AircraftNews.Com » Airlines

Frog in a pot phenomenon

mgiles — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:45:32 +0000

Frog in pot

There is a saying that if one slowly heats a pot of water with a live frog in it the frog will go to sleep and not get out and so get cooked whereas if he is dropped into a hot pot he will leap out. So it is in many situations in life. We have it in aviation where slowly evolving situations get way past a point where some action should be taken because each development is incremental and not so different from the last situation. So it is with Airbus pitots and standby instruments and now with Flight 188 overflying its destination I think we have the same thing. It does not really matter if they went to sleep or lost track of time there was considerable potential for trouble. Much has been made of the poor match of the human physiology and performance and yet steadily the man is being taken out of the loop in flying so that such things can happen. An extraordinary number of RPT flights pass uneventfully but where a trend emerges it should be addressed. Ground control is now possible and studies should be made, discussed and decisions taken. Pilots do not have to leave the cockpit. It is just another logical progression. The Helios tragedy where apparently a cabin crew member was walking about with a portable O2 system but unable to enter the cockpit is another situation where ground control could have saved hundreds. The reasons why this has not happened are many and various and to do with how aviation has evolved a rigid and inflexible regulatory process. Vested interests are many but it is mainly a sort of general inertia and no one has had the courage really to say come on guys wake up or more to the point, hear those who have been saying such. As usual there will be wails of technical difficulty and cost but it seems clear that it is going to be a small cost in the long-term and long over due for considerations. Maybe the risk of different sort of hostile take over is behind the resistance but we seem to find ways to trust our fellow men in many other situations. Why not?

911 Impact

In this last episode apparently, the pilots were so engrossed in conversation while checking their laptops that they lost contact with ground controllers for about 90 minutes.
The two pilots involved have had their licenses revoked, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.
The Wall Street Journal described the episode that occurred last week as illustrating two of the biggest problems in commercial aviation: cockpit discipline and pilot complacency. Surely, said airline experts, they must have fallen asleep. Apparently not. According to interview notes from the National Transportation Safety Board: – Both pilots are experienced and have never had an accident, incident or violation.
- Neither reported medical conditions. Both said they were not sleepy or fatigued. They had just had a 19-hour layover before the flight from San Diego to Minneapolis. Yet, from 6:46 p.m. Central Time until 8:14 p.m., the pilots did not communicate, reported The New York Times. More than a dozen controllers in three radar rooms tried to contact the pilots. Was the plane hijacked? Were the pilots in a medical crisis? Four fighter jets were on runway alert in case they were needed. What happened?
In short, the pilots radioed to controllers that there was “cockpit distraction” and “dealing with company issues.” It appears the pilots were discussing a new workplace schedule system following the merger of Northwest and Delta Air Lines, The Wall Street Journal reported. In the meantime, they failed to switch radio frequencies for a different set of air traffic controllers. Besides this inexcusable (? I’ll bet they dont ever do this again so why terminate thier careers?) example of incompetence, this points out several areas needing correction. Are cockpits too cozy? So much piloting is done automatically, in dark cockpits, that it’s easy to nod off or become inattentive. Airlines need to take steps to put the pilots at work doing something useful during that “down time” in the air. Some Boeing aircraft are equipped with warnings when pilots fail to adjust controls, The Wall Street Journal reported. Are voice recorders adequate?
The box recording the cockpit discussions only had the last 30 minutes available, leaving no record of the earlier distracted time. Every box should record every minute of every flight.
And what about video cameras? They should be used in every cockpit. This is not a privacy issue for the pilots, it’s a safety issue. When so many lives are at stake – 144 passengers, two pilots and three attendants – every reasonable means should be taken to protect them.
The good example of being prepared has been well documented, when Chester “Sully” Sullenberger safely landed an aircraft in the Hudson River with only a few minutes from warning to landing. As for the Northwest Airline pilots, every possible lesson should be learned from this strange incident. It would be appropriate for Congress to hold hearings – not to sensationalize this particular incident – but to probe for issues it has revealed. from http://jacksonville.com/opinion/editorials/2009-10-30/story/aircraft_safety_incredible_failure

Frog in pot

Open Rotor on the Roster?

mgiles — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:41:46 +0000

Open Rotor

Recently a student asked me what an open Rotor was and I replied it was basically a turbo prop but with things being how they are a sexier name had to be invented so they came up with this. It got me to thinking; as we are progressively backed up against the wall by reality it is only a matter of time before the open rotor makes its reappearance and so it is timely to have a look at how accurate my glib explanation was. Basically the problem with propellers is that they suffer from severe efficiency losses as the speed of the propeller tips approaches the speed of sound and basically the advantage of them is that they have to accelerate the working fluid (the air they fly in) less because they accelerate a lot more of it. I.e. they have in effect a much greater by-pass ratio than Turbo fans. The big question is where is the best trade off for speed versus efficiency. Time will tell. the Russian Bear long range patrol aircraft with its huge counter rotating props has been with us for years and conferred enormous range advantages when compared with the turbo jets of the time albeit with a considerable disadvantage in reliability. The new A400 European Military lifter will set new standards of frugality and is forecast to cruise at 450 kts which is quite respectable. After the next round of geared fans it looks as it there is only one place to go and that is the Open Rotor. Look for it in the next new wave; maybe with a blended body conformation aircraft.
OPEN ROTOR: HOW DOES IT WORK?
An open rotor engine is essentially a turboprop with two rows of blades, or propellers, which can operate efficiently at higher speeds than a conventional turboprop. The blades of a turboprop tend to spin air out, rather than pushing it back. In an open rotor engine, the forward propeller pushes the air backwards, while the rear one sucks it. “You actually entrain the air in between the two sets of blades, and you can think of it as a virtual fan case,” says Nuttall. “It’s actually stopping the air going out, and the second one straightens up the air from the first one. Most of the air is doing just what it does in a turbofan, hence you can go a lot faster. You can’t go as fast as a turbofan. We think the most efficient speed is about 0.76 Mach.” This compares to around M0.845 for typical jet-powered airliners. A turboprop engine would also need blades twice the diameter of its open rotor equivalent to produce the same power. “There are only two efficiencies in an engine,” says Nuttall. “There’s thermal efficiency, which is how efficiently you get the energy out of the fuel and turn it into ‘turning’. And there’s propulsive efficiency, which is how efficiently you take that energy and turn it into ‘push’.” In a conventional turbofan, propulsive efficiency increases as cruise speed goes up. A single propeller can provide 90-92% propulsive efficiency, but this drops off with speed. “The trick is to try to get an efficiency of that nature, but at [a turbofan] sort of speed, and that’s why you put one [propeller] behind the other. That entrains the air and lets you actually drive the aircraft forward at a mach number of 0.75-0.8,” says Nuttall. In terms of lifecycle costs, an open rotor has no nacelle, thrust reverser, or fan case. “It’s an interesting debate at the moment,” says Nuttall. “When we’re asked this by customers our basic rule of thumb is that it should be about the same as today. You’ve deleted a lot, but you have added complexity at the back. The main complexity you’ve added is the gearbox, but the gearbox is half the power of the [P&W] geared turbofan. We accept that the gearbox is a significant thing that we’ve got to develop, and we’ve got plans for that.” An open rotor would operate at constant torque, with the pitch of its blades and speed of its rotors controlled by a full-authority digital engine control to provide the thrust demanded by the pilot.

Open Rotor Airliner proposal

See http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/10/06/332991/open-rotor-how-does-it-work.html

More From The Experts on AF447

john — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:29:26 +0000

Here at the AN we do not know what causes accidents, or even death for that matter. We leave that to the experts. It does appear that victims advised by their lawyers have ventured there, and now read this:
You may need a web page translator to render French to English.

AF447: The crash of Paris-Rio was avoidable

The Union of Airfrance Pilots(SPAF) say in this report, it is the failure of the Pitot probes to measure speed that caused the crash.

Suddenly AF447 is back in the limelight. This will not go away, lawyers are on the case. The Black Box will probably not be found, but if it were ever to be found many anticipate it would simply elucidate the sequence. At some point the ADIRU gave up resulting in a handover to the pilots in impossible conditions.

Nobody knows exactly what happened to AF447 but what we do know is that airspeed measurement is of critical importance when we are flying at great altitude in subsonic airframes. In pilot slang, as you ascend you enter the coffin corner, the apex of which is a point where the aircraft is stalled and exceeding the speed of sound (MACH 1)
simultaneously, hence the name.

Coffin Corner (Wikipedia)

Here is a simplified graphic of coffin corner courtesy of Wikipedia. With increasing altitude the stall speed increases and the speed of sound decreases. Our long distance RPT jets spend a large percentage of their flight times in the vicinity of this no go point. The fact that jet travel is very safe is testament to the skills of the engineers, scientists and pilots who make all this viable.

Those of us that fly are well familiar with the airspeed pitot system, in fact most of us can tell a story about what went wrong. Insects, dust, ice, covers left on, paint, masking tape, and so on. There have been major RPT catastrophies outside of the coffin corner for these simple reasons. Shit happens, we all know that. The difference with coffin corner is that we are high and fast, a long way from home with poor or no visual reference, and in addition we are stalling or breaking up, all mediated and filtered by a computer which says over to you.

In the great Echo-Chamber of the Internet you will read that we are depending upon the 18th. century technology of Henri Pitot to measure airspeed. In fact there has been a steady development from the time of Darcy in the 19th. century until now. We are committed to subsonic flight for long range RPT, but this pneumatic sensor technology may have hit it’s use by date.

In the very early days the pioneers flew without air speed instruments. The Wrights used a crude angle of attack indicator, Bleriot flew the English Channel with no airspeed instrument. The onset of WW1 encouraged the development of the Pitot-Darcy pitot method of differential air pressure devices to measure air speed in support of the fast and high powered aircraft required to fight a war. The highly developed devices in use today are direct descendents. Essentially they tap ambient air using pitot probes and static ports, measure the pressure difference, then compute and display a calibrated airspeed.

Airspeed measurement technology is in the headlines now, for everybody, not just the aviation buffs.

Birdstrike in Dusseldorf

john — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:35:06 +0000

YIKES!!. What a coup for Stefan Sonnenberg. You can find him here…

The starlings had a bad day, as well as Germinia who have to fix the engines. It was a lovely VFR day and the pilots did it well as a procedural engine fail on takeoff. Hopefully Stefan will get an award for his image, he certainly deserves that. In the event the aircraft returned to Dusseldorf with no problems other than then those for the passengers to explain their late arrival.

Getting back to aviation, think about what would have been the situation if some of the unfortunate birds had shut down the pitos as well, clearly visible in Stefans pic. Under the VFR conditions applicable the pilots would have done just as well, except that they would have been challenged a little. If however they were entering turbulent IMC they would be challenged greatly. Such is the importance of airspeed in aircraft operation.

More on this in a later post. Hope you liked the pic.

Starlings swarm. Click to enlarge

YIKES!!. What a coup for photographer Stefan Sonnenberg. You can find him here…http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/profile.main?username=Whisperjet

Germania Boeing 737-300 registration D-ADII flight ST-8656The starlings had a bad day, as well as Germinia who have to fix the engines.

It was a lovely VFR day and the pilots did it well as a procedural engine fail on takeoff. Hopefully Stefan will get an award for his image, he certainly deserves that. In the event the aircraft returned to Dusseldorf with no problems other than those for the passengers to explain their late arrival. More here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1217035/Bird-strike-The-moment-200-starlings-sucked-passenger-jet-engine-off.html

Getting back to aviation, think about what would have been the situation if some of the unfortunate birds had shut down the pitots as well, clearly visible in Stefans pic. Under the VFR conditions applicable the pilots would have done just as well, except that they would have been challenged a little. If however they were entering turbulent IMC they would be challenged greatly. Such is the importance of airspeed in aircraft operation.

More on this in a later post. Hope you liked the pic.

Blended body as Green saviour?

mgiles — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:41:33 +0000

Blended body with open rotor engines

Some time ago there was a flurry of interest in the blended body concept in which the wing and body of an aircraft are blended as a way of minimising drag and as a result maximising efficiency.
The concept is not new and there have been a number of pioneers who attempted to develop and put into service an aircraft which could take advantage of the theoretical gains available.
The Horten brothers in Germany designed and flew a number of flying wings aircraft but the end of WW II brought this program to a halt before it could be developed. Another concept which has also been seen to have promise is the lifting fuselage proposed by an American pioneer Burnelli who designed built and flew a lifting body aircraft. In addition to the reduction in drag postulated they had advantages of being crash worhty and having large cabin volumes. There were not surprisingly, problems of various sorts. Flying wings for instance were difficult to fly being unstable.The problems were never adequately solved until modern capabilities made the management of them possible and as a result conventional strategies have been progressively developed and given rise to the airliner as we know it. A long fragile pencil with thin and structurally demanding wings.
Some manufactures have talked of these advantages and have proposed and done detailed planning. One of them being Boeing. The advantages never seemed to outweigh the risks. Not the least of the problems might have been how unconventional they would look to eyes used to the current form. Money talks, however and the environmnt may soon be screaming.
The tide may be turning with a number of manufactures now talking of the blended body as having significant attraction as consumption of oil and production of CO2 become increasingly a problem. Engine and airframe development and aerodynamic refinement are reaching a point of diminishing returns with curent formats and to make further gains more radical solutions will be have to be explored.
It has been claimed that the Blended body, which combines the virtues of the flying wing and the lifting fuselage, used in conjunction with advanced engines such as the open rotor, may be as much as 25% lower in fuel burn compared with the best contemporary practice.
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Evolution_of_Technology/flying_wing/Tech8.htm
http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Aeronautics/Burnelli.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/improvingflight/skyray_48.html

In flight use of cell phones

john — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:46:42 +0000

Cell phones in the cabin

Finally the capability to use mobile telephones is being offered by an increasing number of airlines. We, the passengers have been clamouring for this for years in despair. This was a fight with too many dogs. National aviation and communication regulatory authorities, Industry governing bodies, manufacturers, air crew associations, telecommunications providers, you name it, and of course us, the customers. Eventually an acceptable model emerged for the enabling technology to go forward.

Each aircraft is equipped with a picocell. This is a low power cell phone tower operating within the cabin . This interfaces with the on board satellite communications links to interoperate with the terrestrial telecommunications networks and so process the call normally with full functionality. That is actually very elegant and many enhancements are in the works for Wi-Fi internet access for example raising issues about VOIP and firewalls and the rest of it.
The main providers at the moment are OnAir (http://www.onair.aero) and AeroMobile (http://www.aeromobile.net). The rush is on….

This from aeromobile….
AeroMobile, the market leading in-flight mobile communications provider, has completed the certification of its system on the Boeing 777-300ER, its sixth aircraft type.
The AeroMobile system, which allows passengers to safely make and receive calls, text messages & GPRS data services whilst on board, in-flight, is now certified by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) for use on six widebodied aircraft types.
In addition to the Boeing 777-300ER, it is certified for use and installed on Airbus A330s, A340-300s and Airbus A340-500s, together with Boeing 777-200 and 777-300 variant aircraft.
Launched only in March 2008, AeroMobile’s Avion award-winning system is already in full operation on 45 aircraft belonging both to launch customer Emirates Airline and Malaysian Airlines. During this time, AeroMobile has been used by more than 400,000 passengers.

Meantime the fight goes on , this from the NYT.
Cellphone use on airplanes, it would seem, is on extended hold in the United States.
The national union representing flight attendants wants Congress to ban in-flight phone calls, and survey after survey of airline passengers shows strong opposition to allowing cellphones on planes.
So while domestic airlines rush to wire their cabins to provide in-flight Wi-Fi connectivity, there is no indication whether, or when, passengers in the United States might be able to make a cellphone call at 37,000 feet.
Foreign Airlines Ahead of US on Cellphone Use

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/technology/29phones.html

Anniversary for civil supersonic flight

mgiles — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:09:21 +0000

Concord

On Oct. 1, 1969, the Concorde 001, a joint British-French venture, traveled faster than the speed of sound for the very first time. It was the aircraft’s 45th test flight and it held Mach 1.05 for 9 minutes at 36,000 feet and 75 miles from Toulouse, France.

It wasn’t the first commercial aircraft to break the sound barrier, that was the Russian Tu 144 which had beaten the Concord by a few months but it was the Concord which went on to provide many years of commercial supersonic passenger flight.

Supersonic flight was for long only a dream but in 1974 Chuck Yeager (whom I have shaken hands with and is a real man who likes hunt’n shoot’n n Fish’n) was credited with being the first man to fly faster than sound.

For many years supersonic flight was the realm of the military only but Concord changed all that.

Although Concord has now been retired as uneconomic it looks likely that either as a luxury for the very rich or a service for corporated princes Supersonic flight will soon return to civil aviation as more and more projects move to fruition. In the mean time we will have to leave it to the military to provide us with sights such as this F 22 with its striking cloud trail.
The phenomenon is called a vapor cone or a shock collar, and, if you want to get really technical, a Prandtl–Glauert singularity. It is beautiful demonstration of how quickly things happen at the molecular level

F22 Shock Collar

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/supersonic-speed-demons-breaking-sound-barrier/story?id=8716157

Lawyers sharpen teeth for AF447

john — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:21:41 +0000

AF 447 Wreckage

It had to happen and now we see the first move along the feeding chain of aviation litigation for the AF 447 tragedy.

lawyers want EUR1 billion as a starting point for AF447 – victims

The Air France crash on June 1 was the result of a preventable mix of human and technical failures, according to Stewarts Law, a UK law firm representing 50 of the victims’ families

Stewarts Law presented arguments in Paris this week after experts used a simulator to replicate the conditions experienced by the crew of the Airbus A330 in a storm off the coast of Brazil.

The firm wants Air France and Airbus to put the EUR1 billion into a pot to be divided among the families.

The hearing heard from John Mahon, an Airbus and Boeing training captain, that enough data was transmitted by satellite from the stricken plane to identify four factors that led to the crash:

– The aircraft flew into an area of storms which other aircraft avoided by steering around them.
– The Pitot tubes (speed sensors on the front of the plane) suffered faults.
– There was a malfunction in the ADIRU, the three air data computers that feed information to the flight system and the pilots.
– The pilots may not have had sufficient training to retain control of the malfunctioning aircraft.

“If any one of these issues had not happened to AF447, the accident would not have happened,” said Mahon, who is advising the law firm.

In a separate investigation in France, Air France and Airbus will be asked why no action was taken to replace faulty Pitot tubes on the A330 series although they had suffered multiple failures over a decade.

Meanwhile, the European Aviation Safety Agency has issued a new safety warning, telling airlines to check Airbus speed sensors from the US Goodrich company.
After AF447, airlines were advised to replace any French Thales Pitots with those from Goodrich.

Aviation Attorneys

From http://www.impactpub.com.au/aircargo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4446&Itemid=60

A 380 suffers first Engine incident

mgiles — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:21:03 +0000

SA A380

It was inevitable that there would be an engine incident in the A 380. Yesterday a Singapore airlines flight from France to Asia was returned to Paris after an engine warning lead to one of its four RR Trent 900 engines being shut down. The engine will be changed and the passengers put up in Hotels overnight. The Trent was the launch engine for the A380 and at present 52% of the A380 orders carry the RR engine. The other option is the GE, P&W Engine Alliance GP7000. The RR Trent 900 developed from an earlier version of the highly reliable Trent 500 has a number of advance features including light weight wide chord swept fan blades and Hamilton Sundstrand Fuel controllers.

Given there are four engines on each aircraft and the operators have been doing their best to fly the pants of them it is no surprise that there has been an in flight shut down and in fact one could even say it has been an eagerly awaited event for the voyeurs and pundits of aviation not to mention the industry in general.
Flight SQ333, with a crew of 27 and 444 passengers on board, left for Singapore at 12:35 p.m. yesterday. Two and a half hours into the flight, an engine message to the cockpit prompted a shutdown by the pilot, Singapore Airlines said today. The airline didn’t reveal the cause of the malfunction.

“While the aircraft is able to operate with three engines, the pilots decided to return to Paris as a precaution due to the long flight,” the airline said.

The A380 double-decker jet operated by Singapore is one of 19 in service. The craft is still in Paris, and affected passengers have been put up in hotels until alternate flights out of the French capital are found. The jet is being fitted with a new engine on the ground, the airline said.

The A380 is certified as safe to fly with only three of its four engines, which led the pilot to return to Paris, where trained mechanics and other ground personnel could address the issue, said Eric Heraud, a spokesman for France’s DGAC civil aviation authority. The Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is equipped to accommodate the double-decker, wide-body A380 and is one of 60 airports worldwide that will eventually be certified for the plane, which has a maximum takeoff weight of 1.2 million pounds (544 tons) and a wing area of 845 square meters (9,100 square feet). The plane can fit as many as 853 people in an all-economy class configuration.

France’s aviation authority estimates about one in 10,000 flights operated by the national carrier, Air France SA, suffers a problem with an engine that requires it to land before reaching the planned destination.

Some 16 airlines have ordered A380s, and of the 14 airlines that have already made a choice on engine type, nine have chosen Rolls-Royce.

Rolls-Royce is working closely with the airline to investigate the reasons for the malfunction. The company said the engine has proven highly reliable, with a dispatch rate, or number of times the aircraft has left at departure time, of 99.8 percent.

Singapore began serving the Paris route in June, offering daily connections. The company first began flying A380s in October 2007 as the first customer for the model.

Emirates Airline, the largest carrier in the Middle East, is the biggest customer for the plane after ordering 58. The airline now operates five A380s. Qantas Airways Ltd. has four in service, with another two scheduled for delivery this year and three in 2010.

Air France KLM Group’s Air France is scheduled to take delivery of its first A380 by the end of October, and will fly the plane between Paris and New York’s JFK airport. Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s first delivery was pushed back from 2009 to 2010.

Airbus delivered one A380 in 2007, 12 in 2008, and has committed to delivering 14 this year, after deferrals by several airlines forced it to drop down from 18 units. The company has a total order volume of 200 for the A380.
Some content fromFrom http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aTIiIuPrLkbg

Dreaming on: 787 Repairs start

mgiles — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:56:46 +0000

787 Repairs

Randy Tinseth, vice president for marketing at Boeing’s commercial aircraft unit wrote in a blog post that workers at Boeing in Everett, Washington, have begun fixing a flaw on the first 787 Dreamliner test aircraft in preparation for its long-delayed first flight later this year.
Modifications to reinforce the areas where the plane’s wings join its body had recently begun, three months after the company again abruptly postponed the Dreamliner’s long-awaited test-flight program.

The sophisticated, composite material aircraft is already more than two years behind schedule and Boeing has been rushing to design, install and test a fix for the structural flaw discovered on the aircraft in late May.

In his blog post, Mr Tinseth wrote that the modifications are underway on both the first test plane and the so-called “static airframe”, an aircraft that Boeing conducts all types of tests on, but that won’t ever take a flight. He said modifications will soon begin on the other five 787 test aircraft, which are in various stages of final production.

The modifications are expected to take about 30 days, which means the first Dreamliner could fly by late October or early November.

At the same time, the company is moving to begin test-flying the revamped version of its iconic 747 jet, now dubbed the 747-8. The first of three 747-8 test aircraft is also supposed to fly by the end of the year.

On August 27, Boeing issued a revised flight-test and delivery schedule for the Dreamliner. Boeing now says the first test flight will happen sometime before the end of this year. That’s more than two years behind September 2007 date Boeing had initially envisioned for the first test flight. The company now plans to deliver to the first airline in the fourth quarter 2010.

Eventually, Boeing plans to use six 787’s in the test-flight program, which is expected to last up to a year. For months, Boeing had promised an accelerated test flight program of only eight to nine months, but recently gave itself extra leeway to handle any new problems that might crop up during the tests.

Boeing last month said it would take a $US2.5 billion write-off in the quarter that ends on September 30 relating to the Dreamliner program and said the first three test planes won’t be sold to customers. They hope the remaining three can be sold as business jets. Originally, all six aircraft had airline customers.

Earlier this month, the Chicago-based aerospace giant shuffled some of its top executives, replacing Scott Carson, who ran the commercial aircraft unit since 2006, with James Albaugh, the head of its defence unit.

From http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,26122788-36375,00.html