Fuel savings, durability are behind enhanced powerplant repairs

China’s unsettling new air defense zone is taste of things to come

Aviation Week Senior Air Transport Editor Adrian Schofield was honored at the 2013 Australia and New Zealand Aviation Media Awards, an event held by the National Aviation Press Club in Sydney. Schofield, who works from Auckland, New Zealand, won the Rolls-Royce Trophy for Technical Story of the Year, for an article on automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (AW&ST Feb. 11, p. 46). He was also runner-up in the News Story of the Year category and a finalist for Journalist of the Year.

By making its announcement on Cyber Monday, Dec. 2, the biggest online shopping day of the year in the U.S., electronic-commerce giant Amazon was certain to get exhaustive and enthusiastic news coverage of its plans to use unmanned aircraft to deliver packages directly to customers. While Amazon has conducted test fights using a small quadcopter UAV to deliver a package, the realities of the FAA's regulatory requirements make it unlikely the delivery service, called Amazon Prime Air, will become available in 2015 as the company suggests.

While there is plenty to debate about where U.S. defense budgets could settle in 2014-15, there is no debate about the Pentagon's desire to continue to compete with cutting-edge technology. It expects defense advantages to be sustained through investment in new weapons and support systems that provide a generational lead over those fielded by adversaries.

AgustaWestland is accessing the Internet and the cloud to support the latest addition to its product line. Internet-based tools for flight planning and manipulation of health and usage monitoring systems (HUMS) data will be launched when the new AW189 intermediate-heavy helicopter begins operations early next year.

As expected, Boeing launched the long-range 777X family in grand style at the recent Dubai Airshow. But behind the scenes, the company says engineering work to ready the new derivative for launch has gone better than ever, proving that the Airplane Development organization created in last year's radical shake-up, is working.

When the European Commission set out its first proposals to bring aviation into the existing European Union's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) for stationary sectors in September 2005, airlines warned it would be difficult and contentious, and advised against the noble ambitions. Almost a decade later, airlines can safely say: “We told you so.”