As NASA’s Space Shuttle winds down towards its final flight — PAT NORRIS reports from Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, on the countdown to its retirement and successor space access systems.

This is a full article published in Aerospace International: October 2010. As a member, you recieve two new Royal Aeronautical Society publications each month - find out more about membership.

Aerospace International talks to the Rt Hon Gerald Howarth, MP for Aldershot, Minister for International Security Strategy at the Ministry of Defence and a private pilot, about this year’s Farnborough Airshow, encouraging young people into the industry and why UK aerospace and defence exports will lead the way out of the deficit.

RICHARD GARDNER visits Rolls-Royce at Derby to see progress on the new Trent XWB powerplant for the Airbus A350.

With an intake diameter wider than the fuselage of Concorde, the new Rolls-Royce Trent XWB which has begun ground testing at the company’s main UK commercial engine facility, is a very impressive powerplant, from every angle, and looks set to become one of the biggest civil engine programmes over the next three to four decades. For Rolls-Royce, this is perhaps the single most significant member of the Trent family and is taking engine production technology to a new high within a truly global partnership.

The UK is leading the world in a game-changing new manufacturing technique that has the potential to usher in a new industrial revolution, with aerospace and other hi-tech sectors blazing the way. TIM ROBINSON reports from EADS Innovation Works in Filton, Bristol.

(first published in UAV special edition of Aerospace International, September 2009 - one of two nominations for Aerospace Journalist of the year awards 2010)

Now that portable and hand-launched UAVs have become established as valuable military assets, work is underway to develop smaller and smaller designs. BILL READ reports on the technological challenges faced in the incredible  shrinking world of MAVs and NAVs.

Aerospace International talks to the chief executive of Virgin Atlantic Airways, STEVE RIDGWAY, CBE, about volcanic ash, the rise of airline alliances and his carrier’s green mission.

AI: How has the volcanic ash affected your business? How much do you expect you might have lost?

The UK Government has announced a series of defence cuts in advance of a wider Strategic Defence Review. MIKE BRATBY from the RAeS Air Power Group asks if this combination of cost-cutting before planning for the future is reshaping Britain’s defence in an uneasy mix that does not add up to a strategy.

The Editor, Richard Gardner, interviews Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, KCB, ADC, BSc, FRAeS, CCMI, RAF, Chief of the Air Staff.

As the Royal Air Force enters its 92nd year as one of the best equipped and most operationally active air arms in the world, it is facing a future that is far from clear. By the end of the year it is expected that a new, and long overdue, Strategic Defence Review should provide a re-adjustment in policy to reflect changing circumstances but nobody is expecting defence funding, as a proportion of GDP, to be restored to the higher level that was in place when the last SDR set out its priorities.

After false starts — Boeing’s flight test campaign for the 787 is now underway, ahead of the first delivery of the Dreamliner later this year. TIM ROBINSON profiles the testing activity for the 787 and speaks to Randy Tinseth, vice president marketing, Boeing Commerical Airplanes, on the programme’s future.

On 15 December 2009 on a cold and misty Seattle morning, the prototype Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the first all new airliner of the 21st century made its maiden flight, watched by Boeing employees, the world’s media and also by thousands around the globe logged in online through the Internet. The three-hour flight from the 787 factory at Everett’s Paine Field saw the two pilots, chief test pilot Mike Carriker and engineering test pilot Randy Neville thread ZA001 round foggy weather to finally land at the flight test centre at Boeing Field. With the visibility closing in and a requirement for safety reasons to take off to the north, (where it is more sparsely populated) it had been touch and go on the day but, luckily, a weather window appeared and history was made.

On the eve of the 2010 Singapore Air Show, RICHARD GARDNER looks at evolving air power in the Asia-Pacific defence market.

Defence and aerospace leaders from all over the Asia-Pacific region will be heading towards the Changi exhibition site in February to see what is of interest in one of the world’s most dynamic defence markets. For the global giants, especially those based in Europe, suffering from a general downturn in home defence business, this region represents a highly valuable export outlet which can play a key role in extending production flows through the recession period.