The Air Canada Pilots Assn. (ACPA) late last week voted to strike Air Canada July 1 unless modifications sought to wage, pension and crew scheduling issues were met by the airline. According to the union, 92% of Air Canada's 2,200 pilots had voted to walk off the job. Although ACPA preferred to reach a negotiated settlement, ``we are keeping all options open'' and pilots are prepared to go on strike to achieve their goals, said Capt. Raymond Hall, chairman of the union's Master Executive Council. Air Canada has offered a 14.5% pay increase over five years.
Despite funding uncertainty for NASA's future Space Launch Initiative, the agency is exploring ideas that could turn into its next-generation X-vehicles.
Philip M. Condit, chairman and CEO of the Boeing Co., has received an honorary degree from the Cranfield (England) University College of Aeronautics for his lifelong contribution to commercial aviation. Brian Jones and Bertrand Piccard also received degrees. They crewed the Breitling Orbiter 3 on the first nonstop flight around the world in a hot air balloon.
NASA late last week was preparing to launch the new Hughes Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-H) spacecraft, the flagship of an $830-million program to upgrade critical U.S. relay satellite capabilities used by NASA, the U.S. intelligence community, the commercial sector and the European and Japanese space agencies. The TDRS project, under development for five years, is managed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Patrick White has been promoted to president from vice president-sales and marketing of the Replacement Aircraft Parts Co., Hartland, Wis. He succeeds Michael R. White, who has retired.
The new $5.6-billion Inchon International Airport, scheduled to open in April 2001, is expected to be Northeast Asia's major international passenger and cargo hub. About 170,000 flight movements, 27 million passengers and 1.7 million tons of cargo per year will pass through the facility during its initial operations. By 2020, when the multiphased project is complete, Inchon will handle 100,000 million passengers a year.
Robert L. Nelson has become chairman of Ballistic Recovery Systems, South St. Paul, Minn. He is president of the aviation consulting firm that bears his name.
U.S. officials of Virginia-based Phoenix International Inc. said a salvage team has recovered the Israel Air Force F-16D piloted by the grandson of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin that crashed into the Mediterranean on Mar. 27. The bodies of the aircrew were recovered from the surface at the time of the accident. The team used a side scan sonar to find the wreckage and a remotely operated vehicle to map the debris field. They recovered specific parts of the aircraft, including the flight recorder, from a depth of more than 3,000 ft.
Qantas has opened a new route from Bangkok to London over the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau, using the Future Air Navigation System, which cuts up to 50 min. off the normal flying time of approximately 13 hr. The route was developed in conjunction with the Air Traffic Management Bureau of the Civil Aviation Authority of China. The new route also frees aircraft from flying congested air routes at night over India, Pakistan and the Middle East.
A senior analyst in American Airlines' revenue-management offices breached a secure yield management system for Legend Airlines two weeks before the cross-town rival began flying last April. Her unauthorized entry into an information technology (IT) system that Legend contracts to Sabre Holdings Corp. was discovered only because she made a keystroke error that left a digital trail to her identity.
The U.S. Air Force will ask for increased funding for additional intelligence-gathering resources, airlifters and satellites but not new bombers. Chief of Staff Gen. Mike Ryan said that high on the immediate list of priorities is to get Congress to restore funding for the Discoverer II satellite, a radar-carrying constellation of spacecraft that can track moving targets on the ground. Congress has zeroed funding for the system.
Patrick Strasburger has been appointed president/CEO of LASV Enterprises Inc., Surrey, British Columbia. He was managing director of international operations for Continental Airlines.
The FAA is to be commended for all the preparation and work that its staff put into the Runway Safety National Summit held in Washington last week. Administrator Jane Garvey has made reducing runway incursions and ground accidents among the agency's top priorities for more than a year. And well it should be, with the number of incursions increasing against steady traffic growth. The recent spate of runway incursions and potential accidents has helped motivate much of the discussion on potential fixes.
It was a classic business-school case. Having identified an underserved, fast-growing market--the demand for global communications--the goal was to exploit it by offering a vastly enhanced service for which customers would be willing to pay a premium price. Out of this extraordinary concept grew Iridium, the $5-billion mobile-phone-and-paging service based on a network of 66 low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
Growing environmental constraints and the local residents' fierce opposition to additional runway capacity could seriously limit or halt the French airports' robust traffic growth. In addition, plans for a third Paris airport have been put on hold. But SNCF French railways, which is headed by former Aerospatiale Matra Chairman/CEO Louis Gallois, expects to ease the nation's air transportation worries partially. Air France and independent carriers carry a combined 22 million-plus passengers per year on France's domestic city-pairs.
Tim Campbell has become a project and market development executive of the W.D. Schock Co., Nashville, Tenn. He was executive vice president of the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority and is vice chairman of the International Assn. of Airport Managers.
Mark Burns has been appointed vice president-customer program management for the Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., Savannah, Ga. He was director of information systems.
Eutelsat will add capacity to its Hotbird location at 13 deg. E. Long. to beef up the lucrative orbital slot and free up existing Hotbirds for redeployment. Five existing Hotbird satellites, launched from 1994-98, already serve more than 81 million homes--24 million customers receive broadcasts direct-to-home and 58 million over their local cable network--in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Growth has been especially heavy of late, with demand jumping 28% in 1998 and 35% in 1999.
The FAA is to conduct a special audit of carrier operations beginning July 17. Its aim is to first define, then correct any safety and oversight problems. Some of the carriers to be audited include: American Airlines, America West, Continental, Delta, Northwest, Southwest, TWA, United and US Airways. Several regional and cargo carriers may also be targeted. The findings are expected to be made public in about two months.
Left and right-hand seats in the cockpit continued to be filled at record levels in May, with carriers hiring 1,647 pilots, according to Air Inc. The Atlanta-based airline career consultants say the ``nationals'' or carriers with annual sales of $100 million-1 billion were most active in hiring, signing on 528 pilots. Air Inc. forecasts that if this rate of hiring continues, about 19,150 pilot jobs will be produced in 2000. The number of pilots on furlough at the end of May increased to 479 from 468, or 0.5% of 89,869 active airline pilots.
The Star Alliance announced the formation of a new umbrella organization and welcomed Mexicana Airlines and British Midland Airways as its latest members last week at a meeting of its chief executives in Vienna. Star executives said the alliance's current focus is on the closer integration of current members. And to that end, the new organization was formed, aimed at deepening cooperation and dividing supervisory and management functions.
The House Transportation Committee's former chief, retired Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-Calif.), will succeed Commerce Secretary William M. Daley, who quit recently to honcho Vice President Al Gore's presidential campaign. Mineta, a San Jose native who represented Silicon Valley in the House from 1974-95, leaves his post as Lockheed Martin's vice president for special business initiatives.
Until lower-cost digital systems emerged in 1994, only a few hundred thousand people bought television satellite receivers each year. My, how times have changed. By the start of 2000, nearly 10 million people had purchased the devices and were subscribing to direct-broadcast satellite services, establishing the technology as the best-selling wireless product of the '90s.
