HEICO CORP., Miami and Hollywood, Fla., has acquired substantially all of the assets of Rogers-Dierks Inc. for $15 million in cash. Heico said that the sellers could receive another $7 million in cash or Heico common stock subject to meeting certain earnings objectives. Rogers-Dierks, Anacortes, Wash., designs and makes jet engine replacement parts. It reported sales of $6 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30.
Defense Secretary William Cohen will use his Dec. 13-18 trip to Europe to try to set up a working group within the alliance to focus on command, control and communications, and logistics, a DOD official says. The panel would address how the alliance can act more effectively in these areas before NATO heads of state meet next year in Washington. The official says first recommendations are expected by then.
Pentagon investigators trying to determine whether Hughes transferred technology to China during an investigation of the 1995 failure of a Long March rocket carrying a Hughes satellite found wrongdoing even without having access to all information about the U.S. company's contact with the Chinese. Hughes has denied any violation.
Boeing Co., reversing an earlier plan, said Friday that final assembly of 737 airliners will remain at Renton, Wash., and will not be moved to Long Beach, Calif. The company said in August that it would open a line in the fourth quarter for final assembly of three to five next-generation 737s per month at Long Beach to help spread out the production work load and retain jobs at the California site.
HONEYWELL said it would appeal a jury's $250 million damage award against the company in an anti-trust case. A Federal District Court jury in Los Angeles awarded Litton Industries the damages in the latest development in a long-running case on monopoly of the commercial aircraft market for inertial reference systems (DAILY, Dec. 10). The verdict will be reviewed by a U.S. District Court judge.
Racal Radio and Thomson-CSF Communications formed a joint venture, MBN Ltd., to develop, manufacture, market and support multimedia, broadband military digital access networks. The companies said the market has an estimated value of $2.5 billion to $3.3 billion over the next five years.
With announcement of a major development in European industry consolidation said to be drawing closer - speculation centers on a link-up between British Aerospace and DaimlerChrysler Aerospace before year-end - a U.S. analyst notes that any such development would affect companies all over the continent. "Given that many of the companies have relationships with each other," he says, "you can't take any sort of a transaction in isolation.
NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter probe was launched Friday at 1:45 p.m. by a Boeing Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla. The spacecraft will travel 10 months and arrive at Mars in October 1999, where is will observe seasonal changes by mapping the planet's surface for a Martian year (687 Earth days). Boeing will launch the Mars Polar Lander mission in January 1999.
The U.S. Air Force is looking for sources to produce the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System (JPALS), the military version of the Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS). The service wants to capitalize on research and development performed to date and ensure interoperability between military and civil functions, and at the same time mitigate risks of the military landing environment. The military about two years ago rejected an offer to join the civil program.
BOMBARDIER INC. said Robert E. Brown has been named president and CEO effective Feb. 1, succeeding Laurent Baudoin. Baudoin, 60, who has headed Bombardier since 1966, will continue to oversee long-term operations of the corporation as executive chairman and president of the executive committee. Brown, 53, joined the company in 1987 as VP corporate development; he became president of Canadair in 1989, and later was named president and chief operating officer of Bombardier Aerospace.
EG&G, Wellesley, Mass., extended the expiration date of its $7.75 per share cash tender offer for Lumen Technologies Inc. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 15. EG&G said the extension is being made to give the Antitrust Division of the Dept. of Justice an opportunity to review materials to be submitted by EG&G in response to a request for additional information. Other terms and conditions of the offer remain unchanged.
The U.S. Navy and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are asking industry to come up with concepts for new weapons and sensors that could expand the target set of attack submarines. The weapons should allow a submarine to hit mobile, hardened and airborne targets, as well as those masked by terrain from direct line of sight, according to a draft solicitation given to industry. To keep the cost low, the main interest is in adapting weapons already slated to come into the U.S. Defense Dept. inventory.
The doctrinal dispute between the U.S. Army and Air Force over stopping an enemy attack is now focusing on the length of the "halt phase." The Air Force stresses the importance of the halt, during which it would bring much air power to bear against the enemy. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dennis J. Reimer now agrees there must be a halt phase, but says it should be short. Unlike the AF, which is stressing bombs on target, Reimer says the key to the halt phase is to get U.S. and allied soldiers to battle as quickly as possible.
Pentagon officials have told the General Accounting Office that they are being forced to cut back their guided weapons procurement plans in fiscal 2000 because too many programs are competing for too few dollars, the GAO said in a new report. It also said the Dept. of Defense shouldn't have let the situation arise.
The cost of an Army Strike Force that could be easily deployed but pack more punch than light forces will be about $500 million, Reimer says. He says the program should be affordable if the service gets the additional $5 billion he has told Congress his service needs.
COMPUTER SCIENCES CORP., El Segundo, Calif., signed a 10-year, $62 million outsourcing contract with U.K.-based Computing Devices Co. Ltd., Hastings, East Sussex, England, to manage all data processing systems, including desktop and midrange computing applications, help-desk and network functions. CSC will hire ten of Computing Devices's employees and acquire all of the company's internal network and computing assets. Computing Devices was acquired by General Dynamics last year. CSC signed a 10-year $3 billion contract with GD in 1991.
NASA managers aren't very worried about the hardware that got away from Astronauts Jerry Ross and Jim Newman as they worked outside the new International Space Station last week. On their first spacewalk alone the pair of orbiting electricians lost a retracting tether, a slide wire holder and a socket tool. Most troublesome is the latter item - a 2.5-pound aluminum and stainless steel wrench fixture that is five inches long.
TEXTRON INC., Providence, R.I., formed a joint venture with the San Shing Hardware Works Co. Ltd., Taiwan's largest fastener maker and one of the world's largest makers of internally threaded nuts. Textron Fastening Systems (TFS) will acquire an 80% interest in TFS/Tri-Star Co. Ltd., a newly-formed bolt making operation in conjunction with San Shing. This is TFS' second plant location in Asia. The first was opened in Malaysia in 1996.
If the Pentagon kills the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) program, the U.S. Army won't stop pushing to fill the requirement, service officials say. "If something happens to the MEADS program, I will be very honest and tell you I still have got a requirement, there's nothing that changes that," says Maj. Gen. Dennis D. Cavin, commanding general of the Army Air Defense Artillery Center.
The Pentagon's Joint Requirements Oversight Council is likely to approve the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps requirement for a vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle. The operational requirements document (ORD) was forwarded without changes to the full requirements committee by the JROC Readiness Board. The ORD will govern the planned VTOL UAV acquisition program, to be run by Naval Air Systems Command, which is currently conducting a demonstration of the Bombardier CL-327 and the Bell Helicopter Textron Eagle Eye.
The Pentagon will be conducting exercises with three minimum engagement capability Patriot missile units in Israel just as President Clinton travels to the country. The Pentagon hasn't tied the Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise directly to Clinton's travels, but the nine launchers aren't expected back soon.
NASA CLEARED its Mars Climate Orbiter probe for launch this afternoon after determining that a software "flaw" that could have let the spacecraft's battery overcharge could be fixed and tested in time (DAILY, Dec. 10). The first instantaneous launch window is at 1:46 p.m. EST and a second comes at 2:52. Forecasters predicted a 30% chance the weather would violate launch criteria for the Delta II at Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla., this afternoon.
BOEING CO. has won two orders totaling more than $6 million for its Flashjet Coatings Removal System. It said the paint stripping systems will enter service next year at the U.S. Air Force's Warner Robins Air Logistics center, Ga., and the U.S. Army's Corpus Christi, Tex., depot. At Warner Robins, the gantry system will be used to remove paint from a variety of fixed-wing aircraft. At Corpus Christi, it will be used on helicopters.
NASA and the Central American Commission on the Environment and Development (CCAD) will use archived satellite data to create land-use maps of the region under an agreement signed in Washington yesterday. Under the agreement signed by Administrator Daniel S. Goldin and Miguel Eduardo Araujo Padilla, El Salvador's environment minister and CCAD president, NASA field centers and investigators will join researchers in Central America to develop the maps using optical, radar and topographic remote-sensing data provided by the U.S. space agency.
