ATR may be headed for a breakout year in 2012, aided in large part by the banner order intake the turboprop maker is expecting to record in the first six months of this year. On tap for next year are a production rate jump that will boost revenue and a board decision on the aircraft maker's long-standing plans to launch a new 70-90-seat turboprop family. CEO Filippo Bagnato says, “next year it is reasonable” to seek board approval, while acknowledging there is no guarantee the main stakeholders—EADS and Finmeccanica—will give the green light.
The plethora of small Southeast Asian carriers set to launch service in the coming months may pose a risk to safety. Many will be using older aircraft and may struggle to recruit the skilled personnel needed to operate safely. Older aircraft can be safe, if properly maintained. But there is a real question as to whether start-ups in Southeast Asia can recruit enough qualified pilots and maintenance personnel given the fact that there is generally a shortage of such people in the region.
Writers for national media are taking aircraft manufacturers and airlines to task for building terribly complex aircraft. They fail to realize that automation allows properly trained pilots to rely on a system of support so that at the end of a 12-16-hr. day they can be fresh to make an approach to an airport with the same level of safety they had at the start of the duty period.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems said it will cut 1,200 of its 16,000 jobs across 12 states by year-end. The cuts will include a 25% reduction in middle management. The greatest losses will be in Sunnyvale, Calif., the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania and Denver.
Global Hawk was for a decade the Pentagon's model for spiral acquisition, the process of introducing new capabilities into a project rapidly as they are validated. The U.S. Air Force envisioned infusing a host of new sensors into increasingly sophisticated airframes. But lawmakers never embraced this strategy; their biggest gripe was that it was too complex to monitor. And it never fully caught on in industry or some corners of the Pentagon, either.
Snecma plans to complete deliveries to the French military of the first upgraded Rafale M88 engines by November, with testing of the improvement program now wrapping up. The M88-E4 program is aimed at curing reliability problems that have bedeviled the twin-engine fighter project, with the goal of boosting by 30% the high-pressure turbine engine's planned life. That benchmark is being met, says Bruce Pontoizeau, Snecma's M88 project lead. In fact, the reliability level could be beat, although company officials are not ready to say by how much.
Elsewhere in the Senate, Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and ranking Republican John McCain (Ariz.) are miffed that Chinese officials in the U.S. might be slow-walking visas and other paperwork needed for the senators' staff to travel to China and investigate claims of a wave of counterfeit electronics coming from there. “Sen. McCain and I have tried for the last many weeks to get the Chinese Embassy here and the consulate here to issue visas to our staff without success,” Levin told Capitol Hill reporters last week in an unusual press conference.
Boeing will focus on technology for an advanced production system capable of making more than 60 aircraft per month as part of New Small Airplane (NSA) studies aimed at fielding a replacement for the 737 Next Generation family as early as 2019. The company has spent the first half of the year “engaged with a group of customers to look at different configurations,” says Vice President Nicole Piasecki, the chief business strategist. Now the study will focus on how to produce an all-new aircraft at record numbers virtually from a standing start.
Based on recent Airbus patents, and produced for Aviation Week & Space Technology by artist Henry Lam at 3-D visualization specialist Kaktus Digital, our cover shows one potential configuration for an advanced airliner that could emerge from European research into low-drag wings, fuel-saving engines and lightweight structures. This future single-aisle concept has fuselage-shaping and forward-swept wing to promote natural laminar flow and open-rotor engines to reduce fuel burn. The tail is designed to shield noise from the counter-rotating propellers.
Controllers at the Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (Conae) ground station in Cordova province, Argentina, and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., are well into a 65-day commissioning period for the Aquarius/SAC-D ocean-salinity orbiter after its launch June 10 on a Delta II from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. Tests of the spacecraft are underway, and it will be moved to its operational polar orbit at an altitude of 657 km (408 mi.).
Boeing says it “sees the finish line” for certification of the 747-8 Freighter following the start of function and reliability tests, the last milestone toward approval, on June 1. “It's the last piece of the pie” says 747 vice president and general manager Elizabeth Lund of the F&R tests, adding that as of early June some 92% of the required conditions had been flown, with 87% of certification test items also complete. “Certification submittals are nearly complete,” she said. “We started with more than 1,000; we are down to double digits.”
CFM International will announce a raft of orders for the Leap engine on the A320NEO (new engine option) at the Paris air show following a late redesign with a larger fan, which makes the engine more competitive with Pratt & Whitney's PW1100G geared turbofan.
What Airbus has accomplished since it was formed is one of the remarkable industrial achievements of the last four decades. From its beginning in 1970 to splitting the global market with Boeing for large commercial aircraft, the European airframe manufacturer has become a powerful symbol of what people can do when they are motivated, share a vision and are willing to commit the necessary resources to reach their goal.
India is about to take another big step forward in its nuclear weapons delivery capacity with plans to flight-test the Agni-V ballistic missile this year. The Agni-V would represent a big step forward in India's strategic weapons arsenal given its range in excess of 5,000 km (3,100 mi.). Once testing begins, developers hope to declare the Agni-V operational in two years. The missile's predecessor, the 3,500-km-range Agni-III, is currently under induction into strategic missile groups governed by India's nuclear command.
Rohan Alce has been named Oman Air's manager for the U.K. and Ireland, replacing Abdullah Zantout, who moves to Beirut for a new role. Alce was a senior manager at Qatar Airways, Gulf Air and Etihad.
I understand that you are reporting on information supplied by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), but your coverage of the Airbus A380 Qantas Roll-Royce Trent engine problem in “Detecting the Flaw” (AW&ST May 3, p. 18) risks generating the same type of faulty information that surrounded the de Havilland Comet-type misinformation. The picture accompanying the article appears to show two fatigue cracks, developing into shear lips, neither of which initiates anywhere near the misaligned bore.
Aerojet is proposing development of a novel combined-cycle propulsion system for reusable hypersonic vehicles which packages current technology to achieve a seamless transition from a standing start to Mach 7 plus.
Technicians at Russia's NPO Lavochkin are sending the Phobos-Grunt sample-return probe into thermal vacuum testing, setting the mission up for launch in the planetary window late this year. If all goes as planned, the spacecraft will return samples of the Martian moon Phobos in August 2014.
Mongolia is moving ahead with plans to purchase its own Earth-observation satellite, says Defense Minister Luvsanvandan Bold. Aside from security, the satellite will be used to “monitor the environmental situation” in Mongolia, he says, where there is a need to track mining activities, stop desertification and protect biodiversity. Bold says his ministry has spoken to manufacturers from Japan, Europe and Russia, which could be a front-runner because of its close ties with Mongolia.
National Aviation Hall of Fame member Maj. Gen. (ret.) Johnny Alison—who demonstrated the P-40 fighter for Chiang Kai Shek and later became a seven-victory ace with the 14th Air Force in China—died June 6 at home in Washington. He was 96.
Nearly two years ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates unveiled a new incremental strategy to protect much of Europe and the Eastern U.S. from an Iranian ballistic missile attack. The so-called Phased Adaptive Approach (PAA) was designed with increments, each deploying new technologies in 2011, 2015 and 2018, and—eventually—the final phase would provide coverage from intercontinental ballistic missile threats from Iran in 2020.
Boeing says it is bidding for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Reusable Booster System technology effort. The program will initially run 3-4 years to assess technology readiness for the concept and then could lead to a technology demonstration. Darryl Davis, head of Boeing Phantom Works, says the effort is a top Air Force science and technology priority. The Boeing concept looks similar to an X-37B, but would be smaller. Wind tunnel tests have been completed.
Attacks on the corporate networks of Lockheed Martin and possibly other defense contractors, enabled by the earlier theft of secure-identification data, have underlined the threat facing industry even as it tries to carve out a niche providing advanced cybersecurity products and services to government customers.
Japan's Mitsubishi Electric Corp. (Melco) will spend 3 billion yen ($37.4 million) to double its annual satellite-production rate, reflecting Japanese government policy and a growing satellite market. The company will enlarge its facility in Kamakura, near Tokyo, to 7,700 sq. meters (82,850 sq. ft.), which will support production of eight large satellites a year instead of four. Work on the factory is expected to be complete by March 2013.
