John O'Leary has been promoted to senior director from director of operations and Bill James to director of engineering from manager of design of Airbus's engineering center in Wichita, Kan. David Trent has been named senior director of the Mobile, Ala., center.
Chile's LAN has selected Air France Industries and KLM Engineering & Maintenance to provide component support for its 24 Boeing 767-300ERs. The fleet will grow by 10 more aircraft by 2008. The arrangement is slated to run for 10 years, drawing on the providers' component pool in Miami.
In reply to the letter entitled "Sledgehamer To Kill an Ant" (AW&ST Dec. 12, 2005, p. 8), the cost of Compass Call missions, which among other things reduced the number of attacks on U.S. ground troops by improvised explosive devices, should be measured in lives and limbs saved and not in dollars to man, fuel, assign, monitor and evaluate air missions. I would not be happy to hear that the Defense Dept. decided that it was too expensive for a platform to do its job to save lives of soldiers on the ground.
The Missile Defense Agency's huge Sea-Based X-Band Radar (SBX) is expected to reach its home port of Adak, Alaska, late this spring after a 2,000-mi. trip from Hawaii, where it arrived last week.
Suppliers say the commercial avionics market is recovering as fast as it ever has after past downturns, and this trend should continue through most of the decade.
British Airways hopes its regional operations will be profitable in two years, thanks to the scrapping of its current regional business model and the adoption of low-fare carrier features. The airline will relaunch BA CitiExpress as BA Connect, a single-class entity with one-way pricing, fares reduced by as much as 40% and food and beverage available for a fee.
Buying airline stocks these days carries about the same risk as sitting down at a roulette table in Las Vegas. But just like roulette, some bets on airlines are paying off big.
Raymond JaworowskI (Forecast International/www.forecastinternational.com)
With the business jet market in the midst of a recovery, the question in the industry is how long can it be sustained? After weathering two very difficult years in 2002 and 2003, the industry emerged in relatively good shape, and ready to take advantage of future opportunities and face challenges. Many established business jet manufacturers are competing with product lines that include all-new models and improved versions of older types.
Congressional pressure to avoid a gap in U.S. human space access is behind a NASA push to accelerate the first piloted flight of the planned Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV).
Education is the most strategic way for the aerospace industry to compete for and attract today's and tomorrow's best and brightest, retain these employees and continue to be an innovative giant on a global scale. The all-too-familiar cries that the workforce is in trouble are sounded industry-wide. Laments that cite an aging workforce are rife. While there is undoubtedly some truth to this, there are also solutions.
The first F-35A Joint Strike Fighter was removed from its assembly station at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth on Jan. 8. The airframe is being prepared for installation of a Pratt & Whitney F135 engine later this month. First flight is slated for this fall.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE World News & Analysis 402 Publisher's Letter 9 1. Outlook/Specifications 13 Outlook Overview 17 Military Aircraft Outlooks: Fighter/Attack 18 Bombers 25 Transports 26 Trainers 29 Top 25 U.S. DOD Procurement Programs 32 Top 25 U.S. DOD RDT&E Programs 33 --Military Aircraft Table 34 Information Technology Outlook 50 Commercial Aircraft Outlook 56
In "Brave New World" (AW&ST Dec. 19/26, 2005, p. 16), you say the British government is signaling that the Joint Strike Fighter will be its last manned combat aircraft, to be replaced by UAVs. I remember a British government white paper of 1957 that said much the same thing, albeit about a different fighter and its replacement by missiles. I won't hold my breath.
ST Technics has signed up Spanish carrier Vueling Airlines for its fleet technical management and component support. The contract is to run five years. The work will cover the nine Airbus A320s that the carrier maintains, a fleet that is expected to grow by at least 40 aircraft in three years.
Kenneth Miller, the Air Force's new senior adviser to Secretary Michael Wynne on "acquisition, governance and transparency," is taking on one of the thornier procurement issues for the service--how to revamp the C-130J contract with Lockheed Martin, rejected last year by Congress because it continued to treat the aircraft as a commercial item even though there are no commercial buyers. Miller's office was once occupied by Darleen Druyun, the acquisition chief who admitted bias for her subsequent employer, Boeing, on a number of contracts.
The Indian Navy stood up its first unmanned reconnaissance aircraft squadron INAS(U)-342 last week at Kochi on the country's southwest coast. The unit will fly eight Searcher IIs and four longer range Herons. Both are Israeli designs similar to those used by several European air forces.
Sagem Defense Securite will provide the French military with equipment to secure information exchange over the Internet. The Public Key Infrastructure effort is scheduled to be deployed in June and will be used to authenticate users, provide signatures and manage multi-level security.
Development snags and persisting disagreement over force requirements and deployment strategies are undermining French attempts to help forge a European road map for unmanned aerial vehicles.
Enav (Ente Nazionale Assistenza Volo) plans to buy Vitrociset's ATC radar maintenance business for 108 million euros ($130 million), with final shareholder approval expected this month. Enav initially offered 90 million euros versus Vitrociset's demand for 220 million. Enav was paying a yearly fee of 68 million euros to Vitrociset to provide ATC maintenance and support services, but that was judged as too high by Enav--and an Italian accounting court.
CMC ELECTRONICS HAS COMPLETED MORE THAN 100 Boeing 747 classic cockpit retrofits. The most recent customer, Saudi Arabian Airlines, has signed to update seven of its 747-100s. The suite includes triple CMA-900 GPS-equipped flight management systems. These aircraft will now have Required Navigation Performance capability of RNP 0.3 for GPS non-precision approaches (maintaining 0.3 naut. mi. left or right of centerline 95% of the time) and RNP-10 for oceanic/en route flights (10 naut. mi. left or right of centerline).
THE FAA HAS AWARDED TYPE CERTIFICATION to Raytheon Aircraft Co. for its King Air C90GT--an upgraded version of the C90B featuring 750-shp. Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-135 turboprop engines flat rated to 550 shp. The airplane is being offered as an alternative to very light jets (VLJs) such as the Eclipse 500 and the Cessna Citation Mustang. Takeoff distance is reduced to 2,392 ft. The C90GT can climb to 30,000 ft. in 22 min. and has a maximum cruise speed of 272 kt. Typically equipped price is $2.9 million.
U.S. Missile Defense Agency officials have been coy about admitting there is any development of directed-energy weapons for missile defense. But ITT has now received a $57-million contract from the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command for lethality testing and development in support of directed energy missile defense systems.
Lockheed Martin has passed a software development milestone--a "vital next step"--to deployment of the FAA's En Route Automation Modernization program for the U.S. air traffic control system. ERAM replaces a 1960s-era computer system that has proved difficult to modify with new controller decision-support tools. Lockheed Martin has had the ERAM software under development for 26 months and expects to spend the next two months integrating it for formal testing in its own laboratories as well as at the FAA Technical Center near Atlantic City, N.J.
The article "Wake Warfare" reveals Airbus's disturbing hierarchy of priorities regarding financial concerns, politics and safe operating procedures. As a commercial airline pilot, I applaud the ICAO wake-vortex separation standard for its conservative approach to safety. That it took "months of debate" to decide on a two-model process and the author's reference to "furious" Airbus officials makes one suspect Airbus's priorities.
