The U.S. Army is short of meeting its annual requirement to train helicopter pilots by about 300, says Gen. Martin Dempsey, who oversees the service’s Training and Doctrine Command. With high demand for helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan, this shortage is frustrating commanders abroad who have enough airframes to accomplish their missions, but lack the crews to fly them. Crew training has been hindered by insufficient funding in personnel accounts.
The Northrop Grumman-led Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) team has wrapped up full-scale ground operations drills. In this dry run, the team assembled a full-scale, flight-similar booster using inert rocket motors and flight-qualified structures to validate all interfaces with the booster, ground support equipment and facility structures. The Missile Defense Agency is funding KEI’s development; Raytheon is the team lead for interceptor development; and Orbital Sciences heads booster integration and preparation of range ops.
You repeatedly say biofuels’ big CO2 benefit results from the fact that they absorbed CO2 while growing and will produce a 40-60% savings over petroleum when measured through the full harvesting, refining and burning cycle. Look at the big picture! What do you think the biomass absorbed before being buried and converted into petroleum? CO2 credit trading is just another regulatory invention that should be scrutinized just like stock derivative trading.
Italian defense export license applications are on the rise, indicating continued growth in overseas sales that were already up 39% last year to €1.77 billion ($2.33 billion). Italian companies last year also filed for 1,880 licenses representing €3 billion in orders, a 28.5% increase over the prior year, not including multinational programs such as the Eurofighter Typhoon and NH90 helicopter.
Michael P. Jackson has been named to the board of directors of AirTran Holdings Inc. He is president/founder of Firebreak Partners and was deputy U.S. Homeland Security secretary.
Technology has matured to commercial availability, data standards are close to approval, and by year’s end Airbus and Boeing could be instructing suppliers to put radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags on aircraft parts.
One year after establishing an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) task force, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is continuing his push by outlining up to six new platforms that will be funded in his Fiscal 2010 budget proposal.
The mandatory greening of the globe has opened the door for new ways of providing essential services. And, in the case of change, “check your approach” is a particularly apt slogan when it comes to airport lighting. With the date drawing near to turn out the incandescent bulb—mandated to begin in the U.S. in 2012 and be completed by 2014 (2010 in Australia)—lighting providers are queuing up with alternatives.
USANG Col. (ret.) James W. O’Brien has been appointed CEO of Tactical Air Defense Services Inc. , West Palm Beach, Fla. He was commanding officer of the Townsend Bombing Range.
Yves Prete has become vice president-MRO Div., Jean Massot vice president-sales and marketing, Michel Brioude vice president-Spare Parts Div., Lydie Guerville vice president-improvement initatives and Jean-Jacques Orsini vice president-quality, all for the merged France-based Snecma and Snecma Services. Prete was head of Sichuan Snecma Aeroengine Maintenance in China, while Massot was senior vice president and Brioude director of commercial engines for Snecma Services.
Japan’s SkyPerfectJSAT Corp. has ordered its seventh Lockheed Martin A2100 communications satellite for the JCSAT program, and its second since December. Launch of JCSAT-13 is set for 2013. A launcher provider hasn’t been named. To be located at 124-deg. E. Long., it will use the A2100AX platform and have an all Ku-band payload of 44 fixed high-power communications channels. Up- and downlinks are to provide coverage over Japan, Asia and Oceania. Two steerable antennas will be used for emerging markets.
USAF Maj. Gen. Mark R. Zamzow has been named special assistant to the commander of the Third Air Force, United States Air Forces in Europe, RAF Mildenhall, U.K. He has been deputy chief of staff for strategic communications for Multi-National Force-Iraq, United States Central Command in Baghdad. Maj. Gen. David E. Clary has been appointed special assistant to the commander of Air Combat Command (ACC), Langley AFB, Va.
Mounting deferrals of A380s are further undermining Airbus’s efforts to achieve profitability for the program, and could push the financial break-even point for the aircraft past 2020.
Your Market Focus column (AW&ST Mar. 23, p. 12) refers to a “free market” in executive compensation. How many capable people are there who could do a better job (or at least no worse) than Boeing CEO James McNerney and others for far less compensation? Until shareholders compel the incestuous network of directors running large U.S. (and U.K.) companies to answer this question by regular, genuine “market testing,” the free market to which you refer will continue to be a figment of our collective imagination.
The fanfare surrounding Embraer’s ambitious plan to develop a new military tanker is in sharp contrast to disturbing news emerging for the Brazilian airframe manufacturer. There is evidence that an aggressive production rate for the company’s new family of very light jets is faltering, and a restructuring of its business jet line appears to have brought production to a near-standstill.
Robert Wall (Brussels), Andy Nativi (Genoa), Douglas Barrie (London)
Europe’s aerospace and defense enterprises are urging their respective governments to be more proactive in supporting industry through a variety of measures, including shoring up vital research and development accounts and providing loans to ailing small and medium-size suppliers.
The International Air Transport Assn. and Wall Street analysts remain optimistic that the U.S. airline industry will end the year in the black. But investors seem unconvinced and with the credit markets essentially shut, airlines have little room to maneuver if demand continues to fall.
Engine and aircraft manufacturers have made significant progress in the effort to reduce fuel burn, but trend-line gains anticipated over the next decade will not be any greater than what has occurred since the 1960s, analyst Edmund S. Greenslet points out in his Airline Monitor. The key metric is gallons of fuel burned per block hour per seat. Greenslet says the latest data, based on 2007, is 5.7 gal., a strong improvement over the 12 in the early days of the Boeing 707.
With a preliminary design review in hand, Lockheed Martin can begin detailed design of GEO-3, the third satellite in the U.S. Air Force Space Command’s Space-based Infrared Systems (Sbirs) follow-on production program. PDRs were held for both the third and fourth GEO spacecraft in late March to verify that they address obsolescence part issues from GEO-1/-2, the first two geosynchronous satellites in the baseline Sbirs constellation. The early-warning anti-ballistic missile defense constellation includes two active high-Earth-orbit satellites and four GEO spacecraft.
The market for commercial MRO services this year will be rather flat, which intensifies the competition between OEMs and MROs. OEMs’ more aggressive push to increase aftermarket revenue is intensified by slumping sales due to the credit crunch and decreased demand for airline flight hours. At the same time, airline MROs are pushing to expand their global reach to gain further scale, and independent MROs are trying to bundle services in ways the others cannot to grow market share.
A catastrophic failure of the main rotor gearbox caused the Apr. 1 crash of a Eurocopter Super Puma into the North Sea off Scotland, according to the initial report of the AAIB released Apr. 10. This resulted in the main rotor head detaching from the helicopter and the main rotor blade striking the pylon and tail boom, which severed from the fuselage. The AAIB indicated that its investigation shows the gearbox suffered the failure within the epicyclic module. All 16 people on board suffered fatal injuries.
