As a new phase of ship-borne testing of the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter gets underway on the amphibious assault vessel USS Wasp, British shipbuilders are assembling the ski-jump launch ramp on HMS Queen Elizabeth—the first of two new JSF-dedicated aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy.
For decades, cryptography has been the domain primarily of binary computing, and communications via an encryption-decryption cipher key. Conventional algorithms such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), and Pretty Good Protection still provide a high degree of cybersecurity.
John H. Schmidt (see photo) has been appointed Chicago-based managing director of Accenture's North American aerospace and defense practice. He was a senior executive with the company's communications, media and high-tech industry clients.
Christopher J. Lutat and S. Ryan Swah (Memphis, Tenn. )
The question, “Has Automation Trumped Airmanship?” (AW&ST July 15, p. 22) seems to presuppose that the two are in some way distinct skill sets. This is a dangerous and false point of view. Separating the two is to deny a training and operational reality that dates back at least to the introduction of Sperry's “Gyro Stabilizer” in the first part of the last century.
Rockwell Collins CEO Kelly Ortberg uses a telecommunications analogy to sum up the company's Aug. 11 purchase of communications provider Arinc: If Rockwell Collins is the iPhone, then Arinc is the cell phone network. Though simple, the metaphor is notionally correct—an iPhone is relatively useless without connectivity. The same is true of an information-enabled next-generation flight deck.
International Launch Services (ILS) plans to resume commercial launches of Russia's Proton rocket Sept. 15 following the conclusion of an investigation into a July 2 mishap that sent one of the heavy-lift vehicles crashing to the ground seconds after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The company says its own review squares with the findings of a Russian government investigation into the root cause of the failure, which was attributed to faulty installation of three yaw angular-rate sensors on the first stage of the Proton M/Block DM3 launch vehicle.
Eileen Arnold, a systems engineer at UTC Aerospace Systems, Charlotte, N.C., has been named an International Council on Systems Engineering (Incose) fellow for her contributions to systems engineering. She was cited for leadership in establishing Incose's Expert Systems Engineering Professional credential and for industry promotion of systems engineering.
Meanwhile, the Transportation Department is working to designate permanent areas of the Arctic where small UAVs can operate 24/7 for research and commercial purposes, with the first approved operations coming this summer. The Arctic airspace comes on top of six congressionally mandated domestic test centers the FAA is racing to identify in a closely watched announcement expected by the end of this year. So far, 25 potential centers in 24 states have submitted proposals for the sites, Deputy Transportation Secretary John Porcari told the AUVSI conference.
Sooner or later, Russia's aerospace and defense industry will have to leave the post-Soviet era behind. It's not easy. Russia still has some enviable technology: combat aircraft flight control, missile systems and rotorcraft, to name three. But it takes more than technology to compete in markets around the world. The upcoming MAKS 2013 air show should yield a few answers to the questions raised in the following pages. How good is the T-50 fighter, and when will it be fully operational? Can Russia's industry become a player in the world's commercial markets?
As it winds down its role in Afghanistan, where strategic rivalry in another era was called “The Great Game,” the U.S. Defense Department has been suiting up for the next big round of conflict: cyberwarfare. The Pentagon has been racheting up the rhetoric gradually, with former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warning of a cyber-Pearl Harbor and more and more officials publicly acknowledging cyberwarfare.
Phil Lynch has been appointed chairman of the board of the Louisville (Ky.) Regional Airport Authority. Jim Welch was reelected vice chairman and Jon Meyer secretary-treasurer. Lynch is vice president and director of corporate communications and Welch vice chairman of Brown-Forman. Meyer is partner and chairman of accounting firm of Jones, Nale & Mattingly.
Sabine Minarsky-Bstandig (see photo) has been appointed vice president/manager of the Human Resources Div. of the Austrian Airlines Group, effective Nov. 1. She succeeds Michael Ruplitsch, who has left the company. She has been head of human resources for Erste Bank.
Long before the sequester blew in from the north like Smaug the dragon and stole their gold, the Pentagon's bosses had put themselves in a place where they steadily needed more money year-by-year to do business as usual.
Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver, who has been a policy lightning rod at agency headquarters as the Obama administration worked to shift U.S. human spaceflight from a government-run operation to a commercial venture, has resigned to become general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA). A former aerospace consultant, Garver joined President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign after initially supporting Hillary Clinton.
NASA says it will spend $55 million in fiscal 2014 to fund new milestone payments to the three companies developing commercial crew vehicles under the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) phase of the seed-money effort. The companies will also add unspecified investments to meet the additional milestones, which were listed as optional under their 2012 Space Act agreements, and will extend the CCiCap phase from May to August 2014.
Michael Foale, long NASA's most senior active astronaut, has retired from the space agency after three decades and a half-dozen spaceflights. One of them—a 145-day mission to Russia's Mir space station in 1997—was interrupted by a collision with an out-of-control Progress cargo capsule. During his 2003-04 command of the eighth expedition to the International Space Station, Foale became the first American to accumulate a year in space on his way to logging a pre-retirement total of 375 days.
