France is introducing a system to promote and control arms exports that it hopes will put a spark into sales particularly at a time when the weak dollar is hurting the euro-based industry’s price competitiveness with U.S. rivals.
Alitalia’s board put off naming a preferred buyer until this week, but that hasn’t stopped efforts to find a new owner from becoming more bizarre. After a deadline had passed for non-binding offers, Alitalia reported that late interest appears to have been expressed by a group of investors, including Singapore Airlines, to take a 49.9% stake, although acknowledging that SIA had waved off interest. Singapore Airlines, for its part, stressed reports it was interested in Alitalia were incorrect.
Piotr Wolak has been appointed vice president-customer service and Michele A. Fite vice president-human resources for the Mooney Airplane Co. , Kerrville, Tex. Wolak held the same position at Pilatus Business Aircraft, Broomfield, Colo. He succeeds Al Nitchman, who has retired. Fite was director of staffing and employee relations at Kinetic Concepts Inc. in San Antonio.
NASA’s Discovery Program will fund the launch in 2011 of a pair of gravity probes to measure the structure of the Moon from lunar orbit. Like the twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) spacecraft orbiting Earth, the two Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (Grail) orbiters will monitor variations in the gravity field below by measuring the distance between them with great precision.
Airbus plans to offer a liquid crystal display HUD on all of its in-production aircraft types. The head-up display was recently certified on the A318 and A318 Elite corporate jet, and will be offered on the A320 family as well as on all A330/A340 and A380 models. The A380 can be equipped with single or dual systems; the other models, with a single HUD. The company says the new HUD also has a wide enough field of view, plus video display capability, to accommodate enhanced and synthetic vision systems (EVS/SVS).
Christopher Holmes has been appointed president/CEO of Atlantic Inertial Systems , Cheshire, Conn. He was vice president/general manager of the Goodrich Corp.’s Electro-Optical Systems and Space Flight Systems units.
Bryant McLarty has been appointed as a non-executive director on the board of London-based Aviation plc . He is executive director of Pharmaust Ltd. Richard Sinclair has been named CEO/finance director of subsidiary Capital Lease Aviation plc and has resigned as a director of Aviation plc.
Robert Wall (Tel Aviv and Haifa, Israel), David A. Fulghum (Tel Aviv and Haifa, Israel)
Israel’s military prowess has long rested on dominating the radio-frequency spectrum, and now researchers are pressing to expand that level of information acumen into new domains. Laser technology and measurement and signature intelligence (Masint) are the latest areas where Israeli’s defense industry can give the military an edge. The work draws on a mix of newly developed hardware and software tools that allow for better exploitation of information, particularly in the electro-optical world.
Astrobotic Technology of Redmond, Wash., says it will be an entrant in the Google Lunar X Prize competition to put a robotic rover on the Moon. It has tapped Raytheon to design advanced lunar landing technologies. Raytheon might also be selected for engineering management, the lander design and high-bandwidth telecommunications.
A secret U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) relay spacecraft is completing checkout in a highly elliptical orbit following launch on a northern trajectory Dec. 10 from Cape Canaveral on a U.S. Air Force Atlas V. The mission involved special prelaunch coordination with Canada and the U.K. If a malfunction had occurred during powered flight, rocket and satellite debris could have landed near or on Canadian or British territory.
Italy’s first enhanced cockpit procedure trainer for the Eurofighter Typhoon will go live by the end of December. The simulator is at the 4th Fighter Wing at Grosseto air base in Tuscany. Alenia Aeronautica delivered the simulator Dec. 6. A second simulator will be installed at the Typhoon base at Gioia del Colle in southern Italy.
Dusty solar panels on NASA’s Spirit Mars Exploration Rover blend in with the background in this mosaic self-portrait taken with the vehicle’s mast-mounted panoramic camera. The dust diminishes the panels’ ability to generate electricity, limiting Spirit to an hour of driving per two days of power output. Controllers are using that capability to move the rover to a sun-facing 25-deg. slope on the “Home Plate” plateau for a better chance of survival through the approaching Martian winter.
Arianespace will launch the Amazonas-2 communications satellite for Spanish operator Hispasat in the summer of 2009 from its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, under a contract signed Dec. 13 by Hispasat Chairman and CEO Petra Mateos and Arianespace Chairman and CEO Jean-Yves Le Gall. Based on Astrium’s Eurostar E3000 spacecraft bus, Amazonas-2 will weigh 5,400 kg. (11,900 lb.) at launch and feature 54 Ku-band and 10 C-band transponders. From its geostationary orbital position at 61 deg. W.
Owners and operators of very light jets such as the Cessna Citation Mustang, Eclipse 500 and other airplanes can now access VLJ Magazine, a free web-based publication dedicated to news about VLJs only. For more information go to www.VLJmag.com.
Fred Zimbelman has become general manager of the Hawker Beechcraft Services facility in Wichita, Kan. He was president of the Soundair Repair and Design and Development groups, Woodinville, Wash.
Claude Lajeunesse has been named president/CEO of the Ottawa-based Aerospace Industries Assn. of Canada . He had been president of Concordia University in Montreal and a past president/CEO of the Assn. of Universities and Colleges of Canada.
The U.K. Royal Navy is struggling with a shortage of aircrew for its AgustaWestland Merlin Mk1 anti-submarine helicopter fleet. The British Defense Ministry says there is a 39% shortfall in Merlin pilots, with the figure for observers even higher at 47%. The ministry is trying to manage the situation so that the aircrew shortage does not affect operations.
Flight Options has placed orders for 100 Embraer Phenom 300 jets with an option for another 50. The order is worth about $746 million and could increase to $1.1 billion if all options are exercised. Flight Options, a jet charter service based in Cleveland, Ohio, also operates eight Embraer Legacy 600 business jets. Initial deliveries are scheduled to begin at the end of 2009.
Growing airline profitability and shrinking debt levels are expected to stall next year, raising concerns that the sector’s state could worsen before improving again in 2009. The International Air Transport Assn. for the second time in the last six months has revised downward its estimate of industry performance in 2008, this time forecasting a $5-billion profit. An earlier estimate put it at $7.8 billion. The level also is below this year’s profit projection of $5.6 billion.
In his first interview with the foreign press, Itzhak Nissan, president and CEO of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), lays out an ambitious course that has already seen the company’s net profits rise from $2 million in 2005 to an estimated $200 million in 2007. At IAI’s Tel Aviv headquarters, he tells Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Senior Military Editor David A.
David A. Fulghum (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem), Robert Wall (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem)
The pressures bending Israel’s military and intelligence-gathering into new shapes are well known in the U.S. They involve preparing for the next war, analyzing the last war, better managing defense spending, and envisioning what the nation’s military should look like in a decade.
Stacie Suggs, who is a lead power conversion test engineer at Northrop Grumman’s Los Angeles-based Space Technology Sector, has received the Society of Women Engineers ’ Distinguished New Engineer award. She was recognized for her technical contributions as an expert in power-converter hardware, leadership in the SWE and outreach to the community. Suggs is responsible for all aspects of the test equipment process and is one of Northrop Grumman’s technical rotation program managers.
Hawker Beechcraft Corp. has received FAA certification of the King Air B200GT. The twin-engine turboprop business aircraft is powered by Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-52 engines that can maintain 850 shp. to higher altitudes than the PT6A-42 engines that power the King Air B200. Maximum cruise speed increases by 20 kt. to 305 kt. Typically equipped price is $5.2 million.
DayJet, the on-demand air taxi service launched in Florida in September, is expanding its service network to 28 new destinations, including five cities in Georgia, three in Alabama and one in Mississippi. Travel to these points must begin or end at one of the company’s “Dayports” at Boca Raton, Gainesville, Lakeland, Pensacola and Tallahassee, Fla. DayJet is operating Eclipse 500 very light jets and charges $1-4 per seat per mile, depending on a passenger’s travel flexibility.
