Piaggio Aero has secured the Russian type certificate for its P.180 Avanti II, so the aircraft can be legally registered and operated throughout Russia. Piaggio's international sales director, Fabio Sciacca, says the first delivery of the aircraft to a Russian customer may occur by early next year. Negotiations reportedly are under way with a number of potential customers who are interested in flying Avanti IIs for medical evacuation and surveillanc, as well as VIP transportation.
A ruling by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on separation distances for the new Boeing 747-8 will help the manufacturer keep its promise that the new airplane will have the same operational characteristics as the 747-400 that it replaces.
Just as it needs to boost productivity across all its Boeing product lines, Spirit AeroSystems faces a possible “work-to-rule” slowdown at its Wichita factory as technical employees, members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (Speea), are said to be protesting working without a contract. However, the company says it has seen no evidence of a slowdown to date. Speea Executive Director Ray Goforth says workers are taking the action on their own, not at the union management's behest.
Teams will gather in Northern California at the end of September to compete for aviation's richest prize by breaking the 200-passenger-mpg barrier—at least twice the fuel efficiency of today's best general aviation and commercial aircraft.
Earlier this year, the Europeans were startled by Boeing's long hesitation before it eventually decided to launch the 737 MAX. Why was Seattle focusing on the proposed New Small Airplane, tentatively scheduled to enter service by the end of the decade, while Airbus's upgraded A320 series, dubbed NEO, posed an immediate commercial threat?
As I was searching for inspiration on how to call for key players to move important aviation legislation forward and start exhibiting true leadership—quite possibly by being the first to compromise or at least by resisting public declarations of the wrongness of their opponents—I came across this quote by Alan Keith of biotechnology firm Genentech: “Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen.”
As controllers at the Jet Propulsion Lab and Lockheed Martin/Denver set up the twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (Grail) spacecraft for their 3.5-month trip to a gravity-mapping orbit around the Moon, the teams that built the Delta II rocket that launched it are facing the end of an era. The Sept. 10 Grail launch was the final from Pad 17, the oldest active pad at Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla., where the initial Delta was launched with Echo I, the first communications satellite, in 1960.
NASA and ATK will join forces to accelerate the availability of commercial crew launch services to the International Space Station using the Liberty rocket, a U.S./European hybrid unveiled earlier this year (AW&ST Feb. 14, p. 34).
Russia's Express-AM4 satellite is fully functional and is sending and receiving signals following an Aug. 18 launch mishap, but the Astrium-built spacecraft remains in the same useless orbit where its Proton M/Breeze M rocket dumped it shortly after liftoff. Evert Dudok, president of Astrium Satellites of Europe, says it took about a week to locate and establish communication with the spacecraft after ground controllers and space surveillance networks lost track of it after launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.
The political debate may have shifted from the deficit to jobs, but the ramifications for defense spending could be just the same, or even worse. President Barack Obama's recent addition of $447 billion in hoped-for federal deficit cuts from Congress, to pay for his jobs-creation proposal, is yet another “incremental negative for defense,” say financial analysts. Wall Street was already expecting total defense budget cuts to future spending to total $650-750 billion over the coming decade via August's Budget Control Act.
Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-N.Y.) is asking the Government Accountability Office to assess the costs of completing the Lockheed Martin Medium Extended Air Defense System (Meads) versus sticking with Raytheon's Patriot system. The review is seen as an effort to shore up support for the missile defense program, which the Obama administration proposed to stop after its research phase ends. Germany has conducted a similar assessment and concluded it should stick with the program. (Germany and Italy are the European partners with the U.S.
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which designs and operates classified U.S. satellites, is pulling back the veil of secrecy on three generations of spy cameras used since the 1960s as the NRO celebrates half a century. The systems—Eastman Kodak's KH-7/8 Gambit and Itek's KH-9 Hexagon—were part of a massive spacecraft system designed to collect electro-optical imagery of the former Soviet Union. Their exact configuration and design were hush-hush until now. Gambit was broken into two phases. The KH-7 model camera, with a 77-in.
With bad memories still fresh in their minds over the ratification fight for the New Start nuclear arms reduction pact, White House officials are preparing even more studiously for a long-promised Senate battle to ratify the 1990s-era Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). “We do not expect it will be easy or happen quickly, but we will work hard to make it happen,” says Marcie Ries, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance.
Think fighting three wars simultaneously was tough? Try convincing lawmakers to negotiate entitlement and tax reform while keeping their paws off the Pentagon's war chest—and do it by the end of November. That is the position being pursued by the Pentagon and the defense industry, which are joined at the hip in fighting anything larger than the $400 billion in reductions to the military till that was dealt last April.
The U.S. Capitol has been consumed with battles over deficit reduction. But as plans for fiscal 2012 get down to specifics, a new round of battles is set to begin—over individual programs including Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and its Medium Extended Air Defense System.
Procurement costs are rising, defense budgets are shrinking, and money is being diverted from modernizing to deal with the high operational pace most NATO members are experiencing. It is a formula for disaster, but also the reality that the U.S. and European governments can no longer ignore. Both NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates have warned the bottom line could be security irrelevance if ways are not found to assure critical military capabilities.
Bubble or bonanza? The verdict is still out on which one the U.K.'s cybersecurity market will turn out to be. Industry is betting heavily on the sector, hoping cyberactivities will offset large declines in traditional defense spending.
For some time, the U.K. government's helicopter plan was described as dysfunctional merely because any other descriptor would have been unprintable. And while there are ample challenges ahead, there are signs that key elements of building a future force are falling into place.
Since production of the F-16 started in 1976, more than 4,500 of the single-engine fighters have been sold to more than 20 nations. Now, however, the decades-long production run for the fighter, once said to “sell itself” to customers globally, is facing an unfamiliar predicament: potential shutdown.
Newly developed sensor technologies are helping U.S. forces take the fight against the Taliban to bomb-making factories, where insurgents craft improvised explosive devices (IEDs), before those lethal explosives reach the streets. Using hyperspectral sensors, commanders could locate the facilities where IEDs are made, a key step toward crippling the Taliban's logistics operations and withdrawing allied forces as planned by 2014. This sensor market is also budding, a rarity in an increasingly austere budget climate.
NATO-led operations in support of rebels in Libya clearly demonstrated that where Europe has precision weapons, they can be highly effective. But the campaign also revealed that European weapon inventories are lacking in depth and breadth. France relied heavily on its AASM precision-guided munition, while the Royal Air Force used so many of its Dual-Mode Brimstones it both redeployed some from Afghanistan to the Libya campaign and asked MBDA to surge production in the second urgent operational requirement effort for the weapon.
Turkey has huge ambitions when it comes to its defense industry, including building fighters and trainers. But much time and the crossing of many stepping-stones will be required to achieve these goals. Ankara is seemingly on the right path, though, with several efforts starting to bear fruit. Last year, the country introduced the medium-altitude, long-endurance Anka unmanned aircraft, and it is taking the first big steps into the guided-missile sector with the start of Standoff Missile (SOM) flight trials.
Although open rotors offer a realistic chance of meeting lower fuel-burn requirements, they face potential hurdles to certification. To tackle these issues, researchers are finalizing preferred concepts on which to focus critical large-scale demonstration tests.
We have to start sometime. What's the point of waiting?” That idea, often heard in the Chinese aero-engine industry, probably best sums up the fatalistic attitude as the country's aviation propulsion sector, experienced mainly in making foreign machinery, sets out to take on leading Western and Russian manufacturers.
With the confirmation of a design for NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) human exploration rocket, the agency's hard-pressed spaceflight contractors finally have some information they can use to help them retain space shuttle and Constellation engineers and other workers. The skills of those employees, which come only from many years of experience, will be essential for building and flying the most powerful rocket ever built.
