British Airways will add two more steep-approach variants of Embraer’s E-190 twinjet to its BA CityFlyer fleet as part of an effort to expand the regional division’s London City Airport network.
USAF Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Sargeant has been appointed special assistant to the chief of safety at USAF Headquarters/commander of the Air Force Safety Center, Kirtland AFB, N.M. He was commander of the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center at Kirtland. Sargeant has been succeeded by Maj. Gen. David J. Eichhorn, who was commander of the Air Force Flight Test Center of Air Force Materiel Command, Edwards AFB, Calif. Eichhorn, in turn, has been followed by Brig. Gen. Robert C. Nolan, 2nd, who was director of Standing Joint Force Headquarters of U.S.
A list of competing teams for the Next Generation Jammer was incomplete in a story headlined “Pod Predicament” (Oct. 11, p. 27). The two teams and two individual companies that have been awarded contracts for technology maturation are: BAE Systems/Cobham, ITT Corp./Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.
The Royal Australian Air Force has cleared its BAE Hawk lead-in fighters to resume operational flying, officials said Oct. 19. On Oct. 11 they said they had suspended all Hawk operations after one of the aircraft experienced a technical fault while taxiing prior to takeoff from RAAF Base Pearce, Western Australia.
John Rishton, chief executive of the Dutch retail group Royal Ahold, has been named to succeed John Rose as CEO of Rolls-Royce when Rose retires at the end of March. Rose joined the company in 1984 and became a board member in 1993 before being appointed to the top job.
Joe-Tao Zhou (see photo) has been promoted to president-Asia Pacific for the Shanghai-based Eaton Corp. Aerospace Group . Zhou joined Eaton in 2008 as country president for China and before that worked for Alcatel Lucent.
NASA’s vision of the future flight deck is an intelligent cockpit that forms an integral and interactive part of the airspace system. It will be aware of the aircraft, the crew operating it and the surrounding environment. It will sense hazards, evaluate them and provide timely and appropriate responses to the crew.
Cessna has unveiled a new version of its high-speed business jet, which is now labeled the Citation Ten. The upgraded aircraft will be the launch platform for the Garmin G5000 integrated cockpit, that firm’s first FAR25 installation.
Renee Allen has been named to receive NASA ’s Silver Snoopy award, which honors achievements related to flight safety or mission success. Allen is a criminal investigator for the Northrop Grumman-led joint venture Space Gateway Support at the Kennedy Space Center.
Systems that generate synthetic three-dimensional images of terrain on cockpit flight displays could allow pilots to fly down to lower weather minimums in reduced visibility than they currently can using unaided vision. Key to unlocking that potential could be finding the best way to combine the complementary strengths of the database-derived synthetic vision system (SVS) and real-time imagery-based enhanced-vision system (EVS).
Jeff Mihalic (see photo) has been appointed senior vice president-fixed wing maintenance, repair and overhaul at Greenwich AeroGroup , Greenwich, Conn. He has held senior positions with Bombardier Aerospace, QAviation and Boeing Commercial Aircraft. Allen Hoyt, president of subsidiary Western Aircraft, Boise, Idaho, will retire at month-end after nearly 30 years with the company.
As the U.S. Army weighs its options for an armed aerial scout and draws up plans for rotorcraft technology demonstrators, Sikorsky has jumped ahead of its competitors by announcing it will build two light tactical helicopter prototypes on company funds. The S-97 X2 Raider prototypes will incorporate technology from Sikorsky’s X2 high-speed coaxial-rotor helicopter demonstrator, which in September exceeded 250 kt. in level flight. The first aircraft is scheduled to fly in 48 months, and will be instrumented for experimental test flights.
On the same day that it announced a 23% drop in operating profit in its defense business amid shrinking margins, Boeing Co. received some good news. U.S. officials announced a $60-billion set of Foreign Military Sales to Saudi Arabia that includes updated Boeing F-15 fighter jets. “I would not characterize the prospects ahead of us in defense as wild-eyed growth, but I would suggest there is an opportunity to grow, with international [sales] and adjacent [markets] leading the way,” CEO James McNerney told Wall Street analysts.
Megan Rosia (see photo) has joined Pinnacle Airlines Corp. as Washington-based vice president of government affairs. She was assistant administrator for government and industry affairs for the FAA and for 12 years as chief regulatory attorney at Northwest Airlines. She was also a partner with Crowell & Moring in Washington.
Simon van den Dries has become vice president-global sales of EMS Global Tracking . He was head of commercial sales for General Electric’s GE Asset Intelligence unit in Europe. Honors and Elections Capt. Lee Moak has been elected president of Air Line Pilots Association International. He is a Delta Air Lines pilot and has been head of Delta’s pilot union since 2005.
In your article on another strategy for designing a laminar flow wing, there was considerable emphasis on the use of “discrete roughness elements” (DRE) to reduce the crossflow instability associated with swept wings (AW&ST Sept. 20/27, p. 61). The DRE are reported to be a few microns in height and the effectiveness depends on their distribution. Did the researchers measure the roughness of an airliner wing that has been in service for a few years? Is it possible that the DRE and their distribution might be swamped or contaminated by naturally occurring roughness?
Clay Lacy, legendary aviator and entrepreneur, was honored with the Pathfinder Award at the Seattle Museum of Flight , also the location of the beginning and end of his record-setting around-the-world flight for children’s charity in 1988.
A major government information technology (IT) trade organization in Washington is predicting overall U.S. defense spending will drop to $633 billion by Fiscal 2021, from more than $700 billion per year now. Moreover, accounting for expected inflation over the decade, the annual defense budget will have plummeted $512 billion in constant Fiscal 2011 dollars—close to the equivalent of a one-year baseline budget now, excluding war costs.
Designers of future spacecraft that need to dock with each other for crew and cargo transfers are likely to use a new set of interface standards just published by the International Space Station partners in the hope they will simplify human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.
Michael A. Taverna (Paris), Amy Butler (Washington), Robert Wall (London)
Although political and military preparations are setting the stage for NATO approval of a more expansive involvement in missile defense, next month’s Lisbon summit is once again expected to stop shy of pushing forward full force on the concept of territorial defense throughout the alliance.
Corruption allegations are hobbling the Philippines military from procuring helicopters, but delivery of trainer aircraft and efforts to purchase a second-hand Lockheed Martin C-130 appear to be on track. Derco Aerospace, an arm of Sikorsky, is on the brink of winning a contract to sell a refurbished C-130H to the Philippine Air Force, say officials at the air force and the defense department. This C-130H arrived in the Philippines on Oct. 11 and if it passes the air force’s technical evaluation it will be selected, the officials say.
National security reviews share a pattern the world over. They begin with the best of intentions, strategically driven but fiscally informed; they end up fiscally driven and, when lucky, strategically informed. The results are often pretty ugly. A case in point is the strategy and spending plan unveiled last week in Britain (see p. 20).
Imminent deregulation of China’s low-altitude airspace will help secure the future of the country’s rapidly growing business aviation sector. Opening up the skies for small general aviation aircraft should result in building of the small airports that business aviation will need in the coming years.
