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Sandra Arnoult
Aloha Airlines operated its last scheduled flight yesterday, shutting down operations after 61 years of service.

Aaron Karp
TAM's 2007 net income dropped 78.9% to BRL128.8 million ($74 million) from BRL611.8 million in the prior year as it contended with both the aftermath of the July A320 crash that killed 199 people and ongoing ATC problems in Brazil. The carrier called 2007 "a year of many challenges" and said the accident combined with Brazil's aviation "infrastructure" issues ( ATWOnline, July 30, 2007) and "high volatility" in the global economy drove the poor result, but it expressed optimism about future prospects.

Lee Ann Tegtmeier
The Special Air Mission Wing of Germany’s ministry of defense will be modernizing its long-haul and medium-haul aircraft fleets in 2011 and 2012 through contracts awarded to Lufthansa Technik.

Staff
RESEARCH EQUIPMENT: DOD will award $49.3 million to academic institutions to support the purchase of research instrumentation. The 210 awards to 98 academic institutions are being made under the Defense University Instrumentation Program (DURIP), and are expected to range from $50,000 to $1 million. DURIP supports the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment that augments current university capabilities or develops new capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research.

Staff
Saturn’s bizarre moon Enceladus is a little more mysterious after the recent Cassini flyby found it to be remarkably like a comet in its internal chemistry. “A completely unexpected surprise is that the chemistry of Enceladus, what’s coming out from inside, resembles that of a comet,” says Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute, principal investigator for the Cassini Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer. “To have primordial material coming out from inside a Saturn moon raises many questions on the formation of the Saturn system.”

Staff
CYBER HOME: U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne has invited the governors and communities of 18 states interested in hosting the new Air Force Cyber Command to join in the basing process, the Air Force said March 27. Assistant Air Force Secretary for Installations and Logistics Bill Anderson sent a letter to select state governors outlining the basing process and notifying them of an upcoming call for each to showcase their own state. The request for information will be sent out before May 15, with responses due from communities by July 1.

Bettina H. Chavanne
BOEING ACQUIRES: Following the successful navigation of regulatory hurdles, Boeing will acquire Vought Aircraft Industries’ interest in Global Aeronautica, a South Carolina-based fuselage sub-assembly facility for the Boeing 787. Once the approvals go through, Global Aeronautica will become a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Alenia North America, a subsidiary of Italy’s Alenia Aernautica. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Frank Morring, Jr.
Astronomers are analyzing a brilliant gamma ray burst that took place an estimated 7.5 billion years ago, yet was still so bright it could be seen with the naked eye if you happened to be looking in its direction when it blew. “This burst was a whopper,” says Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, principal investigator on the Swift satellite that first spotted it. “It blows away every gamma ray burst we’ve seen so far.”

Michael Bruno
MDA TESTING: Raytheon said March 27 that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency awarded it a $22.9 million contract modification to develop an initial Concurrent Test, Training and Operations (CTTO) capability and integrate it with the Missile Defense System Exerciser.

Frank Morring, Jr.
Crew performance is the limiting factor in a worrisome thrust oscillation linkage between the solid-fueled first stage of NASA’s planned Ares I launch vehicle and its upper stages, according to the former shuttle commander who conceived of using a single space shuttle solid-rocket boost to launch humans toward the moon.

Staff
AGREEING TO AGREE: U.S. President Bush and Russian President Putin haven’t agreed on much in recent years, especially over missile defense, but the two outbound chief executives expect to meet in Sochi, Russia, this week on the heels of high-level administration officials on both sides trying to find common ground. “This is an opportunity for the two leaders to ... consolidate areas where we’re cooperating together, maybe resolve some outstanding issues such as missile defense, and provide a platform for the relationship of the two countries going forward,” says U.S.

Staff
C4I CORRECTION: After peaking in 2008, the worldwide C4I market is now in the beginning of the predicted “market correction” with several 9/11-inspired programs and efforts wrapping up, according to Forecast International (FI). Still, more than 200 leading programs and some 25 companies should produce at least $64.1 billion in market value over the next 10 years. The programs further are expected to be worth $11.645 billion in 2008, and then steadily decline in value to $3.384 billion in 2017.

Staff
BATTLE TANKS: Analysts at consultancy Forecast International expect the international market to produce over 6,900 main battle tanks, worth nearly $27.9 billion, through 2017. Last year, the Chinese Type 98 program maintained its position as the single largest new-production program, they said. But with a total value of $402.62 million (for 118 new-production tanks), Type 98 was worth less than 33 percent of what the U.S. Defense Department spent on the M1 Abrams in 2007.

Staff
UAV POPULARITY: Life is getting rougher for U.S. Air Force unmanned aerial vehicle (Predator, Reaper, Global Hawk) aircrews. A standard assignment has been increased to five years, tours are being increased involuntarily and those who thought they had escaped back to manned flight are being recalled to the UAV home base northwest of Las Vegas. And demand is only increasing. “If there is a growth industry inside the Air Force, it’s in unmanned aerial systems,” says Gen. John Corley, chief of Air Combat Command. “There’s been surge, upon surge, upon surge.

Michael Bruno
Forecast International (FI) projects that a total of 3,706 medium/heavy military rotorcraft will be produced from 2008 through 2017, worth $84 billion, driven largely in part by new models outside U.S. plans. The U.S. military has mostly preferred buying new versions of helicopters already in its fleet rather than pursuing often lengthy and costly development of new designs, according to FI, and U.S. manufacturers have in turn focused their development on providing related upgrades. But the consequence is that all-new models are mainly non-U.S. designs.

Staff
FUEL FOR LAWYERS: The U.S. Air Force isn’t taking Boeing’s protest of the tanker contract sitting down. The service’s lawyers have filed for “partial summary judgment dismissal” of some of the claims in Boeing’s protest of the $35 billion award to its rival, a Northrop Grumman/EADS North America team. The Government Accountability Office is reviewing Boeing’s claims – including two supplemental items filed after the March 11 protest – that the Air Force award was unfair.

Michael Bruno
Congressional auditors at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) are sounding an alarm that the Bush administration never issued a National Security Space Strategy and they are suggesting lawmakers consider forcing defense and intelligence leaders to work out differences and publish a plan.

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Staff
JIEDDO CRITIQUED: The Pentagon’s special group tasked with finding and speeding billions of dollars worth of anti-improvised explosive device (IED) technologies and capabilities to combat theaters does not have good internal controls, including insight into personnel and spending, according to congressional auditors. In reviewing funding transactions totaling $795 million, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found 18 of 24 initiatives were not properly authorized in accordance with internal control standards.

Frank Morring, Jr.
Squabbling over budget cuts in the Mars program apparently led Alan Stern, NASA’s hard-charging associate administrator for science, to resign from the agency Mar. 25. Stern declined comment on his abrupt move, but it came right after Administrator Michael Griffin countermanded an order from Stern’s Science Mission Directorate to trim $4 million from the budget of the long-lived Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs), Spirit and Opportunity.

Staff
SLOWING I.T.: With the Bush administration’s last budget forecasting declining discretionary spending through fiscal 2013, under compound annual growth rate data, federal information technology (IT) consultancy Input is telling customers to prepare for slowing government IT work. According to Input’s analysis, federal IT spending rises and falls with discretionary spending, despite a “conventional wisdom” that IT spending is insulated from overall budget fluctuations because it is increasingly embedded in agency missions.

Michael A. Taverna
PARIS - Germany’s SARLupe radar satellite constellation has moved a step closer to full operating capability with launch of its fourth satellite.

Staff
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicated new calendar listing.) April 1 - 3 — Ground System Architectures Workshop, Crown Plaza Hotel, Redondo Beach, Calif. For more information call 310-336-6805 or go to www.aero.org April 3 - 4 — 2nd Pacific Workshop, “Consolidated overview of Galileo’s Public Regulated Service (PRS) market,” Nice, France. For more information go to www.prs-pacific.eu

Staff
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Ingrid Lee at [email protected] (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) APRIL 8-14 — Experimental Aircraft Association Sun ‘n’ Fun Fly-In, Lakeland Linder Regional Airport, Lakeland, Fla., 920-426-4800. APRIL 14-17 — 2008 Aviation Maintenance Conference, Tulsa Marriott Southern Hills, Tulsa, Okla., 410-266-2008

Staff
30 Years Ago April 3, 1978 -- Lamar Muse resigned as president of Southwest after he tried a “power play” and lost the last round in a series of disagreements with board member and major shareholder Rollin King. Muse offered few comments but did say King “wanted from the outset to be CEO and worked diligently to get me out of the way.” 20 Years Ago