Boosting Fleet For Overseas Ops

Jul 21, 2014
With its first widebody jets set to arrive next year, WestJet may be planning transatlantic expansion
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MH17 Adds Another Severe Blow to Malaysia Airlines Prospects

Jul 21, 2014
Asian legacy carriers struggle with profitability problems

Utility Aircraft

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Vietnam Navy Stands Up First Fixed-Wing Unit

Jul 23, 2014
The Vietnamese navy is close to completing its first fleet of fixed-wing aircraft with the delivery of the final pair of Viking Air DHC-6-400 Guardian maritime patrol and utility aircraft.
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New Life For Old Workhorses

Jul 22, 2014
‘Re-life’ program and gross weight increases boost market prospects for aging Twin Otters

Rotorcraft

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Army’s JMR Demo Choices Key To Helo's Future

Jul 21, 2014
Advanced rotorcraft demos must convince U.S. Army of their affordability, performance

Aerospace Calendar

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Aerospace Calendar

Jul 21, 2014
July 28-30 — 50th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference. Cleveland. www.aiaa.org/EventsLanding.aspx?id=79 July 28-Aug. 3 — EAA AirVenture. Wittman Field. Oshkosh, Wisconsin. www.eaa.org Aug. 21-22 — Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide UAS Workshop. Dayton Beach, Florida. For more information, visit proed.erau.edu or email [email protected].

Upcoming Events

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Upcoming Events

Jul 21, 2014
Aug. 10-12 — Executive Intelligence Summit, Middleburg, Virginia. Sept. 23-24 — Brazing Symposium. Arizona. Oct. 7-9 — MRO Europe, Madrid. Nov. 4-6 — MRO Asia, Singapore. Nov. 19-20 — A&D Programs, Litchfield Park, Arizona. Jan. 13-14 — MRO Latin America, Argentina. Feb. 2-3 — MRO Middle East, Dubai. April 14-16 — MRO Americas, Miami.

Viewpoint

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Opinion: Only Collective Action Can Save Near-Earth Space

Jul 22, 2014
For the first several decades of human space activity, the economically and militarily valuable region of near-Earth orbit seemed like an infinite resource.