Trevor Stedke (see photo) has been named VP-technical services of Southwest Airlines. He was managing director of aircraft engineering planning and performance at Federal Express.
Sebastian Hirsch has become managing director of Pluna Airlines, Montevideo, Uruguay, succeeding Matias Campiani, who resigned. Hirsch was a VP at Leadgate, one of Pluna's investors.
It took European space scientists eight months to bite the bullet and formally agree on June 20 to start the $1 billion Euclid project devoted to the study of dark energy. In the end, with commitments from France, U.K. and Italy to fund instruments and ground structure, Euclid proved too compelling to set aside, despite far exceeding the funding allocated for what the European Space Agency calls its medium-class missions.
Daniel E. McFadden has been named director of operations for the aerospace bearings business of the Canton, Ohio-based Timken Co. He was manager of package bearing operations at the company's plant in Gaffney, S.C.
Assembly of the International Space Station has been complete for almost a year, but the community of its potential users still is taking shape. Station-partner space agencies are starting to get good results with their own research, but U.S. efforts to open up the station to all comers, via a “National Lab” setup, are off to a slow start.
While the U.S. capital struggles to come to any kind of agreement on anything this year, policy debates involving UAVs seem to be raining from the skies. First, there was the disagreement over UAVs in ongoing anti-terrorism operations overseas, including killing Americans who have taken up with the enemy. Now, there is growing concern back home over the potentially prolific deployment of UAVs by law-enforcement authorities.
Forget politics, congressional investigators are issuing a stream of inconvenient truths showing that a key challenge to affording the Pentagon's largest weapon acquisitions next decade will be the size of the programs themselves. In the latest missive, the military must find more than $15 billion a year from 2019-28 just for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program of record, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The North Carolina Global TransPark in Kinston, where Spirit AeroSystems established its factory to make composite fuselage and wing assemblies for the Airbus A350, has signed its first tenant supporting that operation. CrateTech Inc. will provide custom packaging for Spirit's shipments to its St. Nazaire assembly facility in France.
In the mid-1990s, the U.S. government decided to merge its military and civilian polar-orbiting weather satellite programs, because they shared a number of similarities. The combination of future weather-satellite systems into a single program, designated the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (Npoess), was justified as a cost-saving measure. Consequently, military-civilian weather satellite ground control stations were integrated into NOAA facilities at Suitland, Md.
The independent organization that NASA selected to run National Laboratory work on the International Space Station may be off to a slow start, but outside “pathfinders” on the ISS are demonstrating ways to use its unique environment that already fall outside traditional government methods.
Embraer has finally secured government approval to assemble Embraer Legacy 600/650 business jets in China, extending a relationship that existed with the ERJ 145 using the Harbin Embraer Aircraft Industry Co. joint venture with Avic. The first aircraft is to be delivered next year. Embraer initially considered moving some E-Jet assembly to the site, but China balked because of its own ARJ21 program. Concurrently, ICBC Financial Leasing Co. announced a firm order for five Legacy 650s with an option for five more. The lessor is the launch customer for Chinese deliveries.
Astronaut Don Pettit is a real Mr. Fixit, and that is just fine with the scientists who trust him to run their experiments on the International Space Station.
Joseph Hough is the new program manager for HTF7000 service and support operations at Dallas Airmotive. He was director of new business, sales and customer services for Consolidated Turbine Support.
XCOR Aerospace will use its planned two-seat suborbital Lynx spaceplane to train crewmembers for missions the Excalibur Almaz startup hopes to fly to low Earth orbit and beyond with surplus Russian hardware. Under an agreement signed in London June 20, XCOR will tailor flight profiles for Almaz crews. Based on the Isle of Man, the company plans to use Russian reentry vehicles and larger Salyut-type to mount human space missions.
As NASA mission planners wait with bated breath for the Mars Science Laboratory to scream into the Martian atmosphere at hypersonic speed on Aug. 5, deploy its braking parachute, fire its retro-rockets and lower the Curiosity rover by tether to a soft landing, thoughts are again turning to exploring the red planet from the air.
USAF Lt. Gen. Mark F. Ramsay has been nominated for promotion to lieutenant general and assignment as director of force structure, resources and assessment for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. He has been commander of the Eighteenth Air Force of Air Mobility Command, Scott AFB, Ill. Ramsay will be succeeded by Maj. Gen. Darren W. McDew, who has been nominated for promotion to lieutenant general. He has been commander of the Air Force District of Washington, Joint Base Andrews, Md. Maj. Gen. Thomas W.
