Based in London, Tony covers European defense programs. Prior to joining Aviation Week in November 2012, Tony was at Shephard Media Group where he was deputy editor for Rotorhub and Defence Helicopter magazines. Tony has covered avionics, unmanned vehicles, the supply chain and cyberwarfare.
Trials have begun on a series of optimized transatlantic flights which will test technologies and ideas destined for use in the next generation of air traffic management systems. Air traffic control organizations in Canada and the U.K. hope these “perfect” flights will offer fuel savings of up to half a ton per transatlantic sector and help reduce delays without increasing workload for pilots and controllers.
Governments have not always been good at dealing with the defense industry. Over history and probably in the future too, there have been and are likely to be a litany of delayed or canceled programs caused by overspecification, cost overruns or poor quality. Such affairs are typically part and parcel of defense life, but as fiscal belts tighten, these events are becoming increasingly politically untenable.
Bell Helicopter is attempting to reinvent the JetRanger and reenter a market it left behind five years ago. Juggling development of the Bell 525 super-medium and V-280 Valor, the company's tiltrotor candidate for the U.S. Army's Future Vertical Lift requirement, Bell has added the Short Light Single (SLS), revealed at the Paris air show here, in a bid to regain market share lost to types such as the Robinson R66 and Eurocopter EC120 that have leaped into the gap created when JetRanger production ended 2.5 years ago.
