Chinese astronauts manually docked their spacecraft with an orbital laboratory on June 24, proving a technology that the country regards as offering redundancy for its proposed space station program. Astronaut Liu Wang, helped by his two colleagues on board Shenzhou 9, took 7 min. to bring the spacecraft into contact with the laboratory, Tiangong 1, from a range of 400 meters (1,300 ft.).
In the On Space blog, a discussion spurred by Senior Editor Frank Morring, Jr.'s In Orbit column (AW&ST June 18, p. 26) regarding commercial space flight—and who is to blame or thank—continues. Dave_In_Rio_Rancho opines:
David Davenport (see photos) has been promoted to VP at New York-based 's Gulfstream Learning Center in Savannah, Ga., and regional operations manager. Steve Gross has been promoted to VP-sales from director-worldwide sales and Bill Nugent to VP-government contracts and training from executive director.
There is a perfect fiscal storm brewing which some have been slow to recognize and has already reached our shores. The most significant element is the Category 5 hurricane known as “sequestration.” Mandated by the Budget Control Act passed last year days before the U.S. credit-rating downgrade, sequestration mandates significant cuts to both defense and discretionary domestic federal spending. It happens on Jan. 2, is automatic and can only be altered by a change in the law.
There's nothing novel about European firms chasing export deals to offset shrinking domestic defense budgets, but MBDA wants to go a step further by making weapon-design decisions to help enhance its new products for customers beyond the home market. Historically, MBDA—the joint venture comprising BAE Systems, Finmeccanica and EADS—has generated roughly 30% of turnover from exports. But Paul Stanley, market development director, notes that “to sustain the business we will be looking much more to 50%” of exports.
Walter J. Zable, the aerospace industry's oldest and longest-serving CEO and a pioneer in the field of global positioning, died June 23 of natural causes at a San Diego-area hospital. He was 97. Zable founded Cubic Corp. in 1951 in a San Diego storefront. Long before GPS was invented, the company developed a satellite-based technology that identified the location of land masses and enabled the U.S. military to pinpoint targets to improve the accuracy of ballistic missiles. Later, Cubic fielded the world's first instrumented air combat training system.
Assuming the hypothesis that most top-performing airlines outgrow their “sweet spot” is true, what steps can airlines take to maintain a competitive edge?
In past economic cycles, most major U.S. airlines tended to make profits in the “up” arc of the cycle and then lose a large amount of money in the down part. Within the last four years, the macro environment has been down sharply with only a very slow recovery indicated in the past three—so why are the airlines earning profits? Investors and the stock market still do not yet fully believe what they are seeing, according to current valuations of airline stock prices.
Boeing is winding down work on equipping its A160T Hummingbird unmanned helicopter with the BAE Systems Argus-IS wide-area surveillance sensor for deployment to Afghanistan, after the U.S. Army issued a stop-work order following the crash of an aircraft carrying the gigapixel electro-optical camera on a test flight.
All carriers in the Top-Performing Airlines (TPA) study are now scored using a single algorithm. Prior-year results have been restated to reflect this. The scoring methodology represents a composite of five performance categories (and their contribution to total score):
Your recent articles on power-airframe integration were informative and accurate, but incomplete (AW&ST June 4/11 pp. 41-63). Power-airframe integration will change the calculus of aircraft design significantly, but the benefits enabled need not take decades to realize. Modifying existing aircraft types with a new fuselage featuring fully mature, off-the-shelf Boundary Layer Control (BLC) suction hardware can create more fuel-efficient airliners in mere years.
Michael A. Ward has been appointed senior general manager of the maintenance facility at William P. Hobby Airport in Houston. He was CEO and president of EAS Completions.
News that Airbus is close to announcing it will set up a final assembly plant for its A320 jet in Mobile, Ala., is reverberating across the aerospace industry. The move would give the European airframer a manufacturing beachhead in rival Boeing's home market (p. 33). And French labor unions can't be pleased: Workers in southern, non-union U.S. states don't expect 35-hour workweeks and eight weeks of vacation per year, and can be laid off more easily when hard times hit.
