AerCap Holdings has announced that its shareholders have approved the previously announced acquisition of International Lease Finance Corporation (ILFC) at the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders held earlier on February 13.
The transaction, which is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014, remains subject to receipt of necessary regulatory approvals and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.
All other proposals made to the shareholders at the meeting were also approved.
Meanwhile, much has been said about the issue of being able to detect defaults in composite structures – namely the new airframes. Now a UK firm, Element, has completed a study to demonstrate the feasibility of a state-of-the-art technique to instantly evaluate defects within composite aerospace structures. This could potentially have wide-ranging implications for the industry, as it could be used to immediately determine the viability of parts during the manufacturing process and be applied in-service, to evaluate whether component damage should affect the status of an aircraft and whether it can continue to operate or if it requires repairs.
Element’s Engaged Experts were part of a consortium that comprised participants from industry-leading names, including Spirit Aerospace, LMS SamTech and Wavelength NDT. The team successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept to automatically integrate NDT inspections into damage tolerance evaluations for composite materials. This required the development of new technology to ultrasonically scan composite aerospace structures, which could then interrogate scanned information and digitally map data directly into a finite element analysis code, allowing for the instant evaluation of any defects.