GENERAL ELECTRIC's GE90 high bypass turbofan for Boeing's 777 widebody twin won certification Friday from Europe's Joint Airworthiness Authorities and the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority. The engine won its FAA certification in February.
NASA Friday lifted the suspension notice it had imposed on the X-34 small reusable launch vehicle program after Orbital Sciences Corp. and its X-34 partner, Rockwell International, agreed to settle their differences with NASA over the vehicle's engine and configuration. An agency spokesperson said all three parties agreed to "get things back on track" and work to resolve the milestone issues that triggered the one-day suspension. The action came after the White House "encouraged" all three parties to work things out.
The Pentagon won't buy militarized versions of Boeing's 747-400F freighter to supplement its planned fleet of McDonnell Douglas C-17s, opting instead to extend the C-17 program to its original size of 120 aircraft for $18 billion under a multi-year buyout arrangement, Deputy Defense Secretary John White said Friday, but final approval of the buy- out will have to wait until next summer.
Augustine's revelations will come as no surprise to Altera Corp., San Jose, Calif., which last week pulled out of the military parts business - for all practical purposes, because of the Pentagon's new fascination with commercial-off-the-shelf. The company was a player in the MIL-STD-883 compliant and Defense Electronics Supply Center business, mostly with state-of-the-art programmable logic arrays.
Despite the gloom and doom, stocks of major defense contractors are outperforming the Dow Jones Industrial Average by factors of two and three. All of which has led Augustine to formulate yet another law: "When the defense budget hits zero, defense stocks rise to infinity."
The U.S. Air Force has brought back into service two SR-71 reconnaissance planes as directed by Congress and will operate them through 1996, but the cost of operating them will increase in fiscal year 1997 and Congress will have to decide whether it wants to continue to foot the bill.
Norman Augustine, Lockheed Martin's chairman-in-waiting and no stranger to the Federal Trade Commission and antitrust actions, thinks FTC should re-visit consolidation cases after two years to see if what the commissioners intended actually happened. His own newly merged mega-company is an example - FTC demanded that Lockheed and Martin Marietta each break up long-standing teaming agreements with an eye toward increasing the number of competitors.
Westinghouse Electric Corp. said it has received FAA certification for its MR-3000 predictive windshear radar. A supplemental type certification was awarded following flight demonstrations in Orlando aboard the company's BAC-111 testbed aircraft. It was fitted with a degraded radome. "We have demonstrated that this advancement in predictive windshear weather radars allows windshear to be detected in spite of a severely degraded radome," said Jim Pitts, general manger of the avionics division.
Contractors vying for the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile weren't surprised by a budget shortfall in fiscal year 1997, but they did note the flexibility of the schedule in the pre-engineering and manufacturing development phase and in full EMD. Both phases will last between 18 and 24 months, depending on what contractors propose, says JASSM program director Oscar Soler.
Pratt&Whitney is preparing to join Russia's NPO Energomash on development of the RD-180, a scaled-down version of the Russian enginemaker's huge RD-170 rocket engine. The new engine fell outside the exclusive marketing deal P&W signed with Energomash in the fall of 1992 because General Dynamics had already opened discussions about using it as a possible powerplant for the Atlas booster (DAILY, April 8, 1994, page 45; April 13, 1994, page 71).
Fokker's military utility version of the Fokker 50, the Fokker 60 Utility, flew for the first time Thursday in a flight lasting nearly four hours, Fokker reported Friday. Stretched more than five feet and fitted with more muscular Pratt&Whitney Canada PW127B turboprop engines, the -60 nonetheless "handles no differently than the Fokker 50," said Fokker chief pilot Wim Huson after the flight. "As such it was a routine flight with nothing amiss, which is exactly as it should be. I'm very proud of it."
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) tells Senate that "getting rid of several thousand nuclear weapons in Russia is so clearly in our national interest" that the Senate should be taking up ratification of the START II Treaty - but it isn't.
Relieved friends of McDonnell Douglas' C-17 airlifter program, both in and out of uniform, hope Friday's move to seal the Globemaster III as the U.S. Air Force's core airlifter will end two years' debate over how to meet airlift needs. But budget-conscious denizens of Capitol Hill say they plan to keep pushing the idea that a handful of militarized Boeing 747s could do part of the job and save a lot of money, especially since the C-17 multi- year acquisition proposal won't win full approval until next summer.
The growing dominance of Japan in critical commercial technologies with potential dual-use military applications, notably optoelectronics and electronic materials, may deny these technologies to the U.S. defense industry, according to a report released last week by the National Research Council. The 126-page report, "Maximizing U.S. Interests in Science and Technology Relations with Japan," was prepared by NRC's Defense Task Force and unveiled last Thursday by the chairman of the task force, Gerald P. Dinneen.
The EA-6B may give new meaning to the term "joint aircraft." Pegged to take over the standoff jamming mission for the Air Force from the retiring EF-111s, the Navy Prowlers will be crewed by both Air Force and Navy officers, Air Combat Commander Gen. Joseph Ralston tells reporters. Mixed crews "would make sense for scheduling," he says.
Cosmonauts aboard Russia's Mir space station, including Thomas Reiter of the European Space Agency, used a backup system for two days after a cooling line in the station's main carbon dioxide scrubber was discovered leaking. Officials at Mission Control Center-Moscow said Thursday the leak, discovered on Tuesday, had been plugged without incident.
Twenty-seven Senators have written to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, urging him to remove the $493 million for additional B-2 stealth bombers in the House- rejected defense appropriations conference report. The letter, sent last Wednesday, appeared aimed not at the immediate prospect of reconvening the conference over the abortion issue as seems likely, but at the prospect that the $243 billion bill will have to be renegotiated downward if President Clinton vetoes it.
An article in The DAILY of Oct. 3 (page 14) incorrectly identifies the amount NASA will be spending on eight "Advanced Concepts Research Projects." The overall budget for the program is $1 million, not $1 million for each project.
Indonesia, which already flies a dozen F-16s, was more than happy to hear President Clinton's offer last month for more of the fighters, but "it is impossible to pay in cash," Indonesian President Suharto tells reporters aboard his aircraft after an 18-day swing through the Americas and Saudi Arabia. "Actually, Indonesia still needs" more F- 16s, but "I stressed to the U.S. that Indonesia's priority is economic development." Suharto told Clinton that if the U.S. can provide export credits, "certainly Indonesia will accept it."
SANDERS-ITT team on Friday won the competition for the RF portion of the Integrated Defensive Electronic Countermeasures (IDECM) system. It won $26.8 million from U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, beating Northrop Grumman, a team lled by Raytheon, and a Westinghouse-led team. Sanders is the prime and ITT is the major sub.
Never at a loss for a vivid metaphor, Lockheed Martin President Norman R. Augustine notes that, with military acquisition budgets down 70% since 1987 and industry employment down by 1.3 million - and more to come - "For our industry, this is 1929."
The Washington-based Defense Budget Project, meanwhile, has issued a report arguing that Japan is exporting too much technology with military potential, particularly to the newly industrialized countries of Korea, China and Taiwan. The study, "Windows of Opportunity: The Potential Military Applications of Japanese Advanced Commercial Technology Transfers to East Asia," warns of "spin on" to weapons technologies acquired initially for commercial purposes. It was authored by Richard A. Bitzinger and Steven M. Kosiak.
Continuing its campaign for a U.S. national missile defense system, the Heritage Foundation last week said a U.S. commitment to building such a capability should be one of the preconditions to ratifying the second round of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, or START II.
Test engineers at NASA's Lewis Research Center have simulated rain, ice and lightning all at once in a wind tunnel to study improvements in aircraft nose radomes. In tests at the Icing Research Tunnel at Lewis, a new type of radome diverter was subjected to simulated lightning generated by a 500 kilovolt Marx generator and fed into the tunnel through an insulated bushing in the floor. At the same time, the tunnel was producing the sorts of severe weather conditions that typically accompany lightning, NASA said.
NASA hasn't ruled out a role for itself in helping industry pay for development of a commercial reusable launch vehicle early in the next century. Jack Mansfield, associate administrator for space access and technology, tells the House Science space and aeronautics subcommittee that long-term budget plans include notional funds for RLV development after the X-33 program is concluded.
