Vshk Germany and U.S. to Share Intimate Data on Terror Suspects
NEW YORK - The Southwest Airlines incident may just be an indication of a much larger problem. It all has to do with the relationship between the Federal Aviation Administration and the airlines the agency is supposed to regulate. When an airline is caught by the agency for safety violations, the FAA often announces huge fines against that airline. But how many of those fines actually get paid CBS News travel editor Peter Greenberg reports that the FAA s system of fining airlines for maintenance problems isn t working, according to at least one former National Transportation Safety Board member. I don t know of a study that has ever been done by the FAA or anyone el stanley cup website se that can correlate the fines to improving safety, former NTSB member John Goglia said.Boeing didn t expect 737 cracks so soonFAA orders emergency inspections of Boeing jetsSouthwest: 5 jetliners found to have cracks In 2007, t stanley website he FAA found that Southwest Airlines had improperly inspected 46 of its planes for metal fatigue, and when re-inspected, all were discovered to have cracks. The FAA slapped the co stanley cups uk mpany with a $10.5 million fine. A year later, however, Southwest had the fine knocked down to $7.5 million. News of more cracks this week raise questions about the effectiveness of those fines. There is very little incentive if the airline doesn t feel the pain of the fine. The ultimate victim is safety, said ex-Rep. James Oberstar, former chairman of the House Transportation Committee.This raises the qu Hgjd Intel Reform May Be Slow Go
DARPA is going gaga over the pew-pew. The department just awarded a Northrop Grumman a $20.2 million contract to begin the second phase of its Excalibur Program鈥攐ne which aims to give the same kind of missile-frying laser cannon that currently patrolling the Persian Gulf to America Air Force. Specifically, Northop has been contracted as part of Project Endurance, which focuses on miniaturizing components as well as developing tracking, identification, and engagement systems basically all the stuff that would allow stanley cup quencher a pilot to aim and fire a beam weapon . Project Endurance is an offshoot of the department larger Excalibur Project whose goal is to develop coherent stanley thermos optical phased array technologies to enable scalable laser weapons that are 10 times lighter and more compact than existing high-power chemical laser systems. This is, surprisingly, not an offensive weapon but is rather being developed to counter incoming IR heat-seeking missiles. And by counter, I don ;t mean simply dazzling the incoming threat, or leading it away from the aircraft with decoys or chaff鈥攖his laser will simply burn through the missile before it can detonate. That a tall order. You look at the size of the existing laser systems America has fielded in the past few years鈥攍ike the H stanley becher EL-MD and the laser aboard the USS Ponce鈥攁nd they ;re all enormous. What more, they require massive amounts of power to operate. So shrinking all these bits d |