Whether it's a Farnborough or Paris year, the major show of the year sets the benchmark for Flightglobal as it does for the rest of the aerospace industry.

This year saw online activity build to a frenzied high during the month of June.

The Air France tragedy, Sir Richard Branson as Guest Editor, and the wealth of Paris Air Show coverage all contributed to build on Flightglobal previously record audience and traffic totals to reach unprecedented levels.

The month's overview looks like this: Nearly 1,000,000 individuals (one million) visited the site looking at over seven million different pages on this website.

We also saw Flightglobal overtake Boeing in the Alexa rankings to become the number one industry website on the internet.

In terms of all aviation-related sites Flightglobal is now second only to popular photo site airliners.net in the Alexa charts.

Of course the higher up the Alexa rankings you go the bigger the leap needs to be in terms of traffic and audience in order to remain competitive. For example, a website maybe holding steady for their own traffic figures but slipping down in the Alexa rankings as sites like Twitter and youtube gain more share of global internet traffic.

The frenzy of activity on Flightglobal during June is therefore reflected in our recent gain of an additional 2,600 places in the Alexa rankings.

But to put that in perspective, if you're Facebook and ranked 4th in the world in terms of most popular sites - that's somewhere in the region of 50.6 billion pages views generated by 123.9 million unique visitors.

Flightglobal is currently ranked about 15,000th out of all the internet sites in the world - representing 7.1 million page views per month from 985,000 individual visitors.

Another aerospace website - AviationWeek.com is ranked as the 41,800th most popular site in the world which according to their figures reflects 1.75 million pages viewed from 300k unique visitors per month.

So an audience gap of 700,000 visitors and activity gap of 5.35 million pages views between flightglobal.com and aviationweek.com equates to 26,000 places (or websites) of difference.

But at the sharp end of the rankings the game changes significantly. The ranking gap between Flightglobal and Facebook is quite a bit smaller - only 15,000 places, but it actually represents a difference of 49 billion page views and 122 million users!

Flight International - issue 30 June - 6 July

Flightglobal spent the week recovering from the 100th Paris Air Show hangover but staffers were by no means less busy. Why not reminisce over the aviation developments over the last century and see our archive special "100 Years of Paris".

FlightBlogger liveblogged the news from Boeing's press conference call detailing the most recent set of delays to the 787. See his roundup video of information from the call he tapped into.

Flightglobal obtained exclusive images of Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnight Two mothership Eve at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway airport in Arizona after a speedbrake actuator failure diverted it from its New Mexico destination.

See the Flight Blog showing a post of Airbus, Sichuan Airlines, and Dragon Aviation Leasing marking the delivery of the first A320 assembled in Tianjin. The aircraft, B-501L, sported a special livery, reportedly named "China Dragon", added since its first test flight last month.

Watch an interview with Lee Jackson, the design engineer for the Air Tractor AT-802U gunship which was on show at the Paris Air Show static display by DEW Line blogger Stephen Trimble.

The all-new Flightglobal Achievement Awards launched in Paris are your chance to nominate and vote for the best aviator, the best innovator and the best leader in the industry today.

The awards also recognise the stars of the future, with a special award for the Engineering Student of the Year, sponsored by Boeing. Look out for your opportunity to play your part in the nomination and judging process by visiting our awards page over the next few months.

Week on the Web is also available as an audio podcast on AirSpace and iTunes.

Is it just me or did GiFAS (organisers of the Paris Air Show) rip off the logo from our big anniversary campaign - Flightglobal's 100 Greatest - for this year's 100 anniversary show website?

Observez vous:

Paris Air Show official site:

100 Greatest Logo:

I'm not precious though.

Flight International issue 23 - 29 June

This week was the 100th Paris Air Show covered as ever by Flightglobal. But this year we did things a little differently.

Exhibitors visited our chalet to see our multimedia studio in operation and were greeted by the sight of our journalists interviewing the newsmakers and giving their take on the news gathered at the show.

Mary Kirby and Jon Ostrower make a great double act as they sum up each day's news and notable events at the show. See Mark Pilling and David Kaminski-Morrow as they evaluate the Sukhoi Superjet which was showcased at the static and aerial displays.

There are plenty of CEO interviews from the show including Qatar Airways' Al Baker who last week warned Boeing that it would lose out to Airbus if it delayed the 787 any further.

See our Paris gallery on AirSpace hosting images from the aerial displays taken by AirSpace user apgphoto and take a look at our gallery of images of Paris Grand Palais and Le Bourget from days gone by.

Scroll through our interactive Paris timeline showing the iconic moments from the show over the last century.

If you're visiting the Paris Air Show this year and make it over to the Flightglobal chalet, then you'll have a very different experience to the fine dining and business meetings of the past.

Visitors will be treated to an in-depth overview of our multi-media operation at the show, with a working newsroom and clusters of plasma screens showing our editorial coverage taking shape in real time.

The Flightglobal media lounge is an exciting milestone in show reporting, featuring unprecedented levels of integration between our print and online publications.

The clear advantage is in making full use of our expert journalists across the entire Flightglobal portfolio, which includes Flight Daily News, Flight International, Airline Business and a suite of premium products such as Air Transport Intelligence, ACAS and Commercial Aviation Online.

It's also a chance for us to show the industry how we operate, how we use modern technologies such as social media and the degree of professionalism with which we approach our online publications."

Visitors to the show are welcome to drop in on the chalet D220.

His lead story choices, unsurprisingly, reflected his interests in the airline industry. Airline CEOs will have logged on to Flightglobal in the morning to find that IATA announced, at its AGM in Kuala Lumpur, that it had revised its airline financial forecast for 2009 to a global loss of $9 billion, almost double its March estimate of $4.7 billion, due to a rapidly deteriorating operating environment.

He was clearly worried but while director-general and CEO Giovanni Bisignani might be a "merchant of doom and gloom... he's a good barometer of when recovery comes." 

He lead the news agenda in the afternoon with news that Virgin Nigeria will lose the Virgin brand next month.

In the story Virgin Atlantic says it "always intended" to pull out from the Nigerian carrier within about five years, and last week brought technical co-operation to a close, essentially ending its day-to-day participation in Virgin Nigeria's operations.

Sir Richard said that "Virgin Nigeria had been a breath of fresh air in the Nigerian aviation industry".

A final lead for the day showed Sir Richard's deep sadness over the tragedy of the Air France A330 accident last week. Pictures were released showing search team divers retrieving the aircraft's vertical tailfin.

Q & A competition  

Sir Richard answered a handful of the best questions you sent in and selected a question by Jean-Baptiste Betrand about the "real heroes of aviaiton" as his favourite out of the hundreds submitted.

Congratulations to Jean-Baptiste who wins a return flight anywhere in the Virgin network.

You saw it here first

As part of Virgin Atlantic's 25 year anniversary, the airline produced a short video featuring some of the highlights and iconic imagery that has marked Virgin Atlantic's colourful history. Sir Richard gave this video to Flightglobal as an exclusive so you saw it here first.

Maiden Voyager - maiden commercial flight

He chose an image for the Image of the Day blog of himself with a collection of celebrities on the steps up to the airline's first Boeing 747 named Maiden Voyager before it took off for Newark on 22 June 1984.  

See more images of Sir Richard in the Virgin Atlantic gallery and see how Flight reported on Virgin in the archives. 

Sadly, I didn't get a day off, nor was I running Virgin Atlantic (we didn't agree on a jobswap) so I spent most of the day strategising with our troops in preparation for the next week's 100th Paris Air Show.

It's no wonder BA and AA are concerned.

Their plans to effectively merge are not going according to plan. When they announced in August last year, for the third time, their proposals to combine, they said that the application for anti-trust immunity would be cleared under the Bush administration. Their dream turned sour.

Rightly, the regulators need to look in great detail at what the two airlines are trying to do. If their plans were allowed, BA/AA would have a stranglehold on some of the busiest routes in the world into and out of London's Heathrow.

That's what makes this immunity application very different from those of other alliances, such as Skyteam or Star. BA already has a dominant presence at Heathrow, which is full and constrained, with nearly half the takeoff and landing slots. When combined with AA, the two airlines would have market shares that regulators bawk at: 49% on LHR-LAX; 63% on LHR-JFK; 66% on LHR-ORD; 75% on LHR-MIA and  82% on LHR-BOS. Not to mention the 100% monopoly on LHR-DFW.

It is not in the best interests of consumers for one combined group to have such a lock on key overlap routes. We know what happens in such cases - prices rise as the monopoly supplier squeezes out rivals. Choice disappears. Service quality deteriorates. American carriers already offer some of the worst service in the skies. Some say to us, well, wouldn't that be good for Virgin Atlantic? It would, if we were able to fend off this monster monopoly. But, it would be impossible as they would be dominant among travel agents and suck the life out of their rivals.

It is no excuse for BA that they are facing a fight for survival. That's what healthy competition should produce. If a carrier is weak, it should be allowed to go to the wall. Governments shouldn't be stepping in to prop up ailing airlines. So, the regulators musn't allow BA/AA to progress because economic conditions are tough. What would such a beast look like when the economy improves and recovery enables them to benefit from a bad decision made in a recession?

Luckily, the regulators will also be asking what are the consumer benefits from this planned tie-up? It's difficult to find any. Nothing's changed since the last two applications for immunity failed.

Virgin Atlantic is still red hot in its 25th birthday year. Winner of Best Scheduled Airline to the USA, and Best Airline Business Lounge, find out more at www.virginatlantic.com/stillredhot

Richard Branson

I've just returned from a trip to Shanghai, to celebrate Virgin Atlantic's 10 years of flying to the city. Never could the Chinese expression "may you live in interesting times" be more apt.

In fact, interesting is an understatement. Unbelievable times would be more appropriate.

Everything has been thrown at our industry - volatile oil, swine flu, recession, environmental pressure, higher government taxes. What next?

We're clearly at a tipping point. The next 12 months will determine how our industry looks for the longer-term. Our industry will be shaped by:

• the survival of the fittest and the demise of the weakest
• how regulators protect consumers and smaller airlines from dominant groups or alliances
• whether Boeing can finally launch the game-changing 787 and prove its fuel-efficiency
• the success of a global aviation deal at the Copenhagen Summit
• and political decisions around Heathrow's third runway

With these big events ahead, we'll discover how aviation will change for the better, and hopefully not the worse.

Picture credit: Steward Cook/Rex Features 

I'm honoured to be Flightglobal's Guest Editor for the day and hope you enjoy the site today.

On the site today you can:

• visit a photo gallery featuring photos of myself and Virgin Atlantic from the last 25 years
• watch a brand new video celebrating 25 years of Virgin Atlantic
• see which news headlines I select for the Flightglobal Homepage
• and follow what else we're up to on Twitter

Richard Branson

To help celebrate 25 years since the launch of Virgin Atlantic, the airline has produced a short video featuring some of the highlights and iconic imagery that has marked Virgin Atlantic's colourful history.