NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin ratcheted up pressure on his White House bosses for money to fix the international space station, saying the beleaguered project may as well be canceled if new sources of funding can't be found.
Adm. William A. Owens (USN, Ret.) has been named to the board of directors of ViaSat, Carlsbad, Calif. Owens is vice chairman of Teledesic and CEO of Teledesic Holdings. He is a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Missile guidance systems are advancing on several fronts as GPS spreads into old and new systems, automatic target recognition moves toward deployment, and ballistic missile defense programs improve the state-of-the-art in data fusion and infrared sensors.
William Gehman has been elected 1998-99 chairman of the National Association of State Aviation Officials (NASAO). He is deputy director of the Michigan Bureau of Aeronautics. Other officers elected are: vice chairman, William Blake, director of the Illinois Aeronautics Div.; secretary, Kim Stevens, director of the Nebraska Aeronautics Dept.; and treasurer, Kenneth Wiegand, director of the Virginia Aviation Dept. Robert Kunkel, director of the Wisconsin Bureau of Aeronautics, is immediate past chairman.
Sogerma, an Aerospatiale maintenance and overhaul affiliate, has received an order from Iberia to upgrade the business-class sections on eight Airbus A340s.
With runway incursions on the rise, the FAA plans to conduct tests of an Airport Target Identification System (ATIDS) late in 1999 at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). Unlike existing ground surveillance radars, ATIDS would use signals from on-board transponders to provide controllers with details about location, speed and identity of aircraft and vehicles on runways, taxiways and ramp areas. Receivers and transmitters installed at strategic locations would track the aircraft and vehicles.
Lockheed Martin has completed a Final Design Review of its X-35 Joint Strike Fighter candidate by the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps and the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence in preparation for initial flight tests scheduled to begin in 2000.
In a series of simulations from Oct. 27-29, the System Development and Evaluation Center of Japan's Ministry of Transport at Tokyo's Haneda airport and the FAA's Technical Center near Atlantic City, N.J., will test whether Japan's air traffic control computer system is Year 2000 compliant. Currently, Japan's Air Traffic Control Center in Tokyo and the FAA's Oakland (Calif.) center use telephone links to report departure and arrival times and routes for transpacific flights. Japan is to install a computerized system based on global positioning satellite linkages by 2000.
Russia, seeking to bolster its cash-starved defense industry, is offering for export the latest versions of surface-to-air missiles designed for use with its S-300PMU Favorit air defense system.
Osama bin Laden was at a meeting of his terrorist leadership in one of the Afghanistani camps hit by U.S. cruise missiles in August, the Pentagon is telling aerospace officials. But bin Laden was in one of the hardened facilities that proved immune to the relatively light, blast-fragmentation warheads used. They are designed for destroying softer targets like warehouses, office buildings and air defenses. ``The Tomahawks wiped out the guards, drivers, vehicles and electrical and water supplies,'' said an official who was briefed by the Pentagon on attack results.
Bradford Parkinson will be acting president/CEO of Trimble Navigation, Austin, Tex., while the board of directors seeks a successor for company founder Charles Trimble, who has stepped down. Trimble will be vice chairman and continue as chairman of the U.S. GPS Industry Council. Parkinson is on a leave of absence as a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University.
The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency has awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. a $16.9-million contract to provide analysis processors, superheterodyne controllers, directional finding receiver units and power supplies for the AN/ALR-56M radar-warning receiver on F-16s and C-130Js. Britten-Norman has completed work on the first aircraft, a BN2B-26 Islander, to be refurbished at its new maintenance repair and overhaul facility on the Isle of Wight, England. The maritime patrol aircraft has been delivered to the armed forces of Malta.
The Airbus A318 has a heavier takeoff weight than the Boeing 717, but weight will probably not be a big factor for Japanese regionals in the choice of a new 100-seater (see p. 44). High landing fees once made weight a big issue at Japanese airports, but the Ministry of Transport has rolled back fees by one-third at most airports. Still, the new aircraft face an uphill battle in Japan, where regional carriers are focused more on replacing 50-seat Nippon YS-11 turboprops than introducing the larger jets.
Airbus Industrie expects that new developments in laminar flow control technology will significantly reduce airframe skin drag, lower fuel consumption of its commercial transports and help cut direct operating costs. An Airbus A320 twinjet equipped with a Hybrid Laminar Flow (HLF) fin recently began a flight test program. The initiative is expected to play a major role in the proposed A3XX high-capacity transport.
Raytheon Co.'s new president and chief operating officer, Daniel P. Burnham, completed his first 100 days on the job last Thursday. During that time, Wall Street was hoping he would unveil a comprehensive plan to improve the $21-billion corporation's efficiency, ensure that the company will meet performance commitments and increase shareholder value. With the productivity and cost-reduction initiatives announced last week, it appears they won't be disappointed. ``Those were pretty bold steps he announced, but I wasn't surprised,'' JSA Research analyst Paul Nisbet said.
Los Alamos National Laboratory has used 3Com Gigabit Ethernet switches as the backbone of a network of Carrera desktop computers (with DEC processors and motherboards) to create a low-cost supercomputer called Avalon with a data handling capacity of 47 gigaflops (47 billion operations/sec.). Avalon's chief architect, Michael Warren of the lab's Theoretical Astrophysics Group, used a Beowulf design for the system architecture. The network originated last spring with 70 64-bit processors, or nodes, but it was designed for expansion to 144 nodes.
Continental Express pilots are bracing for a potential strike against the regional airline over pay for entry-level first officers having less than one year of service. They initially earn $13,372 annually, and receive no health, retirement, or pension benefits until after the first year, according to an official of the Independent Assn. of Continental Pilots. Although progress has been made between the two sides during recent meetings, a strike vote is scheduled to be counted on Oct. 14.
Japan's Defense Agency has delayed the completion of testing of its Mitsubishi/Lockheed Martin F-2 close air support fighter until late next year while modifications to its composite wings are completed following revelations of wing drop, flutter and surface stiffness problems.
Eagle-Picher Technologies has won a $10-million contract to develop, design, fabricate and test a high-energy density lithium-ion rechargeable battery for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to be used on multiple aircraft and spacecraft.
Sea Launch has decided to conduct a demonstration launch next March from a location near the equator with a fully integrated, three- stage Zenit booster and inert payload. The payload will be a simulated spacecraft that has been used during ``pathfinder'' activities to test processing procedures at the Sea Launch home port prior to handling an operational satellite. The simulated payload will be placed in orbit flying a Galaxy 11 mission profile.
In a $4-million contract, the Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH. (DFS), Germany's air navigation administration, has selected AD OPT's ShiftLogic scheduling software for use by its 3,300 air traffic controllers, flight data assistants and technicians. Implementation of ShiftLogic at 18 DFS ATC sites is to begin next spring. All sites, including the air traffic coordination centers in Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe and Bremen, are to be completed by 2001. ShiftLogic is used for shift schedule planning, updating and administration.
The protection of the new International Space Station, the shuttle and other spacecraft from potentially catastrophic or fatal impacts from meteoroids or man-made space debris is a growing area of international concern, numerous analysts told the IAF meeting here last week. Those concerns are being heightened by the impending Leonid meteoroid storm that on Nov. 17-18 ``will represent the largest meteoroid threat to spacecraft in history,'' according to David K. Lynch of The Aerospace Corp. in Los Angeles.
Watch for fireworks in a congressional hearing this week on the International Space Station. First, NASA has made it official--the Russian-built service module won't be ready for launching next April. The space agency is slipping the launch to July 1999. But in an effort to avoid an embarrassing delay in beginning construction, the agency is keeping the first two station assembly flights set for Nov. 20 and Dec. 3.
Willis J. Brown, Jr., has been appointed vice president-marketing of Wamar International Inc., Simi Valley, Calif. He was executive vice president of the Hughes International Corp.
