August 2011 Archives

On Asian Skies, Greg Waldron analysed Taiwan's fighter acquisition plans and commented: "Virtually every pundit, journalist, official, and industry executive I've spoken to privately feels that Taiwan won't get new F-16 C/Ds. Washington's fear of angering China is simply to great."

Look out for Waldron's upcoming Flight International feature on the subject.

The DEW Line carried video of the Sukhoi T-50-2 fighter's flameout at the end of MAKS 2011, and quoted an eye witness, namely our Russian correspondent Vladimir Karnozov: "Two bursts of flame erupted from the right engine and two loud bumps were heard."

Blog author Stephen Trimble also drew attention to footage from the MAKS debut of Sukhoi's Su-35S, which he billed "an air show stud".

And, in rare form, he managed to pen an analysis of the Lockheed Martin F-35's grounding in the style of Naughty by Nature's early-'90s rap hit 'OPP'. Yes, really.

Website relaunches and redesigns often polarize regular site visitors - "why did you change it?!!", "I don't like that one single bit", or "that looks so much better," "thank you for finally fixing that".

These are all common responses in the days following a major change.

So it may be of interest to fans of Flightglobal to provide some backdrop to the redesign elements of the relaunched site.

The driving need for a major change was that the old version of the site (dating back from 2005) was designed for a previous era of websites (and browsers / devices).

It hails back to the day when flightglobal.com's primary function was to deliver news and jobs for free to its visitors.

Since then Flightglobal has added many new areas and layers to the site, e.g. community areas, historic archive, video, social media, and now premium data and research channels.

These additions have been bolted onto the old navigation and pages templates one after another until the site's structure and user experience has begun to creak under the tangle.

Today's relaunch has given us the opportunity to reorganize the "information architecture" as well as tackle many of the usability issues that have developed over the years.

Users of other popular multimedia websites will see where we have borrowed best practice.

The bbc.co.uk for example, is one of the leading examples of a site that serves a lot of different types of users trying to achieve many different activities (e.g. news, weather, tv programmes, radio listings, iplayer, games etc ...) all under one url.

Elements of the main bbc home page have influenced our own global home page as we look to surface the raft of different activities visitors to flightglobal.com are trying to achieve.

We also wanted to bring back an element of magazine style to the website, which is something the previous generation of websites often sacrificed at the expense of functionality and search engine optimisation.

Today's software and technology facilitates the reintroduction of design features that help visitors enjoy their time on the site as well as find what they're looking for quickly.

The most obvious hat tip towards design cool is our home page "skyscape". For launch we have one skyscape and one aircraft silhouette but with subsequent development the skyscape will alter depending on the time of day and the aircraft silhouette will be drawn from a selection of different aircraft.



Elsewhere on the site, our cleaner-looking news channels are in tune with the current best practice design, meaning the whole news browsing experience is more comfortable and more enjoyable.

These include: article text size has been increased, intrusive advertising has been scaled back, hyperlink colours are more obvious, slick carousel controls expose more news content without using up more space, blog and video content is now displayed alongside traditional news content, and the list goes on.

Our navigation features an integrated crumb trail (also seen on the guardian.co.uk) helping to reduce the vertical size of our header and deliver colour orientation cues for site visitors.

We've rolled out a new "universal footer", acting as a mini sitemap, which should mean that wherever you are on the site you can get to your intended destination within a click or two.


Failing that, there's even an "All channels" page accessible via the "More" navigation tab that features a full and comprehensive list of pages and places on flightglobal.com.

A finally note on feedback. Fundamentally, we're trying to make flightglobal.com as user friendly as possible.

If you feel strongly about something we've done or haven't done - no matter how small - then please let us know. If we don't know about it, we can't fix it.

The DEW Line had video of the moment when activist Medea Benjamin, co-founder of "women for peace" group CODEPINK, hijacked a press briefing by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International at Washington DC's National Press Club.

"We were a little disappointed by how quickly the protest was subdued," admitted Stephen Trimble.

As the Cro(ft) Flies carried a photo of the scene after "fatigue put a tired cropduster pilot in Buttonwillow, California right into the dumpster, literally".

Asian Skies featured a Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology simulation of a Taiwanese F-16 destroying a Chinese warship and ground targets.

And FlightBlogger ran a clip of Boeing's test aircraft ZA102 departing Everett: it "should give a good sense of the 787's acoustic properties".

 

Using FlightAware to track a Boeing 747-8F flight test FlightBlogger discerned "the unmistakable shape of the numbers 747 covering the states west of the Mississippi River".

The DEW Line carried video "from the world's least-secured runway for officially classified, experimental military jets", in China.

It shows take-offs by Chengdu's J-20 and JF-17, developed with Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, plus a surprise debut from the all-new J-10B.

The latter is powered by the indigenous WS-10 Taihang engine, which "symbolises China's ambition to become independent of foreign supply for its own tactical aircraft".

On Asian Skies, Greg Waldron explained how to tell a J-10A from a J-10B, and flagged an image that might show India's answer to the Boeing X-37B orbital test vehicle.