The Wall Street Journal reports that The Boeing Company has secured an order for 150 of its MAX aircraft to India’s Akasa Air, which will increase the airline’s order book to more than 200 as it seeks international expansion.
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Reuters reports that Akasa Air “is set to close an order for around 150 Boeing 737 MAX narrowbody planes, two sources said, its latest bid to tap the travel boom in the world’s fastest-growing aviation market.” Contract negotiations “are ongoing and a deal is expected to be announced at Wings India, the country’s largest civil aviation event scheduled for Jan. 18-21.” Akasa “is India’s newest airline and has garnered market share of 4% since it started flying in 2022, against IndiGo’s 60% and Tata Group airlines’ combined 26%.”
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FlightGlobal reports that Gulfstream “is hoping that deliveries of its G700 can begin in the current quarter after slower than anticipated certification of the ultra-long-range business jet by the Federal Aviation Administration caused revenue and profit to fall below expectations for 2023.” US type approval “for the Rolls-Royce Pearl 700-powered G700 was anticipated in the fourth quarter, enabling 15 deliveries by year end.” However, that “did not happen, causing Gulfstream’s parent General Dynamics to miss out on around $1 billion in revenue and $250 million in earnings for the three-month period.” General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic “said Gulfstream has told the first customers for the jet to ‘schedule their pre-delivery inspections contemplating delivery this quarter.’” Gulfstream expects to “deliver 50 G700s this year, a large proportion of the 160 jets it expects to hand over in 2024.”
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Aviation Week reports that the FAA “has authorized Zipline International to perform beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) flights of its cargo drones.” The company, which “is a Part 135 operator, is now authorized by the regulator to deliver commercial packages using its UAV and a parachute.”
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ExecutiveGov reports that the Federal Aviation Administration is asking for feedback from UAS industry members “on requests by four companies to fly uncrewed aerial vehicles beyond visual line-of-sight.” Aerial data acquisition services provider Phoenix Air Unmanned, UAS technology developer uAvionix and autonomous delivery companies UPS Flight Forward and Zipline “have sought permission to conduct BVLOS drone operations at or below 400 feet, the FAA said Tuesday.”
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Reuters reports that The Boeing Company “delivered 46 narrowbody 737s in November, sources told Reuters on Tuesday.” Last month’s total “brings Boeing’s single-aisle deliveries up to 351 units for the year so far, leaving the US planemaker about 25 planes away from making its revised target for at least 375-400 737 deliveries this year.” Last month’s 737 deliveries “included 45 MAX planes and 1 737 NG-based P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, sources said.”
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Aviation Week reports that The Boeing Company is shifting its 787 Dreamliner focus “to wiping out a 120-airframe stored backlog while steadily increasing production from the current rate of about one per month.”
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Aviation Today reports that Volansi’s Voly 10 UAV “completed the first-ever completely autonomous maritime drone delivery demonstration with the Navy and Coast Guard on July 18 near Key West, Florida.” The VOLY 10 had a “5-pound payload and completed a 15 nautical mile trip from a Navy ship to the Coast Guard Cutter William Trump and back to the naval ship. The drone did not land on the cutter to simulate a situation where a landing was impossible.”
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The Wall Street Journal reports that United Airlines has made the first actual cash commitment to an eVTOL company, giving Archer Aviation $10 million for 100 electric aircraft intended to operate as taxis. The industry is still awaiting Federal Aviation Administration movement on things like pilot requirements and how the planes would be worked into the airspace.
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CNET News reports that UAVs “will begin ferrying medical supplies to addresses” in Tacoma, WA beginning in 2024. Although the initiative “still requires regulatory approval for details of the flight operations,” the two companies behind the project – Zipline and MultiCare – “said the service will whisk lab samples, medicines, and test kits among Multicare’s local facilities.” CNET News says the Tacoma project “marks the latest use of drones to speed up deliveries” of much-needed goods, “which can be slowed by increasingly congested roads.”
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CNET News reports that drone company Zipline will “begin delivering prescription drugs and other medical supplies in May to hospitals in Japan’s hard-to-reach Goto Islands.” Toyota Tsusho, which “invested in Zipline in 2018, will run the operation.” Zipline and Toyota Tsusho “said the service will cut delivery times to 30 minutes from several hours.” Test flights “are already underway.” Zipline said it plans to expand the service to several islands in time, with the ability to handle 250 deliveries a day “to thousands of facilities and homes within the service area.
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BNN Bloomberg (CAN) reports that “Zipline International Inc., which already is making deliveries with companies such as Walmart Inc., said Tuesday that the Federal Aviation Administration certification would allow it to expand by shipping [health-care] products from its North Carolina headquarters.” Zipline’s drones do not fly like typical drones but fly “more like a traditional plane and [are] capable of traveling longer distances.” The company has “made more than 300,000 commercial deliveries, many of them medical supply drops in Africa.”
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Aviation Today reports that FedEx Express “has a new partnership agreement with Elroy Air aimed at flight-testing their autonomous vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) air cargo system for middle-mile logistics operations by 2023.” FedEx Express is to test Elroy Air’s Chaparral VTOL aircraft’s “ability to fly shipments between its various sortation facilities.”
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Reuters reports, “Boeing delivered on Wednesday the first of two 777 freighters ordered by China’s Suparna Airlines, the U.S. planemaker said on Thursday via its official WeChat account. It marks the first new-build freighter handed to a Chinese carrier since the U.S.-China tariff war began.”
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Space News reports, “The U.S. Space Force has accepted delivery of the initial version of its long-delayed Next Generation Operational Control System (OCX), marking a key milestone for a GPS infrastructure upgrade that has become emblematic of Pentagon software development challenges. The Space Force’s Space Operations Command announced it accepted delivery of the ‘modernized operating system for the Global Positioning System, which is designed to maintain resiliency of the constellation and improve positioning, navigation and timing services to meet user demand now and in the future.’”
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The War Zone reports, “California-based space startup Inversion has unveiled its design for a fully reusable, lifting-body spacecraft named Arc. The spacecraft is intended to deliver critical cargo from space to any point on Earth within an hour, landing on water, snow or soil with a precision of around 50 feet, the company says. The concept, aimed squarely at the defense sector, reflects longstanding U.S. military interest in using space-based systems to rapidly move cargo around the globe to meet commanders’ urgent needs.”
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