BoJo's H-ro rant
London mayor Boris Johnson - whose pet project remains a new hub airport in the Thames estuary - recently told opponents of a third Heathrow runway that such a project would "desecrate" the capital with "hundreds of thousands, if not millions of great flying fleets of fortissimo flatulence".
That image of large, noisy objects descending from the sky over London, often unable to land... it reminded us of something. Not sure what.

The last survivor
Another icon of the Second World War - the only surviving Dornier Do 17 "Flying Pencil" - is to be raised from the English Channel, 73 years after it was shot down during the Battle
of Britain.
The aircraft - preserved largely intact - was spotted by divers in 2008 off the Goodwin Sands in Kent. Aside from barnacles and other effects of sea life, the condition of Do 17Z Werke nr 1160 is said to be "remarkable", with its tyres inflated and damage to the propellers only, inflicted during its final crash landing.
The three-week project to raise the Do 17 is described as the biggest recovery of its kind in UK waters.
The restored aircraft will go on to be exhibited at the Royal Air Force Museum.

Taking to the aria
Leisure airline Monarch entertained passengers who were checking in at London Gatwick for its inaugural flight to Verona with some traditional Italian opera. Sadly, there were no seats for a tenor.

Still human
Jesper Vanddam writes from Denmark saying that it was with some relief that he read our flightglobal.com headline: "USAF leader confirms manned decision for new bomber." He says: "I have long feared that such a decision would be taken by robots."
Hands off Earth!
EADS Cassidian's "Defending world security" certainly wins the prize for most ambitious corporate slogan. Those Klingons must be terrified to invade now.

EasyJet's move to develop volcanic ash tracking technology shows impressive lateral thinking. Not, in fact, the kind of thinking normally associated with the stereotype of a low-cost carrier.
Anyone who doubts that assertion should test it by trying to imagine Ryanair investing time and money developing a similar system. For all the raucous protests by Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary when his airline was grounded in April 2010 because of airborne ash, investing in a system that would not deliver specific advantage to Ryanair is not his style. But, to be fair, IAG boss Willie Walsh - then chief of British Airways - protested just as loudly at the time, but has not matched EasyJet's imagination either.
As with all experimental systems, there is a financial risk. After all, this aircraft-mounted ash detector - known as Avoid - is not guaranteed to be a total success. So, with airlines presently at their most risk-averse, why is EasyJet, with Airbus and Nicarnica Aviation, taking the risk? The answer is that an ash cloud will definitely affect European airspace in the future. With some of its aircraft fitted with Avoid, EasyJet may be airborne with loads of zero-discount passengers when its competition is grounded.
But actually, and EasyJet knows this, aircraft-mounted Avoid will play its part with other sensor technologies in keeping the skies usable when ash threatens.

Boeing's board of directors has been busy in the past two years. Among its other duties, the board is charged with authorising its sales staff to present new products to customers. Years normally pass between such landmark events for an aerospace company, but not recently.
Since August 2011, Boeing's 11 directors have flexed this authorising role three times, giving the go-ahead to the 737 Max, the 787-10X in November 2012 and, most recently, the 777X in late April. Including the 767-2C-derived KC-46A tanker, Boeing now has four major programmes in active development.
But this burst of development activity cannot last forever, and the proverbial door to launching developments, in fact, may already have slammed shut.
Further derivatives of the 777X may come before the board during the next decade, but no other new developments are foreseeable until Boeing begins work on a replacement for the 737 Max several years after the re-engined narrowbody makes its operational debut in 2017. Barring any surprise developments, Boeing's product mix appears fully scoped for most of the next two decades.
The company is clearly ready to take a breather from new product development. The 10-year saga of the 787 - from missing fasteners to overheating batteries - has exhausted the company's leadership. Boeing chief executive Jim McNerney now talks about harvesting hard-won lessons, not learning new ones. It is an understandable position, but carries its own kind of risk. Boeing's next all-new aircraft - most likely a 737 replacement - may not appear for at least 15 years, or 25 years after the launch of the 787. An entire generation of Boeing engineers could pass into retirement before the next new aircraft enters service.
A similar gap was allowed to grow between the authority-to-offer milestone for the 777 in 1989 and that for the 787 in 2003. Indeed, McNerney himself has partly blamed that hiatus for the costly errors which delayed the 787 and for those that have continued to plague it.
McNerney also seems aware of the trap he has set for his successors. "Thirty years from now, will there be some new technology that we'll all wrestle with? Probably," McNerney said on 24 April. "Will there be enough people in Boeing that are here today that will remember the lessons learned from the 787? I hope so. I'm old. I'll be on a beach somewhere then."

Our cover and cutaway star is the latest Dassault business jet, the Falcon 2000LXS. The main selling point of the type, which replaces the 2000LS, is its short-runway performance. Our poster takes you under the aircraft's skin, while the technical description explains how the French manufacturer is positioning the aircraft.

Also in our pre-EBACE package, Mike Gerzanics flies the Nextant 400XT, the independently remanufactured successor to the Hawker 400. How does it compare to the original?

Stephen Trimble looks at what new aircraft announcements are on the horizon, and which ones will be revealed at EBACE. He also gets an update from Aerion on its plans to produce a supersonic executive jet. Kate Sarsfield finds out about the rapidly-growing African business aviation sector. Michael Gubisch takes a glimpse at some of the more exotic and innovative cabin designs gracing the largest business jetliners. Murdo Morrison asks if there is an future for the air taxi concept in Europe.

In news: David Learmount explains how EasyJet and Airbus plan to bring to market on-board equipment designed to detect volcanic ash, David Kaminski-Morrow reports on CFM International's roll-out schedule for its new Leap engines, and Greg Waldron looks at how Asia-Pacific is shaping up to be the main battleground for Airbus's and Boeing's latest-generation widebodies.

A go-around to remember
Our story about the world's most spectacular airport approaches (Flight International, 5 February) illustrated the winner using a familiar photograph of a widebody airliner descending low over sunbathers on St Maarten's beach.
Chris Barnes speculates as to what would happen if the landing pilot pressed the TOGA (take off go around) while over the shore. "The max power
and high alpha climb out
would do some considerable sandblasting and remove any remaining punters from the beach," he suggests.

Song for Eamon
Ryanair captain and singer-songwriter Sean Kelly has penned a tribute to fellow Ryanair captain and musician Eamon Wall, who died in January.
Kelly, a base captain at Prestwick, first performed the song at a gathering in Scotland for friends and colleagues who could not make it to Wall's funeral. "I played Drive Her On, a song I had written about Eamon that seemed to capture his spirit. It went down so well that we decided to release it as a charity single," he says.
Proceeds will be donated to the Carlow Kilkenny Home Care Team, the organisation that looked after Wall in his last weeks.
Drive Her On (The Ballad Of Eamon Wall) is available as a download from iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and other online stores.

Jetihad/Jatihad
When, during its lengthy courtship of India's Jet Airways, Etihad announced a codeshare agreement with JAT, it led HSBC analyst Andrew Lobbenberg to mischievously wonder if a typo on an email from James Hogan's office had caused confusion.
Had, he speculates, a minion gone west to cut a deal with the ailing flag carrier of lowly Serbia (population 7 million) rather than one of the emerging giants of aviation in India (population 1.2 billion).

Flight fiction
Back when what we said really mattered. The storyline on a recent episode of Endeavour, a prequel to the long-running TV series Inspector Morse, set in the 1960s, centred on murders at the British Imperial Electric Company, a (fictional) family-owned defence contractor building the Standfast surface-to-air missile.
One of the company's directors is seen reading your favourite aviation magazine and remarking: "I see we got a good write-up in Flight..."

Saving Trident
Tony Jarrett updates us on the effort to restore the last example of a Hawker Siddeley Trident IC. The project needs £3,000 ($4,700) to carry out work earmarked for this year.
The aircraft - G-ARPO - the 16th Trident built and the last 1C variant to fly, was dismantled from its last resting place at Teesside airport and brought to the Sunderland aircraft museum in 2011.
The volunteers behind the project have already raised £1,100 and say the trijet has been "transformed quite a lot".
This year, they want to finish the flightdeck and fore galley as well as paint the fuselage.
If you want to see how G-ARPO was moved to its latest home, check progress or contribute to the project, go to  www.savethetrident.org

Size certainly matters when it comes to the fortunes of business jet manufacturers during the past four years. Demand for super-midsize types and larger has remained robust since the start of the global financial crisis; that for medium, light and very-light aircraft sluggish or worse.
For those in the latter segments, it is difficult to detect any light at the end of the tunnel, and there is a serious question over whether these segments are victim to a permanent structural shift in market demand.
Citations, Learjets and Hawkers - for decades the workhorses of the North American corporate world - and a new breed of very-light and personal jets which promised to smash entry barriers to business aviation have simply not taken off in the markets that matter: Asia, the CIS, Middle East and Africa.
Meanwhile, demand for these types of aircraft in their backyards is struggling to recover, partly due to a glut of for-sale signs on unwanted, nearly-new jets because makers were slow to put the brakes on production lines as the downturn deepened.
As a time machine for busy executives, the business case for the compact business jet remains compelling. Their manufacturers must be hoping that - as spending power and corporate confidence return in the West and newer markets broaden their tastes beyond large-cabin status symbols - that message gets through.

Say the word "spaceflight" and most people think of daring missions, dashing astronauts and achingly beautiful images of our own world or the deep cosmos. From Sputnik through Apollo and the Moon walks to Mars rovers, orbiting telescopes and the incomparable views from the International Space Station, the space age has opened a new frontier and brought to humankind benefits that would dazzle even the visionaries who first probed the edge of our atmosphere.
Unfortunately, as humankind has done with every other new frontier, we've also turned space into a giant junkyard.
Space is a big place, so that is quite an achievement in less than 60 years. But the reality is that while we can talk about new missions to exotic worlds (back to the Moon, anyone, or how about a foot on Mars?) we should be talking seriously about much less glamorous missions - to clean up the mess we've left in orbit.
All the experts are alarmed. At orbital speeds, even coin-sized flecks of metal can destroy a spacecraft, and there are many tens of thousands of such flecks whizzing around the useful orbits that host the satellites which give us intercontinental telecoms, navigation, make bank transfers work, and view the ground.
Big chunks of metal are also up there, from old rocket bodies and dead satellites to pieces thereof. Even if every mission from today onwards were to be as responsible as possible and leave no more pieces behind, collisions are inevitable, and every collision makes more pieces. The problem goes beyond the probable loss of valuable space assets; we actually run the risk of being grounded.
We must hope that policy makers - and budget holders - in the capitals of all spacefaring nations heed the scientists' call for the money and political will to start cleaning up space. As delegates to the sixth European conference on debris recently concluded, the need is urgent, and it is time - past time - to recognise that "the removal of space debris is an environmental problem of global dimensions that must be assessed in an international context, including the UN".
The problem has even been likened to our realisation 20 years ago that global warming is a brewing cataclysm that cannot be ignored. The rather poor record so far of the international community in turning climate change concerns into effective action does not bode well for the space debris crisis. But crisis it is, and the sooner it is widely recognised as such the better.

Fawlty spelling
Ian Goold spotted this cutting from a European Aviation Safety Agency bulletin:
"...skin disbonding was reported on a composite side panel of a rudder installed on an A310 aeroplane. The investigation results revealed this disbonding started from a skin panel area previously repaired in-service in accordance with the Structural Repair Manuel (SRM)."
"That will be Airbus Spain, then," he says.

Jack's passion
In the pantheon of aviation pioneers, no aircraft designer wears the slightly back-handed label, "ahead of his time", with more authority than American Jack Northrop.
Originally employed by Lockheed in 1916, Northrop earned his reputation as designer of the Lockheed Vega and an assistant on the Douglas Round-the-World-Cruiser and the wing of Ryan's "The Spirit of St Louis" monoplane.
It was only afterwards, in the early 1930s, that Northrop began working on the flying wings that were his passion and still his most profound contribution to the aerospace industry.
In the newly-published Northrop Flying Wings, aviation historian Graham Simons skillfully tracks the succession of experimental and developmental - yet, sadly, never operational - flying wings developed by Northrop and his team over a period of more than two decades.
In Simons' detailed account, including dozens of illuminating cutaway drawings, Northrop's battles are shown not only against the significant aerodynamic challenges posed by such a low-drag platform, but also against the reluctant industrial partners and chronic shortages of government-furnished equipment.

The grapes of the Glens
A Budgie staffer on a trip to China thought he had mistakenly set his watch back several decades, rather than hours, when he heard this Captain Speaking about safety reminders on a certain Hong Kong flag carrier's flight: "So, ladies stop nattering and men put down your newspapers."
Meanwhile, does Scotland have a new national drink? Perhaps, if this menu on board a China Southern internal flight is to be believed. Maybe the vineyards of the Highlands are a secret the Scottish nationalists are trying to keep bottled up until independence.

Turkish Airlines' grandiose plans to become the planet's biggest airline are being matched by equally ostentatious government ambitions to build the world's biggest hub airport in Istanbul, both in a manner that threatens to outpace rivals in the Arabian Gulf.
So just how realistic is Istanbul's bid to become aviation's next Dubai - or something even bigger? A larger home market, full of young, aspiring travellers getting more affluent is one significant advantage, and a geographical location allowing short-haul flights to destinations in Europe and parts of Africa to which Emirates must fly widebodies is another.
The 150 million passenger, $10 billion, six runway airport project should help Turkish Airlines reach its target of operating 2,000 flights per day while boosting the country's other emerging carriers, which cannot currently expand in slot-constrained Ataturk.
Yet assuming the new airport goes to plan, and given the scale of the task that's a very big assumption, will Turkey's airlines be able to hold on to the reins while growing at such speed? Of course they say they can, but building scale efficiently and not letting costs run out of control will be a huge challenge.
Any number of imponderables may play a hand in shaping Istanbul's destiny, but given everything Turkey has achieved so far and where it was 10 years ago, who would bet against the country pulling it off again?

Even as Boeing scrambles its technical squads to begin the modification work on the grounded 787 fleet, there is an inescapable sense of unfinished business with the battery fire investigation.
Because the airframer cannot yet be certain that it's tamed the lithium dragon that crippled two Japanese 787s in January. Its response - a containment system to prevent collateral damage - is functional rather than elegant: effectively a big stick with which to beat the dragon unconscious if it gets out of hand.
But it's really the only option for the time being. Boeing has conceded that it might never fully understand the failures that led to the grounding, which leaves the company in an uneasy limbo.
The situation is not unprecedented. Investigators probing the explosion that destroyed a TWA 747 over the Atlantic in 1986 concluded that the source of ignition "could not be determined with certainty". Their best guess - excessive voltage arising from a short circuit - drove the effort to inert fuel tanks and contain the wild and transient nature of wayward electricity.
Neither of the 787 incidents was on the same scale, of course, which is to Boeing's credit. But the whole saga highlights the dilemma of technological advancement, and the possibility that the extent of knowledge - even that as deep as Boeing's - can sometimes unexpectedly fall short. The need to hunt for the "unknown unknowns" affecting a new aircraft is a lesson that, in the jet age, dates back to the de Havilland Comet.
While Boeing's intense round-the-clock effort to construct fault trees, examine the battery's functioning and test for potential flaws is commendable, it also leaves the company exposed to the obvious question as to why it hadn't done all that before.
Fear of fire is hard-wired into the human mind. Given the well-documented hazards associated with lithium-ion batteries, and the images of smoke pouring from the hold of the Japan Airlines 787 at Boston, Boeing's reputation might have fared better if it had demonstrated a little more humility - perhaps even left open the option of reverting to nickel-cadmium.
By enabling the 787 to return to flight relatively quickly, the containment system - with its weight penalty - is less of a best solution than the least unpalatable one. Even if the revamped battery demonstrates itself to be docile, don't expect any quick restoration of trust in lithium-ion technology until a few more of those unknowns are no longer unknown.

Our main feature package examines Turkey's fast-emerging aviation and aerospace industry, with profiles on Turkish Airlines and Turkish Aerospace Industries, partner with Airbus Military on the A400M and with AgustaWestland and aspiring manufacturer of a number of its own military aircraft designs.

We also focus on US regional aviation, with pieces on the slow retirement of the Bombardier CRJ200 fleet and Embraer's revamped E-Jet family.

In the news section, there are reports from the MRO Americas show in Atlanta and Aero Friedrichshafen in Germany. Plus: how Eurocopter's departing boss thinks vertical lift commuting could be the solution to airport congestion and why CFMI believes its Leap-1A engine is still in a strong position to power the lion's share of Airbus A321neos, despite rival P&W's early lead.