John E. Evard, Jr., has been named vice president-taxes of the United Technologies Corp., Hartford, Conn. He was senior vice president-corporate development /general tax counsel for CNH Global. Evard succeeds Kevin Conway, who has joined the Seagram Co. Ltd.
The rapid growth of Internet sites that offer airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars and you-name-it--scuba lessons!--to passengers are, in essence, reinventing and expanding the concept of distributed data that allowed computer reservations systems to revolutionize air travel in the 1980s. The difference is that the Internet distributes data to passengers directly, rather than reserving it for travel agents and airlines alone.
MD HELICOPTERS IS EXPANDING ITS FACILITIES AT MESA, ARIZ., through construction of a 35,000-sq.-ft. warehouse containing 2 million spare parts, and a 40,000-sq.-ft. hangar that will be used for customer training, airframe completions and deliveries of new aircraft. Chairman and CEO Henk Schaeken said the additional space will allow the company to boost production to about 100 helicopters annually by 2002.
Convinced the U.S. is short of military airlift, Congress has ordered a detailed readiness report on the Pentagon's C-17, C-5 and C-141 fleets. New legislation directs the Air Force to provide an analysis by March, spelling out the air-cargo capacity the Pentagon would need to carry out two major theater wars at once, as stipulated in President Clinton's national security strategy.
Larry Resnick has been appointed corporate vice president of the Triumph Group Inc., Wayne, Pa. He was president of Triumph Controls and has been succeeded by William Bernardo. Jeff Frisby has been named president of Triumph's Control Systems Group and Thomas Tanner director of lean manufacturing.
Lockheed Martin Systems Integration-Owego has been awarded a five-year, $64-million contract to provide logistics information management support services for 12 Naval Air Systems Com- mand locations.
BAE SYSTEMS CANADA, formerly Canadian Marconi Co., will be the prime contractor and systems integrator for the CP-140 Aurora navigation and flight instruments modernization project. BAE hopes to leverage the U.S. $38-million contract from the Canadian National Defense Dept. into contracts to modernize P-3 aircraft, from which the CP-140 is derived. The company estimates the global P-3 market is worth $658 million.
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. (LMAC) is testing a Block 50 F-16D covered with adhesive film appliques instead of conventional coatings, and is studying use of the ``paintless'' process for the company's Joint Strike Fighter program. According to LMAC, the two-seat airplane has flown 40.8 hr. since August at speeds up to Mach 1.8, and further flight tests are anticipated. About 1,300 sq. ft. of appliques were attached to the airframe and covered nearly all of the external surface of the fighter, including the fuselage nose section.
China has fired a new warning aimed at blocking impending weapons deals with Taiwan. The latest salvo was directed at France, whose president, Jacques Chirac, is scheduled to visit Beijing this week. China is opposed to France's authorization late in 1999 of a surveillance satellite to Taiwan, and to possible sale or modernization of French-built frigates.
United Technologies Corp. (UTC) was poised last Friday to purchase Honeywell International Inc. in an all-stock transaction valued at more than $40 billion. On Thursday night, a UTC official would only confirm that the two companies had been in talks.
The strengthening outlook for commercial aerospace, combined with specialty-metal producers' need to improve their finances, could push the price of titanium and some other critical materials higher in coming months. For producers, the increase comes none too soon. The sector has been financially battered in the last two years by huge inventory adjustments by aerospace customers. In some cases, orders for titanium have been running far below contractual requirements, adding to producers' financial woes.
Todd B. Nelp (see photo) has been apppointed vice president-sales and business development for FlightSafety Boeing Training International of Seattle. He was director of customer support for Boeing Spare Parts and Logistic Services.
In a scene reminiscent of a Frank Capra movie, last week The Planetary Society hand-delivered more than 10,000 letters to Congress supporting restoration of the Pluto-Kuiper Express mission. The project was to launch a spacecraft in 2004 for 2012 arrival at Pluto, but NASA headquarters ordered the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to stop work last month. As NASA recovers from faster-better-cheaper self-delusion, planetary programs have increased testing and reserves, forcing a budget crunch.
As demand grows for passenger travel and air cargo movements over the next decade, testing infrastructure in all parts of the globe, the key components of air transport will undergo significant change. These range from aircraft operations, airports, and overhaul and maintenance to critical areas of labor, information technology, safety and the environment. Cargo and express sectors are exploding with growth already, and this decade will also see continued research and development into the next supersonic transport.
Last year, 1.8 billion passengers traveled on the world's air transport system, and slightly more than 1,000 people died in 97 fatal aircraft accidents. By any standard, commercial flying continues to be amazingly safe. Yet if that extremely low accident rate does not change, it is projected that growth of aviation will lead to one major accident a week by 2010.
Air service between Taiwan and the Philippines resumed this month, following the signing of a new air accord between the two countries. In July 1999, the Philippines had unilaterally terminated a 1996 bilateral pact, claiming Taiwan had violated the agreement. The dispute centered on sixth-freedom rights, or the right of one carrier to transport passengers from its partner's nation to a third country via its homeland. The Philippines complained that Taiwan's transporting Filipino passengers to the U.S. and Europe hurt the debt-ridden Philippine Air Lines.
European space and industry officials have begun laying the groundwork for an environmental monitoring and disaster-warning network that could rival the planned Galileo navigation satellite system in size and complexity.
For airlines, the introduction of widebody jets heralded the opening of long-range, low-cost air travel. Astronomers envisioned a far different use for them. They wanted to lift big infrared telescopes above 40,000 ft.--into the stratosphere--where the air is so thin that 99% of the water vapor that obscures the ``seeing'' of Earth-bound astronomers is left behind. The only problem was that when the big jets entered service 30 years ago, current-day optics were too heavy to take full advantage of the lift the big aircraft could provide.
Gary Toomey has been appointed CEO of the Air New Zealand and Ansett Australia Group, effective in December. He was deputy chief executive of Qantas Airways.
NASA's Genesis spacecraft, designed to collect and return samples of the solar wind, has received its final piece of science data-gathering equipment--a solar wind collector made of a new formula of bulk metallic glass. The mission calls for the spacecraft to fly toward the Sun to the Lagrange point, a region outside the Earth's magnetic field where the gravity of the Earth and Sun are balanced. The spacecraft contains a canister with collector plates that fold out to gather ions and particles that make up the solar wind.
Lockheed Martin has completed the first of six upgrades to U.S. Air Force tethered aerostat radar sites along the southern border of the U.S. The modifications include installing L-88 airborne surveillance radar that has a range of 200 naut. mi. at an altitude of 15,000 ft. The company's Naval Electronics&Surveillance Systems division will install the upgrades on all 71-meter (232-ft.) aerostats. Upgrades at the Deming, N.M., site are complete. Yuma, Ariz., is the next site scheduled to receive the improvements.
The European Commission is taking the U.K. to the European Court of Justice over its ``golden share'' in airport operator BAA, which was privatized in 1987. The EC said U.K. provisions prohibiting any one person or group from controlling more than 15% of BAA violates European Union treaty provisions on cross-border investments. The BAA case is the latest in a string of EC challenges to government golden share provisions and those aimed at blocking foreign takeovers of former state-owned companies.
LoganLM has won a contract from US Airways to install its Series III baggage handling conveyor at Newark (N.J.) International Airport as a replacement for the carrier's current system.
Boeing officials say a decision on whether to go ahead with the offering of a smaller version of the 717 to airlines could be made by year-end. The 717-100X would hold 85 passengers in a standard two-class configuration, compared with the 106-passenger 717-200 in the same cabin configuration. Both aircraft would have 1,500-naut.-mi. range.
Ray Edwards has been named senior vice president-production and Duncan Koerbel vice president-928JET program of Fairchild Dornier. Edwards was vice president-product support in Toulouse, France, for BAE Systems. Koerbel was head of the Premier 1 business jet program at Raytheon. Clayton A. Callihan has become director of advertising, based in Herndon, Va.
