July 2005 Archives

Flight International's spaceflight specialist Rob Coppinger writes:

Why is US Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg buying goats?

We don't normally ask a question like this. But as we attempt to monitor the US military's vast acquisitions of aircraft and the like, sometimes we find other things that make us curious.

We do know that the army's commandos intend to buy a whole herd of goats, or "caprines," as described in this recent solicitation.

We also have learned, courtesy of strangely knowledgeable friends and the Google search engine, that there may be a convenient explanation, and it doesn't involve a taste for North Carolina barbecue.

This seemingly credible book makes the claim that Fort Bragg has been acquiring de-bleated goats since 1979. The goats are used by the army to test a rather bizarre theory that an especially-trained soldier can kill an animal by staring at it. Really.

Now we are regretting asking the question in the first place.

The appointment of new UK chief executives at Boeing and EADS shows the very different visions of the world's two biggest aerospace companies when it comes to flying the flag in Europe's biggest aerospace market.

EADS's Robin Southwell is an industry man through and through, who made his name and reputation steering through the successful EADS, Rolls-Royce and Thales-led Airtanker consortium bid for the UK's Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft deal. EADS says his "track record" leading the diverse partnership convinced them that he was the guy for the job. His predecessor, Sir Jeremy Blackham, though not from industry, worked on the other side of the fence. As one of the Royal Navy's most senior officers, he was for years someone the UK's defence contractors knew they had to have on their side. Southwell is certainly an "operator", who knows how to build relationships with journalists and the importance of PR.

Boeing has gone down a very different road, appointing their second retired ambassador to the post. Sir Roger Bone replaces Sir Michael Jenkins, who became the US company's first UK CEO two years ago. I've not met Sir Roger yet (he joins on 1 September) but Sir Michael was a charming guy, used to dealing with presidents, prime ministers and captains of industry and a speaker of umpteen languages. And while - as someone who held down a string of ambassadorial posts for Her Majesty's government and later worked in international banking - was no stranger to the business class cabins of airliners, he, by his admission, knew little about the aerospace industry when he joined.

There is a big age difference too. Southwell, at 45, is in the prime of his career. Bone, at 60, recently completed 40 years at the Foreign Office.

While Boeing appears to be putting the accent on diplomacy and long experience, EADS is going for industrial track record. Who has got it right?

I was talking to a 747 pilot the other day and he asked me whether the aviation industry had considered steepening the traditional three-degree glideslope approach for landing to 3.2 degrees. The benefit would be that aircraft would come down the approach using less engine power, therefore burning less fuel, with the added benefit of overflying local residents at a higher altitude. This 747 pilot reckons his aircraft can cope with 3.2 degrees with no problem. Seems like a sensible idea, so should we launch a campaign for the 3.2 degree approach?

Glorious weather, a hospitality village restricted Baghdad Green Zone-style to invited guests, no press conferences with pesky prying journalists, and a chance to indulge champagne-glass in hand with your passion for watching spectacular displays by military aircraft. No wonder industry - for whom attending the big trade shows is a necessary evil - loves the Royal International Air Tattoo, held over the weekend at RAF Fairford in the UK. www.airtattoo.com

A lot of business gets done at RIAT - true, it's over a relaxed lunch of sea bass and semillon blanc or Earl Grey and smoked salmon sandwiches, rather than the power meetings and business breakfasts of Farnborough or Paris. And it's more about schmoozing and relationship building than doing hard deals. But the calibre of attendees - generally flown in to the out-of-the-way air base and secluded in their corporate marquees from the hoi poloi - is impressive: chief executives, politicians, top brass and Whitehall mandarins.

There are pickings for the journalists who attend, although the closest most come to a scoop are the ones used by the waiters to serve the lemon sorbet. Dr John Reid - the UK's combative new defence secretary - was there. The Scot is a complete contrast to his predecessor, Geoff Hoon, who looked as comfortable among squaddies or airmen as a stray siamese in Battersea Dogs' Home. An announcement on the UK Watchkeeper UAV programme was hinted at, as was something on Typhoon Tranche 3 and we were escorted over by BAE Systems to the Eurofighter Typhoon in the static display, notebooks at the ready. In the event, Reid - famous for bombastically defending government policy to a generally sceptical media in the run-up to the Iraq war - met a Typhoon crew, climbed into the cockpit for a photo opportunity and said what a wonderful aircraft it was - it was his first time "up this close" to the UK's latest warfighter, he noted. Almost as up close as the Typhoon pilot, who later that day almost succeeded in mowing the grass at Fairford during one manoeuvre. Anyone see it or got pictures, by the way? Our photographer missed it because he was on the "ice cream run" at the time.

There has been talk of RIAT playing a complementary role to Farnborough every second year - RIAT takes place the weekend before the air show - with the business taking place at Farnborough and air displays at Fairford. The base's inaccessibility, in the rural west of England, and the fact that it is a charity event probably makes that impossible. But Fairford's remoteness has its advantages - Boeing flew its ScanEagle UAV, the first time a UAV has flown in a public display at a European air show. Trying applying for permission to do that in the stockbroker belt.

Let us know what you think about RIAT and Farnborough.

US East Coast editor Stephen Trimble reports from the field:

Lockheed Martin's US101, better known in Europe as the AgustaWestland EH101 and winner of the prestigious US Navy VXX presidential helicopter competition, has been officially designated the VH-71A. As the last helicopter to receive an official US military designation was AgustaWestland's A109, operated by the US Coast Guard as the MH-68A Enforcer, that begs the question "what happened to the H-69 and H-70?". An informative website, www.designation-systems.net, may have the answer. In its section on missing US Department of Defense designations, the website speculates that H-69 has not been assigned because of its sexual overtones, while H-70 may have been skipped to avoid confusion with Sikorsky's S-70 - the export version of the H-60 family. The US101, meanwhile, is competing for the US Air Force's CSAR-X combat search-and-rescue requirement. If it wins, it will presumably become the MH-71B.

http://www.designation-systems.net

With the Space Shuttle's return to space delayed - not wholly surprisingly - the people who would like to see manned exploration put on the back-burner (probably for a couple of decades if they're honest) are naturally taking the chance to give it another kick. But they're wrong.

As a species we can technically and financially perform manned and unmanned exploration, but if push comes to shove then the manned part is non-negotiable. Why's that? It's because of the kind of entity that we are. Our whole experience of life occurs through or in our minds, and apparently in our brains - according to your favoured theory of perception. We can't all go into space (at least those of us here today can't), so we need someone to go, "feel" what it's like, and tell the rest of us.

Knowing that the dust is brown, the temperature is minus 132, and the wind blows at 112 knots is just not the same. I read here http://www.ghg.net/redflame/whyhuman.htm that James van Allen of Van Allen belts fame wrote: "But the application of the Columbus analogy to support advocacy of a manned mission to Mars is massively deceitful. Mars is not terra incognita. We have already explored it and found it to be far more desolate and sterile than the heart of the Sahara desert."

I think Van Allen is wrong (Columbus bores please don't bother responding.) The Oxford Dictionary (Pocket version - I'm only a journalist remember) defines desolate as: left-alone, solitary, deserted, uninhabited, barren, dismal, forlorn, wretched. I suppose the first four apply to places, the last two to people, and dismal is somewhere in between. It's not clear what Van Allen means by desolate here, but I'd suggest he's being subjective and that, despite mountains of data, neither he, me nor you know what it's like on Mars. I'd love to talk to someone who had been there (or better still, go myself.)

I'm second to no-one in my advocacy of the science, but in space of all places science that the world cannot connect to is of enormously questionable value. There are serious problems to solve using this science, ultimately where our descendants are going to live if it's not on Earth. But in the intervening centuries astronauts are our eyes, ears and other senses in space. And in fact they should be selected at least partly on their ability to fulfill that role.

Look here for other views we've expressed in Flight International magazine: here, here and here.

Basel, Switzerland

When you are used to the sardine-can economy class cabins of conventional airliners, stepping through the door of a VIP-configured Boeing 747-400 takes you aback. Jet Aviation's Basel completion centre is half way through converting a 747 from a giant bus designed to carry more than 400 passengers to a flying palace for a Middle Eastern royal family.

It is the second 747-400 the Swiss-based company has converted (the first was delivered four years ago) and, although the example sitting in the hangar looks like any aircraft in mid-completion - electrical components hanging from the ceiling and polythene and cardboard everywhere - you can already see the trappings of opulence in the cabin forward of the door and staircase, where the luxury carpet has been laid and a 2m-diameter hole made in the ceiling for a giant indented light. The technicians bustle about in the cabin in their socks, despite the fact that thick industrial polythene covers the deep, blue carpet.

I was in Basel to look around Jet Aviation's large business jet completion operation there. The company prides itself on the fact that it outsources very little - it has what it modestly calls a "woodshop" to make the cabinets and fittings, and upholstery is hand-stitched. Aircraft are painted with all the attention to detail of Michelangelo in the Sistene Chapel. Wages in Switzerland are among the highest in Europe, but Dietmar Gasper, manager of customer services, says it would not make sense to use companies in, say, the Czech Republic or Poland to do this very labour-intensive work. It's a customer-driven market, he says, with very fussy clients paying large amounts to have their every demand met at extremely short notice. You need constant, real-time quality control. Get it wrong - to the extent of some less than perfect stitching on a seat - and you lose not just that customer but very possibly others as well. "It's a niche market where word of mouth, rather than marketing, determines where your business comes from," he says. "It doesn't take much to establish a bad reputation."

Basel nestles in a corner of Switzerland, right on the border of France and Germany and the company draws in workers from all three countries and beyond. It's a cosmopolitan mix: colleagues greet eachother variously with "salut", "guten tag" and "hello". They tend to stay a long time as it's a highly-specialist business. The Jet Aviation site hugs the border with France. The frontier fence runs around its perimeter and the Basel-Mulhouse airport terminal next door is actually on French soil but with a dedicated road for Swiss passengers through to Swiss territory. Space is at a premium but Jet Aviation obviously has influence: when the company needed land for a new woodshop, the border fence was moved to enclose the only property available within Switzerland.

Airbus are taking a pretty direct route to selling the A380 in China as you can see in this picture from Flight's publishing director Jim Muttram on the Airport Expressway in Beijing. Anyone able to translate the message?

Over the past decade Boeing and Airbus have each created engineering design centres in Moscow. They have similar objectives and I've just had the fascinating experience of visiting them on consecutive days. We'll talk about them at length in the magazine shortly, but my overriding memory right now is just how powerfully they've inserted their corporate cultures into what are essentially Russian operations. I also visited UTC which had terrible experiences putting P&W engines on Russian airliners in the early 1990s - none of them have really sold - but in many ways have quietly achieved more than any other Westerners in Russian aerospace since then.

One of the strangest features of aerospace in Russia is the way engineering and manufacturing facilities are located in downtown Moscow. You turn into an office building off one of Moscow's glitziest shopping streets, take the elevator, and you're looking at rows of engineers designing Boeing freighters as you can see here.

Boeing is like Boeing everywhere. Hard to get into, but informal and open once you do. (Their blogs are the other way round - easy to get into but just a little on the 'corporate' side - but kudos to them for taking the plunge before we did.) In Moscow the boss - Sergey Kravchenko - is Russian and was unfortunately out of town. The rest of the staff are also almost entirely Russian with just a handful of engineering and management liason staff seconded from Seattle. You could still be in Everett though - functional offices, lots of blue and grey, .

Airbus, which runs its ECAR centre as a joint venture with Kaskol of Russia is similar. The building is even more anonymous but the contrast inside is much the same, as you can see.

And Airbus is like Airbus everywhere. Brittle and complicated, control-freakish, but laser-focused on the objective of the hour, day or year. Airbus' hospitality knows no bounds but they won't let you leave without being sure you got whatever was the message. I'll say frankly that I'm a huge admirer of both companies with all their differences.

Airbus/ECAR is run by the strangely low-profile Vladimir Raschupkin. Why strangely? Well this is a man who headed GE Aircraft Engines in Russia for seven years and also the P&W Canada engineering centre in St Petersburg - but try a web search and see what you discover about him. As expected from a graduate of the Jack Welch school of management, he's tough-minded, intensely focused, hugely proud of his operation, and fascinating to talk to.

UTC is different again. This is a company that employs 3,000 Russians, but the vast majority work for Otis Russia - in the land of the apartment block Otis is in elevator-manufacturer heaven! P&W and P&WC are still hard at work, but the most interesting thing is HS Nauka - the joint venture of Hamilton Sundstrand with Russian heat-exchanger specialist Nauka. Small? Well yes, but not trivial. On my visit I found myself looking at most of an A380 air pack in one room, and seeing the Boeing 787 system being designed on screen in the next. General manager Leonid Mazin oozes pride in his young workforce and the way the joint venture has gradually worked its way up UTC's value chain.

I also had one of those "don't touch that - oh, you already did" moments when Mazin showed me a just-completed heat-exchanger element. Entranced by all the crinkly aluminium I just had to take hold of it, at the precise moment that he explained that it had just undergone chemical cleaning ready for installation. Ho hum. Apologies.

The Flight International blog provides you a different perspective of the world of aviation. From authoratative commentary on the latest news, to highlighting the interesting or more bizarre stories from around the world, our aim is to provide another perspective on the aviation industry.