When it comes to growth, Rockwell Collins CEO Clay Jones is more concerned with improving efficiency and profit margins than expanding the avionics company’s sales at any cost. “If you look at the history of this industry, there has been far more wealth destroyed via acquisitions than there has been created,” he said recently. “We don’t want to replicate that story.”
The Swedish government this year plans to issue a tender to outsource some of its satellite communications needs. The contract is supposed to cover 3-5 years of support for existing and new satellite communications systems. Additionally, the government may outsource systems integration activities.
Several distinctive external features of the 787 were clearly visible for the first time at rollout, including a protruding keel beam, larger air scoops, smaller flight control and flap surface actuators, as well as the smooth butt joints between the adjacent one-piece composite fuselage barrel sections.
Virgin America expects to begin flights from San Francisco International Airport to New York John F. Kennedy International Airport in August, following FAA authorization to begin service and approval by the Transportation Dept. to begin selling tickets.
Lapses in Boeing’s security for confidential internal documents were exposed by a worker, who subsequently was fired and who is said to have downloaded 320,000 pages of documents because he was disgruntled over inspection of parts. Gerald Lee Eastman has been charged with 16 counts of computer trespass. Boeing says it has tightened its computer security standards.
Don’t talk to Blake Emery about airplanes without windows for passengers. Emery studies how Boeing can differentiate its products in the marketplace. His work takes him into all sorts of things, like trying to quantify what makes passengers happiest. Or, the opposite. He’s been doing this as part of the company’s research into the cabin environment for the 787 along with Klaus Brauer, Boeing’s guru on passenger satisfaction and revenue. Much of what they’ve found goes well beyond the 787.
Despite the proliferating and increasingly sophisticated cruise and ballistic missile threats in Asia, Japan isn’t displaying much urgency in preparing defenses. The Patriot advanced PAC-3 missiles—designed for cruise missile and terminal ballistic missile defense—arrived in Japan a year ago, but in a recent assessment they weren’t rated fully mission-capable because of bureaucratic snarls. The problem is that the radios used to link all the scattered firing units into a single defensive system use frequencies assigned to the Japanese cell-phone industry.
This year’s rankings of publicly traded aerospace and defense contractors and airlines are the result of a composite scoring of four performance categories that place significant emphasis on operating excellence. The four categories are:
U.S. military planners are increasingly interested in buying electro-optical scene-matching capability for some weapons that would allow them to discriminate and confirm targets using previously captured imagery. Israel’s Rafael is producing the Spice weapons-guidance kit with this capability. As the Pentagon makes its weapons yields ever smaller to reduce collateral damage, the need to discriminate a target within feet is growing, Navy Capt. Peter Murphy, an air warfare expert in the Pentagon’s acquisition office, tells the Precision Strike Assn.
Securing funding for a weapon family and a potential purchase of an Airbus facility are emerging as milestones for Diehl, as the company tries to grow its defense and aerosystems business. Diehl recently decided to break defense and aerospace activities into separate units. Claus Gunther, head of Diehl VA Systeme, says the two markets are diverging, and to properly serve them Diehl Defense and Diehl Aerosystems will operate separately beginning in October. Following the restructuring, Gunther will be in charge of the defense product line.
The shuttle orbiter Endeavour is undergoing final checkout on Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center after being transported from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad with its external tank and solid rocket boosters early July 11. An earlier attempt to move the stack July 9 resulted in a work platform in the VAB placing minor scratches on a tank attachment strut. Liftoff of the STS-118/13A.1 mission to the International Space Station on the 119th mission of the space shuttle program is set for Aug. 7 at 7:02 p.m.
Congress is fulminating about the ability of their investigators, posing as businessmen, to obtain a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to buy enough radioactive material to build a dirty bomb that uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive debris. But members of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board say there’s a far bigger threat from radioactive material used to process whole blood for storage, by radiating it to kill bacteria and keep it fresh longer. DSB members say there are seven such facilities—lightly guarded—in the Washington area alone.
Thales as developed and certified its TopFlight satellite communications system to meet Arinc 781 standards. The product, now in series production, was developed initially for regional jets as well as large corporate aircraft. After flight trials concluding next March, the first passengers will be able to connect with the new system starting in the second quarter of 2008, according to Peter Hitchcock, the director of avionics systems for Thales Aerospace.
Component manufacture for the U.K.’s Environmentally Friendly Engine (EFE) technology validation program is now underway, with a first engine run anticipated for the Rolls-Royce-led project in mid-2008. Ian Ritchey, Rolls-Royce’s chief engineer for the EFE, says work is also underway to upgrade an engine test cell at the company’s Bristol site for the program. The EFE will test lean-burn combustors and high-pressure turbine technologies to reduce levels of carbon dioxide and oxides of nitrogen emissions.
Etihad Airways is facing serious questions about its crew scheduling procedures and ultimately its safety standards following a near controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accident at Pakistan’s Peshawar airport, several industry sources say.
It’s time to turn down the heat on Washington’s sound bite-driven debate over how to fund modernization of the U.S. air traffic control (ATC) system, and instead shed a little light on some fundamental business questions on the issue. We risk triggering the law of unintended consequences if Congress makes decisions on how to modernize and expand the system without having answers to these basic questions.
The results are in from Aviation Week & Space Technology’s 11th annual Top-Performing Companies study. This year’s rankings of the industry’s publicly-traded aerospace and defense companies begin on p. 54; airline rankings start on p. 68. Articles that analyze the trends emerging from the study and comments from a team of industry analysts who closely studied the results begin on p. 52. Results include a one-year snapshot of how each company ranks and a measure of how its score has changed during the past five years.
Isavia, Iceland’s air navigation service provider, and the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) plan to set up a limited company, with equal shares held by the two parties, for handling user charges for joint operations of their aeronautical communications facilities. The centers in Gufunes, Iceland, and Ballygireen, near Shannon, provide high-frequency radio and other communications services to aircraft over the North Atlantic.
A combination of a more than 25% cost overrun to the $5.8-billion program and technical problems would be enough to kill most Pentagon efforts. But, this one-time acquisition darling of the Air Force seems impervious to such travails. With 600 weapons already in the field, USAF appears to have staved off a termination—for now.
The Pentagon complains that Iranian weapons and explosives have killed U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Now Turkey says its soldiers along the border with Iraq are being killed by U.S. weapons. Nabi Sensoy, Turkey’s ambassador to Washington, says weapons and explosives the U.S. supplied to the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq are winding up in the hands of a terrorist group that uses them to attack Turkish troops patrolling the Kurdish-populated areas of Turkey. “We know there have been a number of weapons of American origin,” Sensoy says. “We know that the U.S.
The emergence of Railteam—an ambitious new strategic alliance created by the leading European high-speed train operators—signals that next-generation surface transport is poised to play a growing role in short/medium-haul markets. Railteam executives believe high-speed trains have evolved into a viable alternative to air transportation. Moreover, establishing a unified network “helps to change the perception that cross-border travel by train is difficult,” they say.
Israel’s Space Communication Ltd. will pay Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) some $365 million for a fourth Amos-class communications satellite, which will be placed in a new orbital slot to provide coverage in Asia. Amos 4, a 3.4-ton high-power Ku- and Ka-band spacecraft, is to be placed in a slot between 64 and 76 deg. E. Long. for the expanded coverage. Set for launch in the third quarter of 2012, it will have a projected service life of 12 years. Spacecom’s Amos 1 and 2 and its planned Amos 3 all operate or will operate from 4 deg. W.
In a reversal of fortune for Alcoa, the dominant aluminum supplier to the aerospace industry withdrew its $29-billion offer to buy Alcan after the Canadian company struck a $38-billion deal on July 12 to sell itself to Rio Tinto, a major mining company based in the U.K. and Australia. If the deal goes through, the new Rio Tinto subsidiary will aim to be a major player in the global aluminum industry. Global headquarters of Rio Tinto Alcan would be in Montreal led by Alcan CEO Dick Evans.
Selex Sensors and Airborne Systems is developing a small vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle, the Damselfly, with a subscale demonstrator first flown in April. Additional flight trials will be carried out in November at the Parc Aberporth range in Wales.
