BUCHAREST, March 14 (Reuters) – Romania’s Blue Air will make a decision on its order for 12 Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets only after an investigation into a fatal crash of one of the planes in Ethiopia at the weekend, CEO Marius Puiu told Reuters.
Puiu said his company was “monitoring the situation very carefully.”
“We
trust the world-wide precautionary suspension of flights, a decision
that puts civil aviation transport safety first,” said Puiu, adding the
first 737 MAX 8 plane was planned to arrive in Romania this summer.
“We
are in permanent contact with the manufacturer, with EASA (the European
Union’s aviation safety regulator) and the Romanian civil aeronautical
authority,” he said.
Currently, Blue Air operates 25 Boeing 737 series aircraft – 737-300, 737-400, 737-500, 737-700 and 737-800, with capacities ranging from 120 to 189 seats.
(Reporting by Radu Marinas; Editing by Mark Potter)
BREMEN,
Germany (Reuters) – Ariane 6, Europe’s next-generation space rocket, is
expected to win its first two commercial launch orders in coming weeks,
company officials said, a key milestone as the European launcher vies
for orders against Elon Musk’s U.S. competitor SpaceX.
Operator
Arianespace faces increased competition from SpaceX and Blue Origin,
owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Japan and India also pose a growing
challenge.
Ariane
6 has three institutional orders in hand from the European Commission
and France and is close to signing deals with two commercial customers,
said Mathias Spude, spokesman for ArianeGroup, a joint venture of Airbus
and Safran, that is the majority stakeholder in Arianespace.
ArianeGroup
has invested 400 million euros (£347 million) of its own funds in the
3.4-billion-euro development of Ariane 6 – a project key to ensuring
Europe’s independent access to space and a market valued at over $1
trillion by 2040.
Manufacturers
say the rocket will be more versatile than Ariane 5, able to carry out
missions from placing as many as 90 small satellites in low-earth orbit
to taking classic spy satellites to far higher perches in geostationary
orbit.
But
the business case depends on drumming up enough commercial business to
augment the 5-6 institutional launches expected in Europe annually in
coming years, about a quarter of those planned in the United States.
European governments also face industry pressure to use Ariane 6 even if they could get cheaper rides using SpaceX.
“Europe
continues to need its own access to space – the market of the future,”
said Matthias Wachter with the BDI German Federation of Industry. “It
doesn’t make sense to use European tax money to develop our own rocket
but then launch satellites with competitors from the United States or
Asia.”
Ariane
6, due for a first launch in 2020, was designed to save significant
costs compared to Ariane 5, but industry experts say it will still cost
around 70 million euros per launch – well above the rate offered by
SpaceX, which uses reusable rocket technology and can count on larger
U.S. orders.
Ariane
6’s designers insist innovative production techniques will favour the
European launcher when the commercial market recovers from a recent
slump.
“When
it wakes up … we will be on the market with a rocket that is 40
percent cheaper, and will continue to reduce costs after that,” Spude
told Reuters at the Ariane 6 production site.
Still,
experts say SpaceX is widely credited with jolting the overall market
with a keen focus on cutting costs, forcing Europe to shake up its
launch industry.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, Editing by Tim Hepher)
MOJAVE, Calif., Dec 13 (Reuters) – A Virgin Galactic space tourism vehicle took off from California’s Mojave desert under clear skies on Thursday bound for the fringes of space, a mission that if successful would mark the first U.S. human flight beyond the atmosphere since the end of America’s shuttle program in 2011.
The test flight foreshadows a new era of civilian space travel that could kick off as soon as 2019, with British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic battling other billionaire-backed ventures, like Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to be the first to offer suborbital flights to fare-paying tourists.
In the first steps before a high-altitude rocket launch, Virgin’s twin-fuselage carrier airplane holding the SpaceShipTwo passenger spacecraft took off soon after 7 a.m. local time (10 a.m. ET) from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 90 miles (145 km) north of Los Angeles.
Richard Branson, wearing a leather bomber jacket with a fur collar, attended the take-off along with hundreds of spectators on a crisp morning in the California desert.
If all goes according to plan, the carrier airplane will haul the SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket plane to an altitude of about 45,000 feet (13.7 kms) and release it. Seconds later, SpaceShipTwo will fire, catapulting it to at least 50 miles (80.47 km) above Earth, high enough for the pilots to experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the planet.
Virgin’s latest flight test comes four years after the original SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight that killed the co-pilot and seriously injured the pilot, dealing a major setback to Virgin Galactic, a U.S. offshoot of the London-based Virgin Group.
“We’ve had our challenges, and to finally get to the point where we are at least within range of space altitude is a major deal for our team,” George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive, told reporters during a facilities tour on Wednesday in Mojave, where workers could be seen making pre-flight inspections of the rocket plane.
While critics point to Branson’s unfulfilled space promises over the past decade, the maverick businessman told a TV interviewer in October that Virgin’s first commercial space trip with him onboard would happen “in months and not years.”
Thursday’s test flight will have two pilots onboard, four NASA research payloads, and a mannequin named Annie as a stand-in passenger. More than 600 people have paid or put down deposits to fly aboard Virgin’s suborbital missions, including actor Leonardo DiCaprio and pop star Justin Bieber. A 90-minute flight costs $250,000.
Short sightseeing trips to space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket are likely to cost around $200,000 to $300,000, at least to start, Reuters reported in July. Tickets will be offered ahead of the first commercial launch, and test flights with Blue Origin employees are expected to begin in 2019.
Other firms planning a variety of passenger spacecraft include Boeing Co, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch.
In September, SpaceX said Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, founder and chief executive of online fashion retailer Zozo, would be the company’s first passenger on a voyage around the moon on its forthcoming Big Falcon Rocket spaceship, tentatively scheduled for 2023.
Musk, the billionaire CEO of electric carmaker Tesla , said the Big Falcon Rocket could conduct its first orbital flights in two to three years as part of his grand plan to shuttle passengers to the moon and eventually fly humans and cargo to Mars.
According to Virgin, SpaceShipTwo is hauled to an altitude of about 45,000 feet (13.7 kms) by the WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane and released. The spaceship then fires its rocket motor to catapult it to at least 50 miles (80.47 km) above Earth, high enough for passengers to experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the planet.
Bezos’ New Shepard has already flown to that altitude – an internationally recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space known as the Karman line – though the Blue Origin trip did not carry humans.
Virgin’s Thursday launch likely will not go as high as the Karman line. Virgin’s pilots are aiming to soar 50 miles into the sky – the U.S. military and NASA’s definition of the edge of space and high enough to earn commercial astronaut wings by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
Thursday’s test flight carried two pilots, four NASA research payloads, and a mannequin named Annie as a stand-in passenger.
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Mojave, California Additional reporting by Irene Klotz in Cape Canaveral, Florida Editing by Leslie Adler and Nick Zieminski)
(Reuters) – U.S. stock index futures jumped around 2 percent on Monday, setting Wall Street up to add to last week’s strong gains, after the United States and China declared a temporary trade truce.
Strong gains in Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and other technology stocks pushed Nasdaq futures NQc1 up more than 2 percent, while S&P 500 e-minis ESc1 touched a near 1-month high. Gains in Dow futures set the blue-chip index up for a near 450-point gain at the open.
Washington and Beijing agreed to a 90-day trade ceasefire during the G20 summit in Argentina on Saturday and U.S. President Donald Trump said China has agreed to “reduce and remove” tariffs below the 40 percent level that the country is currently charging on U.S.-made vehicles.
However, the White House also said that the existing 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods would be lifted to 25 percent if no deal was reached within 90 days.
The trade optimism spilt over to shares of Apple, which gained 3.3 percent in premarket trading.
Trump had said last week that the next round of tariffs could also be placed on the company’s iPhones, as part of the $267 billion list of goods not yet hit by tariffs.
Trade-sensitive Caterpillar Inc (CAT.N), Boeing Co (BA.N) gained over 4.5 percent each, while U.S. carmakers General Motors Co (GM.N), Ford Motor Co (F.N) and Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) rose between 3 percent and 4 percent.
Shares of energy companies also rose as crude prices surged, helping lift Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) up by 2.1 percent and Chevron Corp (CVX.N) by 2.4 percent. [O/R]
“Most of us were hoping that we would come out of these discussions with no new tariffs and a pause, which is ultimately what we got,” said Randy Frederick, vice president of trading and derivatives for Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas.
Singapore Airlines, which first introduced iPads to the airline cockpit back in 2015, has explained the difference they have made – and its plans for the future.
The airline also noted a simple user interface trick it employs to make apps easier to use …
CNET reports that the airline went beyond the weather forecasts and flight chart information that many airlines now put on iPads instead of paper.
