Singapore Airlines Group posted a loss of S$62.5 million ($36 million) for the first half of fiscal 2003 (ending Sept. 30), its first-ever operating loss. The SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) health crisis was called the culprit. In the same period last year, the airline group had a S$510-million profit. Revenue plunged 20% to S$4.2 billion. At the height of the outbreak the carrier reduced capacity by 40%. By late September, capacity had climbed back to 90% of pre-SARS levels.
TIMES CHANGE When Vice President Dick Cheney was U.S. defense secretary, he very publicly rebuked then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Larry D. Welch for advising Congress about the service's needs. Now Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has presented Welch with the 2003 Eugene G. Fubini Award that recognizes an individual each year who has made significant contributions to the Defense Dept. in an advisory role over a sustained period. Welch has been a senior official with the Institute for Defense Analyses since soon after his retirement in 1990.
FLIGHT BAG DEBUT KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has taken delivery of the first of 10 Boeing 777-200ERs as replacements for its 747-300 fleet. Deliveries stretch out over the next two years. The new aircraft includes the first installation of the Class 3 certified Jeppesen Electronic Flight Bag. FAA's recent acceptance of Class 3 status for EFB means permanently installed systems can be used. Previous FAA certification has allowed use of laptops, but the Class 3 installations are the only ones fully integrated with the aircraft's avionics system.
William B. Scott (Missoula, Mont., and Kamloops, B.C.)
Two fatal airtanker accidents caused by inflight structural failures last year led to major reassessments of the U.S. government's fire and aviation programs. Signaling a new willingness to accept outside scrutiny of its operations, the U.S. Forest Service allowed an Aviation Week & Space Technology editor to fly on single- and multiengine airtankers, leadplanes, Aerial Supervision Module aircraft, smokejumper platforms and a large helicopter during firefighting missions last summer.
LONG-RANGE SECRET Boeing researchers have fired a demonstrator weapon that they will offer for the U.S. Joint Common Missile competition. Details are lacking, but they said the missile was fired from a shore defense system tripod and it flew more than the 16 km. (9.9 mi.) required for a helicopter-launched design. The JCM is expected to replace many current missiles, including Hellfire and Maverick, and threaten hardened bunkers as well as relocatable and moving targets such as tanks. The Boeing demonstrator used an advanced rocket motor developed by ATK.
The question that keeps recurring about the Ballistic Missile Defense program is: "Why are we making this so difficult?" Of course, the idea of hitting a bullet with another bullet is a difficult concept, but who says we need to hit it? Why spend billions of dollars to develop multi-spectral seeker heads to differentiate actual warheads from decoys and complex terminal guidance systems to steer the interceptor to impact?
Smokejumpers are a decades-old, well-proven "initial attack" resource for snuffing remote wildfires while they are small, but years of declining U.S. budgets have cut the elite teams' numbers considerably.
NASA has optioned four launches from Orbital Sciences Corp. in 2007 and 2008 under the agency's Small Expendable Launch Vehicle Services contract with the company. Orbital's air-launched Pegasus was slated to orbit the Space Technology-8 and Small Explorer-10 missions, while its ground-based Taurus would launch the Glory Earth-observing and Orbiting Carbon Observer satellites, both of which Orbital is developing for NASA.
Tanker 10, a Neptune Aviation/Lockheed P-2V Neptune flown by Christian Holm and David Seashore, makes a retardant drop on a major fire in Arizona. More than 30 privately operated large airtankers--which constitute the U.S. government's contract aerial firefighting fleet--deliver millions of gallons of phosphate-based retardant each year to help ground teams control wildfires (see p. 58). Large tankers are former military or air transport aircraft fitted with special tanks that carry and precisely dispense up to 3,000 gal. of retardant. Photo by Willi Hamm.
Susumu Saiga has become Tokyo-based sales manager for Japan for Delta Air Lines. He was Osaka-based head of Northwest Airlines' operations in western Japan.
A request for proposals is on the street for the U.S. Navy's Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft (MMA). The two primary contenders are Boeing's 737 derivative and Lockheed Martin's Orion 21. The Navy could buy between 108-150 of the aircraft, depending on the success of the associated Broad-Area Maritime program, which has the potential to produce up to about 100 unmanned aircraft. They could act as communications nodes, surveillance platforms and sensor-dropping ad- juncts to manned aircraft.
Eric Hinson has become Paris-based vice president-commercial aerospace for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Honeywell. He succeeds Barry Eccleston, who has been appointed vice president for the Propulsion Systems Enterprise of Honeywell Engines, Systems & Services. Hinson was senior vice president-business development and financial services for Gulfstream Aerospace.
The NASA Engineering & Safety Center (NESC), formed in the wake of the Columbia accident to provide more independent safety oversight of all NASA programs, is being formally activated this week as International Space Station as well as shuttle topics are elevated for review by the agency. The organization, headquartered at the Langley Research Center, will eventually have about 250 personnel spread NASA-wide. One of its first tasks underway now is determining how to conduct these reviews under an effective management structure.
Jung-Dae Cha, who is managing vice president-cargo strategy and alliances of Korean Air Cargo, will succeed Tom Nolan as vice president-sales and marketing for the U.S. Cargo Sales Joint Venture of Air France, Delta Air Lines and Korean Air. Nicholas Cushnie, who is general manager of alliances for Delta Air Logistics, will succeed Jin-Hong Kim as vice president-commercial network of the joint venture. Nolan will return to Delta Air Logistics and Kim to Korean Air Cargo.
USMC Maj. Gen. (ret.) Thomas L. Wilkerson has been named CEO/publisher of the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Md. He was executive vice president/general manager of the Government Services Group of Primedia Workplace Learning.
A LOT IN STAR LOT Polish Airlines became the 16th member of the Star Alliance on Oct. 26 and began code-sharing with Star partner United Airlines on 30 flights at Chicago, New York JFK and Newark. United was unable to reciprocate by code-sharing with LOT flights under a restriction placed on United when the FAA, last September, ranked Poland's civil aviation authority as a Category 2 under the agency's International Aviation Safety Assessment program.
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A sudden loss of transmissions from Japan's $594-million Advanced Earth Observation Satellite II (Adeos II) has plunged the Japan Aerospace Exploratory Agency (JAXA) into its first mission crisis.
An Oct. 30 image of the Sun, provided by the NASA/European Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft that is parked 1 million mi. from Earth, shows several bright active regions that last week produced two of the largest coronal mass ejections ever recorded as having been directed toward Earth.
SEEING STARS The FAA's STARS (Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System) is approaching yet another crossroad, research and acquisition chief Charles Keegan tells Congress. The agency's Joint Resources Council will decide this month whether to deploy Raytheon's STARS equipment throughout the ATC system or mix it with Lockheed Martin's less expensive Common ARTS, the latter endorsed by Transportation Dept. Inspector General Kenneth Mead.
Joseph Cox has been named vice president-operations and manufacturing, David Murphy director of quality and Cliff Vogelsberg director of production, all for the Safire Aircraft Co., West Palm Beach, Fla. Cox has held senior operations and manufacturing positions at the Lockheed Martin Corp., Dyncorp, BAE Systems and the Alliance Aircraft Corp. Murphy was director of quality for Sunvair, Valencia, Calif., while Vogelsberg was a director of production operations at SR Technics, Alliance Aircraft and BAE Systems.
The British Defense Ministry and EADS subsidiary Paradigm Secure Communications Ltd. have signed a private finance initiative contract, worth more than 2.5 billion pounds ($4.24 billion), covering the Skynet 5 military communications satellite program. EADS Astrium will act as prime contractor for the two Skynet 5 spacecraft. The first satellite will be launched in 2006 and the second during the following year.
Stephan Koss (see photo) has been named president/general manager of Jet Aviation London Biggin Hill. He was a maintenance sales engineer at Jet Aviation in Basel, Switzerland. Koss succeeds Elie Zelouf, who will head customer support at the Basel facility.
NASA hasn't committed itself to accelerating its proposed Orbital Space Plane (OSP) program by two years, and it won't issue a contract on the project until Congress has a say on any long-term space-exploration plans the White House may propose, Administrator Sean O'Keefe has told members of Congress worried the space agency is getting ahead of itself on the $15-billion program.
