Hainan Airlines’ owner is strengthening its position in the major port city of Tianjin while separately moving into the Indonesian domestic market. Grand China Express, the group’s Tianjin-based short-haul unit, will be renamed Tianjin Airlines as part of a deal under which the city government will become the major shareholder.
Elbit Systems of America and General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products have formed a joint venture—UAS Dynamics—to provide unmanned aerial systems for the U.S. Defense Dept. and other potential U.S. government customers through such programs as the Navy/Marine Corps’ Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System (STUAS)/Tier II. The intention is to use new platforms to fill operational gaps via intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities that range in size and scope from hand-held and tactical level systems to medium-altitude, long-endurance systems.
This year’s Paris air show will once again manage to log its obligatory firsts and deliver record exhibitor numbers, but that is not to say the biannual industry gathering is immune from the severe economic downturn that has gripped much of the air transport industry.
April ended badly for the U.S. airline industry, which is seeing a continuing decline in passenger and cargo traffic, according to the Air Transport Assn. Compared with the same month in 2008, passenger revenues were off 18%, marking the sixth consecutive month demand has declined. The number of passengers flown in April decreased 6.3% compared with April 2008, and price per seat mile, 12.6%.
The U.S. government’s Export-Import Bank has stepped in to help struggling Textron by authorizing a $500-million loan to enable the company to finance international sales of its Cessna aircraft and Bell helicopters. The loan covers deliveries to the end of 2010, and Ex-Im will replenish Textron’s coffers every month based on demonstrated export sales. Textron approached Ex-Im because it was unable to raise funds in the capital markets at competitive rates.
A decade-long debate about strengthening rules for commercial air crew flight and duty time is likely to take center stage with the confirmation of former Air Line Pilots Assn. President J. Randolph Babbitt to run the FAA.
Astronauts and engineers here are building on 19 years of experience servicing the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit as they ponder what it will take to maintain outposts on the Moon and ships en route to Mars.
NASA’s rover project team plans to use the same simulated Martian soil material employed by the Phoenix Lander team in 2008, to help develop an escape maneuver for the Spirit rover, which is bogged down in the planet’s soft surface. Operations with Spirit were suspended on May 7 when signals showed the left middle wheel was jammed and the other wheels were dug into the surface up to their hubs.
BMI majority shareholder Sir Michael Bishop has launched legal action to force Lufthansa to complete the takeover of the British airline. Lufthansa Chief Financial Officer Stefan Gemkow said last week that BMI is not in the financial shape it should be, giving the German carrier the option to walk away from the deal. Lufthansa wants Bishop to put another $140 million into the airline. Last October, he exercised a contractual clause forcing Lufthansa to buy his stake of 50% plus one share in BMI.
Schwartz also says it is a “serious question” whether the U.S will want its next nuclear bomber to be an unmanned platform. In response to an AVIATION WEEK question at a Center for Strategic and International Studies forum, the chief also said it seemed unlikely that transport aircraft could be as humanless as some combat-oriented systems have become. But Schwartz maintained that the U.S. military is at a turning point toward unmanned aircraft overall. A new long-range strike platform will be discussed during the pending Quadrennial Defense and Nuclear Posture reviews.
Seeking only modest growth in aeronautics funding over the next five years, NASA nonetheless is carving out money from an already limited budget to launch a “green aviation” initiative to accelerate the transfer of promising technologies to industry. The agency plans to launch the Integrated Systems Research Program (ISRP) in Fiscal 2010 to bring together technologies developed in its Fundamental Aeronautics program and conduct more realistic testing to evaluate their benefits. This could mean more flight-testing of advances.
As the Air Force looks to fundamentally overhaul its electronic warfare spending plans, it is starting to explore how much longer its EC-130H Compass Call electronic attack aircraft can remain in service and how the fleet might be replaced.
Recently, various elements of Airbus’s industrial setup/approach have been called into question. In this magazine, Pierre Sparaco highlighted some key trends that characterize our aerospace industry today (AW&ST Mar. 30, p. 62):
Thales has a new chief executive and new major shareholder, now that Dassault Aviation has completed the deal to buy Alcatel-Lucent’s 20.8% share in the defense and aerospace electronics company. Dassault already owned 5% in Thales. The deal closed on May 20. As part of the transaction, Denis Ranque was forced out as Thales chairman and CEO. He has been succeeded by Luc Vigneron, who was head of Nexter, a French military ground vehicles company.
The first Obama space budget almost certainly means NASA will not be able to return humans to the Moon by 2020, the agency’s acting administrator said last Tuesday, although he backed away from flatly predicting a delay in another Capitol Hill appearance two days later. “Clearly, the situation as it stands right now means we couldn’t do the program of record—putting humans on the Moon by 2020,” acting Administrator Chris Scolese told House lawmakers May 19. But on May 21 he was telling senators only that it would be “a challenge.”
A string of Indonesian military aircraft accidents has culminated in the deaths of at least 101 people in a Lockheed C-130H crash in East Java. The plane crashed on approach to the Iswahyudi AFB, having flown from Jakarta. The 112 passengers were military personnel and their families. Among the dead were an air marshal (one of the top officers of the air force) and two people on the ground. Survivors heard at least two explosions and felt the 1980s-built aircraft swaying just before the crash, according to the Associated Press.
Southwest Airlines on May 20 announced intentions to start service from Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport “late this year.” The carrier (stock symbol: LUV) plans to release specifics about the service in the coming months. Southwest indicated only that it will offer multiple destinations from MKE following its launch of other new services to New York LaGuardia on June 28 and Boston Logan International Airport on Aug. 16.
The largest rocket parachutes ever fabricated worked as planned in this drop test May 20 at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, demonstrating that the three-chute package probably will be able to ease the first stage of NASA’s Ares I crew exploration vehicle back into the ocean for reuse. The parachutes will get a more realistic test during the Ares I-X prototype suborbital flight test this fall (AW&ST Mar. 23, p. 36), but on their first outing they functioned properly in a drop out the back of a U.S. Air Force C-17 at 10,000 ft.
The arrival of two Boeing 737-800s at American Airlines in March signaled the beginning of an ambitious fleet overhaul, as American prepares to take delivery of nearly 120 long-haul and narrow-body aircraft and update its 757s and 767s for new roles.
Raytheon has awarded MathMoveU bonus award scholarships to 30 high school seniors and college undergraduates who are pursuing majors in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. The recipients were chosen from the pool of 900 students who previously received the company-sponsered MathMoveU middle school scholarship. Each bonus winner will receive a $20,000 scholarship.
Testing of the General Electric Rolls-Royce F136 alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has resumed at GE’s Evendale, Ohio, altitude test facility following modifications to the bearing system. Tests were halted on engine 625-004 in late February after debris was detected in the oil system due to reduced clearance in one of the main bearings. Tests of engine -005 are expected to begin at USAF’s Arnold Engineering Development Center, Tenn., in mid-June. Lockheed Martin plans to fly the first F136-powered F-35 in February 2011.
Singapore Airlines is disposing of its ground service company, Singapore Air Terminal Services. The airline is not selling the business, however, in contrast to carriers elsewhere that have scrambled to raise cash through asset sales. Comfortable with its cash position, Singapore Airlines is instead handing its stake in Singapore Air Terminal Services to its shareholders, allotting stock in proportion to their stakes in the airline.
Astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis took a small amount of time from their work servicing the Hubble Space Telescope to tend a commercial drug experiment aimed at finding a vaccine against a deadly staph infection that plagues hospital patients. The astronauts turned a crank in one of the middeck lockers twice during the mission, once to mix liquids in test tubes inside a triple-redundant containment cylinder to start the experiment, and once to inject a fixative to halt it.
For American Airlines, this decade has been defined by a relentless procession of external shocks that have rocked the entire industry. But the airline is proving that even the worst short-term crises cannot distract it from its long-term goals. While many carriers would claim this philosophy, few have adhered to it as tightly as American. This in large part explains why the airline has taken a markedly different approach to problems shared by all of the network majors.
