FAA TEAMS will be at Boeing's 737 facilities in Renton, Wash., and Wichita, Kan., until Friday conducting unannounced inspections of the company's manufacturing process documentation and meeting with senior officials. The inspections follow the loss of a new Silkair 737-300. Twenty-six fasteners were missing from the horizontal stabilizer, but it's not clear whether this figured in the crash. FAA said inspectors may look at parts or at aircraft as they follow Boeing's documentation process.
Scientific space probes built under the faster-better-cheaper philosophy espoused by NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin are "excellent" for tackling specific, high-priority space science objectives, but their capabilities fall short of the requirements for meeting broader scientific goals, a panel of the National Research Council has concluded.
France's Aerospatiale will spin off its Airbus business this year, clearing the way for its integration into a new Airbus corporate entity, the company said yesterday in an announcement of a record year for 1997.
The U.S. Army is considering several programs to improve the weapons used by its attack helicopters. It was prompted by language in the Pentagon's most recent defense planning guidance calling for a focus on precision guided munitions. One possible program is a precision guided rocket, according to a briefing for the American Helicopter Society last week in Arlington, Va. Existing rockets aren't precise enough for the modern battlefield because they can result in collateral damage, the AHS was told.
RUSSIAN CONTROLLERS reported pressure in the Kvant-2 airlock on the Mir orbital station lost air pressure over the weekend, suggesting that a temporary fix to a persistent hatch leak wasn't working. Cosmonauts used 10 backup latches to seal the hatch after discovering one of 10 primary latches was broken (DAILY, Jan. 12). Mission Control Center-Moscow said yesterday the problem wouldn't hamper Wednesday's spacewalk by Astronaut David Wolf, or other upcoming operations.
The U.S. Navy may not deploy a fully digital version of the Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance Pod (TARPS) in favor of proving the technology and then transitioning to the TARPS follow-on, the Super Hornet Advanced Reconnaissance Pod (SHARP).
The Clinton Administration isn't doing enough to stem proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and is jeopardizing U.S. security by waffling on when to deploy a national missile defense (NMD) system, according to report released on Capitol Hill yesterday.
Even though Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev late last month declared operational the first two Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles, the U.S. Defense Dept. doesn't view them as an immediate threat because one is a training missile and the second may not be carrying a nuclear warhead.
NASA's Lunar Prospector continued to perform almost perfectly yesterday, completing the second of three engine burns designed to place the low-cost spacecraft in a circular orbit 62 miles above the moon's surface.
LOCKHEED MARTIN Federal Systems, Owego, N.Y., won a $94.4 million multi- year production contact for radar frequency interferometer (RFI) systems from the U.S. Army Aviation&Missile Command, Huntsville, Ala. The contract calls for 207 prime systems and 15 spares to be integrated on Apache helicopters. Federal Systems has been involved in development, production and test of the system, also known as the AN/APR-48A, for 12 years.
The U.S. and France have teamed to develop flight control and flight management technologies that will permit manned aircraft and uninhabited combat air vehicles ((UCAVs) to operate together in a strike package. The U.S. Air Force said it expects the work to focus on two concepts of employment. In the first, manned combat aircraft flying alongside UCAVs would control the entire strike package, according to a Jan. 9 Commerce Business Daily notice.
Boeing Commercial Airplane Group received 568 announced orders worth $42.8 billion during 1997. It said that U.S. customers accounted for 316 of the orders. In net orders, on which Boeing usually bases order-related markets share calculations, Boeing totaled 502 airplanes valued at $39.1 billion, while Airbus recorded 438 net orders worth $27.8 billion. Airbus Industrie reported 460 gross firm orders worth $29.6 billion (DAILY, Jan. 7, 1997).
Indonesia's IPTN said it will continue with a $2 billion program to develop the 130-seat N-2130 twinjet airliner, but analysts questioned the wisdom of the move in light of the country's growing financial crisis. The company announced over the weekend that it would proceed with the project, which was initiated in October 1994. IPTN - Industry Pesawat Terbang Nusantara - has envisioned airliner use of the plane beginning in about 2000.
The Pentagon's national missile defense (NMD) program contains technical risks due to a development schedule that allows only for limited testing, according to a new General Accounting Officer report. Under the NMD acquisition strategy, a large number of activities need to be completed in a relatively short time frame, increasing the programs's schedule risk, GAO says in "National Missile Defense: Schedule and technical Risk Represent Significant Development Challenges" (GAO/NSIAD-98- 28).
Engineers from EarthWatch Inc. and Orbital Sciences Corp. were still trying to reestablish contact with the EarlyBird 1 remote sensing satellite yesterday, sending commands to the ailing spacecraft designed to conserve power and recharge its batteries, according to an EarthWatch spokesman.
Senior Pentagon officials have rejected the idea of developing one common interceptor for use in different theater missile defense (TMD) systems, but support the idea of sharing common advanced interceptor technologies that could be adapted as needed to meet the varying requirements of those systems, according to sources and Pentagon documents.
The U.S. Army continues to try to upgrade its AH-64 Apache forward looking infrared system, which one program official said has been at least partially responsible for 17 Class A mishaps. Army Lt. Col. Fred Jernigan, who monitors the Apache program at the Pentagon, told a meeting of the American Helicopters Society last week in Arlington, Va., that "we are pursuing [the second-generation FLIR] by any means available." He added the program is the top priority for the Apache program.
