U.S. and Japanese negotiators meet this week in Tokyo amid rising hopes they may be able to hammer out a revised bilateral air services agreement providing the most significant liberalization of the restrictive U.S.-Japanese market since the initial agreement was signed 45 years ago.
Pentagon planners are beginning to consider the implications of the huge economic costs of war. ``Future battles will be like open-heart surgery,'' says Maj. Gen. Kenneth Israel, the chief of the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office. ``You want to get in and out just as fast as possible. That gives you the best chance for survival'' and it cuts cost. Israel figures the complete cost of Desert Storm was $68 billion, of which $20 billion was from 600 oil wells burning for more than 200 days. Dominant battlefield knowledge would allow the U.S.
Northrop Grumman and TRW will continue joint development of a new ``smart skin'' antenna that flight testing has shown can greatly increase the range and quality of radio frequency transmissions and reception.
The U.S. Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office is trying to save at least the Army version of the Outrider tactical range unmanned aerial vehicle. The UAV has suffered fuel consumption, vibration and driveshaft problems, and may not meet the Navy's requirement to fly 125 mi., loiter for 3 hr. and return. It should far surpass the Army's 31-mi.-range requirement, however. Manufacturer Alliant Techsystems has moved on to the British-built UEL-810R engine, which is lighter and eliminates the need for a driveshaft.
The Middle East was the developing world's largest arms market in the years 1989-96, and volume is expected to remain heavy for a long time, as 21st century security balances shift and regroup. The region signed arms agreements worth $100 billion during the period, easily outstripping Asia's $77 billion and Latin America's $11.9 billion, according to the latest U.S. figures. The U.S. picked up better than half--nearly $56 billion--of the Middle East total. Russia and France were distant seconds, respectively, in succeeding periods, 1989-92 and 1993-96.
Launched seven spacecraft into low-Earth orbit for the Iridium satellite mobile telephone venture. The Sept. 13 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan marked the fifth launch of Iridium satellites in five months. The venture now has 29 of its 66 operational satellites in orbit. Meanwhile, Japan's NASDA space agency has delayed the Nov. 1 launch of an H-2 booster by 2-3 weeks after an attitude control system malfunction was detected in the ETS-7 test engineering satellite payload.
Learjet Inc.'s Model 45 is a new breed of business jet that takes performance, efficiency and cockpit technology to a higher level of sophistication and mission capability.
Agreement has been reached to provide Australia's newest startup carrier, Aussie Airlines, with terminal space at seven leading airports, ending a two-year standoff with Qantas Airways and opening the way for a new domestic competitor to begin service in March 1998. In the battle of the gates, Aussie Airlines won a loss-of-profits damages claim against Qantas when the latter refused to relinquish gate and terminal space to help get it started. A Federal Appeals Court sided with Aussie Airlines, demanding that Qantas negotiate a gate access settlement.
The chairman of the House Science Committee is calling on NASA to reconsider its plan to launch astronaut David Wolf to Mir this week for a four-month stay on the troubled Russian station.
If the emerging market for automated explosive detection equipment for airline baggage grows as rapidly as some industry observers think it will in the next 2-3 years, Vivid Technologies Inc.'s stock will be one to watch closely.
Considering how poorly America West Holdings' stock has done thus far in 1997, it would seem the U.S.' ninth-largest airline may be one of the most underappreciated companies in the commercial air transportation sector.
The French government is about to appoint a new chairman/CEO for Air France to succeed Christian Blanc, who resigned in the midst of a controversy centered on the carrier's lagging privatization plan. Although the left-wing coalition of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin recently showed a promising inclination for economic pragmatism, Communist Transport Minister Jean-Paul Gayssot's unyielding stance eventually prevailed during a heated ideological dispute.
The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft decelerated to enter Mars orbit on Sept. 11, and should begin using the planet's atmosphere this week to further decelerate to final mapping orbit, if events continued according to plan. It is the first orbiter to arrive at Mars since the Soviet Phobos 2 in January 1989, which died two months later. Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) is a Jet Propulsion Laboratory project, and the spacecraft bus was built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, which is controlling the spacecraft from its Denver facilities.
Stanley Marcus ruled last week in Miami that an American Airlines cockpit crew was guilty of willful misconduct in the crash of a Boeing 757 near Cali, Colombia, in December 1995. The airline was scheduled to go to trial this month before Marcus and present evidence that ``proves our pilots were clearly not guilty of willful misconduct,'' American said. But in a pretrial hearing last week, attorneys for the families of victims killed in the accident moved for a summary judgment by the court, and Marcus accepted the motion and made the ruling.
One of the Defense Dept.'s key software inventory systems will not be a reliable or accurate tool for grappling with the department's Year 2000 computer problems, a congressional study says. Some services will be able to work around the problem, but the Navy will be especially hard-hit, according to a report from the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Look for increased joint ventures, closer business relationships and more information sharing between the maintenance organizations that support airline operations. Better management of the supply of serviceable material offers the greatest opportunity to shorten overhaul cycle times and reduce the estimated $52 billion in spare parts inventories now in the aviation supply chain, according to T. Douglas Cribbes, a vice president of Rolls-Royce Canada Ltd. That figure does not include the value of spare engines, he said.
NTSB officials will analyze the work of repair stations and the oversight of them by airlines and the FAA in a special safety study of maintenance contractors. The National Transportation Safety Board plans early next year to launch the study, which was provoked by recent accidents that raised questions about the performance of repair stations operating under Part 145 of the Federal Aviation Regulations.
Airline chiefs around the world should have in hand their copies of the first ``Managing for Safety'' bulletin from the Flight Safety Foundation. The one-page bulletin, ``The Dollars and Sense of Risk Management and Aviation Safety,'' outlines the propensity for individuals in any organization to err and the wisdom of controlling that propensity through safety management efforts.
Maj. John R. Parker (see photo) has been named Marine Aviator of the Year and is scheduled to receive the Alfred A. Cunningham Award on Sept. 27. He was cited for flight leadership during Operation Silver Wake, when he landed his CH-46 helicopter with one engine down, on the USS Nashville at night.
U.S. and British partners are putting the final touches on a proposed system for simply and inexpensively inerting fuel tanks as well as reducing fire risk in other sections of commercial aircraft. A New York-based aeronautical engineer, Kenneth Susco, and officials of U.K.-based BOC Gases this week are to review plans for the system, which would inject carbon dioxide into the tanks to reduce the oxygen content therein to a point below which combustion of fuel vapors could be sustained. BOC Gases is a major supplier of CO2.
Canada's Greyhound Air likely will shut down on Sept. 21 as the result of a planned takeover of its parent company, Calgary-based Greyhound Transport Canada Corp., by another bus line operator. The no-frills airline, which started flying in mid-1996, had lost an estimated $22 million through last spring. Kelowna Flightcraft, Kelowna, British Columbia, operates Greyhound's fleet of seven 727s. The airline has a hub in Winnipeg.
The direct voice input system for the Eurofighter program. The company is to develop hardware over the next 18 months and to be ready for flight trials within two years. About 25 different nonflight-critical cockpit functions will be controlled verbally to reduce pilot workload using a 200-word vocabulary. Eurofighter is expected to be the first production aircraft to incorporate interactive voice technology as standard equipment. During the development, prototype systems were successfully tested on the F-16, F/A-18 and AV-8B Harrier.
France-based Aero International Regional believes the market for turboprop-powered transports will remain robust, despite regional carriers' growing interest in small twinjets. ``The twin turboprop market is far from being dead. We are expecting to deliver several hundred additional aircraft in the next 10 years,'' AIR Chief Executive Officer Patrick Gavin said. He was referring to AIR's healthy sales and strong backlog.
It has been said by some that Aviation Week has never met an airplane it does not like. As a pilot who has flown more than 100 different aircraft for evaluations in the magazine, I will admit there is some truth to that statement. Most of the aircraft I have flown in the past 20 years I have liked, but there were exceptions and some that did not measure up to their billings.
