The Pentagon plans to launch a new series of exercises focusing on information superiority that are intended to enable the development of new operational concepts and doctrine for military hardware. The exercises will begin this fiscal year, R.T. Gooden of the Pentagon's Joint Staff told the Association of Old Crows yesterday in Washington. The Joint Staff and the Pentagon's directorate for Defense Research and Engineering are working together on the effort.
WAYNE LITTLES, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Ala., will retire on Jan. 3, 1998, the agency said yesterday. It said a search for a successor is underway. Littles, 58, became the eighth director of Marshall in February 1996. He joined NASA and Marshall in 1967. He was named deputy director of the center in 1989. In 1994, he moved to NASA Headquarters as the agency's chief engineer; later that year, he was named associate director of space flight.
A Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) III satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla., at 8:46 p.m. Friday on an Atlas IIA booster, Lockheed Martin announced. The spacecraft was built at Lockheed Martin Missiles&Space, Valley Forge, Pa., and tested at the military communications satellite highbay, Sunnyvale, Calif. The program is part of the overall consolidation of Missiles&Space production facilities, as operations at Valley Forge and East Windsor, N.J., are moved to Sunnyvale, Calif.
TAIWAN'S GREAT CHINA AIRLINES ordered two de Havilland Dash 8Q(x) Series 300 aircraft worth about $38.2 million from Bombardier Regional Aircraft, Bombardier said yesterday. The airline intends to replace two of its older Dash 8 Series 300s with the new aircraft, which are scheduled for delivery at the end of the year. Great China has ordered 24 Dash 8 aircraft since 1989, including six of the new generation Dash 8Q Series 400s.
Development of four-dimensional cockpit instrumentation is being unanimously backed by American Airlines' pilot union to counter controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), which accounts for about half of commercial aircraft accidents worldwide. The 9,000-member Allied Pilots Association said the instrumentation enables a crew to navigate along a synthetic flight path using real-time images of the surrounding landscape.
AAR Corp., Wood Dale, Ill., has acquired advanced composite parts maker ATR International Inc.. ATR, based in Clearwater, Fla., holds several patents for composite structures and specialized fasteners and supplies interiors for business aircraft. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
BOEING CO. said its Wichita, Kans., unit will convert four 747-300 jetliners from domestic passenger configuration to international passenger configurations for Japan Airlines (JAL). This will be the first time Boeing Wichita has modified a 747-300. The first airplane is scheduled to arrive in Wichita in November 1998 and be delivered in January 1999. The remaining 747-300s will follow in sequence, with the last one scheduled for delivery in November 1999.
NASA has selected its Kennedy Space Center to take responsibility for acquisition and management of expendable launch vehicle (ELV) launch services. The Florida center will be fully functional in this new role by fiscal year 1999, the space agency reported yesterday. Goddard Space Flight Center, Md., and Lewis Research Center, Ohio, will retain their responsibilities for manifested near-term missions, NASA said.
The U.S. Army plans to award a Boeing-led team a contract of up to five years to support AH-64 Apache helicopter weapon systems, the service said in an Oct. 29 Commerce Business Daily notice. The Army leadership recently cleared the program office to proceed and begin negotiations on the so-called "Prime Vendor Support" contract (DAILY, Oct. 16). The contract is planned to have a one-year base with four option years, the Army said.
Legislation to accelerate development of theater missile defense (TMD) systems to protect Israel and U.S. forces in the Middle East from an Iranian ballistic missile threat projected to materialize within a year requires $325 million in new funding, the bill's sponsors told reporters yesterday.
Iran Asseman Airlines signed a $40 million contract with AIR for two ATR 72-210A aircraft to be delivered in the middle of 1998. Iran Asseman, which already operates a fleet of four ATR 72-210s, will fly the new version in a 66-seat configuration. The newest version of the ATR was certified in February. With the order from Iran Asseman and Air U.K. recently transforming an option into a firm order, AIR now has sold 49 ATR 72-200s since the beginning of the year.
The U.S. and China reached an agreement on the pricing of commercial space launches, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky said. Barshefsky and Liu Jiyuan, president of the China National Space Agency, signed the agreement, putting the new provisions into effect as part of the overall U.S.-China space launch accord.
China will sign a contract at the U.S. Dept. of Commerce building in Washington on Thursday to buy Boeing airplanes, a Commerce spokesman said yesterday. Reports indicate that the contract will be for $1.9 billion in firm orders, along with a letter of intent for another $1.1 billion worth of aircraft for Chines airlines. Boeing declined to comment.
Lockheed Martin said it has overcome several problems as flight testing of the C-130J aircraft approaches the 2,000 flight-hour mark. The company installed a "stick pusher" and audible and visual warnings to deal with stall characteristics. Bob Price, Lockheed Martin's C-130J chief test pilot, said "I started out as a skeptic of the stick pusher, but I'm now the biggest champion for it."
The U.S. Navy thinks it can wait until about 2005 or '06 to determine how to replace the EA-6B electronic combat aircraft because it won't develop a new plane for the job and instead plans to leverage either the F/A-18E/F or the Joint Strike Fighter. Rear Adm. J.M. "Carlos" Johnson, head of plans and programs for Navy aviation, said yesterday that the F/A-18E/F and JSF are the only two planes the service will consider for the mission, and that both will be available "in the timeframe the EA-6B will go out of service."
The House Appropriations aviation subcommittee has slated a hearing Thursday on the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System (STARS) program to address complaints by air traffic controllers. Subcommittee Chairman Frank Wolf said he decided to hold the hearings after "very open" discussions with FAA officials.
In an apparent move to get around President Clinton's line-item veto of the Clementine 2 interceptor program, the fiscal 1998 defense authorization conference approved restructuring of the effort into a micro- satellite technology development program supporting a range of mission areas. With the $30 million FY '98 Clementine 2 appropriation lost in the veto, the conferees pointedly said they believe that "funds appropriated for the Clementine 2 program in prior years should be used" to support the restructured micro-satellite program.
F/A-18E/F Super Hornets could resume flying in the next few days pending the completion of a U.S. Navy analysis of the seriousness of the problem with their General Electric F414 engines. The Navy hopes to complete a risk assessment soon to see if it can resume the Super Hornet flight test program at NAS Patuxent River, Md., while it and GE develop a fix for an engine problem, according to a Navy official. Last week, engineers discovered that a test engine had developed a crack on a stator vane in the compressor (DAILY, Oct. 27).
Although the V-22 flight test program is running behind schedule due to late delivery of all four engineering and manufacturing development aircraft from V-22 prime contractor Bell/Boeing, the V-22 program office hopes to be back on schedule by the end of next year. "The airplanes are late in arriving to flight test," Barbara Smith, the active V-22 deputy program manager said in an interview. The program is about 16 aircraft months behind, or an average of four months per aircraft.
The U.S. Marine Corps is eyeing use of parts of an electronic warfare system for its MV-22 tiltrotor aircraft that is already being integrated into the CV-22 variant of the Air Force's Special Operations Command. ITT is doing a tradeoff study for V-22 prime contractor Bell/Boeing on the Suite of Integrated Radio Frequency Countermeasures (SIRFC) system, Lt. Cdr. Don Mueller of the V-22 program office said in an interview. "The Marines would love to have that option," he said. "It would give them a jammer and a more accurate detector."
A consortium of Raytheon TI Systems and Raytheon Electronic Systems has entered an arrangement with the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for phase three of the Affordable Multi-Missile Manufacturing (AM3) program. DARPA is funding $40 million of the $100 million program, with the Raytheon consortium covering the remaining $60 million.
NASA and industry managers will try to nail down performance and operability tradeoffs for the X-33 reusable launch vehicle testbed this week, balancing the need to get the prototype moving fast enough to produce useful data for future development against the difficulty in achieving those speeds safely. The critical design review, underway now at Edwards AFB, Calif., and scheduled to wrap up on Friday, is expected to opt for the use of densified cryogenic propellant to power X-33 on top-end flights.
WILLIAM LYNN has been nominated by the White House to become the Pentagon's new comptroller. Lynn, who is now director of program analysis and evaluation in the comptroller's office, would replace John Hamre who now serves as deputy defense secretary.
