A Pinnacle Airlines contract with its pilots, if ratified in mid-January, will provide Delta Air Lines with its path to reducing the number of 50-seat jets operated by its regional airline partners to 125 or fewer. Doing so could reduce its maintenance costs.
This has been quite a year. Neil Armstrong has passed on, but Curiosity is alive on Mars. One of the most amazing sights that I have seen was in October 1957 when I witnessed the first visible pass of Sputnik over California. I was a medical intern at Los Angeles County Hospital at that time. I, along with numerous others, went to the athletic field at CalTech to observe this event. Someone called out “There it is!” And there it was. All of us gathered there knew in an instant that the world had changed.
One day in the distant future, air traffic will certainly stop growing. The current annual growth rate of 5% per year cannot be sustained forever. If it were, the world's population would eventually spend more time in the air than on the ground.
NASA 's fuel-depleted Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (Grail) A and B lunar mission probes slammed into a mountain near Goldschmidt crater at the Moon's North Pole late Dec. 17, ending a one-year mission. The carefully targeted impact of the two washing machine-sized spacecraft, renamed Ebb and Flow, occurred on schedule, with Ebb striking first at 5:28 p.m. EST, and Flow striking 32 sec. later. The spacecraft impacted the Moon at 3,800 mph.
It's a classic chicken or egg dilemma. Small satellites are not being built because there is no cheap way to launch them, and small launchers are not being built because there are no satellites to launch on them. So the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is attacking the problem from both directions simultaneously, with dual programs to develop $500,000 imaging satellites of less than 100 lb. and air-launched boosters to place them in low Earth orbit for $1 million a flight.
Jan. 22-23—MRO Middle East. Dubai, United Arab Emirates. March 5-6—Defense Technology Requirements. Arlington, Va. March 7—Aviation Week's Laureate Awards. Washington. April 16-18—MRO Americas/MRO Military. Atlanta. May 7-8—Civil Aviation Manufacturing. Charlotte, N.C. May 14-15—MRO Eastern Europe. Vilnius, Lithuania. Sept. 24-26—MRO Europe. London. You can now register ONLINEfor Aviation Week Events. Go to www.aviationweek.com/events or call +1 (212) 904-4682.
Allan Stanton has become VP for international sales in the Middle East for Savannah, Ga.-based Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. He was sales director for Hawker Beechcraft in the Middle East, Africa and Turkey.
Constantine Karayannopoulos has been named interim president and CEO of Greenwood, Colo.-based Molycorp, succeeding Mark A. Smith, who has left the company. Karayannopoulos was president and CEO of Neo Material Technologies.
Six completed Boeing 787s are idle, awaiting a type certificate that the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) will probably not issue until March. Hainan Airlines, owner of three of the aircraft, is particularly anxious to take delivery, because it needs the aircraft to open planned routes, say industry sources. China Southern owns the other three, and it will put the type into Chinese service first. The CAAC's target is March.
“On the Covers” on the Table of Contents in the Dec. 17 issue (page 6) misidentified the aircraft on the cover of the MRO Edition. It is an Air Canada Embraer 190.
Jan. 7-10—AIAA's 51st Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition. Gaylord Texan Hotel and Convention, Grapevine, Texas. See www.aiaa.org/asm2013 Jan. 9-10—Fourth Annual China Aerospace Manufacturing Summit. Post Hotel, Harbin City. See www.galleonevents.com/2013CAMS Jan. 9-11—Army Aviation Symposium and Exposition. Gaylord National Hotel and Convention Center. National Harbor, Md. See www.ausaaviation.org
(L to R): Photographer, author and archivist DANA BELL has retired after a 30-year career with the U.S. government. Starting as a photo researcher with the Air Force in 1976, he moved to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 1982. Bell has written 32 books on aviation history, and is now a full-time author. This year marked his 16th as a photo contest judge.
Grace Lieblein has been named to the board of directors of Honeywell, Morris Township, N.J. She is president/managing director of GM Brazil and vice president of board of directors of the American Chamber of Commerce Mexico.
The U.S. Air Force is planning to use the RL10B-2 engine for a late February flight of the fifth Wideband Global Satcom satellite on a Delta IV rocket, according to the Air Force's military satellite communications system program office. The Delta IV, which uses the RL10B-2 to power the upper stage, malfunctioned during an Oct. 8 GPS IIF launch.
The final report on the May 9, 2012, crash of a Sukhoi Superjet 100 prototype on a demonstration flight near Jakarta, Indonesia, highlights a growing trend in fatal airline accidents: the reemergence of controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) as a major contributor to airline fatalities. “[The Superjet accident] is in keeping with the rising trend in CFIT accidents over the past two years,” says Jim Burin, director of technical programs at the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF). “We had hoped we were getting rid of them.”
Edgar Maimon has been appointedgeneral manager of Haifa, Israel-based Elbit Systems Electronic Warfare and Sigint-Elisra Div., effective Feb. 1. He will succeecd Itzchak Gat, who has announced his retirement. Maimon is VP-marketing and business development. Yehuda (Udi) Vered will become general manager of Elbit Systems Land and C41 Div., succeeding Bezhalel (Butzi) Machlis, effective Jan. 1. He is executive VP-service solutions, and VP-marketing for the Land and C41 Division.
Lawmakers are constantly caught between balancing the needs of the federal government while staying true to the voters at home. Such is the case in this year's fight to maintain the Air National Guard (ANG) and Reserve, which lends a hand to the active duty military while also standing ready to serve all 50 states. Congress balked at the Air Force's initial proposal to cut 287 aircraft and 11,600 personnel, ordering a freeze on retiring or transferring aircraft.
A year-end deadline for the Air Force and Navy to disclose the target initial operational capability (IOC) dates for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was extended until June 1, 2013, in the last days of congressional conference negotiations over the 2013 defense budget. Programs are considered to have reached the benchmark once they complete initial operational test and evaluation.
USN Rear Adm. (lower half) Randolph L. Mahr has been nominated for promotion to rear admiral. He is deputy director of the Joint Strike Fighter Program in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics at the Pentagon.
