Sikorsky Aircraft and Bombardier Aerospace have teamed to offer the Sikorsky S-92 helicopter as a replacement for Sea King aircraft currently in service with the Canadian Forces. Under the agreement, Sikorsky will assemble the aircraft while Bombardier will have responsibility for aircraft completion including interior installations, mission equipment checkout and exterior painting. The Canadian company also will be responsible for final acceptance and delivery support.
The Joint Strike Fighter is going to be competed on a winner-take-all basis, but in a move widely anticipated by Pentagon insiders, no options for changes at a later date have been foreclosed, essentially tossing a final decision to the next Administration. But, the Rand Corp. has been asked to make an independent assessment to validate the Pentagon's decision.
Rickenbacker International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, is continuing its focus on freight with construction of a third air cargo terminal. The 40,000-sq.-ft. building is scheduled to be completed in November and will be located adjacent to Air Cargo Terminal No. 2, a 57,600-sq.-ft. building now under construction. The airport's 67,200-sq.-ft. Terminal No. 1 was constructed in 1999. Rickenbacker, which has twin 12,000-ft. runways, also has an ``airside'' foreign trade zone.
The June 12 near collision of an arriving US Airways Airbus A320 and departing King Air aircraft at New York's LaGuardia airport (see diagram) drew sharp focus as industry prepared for this week's summit meeting.
Fred Hutchison and Mireille Gerard have become senior partners of the Washington-based Plexus Consulting Group. Hutchinson has owned a government relations and public affairs consuilting firm, and Gerard was head of international business development for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Kaman Aerospace Corp. has received a follow-on, $2.7-million contract from the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory for further development of the remotely piloted K-MAX helicopter.
Air France Finance, the French flag carrier's financial unit, will acquire for an estimated $44 million a 51%-controlling stake in Brit Air, a Brittany-based regional carrier. Brit Air, an Air France franchisee, in fiscal 1999-2000 carried 2.2 million passengers and made a $7.5-million net profit on $236 million in revenues. Air France, which recently acquired Regional Airlines and stakes in Flandre Air and Proteus Airlines, seeks to further expand in France's robust domestic market.
Chuck Vehlow, vice president/general manager of Army programs and military rotorcraft for Boeing Helicopters, is the new chairman of the American Helicopter Society International. Other new officers are: president, John Murphey, president of Bell Helicopter Textron Inc.; and secretary/treasurer, Gilles Ouimet, president/CEO of Pratt&Whitney Canada. Marc Sheffler, director of Apache airframe and aircraft for Boeing Mesa, was named technical director.
Strong demand has prompted Continental Airlines to add a second daily nonstop flight to Tel Aviv, less than a year after inaugurating the service. Boeing 777s, configured with 283 seats, are used for the Newark to Tel Aviv flights. Flying time is about 10.5 hr. eastward and 12 hr. for the return. Capacity on the route was diminished earlier this year when Tower Air declared bankruptcy, although El Al Israel Airlines has added about 2,000 seats a week for the busy summer season.
A prototype Aviation Weather Information (AWIN) system is being evaluated in a Federal Express MD-11 using a laptop computer display. A consortium led by Boeing Phantom Works is fine-tuning AWIN with the target of delivering a fully proven system to operators late this year. The application, which can be displayed on either a laptop or instrument panel-mounted screen, augments textual aviation meteorological reports with real-time color weather graphics including composite radar mosaics, lightning-strike and wind data and satellite images.
Regulators and industry leaders converge on Washington this week to grapple, yet again, with what is perhaps the U.S.' No. 1 aviation safety issue--runway incursions--at the FAA's Runway Safety National Summit. Their mission: to determine why incursion incidents are continuing unabated and find plausible solutions in making the runway environment a less hostile, user-friendly place for pilots, air traffic controllers and passengers.
Donald G. Andrews has become vice president-aviation planning for Reynolds, Smith and Hills Inc., Jacksonville, Fla. He was an assistant director of aviation for the Houston Aviation Dept.
Aerojet has won a three-year, $5-million contract from the U.S. Army to develop controllable thrust propulsion for the Hellfire/Common and compact kinetic energy missiles.
General Electric's CF34-8C1 turbofan engine, the powerplant for the Bombardier CRJ700-70 regional jet, has been granted its type certificate by the European Joint Airworthiness Authorities. The FAA certified the engine last November.
Low-fare carrier LAPA is shaking up Argentina's domestic market, building to a fleet of 21 jets and winning more than a 35% market share against state-controlled Aerolineas Argentinas in the first quarter of this year.
The global airline alliance formed by Air France, Delta Air Lines, Korean Air and Aeromexico, dubbed Skyteam, could be extended to cargo operations, according to Air France Managing Director Pierre-Henri Gourgeon. He added that the Skyteam carriers are talking with potential new members such as CSA Czech Airlines.
The U.S. Navy's replacement for the aging Harm antiradar missile underwent its second successful test at the China Lake, Calif., test range last week. This test of the Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile put an advanced, multimode (RF homing and millimeter-wave radar) seeker on a Harm AGM-88 missile body, which was fired from an F/A-18. The missile separated safely and was guided through a series of waypoints before hitting close enough to the aimpoint to validate the accuracy of a new inertial navigation system.
The European Space Agency (ESA) last week rejected Snecma's and Pratt&Whitney's joint proposal to develop a next-generation cryogenic engine to equip upgraded derivatives of the Ariane 5 booster. According to ESA Director General Antonio Rodota, such a transatlantic partnership would have reduced development costs and extended the proposed engine's production run. ``However, an analysis [of the joint venture] has not produced an acceptable result that could be ratified by ESA's council,'' Rodota said.
Russia's Energia and MirCorp. have laid out a tentative plan for continued Mir manned flight operations into 2001. An all-Russian crew with cosmonauts Salizhan Sharipov and Paval Vinogradov is tentatively planned for launch to Mir in November for maintenance and experiment operations on the outpost. In addition, MirCorp is in final negotiations with Dennis Tito, 59, a wealthy Santa Monica, Calif., investment manager, for his launch on a commercial tourist flight to the station with two cosmonauts in April.
Singapore has selected Honeywell to provide equipment and training for the Honeywell T55 gas turbine engines that will power the country's fleet of CH-47 Chinook helicopters. The contract is valued at $6.3 million.
Ryan sought to shore up the case for buying the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter, saying both will be needed against the advancing threat posed by Russian-made SA-10 Grumble, SA-12 Gladiator/Giant and SA-20 antiaircraft missiles. The SA-20 NATO designation, relatively unknown and confusing, essentially renames existing systems. The Russian-built S-300 family of surface-to-air systems includes all three weapons. But the 80-mi.-range SA-10C/D has just been renamed the SA-20 Gargoyle.
Sukhoi said its net profit in 1999 increased more than ninefold, to 213.9 million rubles ($7.58 million), compared to 1998. Revenues were up 5.8 times over those of the previous year, the company said, although it would not reveal exact figures. Only 2% of Sukhoi's revenues were generated by Russian defense contracts, however, with the core part of income coming from foreign business, the company said. The average monthly salary at Sukhoi, which employs 43,000, was 4,500 rubles ($160), the highest in the Russian aviation industry last year.
Rudy de Leon became the deputy U.S. secretary of Defense on Mar. 31. He adapted the following piece from an address he delivered earlier this month at a workshop on NATO political-military decision-making in Berlin.
Scientists are scrambling to understand new pictures of Mars unveiled last week that strongly suggest there has been liquid water springing from the surface within the past million years, and perhaps still today. Liquid water is the final element required to say Mars has conditions conducive to life. The other two--organic compounds and an energy source--were already known to be present, and they are all close to the surface.
