TPT July 2014

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78 July 2014
Global Marketplace
› Con Ed has made progress too. William Akley, its senior
vice president for maintenance and construction, told the
Times that the utility has doubled the pace of its replacement
programme, Still, he said, it will take as long as 25 years to get
rid of all of the “vintage” pipes, made of iron or bare steel, in
the system.
The reporters noted that the company faces unique
challenges. In Manhattan, “the heart of its territory,” the rules
on when and how Con Ed can disrupt traffic are much more
restrictive than elsewhere. As a result, the utility says it can
cost as much as $2,000 a foot, or well over $10 million a mile,
to replace a gas main.
Felim McTague, a Con Ed construction manager, said it was
taking about two weeks per block to upgrade the gas mains in
the rapidly gentrifying meatpacking district of Manhattan.
A crew of seven has to thread the new pipe – coated steel
at the intersections, plastic in between – through a maze of
steam pipes, phone lines, TV cables, and sewer and water
mains. Every night, the Times was told, workers have to cover
the hole in the street with thick steel plates that can bear city
traffic.
Said Mr McTague, plausibly, “It’s a tedious process.”
› Elsewhere in the US, a rupture in a major pipeline in San
Bruno, California, in 2010 caused an explosion that killed
eight people. In 2011, a leak from an 83-year-old cast-iron
main in Allentown, Pennsylvania, caused a blast that killed
five people.
“It’s like Russian roulette,” said Robert B Jackson, a professor
of environment and energy at Stanford University (Palo Alto,
California) who has studied gas leaks in Washington, DC, and
Boston.
“The chances are, you are going to be lucky,” he told the
Times. “But once in a while you’re going to be unlucky.”
Aerospace
› Under a deal brokered by US Secretary of State John
Kerry in November 2013, Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear
activities for six months in exchange for sanctions relief from
nations including Britain, China and the United States.
Tehran had reportedly argued that the sanctions imposed
after the 1979 hostage crisis prevented the upgrade of the
Iranian commercial air fleet, endangering passengers.
Now, the US Treasury Department has granted Boeing
Co a licence to export certain aircraft parts to Iran. The
Chicago-based plane manufacturer said on 4 April that the
authorisation is solely for components necessary to the safe
operation of planes it sold to Iran before 1979. Iran Air is still
flying Boeing passenger planes bought before that year.
Another American company – General Electric Co (Fairfield,
Connecticut) – said that it had received permission from
Washington to overhaul 18 engines sold to Iran in the late
1970s. That work will be carried out by GE in the US or at
facilities of the German firm MTU Aero Engines (Munich).
If the moratorium should lead to a permanent lifting of
sanctions, Iran would be a likely customer for hundreds of
new commercial planes. But until such time, no discussion on
prospective sales of aircraft is permitted.
› Global sales of business jets, which dropped during the
financial crisis, have been in a slow recovery, and will
account for $250bn in sales from 2013 to 2023, according
to the business and general aviation division of Honeywell
International (Morristown, New Jersey). In its most recent
ten-year forecast, Honeywell said that bigger, faster, more
expensive long-range jets would by 2024 account for 70 per
cent of new expenditures worldwide on business jets.
Throughout Asia, Honeywell said, over the last five years the
total number of business jets has grown about 12 per cent
annually. Large-cabin, long-range jets accounted for 77 per
cent of sales over that period.
Figures from the Washington-based General Aviation
Manufacturers Association (GAMA) show marked global
shifts underway in the market for business jets of all sizes and
types.
In 2007, the US and Canada accounted for 58.3 per cent of
the 1,136 business jets delivered worldwide. That dropped to
49.7 per cent in 2012, then rose slightly, to 52.4 per cent, last
year – when shipments totalled 678.
But GAMA noted significant growth in the Asia-Pacific region,
which accounted for 11.9 per cent of shipments of business
jets in 2013, up from 4.2 per cent in 2007. In Latin America,
the share grew to 11.1 per cent in 2013 from 7.5 per cent in
2007.
Boeing has signed a deal that allows exports of parts to Iran