Rob Higby (see photo) has been appointed vice president-sales and marketing for the airlines and fleets business of StandardAero, Tempe, Ariz. He was vice president-worldwide airline sales for GE Aviation.
NASA will pay Russia $70.7 million a passenger to train and transport another six crewmembers to the International Space Station, under the latest modification to its Soyuz transportation services contract with the Russian space agency. The add-on will run through 2017, when NASA hopes to begin sending U.S.-built commercial crew vehicles to the ISS. But a showdown is brewing between Congress and the White House over how much NASA can spend to spur a commercial U.S. route to the ISS.
With sequestration canceling the rest of the season for both the U.S. Navy/Marines Blue Angels and the Air Force Thunderbirds, is it time to consider a single flight-demonstration team. Budget considerations may continue to drive the need for consolidation in many areas between the services including flight training, UAV operations and intelligence-gathering.
Mary Lynn J. Rynkiewicz has been appointed director of communications for the Washington-based General Aviation Manufacturers Association. She was communications and contract manager for the NextGen Institute.
The precedent is now clear: Congress will fix only in piecemeal fashion the innumerable problems created in the U.S. by lawmakers' failure to agree on an alternative to the 2011 Budget Control Act and its indiscriminate cuts, known as sequestration. And even then, it will be driven by political exigencies, not assuring national security or revitalizing the economy.
A failure review oversight board convened by Sea Launch and Energia Logistics Ltd. will conduct the fixes proposed by its contractors probing the Jan. 31 failure of a Sea Launch Zenit 3-SL, and believes the investigators correctly identified the cause of the failure, shortly after liftoff from the Sea Launch Odyssey floating launch pad. The mishap cost Intelsat a communications satellite designed to serve the Americas, North Atlantic region and Europe; and a hosted communications payload.
“Diversifying in South Carolina” (AW&ST April 15, p. 40) reports that Boeing Charirman/CEO James McNerney noted that Germany has high wages and strong unions, “Yet they are more productive.” This is true, but I would like to point out that in Germany labor often has a place on the board of directors, therefore a board's strategic direction and oversight considers more than just profits and management bonuses. Perhaps if Boeing gave labor a place in the boardroom, its Seattle workers would be more productive, too.
Ten days after saying it will cut 747-8 production rates later this year, Boeing has revealed it has lost five freighter orders. International airfreight's two-year slump is largely responsible for the decision to slow building rates from two per month to 1.75. The backlog reflects minus-two net 747 orders for the year and 105 remaining.
Nearly four years into the Obama administration's initiative to reform U.S. export controls, the effort is on the verge of finally notching a significant victory. And yet, it seems almost as far as ever from achieving its ultimate goals.
Few actions could be more damaging to the long-term, game-changing mission of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency than the 2011 Budget Control Act and its recently triggered sequestration cuts and subsequent furloughs, the agency's new director tells Aviation Week. “It's just corrosive,” Arati Prabhakar says. “We work so hard to recruit these amazing people out of universities and companies and other parts of the government.
As Thailand's military seeks to better monitor the country's borders and combat piracy, particularly in the south, it continues to work to boost its network-centric warfare capability. The trend makes Link-T, an indigenously developed data link, the potential linchpin for defense companies hoping to win aircraft contracts there. Avia Saab Technologies, a joint venture between Thai company Savia Satcom and Sweden's Saab, developed Link-T. It was born out of what Thai air force Air Chief Marshal Prajin Juntong refers to as “The Gripen Project.”
Sergey Reznikov has become vice president of Volga-Dnepr Unique Air Cargo (USA). He succeeds Konstantin Vekchine, who was vice president-sales and marketing for charter operations. Reznikov was deputy sales director.
One side-effect of the uncertainties of defense spending is a shrinking of mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity as companies hoard cash rather than invest it. The phenomenon was evident in 2012 and is not limited to the U.S., an analysis by consultants PwC shows. Data extrapolated from the first quarter of this year shows an annual rate of just $6 billion in M&A activity in the aerospace & defense (A&D) sector worldwide compared to a 10-year average of $20 billion.
Sameer Rehman has been named director of international trade support for commercial sales and marketing for Bell Helicopter of Fort Worth. He was managing director of Asia-Pacific commercial sales and has been succeeded by C.M. Hwang, who was commercial business development manager for Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Singapore.
On its fourth attempt, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's Boeing X-51A Waverider demonstrator achieved prolonged scramjet-powered hypersonic speeds in its final test flight on May 1. The X-51A is thought to have exceeded Mach 5 and run close to the full duration of the planned powered phase of the test. Based on targets established for the previous test attempts, this could have been as long as 300 sec., followed by an unpowered gliding descent of around 500 sec. prior to impacting the sea off California.
A U.S. Army-integrated upgrade for the Bell OH-58D Kiowa Warrior has entered flight-testing as the service surprised industry by declaring that no off-the-shelf (OTS) candidate can meet its requirements for the replacement Armed Aerial Scout (AAS).
Inexpensive satellites little bigger than a Rubik's Cube have been the provenance of university and small research projects for more than a decade. Increasingly, innovations from the smartphone world are showing how these classroom projects can play outsized roles in space science.
An opportunity may be slipping from South Korea's hands—if it was ever there. Since at least 2010, the country's government and industry have been working to begin developing a 90-seat turboprop regional airliner, but talks with the latest prospective partner, Bombardier, have failed.
Andy Weeks (see photos) has been named vice president-operations and Deborah Scott group vice president-human resources for Cleveland-based Parker Aerospace. Weeks held senior leadership positions in engineering, sales, marketing, and operations for the Eaton Corp.'s Aerospace Group. Scott was a Parker human resources area manager for the three divisions, as well as the Asia-Pacific region.
