Alan Garwood (see photo) has been appointed deputy chief executive officer of Matra BAe Dynamics. He succeeds Roger Hawksworth, who has been appointed to the British Aerospace Secretariat. Garwood was managing director for sales and marketing in Europe and North America for BAe.
Air New Zealand's order for seven Boeing 737-300s announced two weeks ago will be filled by aircraft built for Garuda Indonesia and now stored by Boeing at Marana, Ariz., because Garuda could not pay for them. Garuda has had to return six McDonnell Douglas MD-11s to Boeing and renegotiate terms for its six Airbus A330s. The cash-strapped airline has canceled its U.S. services and most of its European routes.
Top management at Eurocopter is seeking to generate support within the European helicopter industry and the European Commission in Brussels for a tiltrotor demonstration program to prevent the U.S. from gaining a stranglehold on this technology.
Boeing's Phantom Works is using a ``virtual factory'' technique to significantly reduce design, development and manufacturing costs and cycle times on its X-32 Joint Strike Fighter demonstrators. The process, called Design, Manufacturing and Producibility Simulation, brings design and manufacturing engineers together early in the component development process to build virtual parts in a virtual factory using planned materials, techniques and processes.
French, German and Italian military officials are looking at additional applications for the Polyphem fiber-optic guided missile, including ship and coastal defense, as well as airborne anti-ship missions. The trinational program, recently moved into phase two earlier this year, will include manufacturing and testing of an entire system. The first phase, completed last year, involved technology development and demonstrations of key subsystems including the firing of a complete missile.
Twenty years after the U.S. deregulated its airline industry and began exporting the concept to other parts of the world, a debate rages over the future direction of U.S. aviation policy--both domestic and international.
Air Commo. Gordon McRobbie, Royal Air Force director of public relations, is retiring after more than 30 years of service to become director of the U.K. Airprox Board, recently created to investigate air proximity incidents. He will be succeeded by Air Commo. David Walker.
Pierre-Emmanuel Gires (see photo) has become vice president-industrial market for Europe, the Middle East and Africa of AlliedSignal. He was director of Snecma's large commercial engine programs.
Construction of a second passenger terminal has been approved by Japan's Ministry of Transport for Tokyo's Haneda airport. Haneda is Asia's busiest airport and sixth busiest in the world but is less well-known than others because it handles domestic traffic almost exclusively. The passenger terminal has been a longstanding need but was delayed due to the recession in Japan. The cost is to be more than 100 million yen ($870 million) with completion expected in 2003. The ministry also said a crosswind runway is to be built, but gave no cost estimate.
Seeking to accelerate the spread of free trade, U.S. policymakers are reviewing acceptance of business practices long regarded as taboo in commercial aviation. The chief liberalizations under consideration are the right of cabotage under which foreign airlines would be permitted to operate within U.S. borders, and an easing of current restrictions on foreign investment in domestic airlines.
A major restructuring of airline ownership in Southeast Asia is seen as the only viable solution to the region's unprecedented combination of problems that include falling traffic, declining yields, excess capacity, huge debt and savage currency depreciation. Worse, no end is in sight to the economic problems plaguing the area.
Scott Crossfield and Harvey Ray Tyson, Jr., will be inducted into the Virginia Aeronautical Historical Society's Aviation Hall of Fame on Nov. 14. Crossfield is a veteran test pilot and Tyson a businessman, pilot andmajor contributor to the Virginia Aviation Museum.
THE U.S. AIR FORCE'S ROME (N.Y.) LABORATORY has selected Sky Computer to supply a 384-processor Sky channel system as part of the Defense Dept. High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The 256-gigaflop system, which will be shared by the other services for signal/image processing, will be the most powerful super computer in the Air Force and and rank 20th in the world. Basis for the Sky Channel is the Excalibur 333 which has four PowerPC 604e microprocessors, running at 333 MHz. The computer will have three chassis, each with 32 Excalibur motherboards.
The Greek government is seeking a strategic investor for troubled state carrier Olympic Airways. A stake of 15-20%, which could also involve management of the airline, is being offered to prospective investors. Olympic has been struggling to implement a restructuring plan, which includes wage freezes and longer working hours, against stiff opposition from labor unions. Meanwhile, Dutch carrier Transavia has become the first non-Greek airline to operate a scheduled domestic service in Greece.
An AirTran Boeing 737-300 ran off the runway at Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport Nov. 1 after one of its hydraulic systems failed in flight and the other failed after landing, National Transportation Safety Board officials said. Ten of the 100 passengers suffered minor injuries. Investigators are looking into whether a failed thrust-reverser hydraulic line was left uncapped, leading to loss of fluid.
Donna Shirley, recently retired manager of the Mars Exploration Program at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., is among recent inductees into the Oklahoma Aviation and Space Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. Others are: Clyde Martin DeHart, Jr., Southwest U.S. administrator of the FAA; J. Milton Heflin, Jr., deputy chief of the Flight Director Office of the Johnson Space Center in Houston; and Gen. Kenneth Taylor (USAF, Ret.). Maj. Gen. William P.
International safety officials are considering hiring professional marketeers to help them convince the world's airlines to use countermeasures and training aids developed over the last several years to prevent accidents involving controlled flight into terrain (CFIT). Such accidents were the target of a five-year effort by the International Civil Aviation Organization and the Flight Safety Foundation. CFIT has been identified by numerous studies as the most common cause of fatal aircraft accidents.
Deregulation is slowly becoming a reality in the European Union's single market. However, airline fare structures are far from being revolutionized, dramatic service improvements have not materialized yet and no major consolidation initiatives are in sight.
While attacks on Yugoslavia were being planned, the U.S. Navy moved quickly to test the ability of its Standoff Land Attack Missile (Slam) to strike accurately without human guidance, using only GPS coordinates as an aiming point. Normally, Slam is maneuvered in the last seconds of its flight by a person operating flight controls in the launch aircraft.
Sokol Aircraft factory officials at Nizhnyi Novgorod in Russia have begun openly criticizing the ``economic logic'' of an upgrade program for Indian MiG-21 fighters. Sokol officials are ``smarting over the fact that [their] plant will upgrade only two MiG-21s...as against the 123 India will produce under the arrangement,'' according to a report from Moscow.
A NEW DIRECTED INFRARED COUNTERMEASURES (DIRCM) system with a small (5.5-in.-dia.) beam-pointing tracker head for use on jet fighters was unveiled by Northrop Grumman at the recent Assn. of Old Crows (AOC) conference in Virginia Beach, Va. The IR beam is provided by a solid-state laser instead of lamps used in the AAQ-24 DIRCM which the company is now producing for the British Ministry of Defense (AW&ST Oct. 26, p. 44). The new DIRCM, called Wanda (not an acronym), is expected to undergo flight tests next year.
In an effort to combat the rising number of ``air rage'' incidents involving violent and abusive passengers, U.K. Transport Minister John Reid has called for a meeting with British airline officials to discuss ways to take action.
FAA officials in the Great Lakes Region have decided to suspend indefinitely testing of the Extended Compressed Arrival Procedures (ECAPS) at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Plans had called for testing the system 16 hr. instead of only 2 hr. on certain days. ECAPS allows controllers to form two streams of aircraft at a distance of 60 mi. from O'Hare, and expedite flow to the airport.
Russia's defense industry is continuing to update its offerings of air defense weaponry, with an eye to increasing exports and re-equipping Russian forces. They have fielded an improved version of the highly mobile SA-6 that shot down Air Force Capt. Scott O'Grady's F-16 over Bosnia. Dubbed ``Gainful'' in the West, it has been fitted with a longer-range missile developed for the SA-11 ``Gang'' system. It is one of the systems the Russians were threatening to give Serb forces if the U.S. launched air attacks because of repression in Kosovo.
