Michael Girps (see photo) has become vice president/general manager of Jet Aviation London Biggin Hill. He was general manager of Jet Aviation Engineering Services, Spring Branch, Tex. Girps succceeds Stephan Koss, who will become a sales executive at Jet Aviation Basel, Switzerland. Michael Sattler (see photo) has been named vice president/general manager of the Singapore maintenance and fixed-base operation. He was director quality and technical services for Jet Aviation Basel. Sattler succeeds Thomas Rudisuhli, who has left the company.
Teledyne Controls will supply the Aircraft Health Monitoring System for the Navy's P-8A Multi-Mission Maritime Aircraft. Teledyne won the contract from Boeing for an enhanced configuration of its Digital Flight Data Acquisition Unit, which is already flying on about half of the 737 Next-Generation-series aircraft. Los Angeles-based Teledyne is to provide the hardware, software and engineering support for the AHMS.
Singapore Airlines CEO Chew Choon Seng has been appointed chairman of the board of governors of the International Air Transport Assn. He succeeds Robert Milton, chairman of Air Canada.
The Pentagon's inspector general and the Government Accountability Office are writing a report that says Air Force officials grossly inflated C-130J termination costs in testimony to Congress, a move that helped save the contract, according to congressional sources. The USAF estimate that canceling the 60-aircraft multiyear deal with Lockheed Martin could result in termination costs of more than $1 billion was too high, a Capitol Hill official says. The actual cost of termination would have been about $383 million.
Michael A. Taverna (Villepinte, France), Douglas Barrie (London)
European efforts to develop a new family of modular tactical missiles finally look ready to gel, as contractors scurry to team up for the new requirement.
Boeing has identified Nippon Cargo Airlines as the buyer of two 747-400 freighters that it has been carrying as "unidentified" on its orders list. Nippon Cargo also was a launch customer for the 747-8 freighter last year, with an order for eight.
Thales Air Defense says it is discussing the sale of command and control systems to China as part of 250 million euros in defense orders expected to be placed there over the next four years. The company says it has already sold surveillance radars to the Chinese, after informing the U.S. through ThalesRaytheonSystems, a joint venture set up to market C2 and surveillance radar hardware. Thales also is finalizing a pair of new ventures in China to build, market and support air traffic management and radar systems.
Orbiting observatories continue to give scientists new views of the Universe, unraveling old mysteries and revealing new ones. Space dust--small particles of carbon, silicon, magnesium, iron, oxygen and other elements--is a significant part of galactic structures, as the dark "dust lane" in this new side-on Hubble Space Telescope view of the galaxy NGC 5866 shows (the galaxy has a diameter of about 60,000 light-years).
NORTH ATLANTIC AIRSPACE IS USING a technique known as "collaborative decision making" (CDM) on a global scale, something that surprised many people in Brussels. CDM involves an exchange of data between government regulators, airlines and other stakeholders that rely on the efficient use of a particular block of airspace.
Market Focus 10 Saab confounds consolidators, buys Ericsson military and space News Breaks 17 Congress looking for ways to get Secure Flight back on track 18 Emergency landing blocks major U.K. airport runway 19 Joint military/police exercise show- cases antihijacking operations 20 Thales seeks to beef up its land- based defense systems 20 European defense firms move to- ward deals at Paris-area conference World News & Analysis
Both the U.S. Senate and House have passed a compromise $94.5-billion Fiscal 2006 emergency supplemental appropriations measure. The legislation, which provides supplemental spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and hurricane recovery, is on track to go to the White House for President Bush's signature.
The House Appropriations Committee isn't buying the Bush administration's decision to cut airport grants and procurement rather than let the FAA budget grow. The bill the committee sent to the floor boosts Airport Improvement Program funding by more than one-third, to $3.7 billion, and facilities and equipment spending by nearly one-quarter, to $3.11 billion.
Airbus awarded a contract to Avtech, an air navigation consultancy in Sweden, to participate in the Single European Sky Implementation Pro-gram (Sesar) to modernize air traffic management in Europe by 2020. Airbus and its partners in the Air Traffic Alliance (Thales and EADS) are leading the Sesar effort to develop an ATM master plan for Europe. Avtech has been working on a European Commis- sion-funded flight trial program at Stockholm's Arlanda airport involving the transmission of 4d trajectories from Boeing 737 flight management systems to the ground.
USAF Maj. Gen. Vern M. Findley, 2nd, has been named director of plans and policy at United States Central Command Headquarters, MacDill AFB, Fla. He has been special assistant to the assistant vice chief of staff at USAF Headquarters at the Pentagon. He will be succeeded by Maj. Gen. (select) Kurt A. Cichowski, who has been commander of the 49th Fighter Wing of Air Combat Command, Holloman AFB, N.M. Cichowski, in turn, will be succeeded by Brig. Gen. (select) David L.
Thales and Rheinmetall of Germany reportedly are looking at how they too might collaborate in the land systems market. Thales wants to beef up its German defense base and recently added considerably to its defense and aerospace portfolio through new collaborative deals with Diehl (see p. 20). Potential areas of collaboration include unmanned aerial vehicles, weapon systems and integrating land systems into the digital battlefield environment.
Jeffrey Q. Palombo (see photos) has been appointed vice president-infrared countermeasures (IRCM) for the Defensive Systems Div. of the Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Electronic Systems Sector, Rolling Meadows, Ill. He was president of the company's Amherst (N.Y.) Systems. Palombo has been succeeded by John D. Stanfill, who was director of IRCM commercial programs.
Giovanni Bisignani, the International Air Transport Assn.'s director general, is right when he repeatedly claims that airports do not participate strongly enough in the airline industry's desperate quest for lower operating costs. Earlier this month, while acknowledging that most carriers have begun to see some light at the end of a five-year tunnel of losses, he stressed that: "The gap between airline cost reduction and airport cost increases is not acceptable and is not responsible."
Saab has unveiled an unmanned rotary-wing UAV (see photo) that is intended to meet targeting, surveillance and other defense requirements, as well as implement homeland security and civil applications. Based on a concept developed by Cybaero of Linkoping, Sweden, the 150-kg. Skeldar V-150 displays notable stealth features. Capable of remaining in flight for up to 5 hr. and carrying a 30-kg. payload, the machine first flew in March and is being considered for ship trials with the Swedish navy.
Based on the theory that what works well in Canada will work just as well elsewhere, Nav Canada is looking outside its borders to find markets for ATC technology it has developed--including a tower system that is being evaluated by the FAA.
Saab and South Africa's Denel have formed a combined aerostructures company to compete for design, manufacturing and assembly work in civil and defense markets. The business, owned 80% by Denel and 20% by Saab, will start with a turnover of around $29 million, but that is expected to grow quickly. Saab is heavily involved in South Africa's military market.
AIR TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT CAPABILITY IS more flexible over the North Atlantic now than many people realize, according to Bob McPike, head of oceanic development for the National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the air navigation service provider in Britain and controller of oceanic airspace west of Ireland. For example, pilots of airline aircraft crossing the North Atlantic between Europe and the U.S. are seldom requesting higher altitude, even though it could be granted more than half the time, McPike says.
Ted Austell, Vice President-International Trade Policy (The Boeing Co., Washington, D.C. )
Pierre Sparaco, in a column entitled "The Learning Curve," says about European government aid to Airbus: "Airbus became a profitable undertaking in the 1980s, fully reimbursing the governments' controversy-laden loans. . . ." (AW&ST June 5, p. 43).
He may have been the world's only forensic engineering journalist. Michael A. Dornheim, who joined this magazine 22 years ago and died this month, could explain better than any other journalist how things fly in the atmosphere and in space--and, more importantly, why they sometimes don't fly right.
In "Rebalancing Act" (AW&ST May 8, p. 25), we're told that the Bush administration's vision for moving "the U.S. space program back into the kind of exciting work needed to attract the best students to 'the hard subjects' of math and science," is to beggar NASA's science programs in order to fund its manned space effort. Excuse me? It was manned efforts like the International Space Station and inc- reasingly directionless shuttle program that, in NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's words, "ultimately didn't matter much to very many people."
