Aviation Week & Space Technology 1996-10-21

Some Wall Street analysts are advising FlightSafety International Inc. stockholders to avoid hastily tendering their shares to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. at the price it is offering to acquire FSI (see p. 31).

WorldSpace's $750-million investment in a digital radio broadcast network is expected to make its first profits 2-3 years after launching the startup company's three spacecraft in 1998-99.

A French court is analyzing bids from suitors offering to acquire ailing Air Liberte and is scheduled to make a decision on the carrier's fate early next week.

Photograph: The RAH-66 Comanche is set to fly again in November when test pilots will begin retracting the landing gear to push the helicopter toward its top speed of 170 kt. As the RAH-66 Comanche program prepares for its third round of prototype flights, U.S. Army and Boeing/Sikorsky officials revealed that tests of the design show dramatic increases in the scout/reconnaissance helicopter's projected low-observability compared to current first-line rotary-wing aircraft.

The Rockwell/Hughes/E-Systems team competing for the Air Force airborne laser (ABL) program plans to flight test a 1/4-scale beam director nose cone around the end of October, just before the mid-November selection of one team for further work.

Killer-scout tactics developed by Air National Guard pilots are tailored to the capabilities of today's laser-guided bombs, which have become the ``weapons of choice'' for tactical missions since the gulf war.

ASTRONOMERS FROM Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute have discovered what they believe is a thin oxygen atmosphere on Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter's 16 moons. The team studied ultraviolet observations of Ganymede made with the Hubble Space Telescope's Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph. It showed that the moon probably has an atmosphere with pressure comparable to Earth's atmosphere at several hundred km. altitude--roughly the level of space shuttle orbits.