Asia's ongoing financial crisis has prompted Japan Airlines to decrease flights into Southeast Asia and to increase services to the U.S. and some European destinations for fiscal 1998, which begins Apr. 1. Service decreases to Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore and Guam are planned, while increases are planned to New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, London and Paris. However, Frankfurt and Milan will have services cut.
Photograph: CUMULONIMBUS CLOUDS WERE BUILDING along the path of a SilkAir Boeing 737-300 at the time that it plunged from 35,000 ft. into a river on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Officials investigating the Dec. 19 crash of Flight 185 initially said skies were clear and have maintained that weather appears to have played no role.
General Electric plans to develop, flight test and certify, by the end of this year, an increased efficiency compressor for its GE90 family of engines.
Michael Harrington has been appointed deputy chief executive/chief operating officer and Silvio Petrassi general manager of marketing and sales of Debonair Airways.
Georges Sangis has been appointed vice president-commercial engines of Snecma. He succeeds Pierre Alesi, who has retired. Sangis was vice president-military engines. He has been succeeded by Pascal Senechal, who headed Snecma's Gennevilliers production facilities. Jean-Christophe Corde has succeeded Senechal at Gennevilliers.
A new approach to aviation safety analysis has been taken by a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based consultant, Alex Richman. Current safety investigations usually focus on seeking the cause behind a single accident. A physician and former professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Richman analyzes data collected by regulatory authorities on airplanes and airports, in the manner which an epidemiologist would check into the incidence of disease in humans at a particular location--he measures the results and quantifies the outcomes.
Shuttle Mission 89 to Mir has further bolstered the U.S.-Russian relationship by delivering 6,000 lb. of water and cargo to the outpost as the joint program begins to wind down and the two countries move toward assembly of the International Space Station.
Difficulties surrounding the proposed AE31X project, Aero International Regional's decision to terminate the AIRjet program, Saab's initiative to cease production of turboprops--and Asia's economic crisis--are endangering Europe's strong position in the regional transport market.
Air France is shifting its Asian regional headquarters from Hong Kong to Bangkok ``in order to serve the Southeast Asia region better and reduce regional overhead,'' Asia-Pacific Managing Director Arthur Bullard said. The decision is another blow to Hong Kong's prestige as a business center at a time when air traffic, tourism and business have fallen off dramatically. Meanwhile, Air France says it will begin three-times weekly direct Paris-Shanghai services with the start of its summer schedule in April.
NASA ISSUED A NOTICE to Orbital Sciences Corp. that essentially asks the company to justify within 10 days why its contract to build the Lewis spacecraft should not be terminated. An agency official said Lewis is already two years late and almost 15% over a $50-million budget cap.
Off-the-shelf switching and Internet technology may be a way for NASA to turn satellites into user-friendly distributors of scientific data. Lockheed Martin, AlliedSignal, Computer Sciences Corp. and nine software houses recently demonstrated such a system to senior NASA managers in response to a request for proposals for the agency's Consolidated Space Operations Contract.
Raytheon will soon embark on a much-needed restructuring of its newly forged defense business, but the effort will be costly in the short term. Management last week announced a fourth-quarter pretax charge of $495 million to cover the expense of cutting 8,700 jobs, or about 10% of the workforce, in Washington-based Raytheon Systems Co., the part of the corporation where the defense and electronics businesses are grouped.
Concerns about relying on Global Positioning System satellites for sole-source navigation have escalated in Europe with an airline protest against a continental system to enhance the accuracy of wide area navigation with GPS and the Russian Glonass systems. Instead of augmenting two foreign systems, the airlines argued, the money should be spent to build a separate, civil-controlled one. The system under fire, the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System (EGNOS), is a European Space Agency project that previously had good support.
In the next 10 flight hours, the U.S. Navy's E-6 Tacamo community will have two engines that have surpassed 10,000 hr. of service on-wing. The two GE/Snecma CFM56-2A-2 powerplants are on E-6 No. 163920. The aircraft was expected to reach the milestone by the end of last month. The Navy's Tacamo fleet is based at Tinker AFB, Okla. The Tacamo, a derivative of the Boeing 707-320 airframe, is a multimission and flying command post transport. They are maintained under an ``enhanced'' phased maintenance program performed in association with on-base depot artisans. The U.S.
Karen Geldner (see photo), president of the Shannon and Luchs Insurance Agency of Washington, has been elected chairman of the board of the Gaithersburg, Md.-based International Council of Air Shows and has received its 1997 Sword of Excellence.
The FAA's air traffic control authority stretches from the western Atlantic halfway across the world to 500 mi. east of Tokyo. Some 55% of the world's aircraft in flight are separated by FAA controllers. The agency's massive, complex system has been criticized as inadequate to present needs and, if not rebuilt, destructive to the future economy. Many users were contacted for their critiques of the system. The operations of the FAA's Air Traffic Services and plans for the National Airspace System are addressed.
Air travelers in the U.S. will face serious delays by 2005 and gridlock at most airports by 2014 unless the air traffic control system is modernized, and that effort needs to get well underway by the year 2000, according to Bob Baker, American Airlines executive vice president of operations.
The U.S. Air Force 's Wright Laboratory at Dayton, Ohio, is seeking contractors for a U.S./French cooperative technology program involving unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs). The program is designed to develop, integrate and demonstrate flight control and flight management technologies required for combined strike packages of manned and unmanned combat aircraft.
The Air Force claims there were no near-misses during the past two years when the service's F-16s caused the activation of the collision warning systems on Japanese airliners 28 times. No fighter came within a mile of any civilian aircraft, service officials insisted. Responding to recent complaints from Japan's Transportation Ministry and the Japanese Pilots Assn.
Aviation leaders next week plan to launch the first of two campaigns aimed at focusing public debate and government spending on initiatives that they argue can best improve flight safety.
Poorly coordinated actions by FAA field managers may continue to undermine agency efforts to make its air traffic control system run more efficiently and safely, according to controllers, some senior FAA managers and industry observers. Such managerial actions are among several factors helping to drive the morale of the controller workforce down to what participants in and observers of the U.S. air traffic system consider dangerous levels.
Roy Resto has become vice president-operations of Quality Management Solutions of Milwaukee and its general partner, FlightQuality Inc. He was quality assurance manager of American Airlines.
The House Transportation Committee approved, 39-28, a bill to rename Washington National Airport to honor former President Ronald Reagan. With majority control of Congress, Republicans hope to rename the airport by Feb. 6, Reagan's 87th birthday. It is questionable whether Congress has the authority to do so, however, having relinquished control of the airport to an interstate body and approved a 50-year lease to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority to run both National and Washington Dulles International.
