In addition to the excellent points brought up by Adam Jones in his Viewpoint, “Pilot Race: Why I Am Dropping Out,” consider the added burden in money and time to complete the additional 1,250 flight hours that are required in order to have the necessary 1,500 to qualify for an airline pilot position. This, too, will have an enormous effect on the coming pilot shortage.
Embraer expects a significant boost to its backlog with the addition of a Republic Airways order for 47 Embraer 175s. A U.S. bankruptcy judge cleared American Airlines plans for Republic to fly the aircraft under the American Eagle brand. The manufacturer expects to deliver 18 of the aircraft to Republic in 2013. By the end of last year, Embraer had 10 remaining 170s on firm order and 35 Embraer 175s. The total backlog also includes 109 190s and 31 195s. Last year, Embraer delivered 106 commercial jets and recorded orders for 56.
Norm Augustine, who engineered the 1995 merger between Martin Marietta and Lockheed, has been selected for induction into Cleveland-based IndustryWeek's 2012 Manufacturing Hall of Fame. Other aerospace inductees are Lewis Campbell, who as CEO of Textron in the 2000s launched Textron Six Sigma; and Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, who “brought stability to the company and led it to record revenue.”
Jason Weiss has been named VP-operations at Dallas-based Flexjet, succeeding David Gross, who is retiring after 13 years of service. Weiss was VP-crew resource planning at NetJets. Lori Carr (see photo) has been appointed owner experience officer, a new position. She was president of her own consulting practice, Lori Carr & Associates.
Adrienne Robinson has been named president of Atlanta-based Precision Aviation Group (PAG) subsidiary Gardner Aviation Services. She will add the new role to her current position as VP-business development at PAG.
If what is driving a person's interest in being an airline captain is “the lifestyle, the pay, and the prestige,” as stated in a recent Viewpoint (AW&ST Feb. 11, p. 58). I strongly recommend he or she get out now. After 20 years in the cockpit for three different airlines (and still in the right seat!), I find that pilots who are motivated by these three things tend to never be satisfied—even back in the “good old days.”
Leaders have been appointed to key Boeing Commercial Aircraft programs, filling out an initiative that BCA President and CEO Ray Conner started in December.
Taxes on carbon emissions were also a notable feature of the latest round of earnings reports in Australia. The Australian government introduced a carbon tax in July 2012, so this was the first reporting period to include the cost to airlines. Virgin Australia says the per-passenger carbon tax—which applies only to domestic flights—totaled A$24.4 million in the six months through Dec. 31. To put this in perspective, that amount is larger than its net profit for the period.
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) achieved the highest “hop' of its Grasshopper vertical-takeoff-and-landing test vehicle, reaching almost 263 ft. on March 9 at the company's McGregor test site in Texas. The vehicle, combining a modified Falcon 9 first stage, landing legs and a Merlin 1D engine, first flew in September 2012. The testbed is a key element of SpaceX's longer-term ambition to develop a reusable booster to lower launch costs.
Stop me if you have heard this one before: the U.S. Air Force considers or awards a high-profile aircraft program to an industry team whose marquee player is a foreign manufacturer. Their U.S. competitor protests loudly. The program stops. International hackles are raised. And military personnel are left waiting for equipment they sorely need.
Lufthansa is emerging as a possible launch customer for Boeing's proposed 777X. The airline is including the aircraft in its long-haul fleet evaluation to be decided later this year. It is looking at the Airbus A350-900/1000, more Boeing 747-8s and the 777X, company sources say. Lufthansa added two Airbus A380s to its orderbook and opted for the A320/321NEO as the future backbone of its short-haul fleet. The carrier is taking 70 A320/321NEOs (new engine option) and 30 A320 family aircraft. It also bought six 777-300ERs for subsidiary Swiss.
The U.S. Air Force's interest in its most expensive white-world unmanned air vehicle, the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk, is flagging, at best, and at worst, diminishing to zero. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy continues to dance a stately pavane around the idea of a carrier-based UAV.
Australia's startup satellite operator NewSat will launch the Jabiru-1 satellite in early 2015 after spending several months finalizing more than $400 million in export-credit-agency financing.
A Payern, Switzerland-based startup has joined with France's Dassault, the European Space Agency, Stanford University, the Von Karman Institute and others to propose an air-launched reusable unpiloted space shuttle optimized for launching small satellites at low cost. Swiss Space Systems (S3) plans to use a vehicle based on Dassault's Vehra airborne reusable hypersonic vehicle concept, and a throw-away upper stage, to orbit satellites weighing as much as 250 kg. (550 lb.) at altitudes of 600-800 km.
Companies that market Russian and Ukrainian launch services are banking on their hardware suppliers to get their acts together— and on continued demand for satellite launches—to keep satellite operators returning their telephone calls in the face of ongoing quality-control problems plaguing the once-proud space industry set up by the former Soviet Union.
The first Pratt & Whitney PW1100G geared turbofan to be flight tested for the Airbus A320NEO is being prepared for installation on the engine maker's Boeing 747SP testbed in Mirabel, Canada. The engine is expected to fly in the second quarter of 2013 and is one of eight in the program. Certification is due by early in the third quarter of 2014. Pratt currently has around 1,150 PW1100Gs engines on firm order, or slightly under half the overall engines sales so far for the A320NEO.
Brad Furukawa and Helena K.L. Chan have been named to receive Falls Church, Va.-based Northrop Grumman's Asian-American Engineer of the Year award. Furukawa is VP and chief technology officer of the company's Enterprise Shared Services organization, and Chan is the integration and test lead of the USAF Deployable Instrument Landing program.
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) is hearing from more whistle-blowers inside NASA since he publicized charges about lax security for sensitive technology at Ames Research Center, Calif. The chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, Wolf says he isn't happy with the way the agency's inspector general (IG) has handled security, and the same holds true for federal law enforcement agencies (AW&ST Feb. 18, p. 19).
AgustaWestland is using an unconventional tiltrotor fan-in-wing demonstrator, flown in secret in Italy since 2011, as a self-funded technology incubator for advanced rotorcraft concepts. Measuring several meters in span, the “Project Zero” sub-scale demonstrator has two electrically driven, tilting rotors embedded in the wing. Surprising attendees at the Heli-Expo 2013 show in Las Vegas this month by revealing the program, newly installed CEO Daniele Romiti says the flying wing represents how the manufacturer is “thinking today of how we could fly tomorrow.”
With no takers among cash-strapped European governments, EADS Astrium is talking to Singapore about partnering on the GO-3S space surveillance system, a geostationary satellite that promises to be the first to transmit real-time video resolving objects as small as 3 meters (10 ft.) across.
This gray powder from inside a Martian “mudstone” contains sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and carbon—all chemical ingredients for life as we know it on Earth and a major target of the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. In a first for planetary science, the mission's nuclear-powered Curiosity rover drilled the hole at left, after a test run to the right, and transferred some of the powder to its internal chemistry labs.
This week, Aviation Week publishes two editions. On the cover at the far left is a European Space Agency (ESA) artist's concept of Electra, Europe's first all-electric-propulsion satellite (see page 45). The spacecraft is being developed by OHB of Germany and ESA for Luxembourg-based fleet operator SES. The string of satellites in the background represents the month-long process of raising Electra's orbit with the super-efficient propulsion system.
