Arabsat 5A Satellite Shipped To Launch Site

The first Arabsat 5th generation satellite today left the Astrium facilties in Toulouse and was loaded in Blagnac airport on an Antonov cargo airplane that will transport it to French Guyana in view of an April launch into geostationary orbit.

Arabsat-5A, a multi-mission satellite, will provide additional capacity at the Arabsat 30.5 degrees East position for a large range of satellite communications services such as television backhauling and broadcasting, telephony, business communications, Internet trunking and the provision of VSAT and other interactive services, over sub-Saharan Africa, the North-Africa and Middle East (MENA) region, and beyond.

Arabsat 5A was built by an industrial team of Astrium and Thales Alenia Space acting as co-prime contractors. Astrium, the team leader, supplied the Eurostar E3000 platform and assembled and tested the spacecraft.

Thales Alenia Space supplied the communications payload featuring 26 active transponders in C-band and 24 in Ku-band. The Launch and Early Orbit Phase will be conducted from the Astrium spacecraft control centre in Toulouse.

Arabsat-5A will have a launch mass of 4,800kg and a spacecraft power of 11kW at the end of its 15-year designed lifetime. Arabsat 5A is the 4th Eurostar built for the Arab Satellite Communications Organization (Arabsat) based in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the 1st Eurostar E3000 in a series of four Arabsat 5th generation satellite ordered to date. A sister spacecraft, Arabsat 5B also known as Badr 5, is undergoing final testing in Toulouse.

Arabsat 5A is planned for launch by an Ariane 5 which will also carry another Astrium-built satellite, COMS, for the South Korean space agency KARI. Launch of Arabsat 5A and COMS is scheduled for the end of April.

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Dubai's Emirates to hire 2,000 staff in 2010

Dubai government-owned airline Emirates said on Tuesday it planned to recruit 2,000 cabin crew in 2010 as it expands its fleet and routes.

The Arab world's largest airline has hired around 660 cabin crew and more than 60 pilots since March 2009, a statement said. The airline's total cabin crew stands at 11,000. "More aircraft and flights mean more staff," the carrier said. "It is expected that a further 2,000 cabin crew will be hired this year."

The company has grown its fleet of planes from 131 to 145, since March 2009, including eight Airbus A380s superjumbos.

Middle Eastern airlines saw the highest growth rate of 11.2 percent in air passenger traffic globally for 2009 as carriers snapped up long-haul connecting traffic, international air traffic body IATA said on Jan. 27.

Emirates, the largest customer for the Airbus A380 superjumbo, said in February funding its aircraft purchases was not an issue and that it would post solid results for 2009.

The airline, which has $55 billion worth of orders with Airbus and Boeing, expects to take delivery of 11 aircraft in 2010 as it presses ahead with expansion into Europe.

One of Dubai's prize assets, Emirates in December raised $1.13 billion from Citibank, backed by a guarantee from the European Export Credit Agencies, and a second loan from Doric Asset to finance six aircraft.

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China announces second lunar probe

China Thursday announced plans for its second lunar probe in October ahead of its launch of an unmanned space module set for next year.

The Chang'e-2 lunar probe in October would be launched on a Long March 3-C carrier rocket, said Liang Xiaohong, party chief of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Liang's announcement came a day after Qi Faren, former chief designer of China's Shenzhou spaceships, announced plans for the launch of the Tiangong-I unmanned space module next year.

Tiangong-1 is designed for the country's first space docking and is seen as an essential step toward building a space station, Xinhua said.

A spokesman for the Chinese space program had said a year ago the unmanned module launch would be launched this year but the report blamed the delay until next year on technical reasons but gave no details.

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04718v first Turkish plane arrived in Jerusalem

Pilots Salim Bey, Kemal Bey in leather coats, Bleriot plane 'Edremit', en route Istanbul-Cairo (first completed flight)...info from the ab-ix forum of Air Britain and the Cedarjet website. (May 1 1914)

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The Palestinian Airlines History Pages

Before its partition and the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, Palestine, under British mandate, with both its Arab and Jewish populations had the most advanced economy, possibly the most educated population, and the highest potential for development in the Middle East.

Airports in Palestine, including Gaza and Lydda were important stops in the prestigious network of Imperial Airways. Palestine Airways, founded in July 1937 by Pinhas Rutenberg, was second only to Egypt's Misrair as the oldest airline in the region and was based in Haifa. It started its operations with flights between Haifa and Lydda using 2 Shorts S.16 Scion 2 planes. As tensions between the Arab and Jewish communities increased in the late thirties, the airline's base was transferred to a new airfield in Tel-Aviv (the airstrip is currently known as Sde Dov Airport) in October 1938. The fleet was increased by a Short S.22 Scion and a De Havilland DH-89 Rapide in 1938. The Rapide performed a twice daily rotation between Tel-Aviv and Haifa, a route expanded to Beirut a few weeks later. Palestine Airways ceased its operations in August 1940 and its aircraft were taken-over by the Royal Air Force during the second world war. Palestine Airways' shares were held by Jewish entrepreneurs, its Hebrew title was "Netivei Avir Eretz Yisrael" (Air Lines of the Land of Israel) while its title in Arabic reads "Turuq Al Jawwiya Bi Filistin" (The Airline Company in Palestine), a discrepancy that was lost in the official translation to English.

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New Russian stealth fighter makes first flight

The "fifth-generation" stealth fighter -- Russia's first all-new warplane since the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged the defense industry into poverty and disarray -- flew for 47 minutes, planemaker Sukhoi said.

"It's a remarkable event," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told his cabinet, but he suggested the plane still needed work.

"There is very much to be done, in part as regards the engine," Putin said. "But the fact that the plane is already in the air is a big step forward."

Russia's main television networks led news programs with reports of the flight and showed footage of the needle-nosed, camouflage-painted plane taking off from a snow-lined airstrip at a Sukhoi factory in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in Russia's Far East.

"The plane performed very well. All our expectations for this first flight were met," Sukhoi spokeswoman Olga Kayukova said on Rossiya 24 television. "The premiere was a success."

Foreign journalists were not invited.

Fifth-generation aircraft are invisible to radar, have advanced flight and weapons control systems and can cruise at supersonic speeds. The new plane is Moscow's answer to the U.S.-built F-22 Raptor stealth fighter -- the world's only fifth-generation fighter yet in service -- which first flew in 1997.

Putin said the plane would first be delivered to the Defense Ministry in 2013 and serial production would start in 2015. Analysts have said it would probably be five to seven years before Russia's military gets to fly the new fighter.

Successful development of the fighter, which Rossiya 24 said has been tentatively dubbed the T-50, is crucial to showing Russia can challenge U.S. technology.

The 1991 Soviet collapse ushered in a cash-strapped time of troubles for Russia's military. Its aircraft makers have been building warplanes based on updated Soviet-era designs.

EMBARRASSING SETBACKS

Defense spending increased in the oil-fueled period of economic growth during the 2000-2008 presidency of Putin, who has encouraged pride in Russia's military might.

The military has continued to suffer embarrassing and sometimes deadly setbacks since the nuclear submarine Kursk sank in 2000, killing all 118 seamen aboard.

Several failed tests of the submarine-launched Bulava (Mace) intercontinental ballistic missile, touted by Putin as able to pierce any air defense, have troubled the Kremlin.

The Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified source as saying the new Russian plane had lowered and raised its landing gear twice during the flight and added that "the American F-35 fifth-generation jet couldn't do that (on its test flight)."

Lieutenant Colonel Marcel de Haas, Russian security researcher at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, was not convinced of the plane's bright future.

"My impression is that this new fighter plane is also more propaganda than a real expectancy," he told Reuters by e-mail.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov told the cabinet more work had to be done on the engine and the armaments system. Neither he nor Putin went into details.

The new plane is important for future Russian arms sales.

In a statement on the company website sukhoi.org, Sukhoi director Mikhail Pogosyan said the company planned to develop its fifth-generation fighter program further with India, its biggest client for existing planes.

Sukhoi is Russia's largest exporter of military planes and accounts for about a quarter of the country's annual arms sales, which reached $7.4 billion last year.

Besides India and China, existing clients for Russia's weapons include U.S. foes such as Iran, Syria and Venezuela, and their purchase of an advanced new fighter could cause concern in the United States and its allies.

The U.S. Congress has banned export sales of the F-22.

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