70 Delta Air Lines is giving its Boeing 767-300ERs major interior upgrades, with lie-flat seats in business class and a new on-demand entertainment system in all areas. Delta is investing more than $2 billion in aircraft, technology, and customer products and services following its surprisingly smooth integration with Northwest Airlines. Delta is doing so, however, without any short-term plans for new aircraft orders as it focuses on reducing debt, “de-risking” its balance sheet, enhancing fleet flexibility, and diversifying its network and revenue streams.
Boeing’s 787 program is facing more pressure on its flight-test schedule after the temporary grounding of the test fleet and with deliveries for several early customers delayed yet again.
An agreement to purchase 15 Bombardier Q400 turboprops has established SpiceJet as the most aggressive among India’s budget carriers in pursuit of the country’s fast-growing regional routes.
Andy Nativi (Vandenberg AFB, Calif.), Michael A. Taverna (Paris)
Italian military officials are talking to several allied nations about using data from Italy’s Cosmo-SkyMed radar satellite constellation, following launch of the final spacecraft.
Founded: 1993 Ownership: Peter and John Janicki Employees: 450 Revenues: $50 million Business: Specialist in very large-scale, precision composite structures, including carbon-fiber, fiberglass and metals. The company engineers and manufactures tools, tool molds, prototypes, jigs, cauls, fixtures and parts.
As defense budgets soared through the 2000s, large aerospace and defense contractors cashed in—literally. Companies paid down debt, repurchased shares and shored up their pension plans, and yet their stockpiles of cash kept growing. PwC estimates that the top 10 A&D contractors now have $35 billion in cash on their balance sheets. Broaden that to the top 15 companies and the total is more than $50 billion, according to a separate estimate by Bain & Co.
Phil Krull (see photo) has been named managing director of Embraer ’s first U.S. aircraft assembly plant and customer center, at Melbourne (Fla.) International Airport. He was responsible for steam turbine and generator programs process improvements at Siemens Energy.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has won the UH-X program to replace UH-60J rescue helicopters that it built under license from Sikorsky. The company is offering a lower price than the ¥5-6 billion ($61-73 million) that the government has been paying for the current model. The government is expected eventually to order about 40 of the upgraded UH-60Js, but it is unlikely to build them quickly.
Radames Velez (see photo) has been named American Airlines managing director for the Caribbean, overseeing 23 destinations in 19 countries. Velez began his career at American more than four decades ago in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and has held a number of increasingly responsible positions, among them leading passenger and ramp services at the San Juan and Mexico City airports. He has also served as country director in Ecuador and Peru and has been regional director for Central America.
Joint ventures with foreign companies will be the primary means by which the aircraft-systems company of Chinese manufacturer Avic moves into the global civil market. Driven by the Comac C919 program, the systems joint ventures will generally take over almost all of the civil assets of Avic in their respective fields of business, say Chinese executives.
Will van Zeventer has been appointed vice president-business development of BAE Systems Asset Management . Based at Hatfield, England, van Zeventer joins BAE from Focus Aviation, where he was head of marketing. He also was director of marketing at TransWorld Aircraft Leasing and Services in the Netherlands and Australia and held senior positions at Fokker Aircraft in Amsterdam and Fokker Services in the Netherlands and Singapore.
Judith McCoy (see photo) has joined Hawaiian Airlines as station manager at Pago Pago International Airport in American Samoa. She was an administrator in American Samoa’s Homeland Security Department, and before that was operations coordinator and transportation broker for The Select Carrier Group in Dallas.
Amy Butler (Washington), Graham Warwick (Washington)
The beleaguered F-35 fighter is at yet another—and perhaps its most important—inflection point, with a bipartisan White House commission recommending a sharp curtailment of the $380-billion project, just as program officials finalize details of another potentially dramatic cost and schedule revision.
Arianespace will launch a communications satellite for the Communications and Information Technologies Ministry of Azerbaijan. Construction of the 3-metric-ton spacecraft was awarded to Orbital Sciences Corp. To be equipped with 36 active Ku- and C-band transponders and lofted in late 2012 on an Ariane 5 rocket, Azersat-1 will provide communications services throughout Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as Azerbaijan itself. The award is the tenth of the year for Arianespace and its first ever from the former Soviet Union.
Founded: 1996 Ownership: Bob Finley and Scott Dean Employees: 54 Revenues: $12 million (2010 estimate) Business: Designs and supplies complete manufacturing systems; works closely with manufacturing subcontractors to complete the systems.
Peter Likoray, sales director-Canada at Bombardier Aerospace , has added the U.S. Southeast to his portfolio. Antonio Regillo has been named sales manager-Canada, and Denise Bell has joined the company as sales manager-U.S. Southeast. Likoray began his career with Bombardier Specialized and Amphibious Aircraft Sales in 1990, and Regillo joined the company in 2002 as liaison engineer. He later became team lead for international sales support. Bell worked for Bombardier Aircraft Services and Comair.
The Nov. 2 midterm election results will prompt a shakeup of committees covering civil aviation.One probable Republican leader in the House vows to make FAA reauthorization an early priority. A veteran on aviation issues, John Mica (R-Fla.), is likely to chair the full Transportation Committee starting next year. He replaces James Oberstar (D-Minn.), who was defeated by Republican challenger—and former Northwest Airlines pilot—Chip Cravaack.
The latest attacks on commercial aviation reveal how adaptable terrorists can be. The clever printer cartridge bombs shipped from Yemen, apparently at the hands of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, were the first known attempt at terrorism via the air cargo sector (see p. 32). But these attacks are producing a new and welcome kind of unity for industry and its partners in governments—a clear positive to come out of the recent near-misses at the hands of Al Qaeda.
Fresh off the completion of its integration with Northwest Airlines, Delta Air Lines finds itself facing some new challenges that could threaten its competitive advantages internationally and in a key domestic market.
Questions are emerging about the design and vulnerability to serious malfunction of both the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine and the Airbus A380 airframe following the destructive failure of one of the turbofans on Qantas Flight QF32 Nov. 4. Flying debris from the engine’s uncontained failure caused extensive airframe damage, and appears to have punctured fuel tanks and knocked out some of the A380’s hydraulic and electrical systems, as well as rendered the No. 1 engine unresponsive to shutdown attempts.
The grounding of Qantas’s six Airbus A380s due to a Nov. 4 engine failure has caused major operational headaches for the carrier. The 450-seaters carry a large proportion of passengers on the airline’s key long-haul routes to Los Angeles and London and a fifth of its international travelers overall. The first problem Qantas faced was how to handle more than 1,200 stranded passengers, mostly in Los Angeles. The carrier scrambled to put more Boeing 747-400s on its A380 routes and cleared the backlog by Nov. 8.
Heinrich Loechteken has been named chief investment officer of International Lease Finance Corp. (ILFC), a subsidiary of American International Group. Loechteken was chief investment officer and CFO of AerCap and executive vice president and CFO of DaimlerChrysler Capital Services and chief credit officer of DaimlerChrysler Financial. Pierre Vellay has been retained by ILFC as an adviser on new aircraft and engine programs. He is an associate of New & Next Consulting and a senior adviser to AT Kearney.
Managers across NASA face more uncertainty as the agency scrambles to find at least $1.5 billion to finish the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) while even the telescope’s most powerful sponsor in Congress is calling for “frugality” on the project.
The most striking aspect of Delta CEO Richard Anderson’s office is, well, how unremarkable it is: The room is devoid of the knickknacks and photos that seem to abound in most executive offices. There are not even many work papers—just a few of the most important folders—and the bookcases across the far wall are so bare that I ask, on the way out from my interview, whether he has just moved in.
