With Airbus slated to unveil its new A380 delivery schedule in the coming weeks, Air France is making clear it wants to be the first European carrier with the aircraft. Once willing to trade its slots rather than take the aircraft in the winter, airline officials now say they were the first airline in Europe to order the A380, and should be the first to receive it. Lufthansa is the other player in the game, who at one point had moved up in its delivery slot ahead of Air France as airlines looked to optimize the receipt of the aircraft with their service needs.
When "gridlock" became the catchword to describe the peril of congestion in the U.S. air transportation system, federal authorities saw new pavement as the best solution. Six years later, a dozen runways have been commissioned at the busiest airports and an equal number are coming.
Who said this, and when? "The airline industry has changed dramatically and irreversibly. Customers want quality, high-value service at low fares. To compete, ******* must bring its costs down permanently so that we can both meet customer expectations and reach our goal of sustained profitability. Temporary or halfway measures won't work."
SES Astra TechCom, an affiliate of SES Global's European operation, will supply a pair of ground antenna systems and training for operations personnel for Vietnam's VinaSat-1, a Lockheed Martin communications satellite to be orbited in mid-2008. The 12-month project will be conducted with Hitec, a Luxembourg engineering and consulting company.
The FAA has selected Lockheed Martin to develop a plan for introducing unmanned aircraft into the National Airspace System. The five-year program is expected to assess current need, forecast near-term demand on airspace capacity and chart a strategy to integrate operations. Company officials say they want to define the demand curve for UAV operations in U.S. airspace and match them to manufacturing plans and FAA certification time lines.
Douglas Barrie (Munich), Michael A. Taverna (Paris)
France and Germany are nearing agreement on a ground architecture that will reinforce their ability to share respective satellite intelligence-gathering assets and integrate them into a coherent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance command capability.
Russian air force Su-27 Flankers are receiving a renewed lease on life with the delivery of 24 upgraded aircraft and a follow-on order for at least another 12. The last of the initial batch of aircraft to be brought up to the Su-27SM standard has been delivered by the Komsomolsk-on-Amur production association (KnAAPO). Still at the KnAAPO site are 12 more basic Flankers, which are to be upgraded as part of an additional program in the 2007-09 period.
U.S. airlines' international service expansion to regions with higher demand and revenue don't necessarily have to come in the form of long-haul flights across the world's oceans. Partially thanks to a liberalized government agreement, many carriers--especially low-cost airlines--are increasingly looking closer to home and making an aggressive push across the southern border to Mexico.
Air Deccan has signed a 10-year, $150-million component support contract with Lufthansa Technik and its India subsidiary, One Stop Airline MRO Support, for the budget carrier's fleet of 60 Airbus A320s in Bangalore.
Boeing Commercial Airplanes has added 34 new orders with a list sale value of about $3 billion, bringing its net for the year to 666 aircraft. Eight are for 787s, including two from existing customers, raising that family's total firm order count to 401 from 32 customers. The remaining 26 aircraft orders are for 737s. This was the second time in September that Boeing listed unidentified orders; the previous week it announced orders for 16 787s and 30 737s. But the first passenger customer for the 747-8 has yet to step foward.
When an Aviation Week & Space Technology pilot flew the Airbus A380 recently (see p. 48), the flight validated with certainty one important point about the airplane: It is a technical success. We were pretty sure that would be the case all along. When it comes to what Airbus calls its "industrialization challenges," though, an entirely different set of questions is posed.
Italy's My Way has ordered Bombardier CRJ900s and is ready to upgrade to the longer-range CRJ900X, should the aircraft maker pursue that program. The Vicenza, Italy-based carrier is buying 19 of the CRJ900s, but would convert 15 of those to the CRJ900X. The nominal contract value is $702 million. The regional jets will augment My Way's fleet of Airbus A320-family aircraft and would be used both domestically and on international routes.
After a 16-year hiatus, Cathay Pacific Airways is to resume daily services to Shanghai's Pudong International Airport in December. Cathay says Shanghai accounts for 35% of the passenger market between Hong Kong and mainland China and 68% of the freight market, which is why Cathay already flies 12 weekly freighter services between the two cities. Shanghai has been served from Hong Kong by Dragonair, which Cathay Pacific has acquired. Shanghai, China's financial center, has a mixed blessing in terms of local air services.
Many used the five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to discern clues as to what the searing day will come to mean for the troubled airline industry. But possibly lost in that approach is a curious fact: Ascendant low-cost and low-fare carriers have gained as many market-share points since 9/11 as they did in the previous 10 years. That suggests that the attacks might be better understood as a terrible pause for the network carriers that nonetheless failed to alter the trajectory of fundamental change already underway in the 1990s.
Arianespace has won a contract to launch France's second Helios 2 day/night optical intelligence satellite. Award of the launch, set for the first half of 2009, follows the signature of a contract last month to launch two Satcom BW Stage 2 military communications satellites for Germany.
Maintaining situational awareness and following crew resource management procedures are key to safe taxi and takeoff, advises the FAA in a safety alert issued after the crash of Comair Flight 5191. The National Transportation Safety Board is continuing its probe of the Aug. 27 crash of the CRJ100 at Lexington (Ky.) Blue Grass Airport. So far, human error, as well as airport diagrams that did not reflect construction changes in runways and taxiways, appear to be factors in the accident that claimed the lives of 48 of 49 people on board.
MARKET FOCUS Oil price decline benefiting some airlines 11 NEWS BREAKS GPS constellation upgrades continuing after launch of Block IIR-M spacecraft 18 Strong transport product line, rejuve- nated sales greet new Boeing exec 19 Rocketplane Kistler takes Andrews as partner for NASA's COTS program 20 U.S. appropriators mix F-22 and JSF results, back C-17 21 Obituary for Russian engineer who devel- oped space docking mechanism 21 WORLD NEWS & ANALYSIS
Although the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has strongly backed hybrid ancillary terrestrial component (ATC) satellite broadband projects, not everyone is convinced this will last (see p. 69).
Russia is attempting to assuage European fears that it intends to make a hostile play for EADS, but it isn't backing away from showing strong interest in the aerospace and defense contractor. The Russian stock purchase, along with bad news about the A380, has unsettled EADS equalibrium in recent weeks. What's more, financial analysts suggest that political and program problems, particularly at EADS's main subsidiary Airbus, could keep the company in turmoil for several more months.
Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has been named to receive the 2006 Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy from the Alexandria, Va.-based National Aeronautic Assn. The trophy is awarded for "public service of enduring value to aviation in the United States." Mineta will be recognized "for more than 40 years of accomplished public service to the community, the nation and the world" and accomplishments in transportation and aviation.
Airbus will table the winglet program for its A320 single-aisle family aircraft for a while as it tries to upgrade its best-selling product, although industry officials suspect that it will eventually be back on the agenda. Airbus has run extensive trials of two winglet designs to determine which, if any, would be most appropriate. The first involved an in-house version, the other was developed by Winglet Technologies of Wichita, Kan.
The Indian Navy is contracting with AgustaWestland to return seven of its Sea King Mk42B helicopters to operational service. The Mk42B is one of the navy's main anti-submarine warfare platforms. Hindustan Aeronautics will provide support for the program, covering overhaul and repair of the transmission and rotor heads. India's Sea King fleet suffered the effects of a U.S. embargo introduced in the wake of its 1998 nuclear tests, with a lack of spares badly affecting airframe availability. The sanctions were lifted in 2001.
Abhijit Mahalanobis, a technical lead and manager for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control's Signal Imaging and Processing Group, Orlando, Fla., has been named 2006 Scientist of the Year by Minorities in Research Science. He was cited for leadership in pattern recognition, signal and imaging processing with emphasis on automatic target recognition.
Former Editor-In-Chief David M. North flies the Airbus A380 from the company's facility in Toulouse, France. North has been performing evaluation flights of Airbus transports since piloting the A320 in 1987. He evaluated the A380 late last month on MSN 001, the prototype version of the mega-transport (see p. 48). North was accompanied by Airbus chief test pilot Jacques Rosay, test pilot Peter Chandler and flight test engineer Fernando Alonso. Also on board was AW&ST Paris Bureau Chief Robert Wall. North shared the flight with four other pilot/journalists.
The Soyuz vehicle that spent six months as the lifeboat for the International Space Station landed safely in Kazakhstan Sept. 29, returning ISS Expedition 13 Commander Pavel Vinogradov, Flight Engineer Jeff Williams and the first female space tourist, Anousheh Ansari, to Earth. After reaching the ISS on Apr. 1, Vinogradov and Williams conducted two spacewalks and greeted two space shuttle missions. Ansari, a U.S. telecom entrepreneur, paid a reported $20 million under the Russian Federal Space Agency's spaceflight participant program.
