Boeing Commercial Airplanes is reviewing a proposal from its 22,000 engineers and technical workers—represented by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (Speea)—to institute binding arbitration in 2012 contract talks. “I believe disputes over wages and benefits can be rationally resolved if both sides will voluntarily subject such disputes to binding binary interest arbitration,” Speea Executive Director Ray Goforth told the annual meeting of the union's 150-member governing council June 11.
Dassault Aviation has created a more affordable version of its Falcon 2000 rather than field an all-new super mid-size (SMS) business jet during one of the industry's most severe down cycles. The company's intent is to upstage the smaller competition with an aircraft that has considerably more cabin volume, better runway performance and a larger tanks-full payload.
Japanese airlines are finally detecting signs that the plunge in air travel demand following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami is reversing, although full recovery remains a distant prospect.
The drive to satisfy the airlines' insatiable need for better fuel efficiency will take another step this summer when engineers from Europe's Clean Sky research program complete a feasibility study for installing a counter-rotating open-rotor engine on the side of an Airbus A340-600 flying testbed.
The usual cacophonies of anti-automation types are again carping as the results of the AF447 accident are revealed. The arguments are always the same: Automation makes pilots less capable. But this crew likely would have misdiagnosed and misapplied stall recovery techniques even if they were flying an old “round-gauge” Boeing.
June 27-28—Aviation Safety Management Systems Overview Workshop: ATC Vantage. Tampa, Fla. Call +1 (727) 410-4759 or see www.atcvantage.com/sms-workshop.24l June 27-30—American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' 41st Annual Fluid Dynamics/20th Annual Computational Fluid Dynamics/29th Annual Applied Aerodynamics/42nd Plasmadynamics and Lasers/42nd Annual Thermophysics/Sixth Annual Theoretical Fluid Mechanics Conferences. Sheraton Waikiki and the Hawaii Convention Center, Honolulu. Call +1 (703) 264-7511, fax +1 (703) 264-7551 or see www.aiaa.org
Aeroflot has started commercial operations of the Sukhoi Superjet (SSJ) 100 regional jet. The airline received its first SSJ 100 through VEB Leasing on June 9, clearing the way for the June 16 first revenue flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg. According to the airline's CEO, Vitaly Savelyev, SSJ 100s also will operate from the Russian capital to Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Ufa and Samara. The international routes for SSJ will be unveiled later, he notes. Aeroflot is the largest Superjet customer, with an order for 30 aircraft and an option for another 10.
Rob Tomenendal has been named VP-sales and marketing for King Aerospace Commercial Corp., Ardmore, Okla. He was business development director for Gore Design Completions.
Walter W. Roney, 2nd, has been named business manager of the Airline Avionics Institute, Osprey, Fla., succeeding Phil Wright. Roney has held airline customer support positions at Hamilton Sundstrand, Cessna Aircraft and BAE Systems-Platform Solutions.
Charles Compton, a World War II Civil Air Patrol volunteer, has been named to receive CAP's Distinguished Service Medal. He earned the recognition for his service at CAP Coastal Patrol Base 1 in Atlantic City, N.J., where he flew missions that discouraged enemy submarines from surfacing, forcing them out to sea.
Seats that morph to adjust to a passenger's shape and systems that harvest passenger energy are just two of the ideas in Airbus's latest future aircraft concept.
Franco-British cooperation in the field of unmanned aviation could quickly expand, with government and industry eyeing opportunities to jointly pursue tactical systems.
Although Boeing has not yet decided its product strategy for how to evolve the 737 and 777, what is already clear is the programs will not unfold in parallel. “We will never again do two major development programs simultaneously,” says Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO Jim Albaugh, reflecting on when the company tried to develop the 787 and 747-8 at the same time.
The Falcon 900LX has joined other members of the Dassault Falcon family certified by the Civil Aviation Authority of China for operation. China is targeted as a market of potentially explosive growth for business jets, especially those in the premium category.
Even as the first building blocks of the NextGen air traffic management system are falling into place, behind-the-scenes work is under way to ensure that the future ATM network extracts the full potential from these new capabilities.
Anne-Marie Gammon has been appointed CFO of Brampton, Ontario-based Atlantis Systems Corp., succeeding Ron Brown. He had been interim CFO since February 2010.
A400M flight-test personnel face an intense period as they work to achieve the end-of-year goal of gaining civil certification for the European military airlifter. But program officials are reasonably confident that they will meet the target, although it means logging more than 100 flight hours per month to reach the 2,700-hr. goal by the time the milestone is reached; the total test program is expected to top 3,700 hr. “We are clearly on track” for civil type certification, asserts Cedric Gautier, who heads the project.
Airbus faces a busy second-half of the year when it comes to the A380, as it once more is forced to push hard to meet full-year delivery targets. But an end to long-standing production turmoil may be in sight. Schedule disruptions have become an annual occurrence for the A380, first due to Airbus's assembly problems and in recent years because of supplier hiccups. Setbacks related to Japan-based seat manufacturer Koito and to Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines have been the latest culprits.
Mark Whitman, Tom Chapman and John Frevola have been named to the U.S. national field sales team of Nextant Aerospace, Richmond Heights, Ohio. Whitman came from fractional operator Avantair, Chapman was senior sales director at XOJET, and Frevola was VP and general manager at Flightcraft.
The U.S. Air Force and Boeing are testing a fix to correct an electrical problem on the first GPS Block IIF satellite that was launched May 27, 2010, and is now in orbit. The satellite's “M” code signal, optimized to reduce jamming for military operations, has been shut off until there is verification that the problem has been solved. The glitch was discovered during testing of another GPS IIF satellite on the ground, according to program sources.
NASA is pushing a variant of the design it tentatively picked in January for the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) that Congress ordered the agency to build, but with a new strap-on booster competition demanded by powerful senators with constituent stakes in the outcome. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has endorsed the concept developed by launch vehicle experts at Marshall Space Flight Center, Ala., which tweaks the earlier “reference vehicle design” selected as a starting point for additional analysis (AW&ST Jan. 17, p. 18).
With recently announced layoffs in the space divisions at Lockheed Martin and Boeing and retiring Pentagon leaders warning Congress and industry of a smaller military that will be capable of doing less, it is easy to think everything in the U.S. aerospace and defense sector is contracting. Not so, says the Aerospace Industries Association, which has seen its membership swell by 50% since January 2010. “The industry is banding together during these tough times,” says AIA Vice President David Mandell. “It realizes that it has to work together in order to grow.”
Lessor Aero Nusantara Indonesia (ANI) is shaping up as a potential launch customer for the proposed 100-seat stretch of Mitsubishi Aircraft's MRJ regional jet after signing a memorandum of understanding for five aircraft. The backlog for the MRJ will climb to 70 when ANI's order for five becomes definitive. ANI becomes only the third customer for the aircraft since the development program was launched in 2008.
