The humpback 747-400 that Boeing is developing to carry 7E7 wing sets and fuselage sections is to be as simple an air truck as the company can make. Called the Large Cargo Freighter (LCF), the transport's airframe will feature an enlarged roof running the length of its fuselage and a swing tail for loading its outsized cargo instead of the side-mounted large cargo door originally envisioned.
Paul J. (Page) Hoeper has been appointed to the board of advisers of H&K Strategic Business Solutions, McLean, Va. He is chairman of Versar Inc., and RAE Inc. and a former assistant Army secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology.
The Brazilian carrier GOL Linhas Aereaes SA will purchase 15 Boeing 737-800s valued at $940 million at list prices, raising the size of its 737 NG fleet to 48 aircraft. The airline models itself after the Southwest single-type fleet plan, flying 18 737-700s and four -800s. Its order includes options for 28 -800s for delivery by 2010, raising its list-price value to Boeing to $2.7 billion. The ordered aircraft are due for delivery between 2007-09.
The U.S. Transportation Dept. approved cargo code-sharing across the Atlantic by Korean Air and SAS Scandinavian Airlines. As proposed, SAS will block a portion of capacity on the New York JFK-Oslo segment of Korean's weekly freighter flights over a Seoul-JFK-Oslo-Seoul routing and place its code on the segment, starting next month. Korean doesn't plan to offer its own JFK-Oslo service. The carriers received U.S. authority last year for similar service from JFK to Copenhagen.
Your article "21st Century War" (AW&ST Apr. 26, p. 51) makes it clear that we need bombers but the innards are more critical and costly than the empennage.
Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest the expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang stopped slowing down and started accelerating about 6 billion years ago. The change was driven by a curious counter-gravity so poorly understood that astronomers refer to it as dark energy for want of a better term.
With appropriate fanfare, Lufthansa German Airlines Vice President for Marketing David Friedman sent an e-mail on May 17 from Flight 452 as it leveled off at 35,000 ft. while on a Munich-Los Angeles route. The e-mail was the first for regular commercial operations using Boeing's Connexion inflight wideband service. Lufthansa is equipping its long-haul fleet with WiFi wireless antenna systems and is marketing Connexion as FlyNet. Friedman (left) is pictured with passenger Alexander Neumann of Amgen, Germany, who is surfing the Internet.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has launched modernization studies for New York LaGuardia Airport's Central Terminal and Newark Liberty International Airport's Terminal A. The studies are expected to lead to plans for meeting projected passenger growth. Between 2015-20, LaGuardia is to handle more than 30 million passengers annually, up from 22.5 million in 2003. Newark is expected to handle 45 million passengers, up from 29.4 million in 2003.
There was a lot of love in the room when Boeing held its investor conference in New York last week. The airframer said it has proposals out for approximately 450 7E7s, and believes it could record orders for 200 this year and as many as 500 by first flight in 2007.
John and Martha King of the San Diego-based King Schools have been elected to the board of directors of the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation, which is also in San Diego. It issues grants for projects geared to encourage a balance between technology and the environment.
Low-fare carrier Independence Air's planned 300 daily departures from Washington Dulles International by summer's end will strain efforts to congestion-proof the airport, landside and airside, against the booming travel season.
British Airways has reported pre-tax profits of $410 million for the fiscal year ended Mar. 31--reversing a year-earlier loss of about $230 million--and fourth-quarter profits of $81 million, compared with a loss of about $340 million in the year-ago period. The improved financial performance was just as dramatic on an operating basis. Chairman Lord Marshall attributed the results to costcutting, restructuring to take advantage of new technology and growing Internet use by travelers, as well as a recovery in premium passenger volume on long-haul routes.
Despite some false starts, the deployment of scheduled executive shuttle services is accelerating and appears set to become one of the darlings of the business aviation market. This trend could be a highlight of the European Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition (Ebace), which opens in Geneva this week.
Two Gulfstream GVs modified by Fokker Services for the Japanese coast guard are being outfitted and flight tested here for delivery early next year. The lead contractor on the Sea Watch program is Murabeni Aerospace of Japan, a Gulfstream affiliate. A third Gulfstream may be procured later; if so, it will be the newer model G550.
Let's see if we can connect the dots here: *The Boeing KC-767 lease/buy program is wounded, possibly mortally, and probably ought to have a bullet put in it, but that will leave the U.S. Air Force with a looming tanker shortage. *Boeing has well-engineered, proven programs for converting 747 airframes to cargo configuration (AW&ST Apr. 5, p. 56). *Evergreen International has put a lot of tankage in a 747 for its "supertanker."
Aviation law specialist Ann Thornton Field (see photo) has been named chair of the National Insurance Litigation Dept. of the Philadelphia law firm of Cozen O'Connor, effective July 1. She has been vice chair and will succeed Robert R. Reeder, who is retiring.
Thank you for the Apr. 19 cover photo. Seeing the mechanic defy a basic Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation, requiring that the handrail not be used as a ladder, further emphasizes my commitment to promote safe and proper operation of equipment. Being a design engineer of ground support equipment I have as a primary objective to make it functional and safe. However, no matter how safe your design, you can protect people from themselves only through training. It would be in Continental Airlines' interest to use this photo to show what NOT to do.
The weak U.S. dollar is expected to increase demand for American aerospace products, and the steadily declining U.S. aerospace trade surplus should begin to reverse by 2006. "There is a lag factor between our prediction of sales and the trade balance, but we are forecasting a good-sized uptick in commercial sales of about $5 billion in 2006," says Aerospace Industries Assn. (AIA) President and CEO John Douglass. "The dollar charge against the euro takes awhile to set in place, and U.S. suppliers are becoming less expensive."
In the late 1990s, when the hugely profitable legacy carriers were protecting their turf from startup low-fare airlines by cutting fares and adding seats, the U.S. Justice Dept.'s competition police were every- where, filing lawsuits alleging anticompetitive predatory practices. Fast-forward a few years and the now financially fragile legacy carriers are still using the same strategies to protect their most profitable markets from the low-fare airlines, but Justice Dept. lawyers are nowhere to be found.
SES Americom will maneuver its new AMC-11 spacecraft into place near a sister spacecraft, AMC-10, launched earlier. The twin spacecraft will tighten the competition between SES Americom and PanAmSat for the high-definition television (HDTV) market. The Americom satellites will beam HDTV and regular cable programming to the U. S., Mexico and Caribbean. The 2.5-ton AMC-11 spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral May 19 on board a Lockheed Martin/ ILS Atlas IIAS.
Data from Transportation Dept. Inspector General Ken Mead show how iffy this year's summer travel season will be, particularly in the eastern U.S. In congressional testimony, Mead lists 15 airports, all but three of them in states that border the Atlantic, where 21-27% of scheduled flights were delayed in summer 2003, with average delays of 46-59 min. These airports plan 5-20% more flights this summer. And help isn't on the way: Of eight new runways planned for completion by 2008, only three are at these 15 airports.
Bangkok's status as a Southeast Asian hub is in jeopardy because the Thai government plans a hefty 35% increase in charges for the city's international airport.
German travel giant TUI plans to expand to Russia as part of a plan to gradually export its travel business model outside Europe. Chairman Michael Frenzel said the company will take an interest in an undisclosed Russian tour operator "within the next few weeks," after establishing a partnership in China last year. TUI reported a 26.6% rise in earnings in the first quarter, and says sales for the 2003-04 business year are up 4.5%. It recently doubled a bond offering in response to high investor demand (AW&ST May 10, p. 20).
Douglas Stewart of North Egremont, Mass., has been named the National Certificated Flight Instructor for the Year by the Washington-based General Aviation Manufacturers Assn. Other recent award winners are: National Aviation Maintenance Technician of the Year, Gary Stephen Goodpaster of Cincinnati; National Aviation Safety Counselor of the Year, Walter Schuyler Schamel of Winter Haven, Fla.; and National Avionics Technician of the Year, Keith Bryan Lewis of Spartanburg, S.C. Joshua Bochnowski, a senior at the Purdue University School of Aviation, has won GAMA's Dr.
