Michael: August 2008 Archives

Flight journalist David Kaminski-Morrow recently broke a new record for the site, notching up a million page views so far this year.

Deputy news editor David demolished last year's efforts with a whole bunch of cracking stories, maximising their impact through the use of  videos and images to accompany the textual detail where possible. See below for a list of his top five.

The figures represent a huge increase on last year's best, when Max Kingsley-Jones scored 644,498 page views over the full twelve months. With four months of the year still to go, the annual record looks set to soar.

I think this step up in performance has many contriuting factors - it's not just David but all the Flight journalists that are pulling in more traffic than in 2007. However one key to their success is the use of our web analytics tool, which helps Flight journalists keep track of their performance, make sense of what works online and respond by tuning their output to the needs of the users.

David's top five stories:

• Lufthansa A320 escapes after wing-tip strike in Hamburg storm (56,317 page views)
• American investigates as 777 engine fails to respond to throttle (24,031 page views)
• Boeing investigates as Saudi 777 lands with wing damage (23,547 page views)
• ATR may have been damaged in 'barrel roll' (22,689 page views)
• Emirates A380 first-class cabin to have showers and private suites (22,233 page views)

We thought we'd have you stumped last week but congratulations to Aiso and AvGen who both recognised Uruguay's Montevideo Airport in an extremely short time.

So again it's time to see if we can fox you eagle-eyed airport experts.

Here's Week 4:

As usual please post the name and IATA code into the comments field below the image on AirSpace ...

Good luck!

Far be it for me to steal anyone's thunder but the fact that Jon Ostrower aka FlightBlogger scooped the world's media in Barack Obama's Vice Presidnetial pick seems to have gone relatively unappreciated.

According to Jon, his tip on the flight was picked up by a well known US political blogger and then CNN and FOX mentioned the flight (but not FlightBlogger) on air.

Unfortunately the blogger in question failed link to FlightBlogger directly (bad form!), but a FB twitter caused a 2000 page view jump in traffic in about an hour on Friday afternoon well BEFORE the VP news broke.

As Jon says - planes and politics go nicely together.

Flight International 26 August - 1 September 2008

In celebration of 100 years of flight Le Mans Sarthe Aero Retro group staged an event at the Hunaudières race course in Le Mans marking Wilbur Wright's first flight in France.

See images of Wright Flyer replicas in our gallery of images including one image of a German Wright Flyer replica hung from the church roof of Abbaye de l'Épau.

Inmarsat last week confirmed the successful launch and acquisition of the third Inmarsat-4 satellite see Mary Kirby's Runway Girl blog and because the image was so powerful, we used it again on the Image of the Day blog.

Low cost carrier Volaris is to take delivery of its first Airbus A320 in November and has significantly accelerated deliveries for A319s. See a gallery of images of the aircraft on AirSpace.

See the image on the Image of the Day blog showing Australia's Qantas A380 cabin first flight and see an image of the Cessna aircraft that crashed onto a street in bustling business district Yao, Japan and take a look at an interesting video of a shuttle launch seen by a passenger on an Air Canada flight

Back soon ...

Ok - you guys were seriously quick last week in the inaugural Guess the Airport quiz question to guess that this was Jersey airport in the UK (JER). Joint winners were Titch and Global Ranger, so congratulations to you two - prizes on their way.

This week we've raised the bar! 

Week 2

As usual please post the name and IATA code into the comments field below the image on AirSpace ...

Good luck!

Flight International - week 12-18 Aug

The Flight team were at Oshkosh recently and have now fine-tuned even more videos making the playlist amount to 25.

Watch the video of the V-22 Osprey arriving at the show, see footage from a flight in a Citation Mustang, riding in an S-1A-65F Cadet and Harrison Ford speaking to the industry at the podium.

See a video on Stephen Trimble's blog, The DEW Line, which spoofs a television news show highlighting how the Pentagon has deployed an unmanned drone, which looks similar to Star Wars lovable astromech droid R2-D2, as its spokesman,

See Emirate's new A380 showered by water cannon on touch down at San Francisco Airport as it undergoes a West Coast familiarisation tour.

FlightBlogger has compiled a three part blog which puts, in a broader context, the current state of Boeing's 787 programme and based on an interview he had with 787 programme chief Pat Shanahan. Part one focuses on the progress on Dreamliner One as it prepares for its first flight in November. Part two examines the current state of the supply chain. The final part looks at the five remaining flight test aircraft.

We've launched a new weekly competition where we'll upload a new aerial view of an airport for you to identify and you should state its IATA code. First correct answer posted to the comments section below the image will not only earn you AirSpace kudos but will get you lots of AirSpace goodies.

For a bit of fun to keep you busy during the traditional August quiet period we've knocked up a little friendly competition called Guess the Airport.

Basically we've used some aerial images of ten International Airports around the world (courtesy of Google Maps).

Week 1

We'll be publishing a new airport image once a week (every Wednesday afternoon) over on AirSpace.

The person who guesses the quickest each week (by commenting on the photograph) will win an exclusive brand new AirSpace t-shirt, plus the large dollop of kudos.

Please post the name and IATA code into the comments field below the image (on AirSpace not here!).

Good luck!

TIP: Why not subscribe to the Guess the Airport gallery RSS feed so you're alerted as soon as we publish the next image?

A gem from the archive ... ;-)

I'm glad to report that all of the Flight blogs have now made it onto our new look stylesheets.

The last of them were completed yesterday with this blog, the Flight Blog (which used to be called Flight Intnerational) and Airline Business all getting the same treatment.

On this blog I'll shortly be getting stuck into to making the most of the new widget panels (the columns on the left and right) to better highlight key Flightglobal features and content.

Meanwhile as the redesign bandwagon rolls on keep and eye out for an overhaul of the Archives, Jobs and Shop which are all imminent.

A new addition to the link furniture around our articles is the "Discuss this article on AirSpace" option below the main body of the article.

This has been a little while in development and more than a little tricky as it connects two different platforms is several ways.

Its function is to pass through an article headline to our discussion forums for further debate/comment.

If the "Discuss this article on AirSpace" link is followed a new thread is automatically authored in the relevant section of the AirSpace forums with a post featuring a quote from the article and a link back to it.

In addition, it also opens a new blank post below for the user's comment to go in. This functionality obviously requires a user to be registered on AirSpace and will prompt you for login/registration if necessary.

If you're a subsequent user to follow the "Discuss this article on AirSpace" link then the control/widget intelligently knows whether this has already done and so doesn't duplicate the thread. Instead it takes you to the current discussion, which you can reply to having read other users' thoughts.

The control will also display quick links (with time/date stamps) to the latest existing replies to the discussion if present.

One final feature on the control is a "Who is online?" function which shows recent/current visitors and members to the forums.