Tom Weil has received the Joseph P. Crotti Award for General Aviation Advocacy in California from the Frederick, Md.-based Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn. He is manager of the California City Municipal Airport and a member of the board of directors of the Assn. of California Airports. Weil was cited for "advocacy and leadership in the preservation of general aviation funds during the 2002-03 California budget crisis."
UNITED STATES Editor-In-Chief: David M. North [email protected] Managing Editor: James R. Asker [email protected] Assistant Managing Editors: Stanley W. Kandebo--Technology [email protected] Michael Stearns--Production [email protected] Senior Editors: Craig Covault [email protected], David Hughes [email protected] NEW YORK 2 Penn Plaza, Fifth Floor, New York, N.Y. 10121 Phone: +1 (212) 904-2000, Fax: +1 (212) 904-6068
You can now register ONLINE for Aviation Week Events. Go to www.AviationNow.com/conferences or call Ryan Leeds at +1 (212) 904-3892/+1 (800) 240-7645 (U.S. and Canada Only) Nov. 11-13--MRO Asia Conference & Exhibition. Bangkok Intercontinental Hotel. Mar. 8-9--European Transport Leaders Conference. Merrill Lynch Headquarters, London. Mar. 10-14--Toulouse Symposium. Toulouse (France) Congress Center. Mar. 25-26--Defense Budget Conference. Hyatt Regency Crystal City Hotel, Arlington, Va.
Economic uncertainties continue to seriously pummel the business jet market while, in the absence of reliable long-term forecasts, the duration of the downturn remains "opaque," according to Dassault Aviation executives. The combined production of Falcon twin/trijets is being reduced further to 3.5 aircraft per month, down from four a month earlier this year and as many as seven aircraft a month in 2002.
Delta AirElite Business Jets, a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, will join forces with Bombardier Aerospace's Flexjet fractional ownership program to satisfy customers who like having a choice of aircraft to match their travel preference.
India has cleared two nuclear-capable Agni-specific missile groups for the Army, which will induct both the short- range 700-km. (435-mi.) Agni-I and medium-range 1,500-2,000-km. Agni-II surface-to-surface missiles. A test of the Agni-III missile, which will have a range of more than 3,000 km., is planned for later this year. The Army's artillery regiment has already deployed the short-range (150-250-km.) liquid-fueled Prithvi, which can carry a 1,000-kg. (2,200-lb.) warhead.
Business aircraft should be given access to U.S. airports and airspace on an equal footing with the major airlines, and that means anytime, any place, and no red tape.
In recent years, Boeing has slowly lost market share and is laying off workers. As a former F/A-18C driver and current 757 and 767 pilot, I know what an outstanding product Boeing makes. The problem with Boeing isn't the quality of the product, it is the inability of Boeing to compete on a level playing field.
Regarding "Toppled" (AW&ST Sept. 15, p. 30), some years back when I was a senior advanced systems staff engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. I was asked to join a Tiger team to examine a particular Gemini-Agena spacecraft.
Daniel J. Benjamin has been named vice president-engineering for the Space Vector Corp., Chatsworth, Calif., a subsidiary of Pemco Aviation Group. He was program manager at Boeing for ground-based missile defense boost vehicle transition.
Michael L. Goldberg and John W. Poling have been named to the board of directors of the Kreisler Manufacturing Corp., St. Petersburg, Fla. Goldberg is CEO/general counsel of the Rx Medical Services Corp., while Poling is a partner in financial and information technology services firm Tatum CFO Partners.
WHAT'S AHEAD? Panama's Copa Airlines has taken delivery of the first 737-700 to include Boeing's Vertical Situation Display navigational aid. VSD creates a visual profile of the aircraft's current and projected flight path in relation to ground terrain, rather than the bird's-eye view of current systems. Theoretically, it can show pilots what's ahead of them to the range of their maps. But as a practical matter, it is most effective at displaying terrain up to 80 naut. mi. in front of the aircraft, or about 10 min. of flight time, a Boeing official said.
US Airways has applied to list its stock on the Nasdaq exchange and filed a registration statement with the SEC covering 39.3 million shares of its Class A common stock. The stock is owned or will be issued to Retirement Systems of Alabama, which financed the carrier during its bankruptcy reorganization and was its main investor when it emerged from Chapter 11 last spring; a unit of the U.S.
Air France and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines are expected to sign a "final transaction agreement" Oct. 15 to combine the two carriers under a common parent company. "Europe's leading airline group" will be the result--combining the best of Air France/KLM passenger perquisites while preserving the brand name and identity that brought each airline to preeminence, Air France Chairman/CEO Jean-Cyril Spinetta stated. He added that a full-fledged merger would have been rife with problems, including labor issues.
As an engineer who worked on design and manufacture of insulation systems for the aerospace industry, I had quite a lot to do with the design and manufacture of an insulation product that is used on the outer surface of large exterior white areas of the space shuttle.
EXPANDING BILATERAL Australia and Singapore's new bilateral air services agreements removes restrictions on capacity and the number of flights that Qantas Airways and Singapore Airlines may operate between each country. But the Singaporeans had a rude awakening when the Australians refused to allow SIA to operate flights from Australia to the U.S. For Qantas, the Sydney-Los Angeles route is a gold mine it had no interest in sharing.
Regarding your editorial on the aerospace workforce crisis (AW&ST Aug. 4, p. 54), a large reason for the low interest in aerospace careers is the shabby treatment of workers by employers for the last 15 years. Discerning young people have found they can do better in other industries. The education in trade schools and colleges is adequate. During the immense layoffs of the 1990s, many of the victims were over 40. They found insidious age discrimination from most employers--strong evidence of the inhumanity of the "human resources" departments.
Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have retrieved almost all the final data sent by their Galileo spacecraft before it hit Jupiter. The data could not be deciphered in real time during the last 4 hr. before the Sept. 21 impact, a period of strong scientific interest, after the transmission rate was increased to 32 from 20 bps. (AW&ST Sept. 29, p. 29). Scientists and engineers then anxiously looked to post-processing of recorded radio signals, but promising results didn't appear until Sept. 25.
Having tapped DigitalGlobe to build a better-than-0.5-meter resolution commercial imaging satellite, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency is scrambling to keep alive the other bidder, Space Imaging, to maintain a competitive industrial base.
OFF THE HOOK Following up on its decision to consider a delay in the requirement that visa-waiver travelers to the U.S. carry machine-readable passports (AW&ST Sept. 15, p. 36), the State Dept. extended the deadline through Oct. 26, 2004, for 21 of the 27 visa-waiver countries--everyone who asked for a reprieve. Five didn't ask because virtually all their passports already are machine-readable, so the rule took effect for them on Oct. 1, as scheduled.
Linda Palmer and John McMahon have received WAEA Lifetime Achievement Awards. Palmer is senior vice president of Buena Vista Non-Theatrical, while McMahon is vice president-operations at Atlas Air Film + Media Service Gmbh. Palmer served 11 terms on the WAEA board and was cited for being a leader and innovator in the film distributor community. McMahon is a founding member of WAEA whose career dates back 30 years to when he was manager of inflight entertainment for Qantas. He also has worked for Inflight Services, Hughes Avicom and Entertainment Concepts.
Improved dialogue with the Transportation Security Administration and the industry's security consciousness-raising are transforming general aviation into a "hardened target" for terrorists. Business aircraft couldn't get from "here" to "there" in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, period. Perceived as a soft target, it was denied access to certain of the nation's airports and airspace.
JAPANESE RECONS DELAYED The launch of the second pair of Japan's Information-Gathering Satellite (IGS) military reconnaissance satellites will be delayed until at least November--a slip that also has H-IIA launch managers concerned that Japan's MT-SAT2 weather satellite won't achieve orbit until early next year. The dual launch of the IGS Optical-2 and Radar-2 spacecraft was stopped 40 min. before liftoff Sept. 27 apparently because of an anomaly in the booster's second-stage inertial guidance system.
Roger Chrostowski and Barry Greenberg, who are Boeing engineers that work at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, have won NASA Public Service Medals for their contributions to the International Space Station and U.S. space program. Chrostowski was cited for updating the safety definitions and software safety requirements as the ISS program evolved.
Anthony Piazza (see photo), vice president-business management/chief financial officer for the Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Airborne Early Warning and Electronic Warfare Systems, Bethpage, N.Y., has been elected president of the Long Island Chapter of the National Contracts Management Assn.
