Raytheon Co. has won a $16-million contract to provide Maverick missiles, trainers and spares to Canada, Bahrain, Italy and Turkey through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program. Raytheon will provide 58 AGM-65G/Fs, 20 TGM-65Gs and 13 spare guidance units.
The Pentagon lost 55 aircraft in Fiscal 1999 due to accidents in which 43 Defense Dept. personnel died. The value of the aircraft destroyed was $1.23 billion, the Pentagon said. Overall, the military experienced 1.58 class A aircraft mishaps--those with more than $1 million in damage--per 100,000 flight hours in the fiscal year that ended on Oct. 1. That rate is 4% lower than in Fiscal 1998, when 77 fatalities occurred and 60 aircraft were destroyed. The accident rate over the past five years is 25% lower than it was for the previous five-year span.
Reflectone UK Ltd., a subsidiary of British Aerospace, has received a contract from Syntegra to supply four management information systems for the WAH-64D Apache helicopter training program.
Despite spot shortages and lower military pilot output, the lure of high cockpit crew salaries at large U.S. airlines should ensure a steady stream of qualified pilot candidates for commercial flying jobs in the foreseeable future.
Top U.S. military commanders in Europe during the Kosovo air campaign say they were most worried about three issues--the possibility that Yugoslavia would introduce modern missiles and aircraft to the conflict, security leaks in NATO and the shortage of U.S. troops and weapons.
Shelving a veto threat, President Clinton signed the $268-billion defense appropriations bill for Fiscal 2000, which includes an 8% hike in weapons procurement spending (AW&ST Oct. 25, p. 36). He lauded Congress for approving the sustained military spending increases he had recommended, but criticized as a ``budget gimmick'' the emergency spending designation lawmakers put on $7.2 billion for routine base operations and basic training. Nominally, that enabled Congress to keep spending within statutory budget caps.
FLS Aerospace has signed an eight-year, $26-million contract with Futura International Airways for component support for 10 Boeing 737-800 aircraft that have been ordered.
Setting the stage for government control of the pending airline industry restructuring in Canada, Transport Minister David Collenette has asked Parliament to grant his office permanent authority over mergers and acquisitions involving Air Canada and Canadian Airlines International.
DaimlerChrysler Airbus has launched a freighter conversion program for the A310-300 transport in cooperation with Sogerma, a French overhaul and maintenance center. Conversions will be carried out at DASA's Dresden, Germany, plant or at Sogerma in Toulouse, France. Engineering work for the modification is expected to be completed by mid-2000 with first aircraft delivery expected late in the same year, according to Jurgen G. Habermann, director of sales and marketing for DASA. The cost of each conversion would be $7.5 million.
Russell Widmar has become director of the Kansas City Aviation Dept. He succeeds Raymond Anderson, who resigned. Widmar was executive director at the Salt Lake City Airport Authority.
Gen. James Jones, the new Marine Corps commandant, says that he and the new Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, are working on a proposal for a larger, four-engine tiltrotor aircraft. Imagine a V-22 the size of a C-130. Both services need such an aircraft to improve their fast reaction time and battlefield agility. Jones said the Navy is interested in the large cargo aircraft for ship-to-ship replenishment at sea. ``Frankly, we can produce the V-22 at a much more cost-effective rate,'' he said.
The space shuttle orbiter Atlantis sustained minor damage to push rods and other structures associated with its elevons in late October during power-on testing in a Kennedy Space Center orbiter processing facility. The vehicle's elevons had earlier been configured for a period of storage when no power-on testing would be done. When such testing was resumed, movement of the elevons damaged rods and scraped other parts. The damage can be repaired with no impact to the vehicle's next launch, a mission to the International Space Station about February or March.
Settling for what they can get, Japan's Ministry of Transport and the owners of Tokyo's Narita airport said they intend to open a new runway at the airport in May 2002.
The recent Aerospatiale Matra/DaimlerChrysler Aerospace merger agreement confers to Dassault Aviation an unexpected opportunity to restore its full independence. An independent Dassault could open the door to a deeper relationship with British Aerospace and, perhaps, the creation of a larger European military aircraft grouping. BAe is in a continuing dialogue with Finmeccanica/Alenia Aerospazio about the possibility of creating a military joint venture.
Armand Carlier has been named chairman of the management board/CEO of Astrium, the joint subsidiary of Aerospatiale Matra, DaimlerChrysler Aerospace and Marconi Electronic Systems. Also appointed were: Nick Franks, head of the Telecommunications Business Div.; Klaus Ensslin, head of the Earth Observation and Science Business Div.; and Josef Kind, head of the Space Infrastructure Div.
Boeing has begun an intensive, 6.5-month flight test program of its new 767-400ER derivative aimed at achieving joint FAA and European certification by May.
The second failure of a Russian heavy Proton booster in four months is raising new questions about quality control in the Khrunichev program that is critical to both joint U.S./Russian commercial launch operations and the International Space Station project.
Lawrence J. Gavrich has become vice president-communications of the United Technologies Corp., Hartford, Conn. He was director of internal communications and editorial services.
Despite the Defense Dept. lifting the mandate to use the Ada programming language in 1997, Boeing is sticking with Ada in Phase 3 development of the mission equipment package for the Army's RAH-66 Comanche helicopter. The company was pushing toward using a standard commercial language like C++, but the Comanche team believed that Ada's standardized architecture was better for a project in which several companies were doing the programming, said Gerry Furniss, the integrated product team lead responsible for both the target acquisition and pilotage systems.
The FAA has set up a new, centralized office with the goal of identifying ways to reduce runway incursions, then actually taking action to prevent such incidents. ``We haven't always followed through on our action plans,'' Peter Challan, the FAA's acting deputy associate administrator for air traffic services, told the agency's second annual Safer Skies update on Oct. 27.
Regional airline revenue passenger miles increased 23%, to 5.2 billion, in the April-June timeframe compared with the same period in 1998, according to AvStat Associates, a Washington-based consulting firm, and the Regional Airline Assn. The industry's overall average load factor increased to 59.5%, and the average passenger trip length rose to 263.9 mi. American Eagle, Comair (a Delta Connection carrier) and Continental Express were ranked as the three largest regionals during the April-June period, measured by passenger enplanements.
Two members of the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels flight demonstration team were killed on Oct. 28 at Moody AFB, Ga., as they practiced for a show scheduled there for last weekend. The crash of the F/A-18 occurred at 12:30 p.m. 2 mi. from the base while the aircraft was on approach. Lt. Cdr. Kieron O'Connor and Lt. Kevin Colling were practicing ``circle and arrival maneuvers'' for the show while the team was en route. The team's last crash was in 1990, and the last fatality was in 1985 at Niagara Falls, N.Y., when Lt. Cdr. Michael Gershon died in an inflight collision.
Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) imager has shown that surface features which have led some scientists to believe that oceans may once have covered much of the northern hemisphere of the planet, were not formed by the action of water in a coastal environment, according to project scientists. Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) images recorded last year do not show coastal landforms in areas where researchers--working with lower resolution Viking images--proposed there were shorelines. MGS images have resolution that is 5-10 times better than that of Viking.
The FAA lacks the tools and resources for significantly boosting ATC efficiency and should focus on preserving safety margins in its overloaded air traffic system, warn aviation safety officials. Officials within the FAA's air traffic organization as well as outside it argue that the agency is yielding to intense pressure from airlines and politicians to move aircraft faster through the skies before it can safely do so.
