Week on the web: February 2013 Archives

Our Image of the Day blog carried a Dutch ministry of defence shot of a Boeing CH-74 Chinook. On The DEW Line, Craig Hoyle wrote about UK prime minister David Cameron's trade tour of India, which included a fresh attempt to derail Dassault's apparent victory in the nation's medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) contest: "The timing really couldn't have been any worse, with Cameron having arrived on the sub-continent just days after Finmeccanica chief executive Giuseppe Orsi was arrested as part of an investigation linked to the sale of 12 AgustaWestland AW101 helicopters. While that's an ongoing legal matter for the Italian and Indian authorities, the fact that the VVIP transports are being built at the company's Yeovil site in the UK will not have been lost on critics. That's likely to mean more bad news re MMRCA, I suspect."

On defence blog The DEW Line, Dave Majumdar highlighted an "awesome video from the cockpit of a VFA-103 Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet flying off the deck of USS Dwight D Eisenhower". The footage was produced by Carrier Strike Group 8 last year. "But if the dire predictions of what might happen under sequestration come to fruition, we may not see many more videos like this in the near future," warned Majumdar. Pay a visit to flightglobal.com/superhornetvideo to enjoy it while it lasts. Elswhere on the same blog, a stunning Eurofighter shot of a Typhoon over Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi (above) ran with a post on the combat aircraft type's competitive joust with the Lockheed Martin F-35. And on Ariel View, Arie Egozi noted that Israel Aerospace Industries chief Joseph Weiss had chosen his words carefully at Aero India, where he said, "I urge my colleagues in the Israeli industries to make every effort to promote co-operation."