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The Australians are right, but they did not go far enough. After having to clean tons of sand out of hundreds of KC-135s after they sat for months in the desert while the U.S. Army begged for transports to move heavy equipment to the battlefields before the wars started in 1991 and 2002, you cannot tell me that buying 400 dedicated tankers makes good sense while our battle transport fleet sits at an anemic 180 C-17s and a few outdated and costly C-5s.
A black-nosed NKC-135E with the image of a white missile painted on its fuselage has started tests at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. The trials, involving the Airborne Laser's beam control technology, will continue through the end of March. Low-power lasers are being used to calibrate three special cameras mounted on the aircraft's left wing.
For the past year, speculation has swirled about whether U.K.-based BAE Systems plc would sell off its 20% stake in Airbus. Executives at EADS, which owns the other 80%, have long coveted BAE's shares in the aircraft giant.
I am amused by the discussions of the international partners negotiating their Joint Strike Fighter production agreements. Robert Wall's article "Cold Calculus" would be better entitled "Cold Extortion" (AW&ST Feb. 27, p. 26).
A Russian, an American and a Brazilian are set to lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome this week on a mission that should mark the beginning of a new phase in operations on the International Space Station.
Northrop Grumman has snagged a $275-million contract from the U.S. Air Force to upgrade USAF, Air National Guard, USAF Reserve and Marine Corps F-16s, F-15s, A-10s and B-52s with Litening targeting pods, support equipment, training, logistics and pod integration support.
Mark McGraw has become vice president-tanker programs under the Boeing Co.'s St. Louis-based Integrated Defense Systems' Precision Engagement and Mobility Systems unit. He was vice president/program manager of the Weapons Enterprise Capability Center and managed Boeing's St. Charles, Mo., site.
Aviation Week & Space Technology periodically takes an over-the-shoulder look to capture lessons from past aerospace programs, but aided by the perspective of time and in-service experience. Such revisits can benefit current and future system developments, perhaps avoiding the costly and painful trials of rediscovery and relearning. The articles that follow focus on the B-2's development and how the design techniques, technologies and management approaches it fostered are being applied today.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has revoked the indirect air carrier certification of J.H. World Express for "repeated security infractions." The Los Angeles-based freight forwarder will be able to re-apply for certification in 90 days. Until then, passenger airlines at Los Angeles International Airport that accept cargo from J.H. are subject to $25,000 fines.
For a rocket-boosted, guided artillery round, the launch is extraordinary: from zero to Mach 2.5 in a split second, an acceleration of more than 10,000g., and temperatures of around 3,000F. Making rocket motors and GPS guidance packages that can survive the shock of a cannon blast is a major technical challenge. It's also critical to the U.S. Navy's goal of providing long-range, heavy artillery support for ground operations, a key capability that the Marine Corps has been doing without since the retirement of the Iowa-class battleships in the early 1990s.
USAF Maj. Gen. (ret.) Robert Chedister has been named vice president-operations for Proxy Aviation, Germantown, Md. He was program executive officer for weapons/commander of the Air Armament Center, Air Force Materiel Command, Eglin AFB, Fla. Thomas A. Corcoran has become chairman. He is a management consultant and senior adviser to The Carlyle Group.
It's an idea that's been around for a while, but systems that reliably detect human movement on the other side of a wall are proliferating in the marketplace. Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd. in February debuted its Ultra Wide Band system for tactical, counterterrorism and urban operations, capable of detecting even tiny movements. The portable device uses pulsed ultra-wideband signals to detect movement behind walls or within enclosed structures (people must be moving to be detected).
Rocketplane Limited Inc. is completing assembly of its XP vehicle's first delta wing, a static test article that will be shipped in May to Wichita, Kan., for structural testing at the National Institute for Aviation Research. The fighter-size, reusable Rocketplane XP is to be a suborbital spaceplane tailored for commercial space tourism and microgravity experiments. Powered by two jet engines and a rocket, the horizontal takeoff and landing XP would fly to about 330,000 ft. with as many as four people on board. Last month, Rocketplane and Kistler Aerospace Corp.
Usable biometric devices top the list of special-operations needs, U.S. Army Col. Edward Reeder, commander of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), told an audience at the AFCEA (Armed Forces Electronics and Communications Assn.) West 2006 conference in San Diego. Reeder, who recently deployed to Afghanistan for a third time, said fingerprinting and image-recognition kits are used to track Afghans who travel from base to base seeking employment, giving the military more information about laborers.
Italian politicians face fundamental choices over the extent of Rome's participation in the Joint Strike Fighter, with the process getting underway in earnest next month. The new government will have to review the country's ambitions for the Lockheed Martin F-35 JSF, whatever its political makeup.
W. Peter Cherry, chief analyst for the Science Applications International Corp., Vienna, Va., is among six new members of the Washington-based National Academy of Engineering who have aerospace backgrounds. The others are: Archie R. Clemins, president of Caribou Technologies Inc., Boise, Idaho; Sau-Hai (Harvey) Lam, Edwin Wilsey '04 Professor Emeritus of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University; Verne L. (Larry) Lynn, a consultant on unmanned aerospace vehicles from Naples, Fla.; Albert F.
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) believes that some day, a single aircraft will achieve the capabilities of three or four different vehicles by radically changing, or morphing, the shape of its wings during flight. Long-standing scientific work on these shape-shifting structures took a step forward to applied applications recently with successful wind-tunnel tests of two hunter-killer aircraft designs with morphing wings that were developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works and NextGen Aeronautics, a small California startup.
CAE has been chosen as the first manufacturer to provide a full-flight simulator for the 90-seat ARJ21 regional jet, which is under development by China Aviation Industries, AVIC I. CAE won a C$15-million ($12.9-million) contract to provide the first simulator for the ARJ21, which will be located at a training center in Shanghai, in time for the jet's entry into service in 2009.
Bill Lay and Charles Beard had a wonderful Viewpoint article on the need to include time-certain development as an integral part of the procurement process (AW&ST Feb. 13, p. 70). Here is another reason to include the factor of "time" in development: When technology and capability change every three months and it takes six months to write a specification, and the procurement process takes two or three or more years, the overall project time will stretch way out. These inconsistencies cause project distortion.
India will work with Russia to develop a new generation of Glonass navigation satellites and launch them on its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), under an agreement fleshed out this month after two years of negotiations. The deal between the Indian Space Research Organization and the Russian space agency Roscosmos was signed following the visit of Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to New Delhi Mar. 17. It includes launching of Glonass-M satellites with a version of the GSLV, and joint development of the smaller Glonass-K navigation satellites.
A leaked report that Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners failed to spot homemade bomb-making materials hidden in luggage at 21 airports has Congress in an uproar, but Edmund (Kip) Hawley is taking the long view of the situation.
The Air Force and Navy have come to a "parting of the ways" over the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System, says USAF Secretary Michael Wynne. The Air Force is completing work on refueling unmanned vehicles, with a long-range-strike mission in mind. The Navy wants its UAV to conduct low-observable carrier ops. "If it works, I think the Air Force could show up back on their doorstep," Wynne says. The chief of naval operations, Adm. Michael Mullen, says the Navy plans to field a carrier-capable, unmanned strike and recon aircraft in 10-15 years.
THE MODERNIZATION OF THE NATIONAL AIRSPACE SYSTEM is spotlighted in a Princeton University study, completed in 2004 under the auspices of the FAA and NASA's Joint University Program. Princeton graduate students John O. Andrews, Ezekiel S. Burke and John M. Thomas, whose specialties include aerospace engineering and operations research, called for the FAA to adopt a single tax system so that all commercial operators (not passengers) be taxed on a per-plane, per-time, per-location basis.
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