Raymond M. Gomez has been named vice president-public relations for Rockwell International, Seal Beach, Calif. He was executive director of corporate communications for Ameritech Corp.'s network services unit in Chicago.
William A. Shumann has been named director of public affairs for the David Sarnoff Research Center, Princeton, N.J. He was manager of public relations for Lockheed Martin Astro Space, East Windsor, N.J.
A TWO-WEEK SUSPENSION of NASA's X-34 program was lifted Nov. 3 after one day at ``encouragement'' of the White House. NASA and contractors Orbital Sciences and Rockwell were still trying to iron out a dispute last week over a contractor demand that the reusable winged booster use Rocketdyne's RS-27 engine instead of the Russian RD-120 originally planned.
An international consortium of air cargo and equipment companies will modify a privately owned Boeing 707 to an air refueling tanker configuration, then provide turnkey lease services to U.S. and allied military forces. A Boeing 707-300 owned by Omega Air will be converted to a dual-redundant centerline hose configuration by installing a hose-and-reel system in the rear cargo hold. Fuel will be pumped from existing aircraft tanks, although subsequent versions could have auxiliary tanks installed.
With the number of ``blue ice'' incidents on the rise, the FAA plans to issue two airworthiness directives mandating repetitive inspections and modifications to toilet drain systems on all Boeing 737, McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and MD-11F transports, and may soon expand applicability to other aircraft. Blue ice is formed by liquids that accumulate in leaking toilet drain systems, freeze and eventually dislodge from an aircraft, sometimes striking parts of the airframe or damaging engines (AW&ST Aug. 15, 1994, p. 36).
T. Christopher Fitzsimmons has been promoted to president from general manager of Eastman Kodak Commercial and Government Systems, Rochester, N.Y. Donald L. Light has been named a business strategist for airborne digital imaging and remote sensing. He was a manager of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Mapping Program.
NEW IMAGE ANALYSIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDING Hubble Telescope-like resolution from ground-based telescopes in certain applications. The Fractal Pixon Basis image restoration and reconstruction technique quantifies the information in an image or dataset using a new, information theory-based concept called the ``pixon.'' The method allows optimal image extraction.
George Rose has been named director of finance at British Aerospace. David Scannell, formerly finance director for commercial aerospace, has been appointed corporate director of financial control. Former Treasurer Tony Rice has become chief executive of British Aerospace Asset Management. And, Robin Southwell has been appointed group chief executive of British Aerospace Australia Holdings Ltd.
THREE GAMMA-RAY DETECTORS for the Mars 96 spacecraft are to be delivered to Russia by Los Alamos National Laboratory this week. Two of the devices will be used to map the elemental composition of the Martian surface, the third is a spare. The detectors contain fist-sized crystals of germanium. When a gamma ray penetrates the detector housing and strikes the crystal, electronics register the response of the crystal. Material on the surface of Mars emits gamma rays when hit by a cosmic ray, a fast-moving particle from space.
AUSTRALIA IS CONSIDERING developing and launching a remote-sensing satellite tailored to mineral exploration. The National Space Program is providing $300,000 of the $1 million needed for a study by a government/industry consortium. Australia already makes extensive use of remote-sensing data, but users find that foreign satellites are designed primarily for agricultural, oceanographic and renewable resources applications.
America West is planning a 29% capacity expansion over the next two years to increase revenues at its Phoenix hub by opening them to more markets. The changes are part of the strong turnaround from the carrier's 1991 Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which ended with a reorganization on Aug. 25, 1994. The planned growth addresses its core operation as a Phoenix-based hub-and-spoke airline. This expansion was envisioned earlier as giving immediate benefits, but was difficult to implement in a bankruptcy climate.
The European Space Agency and NASA are preparing to launch ESA's new solar observatory (SOHO), a $1-billion cooperative mission expected to reveal information on the deep interior of the Sun and the mysteries of its violent atmosphere. Twelve instruments on SOHO are to literally dissect the 865,000-mi.-dia. star, which sustains life on Earth. The spacecraft is scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral Nov. 23 on a NASA/Lockheed Martin Atlas 2AS booster.
BOEING HAS DISCUSSED with airline customers two 747 derivatives, a 747-500X and 747-600X. The -500X would be slightly larger than the current 747-400 and have an additional 1,000-naut.-mi. range, to more than 8,200 naut mi. The -600X would be a stretched version and incorporate 24-30% more seats than the current -400, placing it at more than 500 seats in three-class configuration. Both models would use a modified or new wing. Potential launch date is 1996 with first deliveries contemplated in the year 2000. Top Boeing officials stress the studies are preliminary.
Faced with a steady slide in yields, Cathay Pacific Airways has begun to recruit Americans and Canadians as contracted freighter pilots as part of an effort to cut its operating costs by $26 million a year.
A NASA MISHAP INVESTIGATION board released its X-31 crash report on Nov. 7, stating that pitot icing was the cause of the Jan. 19 crash of the No. 1 aircraft, as reported earlier (AW&ST Mar. 27, p. 19). The report was drafted in March but spent the past eight months being reviewed by U.S. and German X-31 team members.
David M. North, AVIATION WEEK&SPACE TECHNOLOGY `s new editor-in-chief and a former U.S. Navy and commercial airline pilot, will take questions about the new direction of the aerospace industry's most authoritative publication and about the 100-plus aircraft types that he has flown in an on-line conference in the CompuServe Convention Center on Nov. 20 at 9 p.m. EST. North was the first journalist to fly the B-2 bomber, and he has piloted everything from the MiG-29 to a wide range of commercial jets.
AIR FRANCE IS NOW SERVING LONDON CITY AIRPORT (LCY) with 79-seat Fokker F70 twinjets replacing slower 46-seat ATR42 twin turboprops. About 30 flights will be operated each week from Paris to LCY by F70s in Air France livery, owned by independent carrier Air Littoral. Jet services to LCY, located near downtown London, currently foreseen by additional carriers, are expected to become European airlines' best marketing response to Eurostar's Paris-London high-speed train services using the tunnel under the English Channel.
Japan's two major carriers have reported better sales for the first half of the year with only moderate increases in operating expenses. Japan Airlines (JAL) said improving overseas tourism and increased international cargo demand helped push its revenues up 6.7% to 561 billion yen ($5.8 billion) for the first half of its 1995 fiscal year.
With the end of the Cold War and emergence of the U.S. as the only remaining superpower in a world increasingly characterized by disorder, America has found itself involved in a number of ``peace operations.'' These are complex, nontraditional missions that are as much political as they are military. Moreover, their conduct requires the U.S. military to work with a wide variety of institutions and organizations--including foreign governments, non-national political actors, international organizations and private voluntary organizations--as well as the variety of U.S.
LITTON'S GUIDANCE&CONTROL SYSTEMS Div., teamed with Hughes Elecro-Optical Systems, will continue to develop and test the next-generation guidance system for long-range strategic U.S. Air Force missiles under a new $13.6-million development and test contract. The system, which will combine self-contained laser gyros and star trackers, would improve the accuracy on long-range flights. It could also replace inertial-only guidance on hundreds of silo-based Minuteman 3 ICBMs.
South African Airways and Dutch carrier Transavia have placed orders or confirmed purchase plans for new Boeing transports worth up to $1.6 billion. Government-owned SAA intends to place firm orders for four Boeing 777-200s and two 747-400s, according to Stella Sigcau, minister for public enterprises. Including an option for three more 777-200s, the deal is valued at $1.3 billion. Transavia ordered eight new-generation 737-800s worth approximately $288 million.
COMMERCIAL MARKETS ARE THE NEW focus for C-17 marketing following news that the Pentagon will buy 120 of the new airlifters (see p. 20). McDonnell Douglas planners believe they can push production from 15 aircraft per year to 20 through foreign military and commercial sales. ``One of the largest untapped markets that we are really beginning to understand is the commercial market,'' says Gary Mears, the company's vice president for C-17 business development. The outsized commercial cargo market has been growing at a rate of 500% per year since 1989.
The Pentagon's eight-aircraft force of Predator UAVs, wracked by four months of flying over Bosnia and pulled back to the U.S. only last week, is expected to return to the former Yugoslavia as early as mid-February.
FRUSTRATION TRIGGERED Gen. Joe Ralston's decision to give up the Air Force's EF-111 electronic combat aircraft in favor of the Navy's EA-6B, he said in Washington last week. Unable to choose between the two standoff-jammers, the new chief of Air Combat Command went to the Nellis AFB, Nev., test ranges where air wars are simulated on a regular basis. He quizzed operators of Russian-type air defenses about who created the most problems, and they said unanimously that it was the Navy's EA-6Bs.
JAPAN AIRLINES WILL CALL ITS NEW BOEING 777s ``Star Jets'' and name each after a major constellation. The series moniker was one of 700 suggested by airline employees. The carrier's Star Jet Naming Committee now is deliberating over which constellation to choose as the namesake for the first 777, due for delivery in December. Other JAL transport types have been named after rivers, cities, national parks and wild birds.
