Aviation Week Events Airlines, MRO, Aircraft & Engine Lessors – The Tricky Triangle September 14-15, 2011 Dublin, Ireland This must-attend event was designed to provide airlines with critical knowledge on maintenance obligations prior to leasing an aircraft. Attend and learn what you need to know in order to avoid costly penalties or expensive last minute maintenance prior to lease return! Learn more and register today at www.aviationweek.com/events
Vice Adm. William McRaven – commander of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden and the man nominated to replace Adm. Eric Olson as chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command – is calling on Congress to provide more airlift and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets for the nation’s Special Operations Forces (SOF).
LONDON — Saab’s move to buy Sensis Corp. not only strengthens the company’s activities in the field of air traffic management, but also expands its footprint in the U.S., where it has been eager to grow. Saab is acquiring Sensis for around $155 million, with another $40 million potentially to be paid by 2014 depending on how the business performs.
BEIJING — The Chinese air force says it will open six airfields to joint military and civil use in the current five-year planning period, running to 2015. The newly opened airfields, which have not been identified, join 63 military fields that the air force has made available for civilian use since the 1990s. Military flying takes up 23.51% of China’s usable airspace, the air force says in a statement released under the guise of a Xinhua news agency report. Civil traffic uses 32%, it says, without accounting for the rest.
NEW DELHI — India has established a state-of-the-art composite rocket propellant processing facility. The Advanced Center for Energetic Materials will help meet the requirements of composite propellants for solid rocket motors during their development phase as well as limited series production.
HOUSTON — The unidentified object that sped close to the International Space Station on June 28, forcing the six crewmembers to take temporary refuge in their two Soyuz lifeboats, is unlikely to pose a further collision threat, NASA orbital debris experts believe.
CAPE CANAVERAL — NASA managers have cleared space shuttle Atlantis for launch on the 135th and final flight in the 30-year-old shuttle program, a 12-day cargo resupply mission considered critical to International Space Station operations. Liftoff is targeted for 11:26 a.m. EDT July 8. If weather or technical issues prohibit launch, NASA could make a second attempt on July 9 or July 10, before having to stand down for a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket carrying an Air Force Block IIF Global Positioning System satellite on July 14.
HILL BARRAGE: U.S. aerospace and defense industry boosters are urging companies to lobby Congress in support of federally funded research and development, which could be cut if appropriations legislation making its way through Congress is enacted. “There were major cuts in the House defense appropriation bill for research and development, and there may be similar cuts in the Senate,” the Aerospace Industries Association says in an emailed alert June 29.
THREATS WORK: The possibility of a subpoena helped lawmakers wrest documents from NASA regarding its heavy-lift space launch system (SLS) plans, says the chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) says NASA has allowed the committee staff “to look at and read but not keep” documents related to NASA’s future human spaceflight plans. Congress has been trying to compel NASA to speed development of the SLS and the multipurpose crew vehicle intended to replace the space shuttle.
At a pre-air show briefing for journalists in Paris last week, EADS leaders presented a graphic that would suggest the Pentagon owes them a big favor. In the 2008 competition for the U.S. Air Force’s tanker contract, Boeing bid $42 billion. When the program was re-competed, Boeing’s ultimately successful bid came in at $31.5 billion. The not-so-subtle implication: EADS’s decision not to pull out of the tanker competition last year after U.S. partner Northrop Grumman quit will save U.S. taxpayers more than $10 billion.
Boeing has developed “optimized transmitter settings” for the GPS IIF spacecraft to support reactivation of the M-code (or military-specific signal), according to an industry official. The U.S. Air Force switched off the M-code on the first GPS IIF spacecraft, which was launched May 27, 2010, owing to discoveries related to signal strength during factory testing (Aerospace DAILY, June 21).
The Pentagon is continuing to depend on private contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq as it tries to wind down both wars, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
Direct analysis of the material in the spectacular ice geysers erupting from fissures at the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus have buoyed scientists’ belief that there is a liquid-water ocean under the moon’s frozen surface. Measurements with the Cassini probe’s cosmic dust analyzer found evidence of an “ocean-like” composition in the relatively large grains of ice near the moon’s surface, adding weight to earlier suggestions that the geysers are produced from a liquid-water layer between the moon’s rocky core and its frozen mantle.
The U.S. Air Force is expecting to pay the largest amount allowable under the KC-46A contract with Boeing to develop a KC-135 refueler replacement, with Boeing picking up the rest of the tab. Two months after Boeing won the contract over rival EADS, which proposed an Airbus A330-based design, the Air Force got news that it would need to pay an additional $500 million to develop the 767-based tanker and deliver the first 18 aircraft.
HOUSTON — The International Space Station’s six astronauts took refuge in their Soyuz spacecraft early June 28, when an unidentified piece of space debris passed as close as 820 ft. from the orbiting science laboratory. The threat posed by the object was detected by U.S. Strategic Command radar about 14 hr. before the closest approach at 8:08 a.m. EDT, NASA Johnson Space Center spokesman Kelly Humphries says. The warning came too late for experts at the station’s Mission Control centers in Houston and Moscow to prepare an evasive maneuver.
The U.S. Navy’s proposed 2012 shipbuilding strategy includes a 30-year funding plan that favors submarines over surface ships and will likely cost more than the service estimates, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
HOUSTON — Recently installed in new lab facilities here, the NASA-funded National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) expects to play a role in enabling future human deep-space missions and leveraging the findings to improve health care on Earth.
AUGUSTINE RULES: The Pentagon’s No. 2 official says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine’s 1980s-era augury over growing costs in tactical aircraft remains just as salient today. Augustine famously quipped that in 2054, it will take the entire U.S. defense budget to buy one fighter. Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn told a Carnegie Mellon University audience last week that cost increases in high-performance jets and other advanced equipment have, indeed, been going up in a linear fashion.
NEW DELHI — India is eyeing MK-54 lightweight torpedoes from the U.S. to arm its eight P-8I long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft being assembled by Boeing.
The Pentagon Inspector General (IG) calls into question a U.S. Army unit’s ability to manage one of the military’s most foolproof contract mechanisms — firm-fixed-price deals — in a recently released report that details deals made between the Army Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command (Amcom) and Boeing supporting the Corpus Christi Army Depot (CCAD).
LONDON — The Norwegian government is looking to turn its air force’s major depot facility into a state-run enterprise to improve its chances of securing maintenance and overhaul work. The government plans to formally propose the overhaul of the Air Depot Kjeller (or LHK) to parliament soon. The transition should be achieved by the end of the year, the defense ministry says.
HYDRA WORK: Final deliveries under a $286 million U.S. Army contract awarded this month to General Dynamics for Hydra-70 air-to-ground rockets are not expected until April 2015, meaning at least four years of work for the company’s Camden, Ark., and Williston, Vt., facilities. GD said it employs more 300 people in Camden, where the company has been the sole manufacturer of the Hydra since 1996, and around 400 for system engineering and program management in Williston. The contract runs through September 2015.
With a lingering stalemate on the deficit and debt ceiling and leftover problems from the previous fiscal year, developing a budget to fund NASA for the coming fiscal year is messier than usual. “It’s a quagmire,” says Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chair of the Senate Appropriations Commerce Justice Science subcommittee. “It’s a fiscal quagmire.” The committee is still sorting through the fiscal 2011 budget, as NASA only just recently submitted its spending plan for fiscal 2011 to Congress.
