Air traffic controllers are anxiously shifting duties and realigning workloads as they prepare for rolling furloughs beginning April 21 and the closures of up to 149 contract air traffic control towers beginning April 7. “It’s going to be rough in a month from now,” says Jim Marinitti, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) representative at the Miami Tower and Terminal Radar Area Approach Control (TRACON).

Manfred Bischoff, who heads Daimler's supervisory board, first told me about 25 years ago that the French government should abandon its stake in Aerospatiale Matra, the predecessor of EADS aerospace/defense group's French arm. Bischoff was then chief financial officer of DaimlerChrysler Aerospace and, like most of his German colleagues, firmly believed the time was right to give the private sector some long-overdue freedom and suppress cumbersome political interference. Although he was convincing, he could not persuade his French counterparts to act accordingly.

Lawmakers came up with a budget penalty bad enough to prompt themselves to deal with taxes and entitlements. Until now, the consequences of the $85 billion budget penalty known as sequestration were largely an academic exercise, but the looming closure of FAA contract towers is already making that tangible (see p. 18).

A new NASA mission to bring an asteroid closer to Earth in time to meet President Obama's goal of landing humans on one by 2025 would do more than bring the mountain to Mohammed. It also would add relevance to some of lawmakers' favorite NASA programs—the Orion crew vehicle, heavy-lift Space Launch System and commercial human spacecraft. NASA's fiscal 2014 budget request will include $100 million for the mission to find a small asteroid, capture it with a robotic spacecraft and bring it into range of human explorers somewhere in the vicinity of the Moon.

A backlog of foreign repair station applications created by a byzantine U.S. congressional mandate is forcing airlines to reconsider both expansion and contract maintenance strategies, because desired stations don't have FAA-approved shops to work on U.S.-registered aircraft. (Credit: Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings)

Broadens ATM footprint while retaining key role in U.S. programs

Is the recent decline in the average age of aircraft retirements an illusion when it comes to determining the economic life and valuation of the jets—or does the false impression come from the reports that dismiss its significance? Avolon, the Dublin-based aircraft leasing company, argued in a report a few months ago that the years-long decline is misleading. Now Boeing is out with a similar study that presents its case for why the dip is a blip, not a trend.

IAE consortium seeks new opening as V2500 production breaks records