Recently in AirSpace Category

Flightglobal is giving you the exclusive chance to have your favourite aviation images featured in an exclusive 2010 calendar.

For the first time, we aim to highlight the best 12 images taken by you and rated by the AirSpace community, a truly unique opportunity for the amateur photographer and a great gift for aviation enthusiasts throughout the world.


To be in with a chance of winning this great prize, you must have uploaded your choice of images to a gallery on AirSpace by Monday 26 October.

Everyone who joins our AirSpace community has their own private gallery and an explanation of how to upload an image can be found here.

The winners will be chosen by a panel of judges from the Flightglobal team and will be selected from the top rated images on AirSpace as well as from AirSpace's image of the week competition, which is featured each week on page 3 of Flight International magazine.

Each selected photographer will win a £100 as well as a free copy of the calendar, with the calendars being on sale in the Flightglobal shop.

For those that miss out don't worry as we will be running our annual Flight International front cover competition straight after this competition ends.

Stefan has covered his fourth event since the beginning of September, but were you able to guess #wheresstefan? Correct guesses win a Stefan t-shirt, so follow our elusive friend on Twitter.  

See some great images of retro aircraft from AirSpace user Ace79 who went to the Vintage Aircraft Weekend at Paine Field Everett, WA, recently.

And why not add your views to the discussion on the accuracy of Thomson's inflight safety video. One user comments about the airline's marketing video: "You should only be seeing it on the flight after you've already bought your ticket and got on the aircraft - advertising in retrospect?"

See a vlog post on Mary Kirby's Runway Girl blog about the latest in inflight entertainment on a recent visit to Florida to see JetBlue subsidiary LiveTV.

A US Marine Corps pilot suggests in an issue of Joint Forces Quarterly that the age of stealth domination in airpower is over according to the DEW Line blog.

The pilot says the US military and industry needs to launch a crash technology programme. "If anything, the technology could be leveraged to understand the techniques potential adversaries could use to shoot down our stealth aircraft".

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

Our #wheresstefan competition on Twitter is well underway with three events in different cities down and more to come. Correct guesses win a Stefan t-shirt so follow our elusive friend (twitter.com/stefanthepilot).

Last week Willie Walsh announced proposals to cut airline emissions by half the 2005 level by 2050.

Users on AirSpace are discussing this and some say they've heard all this before. One user suggests airlines "don't expand, and use hydrogen", another says: " aviation should have been included in Kyoto but it is one polluter among many."

A flying programme to celebrate Birmingham International's 70th anniversary included an autogyro, a military air display and a large number of civil aircraft including an imperial Hercules and an Emirates A380 see more of the event on AirSpace.

You can now buy photos and reprints from Flightglobal's unique 100-year image archive. The Flightglobal Image Store features thousands of historical and modern images, including our extensive technical cutaway drawings and they're available any way you want them, from canvas or jigsaws.

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

Flight International issue 25-31 August 2009

Be honest, who really takes notice of those safety demonstrations before takeoff?

Charter operator Thomson Airways knows this and has come up with a way to get passengers to sit up and pay attention by using children as cabin crew giving the instructions, which is all very heart-warming and actually very effective.

Check out Kieran Daly's blog post pointing to Boston Globe's 40 "fabulous" aviation pictures.

It's a spectacular selection, including an impressive shot of a hot-air balloon above the clouds in Germany and a helicopter, with tourists onboard, in front of Angel Falls at Canaima National Park.

Read about the Su-27 fighter jet that disappeared behind trees at Poland's Radom air show recently and burst into flames killing both pilots and view a newsclip of its aerial display.

Twitter user, RAFairman uploaded an image showing part of an aircraft and challenged followers to guess its type.

Our very own Stefan the Pilot was the winner guessing correctly that the image was of a Westland Wessex helicopter.

See more of the Wessex, once described by Flight International as the "world's largest VTOL aircraft".

Follow Stefan on Twitter... He's going to be busy over the next few months.

Westland Wessex http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1969/1969%20-%200819.html?search=westland%20wessex

See Stefan the Pilot's images in his own gallery 

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

User blogs

Did you know that becoming a member of AirSpace automatically entitles you to start your own blog?

Part of the package of an AirSpace membership (as well as having your own photo gallery, forum membership and profile space) is getting your own blogging platform for you to do whatever wish, and that includes customising the look and feel.

One of our AirSpace members, John Dyer, showcases this with his new blog European Airliner Scene.

John's combined a custom header graphic together with an "out-of-the-box" blog template to make his blog look professional and stylish. He now regularly logs European airliner movements on AirSpace.

Blog functionality

A lot of the blog functionality comes as standard with an AirSpace blog and is the usual blog fare - tags, categories, comments, ratings, extended posts, quotes, wysiwyg text editors, etc ... .

The generating an audience bit is down to you. Write some good stuff, link to other cool web content, cover a unique angle, or get into the micro detail of a subject.

There are numerous ways to do it, but what I can say is that if your blog is working and you're doing a solid job then we'll notice and give you a helping hand by featuring it on the home page of Flightglobal (which gets up to 80,000 views everyday) and the Blogs Channel of the site (which is soon to undergo some redesign).

If you're interested in starting your own blog on AirSpace, customizing it, and getting advice on blogging best practice then contact Maverick on AirSpace who'll be happy to help you out.

As discovered by the Sun and then picked up by Aussie site news.com.au, Ryanair hostess Edita Schindlerova has appeared on X-rated websites posing in graphic photos showing her "having sex with a mystery man".

The thing for Flightglobal here is not that a stewardess has been up to some naughtiness, but that the news.com.au story linked to our lovely Ryanair Calender Girls Gallery on AirSpace and dumped thousands of visitors to Flightglobal this morning. It's 11am as I'm writing this and we've already had 100k page views on the site so far today. Not bad for a morning's work.

The other thing that springs to mind is I wonder how long before the inevitable Ryanair Press Release arrives putting some ludicrous spin on the revelation.

You can almost write the words yourself: "Ryanair fares are so hot even our stewardesses can't keep their clothes on" or something similar.

We've got an on-going project to scan in, host and make accessible on AirSpace some of the thousands of unique images from the Flight Archive.

It's a lengthy and fiddly business but we've made our first step forward in a while with the release of several hundred fascinating black and white historical photos for various periods in the previous century.

In the coming months we hope to turn these initial hundreds into thousands, but I'll keep you posted.

The selection of images are range from pre and post 1914, to air races and historical prototypes. The full list is below:

• Historical Pre 1914
• Historical 1930s Civil
• Historical 1930s Military
• Historical 1939-1945
• Historical Post War
• Historical Air Races
• Historical Experimental and Prototypes

We'll be working through these images to tag them (in order to improve their findability) but I'd like to encourage knowledgable users to help us classify these images by posting tags and descriptions under indivdual photos if possible.

That will help speed up the process and hopefully allow us to link the images to the corresponding pages of Flight magazine from our 100 year Archive.

For the second year running, AirSpace (our user forums and galleries) has offered you the chance to get your favourite image on to the front cover of the end-of-year special issue of Flight International.

The Competition really kicked into another gear this year with nearly 1,500 images submitted in the six categories. In addition the quality of the entries was second to none and caused the judging process to drag out over several days!

Congratulations go to Begemont and was this spectacular shot of a Russian Air Force Su-27 releasing flares at MAKS 2007

And here's the front cover:

The other category winners were:

Menace - Fighters in Flight
Winner - runlikehell
F-22 Raptor at 2008 Oceana air show in Virginia

History - Birds from Bygone Eras
Winner - Photomotion
Ray Hanna memorial flight at Biggin Hill air show 2006

Precision - Aerial Display Teams
Winner - fleeting_images
UK Royal Navy Lynx Black Cats at RIAT

Majesty - Airliners in Action
Winner - bwiadca
Boeing MD-11 climbing to Alaskan storm from Anchorage 2008

Voyage - General Aviation in Dramatic Locations
Winner - allegra66
Rega A109KT during mountain landing in Switzerland

Response - Inspiring Business Jets
Winner - Global Ranger
Bombardier Challenger 300 (G-KALS) on approach to London Luton 2008

Hat tip to FlightBlogger who's taken time to highlight 5 cool things on Flightglobal that he was previously ignorant of.

His picks are:

• Cutaways
• 100 Years of Flight Archive
• Incident Watch
• Commercial Aircraft Directory
• Videos

Regular readers of this Blog should be aware of most of this stuff but in case some of this great content is slipping by unnoticed I'll join Jon in selecting my choices for 5 cool things on Flightglobal that you might not know about:

Week on the Web podcast - it's an audio version of the regular Week on the Web feature which appears here and in the magazine. You can subscribe via iTunes or on AirSpace

AirSpace image competitions - as well as the big front cover one that's running at the moment, there are regular weekly image-based competitions over on AirSpace. They include: caption competition and spaceflight image of the week

Dynamic aircraft profiles - our growing porfolio of aircraft profiles dynamically bring the best and latest information on any given aircraft together in one place 

Email newsletters - why go through the rigmoral of browsing to find out the news when stuff that's relevant to you can be delivered straight to your inbox

Flightglobal on the web - if you love flightglobal and want to embed it into some of your other web activity you can do so in various ways. This page showcases some of our other web activity

It's that time of year again. Ryanair calendar time.

The now infamous Ryanair girls have once again stripped off in the name of publicity charity.

This year's launch was an unhappy coincidence of timing with a Ryanair 737 landing heavy and overrunning in Rome following bird strike, but never ones to be dismayed Ryanair ploughed on, persuading a couple of the girls to shrug off their uniforms and brave the chilly Dublin weather to help get the media in the mood.

More images from the launch and the Ryanair calendar are on AirSpace ...

The proceeds are going to the Dublin Simon Community which provides services for the homeless in Dublin.

The calendar is available to buy here ...