James A. Wilding, general manager and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which operates Washington National and Washington Dulles International airports, for his work in shepherding a $2-billion capital development program that is helping to transform the airports into dazzling and efficient facilities, as befits the U.S. capital.
Michael Biferno, manager of human factors technology, and Shreekant Agrawal, functional manager of the High-Speed Aerodynamics Technology Dept., of McDonnell Douglas Military Transport Aircraft, Long Beach, Calif., have been named McDonnell Douglas fellows.
DASSAULT FALCON JET has put its Computer Assisted Troubleshooting System on CD-ROM for personal computers. The troubleshooting system was developed originally for its ``help desk'' to pinpoint the most likely solution to a malfunction. The system is now being made available to Falcon operators and authorized service centers. The troubleshooting system is a data base of more than 10,000 field technical reports on most Falcon models, including the Falcon 20 retrofitted with the TFE731-5BR engine.
Fielding of a key communications and signals intercept package for the long-endurance Predator unmanned aerial vehicle may have been killed by a new reprioritization of UAV payloads by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
William W. Shurtleff, Hans J. Weber and Chris Seher for their contributions to aging-aircraft research through establishment of the Sandia National Laboratories' Airworthiness Assurance Nondestructive Inspection Validation Center in Albuquerque, N.M. The center has served as a bridge between the aviation industry and a dozen universities working on FAA research grants.
The U.S. Air Force/Northrop Grumman team for putting precision bombing capability on the B-2 with the GPS-Aided Targeting System/GPS-Aided Munition (GATS/GAM). On Oct. 8 on the Nellis AFB, Nev., ranges, two B-2s dropped 16 GATS/ GAMS and scored 13 direct hits. The other three landed within 30 ft. of their targets in a single pass.
Joanne E. Braeunle (see photos) has been appointed director of contracts, procurement and planning and Edward J. Evenski manager of precision optics for Image Acquisition Systems, both for Eastman Kodak Commercial and Government Systems, Rochester, N.Y. Braeunle was manager of planning and adminisration and succeeds William D. MacDonald, who has retired. Evenski was director of new business operations for Image Information Programs and succeeds David Crowe, who also has retired.
McDonnell Douglas Chairman John McDonnell reassured Chinese aviation leaders that the pending merger of his company with Boeing will not affectthe MD-90 Trunkliner coproduction program. McDonnell's recent trip to China included a visit to Trunkliner production facilities at the state-owned Aviation Industries of China plants at Shanghai, Xian, Chengdu and Shenyang. AVIC is to produce 20 MD-90s for Chinese airlines.
Maureen A. Pettitt has been named chief scientific and technical adviser for human factors for the FAA. She was an associate professor of aviation science at Western Michigan University. Pettitt succeeds Mark Hofmann, who has resigned.
Jesse C. Ryles, recently retired director of the U.S. Air Force's Wright Laboratory's Avionics Directorate, who was at the center of avionics technology development for 30 years. For the 20 years as chief scientist, he guided the Avionics Laboratory through a revolutionary series of advances in radar, electronic warfare and electron devices. Among the most noteworthy were founding the technology base in weapons guidance that led to most of the precision guided weapons of today.
METRICA INC.'S DATA MANAGEMENT and analysis software is being used by the Pentagon's Joint Advanced Distributed Simulation (JADS) program to simulate live-fire flight operations. First use of the Winchester, Ma., company's software was last November, when it simulated an F-18 attack with an AIM-9 air-to-air missile on an F-14. Dean Gonzalez, a senior analyst with Science Applications International Corp., said the Metrica software was chosen because the array fields in its data base files allowed JADS to handle huge data bases quickly and easily.
Jacques-Louis Lions, vice president of the French Academy of Sciences, for his leadership in heading the Ariane 5 failure review board, which issued a timely and frank assessment on the European government and industry deficiencies in the program that led to the accident.
OFFICIALS OF CONTINENTAL AIRLINES and the Independent Association of Continental Pilots (IACP) expect to begin initial negotiations on a new contract this week. The IACP represents 4,000 pilots at Continental, who have not had a pay increase since making wage concessions in 1992 to help the airline emerge from bankruptcy. The pilots want immediate wage parity with other major carriers, according to Len Nikolai, IACP president. Both management and union officials said a new contract agreement could be reached by June 30, when the current contract becomes amendable.
The Air Force is looking for more from the YAL-1A airborne attack laser, the antiballistic missile weapon to be mounted on a Boeing 747-400. Officials are studying the laser's potential for shooting down surface-to-air missiles, zapping the electronics of air-defense complexes and surveilling missile launch sites, according to Col. Mike Booen, the program's new manager. Earlier, program officials said they envisioned the airborne laser being used to protect itself and other aircraft from fighters and air-to-air missiles.
Bernard Durin has been named manager of the Offset Group, Abu-Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The group was jointly formed by Dassault Aviation, Snecma and Thomson-CSF.
The French government's initiative to impose Jean-Marie Luton, the European Space Agency's outgoing managing director, as Arianespace chairman/ CEO is sparking an intense controversy.
Frederick S. Billig, recently retired chief scientist for the Aeronautics Dept. of Johns Hopkins University, for a long career of pioneering scramjets and hypersonic vehicles. His team was the first to conduct successful demonstrations of sustained combustion in a scramjet engine. As a consultant, he is assisting USAF investigators to develop an operational hypersonic missile.
Susan Freising and Patrick O'Gara have been appointed Boca Raton, Fla.-based managers of reservations and customer service, and space and yield control, respectively, for Martinair Holland.
Russ Sparks, General Electric GE90 project department general manager, and his team for a nearly flawless first-year entry into service for the GE90-85B powerplant. Although late to enter service on the Boeing 777, the engine completed its first year of revenue service in November with an enviable record--no inflight disruptions and a dispatch reliability of 99.97%.
Designed to give maintenance personnel reference data without paper manuals, this voice-activated wearable computer with head-mounted display permits hands-free operation and full PC capabilities, according to the developer, Xybernaut Corp. of Fairfax, Va.
Potential use of welding on future aircraft will be the subject of a special one-day conference in Los Angeles, Apr. 16. Advanced welding techniques are expected to play an increasing role in future commercial aerospace manufacturing as a means to reduce weight, increase strength and lower parts count and manufacturing labor.
Officials in Jacksonville, Fla., are pursuing a plan for preserving the aviation facilities at NAS Cecil Field and its adjacent airspace to protect the base's possible development as a commercial airport in the next 20 years. County, city and port authority officials there agree that Jacksonville International Airport will remain the region's prime passenger airport. They see Cecil Field, slated for closure by the U.S. Navy, as serving air cargo operators, general aviation aircraft and aircraft component manufacturers.
ECHOSTAR-3, an A2100AX direct broadcast satellite being built for EchoStar Communications, is the first spacecraft to be built in the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Lockheed Martin Commercial Satellite Center. The 158,000-sq. ft. center houses commercial spacecraft operations previously done at the former Astro Space plant in East Windsor, N.J., and is designed to process as many as 16 spacecraft a month (AW&ST Aug. 5, 1996, p. 57). EchoStar-3 is finishing final payload testing in anticipation of systems and core module integration.
NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin is blasting a report that is critical of the agency's space commercialization efforts. The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies said last month that multiple reorganizations at NASA and the elimination of the agency's Office of Space Commercialization have left industry without a central contact point. But Goldin scoffed at the notion that NASA should take the lead in space commercialization. ``You want to have another big office at NASA with a bunch of employees that are civil servants doing commercialization of space,'' he asked.
Overcoming initial coordination problems, Lockheed Martin and NPO Energomash have built and test-fired two RD-180 engines, and a third--the first flight quality version--was being prepared for ground testing last week in Russia. In the process, U.S. partner companies are learning a great deal about economical rocket production methods pioneered by their Russian counterparts.
