Aircraft

Description : NASA's Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel Mission, also known as HS3, is exploring the massive tropical systems from high altitudes via two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft. Instruments on board the planes will collect data researchers and meteorologists plan to use to better understand how tropical storms and hurricanes form and strengthen. Researchers : Scott A. Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, is the mission's principal investigator.

Christopher Lee cut his teeth on public-private partnerships 26 years ago as a Lehman Brothers executive in charge of financing projects in Asia. He put together a consortium of local investors to build a $1.8 billion, 12-mile toll road in Bangkok. Later, as chief financial officer of the second-largest infrastructure company in Mexico, Lee built toll roads. After a brief retirement in his mid-40s, Lee got back in the game with his own firm, Highstar Capital, which invests in infrastructure projects in the United States and Europe, such as energy plants, pipeline construction and waste management facilities.

THE OLD imagery of "free traders" versus "protectionists" is giving way to a much more practical and less ideological search for common rules to govern trade among nations. The latest of these is the tentative agreement between the United States and the European Community limiting government subsidies for the development of aircraft.This agreement, whose final details are still being hammered out, is emblematic of the new pragmatism. The deal, reached after six years of talks,would limit direct subsidies to about one-third of a plane's total development costs, and indirect subsidies to about 5 percent of them.

Eighteen months after Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake voted to approve the purchase of four new helicopters for the Police Department, her proposed budget called for grounding one of them in a cost-saving move. But within days, the administration reversed course and said Thursday it intends to keep all four choppers flying in the unit known as Foxtrot. Police likely will have to find the projected $1 million in savings elsewhere in their budget. It is unclear how the cut became part of the proposed budget, which was unveiled last week.

The Department of Defense is rethinking its recent decision to cancel a new electronic system for identifying military aircraft that was being developed by the Towson-based Bendix Communications Division of Allied-Signal Inc., two members of Maryland's congressional delegation said yesterday.At the urging of Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., and Representative Helen Delich Bentley, R-Md.-2nd, the DOD has asked Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to re-examine the need for a system that would include identification of ground vehicles as well as aircraft.

A Carroll County government lapse may jeopardize or delay a new aircraft manufacturer's plans to open a plant here.County officials are scrambling to find another location for Freewing Aircraft Corp. after learning in the past two weeks that the proposed site will conflict with needed landing space at the county airport.Freewing was scheduled to lease a 20,000-square-foot manufacturing plant that the county planned to build on a 3-acre county-owned lot in the Air Business Center along Route 97 north of Westminster.

A decade from now, business travelers may be routinely flying in aircraft that take off as helicopters do and then tilt their rotors or wings forward to fly as airplanes.The best-known of the new aircraft is the V-22 Osprey, which has a large tilting rotor on the end of each wing. Two military contractors, Boeing Helicopters of Ridley Township, Pa., and Bell Helicopter/Textron of Fort Worth, Texas, are test-flying prototype copies of the Osprey for the Marine Corps.In addition, a small Japanese-owned company, Ishida Aerospace Research Inc., has set up shop in Fort Worth and says it will have a 14-passenger craft with a tilting wing ready for regular commercial airline or air-taxi service by 1997.

Freewing Aircraft, a Westminster experimental aircraft manufacturer, is one of three recipients of $5,000 "Excellence in Design" awards from a national engineering magazine.Hugh Schmittle, Freewing's president, was honored by Design News for the company's "freewing" concept, a wing that flexes with turbulent air to allow a smoother and safer flight. Traditional aircraft use fixed wings, which must be adjusted by the pilot and which force planes to move up and down in turbulence.Mr. Schmittle and his partner, Odile Legeay, are using the concept on small, two-seater aircraft and unmanned drones suitable for military reconnaissance.

WASHINGTON -- A prototype of the V-22 Osprey, a tilt-rotor aircraft whose future was already the subject of furious debate, crashed yesterday in the Potomac River with seven people on board. Pentagon officials said no survivors had been found.The aircraft, which takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane, was headed for a landing at the Marine Corps air station in Quantico, Va.The aircraft was developed by a partnership of Bell Helicopter Textron and the helicopter division of Boeing Co. Pentagon officials and spokesmen for the two companies said they did not know the cause of the crash, but would investigate.

Theodore F. Elliott Sr., 85, aircraft training director Theodore Franklin Elliott Sr., a retired aircraft training director who later owned a tavern, died Tuesday of kidney failure at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. The Salisbury resident was 85. Born in Baltimore and raised in Highlandtown, he attended City College before becoming an accountant for a Pulaski Highway oil company. After serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he joined the Glenn L. Martin Co. in Middle River, where he became director of training before his 1969 retirement.

A Silver Spring man crashed his homemade gyrocopter into a field in Carroll County Tuesday afternoon after hitting a power line, officials said. Sheriff's deputies found Amirkhanian Shahram, 58, in the 700 block of Oak Tree Road in Westminster about 4:30 p.m. with no apparent injuries. The power line the gyrocopter hit as it was coming to land was not severed, and no residents lost power. The gyrocopter was heavily damaged and is being investigated by Federal Aviation Administration and other officials.

Maryland officials on Friday unveiled the first of 10 new medevac helicopters the state ordered to replace its aging fleet, including some that are more than 20 years old. State leaders said the new helicopters, which are being delivered under a $121.7 million contact with Virginia-based AgustaWestland, include the latest in avionics and safety equipment. The new aircraft will replace the state's current fleet of 11 helicopters. Officials said the new aircraft will begin flying missions next year.

Description : NASA's Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel Mission, also known as HS3, is exploring the massive tropical systems from high altitudes via two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft. Instruments on board the planes will collect data researchers and meteorologists plan to use to better understand how tropical storms and hurricanes form and strengthen. Researchers : Scott A. Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, is the mission's principal investigator.

Remember Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who landed his Airbus A320 carrying 155 passengers safely on the Hudson River in 2009 after a flock of geese collided with the jet over New York's LaGuardia Airport and stalled both engines? Mr. Sullenberger's cool handling of the emergency prevented what could have been one of the worst airline disasters in recent memory, and it made him an instant folk hero. It also focused national attention on the threat to commercial airliners posed by bird strikes around major airports.

Why must values always take a back seat to the headlong rush of developing technology? ("Md. sees a future in the rise of unmanned aircraft," Aug. 14.) Sure, the creation of these new jobs in a sagging economy (1,050 jobs at AAI alone over the last decade) looks good to the state and to the nation. But look at the down sides: While drones have, over foreign turf (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, for example), killed targeted insurgents, they have also taken the lives of noncombatant men, women and children.

The recent crash of a $176 million Navy drone in a Chesapeake Bay marsh highlights a number of brewing issues over the domestic use of this new technology. Over the past decade, since the United States' invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and framed by the Bush and Obama administrations' war on terror, the use of drones as both a surveillance tool and a means to kill insurgents has increased. This is a story about effective law enforcement, proper training, the associated costs - and the deadly consequences, intentional or not. Although there was some public consternation last year regarding the use of drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs)

A. Frederick Romoser, a retired aircraft draftsman, died of stroke complications and kidney failure Sept. 24 at Lorien Columbia Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The former Northeast Baltimore resident was 88. Born in Baltimore and raised in the Walbrook area, he was a graduate of Polytechnic Institute. Just before the start of World War II, he became a draftsman and technician at the former Glenn L. Martin Co. aircraft plant in Middle River. He later worked on the Gemini and Apollo programs for what became Martin Marietta.

William Raymond Benton, a retired aircraft engineer whose model of the moon was displayed for several years at the Goddard Space Center, died Wednesday of pneumonia at Maryland General Hospital. He was 79 and lived in Woodlawn. Fascinated by aircraft and the heavens as a young man, he continued his interest throughout his career as a structural test engineer and an electromechanical engineer at several major aircraft companies in Maryland. An internationally recognized authority on selenology -- the study of the moon -- he spent hours in the basement of his Valley Road home sculpting a 3-foot plaster model of the moon.

A company that manufactures airplanes in Hagerstown that are used to monitor the nation's borders would receive $43 million to continue production under legislation approved by the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday. Sierra Nevada Corp., a Nevada-based company with a plant in Hagerstown, outfits the twin-engine aircraft with sensors that assist Customs and Border Patrol agents on the ground with catching people who cross the border into the U.S. illegally. If approved by Congress, the funding will keep the company's production line open, allowing it to begin work on two new aircraft.

Longer and more comfortable, and able to make flights to the Caribbean, Mexico and Hawaii, the first of Southwest Airlines' new Boeing 737-800 jets is set to arrive in Baltimore next week. The new cabins are the company's first redesign in a decade, with seating tested by people with 20 different body types — from the very short to the very tall. Robert Jordan, the airline's chief commercial officer, said the jets herald "the Southwest of the future. " Southwest will take delivery of 33 of the 800-series planes, which cost about $84.4 million each, this year and 41 next year.