Week on the Web

Flight International 24 Feb - 2 Mar

'As the Cro(ft) Flies' is Flightglobal's newest blog from Americas Editor John Croft. In one post last week he talked about the dangers of mobile telephones being switched on during takeoff.

A report from the Federal Aviation Administration said that "as a result the ring tone caused a distraction between the crewmembers during the takeoff phase and could have led to crew to initiate an unnecessary rejected takeoff."

Croft said the crew's airline general operations manual (GOM) didn't address procedures prohibiting the crew -- unlike the passengers -- from having their cell phones on while at their "duty stations" and questions whether common sense is needed.

See the Flight blog which discovered deep in the archives, well as deep as 1981, the reporting of the death of aviation pioneer Jack Northrop at age 85. Flight observed a second blow to the aviation world as being the death of Donald Douglas who gave us among other aircraft the DC-3 for which its design won numerous .

See the picture of the garland-adorned passenger with his wife who became the one millionth passenger on Singapore Airlines A380. The couple were treated to an upgrade to business class on the aircraft plus limousine transfers to a fancy hotel and a safari.

Stephen Trimble posted onto his DEW Line that the US Army is finalizing the design of the joint land attack cruise missile defense elevated netted senor (JLENS), an aerostat tethered 10,000 feet above the ground, carrying about 7,000lbs of radars. He says: "Knowing the missiles are coming is one thing. Shooting them down is quite another. The surface-launched advanced medium range air to air missile (SLAMRAAM) is useful, but has limited range. If the cruise missile is packed with a biological or chemical warhead, intercepting the missile at short range could do almost as much harm."

One user of AirSpace has uploaded a great image of Spitfires in a row and the current highest rated image on AirSpace is the Airbus Beluga.