Since the advent of powered flight, aircraft designers have sought to escape the bondage of heavy rigid structures by moving to lighter, bird-like adaptive shaping and sensing technology.
A small aircraft accident with a happy outcome—all onboard survived with minor injuries—is, years later, evolving into something of an international cause celebre with ominous overtones.
Mark Verdesco has been promoted to director of pre-owned aircraft sales by Dassault Falcon , succeeding Skip Flint, who retired in December. Verdesco has held a variety of positions at Dassault, including a stint as technical marketing analyst.
USAF Gen. Kevin P. Chilton has been selected by the board of advisers of the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement to receive the 25th National Space Trophy. Chilton, commander of U.S. Strategic Command and a former astronaut, is being recognized for his leadership in civilian and military space programs.
The issue of running out of missiles against China is not a new one for jet fighters and surface escort ships. In “Numbers Matter” (AW&ST Jan. 3, p. 21), Chinese air forces certainly provide a “target-rich environment,” but as one sage points out, U.S. Gen. George Custer was said to have the same type of environment prior to his last stand. The article suggests use of high-persistent drones, but they better be stealthy to survive. Just consider a squadron of stealthy J-20s with a mass of conventional fighters.
Brian Gillman has been tapped to become senior vice president/general counsel/corporate secretary for Global Aviation Holdings . He held similar titles at Mesa Air Group and Vanguard Airlines.
The Jan. 24/31 issue, on page 58, the statement that the Delta IV Heavy is the largest launcher since the Saturn V referred to expendable launch vehicles.
Deirdre Clemmons has been promoted to vice president of meetings, conventions and education by Airports Council International-North America . Previously, she directed conferences for the National Defense Industrial Association.
Debra Higgins has become vice president of charter sales for Arcadia Aviation . Her career includes stints as vice president of sales for Capital Jet and director of charter sales at Private Jet Charters in Windsor Locks, Conn.
Graham Warwick (Washington), Amy Butler (Washington)
Details of the revamped F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program are emerging and showing that, despite more than nine years of work, almost six years of challenging development and testing still lie ahead for the Lockheed Martin-led project.
The practice of screening people and baggage is about to take a leap forward after slowly evolving over more than four decades. Future checkpoints will harness channels of personal data to differentiate between passengers and assign to them—depending on how they score on a screener’s confidence scale—varying levels of technological screening. The physical configuration of checkpoints is likely to change as best practices of processing people come into play.
India’s Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) program, currently the world’s biggest international fighter competition, will hinge on a series of national objectives—only one of them being the air force’s need to maintain squadron numbers.
Denise Millard (see photo) has been named vice president of international business development for L-3 Aviation Products . She was vice president of the Customer Group for L-3 company ACSS and had been director of marketing for Thales’s Avionics Regional and Business Aircraft Division.
At least $50 billion will be committed over the next five years to provide the Indian army, navy, air force and coast guard with military hardware, force multipliers and advanced systems of almost every kind. Fixed-wing aircraft, rotorcraft, guided weapons and space asset requirements, spread across the four services and the paramilitary forces, will make India one of the heaviest buyers of military equipment in the world this decade.
Navy Vice Adm. David Venlet, the U.S. program director for the $380 billion Joint Strike Fighter, is due to make his public debut in the role Feb. 15, after nearly a year of working behind the scenes to revamp the troubled Lockheed Martin program. The company has taken a beating from Defense Secretary Robert Gates since last year, when more problems came to light in the testing program (see p. 25). Venlet’s task will be challenging.
John Colucci has joined Avantair as executive vice president after spending 17 years at NetJets. His earlier career was spent at Gulfstream Aerospace as vice president of new business development and in sales positions at IBM.
I admire your recent series of articles about the space shuttle, however, in “Almost an Afterthought” (AW&ST Dec. 6, 2010, p. 50), you state that a Vandenberg-based shuttle (flying a polar orbit no doubt), after a 90-min., single-orbit flight, would need to return to a location 1,265 mi. away from where it was launched “to accommodate the Earth’s precession.” Precession would only change the requirement a tiny amount. Rotation seems the more likely explanation. (The reader is correct-Ed.)
Experts from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will certify any commercial crew transportation vehicle put forward by U.S. companies as safe to fly. Only then will the Japanese agency accept them as substitutes for the space shuttle in the complex barter deals that govern International Space Station operations.
European Space Agency engineers have upgraded the Large Space Simulator (LSS) at the European Space Research and Technology Center (Estec) to prepare the two BepiColombo spacecraft for their upcoming mission to the broiling environment at Mercury. Spacecraft orbiting there must endure temperatures on the order of 350C from the Sun itself, and heat reflected from the planet’s surface that is literally hot enough to fry eggs.
The Indian army wants to expand its aviation corps and has asked the government to give it full control over all tactical air assets in the battlefield, including transport, observation and attack flights.
China’s J-20 stealthy prototype “is at the heavy end of the fighter scale, leaving ample room for medium and light platforms” as follow-on stealth designs from Beijing’s aerospace industry, says Douglas Barrie, senior fellow at The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. The J-20 and Russian T-50 stealth strike fighter projects may offer a challenge for U.S.
House lawmakers are talking again about capping the number of screeners the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can hire. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), who in the past helped set such a cap, is now chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. The subject has already been discussed with Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), who chairs that panel’s homeland security subcommittee. The cap lapsed under the chairmanship of David Price (N.C.), now the top Democrat on the subcommittee.
As the U.S. Air Force’s first next-generation secure communications satellite continues its long journey to orbit after an onboard engine failure, Lockheed Martin is working to ensure that the suspected foreign object debris (FOD) failure that crippled the spacecraft will not occur in other A2100-based satellites.
“Shear Magic” (AW&ST Dec. 13, 2010, p. 22) accords the appropriate amount of praise to Space Exploration Technologies and CEO Elon Musk. The problem is that the general press more or less portrays him as the “Edison” of commercial space. In reality, SpaceX has been drawing on 40-50-year-old technologies with some clever modifications. There is little new here. Musk’s genius is his emulation of the Skunk Works/Phantom Works management systems—minimizing organizational structure, and hence cost—while direct-lining the decision path.
The FAA is dangling a carrot in front of airlines still resisting spending to equip their aircraft for satellite-based NextGen air traffic management. It is giving JetBlue Airways $4.2 million toward equipping up to 35 of its Airbus A320s with automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) avionics. In return, JetBlue will give the FAA data on fuel and time-savings, which the FAA hopes will persuade all carriers to get busy with equipage. FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt does not rule out similar help for other airlines, however.
