The U.S. Navy’s selection of a European airframe for the VH-71 presidential helicopter four years ago was a symbolic watershed. One former Pentagon official said the pick of a Lockheed Martin Corp.-led team using a platform built by the AgustaWestland unit of Italy’s Finmeccanica SpA. was “the most crystalline illustration of how the transatlantic industrial base should work.”
Unmanned air vehicles are to become a larger part of U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations with the launch of a competition to develop a small tactical unmanned aircraft system (Stuas) following an 18-month delay while the services hammered out differences in their requirements.
Belarus could become the first export customer for the Russian Almaz Antey S-400 (SA-21 Growler) surface-to-air missile system, according to Russian news agency RIA Novosti. It cites a senior air force official as suggesting the S-400 will be supplied as part of a broader agreement to create an integrated air defense network covering the two countries.
In contrast to Singapore Airlines’ unpaid leave actions, the restructuring of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore is leading to a recruitment drive for 400 managers, executives and technical officers. As of July 1, CAAS, which owns Singapore Changi Airport, will be split into the NewCo, which will act as Changi’s administrator, and NewCAA, which assumes responsibility as the city-state’s regulator of aviation safety, airworthiness, air traffic services and various administrative responsibilities.
Commercial and military aviators are not the only folks interested in birds. Fishermen want to find birds, not avoid them. Finding flocks of feeding birds, typically smaller than Canada geese, is critical for over-the-horizon location of schools of surface-feeding tuna. The birds congregate over the same bait that attracts the tuna. Visit a commercial fishing electronics trade show and you will find manufacturers touting their radars’ abilities to identify birds from many miles. Perhaps some of those algorithms could be applied to aviation radars.
NASA has chosen the Avcoat ablator system, which was used to protect Apollo capsules during reentry, as the thermal protection system for the Orion crew exploration vehicle. Made of silica fibers with an epoxy-novalic resin filled in a fiberglass-phenolic honeycomb, Avcoat was used both on Apollo and on select regions of the space shuttle in its earliest flights. It was put back into production for NASA to reevaluate.
EADS Chairman/CEO Louis Gallois says a decision by the U.K. to withdraw from Europe’s A400M airlifter program would be “a serious blow” to the multinational initiative, but “not necessarily a show-stopper.” Nevertheless, Gallois insists no effort will be spared to try and keep Britain in the program, noting that the U.K.’s technological contribution to the A400M is significant and that its 25 orders would be hard to replace.
I’m in Boeing’s P-8A Poseidon mission crew mock-up on the ground in Seattle. My tutor is a long-time P-3C veteran. Already I can see it’s nothing like my days and nights in a P-3A. There are no ashtrays full of cigarette butts or half-empty paper cups of the world’s worst coffee.
Singapore Airlines, extending cost-cutting measures it has already applied to senior managers, is asking pilots to take 3-4 days of unpaid leave each month. The local pilots’ association says the carrier is asking captains to take three days off per month and asking first officers to take four. And as of May 1, all of Singapore’s lower-level managers will be reducing the number of work days per month. Other employees, mostly cabin crew, are voluntarily taking leave without pay.
Michael A. Taverna (Venice, Italy), Andy Nativi (Long Beach, Calif.)
To regain its sea legs, Sea Launch is counting on increased operational efficiencies, plus a dose of financial and industrial restructuring and more realistic pricing.
Synthetic vision, a technology formerly available exclusively on big-ticket turbine-powered aircraft, is quickly expanding into the piston-powered aircraft fitted with digital cockpits. Cessna Aircraft announced Apr. 2 that Garmin’s Synthetic Vision Technology had received FAA certification for all G-1000-equipped Model 172 Skyhawks, 182 Skylanes and 206 Stationairs. It expects certification of the system on its Model 350 Corvalis and 400 Corvalis TT.
NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov and space tourist Charles Simonyi landed safely in their Soyuz spacecraft in the steppes of southern Kazakhstan at 2:16 a.m. CDT on Apr. 8. The Expedition 18 crewmembers undocked their Russian Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft from the International Space Station (ISS) at 10:55 p.m. Apr. 7.; the deorbit burn began at 1:24 a.m. Apr. 8. The landing site was shifted south because of poor conditions at the original target site, according to NASA.
Embraer says it is on track to win certification and begin deliveries of its Phenom 300 light jet in the second half of 2009. The Brazilian manufacturer has four aircraft in the flight-test program, and they have accumulated more than 300 flight hours; the full test scenario is expected to require 1,400 flight hours. To date the swept-wing aircraft have flown to 45,000 ft. and maximum cruise of Mach 0.78.
Missile defense backers are seizing on North Korea’s launch of another ballistic missile to stave off a Pentagon plan to massively overhaul the multibillion-dollar misdef program.
Boeing announced last week that the Royal Australian Air Force Wedgetail 737 Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft flying over Washington State in March were demonstrating simultaneous command and control of three ScanEagle unmanned aircraft systems. Airborne operators, via the UAS battle-management software, issued NATO-standard sensor and air-vehicle commands by means of a UHF satellite communication link and ground-station relay. The ScanEagles were launched from the Boardman Test Facility in eastern Oregon, about 120 mi. from the airborne Wedgetails.
Lockheed Martin was scheduled to roll out the first Terminal High Altitude Area Defense weapon system launcher and fire control system at the company’s Thaad launcher integration complex in Camden, N.J., on Apr. 13.
Unusual booking patterns are making it more difficult for airlines to gauge actual demand, further complicating efforts to deal with the huge fall in premium traffic and overall declines in passenger numbers and yields. “What people are not doing is booking 30-60-90 days out. They are deciding this week that they are going to go and make the booking and go,” says Airbus Chief Operating Officer for Customers John Leahy.
Rolls-Royce is completing the preliminary design review of the Trent XWB engine and has finalized the largest set of international partners ever put together to share risk and revenues for one of its commercial programs.
Asia’s largest carrier, Japan Airlines (JAL), is seeing the worldwide recession in passenger and air freight reflected in its books for the fiscal year ended Mar. 31. The carrier’s report for February’s activity shows a nearly six-point drop in international load factors to 66% from the previous period’s 71.8%. Passenger counts were off 16% to 896,118, revenue passenger kilometers (RPK) were down 17.4% to 3.9 million and capacity was off 10% to 5.9 million.
Charles Ingham suggests the shotgun method for bird clearing (AW&ST Mar. 16, p. 10). Here’s another: Back at Grumman on Long Island, N.Y., in 1979, a loudspeaker truck would patrol the runway perimeter, playing bird distress calls. I guess it worked as no accidents apparently occurred.
Japanese Space Agency JAXA has completed a 10-sec. captive firing test of the first stage for the H-IIB launcher that will be used to lift the H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) to the International Space Station. An enhanced version of JAXA’s H-IIA, the newer B launcher uses two Mitsubishi LE-7A liquid hydrogen/oxygen first-stage motors instead of the A’s single motor. The test required thickening the stage’s propellant tank, which Mitsubishi accomplished using friction-stir welding. The B launcher’s liftoff capacity will be 16.5 metric tons, up from 12 metric tons on the A.
Airbus is in talks with an airline to provide at least one high-capacity A380 to transport people to the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Airbus won’t identify the buyer, but says the configuration would be modeled on the 840-seat version that Air Austral plans to buy for use for the La Reunion-Paris route. Airbus hopes to close that deal for two A380s by year-end.
A report by the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense calls for adding space-based technology to the layered land-, air- and sea-based defense network, though President Barack Obama has said repeatedly that he opposes deploying weapons in space. The group, sponsored by think tanks including the George C. Marshall Institute and the Heritage Foundation, warns in its report that the U.S. could wind up like China’s Ming dynasty, which held a preeminent position in ocean navigation and exploration 600 years ago.
Application-specific integrated circuits are going the way of the Studebaker at NASA, at least when it comes to common spaceborne applications. Under its Communication, Navigation and Networking Reconfigurable Testbed (Connect) effort, the U.S. space agency is funding development of software-defined radios (SDRs) that can be reconfigured for different purposes quickly and relatively cheaply. Headed by a team at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Connect studies aim to test reconfigurable SDRs on the International Space Station beginning in 2011.
