Lockheed Martin has won a $119-million contract to conduct system development and demonstration for a guided multiple-launch rocket system variant with a single warhead. Work will be performed at Lockheed Martin facilities at Camden, Ark., Dallas and White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
FREIGHT CONTRACT Australian-based Cobham subsidiary National Jet has concluded a contract with Australian Air Express to provide an overnight freight service. To meet the contract, National Jet is acquiring six Boeing 727s from TransAustralian Air Pty Ltd.
Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne is flying again after testing was halted to address a pitch hangup that occurred on a Sept. 23 flight (AW&ST Oct. 6, p. 43). The company conducted a full-scale wind tunnel test of the winged spacecraft's tailboom and tail surfaces, identified the source of the pitchup, developed a fix and flew it on SpaceShipOne on Oct. 17.
LAND LAUNCH Sea Launch, the U.S./Ukrainian/Russian/ Norwegian venture that launches satellites from a converted oil platform on the equator in the Pacific, will begin selling flights out of Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Using a version of its ocean-going Zenit-3SL rocket, the new venture--appropriately dubbed Land Launch--will use existing Zenit facilities at Baikonur to process and launch satellites and constellations to low-Earth and geosynchronous transfer orbits.
CARRIER COST BUMP Thales officials have denied U.K. reports that Britain's two CVF conventionally powered aircraft carriers may cost up to 4 billion pounds, and not 2.8 billion pounds ($4.6 billion) as initially estimated. The reports imply that a derivative design for France's new carrier, PA2, being studied under a proposed Franco-U.K. program, also would climb from the nearly 2-billion-euro ($2.3-billion) figure previously quoted. "We are determined to stay within this envelope," said Chairman/CEO Denis Ranque.
Kerry Lynch, managing editor of Aviation Week newsletter The Weekly of Business Aviation, has won the 2003 Gold Wing Award from the National Business Aviation Assn. "for excellent, accurate and insightful reporting on issues related to business aviation." Lynch, who also is Washington editor of Aviation Week's Business & Commercial Aviation magazine, was honored for her article "Ghost Town on the Potomac," which was about the continued closure of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to business and general aviation flights since the Sept.
Alex de Gunten has become executive director of the International Assn. of Latin American Airlines. He succeeds Ernest Vasquez Rocha. De Gunten was managing director for Orbitz Latin America and held senior management positions with LanChile and Canadian Airlines.
STALL WARNING The FAA seems to have settled an internal debate on who ought to oversee operations of private suborbital space launch vehicles--the space-savvy regulators who license commercial rockets or others who certify airworthiness of winged craft. It is not a simple matter, because some reusable launch systems under development are hybrids that involve winged vehicles and/or combinations of air-breathing and rocket propulsion (AW&ST July 21, p. 21).
GROWING PAINS Administrative workers across NASA are feeling the pinch as the agency switches to a new Integrated Financial Management Program (IFMP). Rush purchases are bogged down in the transition to a "P-card" system, and it took a full month to close the Fiscal 2003 books and open Fiscal 2004 instead of the usual two or three weeks.
The $2.01-billion fiscal 2004 budget request from the Japan Aerospace Exploratory Agency (JAXA) is weighted with space exploration and technology research projects, but it also starts the financial ball rolling on the agency's proposal for a heavier lift H-IIA launcher.
An increase in commercial aircraft production rates can't come too soon for some small aerospace suppliers, which are struggling mightily to stay in the black and restore sales growth. Last week, B/E Aerospace Corp., Hexcel Corp. and Ladish Co.--which all depend heavily on sales to Boeing and Airbus--posted weak financial results for the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared with a year ago.
More than 6,000 Airbus engineers and technicians are completing the 555-seat A380's detailed design and releasing production drawings to manufacturing facilities in four countries. A cross-border engineering network is concurrently enabling dozens of subcontractors and mainstream suppliers to participate in "Europe's biggest aviation undertaking in peacetime."
A BOY AND THE LONE EAGLE BY ROY I. STEELE (AS TOLD BY ROY E. STEELE, MY GRANDFATHER) It was still dark when Mom awakened me, knowing it wouldn't take much to get her son moving this morning. She obviously was not in favor of my planned trip, muttering something about, "Why Henry wants to take you to see that flying fool is just beyond me."
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines managed to eke out a small improvement in net profits in the second quarter on some early cost-cutting success. The airline made a 90-million-euro net profit (up from 86 million last year) on 1.6 billion in revenues (-12%), but kept its current guidance for the full year. KLM hopes to reach breakeven on an operating basis. The airline said it has cut 62 million euros from its total costs and wants to achieve a reduction of 200 million in fiscal 2004. KLM has also reduced its workforce by 1,400 and wants to cut a total of 3,000 jobs by March 2004.
Sales of commercial air transports for use as business jets have waned in recent years, but Boeing and Airbus claim they see emerging demand in the charter and VIP markets. Both companies are working feverishly to establish the most advantageous market position. Their rivalry in this narrow but important business aviation niche remains as heated as ever, despite the slump in the overall segment.
When the Polish division begins operations in Iraq next year, its surveillance will be provided by Romanian-owned Shadow 600s made in the U.S. That international cocktail illustrates one of the reasons why AAI Corp. is reorienting itself almost exclusively as a military company.
Rogers Smith (see photo), vice president/director of flight test for EADS Deutschland and formerly chief test pilot at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, has received the J.H. Doolittle Award for excellence in technical management or engineering aspects of aerospace technology from the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Burt Rutan and Doug Shane, president and vice president of Scaled Composites, won the Ray E.
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. is tackling weight control issues in the Joint Strike Fighter program through design and manufacturing initiatives aimed at keeping the multi-role fighter lean as well as mean. "We are having to fit much larger subsystems into the airplane than we had to in the past" with legacy aircraft such as the F-16, but "we also have a much earlier awareness of weight on the airplane," said Tom Burbage, Lockheed Martin's executive vice president and general manager for the JSF program.
Aeroflot Russian Airlines' first 116-seat A319 twinjet was delivered by Airbus' German arm located at Hamburg-Finkenwerder, not from Toulouse-Blagnac, France (AW&ST Oct. 20, p. 18).
A U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge approved three satellite-manufacturing deals for Space Systems/Loral last week, clearing the way for action on Intelsat's $1.1 billion offer for the telecom satellites and unused orbital slots Loral Space & Communications owns over North America (AW&ST Oct. 20, p. 17).
The focus of aerospace in China is increasingly on space rather than aircraft. This is because of the diverse payoff China sees from space in high technology, internal and external politics, management reform and the education of its youth.
GOOD CITIZENSHIP Taking a page from archrival Airbus, Boeing is attempting to show it is a good local citizen, right in Airbus' backyard. The Chicago-based group is working with French aerospace industries' association Gifas to determine how many direct and indirect jobs the company generates in France. "We think it's already several thousand," Yves Galland, president of Boeing France, told a U.S. industry gathering in Paris recently. However, mindful that this is a modest number compared to, say, the U.K.
Ivan Getting, who conceived the constellation of navigation satellites ultimately developed as the U.S. Global Positioning System, died Oct. 11 in Coronado, Calif. He was 91. A Rhodes scholar who returned to his alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology to head its radiation lab during World War II, Getting later managed development of the Sparrow III and Hawk missiles at Raytheon. He was named the first president of The Aerospace Corp. in 1960 and served there until retiring in 1977.
