USAF Lt. Gen. Victor E. Renuart, Jr., has been named assistant director for strategic plans and policy for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. He has been vice commander of Pacific Air Forces, Hickam AFB, Hawaii. He will be succeeded by Maj. Gen. David A. Deptula, who has been nominated for promotion to lieutenant general. He has been director of air and space operations at Headquarters Pacific Air Forces. Maj. Gen. John L.
Herve Guillou (see photo) has been appointed CEO of Munich-based EADS Defense and Communications Systems, effective Sept. 1. He will succeed Stefan Zoller, who has been appointed CEO of the EADS Defence & Security Systems Div. Guillou has been CEO of EADS Space Transportation.
China's Civil Aviation Flying University has bought a fleet of 42 Cessna Skyhawks for its ab-initio pilot training program. Twenty will be equipped with Garmin G1000 integrated avionic packages and the remainder will have analog instrumentation. Deliveries are scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2006.
Congress is unlikely to finalize Fiscal 2006 defense appropriations until late October, so the Defense Dept. will need a continuing resolution to keep running beginning Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year. This means the Pentagon will be able to fund accounts only at Fiscal 2005 levels. So big contracts or spikes in operations--in Iraq, for example--cannot be paid for under a Fiscal 2006 continuing resolution unless they are within the Fiscal 2005 levels.
Scientists are sifting the first returns from the sounding radar on Europe's Mars Express orbiter to calibrate which came from the surface and which are subsurface data. The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (Marsis) is designed to peer as deep as 5 km. (3.1 mi.) beneath the planet's surface for features that could even include aquifers, but radar-boom deployment issues had kept the instrument offline (AW&ST June 13, p. 143).
The U.S. may be the engine that drives the world economy, but American airlines certainly are not fueling the current commercial aerospace recovery. Cash-strapped U.S. carriers could account for just 5% of civil jet orders this year, far below their 30-40% share in past recoveries, according to a new report from a team led by Byron Callan, Merrill Lynch's senior aerospace analyst. Underpinning this upswing--and the accompanying rise in the stock prices of aircraft builders and their suppliers--is a boom in orders from Asia.
Growth in passenger load factors and strong unit revenues are bolstering European airlines. But unrelenting fuel-price increases and terrorism concerns could jeopardize the bottom line for the second half of the year.
The Pentagon has "stumbled repeatedly" in supplying equipment needed by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan due to a "large, cumbersome acquisition process where no one is responsible for the totality," says John Hamre, CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a former deputy Defense secretary. "You cannot get complete accountability" because the process is fractured between acquisition, budgeting and operational communities, so responsibility must be given to the service chiefs.
India's travel agent associations say they would be willing to settle for a 5%-plus-service-fee concept in hopes of halting the rapid movement toward zero commissions. Major associations have filed a petition in court against airlines that have reduced commissions to 5% from 9% since Sept. 11, 2001. Airlines, however, say the move to zero commissions is inevitable as they increasingly rely on Internet sales and try to eliminate high distribution costs.
Bell/Agusta Aerospace Co.'s BA609 commercial tiltrotor (see photo), which flew for the first time in full airplane mode last month, reaching a speed of 190 kt., will be flown to a maximum speed of 293 kt. in the next two weeks as the flight test envelope continues to be expanded, says Jack Gallagher, executive director for Bell/Agusta programs. On Aug.
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Robert V. LaPenta retired in April as president and CFO of L-3 Communications Corp., the defense and homeland security company he co-founded with CEO Frank C. Lanza and Lehman Brothers. Two months later, LaPenta announced the formation of L-1 Investment Partners, a private firm focused on the emerging biometrics market (AW&ST June 13, p. 31).
Richard Tranquilli (see photo) has been appointed vice president-organizational development of Cincinnati-based Executive Jet Management. He was a principal in Performance Builders in Cincinnati and had been retail education manager for Fifth Third Bancorp.
James F. Johnson has been appointed chief operating officer of the Boeing Travel Management Co., Tukwila, Wash. Isabelle Donovan has been named vice president-global operations and account management, based in Huntington Beach, Calif. Johnson succeeds Marsha Landgraf-Leeg, who is retiring. Donovan succeeds Dennis Hextell, who has retired.
Angela Boyle, a member of Raytheon's Ames Consolidated Information Technology Services contract team, has received the NASA Public Service Medal at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Boyle supports the NASA Advanced Air Transportation Technologies project office. The project, valued at $400 million, is devoted to improving air traffic management operations in the national airspace system by using expertise at three NASA centers and through collaboration with the FAA.
The competition is taking shape for the U.S. Army's Light Utility Helicopter (LUH) program as Lockheed Martin and MD Helicopters signed a teaming arrangement that pits them against expected proposals from Bell and Eurocopter. The Lockheed Martin-led team will offer MD Helicopters' Explorer, a twin-engine aircraft using the no-tail-rotor anti-torque system, which officials from the companies say is a safety feature. It would also use Pratt & Whitney's 207E engines.
Space Adventures Ltd. wants to send tourists to the far side of the Moon, provided they have $100 million for the fare. Drawing on a study by RSC Energia, the Arlington, Va.-based space tourism company would send a three-seat Soyuz capsule to an in-orbit docking with a Block DM upper stage. That stage would kick the Soyuz into a lunar swing-around trajectory, and the Soyuz would use its own propulsion system for a reentry burn at the end of the nine-day mission.
Austrian aerospace composite specialist Fischer Advanced Composite Components (FACC) expects to double its revenues in the next two years, as the company participates in the ramp-up of key civil aircraft projects and takes advantage of a surge in Boeing winglet production.
Japanese tests of the MTSAT-1R multi-function transport satellite system could interfere with certain Rockwell Collins communications equipment in the region and beyond, according to a safety bulletin issued by the U.S. Airline Pilots Assn. The Japan Civil Aviation Board plans to begin tests on Aug. 26, and interaction between the signal and communications data units could render some radios inoperative. As many as 180 flights daily in the North Atlantic also could be affected by the tests. A software fix is being developed to eliminate potential problems.
BAE Systems Nimrod MRA4 has completed a set of hot-weather trials with the first overseas trip for the developmental aircraft. The MRA4 spent 10 days at Italy's Sigonella, Sicily, air base, with temperatures reaching 104F. BAE Systems adds that two MRA4s have logged more than 100 hr. combined, with the longest mission lasting 4 hr. 35 min. The test aircraft have reached 35,000 ft. altitude. A third MRA4 is to join flight trials soon.
At Bagram AB, Afghanistan, a USAF C-17 rolled off the runway while landing, damaging the nose and right main landing gears. The runway was partially closed for 30 hr. until Army and Air Force engineers could remove the cargo, drain the fuel, lift the aircraft's nose with a crane and place it on a flatbed trailer to substitute for a nosewheel. Two bulldozers pulled the aircraft to the parking ramp.
Flyby imagery from NASA's Cassini Saturn probe shows the moon Mimas to be so heavily battered that its craters even have craters. Imaged at a range of about 42,500 mi. against the backdrop of Saturn's rings, Mimas reveals little or no evidence of internal activity. But the 247-mi.-dia. moon has been repeatedly shocked with violent impacts. Its largest craters appear to be filled with rock shaken loose by subsequent collisions, and that material itself displays newer craters that suggest the original landslides are ancient.
NASA's Centennial Challenges technology-push effort is offering a $250,000 prize for an astronaut glove that is more dexterous, less tiring to use and stronger. At a competition to be held in November 2006, competing glove bladder-restraint elements will be tested for the force required to move the fingers and thumb and in standardized dexterity tests against the clock. One glove from each entry will be pressurized to failure, with points going to the glove that can withstand the greatest internal pressure.
