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.
The Polish finance ministry says three entities have shown interest in acquiring a major stake in LOT Polish Airlines. Although the parties were not named, they include a private equity firm and at least one airline. Lufthansa and Air France-KLM appear to be sitting out the bidding. Meanwhile, LOT says it now plans to receive five of its eight ordered Boeing 787s in 2012, four years later than first planned.
Boeing has inked a $34-million contract with Oto Melara, a Finmeccanica Group member, to co-produce the Small Diameter Bomb Increment I (SDB I) weapon system for the Italian air force. The co-production project is a follow-on to prior joint collaborations between the companies, including production of about 1,000 Joint Direct Attack Munition tail kits for the air force. The U.S. company also is providing technical backing to establish a production facility in Italy.
Gulfstream’s new flagship, the G650, will be the largest, fastest and farthest-flying purpose-designed business jet when it enters service in 2012. Compared with the G550, which will continue in production, the aircraft has a longer and wider cabin, a high-speed wing with greater sweep and area, fly-by-wire flight controls and more-powerful Rolls-Royce BR725 engines. The G650 offers a 7,000-nm. range at Mach 0.85 and a maximum speed of Mach 0.925. The fuselage and wing are metal, and the horizontal stabilizer is a composite.
Qinetiq is aiming for a 14-day flight this summer with the initial production standard of Zephyr solar-powered high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aircraft. The latest—Zephyr 7—has several design refinements to increase efficiency and allow the air vehicle to maintain a higher cruise altitude at night, including a T-tail, greater chord on the inner wing section and ogive wing tips. Weighing less than 100 lb., the human-launched Zephyr is solar-powered by day and battery-powered by night. The earlier Zephyr 6 stayed aloft for almost 83 hr. in July 2009.
As the world struggles for ways to improve airport security, Israel has deployed a new biometric system for passenger screening at Ben-Gurion International Airport that signals a shift in the country’s long-standing security doctrine. Traditionally, Israel has focused heavily on human interaction between security personnel and passengers. But with the new system, dubbed Unipass, technology plays a greater role. This coincides with U.S. and European countries looking to more thoroughly embrace Israel’s approach to profiling and interrogating passengers .
Andrew Dardine/Forecast International/www.forecastinternational.com, Theresa Hartley/Forecast International/www.forecastinternational.com
The emergence of new tactical aircraft and upgrade of established platforms in the years ahead will be marked by the adoption of new electronic warfare systems critical to their survival and mission capabilities. In the U.S., EW systems will be important to the success of three jet fighter programs—the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), as well as a number of military transports and tactical rotorcraft.
