With its annual EBACE business aviation show firmly on the global aerospace calendar, Europe is now turning its attention to creating a viable helicopter exhibition. On Oct. 5-7, Geneva's Palexpo Center will play host to International Heli Trade. Sponsors hope it will become Europe's answer to the annual Helicopter Assn. International (HAI) event in the U.S. HAI may help organize and publicize the new show, as the National Business Aviation Assn. has done with EBACE, which is held at the same venue.
To get out of the tanker mess and save everyone a ton of money, the U.S. should offer to trade new Boeing C-17 military transports for an equivalent value of new Airbus tankers. This would help everybody, except the A400M transport's design team.
Hellenic Aerospace Industry will join France's uninhabited combat air vehicle technology demonstrator program led by Dassault Aviation. DGA French armaments agency and Greek defense officials signed the agreement on Jan. 19, while negotiations with more countries are continuing.
Eiichiro Sekigawa (Tokyo), Michael Mecham (San Francisco)
An unusual string of cracks that raises reliability issues with the Pratt & Whitney JT8D-200 series has hit the MD-81/-87 fleet of Japan Air System. More than half the fleet has been grounded and its domestic flight schedule thrown into chaos.
The U.S. Air Force has awarded teams headed by Lockheed Martin and Boeing $472-million contracts to execute system development and demonstration phases for the transformational communications military satellite (TSAT) program.
The government of India, in partnership with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Universal Postal Union (UPU), will participate in a satellite project to help bring the Internet to a half-dozen remote post offices in neighboring Bhutan. India will provide six VSAT terminals, capacity on its Insat satcom system and maintenance for the $450,000 E-Shabtog project. The ITU will contribute training and expertise and the UPU postal equipment.
John Barclay has been appointed to the board of directors of the National Safe Skies Alliance. He is chairman/CEO of Laser Data Command Inc. of Minneapolis.
David Bond (Washington), Frances Fiorino (Washington)
Southwest Airlines and AirTran Airways, profitable in 2003 and optimistic about 2004, will focus their rapid growth during the coming year on current or already-announced markets, top executives of the carriers indicate.
Most U.S. military contractors will report solid financial performances for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, buoyed by generally stable programs and increased funding levels from the Fiscal 2003 and 2004 defense budgets.
De-peaking flight operations at hub airports--a technique used by network airlines in recent years to reduce costs and increase efficiency--runs the risk of market-share losses and negative overall results because of lengthened connection times, a paper presented at the Transportation Research Board's annual meeting suggests.
To read media commentary across Asia and the Middle East, U.S. President Bush's space plans are "wasteful" or "far-fetched." But in India, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and others expect them to strengthen the cooperative pact he and Bush recently signed.
Investigators seeking to determine why Flash Airlines' Flight 604 plunged into the Red Sea on Jan. 3 late last week began to examine the Boeing 737-300's cockpit voice and flight recorders. They were recovered by a French robot submarine about 2,600 ft. below the surface. The CVR's initial reading confirmed that terrorism could be excluded from potential causes for the mishap, Egyptian and French officials said. The crash killed all 148 passengers and flight crew (AW&ST Jan. 19, p. 406).
Isabelle de Melo has been appointed chief financial officer of Geneva-based PrivatAir. She was CFO of Gemplus before becoming a private financial adviser.
As Asia worries about a new outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in China, Singapore Changi airport's year-end traffic report reflects the devastation of last year's SARS outbreak. The virus is blamed for last year's nearly 15% drop in traffic, to 24.7 million passengers. Cargo shipments held up better, declining 1.6%, to 1.61 million metric tons. Singapore recorded 28 SARS-related deaths, and this year the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore expects traffic to reach pre-SARS levels.
One of the pitfalls the U.S. has encountered in developing the highly tailored weapons required to destroy an adversary's weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities is the accurate emulation of the intended target. Just knowing what a target looks like isn't enough, says Stephen Younger, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency that specializes in building these weapons. An effective device against a target built with U.S. concrete and steel may not work the way one expects against an identical-looking target built with lower-quality materials, he said.
NASA has reestablished the old Office of Aeronautics as part of its reorganization to accommodate President Bush's new space policy. Retaining its "Code R" designation, the office will yield the Orbital Space Plane, Next-Generation Launch Technology and some smaller programs to the new Office of Exploration Technology (Code T), along with what Administrator Sean O'Keefe has said will be about $6 billion to reallocate over five years to the new work. But J.
Paul Brubaker has been appointed executive vice president/chief marketing officer for SI International Inc., Reston, Va. He was founder/principal of ICG Government and is a former deputy assistant Defense secretary.
Boeing and Cathay Pacific Airways will launch the 747-400 Special Freighter program, with an agreement to convert up to a dozen 747-400 passenger aircraft to freighters. Cathay Pacific will receive its first Special Freighter in December 2005, and the sixth during 2007.
NASA's space shuttle main engine passed its 1 millionth sec. of operation during an 8.5-min. static firing at Stennis Space Center, Miss., last week. The engine was undergoing an acceptance test prior to its scheduled flight on the STS-121 mission, the second after shuttles resume flying. Overall the big Rocketdyne engine has racked up more than 826,000 sec. firing in the test stand, and almost 174,000 sec. in flight during 113 missions.
The Pentagon's touted, highly precise combat during the Iraq war may have had an unintended consequence, fueling the insurgency problems the U.S. military now faces there. The fact that specific targets were hit rather than much of the country devastated during the bombing campaign means to many Iraqis the conflict didn't feel like a war and, therefore, some now question the U.S.'s resolve and long-term engagement there, argues Rear Adm. Richard W. Hunt, the Joint Staff's deputy director for strategy and policy.
I agree with Alan Marlow that reducing costs is a good thing, but the economic advantage of reusable hardware is what the space shuttle promised and failed to deliver (AW&ST Jan. 5, p. 6). NASA committed to the shuttle platform for political reasons and then found missions for it. The resulting legacy of Apollo has been a generation of operations in low-Earth orbit, boldly going where men have gone before. The DC-3, P-51 and Saturn V were successful because they were derived from mission requirements, not the other way around.
Teledyne Brown Engineers Inc. will integrate pressurized and unpressurized cargo for the International Space Station under a subcontract to Lockheed Martin Space Operations of Houston that could be worth as much as $40 million. The ISS Cargo Mission subcontract will run for four years, nine months, with two one-year options. Teledyne Brown will integrate such items as scientific payloads, crew-related supplies, vehicle logistics hardware and orbital replacement units needed to maintain the ISS in orbit.
