Air Force U S

Europe's largest defense contractor is aggressively campaigning to wrest one of the Air Force's biggest contracts from Boeing Co. European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co., known as EADS, has launched a major public relations and lobbying campaign to persuade Congress and the Pentagon to buy its aerial refueling tankers instead of those built by scandal-plagued Boeing. The tanker contract is worth up to $100 billion.

WASHINGTON -- One senator in a snit, it seems, can tie up a whole branch of the military. Just ask the Air Force, which is engaged in a dispute with Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) over the basing of planes at an Air National Guard field in Boise. In a stark demonstration of the power a single senator holds in a chamber that prizes minority rights, Craig is blocking the promotions of at least 212 Air Force officers in an attempt to get his way.

The B-2 Stealth bomber, the sleek, sinister-looking Air Force strike plane that is designed to elude enemy radar, is about to run into heavy--and possibly fatal--flak in the 101st Congress. Anxious to find money to divert to domestic programs, both liberal and conservative lawmakers are setting their sights on the $75-billion B-2 project as the most obvious target for making the military cuts that will be needed to reduce the deficit or finance new spending elsewhere.

For people who live next to a rocket test site, it is not unusual to hear an explosion or to see a rising cloud of smoke on the horizon. But residents of this isolated Mojave Desert mining town Friday were soon tipped off that something was wrong at the Astronautics Laboratory. Ambulances hurtled down 20 Mule Team Road toward the laboratory entrance at Rocket Site Road.

The estimated weight of the Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft under development at McDonnell Douglas has increased by 8.2% over original plans, resulting in the aircraft not meeting one of its contractual performance requirements set by the Pentagon. But the weight growth, which has been an ongoing concern in the C-17 development, has not forced the program into a financial overrun on its fixed-price contract, according to Douglas C-17 general manager Robert L. Clepper.

An engineer who quit his job with a Garden Grove defense contractor sued his former employer Tuesday, alleging he was driven out because he blew the whistle on a scheme to defraud the government. John A. Trepl II contends that officials of Swedlow Inc. began to pressure him last year after he refused to cooperate in the firm's alleged scheme to cover up flaws in windshields it manufactured for the B-1B bomber. Trepl also said he alerted the FBI to the case.

An assessment of whether Northrop should lose its position as the government's sole-source contractor for the huge Stealth bomber program was under way Tuesday, as a team of Defense Department and Rand Corp. officials met with executives of Northrop and Rockwell International. Under congressional pressure, the Pentagon is studying how competition can be created in the top-secret bomber program to reduce recent cost growth.

The B-1 bomber could be shot down by the Soviet's most advanced surface-to-air missiles because of deficiencies in its electronic radar jamming system, built in New York by the Eaton Corp., Air Force officials have disclosed. The jammer's shortcomings mean that the bomber cannot safely fly over certain Soviet anti-aircraft sites, as it was expected to do, apparently limiting its capability to attack some highly defended Soviet targets.

The Air Force Wednesday lifted some of the secrecy surrounding its exotic new stealth bomber, releasing a rough artist's rendering revealing the plane to be a modern version of a "flying wing" design tried out and abandoned in the early 1950s. With the picture came the announcement that the controversial plane will make its first flight next fall--a short hop from its assembly facility at Palmdale to the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base.

Jack Northrop, the aviation pioneer who founded Northrop Corp., was granted an extraordinary government security clearance just before his death in 1981 to see the company's design for the B-2 Stealth bomber, which resurrects the "flying wing" concept he had invented in the 1940s, the company's chairman disclosed Wednesday. "I went to the Air Force and said, 'Let this man know,' " Northrop Chairman Thomas V.