Battle lines have been drawn between Navy and Marine Corps officials about whose aircraft programs will suffer the heaviest cuts as the Naval service tries to make its spending fit the reality of near-term budgets.
Allan Harvey (see photo) has been appointed acting group vice president of the Toronto-based Business&Regional Aircraft Business Unit of Messier-Dowty. He succeeds Ken Laver, who will become president of Messier-Dowty Inc. Harvey was vice president-business development.
Frequently under fire for acquisition programs that are behind schedule and over budget, the FAA has, amazingly, failed to take a lesson in management reform from another agency that has also had its share of criticism--the Defense Dept.
The HR series ribbon heater assemblies were designed to be an alternative to heater tapes currently used in aircraft water system applications. The assemblies employ the latest insulation technology, are 70% lighter, install more easily and provide 75% more surface heating coverage than traditional heater tapes, according to the company. They also satisfy FAA flame, smoke and toxicity requirements. Instead of being wrapped circumferentially around water and drain lines, these ribbon heater assemblies are installed from one side, and can be done with one hand.
A testbed carrying the E-2C Hawkeye's next-generation radar is slated to start test flights this month. The equipment for the Radar Modernization Program (RMP) has been installed on a C-130 and soon will start a flight test series that will run through 2006, said Richard Evans, who oversees the program for radar prime contractor Lockheed Martin. The new hardware is supposed to provide better range and clutter-rejection. One challenge is to downsize radar equipment to fit in the E-2C.
Jim Ziegler has been named Wichita, Kan.-based vice president/general manager of Bombardier Business Aviation Services. He was head of the company's Learjet Operations and Completions.
Airbus CEO Noel Forgeard has named four Japanese suppliers that will participate in the A380 ultrawide-body program. The companies--Jamco, Sumitomo, Toray and Toho--will provide carbon upper-floor-deck cross beams and VTP center box profiles, titanium sheet and intermediate-module fiber composites worth up to $650 million during the life of the program. He did not specify whether any of the firms had agreed to take a risk share in the program, but reaffirmed that other Japanese companies would join in the coming months (AW&ST Mar. 4, p. 19).
It's not every day that the U.S. Navy must change out an aircraft engine while the airplane is deployed on an aircraft carrier at sea. But that is necessary on occasion, and it was Lockheed Martin's ability to demonstrate a shipborne engine change on the Joint Strike Fighter that helped win the downselect for the next-generation aircraft.
Marrying its mapping expertise with the digital world, Jeppesen has unveiled a prototype of a cockpit information management system it calls the Electronic Flight Bag. The EFB is a software and data services solution for creating a ``paperless cockpit'' by digitizing a number of tools and tasks. Applications and functions include digitizing logbooks, navigation charts and flight documents.
Tokyo's Haneda airport has long been the key hub for air travel in Japan. Now, Japan Airlines and Japan Air System have concluded that it's also the key to their corporate future. The two carriers have decided that renouncing some of their coveted slots at Haneda will make their proposed merger less threatening. JAL is strongest in international flights and Japan's biggest airline; JAS serves mainly domestic routes and is ranked No. 3. All Nippon Airways, which holds about 50% of the domestic market, is No. 2.
Fairchild Dornier, which filed last week for Chapter 11-like protection from creditors, expects to find a strategic investor within the next three months. The troubled company's survival is at stake.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries, a partner in design and production of the main wing for the 108-seat Embraer ERJ-195, will build a 77,500-sq.-ft. assembly plant at the Brazilian manufacturer's site in Sao Paulo. KHI expects the plant to open in October and wing assembly to begin in 2003. Manufacturing capacity is put at 40-48 wingsets a year with a staff of 70. KHI has orders for 102 shipsets. Not all of the work will be shifted out of Japan, however. KHI will manufacture parts and components for the wing at its Gifu plant near Nagoya.
Randy J. Appelhans (see photo) has become vice president-materials and purchasing for Dallas Airmotive Inc. He was director of materials and logistics for the Plexus Corp. Appelhans succeeds David Searle, who is managing the company's computer system integration program.
Southwest Airlines has launched Boeing's Enterprise One maintenance, repair and overhaul software. Boeing began positioning itself as a major software provider last year by developing Enterprise One components for logistics, engineering and MRO tasks. Southwest has opted for the MaintStream MRO package that was developed by a Canadian subsidiary of Boeing, AeroInfo Systems Inc. MaintStream is scalable for carriers with as few as 20 aircraft, to those with the largest fleets. With 359 737s, Southwest clearly qualifies as one of the latter.
This fire-retardant, single-coated adhesive tape is engineered to meet the requirements of FAR 25.855(d), and is used to join, seal and repair cargo compartment liners on commercial and private aircraft. The tape, T3605, is composed of a white polyethylene-coated cloth covered with a fire-retardant rubber-based adhesive. The high-count glass fabric ensures no flame penetration, and is imprinted with the product's FAR classification to reduce paperwork associated with FAA inspections.
Sikorsky Aircraft has reacted sharply to charges by Eurocopter that it resorted to improper procedures in a successful bid to sell its S-92 helicopter to the Irish Air Corps. ``We were at no stage privy to any of our competitors' prices or any details of their tenders,'' Sikorsky said in a written statement, referring to allegations in an action to be brought against the Irish government by Eurocopter (AW&ST Apr. 1, p. 20). Sikorsky also said that a revised bid filed on Sept.
The space shuttle Atlantis was scheduled to be launched by early this week under even tighter security than the two previous flights since Sept. 11, as NASA moves toward an even greater security challenge in July: the planned launch of an Israeli astronaut.
To bolster the H-1 upgrade program that faces scrutiny in the Pentagon because of large cost growth, Bell Helicopter is touting flight test progress the UH-1Y and AH-1Z have recently made. The UH-1Y prototype that has been flying since last December has logged 50 flights and 44 hr., reaching speeds up to 190 kt. in a shallow dive, 25 kt. in sideward flight and 20 kt. in rearward flight. Later this year, two more UH-1Ys will join the test program at NAS Patuxent River, Md. The prototype AH-1Z attack helo has accumulated 224 hr.
A group of European and Russian organizations will investigate the use of liquid methane/liquid oxygen propulsion in reusable rocket engines. The project, dubbed Volga, will bring together Snecma Moteurs, Astrium GmbH., Volvo Aero, Techspace Aero, NPO Energomash, Chemical Automatics Design Bureau and the Keldysh Research Center. Backers hope to interest French space agency CNES and the German Aerospace Center DLR in the initiative, which is proposed for the European Space Agency's Future Launcher Preparatory Program, intended to be launched in midyear.
Operations in the Southern Philippines claimed another Central Intelligence Agency intelligence-gathering aircraft late last month when an unmanned Gnat 750 crashed in a bay west of Zamboanga City just after takeoff for an early morning mission. However, Philippine and U.S. Navy divers recovered the aircraft almost intact. The CIA also lost the first aircraft in Afghanistan when one of the agency's larger Predator UAVs crashed last year. UAVs and Navy P-3s are supporting the search for Abu Sayyaf Muslim militants in the area.
Preliminary analysis by Honeywell of 71 runway incursions worldwide between 1990-2002 indicates that 70% involved deviations by the cockpit crew from standard operating procedures and 46% involved failure by ATC to provide separation, according to Ratan Khatwa, manager of flight safety human factors at Honeywell. He said 34% occurred in darkness or twilight, which implies a risk twice as high than daylight, and 23% were in visibility less than a runway visual range of 1,200 ft.
The Ecoplate metallic conformal coating process is an automated system that applies a pure metal coating over plastic or metal electronic housings to provide lower-cost EMI shielding. In the patent-pending process, a metal film is atomized and sprayed onto enclosure parts. Shielding performance of the Ecoplate 5030 tin/zinc alloy exceeds 75 dB. from 100 MHz. to 10 GHz. The low-temperature process is free of solvents and corrosives, making it suitable for plastic injection-molded parts. Chomerics, Div. of Parker Hannifin, 77 Dragon Court, Woburn, Mass. 01888.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has ordered 300 explosives-detection systems--consisting of CTX 2500 and CTX 5500DS models--plus 100 component sets from InVision Technologies Inc. The order is valued at more than $148 million.
Hong Kong International Airport said it will add a HK$13 ($1.69) airport security surcharge on all departing passengers beginning May 1 in response to the added costs the airport has experienced since Sept. 11.
