Walter David has been named president/CEO of the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Miami. He was executive vice president of the academy and president of SimCom International, its general aviation division. Patrick McSweeney has been named vice president-pilot development and Mark Johnson vice president-technical services and simulation development of the academy in Atlanta.
A Boeing-led team has been selected by the U.S. Navy to develop training systems, modify or upgrade existing systems and provide ancillary services under a contract valued at up to $325 million.
Robert P. DeRodes has been appointed chief information officer of Delta Air Lines and head of Delta Technology Inc. He succeeds Charles Feld, who is now leader of e-business activities. DeRodes was senior technology officer of Citibank for its Card Products Group.
SupplyView.com is an electronic parts e-business Web site with a database of more than 825 distributor inventories, and wants to expand into carrying aviation parts. It is offering a 60-day free trial membership to sellers of aviation parts and free ongoing service to qualified buyers including OEM and contract manufacturing companies. The site (www.supplyview.com) does not charge transaction fees or act as a middleman, but lets buyer and seller negotiate directly.
Orders for Honeywell Aerospace's enhanced ground proximity warning system are approaching 10,000, with about 6,000 units already delivered. The Phoenix-based company is aware of at least 11 aircraft ``saves'' to date based on airline feedback and related data analysis, according to Brian Pulk, director of EGPWS products. There may have been as many as 20. During the past year, 13 upgrades have been implemented and certificated in the latest version of the EGPWS used in air transports and business jets, including a geometric altitude feature.
Peter Edwards has been appointed executive vice president-sales of Montreal-based Bombardier Aerospace Business Aircraft, succeeding John Lawson, who has retired but will remain senior adviser to the president. Edwards was senior vice president-international sales.
Accidents and incidents that occurred in the last few weeks in Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast are expected to revive concerns about flight safety in Africa. In Tanzania, an investigation team headed by the Transport Ministry's accident investigation branch seeks to determine why a Boeing 707-320C last month made a water landing on Lake Victoria, about 4 km. from Mwanza airport runway's threshold, injuring five crewmembers on board.
Arnold Galloway, a satellite systems engineer and project manager for TRW's Space&Electronics Group, Redondo Beach, Calif., and Norma Clayton, vice president-lean manufacturing and quality at the Boeing Military Aircraft and Missile Systems Group in St. Louis, have received Black Engineer of the Year Awards. Galloway manages the Concurrent Engineering Center, an engineering data facility that supports TRW's systems engineering efforts on the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) Low program.
The Galileo spacecraft recovered from a ``safe mode'' entered on Feb. 24 (AW&ST Feb. 28, p. 24). Engineers were able to revive Galileo after about 17 hr. and resume playback of data from the Feb. 22 Io encounter.
Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter program will experience ``a few weeks'' delay. Its Rolls-Royce vertical lift fan No. 2B was damaged during flight control tests in early February. Word is that a bracket holding an internal bearing in place broke, starting a cascade of problems resulting in engine shutdown and necessitating its replacement. Lockheed officials said they suspected a problem was unfolding when they started finding metal filings in the engine oil samples and sensors picked up increased vibration. But, since the engine had already completed 67 hr.
Dassault Aviation has delivered the first Falcon 50M maritime surveillance aircraft to the French navy. The Falcon 50M is equipped with a Thomson Detexis Ocean Master 100(V) radar capable of spotting a life raft 30 km. (18 mi.) away, along with a Thomson Chlio infrared detector, inertial navigation system and GPS receivers. Three additional aircraft will join naval units by 2001.
Startup company Eclipse Aviation Corp., in conjunction with Williams International, is developing the Eclipse 500 that would provide on-demand, point-to-point air transportation service and significantly reduce the acquisition and direct operating costs of small business jets.
Officially, the Air Transport Assn. (ATA), which represents major U.S. airlines, strongly backs the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), the collection of ground stations designed to make GPS signals suitable for all phases of flight, right through Category I precision approaches. But privately, many member airlines see WAAS as a big waste of money, reports Aerospace Daily, an Aviation Week newsletter.
A camera problem scrambled many of the pictures of Jupiter's moon Io taken by the Galileo spacecraft in October, but they were saved by a clever Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer and the graphical programming of National Instruments' LabVIEW software. The camera was supposed to average 2 X 2-pixel blocks into single pixels to cut radiation-induced noise, but instead it superimposed the left- and right-hand sides of the image, shifted odd and even lines and caused other problems (see top photo).
Boeing last week declared talks with its striking engineers and technical workers' union had reached an impasse and likely will try to impose its own contract terms on the workers. The union has several options to block the move, however.
U.S. officials are trying to salvage an open skies agreement with Argentina. Top State Dept. officials were in Buenos Aires last week, hoping once again to persuade the national government there to proceed in September with phasing out restrictions on the destinations served and flight frequencies offered by U.S. and Argentina carriers between the countries. The current treaty calls for the elimination of most flight restrictions by 2003.
Jaap Schijve, professor of fatigue and fracture, at the Delft (Netherlands) University of Technology, received the 1999 John W. Lincoln Award at the U.S. Air Force Aircraft Structural Integrity Program Conference. The award honors John W. Lincoln of the USAF Aeronautical Systems Center, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.
Bernie Cairns has been appointed materials director for the CTS Corp.'s Glasgow, Scotland-based interconnect systems business.He was planning and procurement manager for Compaq Computers' High Performance Systems.
National Transportation Safety Board metallurgists last week were examining witness marks on the gimballed nut and the lower mechanical stop from the horizontal-stabilizer jackscrew from the Alaska Airlines MD-83 that crashed Jan. 31 off the coast of California. They hope to determine if those parts failed prior to impact with the Pacific Ocean and whether that failure contributed to the crash, which killed all 88 on board.
Under a unanimously adopted Senate bill, Russia would lose U.S. payments for the International Space Station unless it halted the transfer of missile technology and weapons of mass destruction to Iran. Any entities under the Russian Aviation and Space Agency that assist Iran would be named in biannual presidential reports to Congress, and subject to a cutoff of U.S. funding if they violated the nonproliferation provisions set forth in the Senate language.
The Indian government will review proposed policy guidelines, issued in January, that would bar foreign airlines from holding equity stakes in Indian Airlines and other domestic carriers. According to senior officials in the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the government may decide to allow foreign investment on an ad hoc basis ``if there are good reasons for doing so.'' The Confederation of Indian Industry and private domestic airlines have slammed the draft guidelines, and urged that New Delhi allow up to 49% of stock to be held by foreign carriers (AW&ST Feb. 21, p.
Kollsman Inc. has been selected by the U.S Army for a $2.8-million contract to develop the switchable eye-safe laser range finder designator for the Apache AH-64A and D attack helicopters.
Pratt&Whitney, Singapore Technologies Aerospace and SIA Engineering have signed a memorandum of understanding to form an engine part repair joint venture in Singapore. The company will take advantage of Pratt&Whitney's Electron Beam Physical Vapor Deposition coating and Turbotip plating technologies for high-pressure turbine blade repair. The company will focus initially on repairs of PW4000 turbine airfoils. It will be colocated with the Turbine Overhaul Services Pte. Ltd. partnership between Pratt and STA.
Cassini spacecraft data has been used to determine that one side of asteroid 2685 Masursky, imaged earlier this year, is approximately 9-12 mi. across. The spacecraft made images of the asteroid at a distance of about 960,000 mi. using wide- and narrow-angle systems and various spectral and polarizing filters. The asteroid is too small to be measured from Earth. Program officials said it was the first use of the spacecraft's automated object-targeting capability and that the system operated successfully.
