David B. Minnick has become Washington-based senior vice president in the Jefferies Quarterdeck aerospace and defense investment banking group. He was a director of mergers and acquisitions at the Lockheed Martin Corp.
The German air traffic control system is being privatized under a new government plan. Officials hope parliament will OK the move before it is dissolved for elections on Sept. 18. The plan calls for 74.9% of the ATC organization DFS to be sold, with the government retaining the remainder.
The 2003 Centennial of Powered Flight Oral History Session DVD Set by The Society of Experimental Test Pilots 6 discs, $60 ($40 limited-time offer) As an editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology for 20 years, I've been privileged to experience many industry conferences. At the risk of offending some fine get-togethers, I've found the meetings of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots to be the most enjoyable and rewarding, to the point where I'd say nothing else is in their league.
Frontier Systems, a subsidiary of Boeing, has won a $50-million contract to build a demonstrator of the A-160 Hummingbird vertical takeoff and landing unmanned helicopter to assess its long-range, high-altitude and versatile payload capabilities. Advocates believe it can duplicate both fixed-wing and helicopter performance.
Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman has finally received a $21-million U.S. Air Force contract that will let the service deploy two production RQ-4A Global Hawk unmanned aircraft to the growing reconnaissance base in the United Arab Emirates. They will join the technology demonstrator Global Hawk that is flying missions over Iraq and Afghanistan.
OHB Technology reported second-half revenues of 33 million euros down from 43 million euros the year before. EBITDA was also down slightly to 4.7 million euros from 4.9 million euros, as were orders (111.4 million euros versus 159 million euros).
Even though the U.S. Army gave General Atomics Aeronautical Systems a last-minute surprise win for more than twice the expected number of Predator-derived Warrior unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), company President and CEO Tom Cassidy says he's ready to pump them out of his newly augmented facilities as needed. The Warrior beat out Northrop Grumman's Hunter II after a lengthy competition for what will amount to roughly $1 billion of work. The initial contract to General Atomics for system development and demonstration is worth $214 million.
Also, Northrop Grumman officials completed end-to-end testing on the uplink and downlink phased arrays of the antenna being designed for the USAF Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite program. The company is working under a subcontract to Lockheed Martin; both are to provide two AEHF satellites to the government. The phased-array antennae are designed to deliver secure communications, and the system will replace the Milstar satellites now in orbit. The company now will shift to payload integration and testing. The first AEHF launch is scheduled for 2007.
Kenya Airways is the first carrier to subscribe to a new web-based flight-data analysis service being provided by the International Air Transport Assn. The system relies on software tools for analysis of recorded flight data provided by Flightscape of Ottawa. The agreement calls for 16 Boeing jets operated by Kenya Airways to be equipped with quick-access recorders. This means Kenya Airways can avoid the expense of setting up its own system, training a staff and funding an in-house department. Results will be sent by IATA only to Kenya Airways.
Qualcomm and Boeing are demonstrating the simultaneous use of Code Division Multiple Access and GSM wireless technology to illustrate voice and data acquisition with cell phones on Connexion by Boeing's 737-400 test aircraft. The tests employed an onboard network with infrastructure and integration support from UTSarcom Inc. A small in-cabin CDMA2000 and GSM picocell were connected to the worldwide terrestrial network by an air-to-ground satellite link provided by Connexion.
You can now register ONLINE for Aviation Week Events. Go to www.AviationNow.com/conferences or call Lydia Janow at +1 (212) 904-3225/+1 (800) 240-7645 ext. 5 (U.S. and Canada Only) Oct. 18-20--MRO Europe. Estrel Hotel & Convention Center, Berlin. Nov. 8-10--MRO Asia, Suntec City, Singapore. Nov. 14-16--A&D Programs & Productivity Conference, Phoenix. PARTNERSHIPS Oct. 10-12--HeliAsia. Shangri-La Hotel, Bangkok. Oct. 25-27--ARA '05. Shangri-La Hotel, Singapore.
The Turkish government has given the go-ahead for a 52-helicopter purchase. The project, with bids due by Dec. 5, should cover 20 utility helos for the army and six for the navy, six combat search-and-rescue rotorcraft for the air force, and 20 firefighting helicopters for the forestry service.
A Sikorsky S-76+ helicopter crashed Aug. 10 in the Baltic Sea killing all 14 people on board. The helicopter was on a flight from Tallinn, Estonia, to Helsinki, Finland. The crash of the Copterline-operated helo occurred about 10 min. after takeoff. The weather at the crash site was described as windy, but safe for helo operations. The S-76+ was built in 2000 and had 6,253 flight hr., with its last inspection on Aug. 9. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched a team to aid Estonian investigators.
In response to the anonymous letter about the severe impact on TWA employees of its merger with American Airlines, a good argument can be made that 2,000 former TWA employees on the American payroll is better than none (AW&ST July 25, p. 6). Analysis of TWA's economic situation at the time of its merger with American suggests that TWA had no alternative and could not have survived the economic trauma on the airlines caused by 9/11. Accordingly, 2,000 people still employed is better than nothing but is small consolation for the 20,000 others who were affected.
EADS has secured a 260-million-euro ($320-million) contract for work on the Eurofighter Typhoon's EuroDASS self-protection system. The latest deal supports Tranche 2 Typhoon work and equipment deliveries for 236 fighters. The self-protection suite is built by an industrial team that includes Selex, Electtronic, Indra and EADS.
The U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington will install the largest Cray XD1 supercomputer to date. The system's 288 Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors and 144 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) will provide peak performance of 2.5 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per sec.). The FPGAs allow engineers to speed up computer processing. The computer is being acquired under the Defense Dept.'s high-performance computing modernization program. It will replace a 40-processor Cray MTA-2.
Missions for unmanned aircraft will be quickly expanding into the more exotic areas of electronic jamming, communications interception, pulling imagery from obscure portions of the electromagnetic spectrum and the measurement of faint signals that could betray enemy activity.
Affordable high-speed Internet access will soon be available to customers throughout the Asia-Pacific region, thanks to the launch of the first of a new generation of dedicated fixed broadband satellites by an Ariane rocket last week. Thaicom-4 (or iPSTAR-1, as it's also known) was sent aloft on Aug. 11 by a basic Ariane 5G rocket after several delays due to problems with ground handling facilities at Kourou, French Guiana. The launch, the Ariane 5's second this year, had initially been set for July 8.
Intelsat's second-quarter results appeared to back this up, showing revenues up 11%, to $289.8 million, over a year earlier and EBITDA up 12%, to $195 million. However, the company reported a $53.4-million net loss due to higher financing costs and other expenses, a stock buyback and the disposal of interest in Galaxy Satellite TV.
The European Commission has given the U.K. Office of Fair Trading responsibility for a review of the potential sale of Exeter Airport. The Macquarie Airports Group and Ferrovial Aeropuertos plan to buy the facility, but because the two already own the Bristol Airport, there is concern in the U.K. about competition within the airport structure of southwest England. The Office of Fair Trading already has received comments from third parties raising issues about the deal.
The missile-seeker houses of major contractors are each claiming they've got an edge on what has become the Holy Grail for the Pentagon's next wave of weapons--a tri-mode seeker that will allow a bomb to characterize accurately, and hit, a moving target through any weather.
SES Global plans to place more reliance on self-insurance for in-orbit satellites and to acquire a North American orbital slot from New Skies as its medium-term outlook continues to improve.
Devin Madgett has been promoted to general manager of the Signature Flight Support fixed-base operation at Santa Barbara, Calif., from assistant general manager of the Las Vegas FBO.
