MICHAEL A. DORNHEIMJames T. McKenna contributed to this report from Washington.
The crew of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 were troubleshooting a puzzling horizontal stabilizer problem for at least a half hour before the Boeing MD-83 crashed, according to an initial reading of the cockpit voice recorder.
The first production Sikorsky CH-60S helicopter for the U.S. Navy made its maiden flight on Jan. 27 at Sikorsky facilities in Stratford, Conn. The cargo/transport/utility aircraft hovered, flew in forward flight, and demonstrated basic maneuverability and handling qualities. The aircraft is a Black Hawk derivative fitted with a number of Naval Hawk features including engines, rotor system and dynamics. The CH-60 also has a glass cockpit.
A story and a column item (AW&ST Jan. 10, p. 27; Jan. 24, p. 23) on the Y2K troubles experienced by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office both incorrectly reported that downlinks from optical intelligence satellites were switched to a backup ground station at White Sands, N.M., on Dec. 31. The system was completely blacked out for about 3 hr., but U.S. officials were able to rely on Lacrosse radar imaging satellites, which were not affected by the software failure.
ANASA/Boeing team plans to begin flight tests early in 2002 of a sub-scale, low-speed Blended Wing Body aircraft to determine the design's feasibility as a future commercial and military transport.
The Spanish air force has signed a contract with CASA for nine C-295 airlifters and associated logistic support. All nine of the light transports are to be operational by 2004. The C-295 is also being considered by Australia, Greece and Switzerland.
Theprospect of even a modest financial turnaround at Trans World Airlines seems to grow more remote with each passing quarter--the carrier reported a sizable loss for the period ended Dec. 31--and investors aren't the only ones taking notice.
Collaborative Product Commerce is a new buzzword for sharing data between varied information systems in different companies. It uses Web technology such as browsers, search engines, URLs, and languages such as HTML, Java and XML to knit together disparate IT systems, without the need to rehost data. Instead, a layer of connectivity is added to the federation of IT systems, which include enterprise resource planning and managing supply chains, customer resources, product data, component suppliers, documents and e-commerce systems.
Airlines aren't letting their Web sites rest. Northwest Airlines now has a condensed version of www.nwa.com for customers using handheld palm computers with small screens, located at webx25.nwa.com/palm-cgi/index.cgi. To expand its presence on the Web, Lufthansa has a marketing agreement with Travelocity.com to highlight the airline's offerings. Northwest and United Airlines added a customer paging service that alerts passengers to departure times, gates and changes in their flight status via alphanumeric pagers and other text-based gadgets.
China's airlines climbed back into the black in 1999, earning a profit of $95.4 million. The sector earned a total of $9.63 billion last year, up 10% from the year prior, according to Liu Jianfeng, director general of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC). China's airline logged a combined loss of $290 million in 1998 due to the Asian financial downturn, overcapacity and price wars.
The Pentagon is developing a new generation of sensors--often built around improved air- and space-borne radars--that scientists believe will produce a major leap in the U.S. military's ability to find mobile, well-hidden or buried targets scattered across a large battlefield.
New Italian regional carrier SolAir last week announced its intent to purchase two Fairchild Aerospace 328JETs and two 728JETs. SolAir is to begin operations next year out of Naples-Capodichino Airport with the 32-seat 328JETs. In 2003, the regional is to incorporate the 728JET in its fleet, becoming the first airline in Italy to operate the aircraft, according to Fairchild Aerospace.
Public opinion in Europe has recognized that the merger of DaimlerChrysler Aerospace AG (DASA), Aerospatiale Matra S.A. and Construcciones Aeronauticas S.A. (CASA) is not about size or national prestige, but efficiency, competitiveness and profitable growth. The positive response of Wall Street to the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. (EADS) shows that savvy U.S. market operators have also grasped this message, despite the fact that the merger of major companies is by no means a simple matter.
An F-22, tail No. 4004, will be Lockheed Martin's proving ground for the stealthy fighter's avionics. And undoubtedly the most crucial element--in validating the stealth fighter's performance and ensuring the smooth integration of its sophisticated array of sensors, navigation aides and communications--is to be the computer software tapes that control these avionics.
Making a switch from the custom-built workstations it normally uses, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency pulled an off-the-shelf SGI GroupStation from an evaluation program and sent it to Kosovo to meet an urgent request for 3D maps, terrain data and target analysis. Usually there are separate systems for storing, processing and exploiting imagery, connected by a local area network. The GroupStation combined these functions and cut the data transfer time over the slower LAN.
Northwest Airlines and Malaysia Airlines have filed an application for antitrust immunity with the Transportation Dept. for their plans to code-share flights. If granted, the immunity would be the first to cover a U.S.-Asian marketing pact and is seen as a way to pressure other markets to accept liberalization. The U.S. and Malaysia have an open skies agreement, but Northwest and MAS are contemplating extending codesharing beyond their respective gateways.
French Defense Minister Alain Richard and Jean-Yves Helmer, director general of DGA French armaments agency, for their efforts to establish OCCAR, the European armaments procurement agency. Richard and Helmer also implemented a major cost-cutting plan that made France's military procurement spending more efficient.
JERSEY EUROPEAN AIRWAYS WILL EQUIP its fleet of Bombardier CRJ-200 aircraft with the Rockwell Collins Flight Dynamics head-up guidance system (HGS). Air Canada recently decided to retrofit its entire CRJ fleet, which brings the number of HGS operators to six, including more than half of European CRJ operators. The head-up system allows pilots to fly Category 3A approaches and take off with 300-ft. runway visual range and even lower visibility on Type 1 runways.
The FAA may limit the number of new aircraft accepted by America West Airlines this year unless the Phoenix-based carrier can resolve problems with its maintenance operations.
Germany's RapidEye AG has selected Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) of the U.K.'s Surrey Space Centre to build a constellation of four advanced Earth-observation minisatellites. Under a $100-million deal, the 380-kg. (836-lb.) RapidEye spacecraft will be based on Surrey's small satellite platform, which was demonstrated on the SSTL UoSAT-12 mission last April. Surrey also plans to make an equity investment in RapidEye, which will market multispectral imagery tailored for agriculture and cartography applications (AW&ST Jan. 24, p. 67).
The Pentagon's apparent plan to abandon its winner-take-all competition for the Joint Strike Fighter is causing concern within the aerospace industry and has many officials convinced it could cause the price of the multiservice aircraft to increase substantially.
The Hispasat Spanish Satellite Communications Co. and Alcatel are checking out their large Hispasat 1C spacecraft that is to provide new television services to Central and South America as well as large portions of Europe. The 6,861-lb. spacecraft was launched here on Feb. 3 on board a Lockheed Martin/International Launch Services Atlas IIAS. Total cost of the mission is nearly $200 million, split about evenly between the Alcatel Spacebus 3000B2 satellite and Atlas-Centaur booster.
Smaller organizations that need to track how changing requirements affect a project but don't want the cost and complexity of a large management system can use the latest version 1.1 of QSSRequireit, made by Quality Systems and Software. The software runs on a Windows-based PC with as little as 8 megabytes of RAM and operates within Microsoft Word, making it easier to send data to QSS's high-end Doors requirements system used by larger companies. QSSRequireit also is good for training requirements gatherers, the company says.
The intelligence community is finding that demands on it have grown so much that routine operations are stressing its infrastructure daily. The symptoms of strain include glitches, such as the recent failure of a National Security Agency computer system. No intelligence was lost, says George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, but information couldn't be processed for multiple days. ``We have an infrastructure that is functioning at near or over-capacity constantly,'' Tenet said.
