Amy Butler (Washington), David A. Fulghum (Washington)
The U.S. Army has restarted efforts to field a modern Aerial Common Sensor (ACS) intelligence aircraft via increments, three years after halting Lockheed Martin’s work to cram it onto a too-small Embraer ERJ 145. “We’ve taken lessons learned in ACS 1 . . . and we figure we are not going to stick our finger in the light socket twice,” says Army ACS Project Manager Col. Rob Carpenter, who managed the termination of that contract. The forthcoming ACS will have room for payload growth, correcting a major shortcoming of the Lockheed Martin proposal.
Northrop Grumman plans to validate swept-wing laminar flow control, a key technology for its proposed high-altitude SensorCraft reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicle concept, on the Scaled Composites WhiteKnightOne (WK1) carrier aircraft.
A light, wireless radio under development here by BAE Systems can compress as many as five stealthy conversations into the same time and frequency slot and then, on arrival, untangle them. Equally important, while in transit, messages and data packages are seemingly hopelessly mixed, to the point of sounding like static. The chance of intercepting even the digital gibberish is unlikely, since foes or potential adversaries don’t have the receiver technology to sort through such high levels of interferences.
John Young, the Pentagon’s acquisition czar, is peeved with Northrop Grumman over the full-page ad it placed in The Washington Post promoting its offering for the next Air Force tanker competition. Northrop Grumman and rival Boeing are supposed to be observing a “cooling off” period while the Air Force evaluates requirements for the replacement aircraft.
For a low-cost carrier that has shunned overly congested airports, Southwest’s $7.5-million bid to get ATA Airlines’ 14 arrival and departure slots at New York’s LaGuardia Airport seems like a big departure.
CEOs are optimistic on the near-term outlook for the defense market, noting that long lead times in the budget process mean Obama won’t put his imprint on spending until 2010. Even then, they believe, a robust threat environment around the globe will prevent any large-scale cuts. “It’s not an occasion to put a chain saw to the defense budget,” said L-3 Communications CEO Michael Strianese at the A&D conference.
I agree with James C. McLane, 3rd, on the “astonishing lack of discussion on the option to continue flying the space shuttle past 2010 in an unmanned or minimally crewed configuration” (AW&ST Aug. 18/25, p. 12). The idea of abandoning the shuttle concept for a more risky launch and recovery system seems to be a step backward. As McLane also states: “No machine being planned has the capabilities of the shuttle, and there seems little reason to believe any replacement vehicle will be significantly more reliable.”
Israel Aerospace Industries says its third-quarter financial figures are up compared to the same period in 2007. Net profit is $16 million. Sales increased 10% to $877 million. Sales for the first three quarters are up 17% to $2.8 billion. A two-year sales backlog has reached $7.4 billion.
An Air New Zealand Boeing 747-400 is scheduled to take off from Auckland on Dec. 3 on the first flight to use a sustainably produced biofuel replacement for petroleum-based jet fuel. The flight is being touted as a high-profile demonstration of the rapid progress in developing biofuels that meet or exceed the specifications for aviation kerosene.
Michael Stradiot has become sales manager for motor technology for the Circor Aerospace Products Group , Dayton, Ohio. He was director of sales for Barrington Automation.
Italy’s special operations forces will be equipped with a mini-unmanned aircraft, called the Strix, following evaluations using only a small number of early production units. The vehicle relies on an electric motor powered by lithium batteries, giving it a low noise footprint. The batteries currently allow 1.5-hr. endurance, with work underway to stretch that to 2 hr. 15 min., according to Alpi Aviation.
The Pentagon may be moving toward using more fixed-price incentive contracts for development programs. This is part of an effort to boost performance and keep costs down for programs, says James Finley, principal deputy Defense undersecretary for acquisition and technology. In recent years, the Defense Dept. has used fixed-price and cost-plus contracts, but has seen neither as terribly effective in controlling cost. Finley made his comments last week at the Aerospace & Defense (A&D) Finance Conference hosted by Credit Suisse and AVIATION WEEK in New York.
Airlines are reviewing their fuel hedging policies and being driven to use more sophisticated financial instruments after huge fluctuations in oil prices during the past two years exposed the weaknesses of earlier approaches.
An easing of jet fuel prices has prompted Japan Airlines to reduce its fuel surcharges beginning Jan. 1. Japanese fares are regulated, so JAL must receive approval from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. The carrier took action because the average for Singapore kerosene from August through October was $115.92 per barrel, well down from the $163.54 per barrel average of the previous three-month period.
First flight of the Orion crew exploration vehicle atop an Ares I launcher could advance by as much as a year with an additional flight test, extra shifts at the new J-2X rocket engine factory, faster work on life-support systems and other steps, NASA managers say. Accelerating Ares/Orion to shorten the gap in U.S. human space access after the shuttle retires will cost money, of course. But NASA is starting to zero in on just how it would spend any money the incoming Obama administration and the new Congress might allocate to the job.
The U.S. Navy is hoping to reprogram about $40 million in its Fiscal 2009 budget to provide advance procurement funding for three F-35 carrier variant aircraft, according to a senior defense official. The funding was stripped from the budget by Congress earlier this year.
A United Airlines Boeing 777 saved 1,564 gal. of fuel and cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 32,656 lb. on a single flight over the Pacific from Sydney to San Francisco on Nov. 14. The aircraft was participating in a program called the Asia and South Pacific Initiative to Reduce Emissions (Aspire), and it employed 11 fuel-saving techniques. The demonstration spotlighted what might be possible when new procedures allow improvements from gate to gate (during taxi, takeoff, climb, cruise and descent).
The Planetary Society’s call for the U.S. to consider skipping a return to the Moon in favor of manned asteroid missions, as the prelude to manned exploration of Mars, is drawing criticism in some quarters, but not from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin (AW&ST Nov. 17, p. 29). “The architecture we are building is explicitly designed to allow missions not only to the Moon, but also the near-Earth, the Lagrange Points, the moons of Mars and, later, Mars itself. The Moon is hardly our sole focus; it is properly our next step, but not our last,” Griffin says.
Sea Launch and Intelsat have signed an umbrella launch contract covering five missions from Sea Launch’s mobile equatorial launch platform that will be conducted from late 2010 through 2012. The move continues a trend set by SES, which last year signed separate five-launch agreements with International Launch Services and Arianespace. Sea Launch has performed eight successful missions for Intelsat, including Galaxy 18 and Galaxy 19 this year.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed vast Martian glaciers of water ice under protective blankets of rocky debris at much lower latitudes than any ice previously identified on the red planet. Scientists analyzed data from the spacecraft’s ground-penetrating radar and report in the Nov. 21 issue of the journal Science that buried glaciers extend for dozens of miles from edges of mountains or cliffs.
NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory has arrived at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., for final preparations prior to its scheduled January launch on board an Orbital Sciences Taurus rocket. Built by OSC and dedicated to the study of carbon dioxide and the carbon cycle in Earth’s atmosphere, OCO will be launched into a 438-mi.-high near-polar Sun-synchronous orbit inclined 98.2 deg. to the equator. From there it will map the globe once every 16 days, flying in formation with five other spacecraft in the NASA-led A-Train constellation.
The Italian government has approved the takeover of Alitalia by a consortium of Italian investors (CAI). Both the economic development minister, Claudio Scajola, and Augusto Fantozzi, the state-appointed commissar running Alitalia, backed the deal that should see Alitalia merged with Air One, reborn as a smaller company.
Sales in the maintenance, repair and overhaul industry will decline 5-10% in 2009 as airlines defer maintenance and reduce parts inventories to save cash, predicts AeroStrategy principal Kevin Michaels. But he ultimately sees a strong rebound in the market. The global airline industry won’t start growing again until the fourth quarter of 2009, predicts Goodrich CEO Marshall Larsen. Next year “is going to be a correction year before we start stabilizing and moving upward,” he says. Both spoke at the A&D conference.
It appears that not all air travelers are created equal—or have equal flying experiences. During the rollout last week at the Transportation Dept. of initiatives on airport slot auctions, passenger rights and air traffic control modernization (see p. 36), President George W. Bush said as far as he’s concerned, the department has already done a great job. After all, he quipped, for the last eight years he hasn’t seen a single traffic jam, been on a delayed flight or had his baggage lost.
