Boeing

The F/A-18E/F Super Hornet team last night added another award to its long list of achievements by receiving the 2000 Aviation Week Quality Center Award during a ceremony in Long Beach, Calif.

The award recognizes superior quality management in civil, military and space organizations and facilities. The Super Hornet team - Naval Air Systems Command, The Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman, GE Aircraft Engines and Raytheon - was chosen for consistently remaining on or ahead of schedule and under budget, meeting or surpassing key performance parameters and flying the first engineering development aircraft one month early.

Tony Parasida, Boeing vice president of the F/A-18 program, thanked Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine for recognizing the entire program's commitment to quality. "The success of the F/A-18 program is about the U.S. Navy, our industry partners and our people at Boeing working as a team," said Parasida. "The Super Hornet is the future of naval aviation, and this team is committed to ensuring that it stays that way."

Aviation Week's Quality Center Award is a major initiative to identify and celebrate the industry's finest examples of quality practices at aerospace and defense operations, logistics, procurement, manufacturing and research-and-development centers worldwide.

Earlier this year, the Super Hornet received one of the aerospace industry's highest honors - the 1999 Robert J. Collier Trophy. The Collier Trophy is awarded annually in recognition of the greatest achievement in aeronautics and astronautics in America. It has been called the greatest and most prized of all aeronautical honors in the United States.

The Super Hornet is the U.S. Navy's newest tactical fighter and the most advanced version of the combat-proven F/A-18 Hornet. Both the single-seat E and two-seat F models of the Super Hornet offer increased range, greater endurance, more payload-carrying ability, more powerful engines, increased carrier bringback capability, enhanced survivability and a renewed potential for future growth. The Super Hornet is an adverse-weather, day and night, multimission strike fighter whose survivability improvements over its predecessors make it harder to find; and if found, harder to hit; and if hit, harder to disable.

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