The “Big Five” U.S. space companies could lose up to 10,000 jobs over the next few years unless the government accelerates procurement of the first elements of the Constellation family’s Ares V and Altair programs, warns Boeing Space Exploration head Brewster Shaw. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ATK, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and United Launch Alliance “are at risk of laying off 8,000 to 10,000 people,” because of the looming gap between retirement of the shuttle and emergence of the follow-on Constellation family.
The French aerospace and defense industry is urging the government to come through on military spending commitments to help offset the drastic decline in commercial business.
Budget woes and old ways of doing business are increasingly tripping up Iraq’s attempts to rebuild its military as the nation struggles to recover from decades of combat and mismanagement, coalition officials are saying in Washington and Baghdad.
As a former USAF C-5 program manager, I propose that organizational reform should come before “acquisition reform.” The service has long struggled with the issue of transferring acquisition program management to commands, with no real single manager of the process. Many Defense Dept. acquisition problems can be overcome through a flatter organizational structure.
Apr. 15—Washington Branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society Lecture by Gordon Leishman: “Helicopter-Thinking Forward, Looking Back.” Kim Engineering Building Rotunda, University of Maryland, College Park. Call +1 (703) 693-1564 or e-mail [email protected] Apr. 16-17—Technology Training Corp.’s Military Energy & Fuels Conference. Also, Apr. 30-May 1Information Operations Conference. Both at Holiday Inn Hotel & Suites, Alexandria, Va. Call +1 (310) 563-1210 or see www.ttcus.com
Steven H. McCoy (see photo) has become vice president-advanced concepts for the Northrop Grumman Corp. ’s Baltimore-based Electronics Systems Sector. He was director of airborne systems.
Terence W. Lyons has become president/CEO of AmSafe Global Holdings Inc. of Phoenix. He was chief financial officer and succeeds Kenneth J. Beckemeyer, who has resigned. Chris Muklevicz has been appointed vice president-sales for AmSafe’s aviation unit. He was vice president-sales and marketing for the Pacific Scientific Electro Kinetics Div. of the Danaher Corp.
The FedEx MD-11 crash at Tokyo Narita now makes it three times that an aircraft of the type has flipped over on landing. The others were the Mandarin Airlines crash at Hong Kong in 1999 and the FedEx crash at Newark, N.J., in 1997. The wing broke off below design or certification specifications. I wonder if the United Airlines DC-10 crash at Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989 was made worse by the same flaw.
In a $50-million, 4-year contract, Boeing has tapped Ball Aerospace & Technologies to build the instrument unit assembly (IUA), flight computer and command telemetry computer for Ares I, the shuttle-replacement crew launch vehicle. Ball says it will use its common computing architecture already proved on the Kepler and WorldvView-1 missions for the IUA to build three flight computers that operate synchronously—to assure fault-tolerant safety for astronauts—and two command telemetry computers for each launcher.
Boeing is working on a fix to a signal processing system on its first GPS IIF satellite. Launch has repeatedly slipped, but is now set for November, says Craig Cooning, vice president of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems. Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, has completed 61 of 71 preliminary design reviews under the GPS III contract it won over Boeing nearly a year ago. A final system design review is slated for next month. The first GPS III is expected to launch in 2014. Eight satellites are included in the first block, with more expected with future enhancements.
Regarding the article “Flight Idle” (AW&ST Mar. 23, p. 32), on the woes of the A400M development schedule, EADS CEO Louis Gallois retorts, “We accepted a time schedule that was absolutely unachievable—delivery of the first aircraft in six and a half years from the time we signed the contract. No military aircraft in the world has ever been delivered in less than 12 years.”
A method of quickly simulating and testing components and software for “plug and play” tactical satellites that can be put together in a matter of days has been developed by Albuquerque, N.M.-based PnP Innovations. Based on the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Plug and Play Avionics (SPA) standards, the company’s structural panels contain embedded power and data routers as well as mounting positions for PnP sensors and processors.
Creditors are applying for Chinese private carrier East Star Airlines to be declared bankrupt, while Air China’s parent—China National Aviation Holdings Co.—has started preliminary talks to buy the business. East Star ceased operations Mar. 15 and has losses of 500 million yuan ($73 million). China National said it was likely to buy 90% of the carrier for 600 million yuan. East Star’s operator’s certificate would be a prize, as the Civil Aviation Administration of China will not entertain applications for new ones until next year.
Deirdre Hutton will succeed Roy McNulty as chair of the British Civil Aviation Authority in August. Hutton is chair of the British Food Standards Agency.
Lockheed Martin hopes a demonstration flight this summer will lift the concept of high-altitude airships as persistent surveillance platforms off the drawing board and into the stratosphere. Unmanned airships are attracting attention because of their capability to stay aloft for weeks, even months, at altitudes that greatly extend sensor and communications coverage. But questions remain about the ability of lighter-than-air aircraft to remain on station in high winds and through repeated day/night cycles.
The global airline industry is increasingly at risk of seeing its growth capped or billion-dollar increases in taxes imposed at this year’s inter-governmental meeting to define a post-Kyoto policy on climate change.
Our European allies seem unable to duplicate, in about 10 years’ work, the tactical capabilities that Douglas Aircraft created in less than four years a bit more than 50 years ago. I refer to the C-133, which had bulk capacity, payload and speed similar to the Airbus A400M specification, and the first Pratt & Whitney turboprop engine. After some early losses, corrected by training and a redesigned stall warning system, the 50 aircraft carried all manner of bulky objects to Vietnam in two days instead of four weeks by ship.
Lease Corp. International is providing the launch order for the Bombardier CSeries CS300 as part of its deal to take 20 of the new narrow-body series and options for 20 more. Deliveries of three CS100s will start in the second quarter of 2014, with 17 CS300 handovers to commence a year later. All 20 aircraft should be in hand within three years.
Rolls-Royce will deliver an upgraded standard of the Trent 1000 for tests on the Boeing 787, which it says will bring the engine to within 1% of targeted fuel consumption at service entry.
Part 121 operators held the best safety record among the aviation sectors covered in the NTSB’s 2008 accident statistics report released Apr. 2. Last year, they carried 753 million passengers on more than 10.8 million scheduled and non-scheduled flights without a passenger fatality in 28 accidents. A spike in fatalities among Part 135 on-demand air charter operations is of particular concern, noted NTSB acting Chairman Mark V. Rosenker. This sector, which includes air medical, air taxi and air tour flights, logged more than 3.6 million flight hours in 2008.
FAA Administrator-nominee Randy Babbitt will not have the luxury of a quiet settling-in period in his new role, as he will quickly have to grapple with major challenges ranging from air traffic control modernization to thorny labor disputes.
NASA will soon begin conducting seaworthiness tests of a full-size mockup of the Orion capsule in the Atlantic Ocean to give engineers a feel for recovering the spacecraft and the kind of conditions the crew can expect. The mockup can simulate normal splashdown conditions as well as what could happen if the capsule takes on water. It is rigged to accommodate ballast from 18,000-33,000 lb.—the latter is what Orion would weigh in the event of a launch abort.
A first flight test for the vehicle intended to deliver U.S. astronauts to space after the shuttle fleet retires next year has slipped by about a month, to late summer at the earliest. Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B will be occupied too long by the space shuttle Endeavour, which NASA managers have decided to position there when sister ship Atlantis lifts off from Pad 39A to service the Hubble Space Telescope, to support an earlier test-flight date.
Last-minute political maneuvering could yet thwart the ambitions of senior Royal Air Force officers to acquire the U.S. RC-135 Rivet Joint as a replacement for the Nimrod R1 electronic intelligence aircraft.
The FAA and European Aviation Safety Agency have approved the technology to provide synthetic vision on the Daher-Socata TBM850 turboprop. Garmin’s SVT will be integrated in the company’s TBM 850 Garmin 1000 integrated flight display.
