Even as the first building blocks of the NextGen air traffic management system are falling into place, behind-the-scenes work is under way to ensure that the future ATM network extracts the full potential from these new capabilities.
Anne-Marie Gammon has been appointed CFO of Brampton, Ontario-based Atlantis Systems Corp., succeeding Ron Brown. He had been interim CFO since February 2010.
A400M flight-test personnel face an intense period as they work to achieve the end-of-year goal of gaining civil certification for the European military airlifter. But program officials are reasonably confident that they will meet the target, although it means logging more than 100 flight hours per month to reach the 2,700-hr. goal by the time the milestone is reached; the total test program is expected to top 3,700 hr. “We are clearly on track” for civil type certification, asserts Cedric Gautier, who heads the project.
Airbus faces a busy second-half of the year when it comes to the A380, as it once more is forced to push hard to meet full-year delivery targets. But an end to long-standing production turmoil may be in sight. Schedule disruptions have become an annual occurrence for the A380, first due to Airbus's assembly problems and in recent years because of supplier hiccups. Setbacks related to Japan-based seat manufacturer Koito and to Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines have been the latest culprits.
Mark Whitman, Tom Chapman and John Frevola have been named to the U.S. national field sales team of Nextant Aerospace, Richmond Heights, Ohio. Whitman came from fractional operator Avantair, Chapman was senior sales director at XOJET, and Frevola was VP and general manager at Flightcraft.
The U.S. Air Force and Boeing are testing a fix to correct an electrical problem on the first GPS Block IIF satellite that was launched May 27, 2010, and is now in orbit. The satellite's “M” code signal, optimized to reduce jamming for military operations, has been shut off until there is verification that the problem has been solved. The glitch was discovered during testing of another GPS IIF satellite on the ground, according to program sources.
NASA is pushing a variant of the design it tentatively picked in January for the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) that Congress ordered the agency to build, but with a new strap-on booster competition demanded by powerful senators with constituent stakes in the outcome. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has endorsed the concept developed by launch vehicle experts at Marshall Space Flight Center, Ala., which tweaks the earlier “reference vehicle design” selected as a starting point for additional analysis (AW&ST Jan. 17, p. 18).
With recently announced layoffs in the space divisions at Lockheed Martin and Boeing and retiring Pentagon leaders warning Congress and industry of a smaller military that will be capable of doing less, it is easy to think everything in the U.S. aerospace and defense sector is contracting. Not so, says the Aerospace Industries Association, which has seen its membership swell by 50% since January 2010. “The industry is banding together during these tough times,” says AIA Vice President David Mandell. “It realizes that it has to work together in order to grow.”
Lessor Aero Nusantara Indonesia (ANI) is shaping up as a potential launch customer for the proposed 100-seat stretch of Mitsubishi Aircraft's MRJ regional jet after signing a memorandum of understanding for five aircraft. The backlog for the MRJ will climb to 70 when ANI's order for five becomes definitive. ANI becomes only the third customer for the aircraft since the development program was launched in 2008.
ATR may be headed for a breakout year in 2012, aided in large part by the banner order intake the turboprop maker is expecting to record in the first six months of this year. On tap for next year are a production rate jump that will boost revenue and a board decision on the aircraft maker's long-standing plans to launch a new 70-90-seat turboprop family. CEO Filippo Bagnato says, “next year it is reasonable” to seek board approval, while acknowledging there is no guarantee the main stakeholders—EADS and Finmeccanica—will give the green light.
The plethora of small Southeast Asian carriers set to launch service in the coming months may pose a risk to safety. Many will be using older aircraft and may struggle to recruit the skilled personnel needed to operate safely. Older aircraft can be safe, if properly maintained. But there is a real question as to whether start-ups in Southeast Asia can recruit enough qualified pilots and maintenance personnel given the fact that there is generally a shortage of such people in the region.
Writers for national media are taking aircraft manufacturers and airlines to task for building terribly complex aircraft. They fail to realize that automation allows properly trained pilots to rely on a system of support so that at the end of a 12-16-hr. day they can be fresh to make an approach to an airport with the same level of safety they had at the start of the duty period.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems said it will cut 1,200 of its 16,000 jobs across 12 states by year-end. The cuts will include a 25% reduction in middle management. The greatest losses will be in Sunnyvale, Calif., the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania and Denver.
Global Hawk was for a decade the Pentagon's model for spiral acquisition, the process of introducing new capabilities into a project rapidly as they are validated. The U.S. Air Force envisioned infusing a host of new sensors into increasingly sophisticated airframes. But lawmakers never embraced this strategy; their biggest gripe was that it was too complex to monitor. And it never fully caught on in industry or some corners of the Pentagon, either.
Snecma plans to complete deliveries to the French military of the first upgraded Rafale M88 engines by November, with testing of the improvement program now wrapping up. The M88-E4 program is aimed at curing reliability problems that have bedeviled the twin-engine fighter project, with the goal of boosting by 30% the high-pressure turbine engine's planned life. That benchmark is being met, says Bruce Pontoizeau, Snecma's M88 project lead. In fact, the reliability level could be beat, although company officials are not ready to say by how much.
Elsewhere in the Senate, Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and ranking Republican John McCain (Ariz.) are miffed that Chinese officials in the U.S. might be slow-walking visas and other paperwork needed for the senators' staff to travel to China and investigate claims of a wave of counterfeit electronics coming from there. “Sen. McCain and I have tried for the last many weeks to get the Chinese Embassy here and the consulate here to issue visas to our staff without success,” Levin told Capitol Hill reporters last week in an unusual press conference.
Boeing will focus on technology for an advanced production system capable of making more than 60 aircraft per month as part of New Small Airplane (NSA) studies aimed at fielding a replacement for the 737 Next Generation family as early as 2019. The company has spent the first half of the year “engaged with a group of customers to look at different configurations,” says Vice President Nicole Piasecki, the chief business strategist. Now the study will focus on how to produce an all-new aircraft at record numbers virtually from a standing start.
Based on recent Airbus patents, and produced for Aviation Week & Space Technology by artist Henry Lam at 3-D visualization specialist Kaktus Digital, our cover shows one potential configuration for an advanced airliner that could emerge from European research into low-drag wings, fuel-saving engines and lightweight structures. This future single-aisle concept has fuselage-shaping and forward-swept wing to promote natural laminar flow and open-rotor engines to reduce fuel burn. The tail is designed to shield noise from the counter-rotating propellers.
Controllers at the Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (Conae) ground station in Cordova province, Argentina, and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., are well into a 65-day commissioning period for the Aquarius/SAC-D ocean-salinity orbiter after its launch June 10 on a Delta II from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. Tests of the spacecraft are underway, and it will be moved to its operational polar orbit at an altitude of 657 km (408 mi.).
Boeing says it “sees the finish line” for certification of the 747-8 Freighter following the start of function and reliability tests, the last milestone toward approval, on June 1. “It's the last piece of the pie” says 747 vice president and general manager Elizabeth Lund of the F&R tests, adding that as of early June some 92% of the required conditions had been flown, with 87% of certification test items also complete. “Certification submittals are nearly complete,” she said. “We started with more than 1,000; we are down to double digits.”
CFM International will announce a raft of orders for the Leap engine on the A320NEO (new engine option) at the Paris air show following a late redesign with a larger fan, which makes the engine more competitive with Pratt & Whitney's PW1100G geared turbofan.
What Airbus has accomplished since it was formed is one of the remarkable industrial achievements of the last four decades. From its beginning in 1970 to splitting the global market with Boeing for large commercial aircraft, the European airframe manufacturer has become a powerful symbol of what people can do when they are motivated, share a vision and are willing to commit the necessary resources to reach their goal.
India is about to take another big step forward in its nuclear weapons delivery capacity with plans to flight-test the Agni-V ballistic missile this year. The Agni-V would represent a big step forward in India's strategic weapons arsenal given its range in excess of 5,000 km (3,100 mi.). Once testing begins, developers hope to declare the Agni-V operational in two years. The missile's predecessor, the 3,500-km-range Agni-III, is currently under induction into strategic missile groups governed by India's nuclear command.
