NASA’s plans to subsidize commercial human spaceflight are off the table as a money-saving suggestion from the bipartisan cochairs of the President’s deficit-reduction panel. Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson last month had suggested the move could save $6 billion, but they left advocates of the Obama administration’s efforts to seed a commercial crew transport industry an out when they demonstrated they did not have a clear understanding of what the agency wants to do (AW&ST Nov. 15, p. 26).
James F. Albaugh, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, has been elected chairman of the Aerospace Industries Association Board of Governors for 2011, succeeding Scott C. Donnelly, chairman and chief executive officer of Textron. David P. Hess, president of Pratt & Whitney, has been elected vice chairman.
Lufthansa restarted its inflight Internet offering Nov. 30 on an Airbus A330-300 from Frankfurt to New York. Availability will be expanded to cover the entire long-haul fleet and its network by the end of 2011. Lufthansa will also allow the use of mobile phones, smart phones or PDAs, but for text messages or e-mail and not voice communications.
USAF Lt. Col. (ret.) Price T. Bingham (Melbourne, Fla.)
The bipartisan White House Commission’s proposal to terminate the Stovl F-35 variant (AW&ST Nov. 15, p. 36) reveals a dangerously narrow, but unfortunately widespread, perspective of airpower. Despite the reality that future threats are likely to possess large numbers of precision-guided, long-range weapons, even many airmen who should know better tend to assume too much regarding the availability and operability of runways when making plans for the employment of airpower. Should the runway assumptions prove overly optimistic, the U.S.
Nicholas E. Calio (see photo) has been named president and chief executive officer of the Air Transport Association , effective Jan. 1. Calio currently leads Global Government Affairs for Citigroup. Before that, he was assistant to the president for legislative affairs and chief liaison to Congress for Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush.
Jeff Anastas has been appointedvice president-North Asia and Dan Keady vice president-South Asia, both at Hawker Beechcraft . Anastas was sales director in other locations, including Africa, the Middle East and the U.S. Keady was divisional vice president-sales for Africa, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Australia.
Marta Rona (see photo) has joined Malev Hungarian Airlines as communications director. She was trading and media director at Omnicom Media Group’s Hungarian subsidiary.
The Air Transport Association hired a highly regarded lobbyist with Republican connections to become its new president and CEO as of Jan. 1, just before Republicans take control of the House. Nicholas Calio once was an assistant inside the George W. and George H.W. Bush administrations, and has a close relationship with House Speaker-elect Rep.
I enjoyed the insights in Andrew Compart’s report “Beyond The Merger: Delta Invests and Diversifies” (AW&ST Nov. 15, p. 74). CEO Richard Anderson’s decisiveness has impressed me both as a customer and industry watcher.
The name of L-3 Communications’ new Link Simulation & Training Division president, Lenny Genna, was misspelled in the Nov. 29 article “Enduring Realism” (p. 40).
Valerie Rowlands has been appointed director of business development for Europe, Middle East and Africa at CSafe . She was the industry sector leader for the U.K. and Ireland for a freight forwarding company, working within the life science/pharmaceutical market sector.
The first flight of the space shuttle went very smoothly, from liftoff to landing, and hopes rose that President Richard M. Nixon’s promise of “routine access to space” would become reality. “Orbital performance of the space shuttle exceeded expectations and demonstrated that the U.S. has attained an unmatched capability to operate a high-performance, reusable manned system with broad commercial, scientific and military applications,” Aviation Week & Space Technology reported on April 20, 1981, in a 15-page account of the STS-1 mission.
The flying of the space shuttle involves complex choreography of man (or woman) and machine. With five shuttle missions under his belt and a stint as the chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office, U.S. Navy Capt. (ret.) Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson is among the most qualified to explain what must be done to make a flight a success. In an exclusive Aviation Week pilot report, he describes what transpires from launch through landing from the commander’s point of view.
Dec. 14—Waterfront Conference: “A New Direction for Aviation Policy, Improving the Customer Experience by Maximizing Operational Efficiency.” Eversheds, London. See www.thewaterfront.co.uk Dec. 15—Wings Club luncheon featuring Gary Kelly, chairman/president/CEO of Southwest Airlines. Yale Club, New York. Call +1 (212) 867-1770 or see www.wingsclub.org
Short- to medium-haul twinjets are now competing in a crowded playing field and Airbus and Boeing no longer reign supreme. The duopoly, to the surprise of no one, is drawing to a close. We all knew China, Russia and, down the road, other new entrants would seemingly come out of nowhere. And this sea change is even more dramatic in terms of regional jets.
USAF Capt. Cheronda V. Spann, project manager for SBIRS GEO-1 Space Vehicle at the Space and Missile Systems Center, is one of the winners of the Society of Satellite Professionals International ’s 2010 Promise Award. Other winners are: Angela Wheeler, a radio-frequency operations engineer at Intelsat; and Shlomi Izkovitz, deputy vice president-sales and marketing at RRsat Global Communications Network. The award recognizes the potential of young satellite professionals.
Phil Chermin has been appointed to the board of Solairus Aviation . He has been chief executive and chief financial officer of several technology companies and has his own investment banking firm in Lafayette, Calif. Honors and Elections
To date, astronauts and cosmonauts have conducted 150 spacewalks to build the International Space Station, spending more than 944 hr. on extravehicular activities (EVAs). Most of these, and certainly the most difficult, were staged from the space shuttle. The “wall of EVA” that seemed so daunting as the station was being planned has often been as exciting as watching a couple of painters paint a very large house. The spacewalking skills that made it possible to build the station with such deceptive ease were honed on the space shuttle.
Chinese space officials won’t be coming to the U.S. in December, as they had hoped, but there may be a visit in the New Year. Nor is Anatoly Permanov, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, likely to get very far anytime soon with a list of possible cooperative projects he discussed with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in Washington on Nov. 18. Like Wang Wenbao, director general of the China Manned Space Engineering Office, Permanov will have to wait until the U.S. political climate becomes a little more stable.
Dennis Kaney (see photo) is the new regional engine manager for Honeywell products at BBA Aviation Engine Repair and Overhaul company Dallas Airmotive . He has worked as an airframe and powerplant technician, account manager and in sales and support functions for maintenance service providers.
A year ago, investing in airline stocks seemed like a surefire way to destroy money, but a lot can change in a year. Who would have guessed that Wall Street analysts would recommend their long-term investors buy airline shares? That’s precisely what they’re doing, however, as airline share prices surge past market benchmarks. “Long-term investors should begin to add to their positions now and then aggressively buy by mid-winter,” advises Ray Neidl, aerospace specialist for the Maxim Group.
Building a spaceplane to fly back and forth to orbit like an airliner proved a lot more difficult than even the most hard-nosed engineers expected, and the result was a lot less capable than their bosses had hoped. It’s probably too early to know whether that lesson from development of the space shuttle applies today, when NASA’s leaders hope the private sector will be able to devise simpler routes to orbit and to help pay for them. But the hurdles that went into getting the shuttle to fly are a cautionary tale for today’s policy-makers.
The loss of two shuttle orbiters and 14 brave astronauts gave NASA and the nation several textbooks worth of painful lessons about launching humans into space, including how easy it is to forget those lessons. The Challenger accident scuttled forever the notion that the space shuttle was an operational vehicle that could take humans to orbit as a matter of “routine.” Columbia’s loss underscored that schooling, and killed the shuttle program.
