Executives at Loral Space&Communications Ltd. were studying their options yesterday after an unexplained malfunction took AT&T's Telstar 401 television relay satellite off-line early Saturday, effectively eliminating a substantial chunk of the assets Loral is buying with its planned acquisition of Skynet Satellite Services.
Clinton Administration efforts to negotiate a demarcation between ABM and theater missile defense systems with Russia in the Standing Consultative Commission were "misdirected and should be abandoned," a Defense Science Board/Defense Policy Board task force has concluded.
Parliamentary approval for Germany's share of the four- nation Eurofighter program is expected soon, following an agreement between German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe and Finance Minister Theo Waigel to share production start-up costs between their two departments, Ruehe said yesterday.
China's Flight Simulation Research Center has developed the country's first aerial refueling/receiver simulator. The center has developed over 140 simulators for such tasks as takeoff and landing, instrument flight and bombing. It developed a simulator for the Y-12M STOL general purpose aircraft, which has been used to train 35 pilots from 9 countries .
Boeing Co. said it has been authorized by the U.S. Air Force, NATO and the U.K. to being production of radar enhancements for the E-3 AWACS aircraft. The program is the latest step under the Radar System Improvement Program (RSIP), a multinational cooperative effort.
PRESIDENT OF AN ITALIAN COMPANY pleaded guilty in an Italian court to counterfeiting Pratt&Whitney engine parts, P&W said yesterday. It said Enrico Polo, president of General Aviation, had been charged with violating trademarks, committing commercial fraud and misappropriating P&W trade secrets for his parts distributor based in Treviso, Italy.
Rockwell International's Collins General Aviation Div. will supply primary avionics for the Bell Boeing 609 tiltrotor, Rockwell announced yesterday. The configuration of the Collins Pro Line 21 will include three large 10-by-8-inch active matrix LCD Adaptive Flight Displays to provide all necessary flight information, the company said.
China's 1,000 Y-5 aircraft came off the production line on Dec. 25 at Shijiazhuang Aircraft Manufacturing Company (SAMC). The light-weight, multi-purpose, single engine biplane, based on Russia's Antonov 2, flew for the first time in China in 1957. Nanching Aircraft Manufacturing Company (NAMC) produced 728 Y-5s. In May 1970, production was moved to SAMC, which has now produced 274, including 53 Y5Bs, specially modified for agricultural duties. Civil Aviation Administration of China issued a supplementary type certificate for the Y-5B in 1989.
A Defense Dept. study of the future of low observables has concluded that only a small number of stealthy assets are needed to allow non- stealthy systems to continue to operate effectively. The "Low Observable/Counter Low Observable Strategic Vision Assessment," which looked out to 2025, said technology will allow "a relatively small number of combat vehicles with significant levels of multi-spectrum signature reduction" to act as "force enablers," according to an unclassified summary.
Ground controllers have placed the GOES-8 weather satellite in a safe hold configuration after the platform lost its lock on Earth last week. A spokesperson for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Friday controller's at the agency's center in Suitland, Md., believed the problem was caused by an electrostatic discharge that deprived the satellite's on-board computer of momentum wheel speed data.
If the U.S. Air Force thought Congress has been keeping close tabs on the F-22 fighter program, it hasn't seen anything yet, Senate and House aides said. In the wake of the recent revelation that the program may face a cost growth of $15 billion, some Senate aides who have supported the F-22 are warning the Air Force to expect increased oversight on the program.
Jerry King, president of the Boeing Defense&Space Group (D&SG), has been named to head the Boeing/McDonnell Douglas transition team, Boeing announced yesterday. Alan Mulally, senor vice president of Airplane Development and Definition in Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, will replace King as president of D&SG, effective immediately.
The first launch attempted by Russia this year was scrubbed Friday when a Molniya-M rocket experienced an unspecified problem 16 seconds before lift-off. The four-stage booster, manufactured by TsSKB-Progress Center of Samara and operated by the Russian Space Forces, was to lift off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome with a classified Cosmos satellite. This type of launcher, equipped with a Block L kick stage, is usually used by the Russian military to deliver early warning satellites into high elliptic orbits.
NASA has picked contractor teams headed by TRW, Lockheed Martin and a Ball Aerospace/Boeing venture to begin concept studies for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), a $700 million effort to detect extra-solar planets and other phenomena by making extremely precise measurements of the paths of distant stars.
The NATO Stabilization Force (SFOR), intended to operate in Bosnia until at least the middle of next year, should have strong airborne reconnaissance support, U.S. Army Gen. George A. Joulwan, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, said yesterday.
FIRST IRIDIUM LAUNCH was postponed Saturday until no earlier than Jan. 19 when technicians preparing its McDonnell Douglas Delta II booster for a launch attempt Saturday found cork used as thermal protection on the LOX tank during launch was separating from the tank. A variety of range and ground-hardware problems thwarted a launch attempt earlier last week, and scheduling difficulties will preclude another try before Sunday (DAILY, Jan 8, 10).
Separate tallies of the 25 mergers announced in 1996 among aerospace, defense and aircraft companies put their value at about $40 billion. R. Jerry Grossman, a director in the Washington office of the law firm Houlihan Lokey Howard&Zukin, said "This is an extraordinary level of activity in terms of numbers of deals and dollar values compared with recent historical levels." Topping the mergers, he said, were those of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, valued at $13.3 billion, and Lockheed Martin with Loral, $7 billion.
