The Farnborough air show is - excitingly or terrifyingly, depending on where you sit - but a few weeks away and here at Flightglobal Towers we are gearing up for the big event of the year. Farnborough - like
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Murdo Morrison: June 2010 Archives
The latest issue of Flight International (22-28 June) has one of our most stunning covers of the year. It shows an Alenia Aermacchi M-346 in flight over the ocean. The M-346 Master is a leading contender for the nine-nation "Eurotraining" initiative and our Italian correspondent Luca Peruzzi takes a detailed look at the package being offered around the platform by bidders Alenia Aermacchi and its partner EADS. Meanwhile, Stephen Trimble examines the big stateside contest to replace the USAF's venerable T-38 trainer. At least five companies are in the mix.
Also, Embraer has gone public on an almost taboo subject for the aviation industry: commercial flights flown with a single pilot. While most experts believe the cockpit environment has advanced to such a degree as to permit solo flying (after all, private aircraft fly all the time with one pilot), there are still huge psychological and practical objections. Our Comment piece - entitled The lonely commander - asks whether it will and should ever happen.
This is one of busiest seasons for us on Flight International and Flightglobal and - travel budgets being as they are - I've seen the inside of a lot of Ryanair and EasyJet aircraft in the past three months, flying to among others Rzeszow in Poland, Munich, Berlin and Geneva.
As a seasoned traveller on both airlines it's been interesting to compare the respective passenger experience. Flying with Ryanair these days is like revising for an exam. What are the cabin and hold baggage requirements this week? Have I remembered to check in online and did I pay for a suitcase? Queuing at Stansted is even more painful. It took me 40min of standing in a slowly-moving line to drop my bags off the other week.
Once airside though, the Ryanair system, at Stansted at least, is relatively slick (in an abbatoir kind of way) and the on-board service is good, with edible food and pleasant cabin crew, down to the smug, trumpety announcement of an another on time arrival which can jangle your nerves like an air pocket at 36,000ft if you're not prepared for it.
EasyJet's check-in process at Gatwick is more relaxed and streamlined than Ryanair's - if you can call 250 people all trying to register for their flight at once streamlined. But at both Gatwick and Berlin's Schoenefeld last week, the experience beyond security was abysmal.
At Gatwick, there was one harrassed agent (not an EasyJet employee) trying to process a full A319 load of passengers at the gate, while at the same time making loading announcements and deal with at least one individual with an identity card that she didn't know whether she could accept. She even had to tell one passenger to go to the other end of the departure lounge to inform those queuing there that they were free to board. It was a shambles.
In Berlin a few evenings later, it was even worse. The flight - as many of EasyJet's evening flights invariably seem to be - was running 2h late. The information on the screens at Schoenefeld, a ramshackle airport at the best of times, was inconsistent. Queues kept forming at alleged departure gates, only to disperse and reform somewhere else. Other passengers were the only source of information as, beyond the odd cleaner and barmaid, there was not an airline or airport staff member to be seen.
The crew too seemed a lot less happy to be there than Ryanair's. No one pretends slogging across Europe with no layovers, making the same old safety announcements and serving up soggy baguettes to disgruntled passengers on a budget is up there with the sort of job with a long-haul carrier where you end your shift on a beachfront hotel in the Seychelles. But you get a sense that EasyJet crew are less happy than they were in the early days when Stelios's start-up had an irreverent, we're-with-you-against-the-big-airline-conspiracy feel to it. While BA's cabin crew could be stuck-up, EasyJet's were your mates. Not sure that is still the case.
Arriving home at 02.00h, exhausted, grumpy and hungry, I thought why do we put ourselves through the EasyJet ordeal? Well, my flight to Berlin cost, I think, less than £60 (or around $85) return. Discomfort, disinformation and disorientation are the price to be paid for low fare travel. And judging by the packed budget flights I've been on almost every time, passengers are voting with their feet.
Has Emirates got it right and almost everyone else - including rival airlines who have bought the Airbus A380 in more modest numbers - got it wrong? That is the question examined by this week's Flight International comment, and also the poll question on flightglobal.com, following the mega 32-aircraft deal announced at the ILA show in Berlin last week.
(As I write, the poll result is finely balanced between those who think Emirates has seen the future and those who thinks it has overstretched).
It is certainly one being asked by airlines such as Lufthansa, British Airways and Singapore Airlines (even if they don't admit to it) as Airbus chief Tom Enders alluded speaking to us at the show.
If Emirates' strategy works - they will have 90 of the superjumbos by the last third of the decade - they could be in a postion quite simply to muscle out competitors on the Europe to Asia routes simply because they will have the scale and infrastructure to operate more cheaply.
Add to that, the fact that Emirates has a non-unionised workforce (no walkouts, no outrageous pay demands) and an expandable airport (with a new six-runway replacement coming on stream next decade) when the likes of BA have been told that Heathrow will never have a third runway.
Forget, however, the nonsensical claims of subsidised fuel and bail outs by the Dubai government. They if anything pay more for their fuel than many of their rivals and Dubai's embarrassing cap in hand rescue by Abu Dhabi last year proves that the Al Maktoums do not have bottomless pockets to support a cash-draining flag-carrier. Emirates does have the advantage, however, of being part of an integrated aviation network of airport, civil aviation authority and transportation department which all ultimately sings from the same songsheet and answers to the same Sheikh.
Forget too the prices Emirates are likely to be paying for their big beasts. It's unlikely Airbus will be creaming in the profits on these units. But that's a problem for Airbus, which will be quite relieved simply to shift more of its A380s.
There are reports now that Emirates may order even more A380s at Farnborough.
Could Emirates be like the late Victorian cab firm that, while everyone else was fretting about how to make their horse-drawn carriages more efficient, simply went out and bought a fleet of motor cars?
Or - to utterly mangle the metaphor - have they bet the farm on a herd of white elephants?
The first stories are already breaking from ILA. Boeing is back at the show for the first time in a decade. Read why in our ILA report. And
The Flightglobal multi-media operation is in full-swing at ILA in