Donald A. Graw, who has been president/CEO, has been named chairman of Avteam Inc., Miramar, Fla. He succeeds Leon Sragowicz, who has resigned. Sanford Miller has been named to the board of directors. He is chairman/CEO of the parent company of Budget Rent A Car.
Ralph V. Morabito (see photo) has been named vice president-manufacturing of the Telephonics Corp., Farmingdale, N.Y. He was director of systems integration and services.
Airborne tests of a new clear air turbulence sensor have shown promising results. Following almost 15 hr. of flights on board a Lockheed Electra, researchers found the Airborne Coherent Lidar (laser radar) could detect light and moderate turbulence as far as 5 km. (3.1 mi.) ahead of the aircraft. The structure of the turbulence also stayed constant during aircraft approach, increasing prediction reliability, according to Rod Bogue of NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif.
Photograph: BELL HELICOPTER TEXTRON is proposing its Model 609 civil tiltrotor as a mission-flexible alternative to the U.S. Coast Guard's mixed aviation fleet of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. The USCG plans to evaluate its aircraft assets as integral parts of the service's ``Deepwater'' initiative, which would involve replacing both ships and aircraft early in the 21st century.
David Miller has been named executive vice president/chief operating officer of Innotech-Execaire Aviation of Montreal. He was vice president/general manager of IMP Aerospace Components.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has hoisted Pentagon weapons spending somewhat higher for next year than its House counterpart did, while following the House panel's lead in holding total dollar amounts close to balanced budget ceilings. Proposing a $49.7-billion procurement budget for Fiscal 1999, the Senate committee eclipsed the President's request by just over $1 billion, versus a $215 million increase approved earlier by the House National Security Committee (AW&ST May 11, p. 59).
Computer Sciences Corp.'s (CSC) legal maneuvering to evade the unwelcome advances of Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) in the first quarter cost the professional-services company $20.7 million, or 9 cents per share after taxes.
Thiokol Corp., which has virtually reinvented itself since the end of the Cold War, last week adopted a new name to reflect the company's strategic diversification during the last eight years.
The rock-bottom, $275,000 price the U.S. Air Force is paying Lockheed Martin for each of the first 195 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles is expected to pique international interest. Despite competition from the French-built Apache and U.K. Storm Shadow, USAF officials expect JASSM's price will give the missile a significant edge in future competitions. Even though it is a stealthy weapon, foreign sales are not out of the question, according to Terry Little, JASSM program manager.
AlliedSignal is buying a controlling interest in two subsidiaries of GKN Plc.--U.K.-based Normalair-Garrett Ltd. (NGL) and U.S-based Hermetic Aircraft International Corp.--which both specialize in environmental control systems. GKN has agreed to sell a 4% interest in NGL to AlliedSignal, which already owns 48% of the 30-year-old joint venture enterprise, for 13.7 million pounds ($22.7 million). AlliedSignal also has the option to buy GKN's remaining 48% stake, valued at 66 million pounds ($105.9 million) on or after Dec. 31, 1999.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is readying for the launch of a next-generation U.S. weather satellite designed to improve the quality of space-based data provided to meteorologists.
BRUCE DORMINEY JOINS Aviation Week&Space Technology as Hong Kong bureau chief, arriving from Paris where he was a technology correspondent for the Financial Times. Previously, Dorminey was a science, business and European affairs correspondent for Canada's Globe&Mail, the Toronto Star, the San Diego Union Tribune and various other North American, Australian and U.K. publications. The addition of Dorminey will expand the magazine's news coverage of the Pacific Rim, with editors already in Australia and Japan.
John W. Creighton, Jr., has been appointed to the board of directors of the UAL Corp. He is retired chairman/CEO of Weyerhaeuser. Creighton will succeed Paul A. Volcker, who has retired from the board.
THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCE HAS ORDERED 357 wireless aircraft intercom units from Communications-Applied Technology. The lightweight aircraft wireless intercom system (AWIS) is designed to allow up to six people with portable transceivers to communicate with the flight crew, using the aircraft's internal communication system (ICS), from either the aircraft or outside up to 500 ft. away. Up to six aircraft can simultaneously operate their AWIS, wingtip to wingtip, without interference, according to the company. No airframe modifications are required.
VisionAire has slipped the planned FAA certification and initial deliveries of its Vantage by nine months to accommodate a new construction method for the composite-material, single-engine business jet. The St. Louis-based company had planned to start deliveries of the six-place jet in early 1999, but that date has shifted to December 1999, James O. Rice, chairman of VisionAire, said. The primary reason for the delay has been the decision to have the fuselage built by the pre-preg process in an autoclave, rather than by the wet-layup method, Rice said.
Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, in town to hash over transatlantic affairs with President Clinton, praised White House responsiveness to the Feb. 3 accident in which a Marine Corps EA-6B severed a ski lift cable in the Dolomites. Prodi said he had received ``a very warm and prompt response'' from the moment he called Clinton about the accident, which killed 20 skiers when their gondola plunged to the ground.
Congressional Republicans and Democrats, usually at odds, sometimes unite in excoriating the White House for its China policy. ``There's no excuse for [China's] Long March rocket to put people out of work who make the Delta rocket in my district,'' charges Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican firebrand who represents California's 45th congressional district.
Initiatives to merge the International Space Station with more world-wide commercial space activity are being accelerated by NASA, Boeing and the international station partners as the program faces growing criticism in the U.S. about cost and schedule. Boeing and NASA are starting a new series of meetings with global aerospace companies and officials from Europe, Japan and Canada to secure more commercial space support for the station.
Predicting the weather keeps getting more complex. Scientists in the Seasonal to Interannual Prediction Project will have access to 512 new processors in an upgraded Cray T3E-600 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to run models capable of predicting large-scale atmospheric phenomena such as El Nino. The total system will have 1,024 processors, 131 billion bytes of memory and 1.2 trillion bytes of online disk space so that it can perform nearly 400 billion floating-point operations per second (400 gigaflops) on a standard benchmark.
European space officials are fighting to obtain a quick go-ahead for a package of Ariane 5 improvements so that the critical European launch vehicle is not left behind by U.S. and Russian booster programs seeking the same share of the launch services market.
USAF has given a Boeing-led team the go-ahead to proceed with the Airborne Laser program's next phase after successfully completing a week-long preliminary design review. Col. Mike Booen, ABL program director, said the YAL-1A is on track for a scheduled critical design review during the summer of 1999. A key to program success has been the use of CATIA computer assisted design software, which quickly identifies potential trouble spots and enables selection of alternative designs, Booen said.
Dassault Systemes and IBM have upgraded their CATIA Network Computing Solutions (CATweb) with two new products and an expansion of a third. All are contained in Version 2.1 of Dassault/IBM's high-speed, Java-based electronic business tool, CATweb. The first new offering is CATweb Space, which allows engineers to use the Web to check 3D interferences, minimum distances and clearances to assure that an object will fit in an assembly. The second, CATweb Publish, allows anyone with appropriate authority to publish information automatically on the Web.
