SINGAPORE AIRLINES has dismissed media reports that it is close to making a decision on the A3XX. SIA Deputy Chairman and CEO Cheong Choong Kong said the airline is far from making a decision. Media reports had quoted Airbus Industrie's John Leahy that the airline was close to finalizing its plans for the aircraft.
NASA's failed Mars '98 robotic exploration missions amounted to little more than a $200 million lesson in management techniques for agency leaders, and Congress will be watching closely to see that those lessons are applied in the future, members of the House Science Committee said yesterday.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) yesterday offered twice to increase funding for the PAC-3 theater missile beyond the $365.5 million requested in the fiscal 2001 budget. Stevens made the offers during a hearing to Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
A team led by Northrop Grumman's Logicon unit has been tapped by the U.S. Navy to support development of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems.
The Pentagon should not proceed with existing plans for a National Missile Defense (NMD) system because it could be easily defeated by countermeasures, a panel of scientists long critical of the program said Tuesday in Washington. "The proposed system will not work against threats it is designed to face," said Kurt Gottfried, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The type of countermeasures envisioned would be easy to develop for a country that could build a long-range ballistic missile, panelists argued.
Allen Aircraft, a unit of AAR Corp., said it has won a multi-year contract from Honeywell to be the sole distributor of Honeywell's Hydro Mechanical Unit (HMU) for the CFM56-7 engine. Allen Aircraft, of Wood Dale, Ill., will take charge of spare parts, equipment leasing and unit exchange for the CFM56-7's HMU. The CFM56-7 powers Boeing's next generation 737 aircraft. The HMU controls the amount of fuel delivered to the engine.
TRW Inc., will market and integrate Synapse B2B, developed by Integrated Business Systems&Services, to help customers integrate business-to-business links via the Internet. Users don't have to spend as much to migrate legacy systems to the e-world.
Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. is making technical documents intelligent with the help of Micrografx Inc., an enterprise software graphic provider. Sikorsky's Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMS) have added graphic capabilities to enable desktop updates by the helicopter manufacturer. Customers can also customize the documents and use "intelligent hotspotting," in which the Navy has taken interest, according to Sikorsky's graphic supervisor.
The U.S. Navy exercised a $9.2 million option for Engineered Support Systems Inc. to provide avionics test subsystems for the Consolidated Automated Support System (CASS). The contract option covers 31 High Power Device Test Systems (HPDTS) and related items as part of the High Power Offload (HPOC) system that tests avionics and electrical equipment for military aircraft. The Navy and Marine Corps plan to use HPOC on aircraft carriers and amphibious ships, as well as in flight training centers.
The FAA should require a "cockpit image recording system" to be retrofitted by Jan. 1, 2005, in aircraft that are now required to have a cockpit voice recorder and digital flight data recorder, the National Transportation Safety Board said yesterday. The image recorder should have a duration of at least two hours, and "be capable of recording, in color, a view of the entire cockpit including each control position and each action, such as display selections or system activations, taken by people in the cockpit," the NTSB said.
A deep cut in U.S. Dept. of Defense spending on science and technology has slowed overall federal spending on research in fiscal 2001, even as funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) increases, a joint study by the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine has found.
E-Business for the Aerospace Industry USA 2000, featuring exchange developers, users and manufacturing giants is slated for June 12-13 in Bellevue, Wash. The conference, sponsored by the Royal Aeronautical Society, is the second of three "e-aerospace" events planned for 2000, with the third scheduled for Asia this fall. The first is underway this week in Toulouse. For more information, check www.ecommerceaerospace.com.
Lockheed Martin's Sanders unit has completed delivery to Turkey of a quantity of AN/ALQ-144A(V) infrared countermeasures systems. The combat-proven device protects helicopters and fixed wing aircraft against a spectrum of infrared missile threats.
The U.K.'s Ministry of Defense is working out an e-business plan. The U.K. recently unveiled its e-Government Action plan, which requiring all government departments to come up with e-governance strategies by October 2000 to meet demands of the Information Age. MOD is already investing in e-business. One example is the new Defense Electronic Commerce System, set for launch this summer.
The blast from the crash of a Marine Corps MV-22 in Arizona Saturday, killing all 19 aboard, rocked a second MV-22 that was hovering nearby, causing it to make a hard landing, Marine Commandant Gen. James Jones said yesterday. Jones also said the crew chief of the surviving MV-22 witnessed the crash, and that his description will probably play a role in the accident investigation.
Logicon created Pentagon's EBusiness eXchange, or EBX, designed to handle the $13 billion combination of procurement and delivery transactions from 10,000 sellers and contractors, using Mercator Commerce Broker. Mercator Commerce Broker, the engine for DOD's e-market developed by Connecticut-based Mercator, works with any data type -- from EDI to XML to HTML. EBX is intended to provide a secure, "trusted e-broker" for federal e-commerce infrastructures.
Airbus Industrie launched a new support site, http://spares.airbus.com, where 120 airline customers can order parts over the Internet. The move, part of the Airbus On-line Services (AOLS) initiative, aims to make life easier and cheaper for customers by streamlining order flow. An Airbus spokesman said the site will initially handle existing customers, but will eventually be available to component makers. Airbus' vision is to build an e-marketplace for all commercial activities, says James Rutledge, Airbus' director of material market relations.
Raytheon Co. said it is eyeing a sale, joint venture or spin-off of one of its core businesses, the Engineers&Constructors unit. It said performance problems on an international contract, which it didn't identify, will hit first quarter earnings of the operation. Last year, the operation had sales of about $2.7 billion.
Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) yesterday told a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill that the U.S. should not make any great concessions to Russian negotiators in follow-up talks on reducing strategic warheads since the Russians cannot afford to maintain strategic forces greater than 1,000 warheads anyway. "I'm all for bringing the numbers down," Kyl said, "but it's all going to happen naturally and we don't have to give away the store."
Export process reform is the top priority of Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Deputy Defense Secretary Rudy de Leon, a Pentagon official said yesterday. "This is the number one thing in the Dept. of Defense," David Oliver, deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition and technology, said in his keynote address at the Precision Strike and Unmanned Systems annual program review at Ft. Belvor, Va. "This is the issue."
The FAA has passed an audit by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), proving that it meets safety oversight standards for international aviation. ICAO, a United Nations agency, concluded that the FAA made the grade in areas including aviation legislation and regulations, organization, personnel licensing and training, and aircraft operations and airworthiness.
FlyteCom Corp. is giving away a flight status Internet tool to any website. WebTrax 2.0 is a real-time graphical tracking tool that allows Internet users to pinpoint the precise location of any commercial aircraft in the U.S. and Canada online. The graphical display has information on altitude, speed and estimated time of arrival of any flight. Enhancements include graphic radar and satellite weather imagery, e-mail to a wireless gateway for sending customized flight arrival information to pagers, cell phones and other wireless devices, and a flexible query interface.
RADA Electronics is out to streamline aviation maintenance with its new Internet version of CATS (Commercial Aviation Test System). The new computer, E-CATS, is set to debut at a conference in Germany on April 17. E-CATS links advanced automated test equipment (ATE) to the Internet and the organization's Intranet and supports video, data and voice conferencing. E-CATS should be fully implemented in 2002.
FAA has published an emergency rule on MD-11 aircraft concerning cockpit map light assem blies after determining that a broken bulb housing could expose the power contact, which in turn could cause the light to short or overheat and result in smoke or fire in the cockpit.
