Air Canada has expanded its multi-trip "Flight Pass" ticketing to include London, its first international destination. Passengers may purchase (from the airline's web site or travel agents) a pass for six one-way trips between Canadian cities and London Heathrow Airport. Ticket prices and trip planning are good for a year. By next summer, Air Canada plans to offer up to 15 daily nonstop flights to London from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax and St. John's.
Moscow Domodedovo International Airport handled 11.7 million passengers in January-September--a 9.8% increase compared with the same period in 2005. International routes showed a 7.3% increase to 6.5 million passengers; domestic routes in the first nine months had a 13.1% increase compared with the same 2005 period. Bangkok, Sochi, Rostov-on-Don and Volgograd are among the destinations with the highest traffic growth.
Illinois-based simulator manufacturer Frasca International received an order for two flight-training units from China's Qingdao Jiutian Spartan Flight Academy. The units, to be configured as Cessna 172s, will become part of the training curriculum in early 2007. One will be equipped with Garmin advanced avionics, while the other will have conventional instrumentation.
Ostensibly all options are still being explored, but the most likely outcome is that Britain will remain one of five nations to deploy nuclear ballistic-missile submarines in the strategic deterrent role. The British government and Defense Ministry have been working on options to identify a successor to the Trident II D5 missile and its Vanguard-class boats for at least the past 3-4 years.
The repeal of the Wright Amendment lifts limitations on service from Dallas Love Field, home to Southwest Airlines. Previously, carriers were restricted to fly to certain destinations in surrounding states. With the repeal, Southwest moved quickly, and on Oct. 19 added one-stop connecting flights from Love to 25 new destinations. They include Baltimore/Washington, Chicago Midway, Cleveland, Denver and Detroit.
Aviation Week has transferred its electronic magazine, Aviation Week Contrails (AWC), to Shadowlawn Press, which is changing the online publication's name to SkyWriter and plans to relaunch it. Subscribers to AWC should contact Shadowlawn at [email protected] or (310) 306-5664 with any questions.
French armaments agency DGA says it has handed over the second new-generation Syracuse 3 spacecraft for routine in-orbit operations. The unit, Syracuse 3B, built by Alcatel Alenia Space and launched in mid-August, is expected to support Franco-Italian-led operations in Lebanon (AW&ST Aug. 21/28, p. 39). Syracuse 3A is supporting allied forces in Afghanistan.
The National Business Aviation Assn. convention held in Orlando, Fla., last week drew more than 31,000 people and its exhibit space was sold out well in advance of the event. The flood of announcements at the show included:
Now serving a life term in the Fort Leavenworth, Kan., federal slammer is a clown whose path crossed mine some years back. That encounter resulted in my TWA airline confreres giving me a nickname which, to this day, surfaces at retiree gatherings, when the lads want to jerk my incompetence chain. The subject of this yarn is one Zvonko Busic. It began on Sept. 10, 1976, as domestic TWA Flight 355, a Boeing 727, was routinely making its way from New York La Guardia to Chicago O'Hare airports with 86 passengers and a crew of seven on board.
Andrew G. Morch has been appointed Chicago-based regional director/area manager for the Americas for Volga-Dnepr Group subsidiary AirBridge Cargo. He was director of operations for the Americas for KLM Cargo.
Frank Morring, Jr. and Michael Taverna (Valencia, Spain)
Scientific data from Europe's Smart-1 lunar-orbiting technology testbed are still under study, but the operational feedback will help the European Space Agency plan future missions beyond Earth orbit. Chief among those lessons is the utility of solar-electric propulsion (SEP) in moving spacecraft around the Solar System, says Smart-1 project scientist Bernard H. Foing. The Swedish-built spacecraft used SEP to power through the Van Allen belt and on to lunar orbit, and ESA already has baselined SEP technology for its planned Bepi-Colombo Mercury probe.
SES Global has successfully priced a two-tranche €800-million ($1-billion) bond offering--the second time this year it has ventured into the market to refinance drawn bilateral credit facilities issued notably to cover high-cost bonds held by its New Skies Satellites affiliate. The offering, which includes a €300-million three-year floating-rate note and a €500-million fixed-rate note priced at the tight end of price guidance, was oversubscribed 2.6 times, SES said.
The U.K. will likely field a "novel" weapon system within the next few years--probably a radio-frequency payload--as it increases emphasis on directed-energy weapons research. The government's Defense Technology Strategy considers it "vital that the U.K. retains a capability in RF directed-energy weapon systems (and associated vulnerability and lethality modeling) and highly desirable that a national capability is retained on defensive laser (damage and dazzle) systems."
John Tracy, who is Chicago-based Boeing's senior vice president-engineering, operations and technology, has been named the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference's Hispanic Engineer of the Year for 2006.
It's not easy being on top of the world. Just look at General Dynamics Corp. With wide exposure to the fast-growing U.S. Army budget, the company is well-positioned to benefit from huge war expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan. General Dynamics expanded its presence in the red-hot information technology market with the $2.2-billion acquisition of Anteon Corp. in June. Margins are recovering in its shipbuilding business, and Gulfstream Aerospace, the company's business jet arm, is capitalizing on a surge in demand for corporate aircraft.
Michael A. Taverna (Cherbourg, Biscarrosse and St. Medard, France)
A mammoth project to modernize France's nuclear arsenal will mark a milestone this year with the first land launch of the next-generation M51 ballistic missile.
Europe's fourth-largest low-fare carrier, Copenhagen-based Sterling Airlines, is putting in place a five-year growth plan, marking the end of a tumultuous period that saw heavy losses. The current Sterling Airlines was created a year ago by the merger of two money-losing carriers, Sterling and Maersk Air. The combined airline has remained in the red and just keeping it operating was a struggle at times, say company representatives. Losses last year surpassed $150 million and even in the first half of the year were still around $31.5 million.
A new cabin that Singapore Airlines expected to install in the Airbus A380 is ready but the airplane isn't, so the new look will first appear in December only on the other aircraft on which the cabin was to be introduced, the Boeing 777-300ER. The airline says it has spent $360 million developing the cabin, which has lie-flat business seats in a 1-2-1 arrangement and an entertainment system that lets even economy-class passengers work on documents they bring along on USB memory drives.
A $350-million joint development effort by India and Israel for the advanced Barak-2 missile is under scrutiny because of corruption charges arising out of procurement of the original Barak-1 system. India's Central Bureau of Investigation is looking into charges that middlemen offered kickbacks on behalf of Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) to politicians, including former Defense Minister George Fernandes, for the purchase of six Barak-1 anti-missile systems. Indian law prohibits the use of middlemen in such deals.
As hope is once again raised that the U.K. is on the brink of reaching a deal on a modification program for eight "mothballed" Boeing Chinook Mk. 3 helicopters it badly needs, a senior Defense Ministry official has provided further details of the problems.
Craig Estep has become vice president-Citation/Caravan operations for the Cessna Aircraft Co., Wichita, Kan. He was vice president-operations. Rod Holter has been appointed vice president/general manager of the Independence, Kan., facility. He has been an executive of Eclipse Aviation, Albuquerque, N.M. Brad Thress has been named vice president-component operations. He was vice president-quality. Thress will be succeeded by Cub Marion, who has been vice president-Textron Six Sigma at Cessna.
Boeing has received a follow-on contract for up to three Block II Wideband Gapfiller Satellites (WGS) worth a potential $1.067 billion that are similar to the Block 1 spacecraft already in production. Block II includes a radio-frequency bypass capability to support airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms that need ultrahigh bandwidth for data rates used by unmanned aerial vehicles. Boeing received authorization in February for the fourth WGS and anticipates authorization for the fifth by the end of this year. The first is due for launch next year.
For the men and women who wear U.S. Air Force blue, Oct. 14, 2006, is a date they won't soon forget. On that day, on a promontory adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery overlooking Washington, the Air Force Memorial was dedicated.
Ondas Media, which proposes to build a European mobile digital audio radio system (DARS), says the Spanish government has filed a new application with the International Telecommunications Union on its behalf. Teamed with Club DAB Italia, a consortium of media companies, Ondas is one of several ventures vying to start European mobile satellite radio/TV service. The company said the filing reflects the transitioning of the system, expected to start operations in late 2009, to a more advanced phase.
