As expected, Eclipse Aerospace made news at the recent NBAA Convention by announcing it planned to restart production of an upgraded Eclipse jet, now designated Eclipse 550 to signify its improvements over the 500. What made that announcement particularly notable was the 900-lb. gorilla standing beside Eclipse Chairman/CEO Mason Holland. That's not an unseemly characterization of Jeff Pino, but rather an allusion to the size of the company he heads: Sikorsky Aircraft.
If history has taught the airline industry anything, it is that the greater the transformation a carrier attempts, the more pain it will have to endure to achieve it. Qantas Airways can certainly vouch for that. The carrier is engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight with its largest unions over plans to restructure major aspects of its operation. Bitter labor feuds like these could become more common as other airlines around the globe consider the same kind of changes that Qantas is undertaking.
Tests of Boeing's CST-100 commercial crew vehicle in a supersonic wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center are focused on gathering data that will be needed to keep a four-person crew alive in a launch failure and getting them back to Earth safely. The high-definition 12-in.-dia. aluminum tunnel-test model includes pressure sensors and simulated thrusters to determine the aerodynamics of a launch abort.
Air Force Secretary Michael Donley is opening the door to the thorny subject of closing military bases in order to save money. Asking for another Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round is politically akin to reaching for the third rail. The process is a political game of chess, with lawmakers fighting to keep jobs in their districts. “We have had some excess capacity the last few years after BRAC 2005,” Donley says. “The Air Force is going to get smaller and retire aircraft and capabilities.
U.S. Strategic Command's chief faces the conflicting demands of smaller budgets and a growing number of missions in space, cyberspace and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. “All three of the [nuclear] triad legs have to be sustained and that's going to be one of the budget challenges,” says Air Force Gen. C. Robert Kehler. “Sustaining the B-52 as a standoff platform is something we have to do. So that means communications and electronics upgrades.
Managers at Boeing's space exploration unit in Houston say they can deliver humans to the International Space Station at less cost than government systems because they aren't hobbled by NASA's decision-by-consensus approach. “We can still make the decision in the design and move ahead, instead of having to come to a consensus and go around and around for a while,” says John Elbon, the exploration chief at Boeing Defense, Space and Security and former program manager on the company's CST-100 commercial crew capsule (see p. 26).
When it comes to operating airliners with a biofuel blend, it is becoming difficult to find a name-brand airline that has not conducted a demonstration flight. The problem is, it may all be for naught. Air France recently completed a trial, as have Lufthansa, KLM, Iberia and a raft of others. All tout the carbon dioxide savings these flights—or in some cases longer-running trials—are achieving.
Within sight of the Virginia coast, the USS Wasp amphibious assault ship has been circling since the beginning of the month in a 20 X 20-mi. box quietly—until now—making history as the host of the very first sea trials of the Lockheed Martin F-35B, which is designed for short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (Stovl) operations for the U.S. Marine Corps.
When you have a mountain to climb, it makes sense to get an early start. With that in mind, South Korea is moving rapidly into the demonstrator phase for a stealthy combat drone that it does not expect to field until late in the next decade.
In theory, it may be a golden opportunity to develop a new helicopter, with an increasingly sophisticated Asian partner and a fat requirement for more than 200 aircraft to get the program going. In practice, there is probably not enough money to do more than update an existing aircraft.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are changing their battlefield look as weaponry—some of it advanced—emerges in the Middle East, in part from looted Libyan arms migrating across Egypt and into the Gaza Strip through the Bedouin smuggling pipeline.
The fate of Lockheed Martin's Medium Extended Air Defense System (Meads) is far from clear in Washington, but the chances it will persist through its development phase are increasing in Europe. While advocates and others are battling on Capitol Hill, European partners Germany and Italy are pledging support not only to complete system development but also to proceed into the production phase in 2014.
South Korea will launch its first satellite with a synthetic aperture radar by year-end, with another observation spacecraft using an electro-optical sensor due to follow about six months later. Together they will bring the number of launches of locally built satellites to five, helping develop the country's nascent space technology. It has two domestically built satellites in orbit now.
Just before China Southern took delivery of its first Airbus A380, an industry official quipped it would not be long before one of the aircraft would disappear and be dissected by the Chinese aerospace industry. The notion may be far-fetched, but illustrates the depth of suspicion still associated with China's industrial strategy.
Few aircraft are so inextricably linked to one market as Airbus's A380 is to the Middle East. Little wonder, then, that the region's demand for upgrades is driving the company's thinking as it improves the mega-transport through a range increase.
Ousting Pierre-Henri Gourgeon as CEO of Air France-KLM was the easy part; now the airline group's reshuffled management team will have to decide on quick steps to reset its troubled financial course.
Nearly 150 years ago, when industrialists were finding new ways to harness steam power, visionary Jules Verne wrote a novel in which he described men journeying to the Moon in a capsule after taking off from a launch site not far from Cape Canaveral. The craft was nearly identical in size to the one that transported Apollo 11 astronauts to the Earth's nearest neighbor, and following its return voyage the capsule was recovered after splashing down in the ocean.
U.S. technological leadership was not achieved by people who were afraid of failure. Corona, the first U.S. imagery reconnaissance satellite program, suffered 12 consecutive failures before finally achieving a successful mission a half century ago. It laid the groundwork for the development of space-based capabilities that helped the nation win the Cold War and are now aiding in the global fight against Al Qaeda and extremism.
It is as difficult for the human mind to comprehend the world of the very small—the mysterious, uncertain, quantum world of atoms and particles, for which common sense is of no help—as it is for us to grasp the enormous vastness of space.
While quantum computers will likely revolutionize computing, yet more powerful machines are possible with physical computing. Indeed, it may someday be possible to use our best physical theories to design machines that solve computational problems so difficult that many computer scientists believe them to be unsolvable.
There are three features of quantum mechanics that make it a likely source for future revolutionary innovations: Its predictions are strikingly accurate; they often violate our classical intuitions of what is physically possible; and the theory appears to be universally applicable.
Experimental evidence indicates low-energy nuclear-reaction (LENR) technology is potentially an extremely clean and green energy source that could revolutionize not only aerospace but the wider field of power generation for home and industry. But much work remains to turn today's inefficient and self-destructive devices into practical powerplants,
Now is the time to dream big and have bold visions of the future, even as present realities in aerospace are challenging. We must reflect upon how the dreams of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard led—less than a century later—to space probes visiting every major body in the Solar System and some plunging on to the stars, and how the visions of Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clark and Albert Einstein presaged landings on the Moon, geosynchronous satellites, nuclear power and GPS navigation.
When the first Boeing 787 for revenue service was delivered to All Nippon Airways last month, much of the spotlight focused on the aircraft's revolutionary composite materials, fuel-efficient engines, and health monitoring and reporting systems. But buried deep within the structure is a harbinger to another revolutionary aerospace technology: the role of the photon—the elementary particle of light.
If there is one piece of information that is vital to aircraft safety and efficiency, it is knowing aircraft position with both high accuracy and high integrity. Aircraft navigation has come a long way from the 1970s, when a third crewmember was required in the cockpit. This crewmember's name said it all: “navigator.” The advent of flight management systems (FMS) in the 1980s obviated the need for a navigator, since the FMS was able to automatically calculate aircraft position.
