Northwest Airlines, reporting "disappointing" financial results for 2002, said it intends to keep squeezing costs until they fall in line with what it believes is a permanently changed revenue environment. The carrier has given itself a couple of years' breathing room on capital expenses by deferring aircraft deliveries, but it faces pension obligations it hasn't yet resolved how to handle.
The U.S. Transportation Dept. and the Delta-Northwest-Continental alliance went eyeball-to-eyeball last week, and nobody blinked. They'll meet again in court. Rejecting key conditions the department said were needed to prevent the alliance's prospective code share from being anti-competitive, the third-, fourth- and fifth-largest U.S. airlines said Jan. 21 they will implement the deal "as soon as practicable." The Transportation Dept. retaliated immediately, saying it would launch a formal enforcement proceeding to challenge the carriers.
Lufthansa Technik is continuing its international expansion through additional joint ventures and is likely to make a major move into the Rolls-Royce engine maintenance business in the next few months.
French space policy and national space agency CNES need to be radically overhauled to improve the efficiency of Europe's space effort and restore confidence in its launcher program. That's the inescapable conclusion being drawn in the wake of a highly critical blue-ribbon commission's report on the agency. The report was presented on Jan. 17 by a panel headed by former European Space Agency science director Roger-Maurice Bonnet.
Mar. 10-11--European Transport Leaders Conference. Landmark Hotel, London. Mar. 12-13--Toulouse Symposium. Toulouse (France) Congress Center. Mar. 27-28--Defense Budget Conference. Holiday Inn, Rosslyn, Va. Apr. 15-17--MRO 2003 & MRO Latin America. Broward County Convention Center, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. May 6-8--Aerospace Defense & Finance Conference. Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York. May 14-16--Homeland Security Summit & Exposition. Hyatt Regency Crystal City, Arlington, Va.
Network-centric warfare (NCW) has become a centerpiece of U.S. military transformation efforts. Although they rely on the power of information technology to tightly link sensors, command and control elements and "shooters," high-impact networks also depend on good organization and structured processes (see p. 50). Cover design and F-15E photo by Jim Haseltine. Background, British AWACS aircraft and radar operator photos courtesy of U.S. Navy; Global Hawk photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force.
Thales' Dutch unit has landed a 51-million-euro ($54-million) contract to provide five additional Goalkeeper target detection and tracking systems to the South Korean Navy. The fully automatic systems, intended for a landing ship and three KDXII Batch 2 destroyers, brings the number of Goalkeepers supplied to Korea to 14. Thales Chairman/CEO Dennis Ranque said defense helped boost sales 10% last year, to an estimated 11 billion euros, and a similar showing is expected in 2003.
After reading with amusement the ideas for random approaches and flare dispensing systems being used by airlines, your Jan. 6 edition (p. 46) contains the solution to all of our security problems. The airlines can all adopt the same flight profile as the C-130 Hercules on a combat low-level mission. Many of us old Hercules pilots were flying these profiles before they were taught or even legal.
Operations planned for Iraq are expected to be far different from those employed in Afghanistan, according to those who have read a Rand report on lessons learned from the Central Asian conflict. The report is being vetted around the Pentagon for comments but has not yet been published. "Afghanistan will not be a template for what follows," said a Navy official who had been briefed on the report. "Analysts think that Iraq, with its much more conventional Army structure, will require very different preparations."
Seeing a need for a slightly larger bus for experimental satellites, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries says it will introduce one in 2005. Called Smart Sat-1, the spacecraft is intended for small-scale space experiments, including the inter-satellite optical communications research that Japan has been pursuing for some years. MHI considers Smart Sat-1 a good candidate for in-orbit repairs, as well.
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Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes visited Russia earlier this month, signing a further bilateral agreement expanding already large-scale cooperation between the two countries' defense industries. While, reportedly, no new arms deals were inked, the visit cleared the way for completing several long-awaited contracts, including the acquisition of the aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov.
Eurocopter, which seeks to develop more business in the Americas, will establish additional production facilities in the U.S. but in the longer term is expected to abandon its plant at Grand Prairie, Tex. The Franco-German company unexpectedly has selected Columbus, Mo., as the location of new industrial facilities, in a move believed to be the prelude to withdrawal from Texas.
Network-centric warfare concepts are expected to transform U.S. military forces from an Industrial Age elephant well-suited for the Cold War to an Information Age cheetah (see p. 50).
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A Pentagon decision to delay the next-generation Global Positioning System III has industry perplexed. Companies had already established teams to bid on the project. Some Pentagon officials also worry that, with Europe's Galileo program looming, delaying GPS III could undermine the U.S. lead in precision navigation and timing. Deciding to slip the program wasn't easy, says John Stenbit, the Pentagon's assistant secretary for command, control and communications.
Feb. 3-4--American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics' Defense Excellence 2003 Conference. Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center, Washington. Call +1 (703) 264-7500. Feb. 3-5--Aerospace Lighting Institute's Night Vision Goggle & Glass Cockpit Seminar. Airport Marriott Hotel, Los Angeles. Call +1 (727) 791-0790 or see www.aligodfrey.com. Feb. 4-6--Society of Automotive Engineers' North American Aviation Safety Conference. Westin Peachtree Hotel, Atlanta. Call +1 (724) 772-8530 or see www.sae.org/calendar/meetings.htm.
Swiss International Air Lines' traffic plunged 16.3% in 2002's fourth quarter, generating concerns about Switzerland's born-again flag carrier. Its sudden decrease in traffic is tied to the economic downturn and growing worries of war in the Middle East, according to airline executives. They said Swiss carried 11.6 million passengers last year, a significantly higher number than predicted. Load factor on the carrier's long-haul routes was a healthy 80.3%, but it remained weak (no more than 56.9%) on European routes.
Plans to reassess Europe's Ariane 5 program and return the launcher to service are shifting into high gear as government and industry leaders multiply efforts to analyze the problems besetting the launch sector, and the space industry in general, and find ways to nurse it back to health.
Autogenic Feedback Training Exercise (AFTE), a technology developed at NASA Ames Research Center to combat motion sickness during space flight, is being commercialized. It relies on biofeedback and autogenic therapy to allow individuals to suppress unwanted physical responses to outside stimuli by controlling their autonomic nervous system--involuntary bodily functions such as breathing, heartbeat and blood vessel dilation. Employing compact equipment worn by the user, AFTE measures and displays autonomic nervous system functions.
Michael S. Lewis has become director of the Global Communication, Navigation and Surveillance System program at Boeing Air Traffic Management, McLean, Va. He was head of the technology staff for the Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry.
Atlas Worldwide Holdings, parent company of Atlas Air, last week defaulted on a lease payment on one of its Boeing 747200 aircraft, prompting Standard & Poor's to lower its credit ratings. S&P is concerned about the cargo carrier's near-term liquidity, as well as its ability to meet debt service requirements.
NASA's Next Generation Launch Technology (NGLT) program is drafting a new technology road map for advanced space launch capabilities that will meld near-term development work started with the defunct Space Launch Initiative (SLI), more advanced "third-generation" NASA technology and hypersonics research underway by the U.S. military.
