March 2008 Archives

RBI UK - our parent company - has completed two simultaneous acquisitions in Switzerland and the UK. It acquired both the annual JP-Airline Fleets directory from Bucher & Co, a partnership in Switzerland, and also the affiliated Buchair UK Ltd business, which is the largest country distributor for the directories and has built an international premium data business based around the JP directory.

More information ...

Flight international issue - 25-31 March

Watch a video of a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter as it catches fire and another video of the F-117 stealth fighter the US Air Force which will fly into retirement on 21 April.

There’s a competition on AirSpace to come up with the best marketing slogan for different aviation companies worldwide after The Dew Line blog found much amusement at Lockheed Martin's marketing attempts for the F-16IN which boasts: "Nothing compares because nothing can compare".The winning suggestion comes with a cash prize.

Flight's Graham Warwick argues the case for the Rolls Royce RB.41 Nene as the best engine developed in the last 100 years for the 100 Greatest. Do you agree? Why not nominate your 100 Greatest aircraft, person, engine or moment in aviation.

Flightglobal, like any large website, has the occasional glitch.

And like London buses these issues always seem to come along in groups.

So at the moment our developers are gamely battling against several nasty gremlins including a long running glitchy blog platform (solution due in May), some code corruption issues (nearly sorted), and some problems with formatting on AirSpace (fix should be deployed in a week or two).

As a bit of a cathartic release one of them (Robi) conjured up the graphic below and emailed it to me under the subject “User Feedback”.

How droll ...

(if it's a bit quick for you it shows Commander Riker from Star Trek the Next Generation looking at flightglobal.com and getting excited. But then ultimately his hopes are crushed as he hits the dreaded "Server Error in Application" page).

Flight international issue - 18-24 March

This week on flightglobal.com you will find images of an Adam Air 737 which slid off the runway at Batam, Indonesia and a user on AirSpace began a discussion thread about how the Indonesian Transport Minister has warned that the airline may soon be forced to cease operations.

View a video on the Flight Blog which demonstrates the capabilities of a Saab Gripen.

Singapore Airlines last week took delivery of its third A380, and flightglobal.com has images of the aircraft coming in to land at Changi airport. For more images of the A380 check out the gallery on AirSpace.

Mary Kirby in her guise a intrepid blogger Runway Girl notes the industry is under pressure to address the fuel burn issue. GE acknowledge that it requires “massive investment” and Airbus suggests that open rotor engines may well be the answer, but more research is needed. Citing the EasyJet ecojet concept, industry types, she says, reckon its design is a “starting point for innovation”.

On the KC-X tanker protest, Kieran Daly blogging on his Unusual Attitude platform says that during his recent trip to Paris to report on EADS results, he found there was some surprise that Boeing are going ahead with it.

Quick update on the blogging platform.

We're expecting to upgrade to Movable Type 4.1 towards the end of next month.

This is good news as I know that some of you currently experience some glitchy problems with the existing service, and also it's good news for us as it's a much nicer editorial tool to use.

Each week in Flight International magazine we publish a short piece highlighting various gems from Flightglobal.

In an effort to make it easy to track and find those editor's picks I'll be posting the same piece on this blog (but with links!):

Flight international issue - 11-17 March

Flightglobal.com has been showing a video of a Lufthansa A320 escaping into a go-around after a wing-tip strike on both wings as the aircraft attempted to land in appalling weather.

Glamour model Jordan, who recently went under the knife to reduce her then-sizeable assets, is close to buying a Hawker 900 private jet. AirSpace is currently discussing what she might call the acquisition she intends to paint pink. One user suggests Boob Tube, while another suggests bmibooby.

Take a look at the T5 gallery which flightglobal.com will be adding to when the much-hyped terminal opens at Heathrow in May.

One Flight Image of the Day Blog shows a SIA business class cabin configuration on its A380 which it will reproduce for its Airbus A340-500s to be used on its new all-business class service used for flying business passengers non-stop to the USA.

And finally…. AirSpace noted how a light aircraft crashed into an anthill in Myanmar. It turns out that this was the worst aviation accident in history with initial reports saying the death toll runs into millions.

This is something that’s being discussed heavily at the moment in and around the Flight offices.

In many ways the Flight editorial team is ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing new working methods and ways of thinking and reporting.

For a start we’re a “web first publishing company” (since June 2007), whereby all our news is written with the web in mind and published immediately.

We’ve got a “vertical search engine” that takes on the Web 2.0 philosophies of aggregating and utilising the rich seam of industry content available on the wider web (i.e using not just Flightglobal stuff but everyone else’s as well).

Then we’ve got blogs and blogging. We now have professional bloggers who do nothing but blog; journalists who beat blog, live blog events, and other that take the opportunity to put some personality into their work.

We’ve also got forums that allow us to interact with our users and glean direct feedback or even the first indications of a breaking news story.

And our image galleries offer both ourselves and users the chance to upload unlimited images of aircraft and events to enhance to the user experience.

All of this change requires a lot of work and development from the journalists in terms of leaning new skills and embracing different methods.

Today’s journalist acts in a very different way to one of the 1980’s and I’m sure that 2015’s Mr Reporter will have changed in an equally stark way.

An old colleague of mine summarises this well in his recent blog post - What is a digitial journalist? Towards a DJ manifesto

But at the end of the day the purpose is to serve the changing demands of our audience. I’m often asked the question: “But why are you bothering to doing that particular thing?”

The easy answer is because more and more people are reading, responding to, downloading, linking to or looking at “that thing” and therefore finding it of value.

So not a hard decision really.

Flightglobal’s ever expanding blog portfolio has grown once again with the addition of three new blogs:

First up we have Mary Kirby’s Runway Girl. Mary had been blogging over on blogspot for some time and decided the time was right join some of her colleagues on what is now the most comprehensive aviation blog roll on the internet.

Mary describes Runway Girl as her happy outlet in the blogosphere for newsy posts and slightly cheeky sense of humour.

Also recently added to Flightglobal is Left Field. This is David Field’s solo blog (he’s been contributing to the Airline Business blog since its launch several years ago).

Left Field examines safety, frequent-flyer and consumer issues as well as labour and financial aspects of airlines and airports.

And thirdly we’ve got the cunningly named Aviation and the Environment blog. Our very own blog guru Kieran Daly is looking after this (in addition to keeping Unusual Attitude going), and he describes its objectives as:

• Quickly and conveniently commenting on environmental issues
• Guide visitors around our own and other organisations' published material
• Host an objective debate about environmental issues

Also watch this space as there are more blogs coming down the line!