Bell Helicopter has announced Lockheed Martin as its first “investing teammate” on development of the V-280 Valor tiltrotor aimed at the U.S. Army. Bell has completed negotiations with the Army's Aviation Applied Technology Directorate and expects to sign a cost-sharing contract this month to fly a V-280 demonstrator in 2017 under Phase 1 of the Joint Multi-Role (JMR) technology demonstration.
Aeros plans free-flights of its Dragon Dream rigid-hull hybrid airship after completing the first outdoor tethered evaluation of the subscale demonstrator on Sept. 7. This followed the award of an FAA experimental certificate allowing company-funded research and development flights. Previous testing of the 266-ft.-long vehicle under the Defense Department-funded Project Pelican was conducted inside the airship hangar at Tustin, Calif., and included a demonstration of Aeros's “control of static heaviness” variable-buoyancy system.
One of the sad truths about the ongoing budget wars is that every time another member of Congress assures his or her constituency that further compromise with the other side is wrong, the legislative branch loses more power. It is not a loss of power to President Barack Obama and his political appointees so much as to mid-level budget and program officials within federal agencies.
USAF Cols. Jon T. Thomas and John M. Wood have been selected for promotion to brigadier general. Thomas is to be appointed chief of the Program Integration Div./deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and programs at USAF Headquarters at the Pentagon. He has been deputy director of future joint force development. Wood is to be named deputy director of strategic plans, requirements and programs at Air Mobility Command Headquarters, Scott AFB, Ill. He has been commander of AMC's 87th Air Base Wing, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J.
Fernando Lombo (see photo) has been named vice president/CFO of American Eurocopter, Grand Prairie, Texas. He was head of financial planning, accounting and financial systems for Airbus Military and Airbus Spain.
Eduardo Iglesias has been named executive director of the Miami-based Latin American and Caribbean Air Transport Association. He was vice president-legal of Avianca and had been general counsel of TACA International Airlines. Iglesias succeeds Alex de Gunten.
A new report ranks Alaska Airlines as the most fuel-efficient, and Allegiant Air as the least, among 15 U.S. mainline carriers in 2010. The study uses a new methodology that compares efficiency independent of size, network structure and type of service, say the report's authors. The study, by the non-profit International Council on Clean Transportation, concludes Alaska was 26% more fuel-efficient than Allegiant in 2010, and 11% more efficient than the industry average. Spirit Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines tied for second place, at 9% more efficient than the average.
J. Philip Barnes, President Pelican Aero Group (San Pedro, Calif )
We are delighted to see the amazing feats of albatrosses in the news. But the technical papers of the study highlighted in “Flying Economy” (AW&ST Sept. 2, p. 35) use GPS velocity, in effect groundspeed (at the shallow flightpath angles of the albatross) to compute kinetic energy. Clearly airspeed, and not groundspeed, sets flight kinetic energy, and to know the airspeed requires a vectorial subtraction of local-layer windspeed (in a 60-ft. boundary layer) from the GPS velocity.
He's back. Kenny Dichter, the ultimate Badger and business aviation booster, has returned to the tarmac. And he's promising to “revolutionize aviation around the world.” Don't be too quick to dismiss that prediction. He's done it before.
Thomas D. Grunbeck has become vice president-sales and marketing for Stevens Aviation, Greenville, S.C. He held the same position at the Flight Instrument Corp. and has been vice president/group director for Barnes Aerospace, a director of business development and a business unit leader for Goodrich and director of business development for Gulfstream Aerospace Technologies.
It is a plausible approach on its face. The U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) is a detailed list of munitions no one wants to fall into the wrong hands. It includes deadly hardware up to and including nuclear weapons. In the late 1990s, it also came to include satellite components, regardless of their end use. But because the State Department export-licensing bureaucracy proved more difficult to manage than the Commerce Department counterpart, the U.S. satellite industry found itself hobbled at the very time it faced growing competition abroad.
William Gibson (see photos) has become director of product support global distribution and William Brown, 3rd, director of global security for the Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., Savannah, Ga. Gibson was senior manager of customer operations for Honeywell's space and defense segment. Brown was promoted from senior manager of corporate security services.
Call me skeptical, but I have two things to say to U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory engineers about active flutter-suppression: 1) Fretting and 2) DC-9 elevator jack-screw assembly. Will there be a ballistic parachute for the entire passenger compartment of that souped-up aircraft described in “Fly Flexible, Fly Safe” (AW&ST Aug. 26, p. 13), or just in the first-class section? Tucson, Ariz.
The FAA reports that runway incursions at towered airports in the U.S. increased by 21% to 1,150 between fiscal 2011 and 2012, with the most severe incursions also increasing to seven from five in those years. The agency attributes the increase to incursions that had not been reported at more than 250 contract towers. As with previous years, most incursions in 2012 were caused by pilots (62%), and most of them (82%) were from the general-aviation community.
