Suzanne K. Chambers has been appointed director of external affairs for Washington-based Arianespace Inc. She was head of business development for Parabon Computation.
Construction projects costing $3-4 billion to refit U.S. airports for the mandated high level of security await a rash of decisions expected in coming months from the just-formed Transportation Security Administration.
Bruce Hitchens, Ray Luce, Chris Vukelich and Michiel Verhaagen have been named to the board of directors of Washington-based Universal Air Travel Plan Inc. Hitchens is manager for Travelcard for Air New Zealand, and Luce is director of multinational sales and revenue program planning for Continental Airlines. Vukelich is general manager for global distribution for British Airways, while Verhaagen is vice president-global business for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
BOEING WILL UPGRADE THE RADAR ON FRENCH AWACS aircraft to put them on a par with those of the U.S., U.K. and NATO fleets. Baltimore-based Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, the radar developer, will be principal supplier of the modification kits under subcontract to Boeing. The upgrades will include a new radar computer, radar control maintenance panel and software improvements to the radar and mission system programs. Boeing is scheduled to begin shipping kits for the four aircraft to Air France Industries in the spring of 2004.
Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. has delivered the first MH-60S to the U.S. Navy for fleet operations. The Navy Helicopter Master Plan calls for acquisition of up to 237 of the aircraft as part of the service's initiative to reduce the types of rotorcraft in inventory to the MH-60S and -60R. The MH-60S initially will be operated by Helicopter Combat Support Squadron Three based at NAS North Island, Calif., to train pilots and maintenance personnel before entering service this summer with HC-5 operating on Guam.
Rick Armstrong has been appointed vice president/general manager of the Interiors and Structures Div. of the Nordam Group, Tulsa, Okla., and Laura Lundquist group vice president-human resources. Armstrong was vice president/general manager of the Transparency Div. Tom Villani has been promoted to vice president from general manager and Kevin Knowles to director from manager of marketing and customer service of the Nacelle/Thrust Reverser Systems Div.
Boeing and The Insitu Group have agreed to develop a prototype unmanned aerial vehicle based on Insitu's Seascan aircraft. The prototype will be called Scan Eagle. Seascan is a ship-based surveillance platform which has a nearly 10-ft. wingspan and weighs about 33 lb.
Like diners surprised by a higher-than-expected tab, the Miami-Dade County Commission and American Airlines are engaged in a staredown over who'll be first to reach for a credit card. The commission meets next week to review the thorny issue of who's to provide $300 million to cover cost overruns in the construction of Miami International's (MIA) North Terminal (see photo), originally funded for $1.3 billion in 1999.
MD Helicopters expects to deliver 58 new aircraft this year, according to company officials at the Helicopter Assn. International convention in Orlando, Fla., last week. They said the company generated revenues of $133 million in 2001--a 15% increase compared with the previous year--and delivered 28 aircraft, including 20 twin-engine MD Explorers, four MD 500Es, and two each of the MD 600N and 520N. The Mesa, Ariz.-based company recently delivered three armed MD Explorers to the Mexican navy for drug interdiction operations.
Long-suffering planetary scientists who want Pluto to be NASA's next deep-space destination still may get their wish under the space agency's Fiscal 2003 budget request, even though the Bush Administration has left Pluto funding out of the budget for the second year in a row.
Astrium has contracted to build the spacecraft for the European Space Agency's first Earth Explorer opportunity mission, Cryosat. The 140-million-euro ($124-million) mission, to be launched into polar orbit in April 2004 by a Cosmos or Dnepr rocket, will observe the polar ice sheets and ocean ice pack to study their effect on global climate.
The U.S. Air Force is reducing the number of Global Hawks it plans to buy from 63 to 51. The reductions are made possible by upgrading the unmanned aircraft to a multisensor system, program officials said. At the same time the service may ask for an additional Global Hawk in the near-term and boost production to as many as 10 aircraft by 2006.
A U.S. appeals court has rejected arguments by Loral Space and Communications and Space Systems/Loral against an injunction issued by a lower court in New York last spring at the request of Alcatel Space. Alcatel had filed for the injunction following a decision by Loral to terminate a long-standing industrial cooperation agreement with the French company so that it could pursue a possible alliance with Lockheed Martin. A separate Alcatel action before the arbitration court of the International Chamber of Commerce in Geneva has yet to be decided.
Toray Industries and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are collaborating on fabrication technology for composites that they expect will cut manufacturing time and costs by half. Current processing relies on high pressures and high temperatures to mold composite structures. The Toray/MHI process is based on covering carbon-fiber sheets with a plastic film and then sucking air out while injecting resin. Because this technique isn't restricted by the size of a kiln, it can produce larger fabrications than older methods, according to the companies.
European scientists plan to install a commercial camera on the International Space Station using the orbiting lab as a complement for a constellation of small Earth remote sensing spacecraft. The European Space Agency will back Germany's RapidEye AG in the public-private project, which will install a camera to be built by Kayser-Threde, with support from German aerospace center DLR, on the ISS. Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.
Future space tourists and commercial travelers to the International Space Station must have clean backgrounds and be able to handle themselves in an emergency, but otherwise they will find it relatively easy to qualify for spaceflight under guidelines established by NASA and the other ISS partner agencies.
Delford M. Smith, founder/chairman of Evergreen International Aviation, McMinnville, Ore., is one of the winners of the Horatio Alger Assn. Award for 2002. He was cited for founding the company in 1960 with three helicopters and expanding it into seven divisions operating in 168 countries.
William B. Tutt has been elected chairman of the board of the Colorado Springs-based Space Foundation. He is a principal in Tutco and was foundation vice chairman. Tutt succeeds Jaime Oaxaca. Other officers elected are: vice chairman, John Higginbotham, chairman of Space- Vest Inc.; treasurer, Jaleh Daie, senior science adviser to the Center for the Study of the Presidency; and secretary, Donovan Hicks, former CEO of Ball Aerospace and Technologies and principal in Cygnus Enterprise Development.
The U.K. will have to carefully juggle its strike aircraft if it is to avoid a potential resources gap between the planned withdrawal from service of its Jaguar GR3A and the ability of its early Eurofighter squadrons to take on the role. The British Royal Air Force's three Jaguar squadrons, all based at RAF Coltishall in southeast England, are currently scheduled to be phased out by 2008.
The lean and linear $1.2-billion midfield terminal that Northwest Airlines opens this weekend will raise dowdy Detroit Metropolitan Airport to world-class status and is likely to change opinions of jaded travelers about the Motor City and Northwest Airlines.
Three stashes of federal money, possibly four, are available to reimburse airports for post-Sept. 11 security expenses, but one of them is bare and may stay that way. That would-be cache is the congressional authorization within the Aviation and Transportation Security Act to spend $1.5 billion in 2002 and 2003. However, as any Hill hand knows, authorization is but the first step. Next, Congress must appropriate the necessary monies. Here, the $1.5-billion authorization faces some tough competitors.
BAE Systems has reported a 32.6% increase in profits for 2001, to 1.26 billion pounds ($1.79 billion), with the company confident that its underlying strategy to become the premier transatlantic defense contractor is bearing fruit. Also apparent, however, is that BAE is not willing to pay any price as it looks to opportunities to extend its already considerable U.S. footprint. Senior company executives said the asking price for Raytheon's Greenville, Tex., aircraft integration systems business was too high.
An intense national debate over arming airline pilots to protect air transports from terrorists will be decided within the next few weeks amid furious behind-the-scenes political maneuvering. Pilots claim the decision is a potential life-and-death matter for flight crews and their passengers.
A succession of commentators has started to argue that NATO has been marginalized and that its future is in doubt. This is not the first time that predictions of this kind have been made. When the Berlin Wall fell, some critics suggested that NATO had completed its mission and could pack it in. Then, after the success of the Persian Gulf war coalition, they suggested that all future operations would be exactly like Desert Storm--and that, as a result, NATO wasn't needed.
TSA chief John Magaw says a cadre of interim federal security directors--security experts on loan from the FAA and deployed to airports late last week--will see to it that checkpoint screeners conduct themselves appropriately while the new TSA workforce takes over later this year. Magaw's comments follow a Feb. 8 letter from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) asking how the TSA intends to fix its screener training regime to account for recent complaints by women--both flight attendants and passengers--that they had been ``improperly'' patted down by male security guards.
