Aviation Week & Space Technology

European leaders are cautious over the shape of Trump’s foreign policy.

Incentives for airlines to buy biofuels, ways for airports to offset the price and attracting investment are ways the industry hopes to grow to commercial scale.

The Obama White House has punted on a host of civil, commercial and military space issues.

In this week’s Washington Outlook: a look at Trump’s secdef shortlist; a change of plans after Clinton’s loss and potential for public-private partnerships.

Washington aerospace and defense thinkers call on Trump to revive the U.S.’s aging fighter, bomber and helicopter fleets while boosting investments in space, missile defense and the nuclear triad.

Watch video of Raytheon’s swarm-destroying high-power microwave technology, demonstrated at the U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 2013. Details are now being released.

In this week’s roundup: the U.S. reports $33 billion in foreign sales; Indian council recommends the purchase of 83 more Tejas combat aircraft; Boeing wins electronic warfare upgrade contract; and Indonesia considers Gripen and F-16 fighters.

While most Asia-Pacific full-service carriers are still in the black, in several cases their profits are shrinking significantly.

The most important thing the next president can do for defense policy is revivify the debate over fiscal policy and resolve it before submitting a 2018 budget.

Turkish tactical UAVs paired with Roketsan’s mini munitions are now being used to strike Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey.

NASA has had trouble gleaning financial support from Congress for its Earth science needs, but smallsats could be part of the solution.

With the takeover agreement by InFin Innovative Finance AG, of Switzerland, Mars One would become the first Mars exploration initiative to go public.

NASA does not want to try to service the James Webb Space Telescope once it is 1 million mi. from Earth.

Many U.S. carriers have opted to slightly postpone their recently granted authority to initiate flights to Cuba, most notably to Havana.

The complete ecosystem allowing developers to produce avionics software that is fully portable and reusable between aircraft platforms is ready.

On Nov. 8, the U.S. elected Donald Trump its next president, as well as a Republican House and Senate. Aviation Week editors explain how they think those dynamics will shape the nation’s policy and spending choices in the short term and the long run.

The Air Force has selected Northrop Grumman to build a beam-control system for a self-defense laser it hopes to deploy on fighters.

A new bilateral aviation agreement paved the way for more competition in Mexico, but additional changes to the market are pending.

As the Schiaparelli Mars lander investigation progresses, ESA and the European Commission take a step toward integrating space policies.

U.S. Air Force aims to save its only nuclear-armed cruise missile from threatened obsolescence.

UAS in the news: Flexrotor on ice; Vanilla’s 10-day target; DARPA’s drone hive; Vahana test plans; Flirtey in Silicon Valley; DJI’s Drone SAR app; Airbus bolsters counter-UAS.

Plan to create “an airline within an airline” could be a model – if it works.

A J-20 that performed at Zhuhai may have been a production aircraft, but it also had ill-fitting panels and other features that did not look very stealthy.

The new approach to variable-camber wings builds on a FlexSys-developed compliant composite structure.

Accident investigators are puzzling over the causes of the first-ever failure of a second-stage high-pressure turbine stage on a General Electric CF6-80C2 engine that suffered an uncontained release of debris during the Oct. 28 takeoff run of an American Airlines Boeing 767-300ER from Chicago O’Hare International Airport.