Union leaders and McDonnell Douglas management settled in yesterday for what could be a long strike, as both sides spent the first day of a walkout by some 6,400 St. Louis-based Machinists bitterly criticizing tactics adopted during earlier last-minute talks aimed at avoiding the job action.
KAMAN CORP., Bloomfield, Conn., said the U.S. Navy has exercised an option for a follow-on 180-day demonstration of two of the company's K-Max helicopters for commercial replenishment of ships at sea. The two aircraft were deployed for the month of May in Guam for the initial 30-day assessment, Kaman said. During the 180-day period, it said, the helicopters will fly from the USNS Niagara Falls and will perform services for ships in the Western Pacific and Arabian Gulf.
GE Aircraft Engines is re-opening the F110-GE-100 fighter engine production line, idle for two years, to fill an $85 million order to power Egypt's 21 newly ordered Lockheed Martin F-16s, GE reported yesterday. Egypt spent more than three years evaluating various engine and aircraft options before settling on the GE-powered F-16 - the same engine/airframe combination that country has ordered twice before in deals totaling some 110 GE fighter turbofans.
NASA's administrator believes large aerospace companies that have "gotten rich" on huge, long-term government space contracts in the past may lack the agility necessary to compete in the dawning commercial space age, when small will be beautiful and bigger won't necessarily mean better.
The U.S. Army wants to cut AH-64D Longbow Apache helicopters' operations and support costs some 35% by 2000, but doesn't have funding for one of the critical items needed to meet that goal - a FLIR upgrade Army officials failed to get included in the FY '98-'03 program objective memorandum (DAILY, May 13).
The House Appropriations Committee, in its fiscal 1997 defense appropriations report released yesterday, directs the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO) to study operation of the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle from assault ships and aircraft carriers. The report said the study should look into operating Predator without modification from the ships. A Pentagon report, meanwhile, said the Predator could be useful in drug interdiction missions with certain modifications (DAILY, June 5).
The House Appropriations Committee yesterday approved a $245.7 billion fiscal 1997 defense appropriations bill that Office of Management and Budget Director Alice M. Rivlin said faces a veto, primarily because it is almost $12 billion more than President Clinton requested.
Annual funding for a national missile defense (NMD) system should be no more than $500 million, and theater missile defense (TMD) funding should be no higher than $2.3 billion a year throughout the future years defense plan, according to the Pentagon's Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC).
ALLIEDSIGNAL Communications Systems recently demonstrated its Briefcase Multi-mission Advanced Tactical Terminal (BMATT) to several Defense Dept. executives. The portable tactical terminal, built for the U.S. Special Operations Command, provides simultaneous reception of the UHF satellite communications Tactical Information Broadcast Service (TIBS) and Tactical Data Dissemination System in (TDDS) networks. BMATT provides connectivity to these networks. Production began last month.
Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole introduced legislation to expand NATO to include emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. The bill, Dole said Tuesday, builds on earlier bipartisan legislation like the NATO Participation Act of 1994. It is one of Dole's parting shots as he prepares to leave the Senate Tuesday to devote full time to his race for the presidency.
Europe's new Ariane V heavy-lift booster failed on its first launch attempt yesterday, destroyed by range safety officers when it veered off trajectory only 40 seconds after liftoff. The European Space Agency said it would convene an inquiry board to pinpoint the cause of the spectacular failure over Kourou, French Guiana, and vowed to proceed with its planned second test flight of the 745-metric- ton rocket "in a few months' time." A press conference was scheduled in Kourou this morning to brief reporters on the loss.
Dutch flag carrier KLM came through yesterday with an order for enough F70 regional jets to extend bankrupt Dutch airframer Fokker's backlog another year, a move company executives said would buy time for court- appointed administrators to find solid rescue partners for Fokker.
The U.S. Air Force-led Joint Precision Approach Landing System (JPALS) program has received approval from the Pentagon to enter the concept definition and exploration phase. Noel Longuemare, principal deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition and technology, gave the go-ahead on May 28, a Pentagon spokeswoman said. A program readiness meeting had been completed in anticipation of a May 30 review by the Defense Acquisition Board, but the DAB now does not have to convene.
The Pentagon this month is slated to sign off on a Joint Technical Architecture that will guide development of future information systems, Army officials say. The JTA is in final draft and due to be approved in the next few weeks, Lt. Gen. Otto Guenther, the Army's director of information systems for command, control, communications and computers, said yesterday during the TechNet '96 symposium in Washington. The draft is in final coordination, he said.
SIEMENS AG will supply all of the switching equipment for Motorola's Iridium low Earth orbit satellite communications network under a $65 million contract announced by Motorola's Satellite Communications Div. The German firm will base its Iridium delivery on the D900 Mobile Switching Center, adapting it to link the space-based system with terrestrial networks worldwide. The D900 uses the GSM standard adopted by more than 90 nations for mobile networks.
The U.S./Italian Tethered Satellite was lost last February because of electrical arcing triggered either by outside contamination or a broken strand of copper wire inside the almost 13-mile-long tether that linked it to the Space Shuttle Columbia, a review panel has found. NASA and the Italian Space Agency yesterday released the 358-page report of the investigative board set up after the $379 million Italian- built satellite was lost Feb. 25 (DAILY, Feb. 27).
LOCKHEED MARTIN Government Electronic Systems, Moorestown, N.J., received a $25.3 million U.S. Navy contract for Aegis training and maintenance/logistics support. The contract, from the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, Va., was announced May 29 by the Dept. of Defense.
U.S. NAVY on May 18 christened the fifth vessel in the Wasp-class of amphibious ships being built by Ingalls Shipbuilding Div. of Litton Industries. The ship, named Bataan and designated LHD-5, will be commissioned into active service next year, Litton said.
HUGHES MISSILE SYSTEMS CO., Tucson, Ariz., will supply five Mk. 15 Phalanx close-in weapon systems and related items under a $33.6 million contract from Naval Sea Systems Command. The Dept. of Defense, announcing the contract May 14, said it combines purchases for the U.K., Taiwan and Japan.
AEROSPATIALE is preparing two communications satellites, Arabsat 2A and Turksat 1C, for launch next month on an Ariane IV booster. Arabsat 2A will be the first satellite to use the new Spacebus 3000 bus, while Turksat 1C uses the Spacebus 2000 platform, of which 11 have already been ordered. Contracts with the Arab League and Turk Telekom call for on-orbit delivery of the platforms.
HUGHES RESEARCH LABORATORIES will use a software package developed by Sense8 Corp. of Mill Valley, Calif., to create a shared virtual environment that astronauts and others can use to train for microgravity operations. The WorldToolKit and World Up development software will initially be run on Silicon Graphics workstations, although Hughes plans to adapt it eventually to a number of platforms, including Windows PCs. WorldToolKit is an object- oriented library, written in C, that includes more than 1,000 high-level function calls.
Boeing is pitching to the U.S. Air Force an AWACS software and hardware enhancement that goes beyond the upgrades that are already part of the Extend Sentry program, company officials say. The goal is to make the 1970s AWACS software and hardware more user friendly, Leslie R. Swanson, Boeing Defense&Space Group's airborne surveillance business development manager, told The DAILY yesterday at the TechNET '96 convention in Washington.
FEDERAL MEDIATORS were working with McDonnell Douglas and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers late yesterday to try to avoid a walkout slated to begin today by some 6,300 workers at assembly facilities north of St. Louis (DAILY, June 4). While by late afternoon talks continued, union leaders who had contacted federal mediators in hopes of averting the job action said they were nonetheless assuming the strike would begin on schedule shortly after midnight Tuesday.
RAYTHEON ELECTRONICS SYSTEMS, one of the principal subcontractors to Lockheed Martin Federal Systems on the New Attack Submarine command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) system (DAILY, May 16), said it will receive an initial contract for about $40 million to begin design efforts. It will be responsible for the combat control subsystem, which coordinates targeting and torpedo/missile launches, and for the transmit portion of the sonar subsystems. Walter V.
British Aerospace completed the first guided flight of its Advanced Short Range Air-to-Air Missile after weather and technical problems delayed the test several weeks. The ASRAAM was fired May 29 at Eglin AFB, Fla., as part of the British development program. The missile's seeker acquired the target, a QF-106 drone. The missile was then launched, and accurately tracked the drone, BAe said in a statement. To help keep the overall test cost low, the drone was not destroyed.
