The British government is further tightening aviation security measures, including setting up a no-fly list and another list for persons who will face additional security checks at airports. Moreover, owing to security weaknesses at Yemen’s main airport in Sana, Yemenia has been barred, temporarily, from operating to the U.K. until the situation is alleviated.
Douglas Royce/Forecast International/www.forecastinternational.com
Piston- and turboprop-powered general aviation (GA) aircraft manufacturers are poised to turn out more than 22,000 aircraft worth $25 billion over the next 10 years. This total excludes production of the new category of Light Sport Aircraft (LSA).
Intersputnik has concluded an agreement to lease 16 transponders on Eutelsat’s big W7 satellite. Built by Thales Alenia Space and launched on Nov. 24, W7 carries 70 Ku-band transponders. It is collocated at 36 deg. E. Long. with W4, which carries four Intersputnik channels. The agreement, for the life of the satellite, will permit Eutelsat to double capacity at the 36-deg. slot, where traffic has grown 15% during the past 18 months, principally from demand in Russia and Africa.
Alexander Velovich/FORECAST INTERNATIONAL/www.forecastinternational.com
Fixed-Wing and Rotary-Wing Air aircraft Research Institutes GosNIIAS (State Research Institute of Aviation Systems) (Moscow) is a think tank focused on combat aircraft, aviation weapons systems and military avionics. The institute has an important role in the development of software for onboard mission computers and the integration of weapon control systems.
The future of U.S. human spaceflight may be unclear, but NASA and its international counterparts continue to keep the Moon and Mars in their sights with robotic missions. China will be first to return to the Moon with the Chang’e 2 orbiter planned for launch in October. This is similar to Chang’e 1, which ended its mapping mission in March 2009. A lander with rover is planned for 2013, followed by a sample return mission.
John S. Edwards/Forecast International/www.forecastinternational.com
The concept of using a booster repeatedly makes sense, especially if it drastically lowers the cost of placing a payload in orbit. Although a true RLV has not yet been fielded, those looking to stake a claim on the potentially lucrative space tourism market plan to take a step in that direction.
With a new strike platform, manned or unmanned, unlikely to emerge before the next decade, the ability of long-range, high-speed missiles to extend reach and survivability of current aircraft and warships is drawing increased attention.
Compared to 2008, Italian airports in 2009 lost 3% of passenger traffic or 130 million passengers and had a 6% decline in aircraft movements (100,000 fewer), while cargo traffic decreased more than 17%. According to preliminary analysis, airports reported 1.5 million aircraft movements. The Alitalia group led with 245,000 takeoffs/landings, followed by Lufthansa-Swiss International Air Lines with 120,000 and Ryanair with 117,000.
Heavy-lift launch vehicles of the type many believe will be a part of President Barack Obama’s long-awaited space policy—and in-space assembly techniques based on lessons from the Hubble Space Telescope—could enable NASA to deploy telescopes large enough to answer the eternal question, “Are we alone?” Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute , and John Grunsfeld, his newly named deputy and a three-time Hubble-servicing astronaut, say astronomers are on the cusp of technical advances that will cast their view back, literally, to the dawn of time.
Heavy use of military helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan is generating demand for improvements in performance, reliability, safety and survivability that will shape the future direction of rotorcraft research.
Labor rates play an increasingly significant role in aircraft maintenance planning. Some European airlines already take advantage of low costs in Asia for spot-buying wide-body checks, says Marcus Fromm, a Zurich-based maintenance consultant with Accenture. “There is not so much spot-buying for narrowbodies, except very selectively in Eastern Europe,” he says.
William Wrobel, a former Orbital Sciences Corp. executive who has been managing expendable space launches for NASA, will be the new director of the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. At Orbital, Wrobel was program director for the Taurus Launch Vehicle Program, which plans to launch cargo to the International Space Station from Wallops on the Taurus II rocket. Wrobel succeeds John Campbell, who retired at the end of last year.
Alternative energy will make news throughout the year, potentially headlined by a mid-year attempt by Switzerland’s Solar Impulse team to complete a 36-hr. “through-the-night” flight with the prototype of the solar-powered aircraft with which it plans to stage a round-the-world flight in 2012. While solar power seems best suited to long-endurance unmanned aircraft, battery-powered and hybrid-electric light aircraft are already coming on the market and small UAVs are demonstrating dramatic increases in persistence when converted to fuel-cell power.
Drag-reducing laminar flow is receiving increasing attention as designers strive to meet aggressive emissions-reduction targets for next-generation aircraft. Carmaker Honda will get a jump on the rest when it begins certification testing of the HondaJet light business jet this year.
Douglas Royce/Forecast International/www.forecastinternational.com
Deliveries of civil rotorcraft will decline sharply over the next few years as manufacturers suffer from a steep downward slope in demand caused by ongoing weakness in the world economy. The current downturn caps years of exceptional growth in a market that saw civil helicopter deliveries rise to more than 2,000 from a low of about 800 in 2002 in the six-year period that ended in 2008.
Boeing has started assembly of as many as 242 wing replacement sets for the A-10 at its Macon, Ga., facility. The $2-billion program is to continue through 2018. Completed wingsets are delivered as three wing sections and an installation kit to Hill AFB, Utah .
Michael Bruno (Washington), David A. Fulghum (Washington)
The U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review and the Fiscal 2011 budget will not be officially unveiled until next month, but much is already known about the Obama administration’s long-term security plans. While there may be interesting new areas of attention —such as cyber-security —two paradoxical themes will quickly emerge to dominate the blueprints: personnel and unmanned vehicles.
Amtrak may step up efforts to lure air travelers to the rails in advertising campaigns similar to the one it launched this month at Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Through March, O’Hare passengers depositing personal articles in the X-ray bins at security checkpoints will see Amtrak ads lining the bins. One reads, “Wear mismatched socks—we’ll never know” (see photo). Another , “Upgrade to Coach,” is a gentle put-down of crowded seating on airliners.
Access to advanced radar technology is a central factor in fighter competitions around the world. With active, electronically scanned arrays (AESA) available on all U.S. fighters, but subject to releasability restrictions, European and Russian competitors are rushing to catch up. The international retrofit market is also maturing, with at least two F-16 operators looking to upgrade their fleets with AESAs within the next two years, and both Northrop Grumman and Raytheon offering radars that can be installed in the field.
Rotorcraft manufacturers face the task of balancing meeting tougher environmental targets with fulfiliing customer demands for increased performance and improved safety—all at reduced operating costs. With two major players in civil helicopters, AgustaWestland and Eurocopter, Europe has a robust rotary-wing research program. The flagship, under the Clean Sky initiative, is the Green Rotorcraft technology demonstration.
International Space Station crewmembers are preparing for the arrival of the space shuttle Endeavour next month with a new pressurized node and their long-anticipated cupola. Expedition 22 flight engineer T.J. Creamer and Expedition commander Jeff Williams were to use the station’s robotic arm over the weekend to move a pressurized mating adaptor from the Unity node’s port side to the top of the Harmony node, to make room for the new Tranquility node, which will carry the seven-window cupola. Earlier, cosmonaut Maxim Suraev piloted his Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft on a 21-min.
