Michael: March 2009 Archives

Flight International issue 31 Mar - 6 Apr

See a new blog, Future Proof, about what lies ahead in air travel. Aimee Turner discusses how passengers could be taking a which induces "gentle and harmless sleep for all or most of the flight" and wonders whether full horizontal beds in tiers could prevent deep vein thrombosis and permit comfortable and relaxed sleep".

London Heathrow's Terminal 5 celebrated a low-key first birthday last week. Is it working? See what British Airways and BAA have to say. Additionally, hear what a leading environmental campaigner feels about the proposed third runway and future expansion at the airport.

Follow Flight's journalists as they Twitter on their thoughts on industry developments. Find out who's who on the popular social networking phenomenon. Terminal Q, Megan Kuhn's blog, is tweeting the latest updates on what's hot in airports.

Mary Kirby, AKA Runway Girl, sends her apologies for not attending this week's Hamburg Interiors Show, but Barbara Cockburn Flightglobal's Content Editor is providing footage to keep users fully informed of the current goings on in the IFE market as well the slickest cabin interiors in action.

Read FlightBlogger on the Pratt & Whitney Geared Turbofan demonstrator engine which returned home to Connecticut after concluding a two-phase, 120-hour flight test programme under the wings of a Boeing 747SP and Airbus A340-600.

I was recently invited to have a tour around the Telegraph's much vaunted Hub Office in London.

Very impressive it is too - not least for the hundreds (literally) of journalists that dwell in the space that used to be a trading floor.

The chap who took us round was also pleased to show the four massive projectors beaming various images onto a large white wall on one side of the space.

The images consisted of the telegraph.co.uk home page, a twitter feed (via monitter.com), some Reuters stuff and a tiny little section for the top stories of the day.

The lack of emphasis on that last element surprised me somewhat. I mean what's more important to your operation? Checking that the story you published 10 minutes ago is, yep, still published, or that large numbers of visitors are searching for news on a breaking subject?

At the risk of banging our own drum a bit our own metrics screen puts that to shame slightly.

Our digital whiteboard displays live traffic metrics and the team use this information to aid decision making when reacting to real-time events and user behaviour. If the whiteboard shows our users are searching, viewing or consuming a specific topic then we will focus our efforts to cater for that information need in greater detail.

And to borrow from Steve Trimble, it's also a bit of Distance Early Warning for any live issues. E.g. if an area of the site goes down it's very obvious from the flatline that appears on the screen.

On a personal note I'm pleased to say that the board has been beaming down record figures for much of March and we look to be on course to achieve a record-breaking six million pages viewed for this month. That's a big number in anyone's books, although to be fair the telegraph.co.uk do about fours times that (but with how many staff ... ?).

Metric Man out.

Flight International issue 24 - 30 March

See John Croft's blog post on As the Cro(ft) Flies titled "Cirrus chute tally: 18 activations, 30 saves" about the faults on the Cirrus SR22 rocket-powered parachute system.

Croft has added a photo and diagrams of the chute on the light aircraft which crashed in Florida last month. He says: "The pilot had pulled the chute, but the aircraft was low to the ground and spinning vertically at the time, according to an eyewitness. Both were killed".

Read a forum discussion on AirSpace about how owners of a ferry that helped rescue the passengers and crew of US Airways flight 1549 in January may file a suit against the airline to recoup recovery costs.

A newspaper reports that, in addition to financial considerations, the ferry's 83-year-old chief is frustrated by what he sees as a failure of US Airways to recognise the role his boats played in the rescue.

In our Terminal Q blog there's a post about two Florida politicians drafting legislation to grant airports immunity from state and local liabilities to deter wildlife following the ditching of the Airbus A320 into the Hudson River caused by a bird strike last month. "You don't want to put your employees in legal jeopardy for trying to keep airline passengers safe. It's just not right," says one.

See our F-15E Silent Eagle gallery on AirSpace showing the prototype, unveiled by Boeing last week. And take a look at a rather spectacular image of an Air France aircraft taking off from Turin.

It's placed in our Majesty gallery where you can see other magnificent images of airliners.

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.

Microblogging, ambient noise, social aggregation ... call it what you will, Twitter is certainly helping change the way the media work.

Rather the churn out the same recent examples of Twitter at work in the aviation industry I thought I'd keep it short and sweet and just list who from Flightglobal is currently Twittering and what they tend to bang on about:

Flightglobal
An aggregation of all the latest headline news piped through from the site.

mtargettuk
A.k.a. me. Follow me for hot stuff on Flightglobal, web editor-type stuff and the occasional snarky observation.

Flightblogger
Mr 787 and much more besides. Jon Ostrower covers a remarkable amount of ground in aerospace and aviation development.

TheABEd
Mark Pilling is the Editor of Airline Business magazine and the Airlines Channel of Flightglobal. He tweets about that.

Cockburnb
Flightglobal's very own Content Editor. Tweets about quirky gems and life as a London socialite.

theDEWline
Flightglobal's man on the US defence industry. Steve Trimble provides a backdrop behind his DEW Line blog.

RunwayGirl
Flightglobal's very own pin up. Mary Kirby tweets about IFE, North American airlines and hot sauce.

flighthyperbola
Rob Coppinger is Flightglobal's Man in Space. He covers space tourism and other major current manned space flight projects.

flightdoyle
Head of Content at Flightglobal. Andrew Doyle loves Twitter only slightly less than his BlackBerry. He twitters about a whole host of stuff from events to breaking news.

VictoriaOnAir
Victoria Moores is one of Flightglobal's roving reporters. She tweets to cover her press trips and other commercial aviation nuggets.

discostu1
Disco Stu is the Community Editor for Flightglobal and AirSpace. As well as being a dance floor wizard, he twitters on about web 2.0, social networking and all that other stuff that's a poor excuse for real work.

jmuttram
Jim Muttram is the Managing Director of the Flight Group and Reed Business Information. He tweets about general goings on in RBI and the world of digital publishing.

stefanthepilot
The enigma wrapped in a mystery that is Stefan the Pilot. Follow him and you follow aviation itself.

Flight Events
Providing details of upcoming Flight Events.

Happy following!

Flight International issue 17 - 23 March

Read a post on Unusual Attitude, Kieran Daly's blog, who wonders how a tennis racquet can be considered an unacceptable piece of carry-on luggage.

Take a look at Mary Kirby's Runway Girl blog in which she hosts her weekly vlog, this time she observes that the differences in IFE offerings between Virgin America's and US Airways' domestic in-flight offerings are stark.

See a video on The DEW Line showing Israeli arms firm Rafael's intention, in the style of a Bollywood film, to make missile sales to India.

Lufthansa's supervisory board approved, last week, an order for 30 Bombardier CSeries aircraft, giving the Canadian manufacturer's new-aircraft programme a major boost. Flight's archive has some background in 2004 on the regional jet which Flight reported: "is aimed at tackling the 100-plus-seat market from 2010."

And check out the demonstration of Air France's Smartboarding, a new automated boarding pass service launched last week for its frequent flyers on its Paris to Amsterdam route.

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

Last week's Question of the Week about what aircraft should appear on the cover of JP Fleets 2009 proved popular - 3837 votes!

A record breaker no less (discounting the fantasy transatlantic trip question over the Christmas break which ran for two weeks).

So it's to be the A380 again but not one of SIAs I'm guessing (but I'll leave the specifics to the art and design squad).

I wonder whether if it's the love of JP Fleets or just the lure of having an influence over editorial decisions that's got people clicking ...

Perhaps we should run a couple of "Choose the front cover of next week's Flight International" to see if that's just as popular.

This week's question focuses on the issue if next generation narrowbody engines.

Probably should've done this a long time ago but, as they say, one thing at a time. Anyway, we've set up a new Flight Tests channel on the site.

And we've retrospectively gone back and tagged previous flight tests so they're all grouped in the one place.

These PIREPS are obviously great stuff - recent test flights include the Phenom 100 and Pilatus PC-21.

You can subscribe to our flight tests on RSS ... .

Flight International issue 10 - 16 March

Last week Flightglobal celebrated the 40th anniversary of Concorde's first flight. Take a look at the 6 March 1969 issue of Flight in our pdf archive dedicated to the first supersonic aircraft which includes an article on the technology used, aircraft structure, fuel system, aerodynamics, flight testing, payload accommodation, aircraft data, a cutaway drawing and an airline pilot's view.

We have 5 copies of a new book; Concorde: A Photographic History to give away and we've created a gallery for you to upload your images and a forum discussion to share your memories of the iconic aircraft.

Get involved in the discussion on AirSpace about Rolls-Royce confirming its RTM322 turboshaft engine is the "engine of record" for a new Eurocopter high-speed rotorcraft research programme dubbed "X3".

One user suggest the X3 looks "remarkably like a modernised Fairy Rotodyne" but wonders "what powers the rotor because the drawing shown (in the discussion) has no anti torque tail rotor which suggests that the rotor is powered, when required, by blade tip jets."

Have you suffered from contaminated cabin air asks another forum post. Neurotoxins get into the cabin air of almost all passenger airliners.

Aircraft manufacturers and the airlines say that when it happens the doses are harmless. One user says he was regularly exposed to fumes over a five year period and suffered headaches, lightheaded and dizziness.

Nausea, stomach pains and diahorrea. Fatigue and lack of concentration. He was later diagnosed with Aerotoxic Syndrome and declared medically unfit to fly.

See a great image of three Virgin aircraft at Los Angeles International Airport last week following the launch of Virgin Blue's long-haul arm V Australia with an inaugural flight from Sydney.

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

Two weeks ago we announced the winners of the Flightglobal Webbies - The Aviation Web Awards 2008.

In case you missed it I've included the winners and runners up below together with the judges' comments.

Running and judging the inaugural Webbies has been an interesting and rewarding experience.

There was a great variety of styles, content, design and innovation in the hundreds of website nominated, and it's encouraging to see that the aviation industry is getting serious about online.

Having worked in several other industries I can say that it's not always the case. Some industries simply do not get the potential of the web and how it can make their businesses (both for transactions and marketing) much more efficient and effective. And many fail to see that we're really just scraping the surface of how business methods can be transformed through the new opportunities the web offers.

However, I think two things are at the heart of our industry's adoption of online technologies: the global nature of this business means that any process which helps to bridge the distances between companies and people is something will be actively embraced; secondly, many people involved in aircraft and flying have an innate love of new technology and innovation, of which Web 2.0 technologies are an obvious candidate.

Either way, with so much energy going into our websites and online innovations, it's a great online environment to be working in.