Officine Galileo, a Finmeccanica/Alenia Difesa space affiliate, has been awarded a contract by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory covering the conceptual design of a Stellar reference unit.
Mark Gilman, Lynn Hinman and Tina Margherio have been promoted to associates in the Aviation Group of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, Orlando, Fla. Gilman was a project architect, Hinman a project accountant and Margherio a graphic designer.
Malaysian Airlines (MAS) was cleared by U.K. transport authorities of landing at Heathrow with low fuel (AW&ST May 17, p. 17). In a letter to the Malaysian Ministry of Transport, the U.K. Dept. of Environment, Transportation and the Region said the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) agrees that MAS' fuel policy is in accordance with international standards. Over the past six months, Malaysia Airlines 747s have landed in London with an average of 9.50 tons of fuel.
Ansett International has received approval from Australia's International Air Services Commission (IASC) to code-share on all Singapore Airlines services to Singapore plus four flights a day to Bangkok and seven weekly flights to London starting on July 1. Ansett is also looking at flights to the U.S. in 2000 using its own aircraft.
The Marine Corps' long-term plans foresee a consolidation of the CH-53E and KC-130 aircraft into a single platform once those aircraft have to be replaced after 2010. One leading candidate would be a tiltrotor, much larger than the MV-22 the Marines are now buying, said Lt. Gen. Frederick McCorkle, the Marine Corps deputy chief of staff for aviation. ``I think a tiltrotor-type platform, in the future, will carry what a KC-130 now carries,'' McCorkle said.
B-1 bomber crews flying missions over Yugoslavia are praising the effectiveness of the heavy bomber's towed decoy. The Raytheon-built ALE-50 is reeled out of a pod on the aircraft's tail. In position well behind the aircraft, the decoy retransmits an electronic signal similar to and stronger than the radar reflection from the real bomber. Yugoslav surface-to-air missiles then home in on the decoy. The five B-1s at RAF Fairford have so far flown 50 missions--many of them in attacks on well-defended Yugoslav airfields--during which 30 SAMs were fired at them.
GE Aircraft Engines will electronically publish technical and maintenance documentation for all its major engines using Enigma Inc.'s Insight system. The contract is worth $4.8 million to Enigma, and the data for nine engines are to be published via CD-ROM and the Internet over the next 18 months. Airlines and maintenance shops will be able to customize data using Enigma's Xtend technology
James D. Raisbeck, president/CEO of the Raisbeck Commercial Air Group of Seattle, has won the 1999 Commercial Aviation Technical Achievement Award from The Pacific Northwest Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was honored for his work to extend the useful life of the Boeing 727, through his company's Stage 3 System, to bring those aircraft into compliance with FAR Part 36 Stage 3 noise requirements.
The first of 95 Air-Launched Cruise Missiles planned for conversion into non-nuclear, conventional Alcms (Calcms), has arrived at Boeing's facility at St. Charles, Mo. Boeing received a $41-million contract to reopen its conversion line and perform the work. Deliveries to the U.S. Air Force will begin by year-end, with production ramping up to 24 per month by mid-2000.
Turkish Aerospace Industries will start producing $110 million worth of components for Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters following U.S. congressional approval of the sale of 50 of the helicopters to Turkey. Endorsement of the $630-million deal, following years of dispute between the two countries regarding arms sales, also boosts U.S. chances of winning the upcoming $3.5-billion Turkish competition for 145 attack helicopters. Vying for the sale are the U.S.-built Boeing AH-64 Apache and Bell King Cobra.
Don't look for a near-term improvement in annual worldwide airline passenger death totals, according to Don Bateman, chief engineer of safety for AlliedSignal Aerospace's Avionics&Lighting group. Passenger fatalities from airline accidents around the world consistently averaged about 700 per year from 1968-97. We can still expect to see about 700 airline fatalities annually, Bateman said.
In one of the largest aerospace outsourcing contracts, Pratt&Whitney has signed a $1.2-billion agreement with Computer Sciences Corp. to manage its global information technology systems. Pratt has been making large software investments for several years, most recently spending more than $100 million for SAP's R/3 enterprise resource management system that will replace thousands of software packages in Pratt's global operations (AW&ST Jan. 25, p. 73). CSC will help in the complex task of implementing R/3.
China's bonanza of U.S. nuclear secrets is shocking and perhaps unprecedented, but it remains unclear whether Beijing can, or even wants to, use the stolen technology to alter the nuclear balance of power with the U.S.
EA-6Bs operating over Yugoslavia are among the allied aircraft potentially most at risk to attack from optically guided surface-to-air missile attacks, but upgrades funded by the Kosovo emergency supplemental should provide added protection and mitigate equipment shortages.
As part of a code-share alliance between Continental Airlines and Panama's Copa Airlines, Copa has taken delivery of the first of 12 new Boeing 737-700s the airline plans to operate this year on nonstop flights from Panama City to destinations in South America, including Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo. Beginning June 10, Copa and Continental are scheduled to link their international flights to destinations in the U.S., the Caribbean region, as well as Central and South America.
Congress is expected to rebuff a Pentagon request to move forward on only one of its Upper Tier missile defense programs, leaving the Defense Dept. scrambling to find ways to fund both the Army's Theater High-Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) and Navy Theater-Wide effort.
Racal Instruments of Slough, England, has been selected by Smiths Industries to provide its Freedom Series VXIbus automatic test equipment for the utilities management systems for Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft.
NASA should rejuvenate the public's interest in space by allowing ordinary citizens to go into orbit, said astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who landed on the Moon with Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969. Following John Glenn's example, NASA should send up 2-3 people a year, starting with a journalist, he said at the media history Newseum in Washington. A new shuttle design could let 10-15 people at a time experience the thrill of space, and lend support to a new space vision--permanent stations on the Moon and Mars.
The notion that U.S. aerospace companies no longer may be the world's most competitive probably is unsettling to many industry players based in North America. Nonetheless it is a distinct possibility, as Aviation Week and Space Technology's 1999 Index of Competitiveness strongly suggests. At the very least, it makes a compelling case that some of the world's best-managed aerospace businesses--as defined by profitable growth and positioning for superior performance in the future--are headquartered not in the U.S. but in England (see p. 45).
The Pentagon's long-running effort to develop a weapon to attack chemical and biological weapon production and storage sites has encountered a serious problem--no contractor has come up with an adequate technical solution. USAF wanted to demonstrate such a system under its Agent Defeat Warhead program. However, no acceptable proposal was received, according to the Air Force Research Laboratory. Agent Defeat weapons are supposed to allow the U.S. to attack sites housing chemical and biological agents with minimum risk of collateral damage.
THE U.S. AIR FORCE WILL BUY ORBITAL SCIENCES Corp.'s Digital Terrain System (DTS) for F-16 aircraft. The predictive ground collision avoidance system, made by Orbital's Fairchild Defense Div., provides aural and head-up display alerts. It is already in use in USAF Reserve F-16s and in the air forces of Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway, and has been used over Kosovo. The $16.5-million contract represents the initial step toward equipping a 1,500-aircraft fleet. DTS is a derivative of a terrain-matching system developed by British Aerospace.
Robert B. Stone has been appointed vice president-financial planning and analysis and Laurette T. Koellner vice president/corporate controller of the Boeing Co. of Seattle. Stone was assistant treasurer, and Koellner was vice president/general auditor. Gale C. Andrews has been promoted from director of internal audit to succeed Koellner.
The Navy's Tomahawk cruise missile is undergoing live-fire Y2K tests. All launch-related clocks on the USS San Francisco, a Los Angeles-class attack sub, were set to Feb. 29, 2000, and on ``Mar. 1'' the Tomahawk was successfully fired toward the Navy's China Lake, Calif., range. After a 575-mi. terrain contour matching flight, the missile was recovered by parachute.
Japan plans to start construction by year's end on a new runway at Tokyo's Narita International Airport to handle a projected temporary rise in traffic in 2002. Japan's Ministry of Transport and the New Tokyo International Airport Public Corp. will shift the site of the proposed runway about a half-mile to the north and shorten it from the planned length of about 8,200 ft. to about 7,150 ft.
THE FAA HAS ASKED THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY to assess the civil jamming threats to GPS navigation signals. A January risk assessment by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory concluded that intentional interference ``is by far the largest risk area'' to the ability of satellite navigation to meet aircraft performance needs (AW&ST Feb. 15, p. 59). That study did not have access to classified data but recommended that the FAA work with the intelligence community to conduct a formal threat assessment.
