Star Alliance has told Air India to accelerate its IT integration process and complete all formalities required for membership. Air India, initially scheduled to join Star in March, is now looking at a second-quarter 2010 entry date. The delay has been caused by a re-tendering for systems integration of the Air India and the former Indian Airlines and lack of decision on adopting a common flight code, which is required for Star membership.
Airliner, fighter or business jet —almost every modern aircraft owes part of its aerodynamic design to one man: Richard T. Whitcomb, who died Oct. 15 in Newport News, Va. He was 89. As a NASA engineer, Whitcomb developed three of the most important post-war innovations in aeronautics: transonic area rule, supercritical airfoil and winglets. Whitcomb, shown above working with a wind-tunnel model of NASA’s TF-8 fitted with his supercritical wing, devoted his career to reducing drag.
Global cooperation in human spaceflight will focus on the International Space Station for the foreseeable future, regardless of the course President Barack Obama sets for NASA’s exploration program in the weeks ahead. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says everything is still on the table as the independent human-spaceflight review committee prepares to deliver its final report to the White House. That report on options for future space-exploration policy was originally due at the end of August and expected last week, but was delayed again for final editing.
Three years after Lufthansa pulled the plug on the Connexion by Boeing high-speed onboard broadband service, the carrier has brought out a new service in partnership with Panasonic Avionics. FlyNet will allow passengers to send or receive e-mails or text messages and surf the web with their laptops and handheld mobile devices, but not make phone calls or watch live TV—although both will be technically feasible. FlyNet is to be introduced on Lufthansa long-haul flights in the second half of next year.
When NASA Ames Research Center and Northrop Grumman thought about smashing into a lunar crater with a man-made meteor to search for water, they needed a cheap and easily adaptable spacecraft bus to make the mission possible.
The Boeing A160T Hummingbird unmanned helicopter completed 20 test flights from Aug. 31-Oct. 8 for its Foliage Penetration Reconnaissance, Surveillance, Tracking and Engagement Radar (Forester). Conducted at Ft. Stewart, Ga., the trails validated the radar-carrying A160T’s flight characteristics with more than 50 hr. of flying time. The program is being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army to bring enhanced coverage of moving vehicles and dismounted troops under forest canopies. The 53 flight hours at Ft.
Both General Electric and Rolls-Royce are to continue into Phase 2 of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Adaptive Versatile Engine Technology (Advent) program, but only Rolls’s Liberty Works has been funded to complete development and testing of a demonstrator engine, which is planned to run in 2012.
European Space Agency leaders appear to be closing in on a solution for a Mars lander initiative that would reconcile technological and science goals with available budgets.
Intelsat will issue a senior note offering to refinance debt and provide capital for other corporate activities. The notes will become due in 2019. A portion of the net proceeds from the issue, the value of which was not disclosed, will go to purchase certain oustanding 11.5/12.5% senior payment-in-kind notes that were due in 2017. Intelsat is heavily leveraged and pursuing an ambitious fleet modernization program.
Despite armor vehicle competition losses in the U.S., now being protested, and ongoing fraud investigations in the U.K., BAE Systems’ interim statement last week said trading in the first half of the financial year was in line with management expectations. According to the statement, the company “continues to anticipate a year of good growth for 2009 as a whole despite a lower volume of land vehicle sales than in 2008.”
At face value, last week’s annual Russo-Indian governmental commission on military cooperation—led by the countries defense ministers—was just an ordinary affair aimed at smoothing the often bumpy ride of bilateral defense collaboration. For Moscow, however, India is no longer an ordinary market.
Boeing, Honeywell’s UOP refining specialist and Mexico’s airports and auxiliary services agency will collaborate on research for markets for Mexican-sourced sustainable aviation biofuels. Halophytic plants, which thrive in arid land and can be irrigated with sea water, will be the first research target. Boeing, Yale University and UOP are contributing to a study led by the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi that focuses on the sustainability of halophytes and the carbon life cycle of biofuels.
A year after its launch, the science team for NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) will publish an all-sky map of neutral atoms that define the boundary between the solar wind and interstellar medium—the gas, dust and radiation environment between the stars. That medium reflects roughly 90% of cosmic radiation away from the inner Solar System. The findings are causing some rethinking of how the interstellar cosmic radiation buffer works, says lead investigator Stephen A. Fuselier of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif.
U.S. consultancy Forecast International predicts the market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will be worth $38 billion or more worldwide over the next 10 years. “No matter how many UAVs are built, military agencies want more,” writes Larry Dickerson, Forecast’s senior unmanned-systems analyst. On top of $17.9 billion in procurement, research funding for UAVs could exceed $20 billion through 2018, he adds. The U.S. is the driving force behind this market, Dickerson notes, and U.S.-based companies will account for more than 60% of the market’s value.
Northrop Grumman is using a full-size mock-up of the James Webb Space Telescope’s backplane and sunshield to test integration and develop methods for handling the next-generation observatory as it works through the critical design review (CDR) for the telescope unit.
The South Korean government is likely to approve development soon of its second space launcher, the KSLV-2, which would take the country from experimentation to serious participation in the international launch services market. Korean Air Aerospace, the manufacturing division of the airline Korean Air, is studying a follow-up to the KSLV-2 with a company-developed rocket in the same class, or maybe a commercial version of the government launcher.
The NTSB on Oct. 14 determined that pilot mismanagement of an abnormal flight control situation, and failure to control airspeed and prioritize control of the aircraft are the probable causes of the June 4, 2007, crash of a Cessna Citation 550 that killed six people. The Marlin Air aircraft impacted Lake Michigan shortly after it departed Milwaukee in marginal visual meteorological conditions, to transport a human organ for a transplant.
Ukrainian carrier AeroSvit is outfitting its Boeing 767 and 737 aircraft with AD Aerospace’s CabinVu cockpit-door monitoring system. Cameras installed in the cabin are linked to cockpit monitors that are within reach of the flight crew, enabling the pilots to observe any activity outside the cockpit door and adjacent galleys. AD Aerospace FlightVu inflight surveillance equipment, which includes outside-aircraft monitoring systems, is installed on aircraft of other carriers, including Icelandair, British Airways, and JetBlue.
Industry officials caution that a proposal to dip into a planned French government bond issue to help finance technologies for future European civil aviation projects, including the next-generation narrow-body air transport, will have to beat out a bevy of other projects vying for the €10-billion ($14.8-billion) honey pot. Among them are undertakings from within the aerospace industry itself, including a follow-on Ariane 6 satellite launcher, a space-based CO2 monitoring system and more Ka-band broadband satellite capacity (AW&ST Oct. 12, pp. 24, 34).
Nov. 2-4—A&D Programs Conference. Phoenix. Nov. 4-5—Lean Six Sigma for MRO. Miami. Dec. 2-3—A&D Finance Conference. New York. Dec. 8-10—MRO Asia Conference & Exhibition. Hong Kong. You can now register ONLINE for Aviation Week Events. Go to www.aviationweek.com/conferences or call Lydia Janow at +1 (212) 904-3225/+1 (800) 240-7645 ext. 5 (U.S. and Canada Only)
The Link Simulation and Training Air Traffic Control Academy is in the final phase of a 10-month course of instruction that will qualify 40 students for FAA control-tower certification when they graduate in November. Located at North Texas Regional Airport in Denison, the academy began operating in January and provides 510 hr. of on-the-job tower training, says David Williams, L-3 Link’s vice president of training services. The curriculum is approved under FAR Part 65, and the courses of instruction are taught by certified air traffic controllers.
Jeremiah Farmer suggests U.S. military forces undergo additional reductions because he wants to live in a society that inspires its children to be astronauts and explore space and not be fighter pilots. He also believes we should have the “. . . ability to instantly ramp up to wartime production levels.”
Much attention was focused on DigitalGlobe Inc. when the company successfully orbited its third imagery satellite on Oct. 8. But things have not been quiet at the other end of the high-resolution remote-sensing duopoly.
The passenger rights battle has taken another strange turn. Kate Hanni, a passenger rights crusader lobbying for federal legislation on ground delays and facing airline opposition, filed a lawsuit in a federal court last week alleging that Delta Air Lines illegally obtained access to e-mails hacked from her private accounts. Hanni and her group sued both Delta and Dulles, Va.-based Metron Aviation, which provides analytical, design and software development services for air traffic management.
Following last month’s first flight of an upgraded South African Air Force Pilatus Astra PC-7 Mk.II, Pilatus and its South African industrial partner are looking to undertake further modifications starting next month. The first of 35 PC-7s being upgraded with new avionics flew on Sept. 23 after the aircraft was modified in Switzerland. The work will now transition to South Africa.
