World enginemakers unveiled nearly $4 billion in new business during this year's Paris Air Show, with large orders from International Lease Finance Corp. and Crossair standing out in the crowd. The CFM International venture of GE Aircraft Engines and SNECMA picked up $1.4 billion worth of orders, and a billion dollars of it came courtesy of ILFC's Tuesday order for as many as 100 next-generation 737s powered by CFM56-7s. The U.S. aircraft leasing giant will take deliveries through 2007 in the largest-ever 737NG order.
New Pratt&Whitney chief Louis Chenevert is firmly behind plans for a new 115,000-lbst. turbofan to power the growth version of Boeing's 777 widebody twin.
The Lockheed Martin C-130J program faces a projected budget growth of $400 million during the design, development and manufacture of its first 120 aircraft, according to Gene Elmore, vice president of Hercules programs for Lockheed Martin. Elmore, who joined the program earlier this year after heading up F-22 air vehicle work for Lockheed Martin, said customers will not be affected by the cost growth. The company is already under contract to build 83 aircraft at a cost between $50 million and $70 million per airplane, depending on configuration.
The U.S. Navy grounded all 84 Marine Corps AV-8B Harriers configured with the Rolls-Royce F402-RR-408A engine yesterday, after losing two of the planes to engine problems. The pilots ejected in both cases. Rear Adm. Craig E. Steidle, vice commander of Naval Air Systems Command, ordered the precautionary move while the mishaps are being investigated. On June 4, a Harrier crashed on takeoff from Kadena AB in Japan. The pilot ejected and is listed in stable condition.
Noise on a data circuit forced launch managers at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., to delay the start of NASA's QuikSCAT ocean scatterometer mission by a day, slipping the flight from today until tomorrow. NASA said the delay will give engineers time to troubleshoot the problem on a link from an inertial measurement unit on the Titan II launch vehicle.
The Pentagon approved a request from Egypt yesterday to purchase five update kits for the Northrop Grumman E-2C worth $210 million. The Group II Mission Suite retrofit kits for Egypt's current fleet of Hawkeyes includes AN/APS-145 radar.
Robert Johnson, president and COO of AlliedSignal Aerospace, says customer needs will be the key to the new company formed by AlliedSignal's planned merger with Honeywell. "We need to listen to our customers," Johnson said this week at press dinner during the Paris Air Show. "The most important thing is to integrate technologies to solve customers' problems."
An article in The DAILY of June 16 on NASA's probes of recent launch vehicle failures incorrectly stated that the Delta III upper stage that failed last month was a Centaur. The Delta III upper stage is a new design with a variant of the Pratt&Whitney RL-10 rocket engine that powers the Centaur.
Airbus Industrie announced new orders from International Lease Finance Corp. for 57 A320 family aircraft. ILFC, Airbus said at the Paris Air Show, signed firm orders for 60 planes; three of the orders, however, had been previously announced. The deal includes the first firm orders, 30, for the recently launched A318, which is competing with Boeing's 717. It also includes orders for 16 A319s, four A320s and 10 A321s.
The U.S. Navy should defer multiyear funding for the Boeing F/A-18E/F program until solutions for performance deficiencies are corrected, the General Accounting Office said. GAO said in a reported dated June 15 - "Defense Acquisitions: Progress of the F/A-18EF Engineering and Manufacturing Development Program" (GAO/NSIAD 99-127) - that the Super Hornet entered operational testing and evaluation (OT&E) with 29 deficiencies, including wing drop, airframe buffeting, insufficient cooling capacity and air-to-air countermeasures system vulnerability.
Bombardier officially launched the 3,100-mile-range Continental, its newest business jet, at a Paris Air Show celebration. The Continental is the eighth new aircraft the company has launched in the past five years. Bombardier has 100 orders for the plane, 75 backed by $250,000 worth of non-refundable deposits and 25 designated for use in Bombardier's Dallas-based Business Jet Solutions fractional ownership program. First flight is scheduled for first quarter 2001.
CHINA LAUNCHED two more Iridium low-Earth orbit communications satellites on June 11, continuing Iridium's plan to use low-cost Chinese launches to keep its 66 - satellite constellation supplied with on-orbit spares. Liftoff of the Long March 2C rocket carrying the two Iridium spacecraft came at 1:15 p.m. EDT from the Taiyuan launch site.
The Boeing-led Sea Launch venture has picked up four more Hughes payloads for its ocean-going Zenit rockets, and Egypt's Nilesat 102 will fly on an Ariane launch vehicle, according to company announcements at the Paris Air Show. But while Sea Launch has demonstrated with an instrumented dummy that it can orbit a satellite on a Zenit from a converted oil platform in mid-Pacific, Boeing is having trouble finding a customer for its new Delta III after two failures in two launch attempts with real satellites.
The House has passed the Security Assistance Act of 1999, amending the U.S. foreign military sales program to include additional notification requirements for arms sales. The bill "helps protect our national security by modifying U.S. laws that govern the provision of security assistance worldwide," House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman (R-N.Y.) said prior to passage of the bill on Tuesday.
Midway Airlines is ordering 15 Boeing 737-700 aircraft with options for 10 more, and will also lease two 737-700s from GE Capital Aviation Services. Midway currently operates eight Fokker 100s and 12 Canadair Regional Jets. Steve Westberg, chief financial officer, said the 737s are expected to cost about the same to operate as the F100s, "gaining us the equivalent of 30 free seats per trip."
ATR has sold 22 new ATR regional aircraft since the beginning of the year, making it the first aircraft program in the turboprop category to reach the 600-order milestone, company officials said at the Paris Air Show. All but three of the 1999 orders came from Europe, ATR's number one market.
BFGoodrich and Coltec, whose plans to merge have been challenged by AlliedSignal, may have to go to trial next month with AlliedSignal if the differences can't be resolved, according to BFGoodrich Chairman and CEO David Burner. AlliedSignal filed an antitrust action against the merger of the landing gear businesses of BFGoodrich and Coltec, which owns Menasco. AlliedSignal also plans to merge with Honeywell, and BFGoodrich has said it might protest the deal (DAILY, June 11).
Fairchild Aerospace announced an order for 25 Envoy 7 wide-body business jets worth $760 million from Flight Options, the U.S.-based fractional ownership corporate jet operator. The Envoy 7 is based on Fairchild Aerospace's 718JET regional airliner; the smaller Envoy 3 is based on the 328JET.
Swiss regional carrier Crossair's planned fleet renewal could be worth up to $4.9 billion to Embraer, the companies said at the Paris Air Show. Crossair is not only the launch customer for the Brazilian plane-maker's 70-seat ERJ-170 and 108-seat ERJ-190-200 - it placed 30 firm orders for each and took options for 100 more, the breakdown of which is yet to be determined - it also ordered 15 49-seat ERJ-145s, and took an option for 25 more jets, either ERJ-145s or 37-seat ERJ-137s (DAILY, June 16).
PanAmSat expects its 1999 revenues to come in about $200 million lower than the roughly $1 billion Wall Street expected because development and manufacturing snags have delayed delivery of a new batch of Hughes communications satellites the company needed to make up capacity lost to a series of failures and mishaps last year, according to company officials.
AAR Corp. and Air France Industries (AFI), the maintenance arm of Air France, have created a partnership to provide full component management support for Airbus A320 operators in North and Central America, the companies said yesterday. The joint operation, to be based at the AAR Aircraft Component Services facility in Garden City, N.Y., will provide full spares provisioning and supply, component repair, logistics mangement, pool access and flexible financing options. The facility will open next month.
Fairchild Aerospace has selected Israel Aircraft Industries as a major supply partner for its 428JET regional jet program. Under the terms of the $80 million agreement, IAI will be responsible for system engineering and integration, flight testing and certification support. Further discussions, Fairchild said, could lead to IAI manufacturing the fuselage and performing final assembly of the 44-seat aircraft.
Aerospatiale Matra and Lockheed Martin signed an agreement to provide for potential industrial cooperation on aerospace and defense programs with the new Korean Aircraft Industries (KAI). The companies said the deal, announced yesterday but signed immediately after the creation of the Aerospatiale Matra company on June 4, not only furthers their goal of transatlantic cooperation but also of working together as a global team.
The shortage of bandwidth may limit the digitized battlefield, but residents of the Pentagon in the next five years will have "bandwidth on demand," according to Dept. of Defense officials.
