USAF Brig Gen. Roger Teague has been promoted to vice commander from Infrared Space Systems director of the Los Angeles AFB Space and Missile Systems Center. Brig. Gen. Frederick H. Martin has been nominated for promotion to major general. He is director of operations at Air Mobility Command Headquarters, Scott AFB, Ill.
CFM is gearing up for year-on-year record engine production increases to keep pace with planned order increases by Airbus and Boeing, and expects to be supplying up to 1,600 CFM56-5/7s per year by 2014. The rate increases, which in three years will equate to more than four engines per day from the combined U.S and French assembly lines, will see engine deliveries grow to 1,400 in 2012, 1,500 in 2013 and upward of 1,600 in 2014, from 1,260 this year.
According to Airbus's script, the decision to delay elements of the A350XWB twin-widebody and revamp its technical parameters should leave customers more at ease with the program and glad to be getting a better airplane. But some airlines just aren't buying it.
Sean Kennedy (see photo) has been named senior VP-global government affairs for the Washington-based Air Transport Association, effective July 15. He is special assistant to President Barack Obama for legislative affairs.
With the defense budget under intense political and financial pressures, the Navy and Air Force are looking to cut some capabilities and eliminate redundancies, but not through new efforts. Of particular interest are the Air Force's RC-135 Rivet Joint and the Navy's EP-3E signals intelligence aircraft, both of which are aging and have to be replaced anyway. For a common, manned, fixed-wing replacement, Adm.
The aerospace industry's move toward composites for aircraft structures and engines has created a market for titanium, with which composites easily conjoin. Machine tool company Makino has developed machining centers with advanced technology for cutting this hardy metal and producing aircraft parts with a new level of precision. Contributing Editor James Ott spoke to Makino North America CEO Don Lane in Mason, Ohio, about the company's direction. AW&ST: What are the general trends affecting Makino and the machine tool industry?
Even as Europrop International continues to examine the inflight failure of a TP400-D6 turboprop's gearbox on an Airbus Military A400M, the engine joint venture is preparing to build the first powerplants for the first production version of the airlifter. The pinion gear that failed controls whether it is a left- or right-handed engine. The gearbox is still in inspection and a root cause fault has not been identified, says EPI President Simon Henley. The team inspected other gearboxes and deemed it safe to continue flight testing.
As Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) moves into the assembly phase for the next-generation CVN-78 Ford-class aircraft carrier, CEO Michael Petters stays awake at night focused on CVN-79 and beyond. “The thing I'm a little concerned about with carriers is: What's going to happen to the follow-ons?” Petters tells Aviation Week.
Israel may already have been at the cyberwarfare forefront, but the government has determined that a surge in computer network attacks requires even greater effort to thwart potential new threats. To that end, Israel has established a national cyber-administration in the prime minister's office to improve the country's defensive capabilities. The new organization marks a modest change of course, since Israel was previously focused more on offensive cybertactics.
Airbus scored an unquestionably lopsided win in this year's Paris air show order race, but the week-long flurry may be more of a tactical success than a strategic breakthrough in the competitive airliner wars.
In a recent In Orbit column (AW&ST June 6, p. 18), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Assistant Prof. Yuichi Tsuda is quoted as saying, “The sail met its intended acceleration of 100 meters/sec. . . .” Acceleration is measured in units of length divided by units of time squared. I am sure what was meant was a velocity of 100 meters/sec. due to solar forces acceleration. Binyamina, Israel (The reader is correct-Ed.)
From Washington to Paris to New Delhi, some government officials and executives last week were seemingly obsessed about the sudden prospect of India buying Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighters now that the company's F-16 and Boeing's F/A-18E/F have been ruled out of India's Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) competition.
Pratt & Whitney Canada plans to develop a new, higher-thrust demonstrator based on the geared turbofan core, to break into the recession-proof heavy business jet market. The new demonstrator will wrap a business jet low-pressure spool around one of the two PW800-based cores developed for the initial commercial geared turbofan engines. The smaller of these is the 12,000-15,000-lb.-thrust PW1200G for the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, while the larger is the 21,000-23,000-lb.-thrust PW1500G for Bombardier's CSeries.
The Honeywell/Pratt & Whitney Advanced Turbine Engine Co (ATEC) says it is on track to demonstrate up to 25% fuel savings for its HPW3000 engine contender for the U.S. Army, potentially saving up to $1 billion in fuel costs per year. Both ATEC and General Electric are preparing to test full-engine demonstrators in the run-up to an Army development contract for a 3,000-shp-class turboshaft.
Charles Hughes has become business development and strategy director of Marshall Aerospace, Cambridge, England. He spent 18 years with Rolls-Royce Military Aerospace and the past six at Cobham plc.
Cheryl Marcell has been appointed director of communications and events of Montreal-based Airports Council International, effective Aug. 1. She has been deputy director for marketing and public relations for the Sacramento (Calif.) Airport System since 2000.
Competition is set to increase in Asia's airline industry with Singapore's Tiger Airways Holdings about to undergo its biggest expansion. It is hard enough to run one successful airline, but Tiger is trying to build three low-cost carriers in Asia at the same time. The group already operates Tiger Airways in Australia and Singapore and is about to buy into and relaunch Filipino carrier Seair and Indonesian carrier Mandala Airlines. It is also working to establish Thai-Tiger, a Bangkok-based joint venture with Thai Airways International.
Too bad your Top-Performing Companies ranking (AW&ST June 6, p. 42) excludes companies with state ownership above 50%. Otherwise, Kongsberg Gruppen—50.001% owned by the Norwegian government—could qualify as the top ranking in the $1-5 billion category. The company's aerospace- and defense-related revenues surged by more than 30% last year to $1.5 billion.
Four years after the Carter administration canceled the B-1 bomber, President Ronald Reagan revived the program amid the fervor of the Cold War. Between 1982 and 1986, no fewer than 100 Lancers rolled off the Palmdale, Calif., assembly line. Regardless of what one thinks of the much-maligned B-1B, the episode holds a valuable lesson for political leaders and military planners today.
There is nothing that concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging. This quip came to mind for U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn when asked whether the Lockheed Martin F-35B was still on “probation.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in January that if performance of the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (Stovl) version of the F-35—the most expensive of the three variants—does not improve, he would propose terminating it in two years.
There still is a lot of uncertainty about the direction of the U.S. regional airline industry, given that higher fuel costs have led their mainline partners to cut back on regional flights and reduce the fixed-fee payments they make to the carriers. But here is one suggestion for how regional carriers should adapt their business model: become hybrid carriers.
The LightSquared GPS interference imbroglio has all the right elements to become a classic, intense Washington battle—billions of dollars at stake, technical arcana aplenty, multiple government agencies involved and potentially millions of users affected by the outcome. The basics are that LightSquared plans a satellite-plus-terrestrial system to offer fourth-generation (4G) wireless broadband services. The trouble is that GPS receivers listen for the faint signals from the navigation and timing satellites in parts of the radio spectrum that LightSquared owns.
In a move to bolster its military capability, Mongolia is set to modernize its air force and plans to invest in an Earth-observation satellite. The Mongolian defense budget accounts for 1.5% of gross domestic product, but “we're now debating making defense 4% of GDP,” Defense Minister Luvsanvandan Bold told Aviation Week on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue Asian security summit here. The economy is also growing at more than 10% per year, he adds.
Alain Durand has been promoted to group VP from head of the Advanced Sensors platform of Bellevue, Wash.-based Esterline Corp.'s Bourges, France, subsidiary. Michel Potvin has been named platform president of the company's four U.S.-based control systems operations. He was VP at L-3 MAS, where he led military maintenance, repair and overhaul, and special-mission aircraft activities.
Reader Jaro Franta's letter regarding the JAXA supersonic drop tests (AW&ST June 6, p. 8) as being a possible precursor for self-starting ramjets was intriguing. However, such a free-falling ramjet, once started, would then need to perform a 90-deg. high-g pull-up just to stop its descent. By that time it would be in the lower atmosphere and subject to high heating.
