France's La Poste and the Italian post office have forged an alliance to combine parcel express operations. The venture is owned 51% by the Italian carrier's express affiliate SDA and 49% by GeoPost, La Poste's express holding company. Earlier this month, La Poste inaugurated a new hub in Birmingham, England, combining operations of two private carriers acquired last year. The French carrier also purchased DPD of Germany and is interested in acquiring a stake in the Spanish and Greek postal systems.
TRW Aeronautical Systems has launched AeroVantix--an all encompassing aerospace e-business portal. The multimillion-dollar effort will provide customers with round-the-clock access to the company's supply base with online self-service key data. The site offers buy-side and sell-side transactions, engineering collaboration and supply chain management through the login www.aerovantix.com.
Michael W. Offik (see photo) has been named vice president-sales and marketing of MI Technologies of Atlanta. He held a similar position at Rockwell Automation.
British Airways is ``confident'' it can restart supersonic New York-London Concorde service later this summer using three aircraft outfitted with Kevlar-reinforced fuel tank liners and ``local strengthening of wire in the undercarriage area'' to prevent sparking. By year-end, officials say all seven aircraft should be back in service, allowing for two roundtrips per day. Modifications are complete on one Concorde, which is undergoing several weeks of ground testing related to the fuel system.
Air traffic control officials at London's Heathrow Airport are revising the criteria used for selecting on-the-job training instructors at the airport following a close call last year. The incident occurred Apr. 28, 2000, when an air traffic controller mentoring a trainee allowed an arriving British Airways Boeing 747-436 to come dangerously close to striking a British Midland Airways Airbus A321 preparing to take off on the same runway.
Roland Desjardins has been named general manager of the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and Louisville (Ky.) International Airport training centers of FlightSafety Boeing Training International. He was manager of strategic training planning for American Airlines.
Orbital Technologies Corp.--a Madison, Wis., company working with seed money from NASA--has demonstrated a small rocket engine that uses a vortex inside its combustion chamber to keep the chamber walls cool (see photo). Oxygen injected at the bottom of the combustion chamber sets up a vortex. When fuel is injected at the top of the chamber and ignited, the resulting heat is deflected inward, according to President/CEO Eric Rice. The test engine used RP-1 and liquid oxygen, but Orbital Technologies also has studied hydrogen fuel.
Alain Brodin (see photo) has been appointed vice president-aeronautics of EADS. He was senior vice president-commercial of Avions de Transport Regional. Brodin has been succeeded at ATR by Paolo Revelli-Beaumont, who was senior vice president-asset management.
HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTERS should look beyond silicon chips to unconventional approaches like nanotechnology to achieve the tens of petaflops that NASA will need in the future, Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said at SGI's high-performance computing weather-forecasting summit. He called for spending $100 million to advance analysis techniques before the researchers' observations and computer simulations turn into ``data morgues.'' Last year, NASA collected 330 terabytes of data, which is more than all of the data collected over the previous 40 years.
Robert P. Iorizzo has become president of the Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Baltimore-based Electronic Sensors and Systems Sector. He succeeds James G. Roche, who has been confirmed as U.S. Air Force secretary. Iorizzo was vice president/general manager of the sector's Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence and Naval Systems Div.
The future of NASA's X-37 orbit-and-reentry testbed probably won't be settled until this fall, largely because the Air Force will need that much time to decide what role it wants in the program. By then the service also will have a better idea of whether it wants to take over the X-33 reusable launch vehicle (RLV) prototype, from which NASA has bailed out. Dennis E.
Italy's Finmeccanica/Alenia Aerospazio still plans to become a risk-sharing partner in the Airbus A380 and is contemplating a 10% share in the $10.7-billion program. According to Airbus Chief Executive Noel Forgeard, Finmeccanica has not abandoned a plan to acquire a stake in the newly-established Airbus stock company.
The price of crude oil and jet fuel is projected to decrease through 2001, but the average price for the year will be higher than it was in 2000, according to David Swierenga, chief economist for the Air Transport Assn. He said fuel hedging is not the smart move that it was late in 1999, when prices had not begun to rise and the cost of hedging was less than the benefits achieved. Now, hedging costs reflect more than a year's worth of fuel price increases. ``The guys who sell you the hedge like to make money, too,'' he said.
Not surprisingly, Infotech is making its way into HAL's design and development complexes. India is a software leader, but the computer-aided design and manufacturing software HAL is employing comes from Europe and the U.S., including Catia and Unigraphics for 3D modeling, Nastran, Nisa and Pro-Mechanica for structure and analysis, and NFS Maestro Solo for interoperability translation issues between Unix platforms and Windows NT. User group workstations at HAL's Aircraft Research&Design Center here are linked.
European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. Chief Financial Officer Axel J. Arendt last week told Aviation Week&Space Technology that EADS is laying the groundwork for major merger-and-acquisition activity in the U.S. ``To pave the way and ready ourselves, we need to do more confidence building through joint ventures to show that we can be a reliable partner,'' he said.
Teal Group predicts the U.S. market for forward-looking infrared (Flir) targeting will soar. David Rockwell, the company's senior electronic analyst, says the U.S. airborne Flir market will go from $500 million per year to about $900 million in this decade. The company's Flir Systems Forecast contains about 300 reports on U.S. electronics programs, including nearly 40 on Flir.
The Star Alliance has hired Air Corporate System to represent its 15 member airlines in seven major French provincial cities including Lyons, Nice and Marseilles. The move is intended to increased feeder traffic to hubs in Frankfurt, London, Copenhagen and Paris, which handled more than 80% of the 3 million French passengers carried by the alliance.
Now that the big airlines have adopted a series of customer service commitments, incorporating some of them into contracts of carriage, the real issue is whether the reforms will have ``staying power,'' or whether the carriers will rest on their oars unless Congress keeps up pressure on them. So says Transportation Dept. Inspector General Kenneth Mead.
After years of feeling its way, the Civil Aviation Administration of China has completed a state-ordered consolidation of the country's airlines, bringing with it the promise of less interference from Beijing for the carriers it has split into three powerful groups.
General Electric and Honeywell expect to go their separate ways as better companies after the long and apparently fruitless ordeal for European approval of a proposed merger. Top executives acknowledged that a last-ditch proposal to divest $2.2 billion worth of engine and avionics businesses and to ring-fence GE's aircraft financing and leasing arm, GE Capital Aviation Services, fell far short of the demands of the European Commission, which was reviewing the merger in parallel with the U.S. Justice Dept.
Air New Zealand officials have decided to expand the capital base of the ANZ-Ansett Australia Group through an increase in equity ownership by Singapore Airlines (SIA). ANZ officials are working with the New Zealand government on policy and regulatory issues that must be addressed in order to increase a stake held by a foreign airline in the country's national flag carrier. New Zealand's existing law does not allow a foreign airline to hold more than a 25% stake, or two foreign airlines to have more than a combined share of 35% in ANZ.
A veteran of big air shows looking at the displays at Le Bourget last week might have concluded this was something less than a landmark event. But just because there was relatively little new hardware does not mean it was dull. Coming as the Paris air show did soon after the two big civil airplane builders set out on radically different paths for the 21st century, there were some startling contrasts and significant debates.
Astrium concluded an agreement with Russian space agency Rosaviakosmos to jointly market inflatable reentry and descent technology (IRDT). The partners successfully demonstrated IRDT in a Soyuz mission in early 2000. They plan further demonstrations under the new accord, including a pair of submarine launches from the Barents Sea in July and September. Astrium intends to set up a joint venture with Babakin Space Center, a Russian reentry specialist, to market the IRDT for International Space Station applications.
