The persistent drought in the western U.S. is very much part of the national consciousness; many are wondering about the impact on food pricing and availability. Rest assured that individuals like Robert Blair and Jim Hirsch will do their best to keep the ambered grain waving and the plains well fruited.
The RTCA Special Committee 213 (SC 213), winner of Aviation Week's 2014 Avionics and Systems Laureate, is not so much a committee as it is a “Skunk Works” composed of the makers, users and regulators of advanced vision systems worldwide.
First spaceflight of NASA's Orion crew capsule, with an instrumented prototype riding atop a Delta IV Heavy, may not come until December. At first scheduled for September, the Experimental Test Flight-1 (EFT-1) mission originally was bumped until October by range-scheduling issues at Cape Canaveral (AW&ST March 10, p. 12). Now the launch has moved back to Dec. 4, according to Orion prime contractor Lockheed Martin, with a “protect date” in October in case the logjam clears.
Jean-Yves Le Gall, the newly named president of France's Centre Nationale d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), is Aviation Week's 2014 Laureate for Space, based on his work as chairman and CEO of Arianespace. Named to the helm of Europe's world-beating launch service provider in 2007, Le Gall turned around the performance of the Ariane 5 during his tenure at the company. Under his leadership, Arianespace accomplished 54 consecutive successful missions.
The hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has thrown a harsh light on the fragile nature of internal and cross-border relationships in Southeast Asia, as a lack of coordination hampered both detection of the flightpath and response to its disappearance.
In the “Warning Sign for the Supply Chain” (AW&ST Mar. 17, p. 66), Tom Captain forecasts that when original equipment manufacturers (OEM) pressure sub-tier suppliers to reduce prices, bad things might happen in our industry. He is right, except for the timing. It is already happening. One OEM is asking for cost reductions that would total 15% over five years—and this is for legacy parts, where margins are already razor thin.
Although Airbus remains publicly ambivalent about its willingness to develop a reengined A330, a growing sector of the market is voicing support for the move.
Emirates has seen significant double-digit growth each year since it started in 1985, but this year promises to be more muted due to infrastructure work at its main hub.
When presenting Brussels Airlines' results for 2013 and outlook for this year, CEO Bernard Gustin compared the carrier's efforts to become profitable to the grueling bicycle ride to the top of 1,912-meter-high (6,273-ft.) Mont Ventoux in the French Alps. “We covered 40 to 50 percent of the slope; we still have challenges but we will get to the top,” vows Gustin, an avid cyclist.
A joint safety effort between Boeing and Embraer launched in late 2012 is yielding its first fruits to help with runway excursions, events where an aircraft veers off or overruns the runway. Products of the collaboration include new training aids and updated operating procedures for both manufacturers' aircraft and, coming in late 2015, new flight-display safety tools for the Boeing 737NG.
It will be summer before an FAA preliminary rule to upgrade full-motion simulators with extended models to handle full stall training hits the streets, and nearly five years before airlines have to officially put the updated machines to work. Despite the long grace period, the industry is taking a proactive stance on the safety improvements triggered by new flight-training rules, finalized in November and designed to help pilots recognize and recover from fully developed stalls and attitude upsets, often caused by stalls.
Karem Aircraft has been confirmed as one of four competitors selected for the preliminary design phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (Darpa) Vertical Takeoff and Landing ((VTOL) X-Plane program. The program aims to demonstrate a vertical-lift aircraft that can cruise at 300-400 kt., with a 75% hover efficiency, cruise lift-to-drag ratio (L/D) of at least 10 and a useful load of at least 40% of the vehicle's gross weight. Conventional helicopters have a maximum speed of around 170 kt., hover efficiency of 60% and L/D of 4-5.
April 1-2—SpeedNews Second Annual Aerospace Manufacturing Conference. The Battle House Renaissance, Mobile, Ala.speednews.com/aerospace-manufacturing-conference April 8-10—MRO Americas. Also, April 9—MRO Military. Both at Phoenix Convention Center. events.aviationweek.com/current/mro/index.htm April 11—Society of Experimental Test Pilots' East Coast Section Symposium. NAS Patuxent River, Md. www.setp.org/table/east-coast April 14-17—Asian Business Aviation Conference and Exhibition. Shanghai. www.abace.aero/2012/
USAF Col. (ret.) Gene Cirillo (Gold River, Calif. )
There has been a lot of talk from the “experts” on TV regarding the number of 5,000-ft.-long airports that could accommodate a Boeing 777. A TV-station-generated analysis that states there are 634 such airports is being bandied about recklessly. This flawed analysis ignores the fact that a runway must be strong enough to accommodate a 777. Since the empty-fuel-max-operating weight of the aircraft is 190,600 lb., I doubt there is a 5,000-ft.-long runway in existence strong enough to withstand that amount of weight.
India imports nearly three times as many arms as China and Pakistan, a Swedish-based research institute says, firming the country's position as the world's leading buyer of military weapons: 65% of its hardware. India increased its arms imports by 111% over the past five years, compared with 2004-08, and now accounts for 14% of the world's weapons imports, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) says in a new report last week. The second-highest importers, China and Pakistan, each account for 5% of international defense imports.
As industry tackles areas like runway safety and inflight loss of control, which are seen as ripe for safety improvement, a working group is zeroing in on ways to minimize the most common contributor to airline accidents: inadequate flightpath monitoring.
Two weeks after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared, aviation safety experts continue to toil over plausible causes. But even if debris from the aircraft is recovered soon, it may be months before a clearer picture emerges about what happened onboard the Boeing 777.
For offshore helicopter pilots, the approach to oil and gas platforms is one of the most work-intensive periods of the flight. During bad weather, pilots can struggle with high winds, while low visibility and clouds sometimes obscure heli-decks that often sit hundreds of feet above the sea level, and obstacles such as cranes and gas flares create challenges in the final moments before touchdown.
Matthijs de Haan (see photo) has become general manager of Terma the Netherlands in Leiden. He succeeds Richard Jones, who is retiring; de Haan was director of the Holland Space Cluster in Noordwijk.
New green propulsion technology developed by Swedish Space Corp. is expected to help Skybox Imaging sell black-and-white images at resolutions well below 1-meter ground-sample distance, positioning the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup to compete with established remote-sensing service providers in the U.S., Europe and Israel. Skybox Chief Executive Tom Ingersoll says the first two of a planned 24-satellite constellation of small, optical imaging spacecraft can already offer panchromatic products at 90-cm ground-sample distance.
Diana L. Sands has been named senior vice president of Chicago-based Boeing's Office of Internal Governance, effective April 1. She has been vice president-finance/corporate controller and is succeeding Wanda Denson-Low, who is retiring. Robert E. Verbeck, who has been vice president/chief financial officer of Boeing Defense, Space & Security in St. Louis, has been appointed to succeed Sands. And he will be followed by Leanne Caret, who has been vice president/general manager for vertical lift in Philadelphia.
Temperatures soar to beyond 1,000C in the turbine sections of helicopter engines. This is hardly a hospitable environment for a condenser microphone. But Berlin-based German Aerospace Center (DLR) researchers, because they needed to take sound measurements in just such inhospitable places for experiments useful in the decades-long pursuit of quieter helicopters, have designed a special housing and coiled sound canal probe for the job.
