Jim Zarvos (see photo) has been appointed senior vice president of St. Louis-based Midcoast Aviation and head of MRO and refurbishment activities at its Savannah (Ga.) Air Center. He will continue as head of satellite operations. Dave Smith has been promoted to vice president-MRO satellite operations.
Thales Alenia Space and Orbital Sciences Corp. will supply a new telecom satellite, Koreasat 6, for Korea Telecom. Thales Alenia will be responsible for integrating, testing and launching the spacecraft and ground segment, and will supply the payload. OSC will supply a Star 2 satellite bus for the 30-transponder Ku-band spacecraft.
China will push its new civil aircraft company to operate commercially, even though the manufacturer will surely need some kind of subsidy to get its proposed large airliner to market. The demand for a competitive, market-driven performance from Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China (CACC) has come from the very top of the government. Premier Wen Jiabao, speaking at the inauguration of the company on May 11, made clear that the project would in no way be an engineers’ playground.
The European Aviation Safety Agency, Mexico, India and Saudi Arabia have certified the Hawker Beechcraft 750 business jet. FAA certification was issued in February.
Singapore Airlines would be pleased to consider reasonable offers for the 49% stake in “underperforming” Virgin Atlantic that it bought in 1999 for £600 million, says Chief Executive Chew Choon Seng. Analysts say the Southeast Asian carrier has never been able to exercise as much control over Virgin Atlantic as it would have liked.
A shortage of skilled labor is a growing concern at Airbus, and management worries it could undermine the company’s program execution and efforts to meet strong market demand. “We need to enhance the skills training, knowledge management and succession planning across all our teams,” says Airbus CEO Tom Enders.
Kizuna, Japan’s high-speed Internet satellite, has achieved another world record by establishing a direct 1.2-Gbps. connection with a 2.4-meter (7.87-ft.) ground antenna. The connection was made on May 5, by combining two 622-Mbps. links to create 1.2-Gbps. connections for both uplink and downlink between Kizuna—also known as Winds (wideband internetworking engineering test and demonstration satellite)—and a mobile vehicle-mounted antenna in Kagoshima. Winds is still in the midst of initial instrument checkout, which is scheduled to end late in June.
Air Arabia—the first and largest budget carrier in the Middle East and North Africa—has reported a first-quarter net profit of 78 million United Arab Emirates dirhams ($21.2 million), an 81% increase compared to the first quarter of 2007. Passenger traffic increased 31%, to 757,000 passengers, and the average load factor was up 2%, to 85%. “The uncertainty of high oil prices as well as increasing inflation rates puts an additional challenge on the air transport sector across the globe,” says CEO Adel Ali.
Russia and Canada are to develop a turboshaft variant of the P&WC PW127 to power the Mil Mi-38 medium-lift helicopter. A memorandum of understanding covering development and production of the PW127TS was signed May 15 between Russian Helicopters Corp., the Ufa-based engine manufacturer UMPO, the Central Institute of Aero Engines and Pratt & Whitney Canada. Russian certification of the PW127TS engine is planned for 2011, with the Mi-38 to enter service in 2012.
Bombardier has chosen the 6,100-lb.-thrust Pratt & Whitney Canada PW307B turbofan to power its all-composite Learjet 85 business jet. The engine is a derivative of the PW307A that powers Dassault’s Falcon 7X trijet, and a member of the same family as the PW305A in the Learjet 60. Advanced features include an increased-flow “shock-management” fan, Talon low-emissions combustor, powered-metal high-pressure turbine disks and a DC brushless starter/generator supplied by Innovative Power Solutions, says Bombardier.
Lest anyone underestimate the importance of leasing companies, Boeing passed two milestones last week: It delivered its 300th jet—a 737-900ER —to GE Commercial Aviation Services for lease to XL Airways of the U.K. And it delivered its 400th 737, an -800, to Prague-based Travel Service, an International Lease Finance Corp. customer. Gecas has placed 433 orders with Boeing; ILFC has 769.
Important tests loom for the new composite-fuselage approach that Airbus has embraced for the A350XWB wide-body transport, with the aim of optimizing design and manufacturing processes.
George Saling, who is director of aviation services for Philip Morris and Altria, has received the Business Aviation Meritorious Service Award from the Alexandria, Va.-based Flight Safety Foundation .
South Korea will import more than 100 air-launched cruise missiles to arm its force of F-15K strike fighters as a counter to North Korean ballistic missiles. Contenders are likely to be the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (Jassm) from Lockheed Martin and the Taurus KEPD 350 from LFK and Saab Bofors Dynamics. MBDA, which makes the Storm Shadow/Scalp family, may not bid to avoid duplication of marketing efforts, since it owns the German company LFK, also known as MBDA Germany.
The arrival of initial orders for the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787/747-8 and continued hot demand has makers of VVIP business jets wondering whether they should embark on yet another round of plant expansion.
I spent a lot of time in engineering support at my company’s factory in Mexico (AW&ST May 5, p. 43). Despite having the same tooling and processes that we had in the U.S., the Mexico operation just never performed. It wasn’t a matter of workforce skills, the supplier base or its location in Mexico, it was bad management. Corporate’s solution was to move the factory overseas.
Rising demand in Europe for business aviation is fueling tough competition in the sales arena among builders of legacy turboprop-powered airplanes and new light jets, blurring and overlapping traditional lines between performance, price and technologies. Airframe manufacturers Socata in France, Piaggio Aero in Italy, and Pilatus Aircraft and Grob Aerospace, both in Switzerland, are locked in a tight battle as savvy buyers scrutinize four different aircraft, all of which represent advances in business aviation technology.
European weapons manufacturer MBDA and French aerospace company Safran are expected to announce a partnership agreement this week. Safran’s Sagem unit builds the AASM air-to-ground powered bomb, which was recently used for the first time by French forces in Afghanistan. There has been expectation for some time that Sagem may partner with MBDA to help market AASM to expand the customer base, given the latter’s far-reaching international ties in the weapons market.
Engineers on some Orion crew exploration vehicle subsystems will get a little more time to prepare for an upcoming development milestone after last fall’s major weight-reduction effort, while NASA propulsion experts move into the next phase of the J-2X rocket engine development on schedule.
Vought Aircraft Industries is shuffling factory assignments among its larger-than-expected workforce that builds aft fuselages for the 787 in North Charleston, S.C., to reflect Boeing’s slowed developmental and production rates for the airplane.
The Air Force is hoping to develop a payload that would allow ground controllers to know when a military spacecraft is being jammed or “painted” with radio-frequency energy or lasers, says Gary Payton, the Air Force space honcho. Under a program called Self-Awareness Space Situational Awareness, the service hopes to launch a demonstration payload by 2011 on TacSat-5, a small-satellite effort. Currently, satellites are flying blind, essentially unaware if anomalies are a result of environmental phenomena, on-board problems or tampering.
Although Europe is moving ahead briskly to develop an environmentally friendly air traffic system for business aviation, bizav leaders worry that the continent’s strong environmental consciousness could still end up putting them at a competitive disadvantage.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is trying to increase security fees for airline passengers again. And once again senators from states where people have to fly a lot are challenging the idea. During an oversight hearing on TSA’s $7.1-billion budget request for Fiscal 2009 Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) questioned why TSA was seeking a 50-cent per one-way trip surcharge when previous fee requests were shot down. This is different, Hawley maintains.
Intelsat reported a $413-million net loss for the first quarter on revenues of $573 million, which were up 11%. The loss was imputed mainly to restructuring and transaction costs related to the acquisition of Intelsat by Serafina Holdings, a holding company controlled by BC Partners and other private equity investors. However, contract backlog improved to a record $8.3 billion, and the satellite fill rate reached 78%, up two points from December.
Researchers backed by the European Space Agency will begin evaluating results of four microgravity experiments in fluid physics and metallurgy following a successful sounding rocket mission from the Esrange Space Center in the Swedish Arctic. The Maser 11 mission on a two-stage solid-fuel rocket, based on the Brazilian VSB 30 first stage, reached 252 km. in altitude on May 15, providing 6 min. 26 sec. of microgravity for the experiment package in its suborbital trajectory.
