On his first swing through town as chief of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), Tony Tyler, the former Cathay Pacific CEO, opines that the EU is “misguided” if it believes the furor over the emissions trading system it plans to force upon carriers serving the continent will fade away once it is in place. A bill pending in Congress would prohibit U.S. airlines from participating, and other nations have threatened retaliation.
Back on the ground, the U.S. transportation secretary should make sure tarmac-delay rules are enforced and consider requiring airports to plan for aircraft stuck on runways, say Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). In a Nov. 10 letter to Secretary Ray LaHood, the senators praised his department for putting new rules in place—a move they say has already reduced such incidents. But a recent 7-hr. delay at a Connecticut airport prompted them to chastise LaHood for failing to enforce them.
In the ongoing debate over adding the chief of the National Guard Bureau to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) urges the current Joint Chiefs not to stand in the way. “This is one thing we're agreeing on,” Manchin said of Congress. “Don't deny us that.” The issue is likely to come to a head in the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill, expected this year. The Joint Chiefs—who also do not include the Coast Guard commandant—oppose adding the National Guard owing to concerns over muddying, and losing, their authority.
One enduring lesson from combating improvised explosive devices (IEDs) overseas has been that the answer lies just as much in Washington as in theater. Six months ago, the U.S. government-wide effort to learn more about a network that ran ammonium nitrate from two legitimate manufacturing facilities in Pakistan to Afghanistan was at a “dead stop,” says Army Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, director of the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO).
Finally, in the politics-make-strange-bedfellows department, the Obama administration and Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) are both working to turn back proposed House cuts to life-extension efforts for the U.S.'s nuclear bombs. Turner suggests that some funding was siphoned by lawmakers for local water projects. The squabble has an administration known for wanting to cut nukes siding with a Republican lawmaker against his conservative counterparts who are usually known for hawkish stands.
In a little more than a decade, the role suppliers play in developing, producing and sustaining complex systems has quadrupled. Roughly 60-80% of every major aerospace and defense (A&D) manufacturing program effort is delivered to prime contractors from their supply base.
One of the industry's worst-kept secrets was that there was going to be more to come, when Airbus announced a delay to the A350-800 and -1000 at this year's Paris air show. The only questions were: When would a schedule shift for the baseline A350-900 be announced and how extensive would it be?
With Western aerospace and defense (A&D) budgets increasingly being crunched, and more of the same expected for years to come, program managers in the U.S. have a new mantra to march to: “keep it sold.”
Foreign governments have been known to describe the U.S. export system in terms fit for a circus. Kevin Wolf, assistant secretary of commerce for export administration, remembers the comment this way: “You authorize the export of the elephant, but you make it difficult to get the peanuts.”
Asia-Pacific Staff (New Delhi), Robert Wall (London)
The cost of acquiring the winning aircraft for India's Medium Multirole Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) competition is no longer a secret (except to the public, for now). With final MMRCA bids in for the Dassault Rafale or Eurofighter Typhoon, the offers of both European companies were opened Nov. 4 and their contents revealed for the first time to the two European rivals, as well as the Indian government's MMRCA program team, and three defense ministry officers who will spend the next 6-8 weeks boiling the offers down to a common, comparable form.
New fighters, missiles and missions are the hallmarks of the U.S. Air Force. While these still percolate in long-term plans, near-term fiscal constraints are forcing the service to craft a delicate balance between upgrading existing forces and husbanding funds for new equipment.
As airlines launch the first commercial biofuel flights in the U.S., the government is working with industry to scale up production of biomass-derived jet fuel to commercial quantities beginning in 2012. Following the lead set by carriers in Europe and Mexico, United Airlines on Nov. 7 completed a revenue flight from Houston to Chicago on a blend of 40% biofuel from algal oil and 60% conventional jet fuel. On Nov. 9, Alaska Airlines began a series of 75 flights from Seattle to Washington and Portland, Ore., on a 20% blend of biofuel from waste cooking oil.
For most European network carriers, short-haul operations have been little more than a necessary evil—needed to fill long-haul aircraft but a big drain on funds. Lufthansa is only the latest to try to surmount that situation, although there is little doubt it faces an uphill battle.
The U.S. Air Force is kicking off a series of meetings with industry in the coming weeks to outline the path for would-be competitors to break into the typically exclusive U.S. government launch sector, potentially creating a healthier and more cost-effective rocket market in the next decade. Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), has signed off on a first-ever detailed guide for certifying companies seeking to compete for U.S. government launches.
For its first 50 years, the National Reconnaissance Office's willingness to embrace risk in solving the complex technical tasks of spying from the safety of orbit earned the agency respect by a string of U.S. presidents faced with managing the Cold War. “The value of the photography alone was worth more than the cost of the whole U.S. space program,” said then-President Lyndon B. Johnson about images that are credited with helping to monitor the former Soviet military machine.
The National Reconnaissance Office builds and operates a constellation of space reconnaissance and surveillance systems second to none. Last year it completed an aggressive launch schedule deploying six systems. The organization continually invests in research and development to provide modernization to address cost, reliability and essential mission enhancements to meet stringent demands to provide timely understanding of low-signature targets with global imagery and signals collection.
“We build capabilities that our adversaries cannot imagine.” This was a common description of the National Reconnaissance Office's mission during the last century and was commonly provided to new engineers during their indoctrination briefings. The world's dangers were clear and the need to provide the country with capabilities to gather intelligence against the threats was an imperative. The hardest problems were purely technical, not budgetary, and they required innovation and creativity.
The Pentagon, contractors and defense mavens in Congress are in a state of high anxiety, and with good reason. A Nov. 23 deadline looms next week for a “Super Committee” of Congress to produce a plan to trim at least $1.2 trillion from the federal budget deficit over a decade. Automatic cuts—agreed to last summer in the budget deficit debate that almost led to an embarrassing default on treasury bonds—are a sort of meat cleaver dangling over the committee to induce the panel to use its scalpel to craft a better plan.
The Pentagon is setting up an Air-Sea Strategy Office to act as a “focusing lens” for the armed services, defense officials told reporters last week. The Navy, Air Force and Marines are the main players, but the Army is joining soon. The office's mission will be to counter growing anti-access/area denial threats in the global commons—oceans, airspace, outer space and cyberspace. “We cannot cede a single domain in order to prevail,” the officials said. Understanding the problems will help eliminate redundancy, they claim.
Despite program setbacks at Airbus (see p. 30) and Eurocopter, EADS is upping its financial projections for the full year, with stronger revenue and order bookings. The Airbus parent now expects a gross order intake of around 1,500 units, with 1,372 on the books through October. Deliveries at Airbus should be 520-530 units. EADS CFO Hans-Peter Ring also notes that A380 improvements are progressing, perhaps at a slightly better pace than thought, and he has an increased confidence for output next year.
Airbus Military is betting a connection with state-owned aerospace conglomerate Indonesian Aerospace will revive the fortunes of its tactical transport business. Indonesian Aerospace already assembles the CASA C212 and CASA CN235 under license, but the CASA C295, the largest tactical transport in Airbus Military's product range, has always been made in Spain, although that is about to change.
