June 2010 Archives

Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary taunts England fans by wearing the German strip following England's 4-1 defeat to the Germans in the World Cup. It's causing quite a stir on the Airline Business Blog. One user approves. "[England] are sore losers anyway."

On a more arty note, don't miss your chance to see a Sea Harrier and Sepecat Jaguar where you've never seen them before. Artist Fiona Banner unveiled her latest exhibition yesterday at the Tate Britain, of two decommissioned fighter aircraft models.

The Jaguar aircraft lies belly up on the floor. It's posture, she says: "is suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy".

See a great image of Breitling wingwalkers performing their act on Stearman Biplanes at this year's Southend Airshow in the UK.

On our video channel you will find a neat little video tour of a new passenger lounge by our Washington-based intern Dan Webb who took time out to visit the new Air France passenger lounge at Dulles Airport.

He liked the wooden dividers that split up the space that was previously used by Northwest and applauded the choice of healthy snacks, free booze and tiramisu available. 

 

 

Love airline food?. Then why not experience it at home too. Thai Airways is to sell curry sauces used in the food it offers on board flights. Asia managing editor Siva Govindasamy recalls, on the Asian Skies Blog the food was "decent (even good, perhaps)", but is sceptical as to whether passengers will want such dishes on terra firma.

Alenia Aeronautica launched a flight-test campaign with its Sky-Y unmanned air vehicle technology demonstrator and expects to complete 15 long-endurance sorties by late July.

The Sky-Y air vehicle returned to the air in a flight of about 1h from the Italian air force's Decimomannu air base in Sardinia, opening the Italian company's fourth phase of testing with the design. See a great picture as it takes off.

See an unusual aircraft, the Quik 912 at Shoreham Airport posted by AirSpace user flyer1.

See a video posted on The DEW Line of a hybrid airship taking flight. The airship was designed by the late Roger Munk who spent the last three decades trying to make the dirigible a commercial reality.

Flightglobal is gearing up to honour the best and brightest in aviation and aerospace at the Flightglobal Achievement Awards to be held on at the Farnborough Air Show.

Nominees for the Leader, Aviator and Innovator of the Year, as well as Flightglobal's Lifetime Achievement Award have already been selected by you and shortlisted by a panel of experts and now it's your chance to cast your vote from the shortlist in each category.

Flightglobal won a gong of its own last week at the AOP Awards when it was crowned Business Website of the Year.

The judges were impressed with Flightglobal's results in what has been a tough year for the site's audience and said: "the site uses the full spectrum of digital tools, with a special focus on engagement, and effective use of social media."

 

This was inspired by the infamous "Capello Index", which you might have heard of, which takes a whole bunch of performance statistics from professional football players and tries to calculate their value and aptitude for winning.

In the same vain, we looked for the key elements that indicated an airline's potency. That's not just how big it is or how many routes it flies, but a real effort to calculate its health within its chosen market and size of operations as compared to any other airlines regardless of their market position.

We've calculated the "Kaminski Index" score through the formula below:
The key below shows the associations between real data sets and the equivalent value for a football team.
 

	Kaminski Index values
F	Fleet	[Squad strength]
R	Route	[Tactics]
W	Change in Airline Business World Ranking	[Form]
O	Aircraft on Order	[Attack]
T	Sky Trax Rating	[Defence]
B	Airline Boss experience (years)	[Coach]
P	Annual Passengers (millions)	[Fans]
S	Livery Rating	[Style]
X	Luck factor	Luck

All data was compiled by the Flightglobal Insight team (who provide bespoke research projects) sourcing data from our ACAS and ATI databases (find out more).

Obviously we can't give all our database gold away for free but here's a sample of the Kaminski Index in action from the first stage of the knock out stage between American Airlines (USA) and Qantas (Australia):


So to walk through the calculation for America Airlines in this case:

Step 1.     F     +     R                +    W   +   10
           613   +   149  = 762    +     0     +     10                                                = 772

Step 2.    O    +   T   +   2              x         B   x   P   +  10
                57     +    3    +     2  =  62    x         7   x   92.7   +   10  =  658.9       =  40,851.8

Step 3.  Step 1 total  x      Step 2 total   
                  772           x       40851.8                                                                 = 31,544,211
 
Step 4.    Step 3 total     divided by          X squared
                31,544,211            /                  54   x  54                                           = 10,817

Step 5. Step 3 total       x       S        divided by 10
                     10817            x  5             /           10                                             = 5,408.7


So there you have it. And having run it through the tournament, it proved surprisingly realistic.

Most of the bigger teams made progress but occasional freak results occurred. Some teams had extraordinary runs of good luck (Korean Air, esp. in the QF) while others kept steady and ended up where you would've predicted they would, such as KLM and Lufthansa.

And a few caveats:

• Where a "Kaminski Index" figure was equal, the highest rated livery went through.
• The luck factor is a random number between 1 and 100. Extremes of this figure can completely sway results - although it is an unlikely event. That's a intentional element to mirror the same "against all odds" results that occur in real football matches.
• The Luck factors effect in the equation is slightly tempered by the style rating (livery), which is intended to reflect that ability for teams to "style out" random misfortune.
  
• The Livery rating is obviously Flightglobal staff members' own subjective judgement and in no way an official figure.
  
• Where a nation has no active airline, we have used historic data from the largest historical carrier that has been active within the last 10 years.

Our latest (and greatest) web analytics report is now live and published below. 

RunwayGirl blogs about a survey that takes a good look at what passengers actually want in terms of what influences their choices of airline when booking a flight and what they want out of IFE. She assures it makes for interesting reading.

See video footage of a Korean Air 777 that gets into an oscillation on landing. John Croft, author of As the Croft Flies Blog suggests the control column was cycling fore and aft, promoting a pilot-induced oscillation and there doesn't appear to be a go-around attempt.

What do you think this Korean Air pilot have done?

And don't forget to vote for your choice of the brightest and best people in aviation and aerospace today.

The Flightglobal Achievement Awards celebrate and acknowledge individuals, teams and innovations at work in the aviation and aerospace industries. The four exciting categories aim to find four exceptional people or teams.

Nominees for the Leader, Aviator and Innovator of the Year, as well as our Lifetime Achievement Award, are nominated by you and shortlisted by a panel of experts.

Voting closes 11 June 2010 and winners announced at the Farnborough Airshow on 20 July 2010.

See a great in-motion shot of a Harrier GR9 of the Naval Strike Wing at low level in the Lake District by AirSpace user gatwicksteve.

 

 

 

Why not add to Flightglobal's wiki page on AirSpace and help us remember the notable dates in the aviation calendar.

We'll soon be celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and commemorating the ten years since Concorde crashed on takeoff at CDG Airport.

And it's been 80 years since Amy Johnson successfully flew from England to Australia becoming the first woman to perform such a feat.

At the time, Flight wrote: "Her pluck and her unexpected skill have captured the public imagination to an unprecedented degree. In herself she is a modest but very earnest young woman of 22."

On 5 May 1930, "Amy Johnson, of Hull, left Croydon for Australia, piloting a D.H. Gipsy-Moth...[and] is the only woman to hold an Air Ministry ground engineer's licence."

Virgin Atlantic landed in Ghana for the first time last week and Stefan the Pilot and Airline Business features editor Victoria Moores were there to witness the event.

Read the blog post about the carrier launching its new thrice-weekly service between London Heathrow and Accra and see a picture of Stefan's enjoying the finer things in life in the carrier's Upper Class lounge.

And take a look at an image showing an unusual perspective inside a hot air balloon, uploaded by AirSpace user apgphoto.