Air Force officials are unhappy about the snail's pace toward taking advantage of the slump in airline orders to buy cut-rate Boeing 767s. ``There are a lot of commands competing to get rid of the 707 airframes,'' a service official said. These include those that fly intelligence-gathering Rivet Joint and Joint-STARS aircraft and tankers--all of which are in high demand. However, neither senior Defense Dept. civilians nor Congress have strongly pushed the replacement effort.
Aviation changed forever on Sept. 11, but for companies on the aftermarket side, the changes are less dramatic than in other parts of the industry. While aircraft operators and airports grapple with a host of new variables that affect their businesses, the keys to generating aftermarket profits--cost control, supply chain management and product-line diversity--have not changed.
With radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking and labeling becoming increasingly useful for spare parts management, this company is offering ``total tech support'' encompassing RFID custom programming, ion-deposition variable printing, RFID chip substrate insertion and Internet order tracking.
Michael L. Ballee has been named director of air transportation for Ashland Inc., Covington, Ky. He succeeds Stephen W. Koontz, who is retiring. Ballee has been a pilot supervisor for Citation and Falcon aircraft.
U.S. aviation security screeners will become Transportation Dept. civil servants under a compromise struck late last week between House and Senate leaders, capping a month-long bitter and embarrassing debate among lawmakers.
NASA has completed an independent assessment of tiltrotor characteristics that could affect safety or performance of the V-22. The 13-member panel, led by Ames Research Center Director Henry McDonald, finds no known phenomena that would warrant stopping development and deployment of the aircraft. On the contrary, the panel calls for restarting the test program and adding aircraft and personnel to accelerate it. High-priority recommendations include improving rate-of-descent information to the crew, expanding testing at 40-60 kt.
USAF Gen. (ret.) Howell M. Estes, 3rd, has been appointed to the board of directors of the Colorado Springs-based Space Foundation. He was commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Space Command; and commander of the Air Force Space Command, Peterson AFB, Colo.
Luxembourg-based Societe Europeenne de Satellites (SES) will purchase GE Americom. The $4.3-billion external growth initiative will make SES the biggest satellite operator in the industry, with 41 spacecraft.
A combination of crew-scheduling issues and the dramatic downturn in market conditions since Sept. 11 is apparently giving Singapore Airlines (SIA) second thoughts about proceeding with its $2.2-billion A340-500 order of five aircraft with five options. A lack of regulations for extra cockpit crew duty time for flights exceeding 18 hr. has become a sticking issue. The FAA and Joint Aviation Authorities require four pilots for flights exceeding 14 hr. The Europeans have discussed adding extra crewmembers for flights lasting more than 18 hr.
Susan M. Porter (see photo, p. 19) has been promoted to director of the Advanced Interactive Technologies Dept. of the Southwest Research Institute of San Antonio from manager of the Advanced Simulation Technologies Section of the Training Systems and Simulators Div.
By Stephen E. Ambrose Simon&Schuster 299 pp., Hardcover, $26.00 The Wild Blue takes the reader back to World War II through glimpses into the lives of American pilots who flew the B-24 Liberators. Big for their day, the lumbering four-engine bombers were built by the thousands and launched in raids that could number in the hundreds. Known as the hardest airplane to fly, it took a strong arm to fly wingtip-to-wingtip for saturation bombing--which also simplified the job for enemy gunners on the ground.
DPI LABS IS OFFERING ITS SAFE-LINK COMMUNICATIONS shielding system, now in use in some military and high-security aircraft, to civil users. Safe-Link is a compact voice and data distribution system that shields sensitive communication within the aircraft against sophisticated detection devices. It is designed to protect messages when they are most vulnerable--before a transmission is encrypted and after a received message is decrypted. A cabin management system can create the additional levels of security before use is authorized.
A financial cloud that's been hanging over Raytheon Co. for months appears to have been removed with an agreement in principle between the defense contractor and Washington Group International Inc. (WGI) to relinquish all pending litigation on both sides. The bitter legal battle stemmed from Raytheon's sale of its engineering and construction business to WGI, which abandoned construction projects guaranteed by Raytheon.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems has shipped this U.S. Air Force Milstar II communications satellite from its Sunnyvale, Calif., factory to Cape Canaveral, where it is to be prepared for launch Jan. 15 on a Titan IVB/
British carriers' adjustment to the global economic slowdown continues unabated, and the watchword is battling costs. British Midland's CEO Austin Reid said airlines would have to ``reinvent themselves by examining closely the financial models on which they operate.'' As for other major British carriers, Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) warns investors that further downsizing is likely at British Airways, which is projected to lose about $1 billion this year on a 13% fall in current year revenue.
Jim Jensen has become president/chief operating officer of Polar Air Cargo. He was senior vice president-maintenance and engineering for Trans World Airlines.
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. is grappling with organizational issues and contemplating what role, if any, Boeing will play in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program as it prepares to enter the Systems Design and Development phase. First flight of a production aircraft is anticipated in 2005.
Another program is available for airlines and other companies to keep their cost of fuel and energy down (AW&ST Jan. 15, p. 421). Kiodex Risk Workbench (www.kiodex.com) puts together pricing tools, market data and financial reports, and provides information from online energy trading systems such as EnronOnline and enymex. The Risk Workbench also provides a documentation trail for audit verification. . . . Raytheon has created a wholly owned subsidiary, SilentRunner Inc., to handle its information assurance business, in particular the SilentRunner software.
The French government selected Chaulnes, 80 mi. north of Paris, as the location for a new international airport. It is tentatively scheduled to be inaugurated in 2015 and cost about $6.5 billion.
The MS Series 6000 psi full-ported, bi-directional ball valve is designed for severe service use. It has a 316 stainless forged body, with a variety of seat materials to provide for fluid compatibility in most systems. An array of end connections and valve operators are standard features. Suitable for temperatures from cryogenic up to 500F, the valves are applicable in various rocket engine test stands and launch stands. They serve as the main supply valves on high-pressure, high-flow helium and nitrogen systems.
The two-video course, ``Flying GPS Approaches--Featuring the KLN 89B,'' is designed to introduce pilots to GPS navigation. In Part 1, pilots learn how to go beyond ``direct to'' and use an IFR GPS. The program covers the basics of the GPS system, through the mechanics and details of manipulating flight plans. In Part 2, pilots learn to call up, activate and fly IFR GPS approaches. An intro to accessing and using stored database procedures with departure procedures, followed by a review of the GPS stand-alone approach, is featured.
Two new supercomputers from Silicon Graphics have been installed at NASA facilities to crunch data to make more accurate assessments of climatic change, both natural and man-made. One, installed at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., is an SGI Origin 3800 single-system supercomputer that it describes as the world's first 1,024-processor unit. The second also is an Origin 3800 but half the size, a 512-processor. It was installed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
James C. Christiansen has become vice president-national accounts and Mark Booth co-chairman of the London-based NetJets program of Executive Jet Inc., Woodbridge, N.J. Christiansen was executive vice president/chief operating officer of TAG Aviation USA, while Booth was general partner of News Corp. subsidiary epartners.
On the morning of Nov. 12, is there anyone reading this magazine who did not think, at least for a moment, ``Oh my God, not again!'' Of course not. All of us recognize that one more successful terrorist act against an airliner would downgrade the aviation industry's post-Sept. 11 financial and operational condition from serious to grave. To the relief of the aviation community, it looks at this writing like the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 was no more than a hard-to-explain accident.
