India must quickly improve capacity, air traffic control and infrastructure of its airports--"most of which are not up to international standards"--if it is to compete with the challenge posed by China, warns International Air Transport Assn. Director General Giovanni Bisignani. He links lack of infrastructure with overcrowding of routes. Making a case for air traffic management reforms and route restructuring, Bisignani says 80% of the flights between Europe and Asia are now funneled through only two crossing points between India and Pakistan.
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) expects the first launch of its Falcon I rocket in the first two weeks of December from U.S. Air Force facilities at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, CEO Elon Musk says. The payload will be the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Foxsat 2, which was developed for USAF.
Alcatel Space engineers say they have demonstrated cooling levels close to absolute zero on the Herschel far-infrared/submillimeter telescope, marking yet another key milestone in the European Space Agency mission now set for a late 2007 launch. Assembly of the 3.5-meter monolithic silicon carbide mirror was completed last month (AW&ST Oct. 3, p. 17).
The long-running trend of declining airline insurance rates is being interrupted, with the rate of decline either slowing or in some cases premiums increasing, according to a market review by AON. The insurance firm says the air transport sector will suffer collateral damage from the recent U.S. hurricanes. "Underwriters will try and end this year's run of premium reductions, which have averaged 7% for liability and hull insurance combined," it states.
Frank Morring, Jr. and Michael Mecham (Fukuoka, Japan)
NASA's International Space Station partners are working with the U.S. agency to move their expensive ISS hardware forward in the dwindling space shuttle launch schedule, to give it a better chance of reaching orbit. If it doesn't get there, the impact on President Bush's space exploration plans could be dire. Bush needs international cooperation to make his plan work, and that will be hard to come by if he doesn't deliver the goods to the station.
Raytheon Aircraft Co. (RAC) is improving customer support for Beechcraft and Hawker owners. The domestic and international parts distribution system is being overhauled to use a customized approach. Since implementing a series of major improvement programs in the past four years, RAC has gone from being rated among the worst in customer support to equality with Gulfstream Aerospace Corp.--a premier builder of large-cabin business jets.
USN Rear Adm. (lower half) (selectee) Tony L. Cothron has been appointed chief of staff of the National Security Agency in Washington. He has been commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, also in Washington.
A fall in demand after the Oct. 1 terrorist bombings in Bali has prompted Japan Airlines to cut its frequencies to Indonesia. Instead of thrice-daily services, JAL will operate a single Tokyo flight serving Jakarta and Denpasar (Bali). JAL also will cut daily Osaka to Denpasar flights to three times a week. Regular services will resume in late December.
I may not care for the idea of flying on board a plane that rotates nose gear 90 deg. before tucking them into the fuselage. But so be it, that's the prerogative of its Airbus designers (AW&ST Oct. 3, p. 43). I do, however, question the wisdom of granting airworthiness approval to air transports that cannot dump fuel in an emergency. Orbiting the Los Angeles area for 3 hr. to bring a transport down to a safe landing weight might be a reasonable strategy for stuck landing gear, but what happens in the case of a cabin fire or other emergency?
A Cosmos 3M carrying multiple payloads is due to lift off on Oct. 27-28, following correction of a power failure on an Iranian imaging satellite, Sina-1. The booster also will carry Topsat, an experimental U.K. military payload to study the feasibility of delivering low-cost, relatively high-resolution imagery; BLMIT-1, a Chinese spacecraft that will be part of Surrey Satellite Technology's Disaster Monitoring Constellation; SSETI-Express, an ESA-sponsored student payload; and Russian experimental telecom satellite Mozhaets-5.
A top U.S. intelligence official says the nation can't afford to lose congressional funding of Space-Based Radar, Global Hawk unmanned aircraft or the E-10 multi-sensor intelligence-gathering aircraft.
Powerful electronic pulses will be a key weapon in the battle against enemy command, control and communication networks, but they also threaten the U.S. systems that will launch these thunderbolts.
Like the fictional baseball field in the boondocks that attracts a large crowd--"Build it and they will come"--a new runway will breed airplanes eventually, if not during an industry downturn. That's the view of FAA and local officials as capacity-enhancing runways are opening in the next six months at three Midwest airports among the FAA's top 35 busiest. At each--Minneapolis-St. Paul International, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International, and Lambert-St. Louis International--scheduled flights are, paradoxically, in decline.
I'd like to set the record straight, for all the NASA and space shuttle bashers. No NASA employee can say this, because it would be career suicide in a Republican-dominated leadership.
Pakistan is preparing to buy an undisclosed number of Swedish Erieye airborne early warning systems, under a $1-billion deal. The Ericsson radar system would be mounted on Saab 2000 turboprops.
Tom Byrd (see photos) has become director of program management for government business and Mike Turner senior manager of media relations for the Raytheon Aircraft Co., Wichita, Kan. Byrd was director of strategic customer solutions for BAE Systems Sensor Integration, Austin, Tex. Turner was an account strategist for Sullivan Higdon & Sink.
A contract dispute among its organizers has raised the question of whether Singapore will remain home to Asia's best-known air show. The 13th Asian Aerospace will take place as scheduled next Feb. 21-26 and has attracted the usual level of national delegations from the U.S., France, the U.K., Israel, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and, of course, Singapore.
Mechtronix Systems, a small Canadian company that builds flight simulators based on simplified microprocessor technology, has snared C$8 million ($6.8 million) in venture capital. The money is earmarked to expand its manufacturing facilities in Montreal and further extend its marketing to China, Latin America and Eastern Europe.
NASA's recent announcement that the space shuttle would make only 18 more flights to the International Space Station (ISS), leaving much of the hardware of our international partners on the ground, should be the death knell of this long-running boondoggle (AW&ST Oct. 3, p. 25).
The 22 members of the Latin American airlines association Aital reported carrying 6.9 million passengers in August, a 14.7% increase compared with August 2004 and 10.7% compared with July. From January to August, 4.2 million domestic and 2.7 million Aital carriers transported 51 million passengers, a 15.1% increase from the year-before period. Revenue passenger kilometers were up 12.8% to 81.0 billion. Year-to-date load factor reached 71%, 2.3 percentage points higher than the 2004 period.
The $30.8-billion Homeland Security Dept. appropriations bill signed by President Bush last week disperses $933 million to the Coast Guard to upgrade or replace aging ships and aircraft. The Fiscal 2006 spending bill also allocates $4.6 billion to the Transportation Security Administration for aviation security but cut funding for the TSA's Secure Flight computerized passenger-screening program to $56.7 billion. The spending bill also includes transfer of the Federal Air Marshals Service back to TSA from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Linda A. Mills (see photos) has become vice president-operations and processes for the Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Information Technology Sector, McLean, Va. She was vice president-mission assurance/Six Sigma for Northrop Grumman's Mission Systems Sector. Mills has been succeeded by Kelley Zelickson, who was MSS vice president of ground-based midcourse defense programs.
