July 2009 Archives

Flight International issue 21 - 27 July

Check out the Flight Blog which has a collection of all of Flight International's Apollo 11 content from the archive from the moment in 1961 when President Kennedy announced the ambition to land a man on the Moon, to 1969 when Neil Armstrong (pictured) became the first man to set foot on the Moon's surface.

Check our Apollo 40th anniversary page which fast forwards 40 years to celebrate the anniversary with an interactive graphic which takes you through the Apollo missions to number 11 with links to the relevant page in the archive.

The blog post also includes links to the archive about Saturn V's heavyweight payload, the journey to the Moon and Apollo 11 splashing into the sea upon its return.

Elsewhere on the Flight Blog is a video where a bored artist makes art out of the magazines and safety card in the seat pocket. 

If you want to repeat this feat the next time you fly, just make sure your scissors are TSA-OK and your glue conforms to the 3-2-1 liquids rule.

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

I'm Murdo Morrison and I'm covering for Michael Targett this week as editor of flightglobal.com and it's a hell of a learning curve. Although all of us have been living and breathing the philosophy of online publishing here at RBI for years, my day job is editing Flight International and my skills are essentially "print" ones. Working on a web site is very different with the biggest difference being that - unlike a magazine where a finished product emerges once a week and your five days are dedicated to honing that product - a web site is an ever evolving beast that is not the same from one minute to the next. Unlike a magazine too - with its 30 or so editorial pages - flightglobal.com's content is almost infinite, stretching through the virtual universe in the form of hundreds of thousands of archive pages and links to the worldwide web. And the audience is different too, with a much broader and bigger group of users than the 40,000 or so subscribers and other professional readers I'm used to on Flight International.

We've got some great content set to appear this week, some of it "repurposed" from Flight International, some exclusive to the web site. There's a special on the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, and this Friday my colleagues and I will be reporting from the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford, probably the biggest military flying spectacular in the world. And to continue the history theme, this weekend marked the centenary of AV Roe's first "all British" flight from Walthamstow in London - we were there to record the celebration.

Right - that's it for me and work for the next 10 days at least. I'm off to enjoy the beautiful North Cornwall coast line.

I leave you in the capable hands of none other than Murdo Morrison Editor of Flight International, who'll be sailing the good ship Flightglobal while I'm away.

Flight International issue 14 - 20 June

Watch a video of a kayaker being rescued by US Coast Guard. The kayaker's quest to circumnavigate the globe via human power -- kayaking and cycling -- came to an untimely end in the Bering Sea, 40mi off the coast of Alaska's St. Lawrence Island recently.

Read on the Flight Blog how a man was injured after being hit by a lump of ice falling from a passing aircraft and see more images from the recent Biggin Hill Air Show from AirSpace user BernieC inclduing more from the Red Arrows with coloured smoke billowing from its engines. (see picture)

And see a video of Boeing conducting the first 787 Dreamliner taxi tests in Everett, Washington. FlightBlogger has added images to a blog post which has already attracted 30 comments from enthusiasts and experts tracking Jon Ostrowers coverage of the aircraft's progress to flightline.

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

Flight International issue 7 - 13 July

Have a look at our video page to see behind the scenes footage at the recent Biggin Hill Air Show in the UK with videos of Red Arrows practice footage on the day before the show.

Watch an interview with a "Reds" pilot to find out how the team planned to wow the crowds on the ground.

See another interview with Jamie Hunter, an aviation photographer and author of a new book about the team.

He got to fly with them in the cockpit and get in insight into the formations. AirSpace user BernieC uploaded some great images taken at the show and captured a Virgin Atlantic 747 leading the Red Arrows.

Get involved in a discussion on China's Spring Airlines which is considering  standing only seats on aircraft to cut 20%of their costs, while lowering airfares for consumers.

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

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!