Breaking down the air defenses around Iraq's main urban centers to open the way for an allied offensive would be far tougher than pounding the less sophisticated systems operating in the no-fly zones. ``The no-fly zones are dangerous places, but we own them when we want to,'' a senior Air Force official said.
USAF Col. (ret.) Leonard Friedlander has become vice president of the Defense Programs Div. of RS Information Systems Inc., McLean, Va. He was an executive with Apple Computer Inc. and had been a field team director for the Commercial Information Technology Dept. of TRW.
European regional airlines are facing massive restructuring, bedeviled by slow traffic growth, weak yields and the emergence of no-frills, low-cost competitors. At the European Regions Airline Assn.'s (ERA) annual general assembly here, executives acknowledged that significant changes will be required to sustain or restore healthy results. ``Independents have no chance of survival without links to a major carrier,'' Olaf Dlugi, an airline consultant and former chief executive of Augsburg Airways, claimed.
Jodi Balestrieri, Pamela Scharlach and Matthew Betty have been appointed regional vice presidents-charter services for the Southeast, Western and Central U.S., respectively, for Executive Jet Management Inc. of Cincinnati. Balestrieri and Scharlach were sales directors and Betty a regional sales manager for business jet services, all for the FlightTime Corp.
Axel Arendt has been appointed chairman of Rolls-Royce Deutchland, Dahlewitz, Germany. He was chief financial officer of Munich-based EADS and has been succeeded by Hans Peter Ring, who was a senior vice president. Pierre de Bausset has been named senior vice president-investor relations and financial communications of EADS. He was a New York-based investor relations executive for EADS. De Bausset succeeds Marc Paganini, who has been named chief executive of American Eurocopter, Grand Prairie, Tex.
Russia's Beta Air, supported by Airbus parent company EADS, is accelerating efforts to market the Be-200 amphibian firefighting aircraft in the U.S. and Europe, and certify it to Western standards. The revamped strategy is driven largely by a perceived window of opportunity as the U.S. Forest Service reassesses the need to modernize its aging fleet following a series of accidents this past summer (AW&ST Sept. 30, p. 35). Beta Air officials, who were here last month, said they are planning a demonstration tour of the U.S.
Wayne Dodds, director of aviation/ chief pilot for the International Paper Co., has received a painting by Peter R. Westacott in recognition of the company's contribution to the Corporate Angel Network. The painting depicts one of International Paper's plants with three of its Falcon Jets flying in formation overhead. The award was sponsored by the National Business Aviation Assn. to honor a member company for using its business aircraft to help the Corporate Angel Network transport cancer patients in need of medical treatment.
Trying to stuff encrypted data at high speeds through a satellite communications link can be difficult. The standard TCP Internet protocol doesn't work well over satellites because of the long delays, differences in uplink and downlink speeds, and high loss and error rates. Mentat Inc. has several SkyX products that, unseen to the user, replace TCP with a special satellite protocol to improve performance. SkyX also has acceleration features to boost speed.
Link's Simulation and Training Div. will build a P-3C Partial Aircrew Coordination Trainer (PACT) for the U.S. Navy to help maintain proficiency for aircrew assigned to intelligence-gathering missions. Plans call for the trainer to be installed at NAS Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, in about 19 months. It will be used by P-3C crews with Patrol Reconnaissance Forces Pacific, with the responsibility of monitoring activity in the western Pacific. The PACT simulates the airplane's systems layout, display screens, sensor systems, and navigation and communications equipment.
Last week, Congress told the Army to boost the number and rate of CH-47F Chinook helicopters it builds. The Army was planning to modify only 300 CH-47Ds, but now Congress, in its Fiscal 2003 spending bill, directed the service to upgrade all of them. The production rate is slated to increase to 36-48 instead of the original plan of just 26 aircraft per year. Production is to be completed no later than 2016. The total, more than 460 helicopters, would include Army special operations MH-47Gs. Additionally, the U.K. might be in line for MH-47Gs.
Congress' latest continuing resolution lasts until Nov. 22, permitting federal agencies that don't have Fiscal 2003 appropriations yet to keep spending at Fiscal 2002 rates while lawmakers go home for the elections and return in mid-November for a lame-duck session.
After years of trying to improve its munitions procurement planning, the Defense Dept.'s process is still flawed and causing warfighters to complain of shortages of certain types of munitions, the General Accounting Office says.
Engineers and scientists at the second World Space Congress generally agreed that the next big steps in space, both for exploration and exploitation, must be an international effort that uses the International Space Station as a starting point. But after three days of closed-door meetings, their bosses could not agree on a destination for explorers or specific ways to take advantage of space to benefit the population of Earth. U.S.
The NTSB's hearing on the Nov. 12, 2001, crash of American Airlines Flight 587, set to begin next week, will likely raise more questions than answers, according to sources close to the investigation. For nearly a year, investigators have sought to determine what caused the vertical tail assembly to rip from the Airbus 300-600R after its departure from JFK International Airport and plunge the aircraft into a nearby residential area, killing 265 people--the second deadliest aviation accident in the U.S., according to the safety board.
North Korea seems to have made a clean breast of its intent to develop nuclear weapons, something that U.S. intelligence officials have suspected for some time. The North Koreans also have declared null and void the country's 1994 Non-Proliferation Treaty with the U.S. to freeze nuclear weapons work, and they claim to have the technology needed to build weapons of mass destruction that are even more dangerous. U.S. officials are uncertain whether either type of device has been weaponized or simply remains a laboratory project.
THALES ATM HAS BEEN SELECTED BY ITALY'S civil aviation air traffic services provider to install a remote control and monitoring system for the country's ATC facilities. The project is part of the Italian Civil Aviation Services to allow rapid response through maintenance groups at the regional centers. Designated Sistema Telegestione Nazionale, the system will be based in Rome and exchange data with more than 80 remote sites around the country using 16 regional facilities. The system is set to be completed in 2004.
Communications interoperability is more than a buzzword to Hugo B. Poza, Raytheon's vice president for homeland security--it's a sport utility vehicle. Not just any sport-utility vehicle, Raytheon's First Responder Vehicle is unique: A four-wheel-drive self-contained computer-controlled command and control center with wireless, cell and satellite communications that permit emergency workers at ``ground zero'' to talk to one another, even with incompatible radios.
Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science postponed launch of its Muses-C planetary surveyor from December to May 2003 because of a defect in an O-ring package on the spacecraft's M-5 launcher.
Sivaswamy Aiyer Ramachandran has become regional manager for Europe and North America for Qatar Airways. He was regional manager for the U.K. and Ireland for SriLankan Airlines. Ramachandran succeeds Gregory Epps, who has become manager of special projects at the airline's headquarters in Doha.
Congress has given the Pentagon the green light to provide extraordinary foreign military financing terms to Poland should the country buy Lockheed Martin F-16s rather than Dassault Mirage 2000s or BAE Systems/Saab JAS 39 Gripens (AW&ST Oct. 14, p. 31). Washington would allow Warsaw to defer payment on principal for eight years rather than five, and extend the loan period to 15 years total. Congress attached the approval of the unusual terms to the Pentagon's spending bill, since the foreign operations appropriations are unlikely to be approved before Nov.
Next year's merger of Cincinnati Machine and Lamb Technicon divisions of Unova Inc. will bring fresh focus on the aerospace component of the company's machining and aftermarket business. Production of Cincinnati's advanced composites and machining equipment for aerospace customers will remain in the Cincinnati area. Cincinnati Plus, the aftermarket, value-added service, also will be based there. Production of horizontal machining centers and cellular systems will be consolidated at Lamb Technicon, a specialist in the automotive segment, near Detroit.
The International Space Station crew is getting a little help from Timeliner software that was first used on board during this month's assembly flight 9A. Timeliner automatically activates and controls experiments on the station's new science glovebox, and may also be used for vehicle control, pre- and post-flight subsystem checkouts, handling of failures, and on the Kibo Japanese Experiment Module (AW&ST Sept. 9, p. 25). Developed by the Draper Laboratory, it is a script language that triggers actions based on time, system events or complex dynamic conditions.
The British Defense Ministry last week shrugged off BAE Systems' attempt to strong-arm it into renouncing its competition credo, in unveiling its defense industrial policy--a position paper underpinned by a recognition the U.K. defense-aerospace sector is inexorably being drawn closer to the U.S. BAE has been lobbying vigorously within the upper echelons of government for a relaxation of the Defense Ministry's support for a competitive approach to defense procurement. However, the document maintains, ``competition will . . .
Faced with deepening financial losses and no sign of early recovery in demand or revenues, Delta Air Lines plans to keep trying to control costs, maintain liquidity and exploit the few opportunities it can find. As it reported a net loss of $326 million and an operating loss of $385 million for the third quarter--both substantially worse than last year's third quarter and this summer's expectations--the carrier said it will defer mainline aircraft deliveries until 2005, ground its MD-11s, cut back further on capacity and lay off more employees.
First the Air Force promised its Predator UAV pilots real airplanes to fly. Now senior service officials are letting them credit as flight time the hours they spend remotely piloting the unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. Both of these issues have been sore points since the UAV units were formed several years ago. There are now three squadrons at the Indian Springs auxiliary field north of Las Vegas, the force is expanding rapidly and the high-performance Predator-B will be introduced soon.
