Airbus is still facing some serious behind-the-scenes discussions with its most important customer about design details of the Airbus A350XWB. Steven Udvar-Hazy, chairman/CEO of International Lease Finance Corp. (ILFC), confirmed on the sidelines of the Boeing 787 roll-out in Seattle that he is still not happy with the A350 set-up. “There are engineering teams working at Airbus on what can be changed,” he revealed. Udvar-Hazy has voiced concerns about the way Airbus plans to build the composite fuselage.
Safran’s first-half sales in the aerospace business were up 11.3% (compared to 2006 results), reaching €4.9 billion. The increase was driven particularly by 15.5% growth in the engine business (or 22.6% on a constant dollar basis). Sales would have been higher if not for delays in the Airbus A380 program. But the company’s overall sales growth was held back to 4.7% due to continued problems in the commercial communications segment, where sales fell 22.2% compared to the first six months of last year.
Besides having a good week with its Trent 1000 hanging from the 787 at Boeing’s rollout ceremony, Rolls-Royce also added new customers. Royal Brunei Airlines will use Trents to power four 787-8s it is leasing, and the Nakash Group ordered engines for two 787-9s on behalf of Tel Aviv-based Arkia Israeli Airlines (see p. 28).
Norway's Avinor has ordered 70 high-definition liquid crystal displays for controller workstations from Eg-Electronic GmbH. of Wolfratshausen, Germany. The FD2K-2824 displays provide 2048 X 2048-pixel resolution (2k X 2k) and will replace Sony CRTs at several Norwegian ATC centers. Avinor, a limited company owned by the Norwegian government, provides ATC services in that country. The German electronics company is one of the world’s largest suppliers of 2k X 2k displays for ATC use, according to President Christian von Stuelpnagel.
Northrop Grumman has won a $408-million contract add-on from the U.S. Navy for procurement of three E-2D Advanced Hawkeye pilot-production aircraft. First flight of the new aircraft with its 360-deg. AESA radar is expected in mid-August. Work is to be completed by August 2010. The company also pulled in a $32-million contract to provide maintenance and upgrade work for the fleet’s E-2C and C-2A aircraft.
The Mars rover Opportunity has emerged unharmed from a fierce regional dust storm on Mars, and could begin its descent into Victoria crater as early as later this week, says John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Just a note to express the fury that swept over me upon seeing the photo accompanying Pierre Sparaco’s “Errors in Taste” article (AW&ST May 21, p. 59).
When it comes to growth, Rockwell Collins CEO Clay Jones is more concerned with improving efficiency and profit margins than expanding the avionics company’s sales at any cost. “If you look at the history of this industry, there has been far more wealth destroyed via acquisitions than there has been created,” he said recently. “We don’t want to replicate that story.”
The Swedish government this year plans to issue a tender to outsource some of its satellite communications needs. The contract is supposed to cover 3-5 years of support for existing and new satellite communications systems. Additionally, the government may outsource systems integration activities.
Several distinctive external features of the 787 were clearly visible for the first time at rollout, including a protruding keel beam, larger air scoops, smaller flight control and flap surface actuators, as well as the smooth butt joints between the adjacent one-piece composite fuselage barrel sections.
Virgin America expects to begin flights from San Francisco International Airport to New York John F. Kennedy International Airport in August, following FAA authorization to begin service and approval by the Transportation Dept. to begin selling tickets.
Lapses in Boeing’s security for confidential internal documents were exposed by a worker, who subsequently was fired and who is said to have downloaded 320,000 pages of documents because he was disgruntled over inspection of parts. Gerald Lee Eastman has been charged with 16 counts of computer trespass. Boeing says it has tightened its computer security standards.
Don’t talk to Blake Emery about airplanes without windows for passengers. Emery studies how Boeing can differentiate its products in the marketplace. His work takes him into all sorts of things, like trying to quantify what makes passengers happiest. Or, the opposite. He’s been doing this as part of the company’s research into the cabin environment for the 787 along with Klaus Brauer, Boeing’s guru on passenger satisfaction and revenue. Much of what they’ve found goes well beyond the 787.
Despite the proliferating and increasingly sophisticated cruise and ballistic missile threats in Asia, Japan isn’t displaying much urgency in preparing defenses. The Patriot advanced PAC-3 missiles—designed for cruise missile and terminal ballistic missile defense—arrived in Japan a year ago, but in a recent assessment they weren’t rated fully mission-capable because of bureaucratic snarls. The problem is that the radios used to link all the scattered firing units into a single defensive system use frequencies assigned to the Japanese cell-phone industry.
This year’s rankings of publicly traded aerospace and defense contractors and airlines are the result of a composite scoring of four performance categories that place significant emphasis on operating excellence. The four categories are:
U.S. military planners are increasingly interested in buying electro-optical scene-matching capability for some weapons that would allow them to discriminate and confirm targets using previously captured imagery. Israel’s Rafael is producing the Spice weapons-guidance kit with this capability. As the Pentagon makes its weapons yields ever smaller to reduce collateral damage, the need to discriminate a target within feet is growing, Navy Capt. Peter Murphy, an air warfare expert in the Pentagon’s acquisition office, tells the Precision Strike Assn.
Securing funding for a weapon family and a potential purchase of an Airbus facility are emerging as milestones for Diehl, as the company tries to grow its defense and aerosystems business. Diehl recently decided to break defense and aerospace activities into separate units. Claus Gunther, head of Diehl VA Systeme, says the two markets are diverging, and to properly serve them Diehl Defense and Diehl Aerosystems will operate separately beginning in October. Following the restructuring, Gunther will be in charge of the defense product line.
The shuttle orbiter Endeavour is undergoing final checkout on Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center after being transported from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad with its external tank and solid rocket boosters early July 11. An earlier attempt to move the stack July 9 resulted in a work platform in the VAB placing minor scratches on a tank attachment strut. Liftoff of the STS-118/13A.1 mission to the International Space Station on the 119th mission of the space shuttle program is set for Aug. 7 at 7:02 p.m.
Congress is fulminating about the ability of their investigators, posing as businessmen, to obtain a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to buy enough radioactive material to build a dirty bomb that uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive debris. But members of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board say there’s a far bigger threat from radioactive material used to process whole blood for storage, by radiating it to kill bacteria and keep it fresh longer. DSB members say there are seven such facilities—lightly guarded—in the Washington area alone.
Thales as developed and certified its TopFlight satellite communications system to meet Arinc 781 standards. The product, now in series production, was developed initially for regional jets as well as large corporate aircraft. After flight trials concluding next March, the first passengers will be able to connect with the new system starting in the second quarter of 2008, according to Peter Hitchcock, the director of avionics systems for Thales Aerospace.
Component manufacture for the U.K.’s Environmentally Friendly Engine (EFE) technology validation program is now underway, with a first engine run anticipated for the Rolls-Royce-led project in mid-2008. Ian Ritchey, Rolls-Royce’s chief engineer for the EFE, says work is also underway to upgrade an engine test cell at the company’s Bristol site for the program. The EFE will test lean-burn combustors and high-pressure turbine technologies to reduce levels of carbon dioxide and oxides of nitrogen emissions.
Etihad Airways is facing serious questions about its crew scheduling procedures and ultimately its safety standards following a near controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accident at Pakistan’s Peshawar airport, several industry sources say.
It’s time to turn down the heat on Washington’s sound bite-driven debate over how to fund modernization of the U.S. air traffic control (ATC) system, and instead shed a little light on some fundamental business questions on the issue. We risk triggering the law of unintended consequences if Congress makes decisions on how to modernize and expand the system without having answers to these basic questions.
The results are in from Aviation Week & Space Technology’s 11th annual Top-Performing Companies study. This year’s rankings of the industry’s publicly-traded aerospace and defense companies begin on p. 54; airline rankings start on p. 68. Articles that analyze the trends emerging from the study and comments from a team of industry analysts who closely studied the results begin on p. 52. Results include a one-year snapshot of how each company ranks and a measure of how its score has changed during the past five years.
