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September 11, 2023 | Local, Aerospace

Canada not overly concerned about Lockheed's F-35 production delays - Skies Mag

First deliveries of the F-35A to Canada remain "on track" for 2026, though they may not be the upgraded version of the fighter jet.

https://skiesmag.com/news/canada-not-overly-concerned-lockheed-f35-production-delays/

On the same subject

  • Guns from Iroquois-class destroyers up for sale

    September 24, 2019 | Local, Naval

    Guns from Iroquois-class destroyers up for sale

    DAVID PUGLIESE, OTTAWA CITIZEN The Canadian government is looking for buyers for the OTO Melara 76mm guns removed from the Royal Canadian Navy's Iroquois-class destroyers. All Iroquois-class ships have been decommissioned, and systems that were strictly associated with that class, have been declared surplus, according to the Department of National Defence. The five 76mm gun systems and associated spare parts from these ships were declared surplus in 2015 and 2016 and are moving through the disposal process, noted DND spokesman Andrew McKelvey. But the DND has decided not to provide the guns to museums. Instead they are being sold. Two of the guns were sold last year to the French Defence Ministry for undisclosed amount. The sale of the other guns is being coordinated by Public Services and Procurement Canada. The guns are up for sale to Canadian allies or approved buyers within the defence industry. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/guns-from-iroquois-class-destroyers-up-for-sale

  • PAL Aerospace seeks talent for SAR operating bases

    August 21, 2018 | Local, Aerospace

    PAL Aerospace seeks talent for SAR operating bases

    Chris Thatcher PAL Aerospace is on the hunt for maintenance, materiel, information technology and other support talent to staff the Royal Canadian Air Force's (RCAF's) four search and rescue main operating bases. Twenty months after the federal government selected 16 Airbus CC-295W fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft to replace six CC-115 Buffalos and 12 CC-130 H-model Hercules, St. John's, N.L.-based PAL is ready to hire the team that will deliver in-service support (ISS) for the new fleet. “PAL Aerospace will be providing a wide assortment of program management services as we prepare to undertake the maintenance and logistics support, heavy maintenance, including a mobile repair team, and centralize supply chain management activities for this aircraft,” Eva Martinez, vice-president of ISS, told the Abbotsford Aerospace, Defence and Security Expo (ADSE) in August. As a supplier to Airbus, PAL is responsible for maintenance and material support of the new fleet, providing an integrated team of aircraft maintenance engineers (AMEs), warehouse and tool crib personnel, a technical library and a contractor field office at four main operating bases in Comox, B.C., Winnipeg, Man., Trenton, Ont., and Greenwood, N.S. Each base will require around 11 people. PAL will also establish and maintain a maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility in Winnipeg for heavy maintenance work. The shop will be co-located with its central warehouse, and will be home base for the mobile repair team. In total, PAL expects to hire around 28 people to staff the facility. As for material, PAL will provide ground support equipment, a 30-day supply of aircraft consumables at each base, personal protective equipment, and shipping and handling of all aircraft spare parts, said Martinez, an aerospace engineer who served 13 years in the Air Force. Through a joint venture with Airbus called AirPro, PAL will collaborate on the integration of all ISS services. “Our hiring target as it stands right now is 73,” she said. “As we work with Canada and Airbus to fully define the maintenance tasks, we could see an increase in the level of effort required...for AMEs.” That workload is based in part on RCAF plans to locate three CC-295W at each base. Two more will reside with the operational training unit in Comox while a final two will serve as floaters. “They will be moved around depending on the induction into heavy maintenance as well as the operational tempo,” said Martinez. Comox, which will include the RCAF's new search and rescue training centre, will stand up in 2019 to coincide with the arrival of the first aircraft, expected by the end of next year. The front, mid and rear fuselage sections have been delivered to Airbus's pre-final assembly line in Tablada, Spain, and the final aircraft is expected to roll out in the first quarter of 2019. Full article: https://www.skiesmag.com/news/pal-aerospace-seeks-iss-talent-for-rcaf-sar-operating-bases/

  • PropWorks: Sustained growth over 2 decades

    December 18, 2019 | Local, Aerospace

    PropWorks: Sustained growth over 2 decades

    by Ken Pole Ever since French engineer Henri Giffard flew a hydrogen-filled dirigible 27 kilometres from Paris to Elancourt in September 1852, the propeller was for nearly a century the only way to sustain powered flight. It would be another 51 years before Orville and Wilbur Wright used this “airscrew” technology in the first flight of a powered fixed-wing aircraft at Kitty Hawk, N.C. The Wright brothers also came up with the idea of adding a twist to each blade, giving a more consistent angle of attack. Despite the advent and evolution of jets since the early 1940s, propellers have remained the preferred option for smaller aircraft. But, as with all things mechanical, they require maintenance and repair. That has enabled Winnipeg-based PropWorks Propeller Systems Inc. to become the largest company of its kind in Western Canada. “Winnipeg is where we started, on the fringe of James Richardson International Airport,” company president Jim Ross, one of the founding investors, told Skies. “The company was incorporated in October 1999 and we moved into our building in December 1999.” Winnipeg is home to about two-thirds of the total staff of 30 with the rest at its shop in Edmonton. PropWorks is now privately held by Ross along with a pair of Calgary-based investors, Lorne Gray, who owns the Aircraft Canada sales and appraisal firm, and AvMax Group Inc. “I'm the only constant,” he laughed, quickly adding that some of his employees also are long-term. Before the company was founded, Ross spent 15 years with Cessna Aircraft Co., doing finance and some marketing until it shut down its Winnipeg facility in 1992. So he began marketing for several aviation-related companies, one of which was Western Propeller. When Western decided to close the Winnipeg facility seven years later, to focus on their Edmonton and Vancouver centres, Ross and an original group of investors bought the equipment, moved it into a leased 6,500-square-foot building and began operations with just five employees. It relocated to a new 12,000-square-foot building in April 2015. The Edmonton shop, which opened in December 2006, was moved in December 2017 to a 14,000-square-foot building at Villeneuve Airport, the area's main general aviation and flight training hub. PropWorks' employees, whose experience tallies up to more than 150 years, provide services which “meet or exceed” original equipment manufacturers' specifications. “Sometimes we'll go an extra step with such things with non-destructive testing that we feel gives our customers a bit of added comfort,” Ross explained. “We have a dedicated non-destructive testing room” where blades, hubs and related components are tested before propellers are reassembled and balanced. NDT procedures include magnetic particle inspection, liquid penetrants, eddy current and ultrasonic inspection. In addition to being an Avia Propeller Service Centre, PropWorks overhauls and repairs most models of Hamilton Standard, Hamilton Sundstrand, McCauley, Dowty, MT, Sensenich and Hartzell propellers. (On a historical note, Ohio-based Hartzell dates to 1917 when Robert Hartzell, a pilot whose family owned a hardwood lumber factory and who had noticed a high failure rate in wood propellers, began producing hand-carved walnut units at the suggestion of longtime friend Orville Wright.) To this day, Hartzell prizes and cultivates customer loyalty in having built its global reputation, and so does PropWorks, which has customers in Canada, the U.S. and around the world. Ross said that as with most businesses, “it's about the people as much as the product.” One of his people is director of maintenance Mike Hudec, who had been with Western Propeller and now is his longest-term employee. Cliff Arntson, manager in Edmonton and Mike Wagner, assistant manager in Edmonton have a combined 84 years experience with propellers. Much of the U.S. business is with customers in the border markets of Minnesota and the Dakotas. PropWorks has three trucks which pick up the propellers for work in Winnipeg and Edmonton. “Our customers like that service,” said Ross. His most distant customer is AvMax, which has a base in Nairobi, Kenya, and he has other large customers primarily Canada and U.S. based. PropWorks draws on a variety of sources for its employees, including the Stevenson Campus of Red River College in Winnipeg. They come out of the aviation maintenance engineer (AME) stream but are not certified AMEs because they haven't gone through the requisite apprentice program when they join PropWorks. “They can't do that in a propeller shop because that wouldn't give them a broad enough base to qualify as AMEs,” said Ross. “There's no AME licence for propellers; there was at one time but not for many years now.” The general preference is “somebody with a good mechanical aptitude who we can put in our own training program,” he added. “It takes one to two years for them to become proficient.” Asked to explain the difference between overhaul and repair, Ross said the former involves disassembly, discarding parts mandated for replacement, installing new ones and then putting the entire assembly through NDT before it's painted, reassembled and balanced. That means it's a “zero time” propeller when it leaves the shop. Repairs, on the other hand, can involve a range of things such as dealing with blade nicks or leaking hub seals. If that's all that is done, the propeller leaves the shop as “time continued.” Like everything in aviation, propellers have long since evolved since those early fixed wood two-bladed configurations. “The simple ones nowadays are the fixed-pitch propellers that you'd see on your most basic flight training airplane,” said Ross, who is part-owner of a Cessna 172 and has about 1,000 hours logged. “Then it goes all the way up, through two-bladed constant-speed propellers to three-, four- and even five-bladed propellers.” The most complex ones are Hamilton Sundstrand propellers on the Dash 8 twin turboprop introduced by de Havilland Canada in 1984 and last built by Bombardier Aerospace in 2005. “They simply take more time,” said Ross. Then there are some which can justifiably called vintage, such as the Hamilton Standard three-bladed propellers on Second World War-era Douglas DC-3s but these are “fairly standard.” Ross noted that PropWorks donated one for the equally old North American Harvard Mark II in the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum in Brandon, Man. The company is doing more composites, a capacity which required “a substantial investment” in equipment, including an autoclave to heat the laminates. Asked what the future might hold, Ross replied that while “we've just had our best year ever,” he hesitated to predict the “hectic” growth of the past 10 years would continue. “The key to growth is not necessarily going out to find new customers. It's adding to our capabilities – that way more customers are likely to send their work to us.” While he could only guess at the number of corporate or private propeller-driven aircraft in Canada, he did venture that “it's not a dying market” which bodes well for the future. https://www.skiesmag.com/news/propworks-sustained-growth-over-2-decads

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