Jennifer Wapenski is a 24-year-old aerospace engineer with Boeing, working on the Commercial Airplanes 747 production line. And her story may serve as a helpful case study for aerospace and defense companies seeking to attract young talent. “If you ask my parents, they knew I was going to be an engineer from the day I was born,” laughs Wapenski. “I was [my dad’s] first copilot. He built an airplane in our garage, so I bucked a lot of rivets. I just had a lot of exposure to building things.”
The Phoenix Mars lander will begin the second half of August ready for a new series of samples for its wet-chemistry and organic-detection instruments from recently groomed or newly dug trenches. Over the week of Aug. 11, controllers here have used the robotic arm to enlarge the Cupboard Trench along the right side of the lander, and also to deepen a trench designated Burn Alive. All trenches and samples are named, and mission managers are stressing the importance of keeping these straight.
The fact that it has taken the FAA 12 years to figure out its new rule about center wing fuel tanks is one indication of its priority and the danger of the situation being addressed (AW&ST July 21, p. 47). Said another way, the FAA is either incompetent or dealing with a very minor issue. It cannot even seem to get it own data correctly massaged.
Because of the time and money required to develop satellites, and the costs and risks in launching them, Darpa is trying to change the way we think about space. The agency is focusing on demonstrating technology for quicker, cheaper launches of smaller satellites that can cooperate in orbit.
Concerned that executive pensions may be funneled through regular employee plans, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (Speea) has asked Boeing to disclose the extent and funding source of the company’s executive pension plans. Funneling executive pensions through regular employees’ plans weakens those plans, Speea says.
Supersonic flying wings with variable sweep, rotors that slow or stop in flight, aircraft that maneuver by changing shape, vehicles that cruise hypersonically or loiter indefinitely—all are taking shape as Darpa pushes the edge of the envelope in aeronautics.
The fate of a joint transatlantic business agreement among American Airlines, British Airways and Iberia is now in the hands of the regulators. The carriers announced their deal on Aug. 14, so now U.S. and European officials will decide how many slots—if any—the airlines will have to give up at London Heathrow Airport.
The Bush administration hopes to push through some permanent export control reforms before leaving Washington in January, says John Rood, acting undersecretary of State for arms control and international security. The Senate could vote on whether to adopt agreements designed to ease technology transfer with the U.K. and Australia as soon as September, he says. The treaties will allow contractors to sell products to those two nations and bypass the traditional export control process. The U.K.
Italy plans to procure a small batch of Predator B medium-altitude endurance UAVs, but is struggling to define how to meet its longer-term unmanned reconnaissance needs.
Intense radiation from clusters of newborn stars shapes the nebula walls in this Hubble Space Telescope image collected Aug. 10 to commemorate the observatory’s 100,000th orbit. Astronomers believe a nearby supernova sparked this hotbed of star birth near the Tarantula nebula, some 170,000 light-years from Earth, at the star cluster NGC 2074 (upper left). The image takes in a region some 100 light-years wide, 20 times the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri, the nearest star.
A number of bold steps, including abolishing the National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center should be taken to shake up ineffective military space procurement and operations structures, a national commission recommends, warning that this is becoming an increasingly vulnerable area for the Pentagon.
Back in the Cold War, the Pentagon published an annual series of articles, “Soviet Military Power,” that sensationalized the threat and capabilities of the Red Army, to justify its own claim on budget appropriations. Following the Soviet implosion, the U.S. military-industrial complex seized on China as the convenient new villain, with its periodic provocations across the Taiwan Strait and non-transparent defense spending. The articles by David A. Fulghum and Douglas Barrie (AW&ST July 21, pp. 54-60) may have served this interest group’s ulterior motive.
Are U.S. airlines positioning themselves to make money again next year? A growing body of optimists thinks that’s plausible if the recent easing of oil prices holds. They believe sharp capacity cuts will enable airlines to keep raising fares, supplemented with revenue from annoying surcharges on checked luggage, soft drinks and even pillows. Factor in savings from the parking of older, gas-guzzling jets and you have a recipe for recovery. Morgan Stanley analyst William J.
Under Darpa’s Quiet Supersonic Platform program, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in 2000 began studying a long-range aircraft with low sonic boom allowing unrestricted supersonic flight over land. In August 2003, Northrop’s Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstrator, an extensively modified F-5, proved that an aircraft could be designed to shape its shockwave signature and so reduce the sonic boom.
The National Business Aviation Association reports selling out all 5,305 exhibit booth spaces for its Oct. 6-8 annual meeting in Orlando, Fla. More than 30,000 people are expected to attend. Meanwhile, President Ed Bolen says the success the Inaugural Light Business Airplane Exhibition and Conference, set for San Diego, Mar. 12-14, 2009, will be defined by national attendance by current operators and concept buyers.
A new digital cockpit for the B-2 is being designed and built by Northrop Grumman and Rockwell Collins. A prototype has been tested as the first step toward fielding a smarter, higher resolution display to support bomber modernization. The idea is to ease pilot workload, increase mission effectiveness and ensure the aircraft remains survivable against improving air defense threats.
The JAL Group is initiating trials of User Preferred Route flights to Hawaii in a drive it says could save 3.4 million lb. of fuel and 4,700 lb. of CO2 annually. The group is acting based on improved satellite navigation systems and ongoing safety audits begun last November by the Japanese ministry of land, infrastructure, transport and tourism. Led by Japan Airlines, the group flies 4,700 one-way flights to Hawaii a year, making it one of JAL’s most popular overseas destinations. Flights between Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya to Honolulu and Kona will be affected.
Lufthansa and Air France-KLM are the frontrunners in the bidding for the privatization of financially struggling Austrian Airlines. The Austrian government last week pushed through plans to sell the airline to a strategic investor. State holding OEIAG hopes to conclude the process by year-end. The airline could retain 25% plus one share, the ruling coalition’s two parties agree. But this could change as bidders hone their demands.
Erin Marie Hammons, a senior at the University of Nebraska, is among five summer interns at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who have received John Mather Nobel Scholarships from The Henry Foundation Inc. Funding for the $3,000 scholarships originated from a contribution from the John and Jane Mather Foundation for Science and the Arts, which in turn was funded from the award of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics to Mather. Hammons is a systems engineering intern for the ExPRESS Logistics Carrier at NASA Goddard.
A review of Darpa’s research portfolio suggests its ideal sensor has the range of radar and resolution of electro-optics, can see through trees and walls to track vehicles and people and is small enough to fit into an unmanned aircraft.
Alliance Spacesystems has delivered a prototype robotic arm to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) that could be used to repair satellites in orbit or tow them to new orbits. The Pasadena, Calif.-based company, a unit of Canada’s MDA, developed the arm, related electronics and first-level control algorithms as part of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency’s Front-end Robotics Enabling Near-term Demonstration (Frend) program, which will work with NRL to mount the prototype arm on a spacecraft for on-orbit demonstrations “later in the decade.”
Darpa and the Air Force funded a program to demonstrate that a highly unstable aircraft with forward-swept wing and close-coupled canard could be flown to extreme angles of attack. Grumman was awarded the contract to build two X-29 demonstrators, the first flying in December 1984. The X-29 demonstrated advanced digital flight controls and aeroelastic tailoring of the wing using composites.
The Pratt & Whitney geared turbofan (GTF) looks like a great engine, but it is far from being an innovation. The first GTF engines ran during World War II in Germany (Heinkel S-10 and Daimler-Benz DB007), but never flew. The first GTF to fly, Turbomeca Aspin, did so on Jan. 2, 1952. The first to enter production did so in 1966 (Turbomeca Aubisque, which was not built for long, and only in small quantities).
The Air Force and Darpa began a program to develop a stealthy battlefield surveillance aircraft with a low-probability-of-intercept radar, and in 1977 Northrop was awarded a contract to build the Tacit Blue demonstrator. First flown in February 1982, Tacit Blue contributed to development of the B-2 bomber. Later, Darpa’s Teal Dawn program would develop key technologies for the stealthy AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile.
