Raytheon Aircraft Company has become Hawker Beechcraft Inc., under a sale negotiated between Raytheon Company and GS Capital Partners, an affiliate of Goldman Sachs and Onex Partners. Hawker Beechcraft now owns RAC facilities in Wichita and Salina, Kan., Little Rock, Ark., and Dallas. The “new” company traces its lineage to Beech Aircraft Corp., formed in 1932 and which became a Raytheon subsidiary in 1980, and the Hawker Siddeley Corp., which bought DeHavilland Aircraft in the 1960s. In 1995, the Air Force and Navy chose the Beech MkII as the new joint primary undergraduate trainer, which became the T-6A Texan II. The T-6A replaces the T-37 for the Air Force, which has received more than 200 of its planned purchase of around 400 Texans.
Denys Overholser, the Lockheed Martin engineer whose insights on the mathematics of radar cross section led directly to the first operational stealth attack airplane and permanently reshaped combat aircraft design and tactics, died April 28 at the age of 86.