AgustaWestland has agreed to a collaborative deal with Oboronprom Corp. to jointly sell, support and perhaps build helicopters for the Russian and world markets. The deal, which also includes Loyd’s Investments Corp., initially would involve the purchase of up to €450 million ($706.5 million) worth of AW109, AW119 and AW139 helicopters for resale in Russia and neighboring countries. The acquisition of 10 aircraft worth €65 million is already under contract.
The U.S. Transportation Dept. on May 22 finalized its tentative decision to grant antitrust immunity that will let SkyTeam members Delta, Northwest, Air France, Alitalia, Czech Airlines and KLM coordinate their transatlantic fares, services and capacity as if they were a single carrier in that market.
Darryl M. Fraser (see photo) has become corporate vice president-communications for the Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp. He succeeds Rosanne O’Brien, who will be retiring. Fraser has been vice president-business development and strategic initiatives for the company’s Mission Systems Sector.
Mark McGraw, Vice President/Manager, Boeing Tanker Programs (St. Louis, Mo.)
As a company with decades of proven performance in meeting America’s aerial refueling needs, we at Boeing were dismayed to read the Viewpoint by Jerry W. Cox saying the tanker offered by an unproven U.S.-European team was better-suited to address the evolving needs of the warfighter (AW&ST May 12, p. 66). It doesn’t add up.
Zane Rowe has been appointed executive vice president/chief financial officer of Continental Airlines . He has been senior vice president-network strategy and succeeds Jeff Misner, who will be retiring Aug. 31.
Airlines operating out of Sacramento (Calif.) International Airport could see their per-passenger fees rise to $14 from $5 over the next eight years to cover a $1.27-billion terminal modernization program. In a preliminary move, the city’s Board of Supervisors unanimously voted for the rate change. The program includes a new overnight parking space for aircraft, a taxiway and a landside terminal, as well as a Federal Inspection Station in the airside concourse.
Embraer has selected Honeywell to provide the auxiliary power unit for its new Legacy 450/500. Honeywell had already been picked to provide the HTF7500E powerplant for the twinjets (see p. 36).
John C. Sorensen has been appointed vice president/treasurer and Richard C. Forsberg promoted to assistant vice president from director of aerospace contracts management-Aerospace for the Kaman Corp. , Bloomfield, Conn. Sorensen held the same positions at the Visant Corp., Armonk, N.Y. He succeeds Russell H. Jones, who has retired.
Hank Driesse has been named interim head of the defense business of the ITT Corp. , White Plains, N.Y. He succeeds Steve Gaffney, who has left the company.
Be careful what you wish for. During a Senate Appropriations hearing, Patty Murray (D-Wash.) tried repeatedly to get Defense Secretary Robert Gates to concede the Air Force was off base when it picked the Northrop Grumman-EADS team over Boeing in the replacement refueling tanker competition. Murray and other lawmakers from states with large Boeing constituencies have been complaining the selection process was unfair.
Pat Hassey spent much of his career railing against the use of composite materials as a substitute for aluminum. But today, the 62-year-old metals industry CEO can be heard expounding on how the increased use of composites in next-generation aircraft is going to make his shareholders a lot of money.
Lawmakers with an interest in NASA hope to use the agency’s Fiscal 2009 authorization bill as a road map for U.S. civil space policy. The legislation, now wending its way through Congress, would authorize a boost in NASA spending to prevent the Bush administration’s human spaceflight program from eating up funds needed in other areas. It also would target extra money to close the “gap” between the end of space shuttle flights and the first flights of the follow-on human vehicles now in development.
Jerry W. Cox’s global arguments are valid, but where is the global support going to come from? In 1955-57, I was stationed in Japan as a Marine aviator. We were flying North American, Douglas, McDonnell and Lockheed aircraft and operating Raytheon radars, and had on-site support from each company. In the late 1960s, I was operating Boeing 727s at Eastern Airlines. It was about this time that Pratt & Whitney decided that an aircraft on the ground with an engine problem no longer warranted the expense of a P&W engineer on site.
The tiltrotor design depicted for Boeing’s JCALS concept would be mechanically simpler and better performing if it were redesigned as a tiltwing configuration (AW&ST May 12, p. 29). Use of the tiltrotor configuration for advanced vertical-takeoff-or-landing aircraft is the result of a prejudice from early tiltwing experiments that employed high-disk-loading prop-rotors for propulsion. Since then, the tiltwing concept has been linked with high disk loading and tiltrotor with low disk loading.
HondaJet has started its sales drive in Europe and named Honda Formula 1 driver Jenson Button as the first customer; he’s to receive his aircraft in 2012. Meanwhile, HondaJet is starting to build up the support infrastructure for the aircraft’s arrival in Europe. It identified the first members of the sales and support network last week: TAG Aviation in the U.K., Rheinland Air Services in Germany and Aviastec in Spain.
The French Assembly defense committee says it will move to amend a white paper that is planned to reorient France’s defense priorities in light of new threats and budget realities. In particular, the committee will urge changes to reflect a greater focus on air mobility, and less on complex hardware such as digital battlefield systems.
Switzerland’s Skyguide air navigation service provider and France’s DSNA are both acquiring Comsoft of Germany’s Mesange system for transmitting and receiving aeronautical information. They plan to use it starting in about a year to handle growing traffic. DSNA manages 2.9 million instrument flights annually and Skyguide, 1.23 million. Mesange will carry messages on the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunication Network using the new ICAO/Eurocontrol protocol for international air traffic service message handling.
Product upgrades, such as the range-extension of the Falcon 900EX, are taking center stage at Dassault Aviation right now, as the aircraft maker continues to confine its work on its next aircraft, the SMS, to quiet engineering efforts and talks with potential suppliers.
The National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) will continue development of the software interface and validate the ergonomic design of an Advanced Cockpit Ground Control Station (ACGCS) for UAVs, under contract to the U.S. Air Force and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. NIAR’s Human Factors Lab is helping to improve the operation of the control station, which features multiple keyboards, input devices and displays that have increased operator workload, says Alex Chaparro, director of the lab.
Commercial aerospace in the U.K. in recent months has been taking hits from all sides: various hues of green activism, tax increases and the first-day debacle at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. On the environmental front, the industry is now grouped under the banner of “Sustainable Aviation,” mapping out a plan for the coming decades. This long-term three-pillared approach addresses economic and social benefits while trying to minimize environmental impacts.
Both Boeing and EADS/Northrop-Grumman tanker offerings will perform the Air Force tanker mission. I take exception to the comment that the Boeing offering is a “Frankentanker” and is a higher development risk.
A trio of potential multibillion-dollar deals could reshape the fragmented air charter sector as fractional ownership pioneer NetJets has influenced bizjet ownership. The biggest—a $2.5-billion financing scheme announced here last week—promises to propel XOJet, a little-known California-based operator, almost overnight onto the global stage. The bulk of the financing, through a mix of debt and equity, is being supplied by Tasameem, an Abu Dhabi real estate investment concern, which will acquire a small stake.
George C. Nield has been promoted to associate administrator from deputy associate administrator of the FAA ’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
As oil prices marched inexorably upward during the past four years, conventional wisdom held that costly crude helped boost demand for aircraft by encouraging airlines to replace their gas-guzzlers with new jets that are less expensive to operate. But with oil topping $135 a barrel and airlines hunkered down in survival mode, one group of analysts thinks prices have reached the tipping point from being a stimulant of aircraft demand to being a drag.
