September 2011 Archives

On military blog The DEW Line, Stephen Trimble posted footage from the AVIC Cup, China's first "innovation grand prix" for unmanned air vehicles, and deemed Shenyang University's flying-wing, tailed UAV to be the most interesting design revealed by the event.

The 787 delivery to ANA prompted Jon "FlightBlogger" Ostrower to cast his mind back to the airframer's last first delivery, of a 777-200, to United Airlines, on 15 May 1995 - and publish an excerpt from Peter Coyote's 1996 documentary 21st Century Jet, which "takes you inside the room for the historic, albeit bureaucratic" handover of that aircraft.

 

Ostrower also posted snaps of ANA's 787 leaving for Japan (left). Ariel View's Arie Egozi labelled Elbit Systems' long-range oblique photography system "a high-flying Peeping Tom".

We've been getting some helpful feedback following our first 32 hours live with the new flightglobal.com.

One of the common themes is that visitors to the site miss having a simple list of the latest news stories.

People have been saying that they find this helpful for rapidly catching up on stories that might have been published over several days since they last visited the site.

As mentioned before, Flightglobal Pro subscribers have access to an advanced "My News" section, which allows them to create personlised news streams to fit in with their interests.

We do intend to develop a similar experience for non-Pro people in time, although obviously only displaying non-Pro news content.

However, for the meantime in order to keep news junkies happy, we've quickly knocked up a simple "Latest News" page that lists the latest 210 non-Pro news stories published.

This list would typical cover a two-week period of publishing, so even if you've been away on vacation you should still be able to rapidly catch up on the period you've missed.

And if you need to navigate to the Latest News page in future without coming back to this post, you can find the link on the main News page underneath the "In focus ..." section:

So we're finally live with the new flightglobal.com and with Flightglobal Pro (our paid-for subscriber service).

Thanks for your patience over the last 24 hours or so while we work our way through the inevitable bugs and stability issues that go hand in hand with a code release of this magnitude.

The new site is the culmination of over 12 months of development work, and far longer in terms of planning.

Here's a check list for hot topics at the moment:

• People experiencing bugs should email details to: webmaster@flightglobal.com
  
• People wanting to give general feedback on the new site should email me: Michael.targett@flightglobal.com. However it's probably worth reading this post about some of our changes first.
  
• A few people have contacted me to say that they miss viewing news articles in a simple list format. This experience is still available on Flightglobal but is part of our Flightglobal Pro package. To take a free instant trial of Pro please go here, select which service you'd like to trial and follow the signs to Free Taster
  
• And finally, we've made some changes to our article categorization system so, while we're going through and checking the various news channels, if you spot any oddities (e.g. a military news article appearing in the Airlines channel) email them through to webmaster@flightglobal.com and we'll correct the issue.

Russia stands out among the world's biggest military spenders by not having an indigenous medium-altitude unmanned air vehicle. Defence blog The DEW Line carried a video that cleared up the mystery.

The clip shows the fate of Russia's answer to the Predator, the Vega Stork, a demonstrator of which crashed on 18 January 2010.

The Boeing 747-8F non-delivery had FlightBlogger trawling the Flight International archives to locate our August 1991 story on Singapore Airlines' cancellation of 20 Pratt & Whitney PW4460-powered Douglas MD-11 aircraft in favour of Airbus A340-300s, after the former were deemed unable to fly the Singapore-Paris route without a 5t payload restriction.

On Asian Skies, Greg Waldron posted images - sourced from the Japan Security Watch blog - of the Kawasaki XP-1 maritime patrol aircraft conducting flight tests with two Type-91 anti-ship missiles on its inboard missile pylons.

On The DEW Line, Stephen Trimble extracted from Wikileaks' latest cable dump the verdict of the US Embassy in New Delhi after Ambassador Timothy Roemer toured the Bengaluru factory complex of Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL): "The potential for HAL to successfully partner with US firms on a truly advanced aircraft remains untested and suspect."

FlightBlogger found an "incredibly detailed" documentary on the building of an Airbus A321 for Lufthansa, and RunwayGirl posted Eezeer Data Lab-created info-graphics showing the evolution of the in-flight entertainment and connectivity industry, "and how airlines finally understand that IFEC has become the cost of doing business".

AsianSkies carried details of a leaked briefing about the proposed naval variant of Saab's Gripen fighter, plus a clip of a Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-21 being lifted into its display position atop an office building in New Zealand.

Runway Girl took a look at pictures of the Boeing 787's in-flight entertainment and seats and "was struck by how ancient everything looked".

On The DEW Line, Stephen Trimble analysed a US Air Force Research Laboratory presentation posted online and declared, "Blackswift is dead. Long live the High-Speed Aircraft."

On Asian Skies, Greg Waldron pondered the prospects of the Airbus Military A400M making it to December's Langkawi International Maritime & Aerospace (LIMA) exhibition in Malaysia.

FlightBlogger carried a translated Russian documentary on the supersonic Tupolev Tu-144 - "or Concordski, as it later became known".

Watch a video of Learmount from the day he got a flying lesson a two-seater Spitfire.

Ariel View reported that Israel's Air Force One equivalent is on hold after protests demanding changes in government priorities.

Memories of 9/11 and analyses of its legacy were collected and complete a special page on the web commemorating the 10th anniversary.

On The DEW Line, Stephen Trimble found "startling trends" in cost data for the US Air Force's ageing and most mature combat aircraft, and noted that things get "a little weird" when the focus switches to less mature or less numerous types, citing per-flight-hour figures for the Lockheed Martin F-22 and Bell Boeing CV-22.

In our back-issue archive, Jon "FlightBlogger" Ostrower dug up a 1989 story in which McDonnell Douglas "concedes that, with fuel prices unlikely to rise substantially in the near future, there is 'inadequate motivation' for airlines to gamble on unducted-fan technology".

Asian Skies blogger Greg Waldron sourced from the China Defence Mashup website a photo purportedly of a crashed Chinese UAV.

"To me it looks like the Pterodactyl," he wrote.