CMC Electronics completed a further series of developmental flight trials of its Infrared Enhanced Vision System (IR-EVS) for aircraft equipped with head-up displays in genav, military and air transport markets. When installed in the aircraft's radome, the IR sensor can detect thermal gradients of the terrain ahead. CMC has conducted more than 30 approaches and ground movement operations in various weather conditions: one-quarter-mi. visibility and a 300-ft. ceiling, fog, rain, mist and haze, in both day and night operations.
The worsening aviation market has prompted Qantas to cut 1,500-2,000 jobs by year-end. CEO Geoff Dixon said the cuts will be achieved by layoffs, attrition and not filling vacancies. He said significant staff numbers will be shifted from Qantas' international to domestic operations, which are being expanded following the collapse of Ansett Australia. To fill that void, Qantas has ordered 15 white-tail 737-800s from American Airlines and two Bombardier Dash 8-400s, with deliveries to begin in January. Employee wages will be frozen for 12-18 months.
The one-two punch of the traffic declines that followed the events of Sept. 11, coupled with the ongoing economic downturn, has left Europe's major air carriers reeling. The situation is aggravated by the European airline industry's fragmentation. However, no consolidation plan is in sight and the wake-up calls of Sabena Belgian World Airlines' bankruptcy and Swissair's collapse remain largely ignored.
Indomitable Belgian officials have created a task force to come up with a plan for a new national carrier in the wake of the demise of Sabena Belgian World Airlines. It would succeed Sabena, which ceased operations on Nov. 7, but retain a more limited scope with a focus on European routes.
U.S. Transportation Dept. consideration of antitrust immunity for American Airlines and British Airways should be consolidated with the United Airlines-British Midland immunity application, Northwest has proposed. Many of the issues are the same and each application affects the other, Northwest said with support from Virgin Atlantic, and each depends on negotiation of an open-skies aviation agreement by the U.S. and the U.K.
The U.S. and the European Commission ``may only be at the beginning of our disagreements'' on antitrust policy if this year's GE-Honeywell merger clash reflects ``a fundamentally different view about the comparative ability of markets versus government regulators to get it right,'' Deputy Assistant Attorney General William Kolasky told a George Mason University symposium. The U.S. approved the merger as pro-consumer while the EC vetoed it as anticompetitive. ``In the U.S., we have much greater faith in markets than we do in regulators,'' Kolasky said.
To simulate process conditions, the CLF-II calibrator can be connected to loop-powered transmitter inputs, for performance tests on system software. For transmitter calibration, the unit has an integral 24 Vdc power supply and loop-current read-out. Transmitter readings can be scaled into engineering units like psi, pascal and bar. Readings in percent (%) on 4-20 mA ranges can be obtained by pressing the ``%/mA'' key; useful when testing or adjusting alarm settings. Signal outputs and measurement inputs are electrically isolated to read output and input simultaneously.
Air Force officials are unhappy about the snail's pace toward taking advantage of the slump in airline orders to buy cut-rate Boeing 767s. ``There are a lot of commands competing to get rid of the 707 airframes,'' a service official said. These include those that fly intelligence-gathering Rivet Joint and Joint-STARS aircraft and tankers--all of which are in high demand. However, neither senior Defense Dept. civilians nor Congress have strongly pushed the replacement effort.
Aviation changed forever on Sept. 11, but for companies on the aftermarket side, the changes are less dramatic than in other parts of the industry. While aircraft operators and airports grapple with a host of new variables that affect their businesses, the keys to generating aftermarket profits--cost control, supply chain management and product-line diversity--have not changed.
With radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking and labeling becoming increasingly useful for spare parts management, this company is offering ``total tech support'' encompassing RFID custom programming, ion-deposition variable printing, RFID chip substrate insertion and Internet order tracking.
Michael L. Ballee has been named director of air transportation for Ashland Inc., Covington, Ky. He succeeds Stephen W. Koontz, who is retiring. Ballee has been a pilot supervisor for Citation and Falcon aircraft.
U.S. aviation security screeners will become Transportation Dept. civil servants under a compromise struck late last week between House and Senate leaders, capping a month-long bitter and embarrassing debate among lawmakers.
NASA has completed an independent assessment of tiltrotor characteristics that could affect safety or performance of the V-22. The 13-member panel, led by Ames Research Center Director Henry McDonald, finds no known phenomena that would warrant stopping development and deployment of the aircraft. On the contrary, the panel calls for restarting the test program and adding aircraft and personnel to accelerate it. High-priority recommendations include improving rate-of-descent information to the crew, expanding testing at 40-60 kt.
USAF Gen. (ret.) Howell M. Estes, 3rd, has been appointed to the board of directors of the Colorado Springs-based Space Foundation. He was commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Space Command; and commander of the Air Force Space Command, Peterson AFB, Colo.
Luxembourg-based Societe Europeenne de Satellites (SES) will purchase GE Americom. The $4.3-billion external growth initiative will make SES the biggest satellite operator in the industry, with 41 spacecraft.
A combination of crew-scheduling issues and the dramatic downturn in market conditions since Sept. 11 is apparently giving Singapore Airlines (SIA) second thoughts about proceeding with its $2.2-billion A340-500 order of five aircraft with five options. A lack of regulations for extra cockpit crew duty time for flights exceeding 18 hr. has become a sticking issue. The FAA and Joint Aviation Authorities require four pilots for flights exceeding 14 hr. The Europeans have discussed adding extra crewmembers for flights lasting more than 18 hr.
Susan M. Porter (see photo, p. 19) has been promoted to director of the Advanced Interactive Technologies Dept. of the Southwest Research Institute of San Antonio from manager of the Advanced Simulation Technologies Section of the Training Systems and Simulators Div.
By Stephen E. Ambrose Simon&Schuster 299 pp., Hardcover, $26.00 The Wild Blue takes the reader back to World War II through glimpses into the lives of American pilots who flew the B-24 Liberators. Big for their day, the lumbering four-engine bombers were built by the thousands and launched in raids that could number in the hundreds. Known as the hardest airplane to fly, it took a strong arm to fly wingtip-to-wingtip for saturation bombing--which also simplified the job for enemy gunners on the ground.
DPI LABS IS OFFERING ITS SAFE-LINK COMMUNICATIONS shielding system, now in use in some military and high-security aircraft, to civil users. Safe-Link is a compact voice and data distribution system that shields sensitive communication within the aircraft against sophisticated detection devices. It is designed to protect messages when they are most vulnerable--before a transmission is encrypted and after a received message is decrypted. A cabin management system can create the additional levels of security before use is authorized.
A financial cloud that's been hanging over Raytheon Co. for months appears to have been removed with an agreement in principle between the defense contractor and Washington Group International Inc. (WGI) to relinquish all pending litigation on both sides. The bitter legal battle stemmed from Raytheon's sale of its engineering and construction business to WGI, which abandoned construction projects guaranteed by Raytheon.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems has shipped this U.S. Air Force Milstar II communications satellite from its Sunnyvale, Calif., factory to Cape Canaveral, where it is to be prepared for launch Jan. 15 on a Titan IVB/
British carriers' adjustment to the global economic slowdown continues unabated, and the watchword is battling costs. British Midland's CEO Austin Reid said airlines would have to ``reinvent themselves by examining closely the financial models on which they operate.'' As for other major British carriers, Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) warns investors that further downsizing is likely at British Airways, which is projected to lose about $1 billion this year on a 13% fall in current year revenue.
Jim Jensen has become president/chief operating officer of Polar Air Cargo. He was senior vice president-maintenance and engineering for Trans World Airlines.
