July 2008 Archives

Flight International issue 22-28 July

Last week the Flight team camped en masse at Farnborough to cover the air show in its 60th year.

The team saw the F-22 Raptor demonstrate some of its capabilities in a spectacular aerial display while Stephen Trimble blogged about Russian fans of the Sukhoi Su-35 who said it performed the same tricks ten years ago.

See pictures of the Avro Vulcan which was recently returned to flight, making its air show debut at Waddington. See other images of aerial displays in the Farnborugh 2008 gallery on AirSpace.

Flight also saw the Aero Sekur all-female parachute jump team performing a synchronized display each day and Lewis Hamilton racing a Learjet on the runway and celebrated Flight's 100 Greatest in aviation. And Hollywood A-lister Michael Douglas dropped by to say hello to our Flight Daily News distributing team.

Ahh - the double-edged sword that is user feedback.

Had a couple of mentions about my Editor's Blog photo. One gentleman, who shall remain nameless, said very diplomatically that "it didn't do me justice". How sweet ...

So, always keen to listen to the users, I've replaced it with another one which is hopefully less offensive.

I'm calling the pose "Indigo Charm" which fans of Derek Zoolander might appreciate ...

Our big set piece of the year - Flight's 100 Greatest - was revealed last night at a glitzy party held at the TAG Aviation building at Farnborough.

The 18,000 + votes resulted in our definitive list of the top moments, people, engines and aircraft from the last 100 years of aviation.

The Apollo 11 1969 moon landing came in as The Greatest, with the Boeing 747, R-R Merlin, Wright Bros and Supermarine Spitfire winning the other category shortlists.

Thanks to everyone who participated in nominating and voting in this spectacular public poll. It certainly is a suitable way to help celebrate Flight's 100th Anniversary year.

You can see the full list via these different pages:
 

100 Greatest

Top 10 | 11-20 | 21-50 | 51-100

Top 5s

Civil Aircraft | Military Aircraft | Person | Moment | Engine

Through the decades

Civil Aircraft | Military Aircraft | Person | Moment | Engine

Flight has decamped to the Show ground en masse to bring you all the latest news, video, live blogging and images live from the show all week.

Our Farnborough air show page is well worth bookmarking and adding to your favourites so you can quickly check back regularly to keep up to date with all the latest.

So the shiny new-look Flightglobal is live (with only a small number of bugs!).

Thanks for all your nice emails - all very well received.

Just a few housekeeping messages:

• The Shop hit a couple of snags but should relaunch tomorrow with the universal header/footer
• Look out for the new "Discuss this article" feature at the bottom of every story. Following that link takes you into the AirSpace discussion forums to participate in a discussion around that particular article that you came from.
• We have more goodies to come for next week, including a great Farnborough package and some really cool new pages which pull in related content from all over FG and the web and serve it back in a smart-looking format. We're calling them "dynamic landing pages".
• And yes - my blog is yet to go onto the new design. I'm promised it's coming soon!
  

Just a word of warning, today should (fingers crossed) see the delivery on a big change on Flightglobal.

One of the key elements in our journey towards a fully redesigned and architectured website is about to go live.

Today's changes include most notably a new look and feel, giving the site a more modern and fresher appearance.

Also at the same time we're introducing our universal header. This includes some horizontal navigation to Flight's primary online content (eg. stuff like our Premium Services, Archives, Images and Shop).

There's also a universal footer that serves much the same purpose, only for items such as Contact us and Subscriptions.

So if you're used to finding these items on the old left hand vertical navigation and suddenly can't, then chances are they've moved to either the header or footer.

Some elements on the site have already made this change to their design, such as our blogs. Other areas of the site are due to rollout the new features in the near future (this is known in the trade as an "iterative approach to development" which is basically online speak for "getting on with it").

Once the changes have gone live I'll post another update with some more information.

We've got lots of goodies planned for next week - it being the Farnborough Air Show and all.

A slight word of warning - we're going to use the opportunity to shamelessly celebrate our heritage because we're so proud of it.

But actually once you get past the "look at us, aren't we great" waffle, there's actually some really cool stuff from the past which our online investments are now allowing us to make the most of.

As a little taster we've set up a gallery of historic Farnborough air show images we've dug up from our archives which illustrate how much the Farnborough Air Show has changed from the early years, beginning with the very first show at Farnborough back in 1948.

FlightBlogger is the latest Flight Blog to get the redesign treatment along with our Universal Header and Footer.

And it's heartening to see it so well received.

Within 5 minutes of deploying the new look comments were being left in praise of the new design.

Flight International 1-7 July

This week Flight went to ParcAberporth in windy west Wales UAVs and The Blades Aerobatic Team in action. See pictures on AirSpace ...

An EF-18 Hornet was caught on camera carrying out a tricky landing after a landing gear malfunction. See the images on Flightglobal.

David Learmount becomes the latest Flight journalist to join the blog squad with his eponymous blog, complete with new look page templates and a snazzy universal header ...

Elsewhere in the blogosphere FlightBlogger has been getting all excited about the 787 power on. You can read his take on the milestone achievement on his popular blog.

And a spy picture from the Mojave Desert made it onto Flightglobal. It possibly reveals a part of the SpaceShipII cockpit.

EADS has performed the roll-out ceremony for the Airbus Military A400M transport and we've got pictures of it resplendent in its military paint job