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Aviation History
1995
1995 - 0062.PDF
Business NEWS IN BRIEF • GARUDA The sale of older aircraft helped Garuda Indonesia show a five-fold growth in profits for 1994, according to Indonesian transport minister Haryanto Danu- tirto. The state-owned carri er's profits rose to nearly Rps351 billion (S160 mil lion) over the year, up from Rps64 billion in 1993. Garuda recently disposed of its fleet of 17 McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30s and is negotiating to sell nine grounded Airbus A300B4s to an unidentified US buyer for a reported $99 million. • TWA LEASES Trans World Airlines has renegotiated leases with GE Capital and McDonnell Douglas covering 78 of its fleet of about 140 leased air craft. The airline expects to save about $65 million as a result of delaying lease pay ments as part of a restruc turing to reduce its debt by $800 million, down to $1 bil lion. Negotiations with the airlines' creditors continue. • AIRLANKA PROFIT Airlanka has revealed that it made a record Rps248 mil lion ($5 million) net profit for the financial year ending March 1994, almost doubling Rpsl28 million for the previ ous year. This was achieved in part by a 5% drop in costs. • SABENA ALLIANCE The Belgian Government has made clear that it intends to retain a majority holding in Sabena, even if an alliance is put in place with Swissair. The public Government statement follows reports in Switzerland that up to 75% of the carrier could be on offer. An agreement is still needed with Air France over its 25% holding in the Belgian carri er. Another 12.5% is held by two Belgian banks, which joined with Air France in the Finacta consortium, but they are understood not to be keen to sell. Pentagon endorses Lockheed/ Martin Marietta merger plan THE PENTAGON HAS given its blessing to the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta, in an official endorse ment which company officials hope will pave the way for final approval to be given over the next few months. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) still has to give the final ruling on competi tion issues, which centre on the group's overlapping satellite and space-launch businesses. In a letter to the FTC, John Deutch, deputy defence chief, gives an unreserved recommenda tion to the $10 billion merger. "It represents a step toward a stronger, robust, industry that will result in savings for the US Government," he says, calling consolidation among defence sup pliers "inevitable and necessary". In reviewing the potential consequences of the merger on the defence supply base, the Pentagon also focused heavily on space programmes. There will remain "an adequate number of sources for our future purchas es", Deutch concludes. "We believe that the new corporation will not gain an unacceptable market position in the satellite market," he adds. • MGM Grand Air 121 will be sold or converted to freighters MGM Grand Air sold off MGM GRAND, THE US hotel and casino operator, has sold its luxury charter airline to Michigan-based American International Airways (AIA). Despite the relaunch in 1994 of scheduled routes to Las Vegas, MGM Grand Air had been los ing money. The deal includes the fleet of three Boeing 727-100s and three Douglas DC-8s as well as the air line's charter contracts. AIA says that it will use the DC-8-62s for charter operations, but plans to sell or convert die Boeing airliners for cargo work. AIA, which is owned by Conrad Kalitta, will also abandon the scheduled routes from New York and Los Angeles to Las Vegas, which MGM Grand resurrected in September 1994, having stopped them in the late 1980s. MGM Grand represented 3% of the parent company's revenues. J Boeing buys Litton Precision Gear BOEING HAS PURCHASED Litton Precision Gear, the Chicago-based helicopter-trans mission manufacturer, to "...ensure a reliable supply of high-quality gears" for its main helicopter lines. The former Litton Systems division employs 170 people and is the principal supplier of trans missions for Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport and McDonnell Douglas AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. "Precision Gear is one of the few remaining US producers of high-precision gears necessary for helicopter production," says Boeing's Philadelphia-based Heli copters division. • CASA gains state aid CASA IS TO receive further aid from the Spanish Government, aimed at tiding over the state-owned aerospace group until it starts to see returns from Airbus A3 30 and A340 sales. The Spanish Government pro visionally authorised an extra Ptas 6.3 billion ($47 million) on 23 December and plans to allocate a further Ptas 923 million, says Spanish newspaper Expansion. The cash is to cover CASA's costs as a 4.2% partner in the Airbus Industrie consortium. As the group begins to recover its costs on the aircraft launches, the aid is meant to be repaid. J BE Aerospace posts third-quarter loss BE AEROSPACE (BEA) sank to a loss in its third quarter, after writing off nearly $24 mil lion against in-flight entertain ment products outdated through the success of the group's MDDS interactive systems. The group had warned earlier that a charge would be made, but had not revealed the scale. The charge left BEA with a net loss of S14.6 million for the quarter, although the group's underlying performance was largely un changed, and it could be on course to show a loss for its full year to the end of February. BEA chairman Amin Khoury says that sales of the MDDS equipment booked during 1994 will not show through until 1996's results are revealed. • 12 FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 11 - 17 January 1995
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