Rob Coppinger: September 2007 Archives

In this week's issue of Flight International (28 September - 1 October) the apparent whistle blowing ex-Boeing engineer's claims of crashworthiness issues with carbon fibre composites became a page six leading This Week story and the whole leader comment page was devoted to the argument. You may well ask, where was Flight, why wasn't the magazine dealing with this issue sometime ago, perhaps when Boeing first spoke of a new airliner with a structure that was 50% composite?

So apparently it ends, and Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily is reporting that NASA has finally ended its contract with Rocketplane-Kistler after a troubled process that never saw the company come up with the financing. This leaves SpaceX, which has been doing fairly well itself in meeting its milestones, in the running for the commercial supply of crew and cargo for the International Space Station (ISS).