SWALES AEROSPACE has acquired Welch Engineering Ltd., which provides engineering services to government agencies and commercial businesses. Under the agreement, Welch Engineering's West Coast office will keep its name and operate as a Swales division, while employees at Welch's Rockville, Md., office will go to work at Swales' facility in Beltsville, Md. A specialist in small satellite system, Swales provides spacecraft and instrument design, fabrication, integration and testing, as well as ground control and data collection from its systems.
Boeing will use Oracle Strategic Procurement software as the airframer develops a fully-automated Internet-based system for all general procurement. Oracle Consulting, Oracle Education and Oracle Support will support Boeing in the work as part of the agreement. Boeing Shared Services Group, which buys all goods and services that don't become part of a Boeing product, will roll out the new system company-wide, replacing a variety of disparate systems with a single backbone.
GENERAL DYNAMICS INFORMATION SYSTEMS has taken an equity position in the "Little LEO" low-Earth orbit satellite communications system planned by Final Analysis Communications Services, and will provide command and data handling space processors for the system. Under a strategic partnership announced by the two companies, the Final Analysis data-relay system set for commercial operations in 2001 will use a space processor General Dynamics introduced last year that is able to handle more than 450 million instructions per second.
Airbus aircraft orders will be "significantly lower in 1999" compared with 1998, Aerospatiale Chairman Yves Michot said yesterday in Paris. Last year, Airbus won 556 orders. The chairman of the French member of the European consortium said airlines world-wide needed between 600 and 700 new aircraft of more than 100 seats per year. In 1997 and 1998, Boeing and Airbus registered a total of 2,200 orders. "There will be a market correction which will start in 1999," Michot said.
The Miniature Air-Launched Decoy (MALD) flew for the first time Jan. 9 at Edwards AFB, Calif., the Pentagon reported yesterday. It said the flight met the test objectives of safe separation, engine start, autonomous flight and safe recovery. At 10:40 a.m. EST, MALD was launched from an F-16 flying at 460 knots at 20,000 feet. It separated cleanly and flew at about 20,000 feet and 0.75 Mach.
Bombardier Aerospace received a $250 million order for 10 Canadair 415GR amphibious aircraft, with an option for five more, from the government of Greece. The order, from the Ministry of Defense, includes aircraft, spare parts, ground support equipment and training. Bombardier also will help the Greek Ministry of Public Order establish an Integrated Fire Management System.
KLM Engineering&Maintenance, a division of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and United Technologies' Hamilton Standard unit executed a letter of intent to form a joint venture company serving European, Middle Eastern and African repair and overhaul markets for all large commercial aircraft pneumatic components.
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY flight controllers have tested new software on the U.S.-French TOPEX/Poseidon satellite that will allow Earth-orbiting satellites to adjust their orbits autonomously, reducing ground-support costs. Controllers uplinked software that planned orbital shifts and generated the necessary commands onboard in response to "minimal" guidance from the ground that specified changes in orbital velocity and the time for the maneuver to begin.
ORBCOMM GLOBAL has entered an agreement with two telecommunications companies in the North Caribbean, Systems Solutions Limited and Voice Technologies Limited, to provide its "Little LEO" data relay service in the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Under the agreement the two Caribbean companies have formed Orbcomm North Caribbean Limited, headquartered in the Bahamas, which Orbcomm licensed to provide service in the region.
SPECTROLAB INC. has built a new triple-junction gallium arsenide solar cells that it says marks a 20% increase in efficiency over double-junction solar cells introduced 14 months ago on PAS-5, which Spectrolab parent Hughes built for PanAmSat. With the new design Spectrolab hopes to convert 26.8% of the solar energy reaching its cells to power, compared to 12.3% for a conventional silicon cell, and to have the new cells operating on an orbiting satellite by the end of this year.
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) yesterday expressed their concern about Administration proposals to assist North Korea economically while it continues "aggressive behavior" and development of ballistic missiles. The senators objected to the country's demand for compensation before allowing inspection of a suspected underground nuclear facility, and its refusal to stop developing and exporting missiles.
NASA HAS PICKED 113 small, high-technology companies in 26 states for negotiate for Phase 2 contract awards worth a total of about $73 million under its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The U.S. space agency picked a total of 125 research proposals from 312 submitted by SBIR contractors who have completed Phase I projects. The program is designed to stimulate innovations, increase opportunities for small business, and commercialize the results of federally funded research.
Controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have reconfigured the Mars Polar Lander probe so that a balky star tracker is working properly, according to a mission status report. The tracker was the only serious problem noted after the probe's Jan. 3 launch, and was not expected to threaten the mission (DAILY, Jan. 5). Controllers concluded that the problem was caused by scattered light saturation in the camera.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's chief spokesman yesterday repeated threats to restrict Russian launches of U.S. commercial satellites as punishment for Russian help to Iran's missile program, citing "a steady deterioration in this area." Spokesman James P. Rubin said the State Dept. will take Russia's efforts to stop missile technology transfer to Iran when it reconsiders the Russian launch quota later this year. "If we don't get progress on the missile proliferation problem, we are not going to be able to support increasing that quota."
ROCKWELL INTERNATIONAL CORP. will move its corporate headquarters from Costa Mesa, Calif., to a location in the midwestern U.S. Sites being considered are Chicago and Milwaukee, and a final decision will be made by the end of the month.
The FAA yesterday issued a proposed rule to require repetitive displacement tests of a servo valve of the power control unit for the rudder of all 737 Series 100 through 500 aircraft. Two unexplained crashes of 737s have concentrated attention on the PCUs. The proposal was prompted by reports of cracking found in PCU secondary servo valve slides, FAA said. It said the proposed AD is intended to prevent "failure of the secondary slide and consequent rudder hardover and reduced controllability of the airplane." The deadline for comments is Feb. 12.
Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) yesterday vowed to amend the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 to lift the budget caps on defense spending. Stevens' plan to push for the change will be difficult politically, given the increased pressure to boost other areas like education. Also, defense spending now has less protection from being raided for other accounts because the legislative firewalls that once prevented such moves no longer exist.
U.S. aircraft yesterday, for the third day in a row, attacked Iraqi air defense sites. Around 11 a.m. local time (3 a.m. EST), U.S. aircraft on patrol in the northern "no-fly" zone were illuminated by several surface-to-air missile sites, and were fired upon by at least one missile, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
EG&G Defense Materials Inc. (EG&G DMI), Tooele, Utah, won a subcontract from Parsons Delaware Inc. to provide technical services for the first chemical weapon disposal facility to be built in Russia with American assistance, the company reported. The project site is near Shchuch'ye, in the Kurgan region of Siberia. The chemical weapons stockpile consists of about 2 million munitions containing 5,400 metric tons of chemical agents.
Boeing completed a Systems Integration Laboratory and the loading of the first operational software for the U.K.'s Nimrod MRA 4 maritime patrol aircraft program ahead of schedule. Boeing said the lab will be used to test and qualify the major sensor systems it is developing, including new radar, electronic support measures, electro-optical viewing systems, underwater acoustics detection and locating system, and magnetic anomaly detectors.
SPACE SYSTEMS/LORAL will build the fifth in a series of high-power satellites for the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat) under a contract announced this month. Intelsat 905 will be the fifth satellite SS/L is building for the international consortium under a program with a total value of more than $600 million. Based on SS/L's Model 1300 three-axis stabilized spacecraft, Intelsat 905 is scheduled for delivery late in 2001.
Fairchild Corp. and Banner Aerospace Inc., both based in Dulles, Va., have reached a merger agreement, the companies reported yesterday. The transaction will make Banner a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fairchild.
The John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has concluded that augmented Global Positioning System (GPS) techniques probably can provide sole-means navigation and landing services. The "preliminary conclusions" were presented at a "status report" briefing to FAA, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the Air Transport Association, which had commissioned the risk assessment study, and others.
