Headlines out of Capitol Hill in recent weeks have screamed of major “plus-ups”—tens of billions of dollars in unrequested funding—toward U.S. border security. If enacted, the Senate's contentious immigration reform bill would provide a slew of new military-borne unmanned aircraft, helicopters, and surveillance and communications equipment, as well as an army of additional Border Patrol agents.
Christopher Weinberg (see photo) has been promoted to chief information officer from director of strategy and business development at New York-based FlightSafety International.
Dale G. Farr has become rotary sales manager for Max-Viz Enhanced Vision Systems for the Astronics Corp., East Aurora, N.Y. He was aviation safety manager and a tanker pilot for Erickson Air-Crane Inc.
I have to question the U.S. Navy's decision to call the personnel who fly the Northrop Grumman X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator (UCAS-D) “air vehicle operators” rather than “pilots,” as noted in “Maverick Out” (AW&ST June 24, p. 42). This nomenclature brings back scary memories of the 1960s DASH (Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter) program, where the “controllers” who were also not “pilots” ran up an unsustainable loss rate.
New Zealand continues to face a tight fiscal budget, but is moving to procure new primary trainer aircraft for its air force and plans to replace its Lockheed Martin P-3Ks and C-130Hs in the next dozen years.
Piggybacking on the Google Lunar X Prize and various commercial endeavors, NASA has offered its expertise and test facilities to potential lunar-lander partners who might be able to help mount scientific missions to the Moon's surface as early as 2018. A request for information (RFI) published July 2 seeks concepts for “an industry-developed robotic lander that can be integrated with a launch vehicle for the purposes of supporting commercial (and potentially future NASA) missions.” The U.S.
NASA has cleared Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) through two more of its Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) milestones, so the company's modified Dragon cargo carrier can begin pad-abort testing as early as this year. The U.S. space agency accepted the SpaceX human certification plan, which outlines everything the company plans to do to prepare for human spaceflight. That includes tests, demonstrations, analyses, inspections, verifications and training events, NASA says.
Pascal Picano has been named Dublin-based head of marketing for the Apollo Aviation Group. He was an executive with the International Lease Finance Corp.
When EasyJet confirmed its latest order for a total of 135 Airbus A320s and A320NEOs at the Paris air show, the airline was quick to point out a few of the deal's most important aspects. Flexibility of future fleet size and pricing that management considers to be very favorable to the airline, combined with EasyJet's track record for growth and profitability, make the plan look like a winning formula.
GeoMetWatch, a startup that is building on its engineers' experience developing an unflown government hyperspectral weather sounder to produce commercial weather hosted payloads, has entered a Space Act agreement with NASA to exchange data from orbit for surplus hardware and calibration services. Under the deal, NASA will receive data from the Sounding and Tracking Observatory of Regional Meteorology (Storm) instrument when it begins flying on AsiaSat 9 late in 2016.
Boeing has selected BAE Systems to provide the spoiler control electronics for the 737 MAX, firm configuration of which is on track for completion this month. The move to fly-by-wire spoilers is designed to improve handling characteristics, reduce weight and lower maintenance costs, and is one of the few major systems changes for the aircraft family which enters service in 2017. The control electronics award is BAE's first win on the MAX and the company's first contract since the Partnering for Success program was rolled out by Boeing.
The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee wants the Air Force and Army to report whether the planned retirement of 1970s-era A-10s and the introduction of so-called fifth-generation F-22s and F-35s actually leaves a gap in close-air-support (CAS) for U.S. ground personnel.
Allegiant Air achieved the highest score overall in Aviation Week's annual Top-Performing Airlines study, which ranks 71 airlines from around the world. A wide range of raw data is fed into complex formulas to provide a nuanced assessment of carriers' financial performance. The nine-page TPA feature begins on page 40. The Allegiant MD-80 photo on the cover was taken by Erik Simonsen.
Ed Senen has become president of L-3 Aviation Recorders, Sarasota, Fla. He succeeds Michael Smith, who is retiring. Senen has been vice president and general manager for the Americas for Thales Avionics. Pedro Forte has become sales manager for new business development, covering Latin America and repair management programs. He was an account executive at Pan Am Academy in Miami.
The new Pacific scenario, as outlined in “Pacific Punch,” fails to mention the obvious possible inclusion of the past-testing-stage Landing Pad Dock vessels such as the USS New York (LPD-21) and her sister ships. This would probably be a far more definitive first step in this strategy. New York, N.Y.
If an airline could mix the petabytes of performance data that aircraft generate with Big Data analysis—and control the weather—that could be operational nirvana. Then fuse that with maximizing the customer experience—and save millions or billions of dollars—and you have near-utopia.
Recently, conditions at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) were: visibility 10 mi., 56F, broken clouds at 1,100 ft., and the wind down the runway about 12 kt. In other words, near perfect. And yet, arriving flights were delayed more than 2 hr. because the two main runways at SFO are too close together for parallel IFR (instrument flight rule) approaches. Essentially SFO is a visual-flight-rule-(VFR)-only airport for parallel arrivals. Under easy instrument conditions, arrival capacity is halved.
In “Balance of Risk” (AW&ST May 27, p. 24) Boeing Vice President Mike Gibbons says that the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is now low-observable. Does the U.S. Defense Department have a new definition of low observable that is different than the one that has been used for low-observable aircraft and missile programs for the past three decades?
