Gary Doernhoefer has been appointed general counsel, Steve Hafner vice president-business development and Jane Denman vice president-human resources, all of Orlando, Fla.-based Orbitz. Doernhoefer was senior counsel for government affairs for American Airlines in Washington. Hafner was a project leader for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago, while Denman was vice president-human resources for Navigation Technologies.
By the end of 2003 Bell Helicopter Textron officials expect to double the size of V-22 Osprey assembly facilities in Amarillo, Tex., to nearly 400,000 sq. ft. In addition, the company has access to an additional 119 acres adjacent to the municipal airport for expansion, as well as about $40 million in bonds from the city to finance construction. Although only 248 people currently work at the facility, by 2008 plans call for a labor force of 1,500 people to build the military V-22 as well as the Bell/Agusta BA609 civil tiltrotor.
Air Liberte, Air Littoral and AOM, the SAirGroup's French affiliates, are far from restoring their profitability. They reportedly lose a combined $700,000 per day and urgently require a $250-million-plus recapitalization. SAirGroup executives plan to combine the long-troubled carriers into a unified carrier that could compete against Air France. It would carry nearly 7 million passengers per year on the highly competitive French domestic route system, to European city pairs and on long-haul services to overseas territories such as the French Caribbean.
U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. (ret.) William J. Donahue has been named head of the Aerospace Information Technologies unit of the Computer Sciences Corp., El Segundo, Calif. He was director of communication and information at USAF headquarters and commander of the Air Force Communications and Information Center in Washington.
The French Snecma group's decision to acquire a controlling stake in Hurel-Dubois has been approved by the European Commission's competition directorate. Snecma's external growth initiative is projected to end the long-standing rivalry between Hispano-Suiza (a Snecma subsidiary) and Hurel-Dubois and lead to development of a unified business strategy. The two manufacturers produce thrust reversers and engine nacelles.
The drive for industry standards continues. As aerospace transitions to Extensible Markup Language (XML) for data transfer on the Internet, NASA Chief Information Officer Lee Holcomb says it would do well to study the ``outstanding'' way the insurance industry has adopted XML. XML allows Web page designers to define what data elements on a page represent, which means far greater flexibility than HTML. Government agencies want to adopt commercial standards, but the industry isn't coming up with a clear favorite.
FLIGHTSAFETY TECHNOLOGIES, IN COLLABORATION with Lockheed Martin's Naval Electronics and Surveillance Systems, is attempting to use lasers as optical sensing beams to detect acoustic energy from aircraft wake vortices. Socrates is an applied research and development project sponsored by the FAA, NASA and the Transportation Dept.'s Volpe National Transportation Systems Center. It borrows from sonar principles to detect compressions and rarefactions of acoustic noise created by the swirling vortices.
U.S. satellite licenses for launches on Chinese boosters will again be processed, following a State Dept. decision last week. The decision was made after China said it would cease assisting ballistic missile programs in other countries. Critics noted Beijing has made similar promises before. Concurrently, the State Dept. put sanctions in place against Pakistani and Iranian entities that benefited from past Chinese assistance.
Euroceltic Airways, a new regional startup, plans to launch daily flights between Waterford, Ireland, and London Luton Airport on Jan. 6. The privately owned carrier will operate a 48-seat Fokker F27-500 on the route with a second F27 available for charter. Euroceltic will be based at Luton airport.
The European Cour des Comptes, the equivalent of the U.S. General Accounting Office, says 5.75% of the EU's 1999 budget was wasted through negligence, fraud or mismanagement. The sum, published in a recent report, would be enough to fully fund a major weapons program such as the A400M airlifter, commented a French senator in hearings on last week's rapid reaction force capacity conference (see p. 28).
At about 24 times fiscal 2002 earnings, Bombardier Inc. shares don't come cheap compared with those of other leading diversified industrial companies. Nevertheless, market professionals seem to think Bombardier stock is worth every penny. ``We're looking for earnings per share to grow 33% in each of the next two fiscal years,'' Goldman, Sachs analyst Amir Karim said. ``That's more than double the average of the companies in its peer group--General Electric Co. (14.8%), Honeywell International (11.7%), Textron Inc. (11.8%), Tyco International Ltd.
The U.S. Air Force started seeing the promised benefits of its Distributed Mission Training system last summer, when eight pilots in high-fidelity F-15C simulators were able to practice wartime scenarios together even though they were on two air bases 700 mi. apart.
Preussag, Europe's leading travel firm, based in Hanover, Germany, is facing a possible probe into charges that it paid off managers of a steel unit to secure their support for a selloff to outside investors. The sale was organized under a policy aimed at spinning off industrial operations and focusing on the tourism business. The Lower Saxony state prosecutor's office recently opened an inquiry to determine whether a formal investigation is warranted.
A consortium comprising Bechtel Enterprises, Frankfurt Airport and Cosapi of Peru have won a bid to expand and operate the international airport in Lima. Under a 30-year concession, the team will build a passenger terminal and runway to complement existing facilities, which date back to 1964. Traffic at Lima is expected to more than double, to 10 million passengers, by 2010. Frankfurt is also involved in airport projects in Manila, Athens and Antalya, Turkey.
The U.S. Navy is getting ready to reinitiate flight testing for its Theater Wide ballistic missile defense program, hoping to regain time lost after a test failure stalled the program this summer. The next shot of the Standard Missile SM-3 Theater Wide interceptor is slated to take place before the end of December, according to Navy officials. The test, FTR-1A, was added to the flight test program after the first test in the Aegis Light-weight Exoatmospheric Projectile Intercept series failed in July.
Randy Mamiaro has been promoted to principal director from senior project engineer in The Aerospace Corp.'s support office in Rosslyn, Va., for the assistant Defense secretary for command, control, communications and intelligence, and the Defense Information Systems Agency.
Finally, Washington is getting the credit for international intrigue that it deserves, with the launch of the ``Spies of Washington Tour'' that is hosted by two retired Air Force intelligence officers: the son of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and a Russian aeronautical engineer.
The European Space Agency has moved to reinforce a Mars lander mission planned for 2004, and is considering participation in an additional mission to the planet in 2005. Last week, ESA agreed to a series of measures that would strengthen the management and reduce the risks of its Beagle 2 lander project, and put the effort on sounder financial footing. Beagle 2 is scheduled to be launched with ESA's Mars Express orbiter in June 2003 and is due to reach the Red Planet in early 2004. Under the revised plan, the agency will:
The FAA's National Simulation Program is keeping pace with evolving simulation technology through streamlining and expediting the qualification process, while seeking more accurate predictive data to improve simulator performance.
The Pentagon needs to pay greater attention to maintaining its supercomputer capability and take steps to support ongoing and future developments, the Defense Science Board (DSB) says. Besides the National Security Agency's needs for cryptanalysis, the Defense Dept. could benefit from these high-power machines for radar cross-section modeling, weapon design and analysis, calculations of weapons effects and computational fluid dynamics, the panel of senior advisers notes. But the generally small market for these machines has weakened the U.S. industrial base in this area.
This view of the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building was taken by Space Imaging's Ikonos satellite which has been in orbit for more than a year. The National Security Council recently approved the company's request for a 0.5-meter resolution system. A formal notification hasn't been made on the year-old request. The current system provides 4-meter resolution multispectral and 1-meter resolution panchromatic imagery.
Art Stephenson, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., has received the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Trophy on behalf of the Chandra X-ray Observatory team. The award recognized the team for their efforts in building, placing in orbit and operating the most sophisticated X-ray astronomical observatory ever built.
European Union nations have pledged troops and equipment to field a rapid reaction force by 2003, but serious deficiencies still abound in a number of key areas.
After surmounting the effects of wing production problems, Airbus Industrie now hopes to fly its first A340-600 in May. Initial delivery of the 380-seat transport--the consortium's largest--is planned for June 2002. The program timetable was disrupted by automated production difficulties at BAE Systems involving supplier management and 3D-software providers (AW&ST Apr. 10, p. 55). BAE Systems, which has a 20% share in Airbus, develops and produces European transport wings.
