September 2005 Archives

The UK's patchwork quilt of police helicopter operations continues to provide great value for the helicopter industry - less so for the local taxpayer and the UK government which must despair at not having a uniform airborne surveillance capability throughout the country at a time when the terrorist threat is so high. However, as yet, there has been little extra funding for police helicopter capability.

The helicopter supplier community - gathered at Helitech in Duxford today - are probably fairly happy with the situation, and, in a way, the high level of competition and range of services available on the market probably does lead to some sort of taxpayer value. I'm not sure it should make citizens sleep more soundly in our beds though. While nobody wants police helicopters constantly buzzing over their houses and workplaces, they are unmatched as a resource for monitoring crime and tracking criminals. A central resource, perhaps managed and partly funded locally, would surely make sense.

So many people wanted to be there for Sir Rod Eddington's farewell speech at the UK's Aviation Club lunch at London's Institute of Directors last Thursday that they had to squeeze in an extra place at each table. Someone joked that this was probably the first time the airline executives in attendance had experienced what it was like to sit in economy, but in beating the CBI, BBC and the rest to his valedictory address, the Aviation Club could be rightly proud of their coup.

Days from departing as British Airways chief executive - many would say saviour - Eddington was free from having to observe too many niceties. The Aussie is no Michael O'Leary, but he didn't apply the diplomatic brakes in accusing the USA - "the land of the free ride" - of featherbedding its airlines and condemning the industry to never-ending structural sclerosis; calling the EU's decision to turn a blind eye to state aid for ailing Alitalia "outrageous", and predicting that today's 200 to 300 major airlines - including dozens of carriers flying "vanity routes" - should and would consolidate to 20 to 30 groups.

He paid tribute to his low-cost rivals such as Ryanair and EasyJet - for whom BA has often been the target of aggressive marketing campaigns - for expanding the market and heralding the era of on-line ticket selling.

Eddington will be tough for Willie Walsh to follow. He is an intellectual with a popular touch and a free-market evangelist who still has a paternalistic view towards the welfare of his staff, emphasising that none of the swathe of redundancies that helped BA get its cost base right after 9/11 had been compulsory.

Four years ago, BA looked a basket case: a vastly overstaffed public service of an airline (without enough of the service to the public), with too many routes, and old-fashioned view of the internet and pricey fares. With none of the backdoor state support enjoyed by many of his North American and European competitors, Eddington has turned BA around and (despite his vow that the Ashes were only "on loan" to England) has been accepted as an honourary Brit. The British aviation establishment gathered on Pall Mall awarded Rod the god a long standing ovation: only one of England's cricketing heroes would have been annointed more.

Robots are often used in the media to instil fear with Frankenstein like stories of the scientist and corporation having gone to far with a humanoid machine destroying all before it. But on today's battlefield, and for this US Army sponsored event, and for the war of tomorrow the robots will, apparently, look more like model planes.

On a wind swept car park in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, once home to the 1936 winter Olympics, 16 teams battled it out for a top prize that was the opportunity to bid for a $100,000 research contract. Unsurprisingly a lot of the teams were universities.

From video goggles to video screens the operators, sometimes using remote control, others using autopilot software, guided their flying machines into the target area by hand or a waypoint, care of a click of the PC mouse. The mission was to loiter at an altitude, at which you should not be heard, and transmit back images of the target zone, and wait for the "terrorist" to wander in, "satchel explosive" under their arm. The micro air vehicles (MAV) had to operate for 30 minutes and the terrorist be clearly seen in the video picture.

Not as easy as you'd think. A number of the MAVs had battery problems, others couldn't cope with the wind gusts, others crashed due to pilot error. But every team was given ample opportunity to fly and spot the enemy. Autonomous flight was of key interest to the organisers and four teams all used the same open source software, Paparazzi. In fact they had collaborated on code but the experts were the French national civilian aviation school team. Ecole Nationale l'Aviation Civile (ENAC) developed Paparazzi from another open source software package, Micropilot, which is for helicopters. The ENAC team proved their expertise by having not one fixed wing MAV loiter autonomously around the target zone but two.

Well, it finally happened. Passengers on the JetBlue A320 that landed with a cocked nosewheel in America yesterday were able to watch live TV coverage of themselves during virtually the whole incident. Fittingly enough this quintessentially 21st century event took place in the entertainment capital of the world - Los Angeles.

For sheer in-flight weirdness this probably exceeds even the September 1995 incident in which passengers on a Northwest Airlines DC-10 watched in bemusement on seatback maps as the aircraft flew to Brussels and landed instead of Frankfurt as planned, with the pilots, who had no access to the seatback system, essentially lost.

On JetBlue, passengers were watching themselves courtesy of the seatback LiveTV service - a satellited-based system which the airline itself operates through a wholly-owned subsidiary that it was forced to acquire to prevent its probable commercial failure three years ago.

Staff of NBC television who happened to be on the aircraft reported that the system was switched off only 3-4 minutes before landing, along with other electrical systems. So it seems that JetBlue doesn't share the concerns of other airlines who have long insisted that news progamming provided on board aircraft is doctored to remove anxiety-inducing coverage of aviation safety.

In Europe, BMI of the UK and TAP of Portugal are about to trial on-board mobile phone access, which will also enable Blackberrys and similar devices to function, and will mean that precious little happens on aircraft that isn't reported in near realtime to the rest of the world. And Connexion by Boeing already gives users full internet functionality - including the ability to post public messages and operate blogs like this one - from in the air. Camera-enabled phones and digital cameras complete the link - it's seems only a matter of time before on-board images of a catastrophe end up on the web.

Leaving aside the philosophical implications of this, it means business has changed forever for the airlines. I'm giving a presentation to airline PR officials in a couple of weeks and I'm really looking forward to discussing this turn of events. They're going to need all the help they can get working out their disaster management strategies for the future. 

NASA needs a few successes. Its aeronautics research is in decline and disarray; the Space Shuttle is again grounded and the Space Station out on a limb; and its Apollo-esque "back to the Moon" vision is being greeted by as much scepticism and derision as shock and awe.

NASA had a success earlier this year, but it took place at Danville in rural Virginia and not many people noticed. The success was the public demonstration of the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) - touted as a new mode of public transportation using small aircraft, like very light jets, to provide regular air-taxi service between thousands of small non-tower airports across the USA.

The Danville event was lauded by the Federal Aviation Administration as the first demonstration of technologies key to its next-generation air transport system - but what has happened to SATS since then? The answer is not a lot. The five-year project has ended, the NCAM consortium of state, academic and industry partners that worked with NASA is being disbanded, and the concept is fast disappearing into the bureaucratic maze that is the FAA.

SATS grew out of another NASA success, the Advanced General Aviation Technology Experiments (AGATE) project, which developed the avionics that have since revolutionised GA aircraft - the integrated flightdecks now available in almost every Cessna, Cirrus, Diamond or Piper light aircraft. Will SATS have a similar impact? For now it looks unlikely. AGATE involved only the aircraft. SATS involves the aircraft, the airport and the airspace system.

Supporters of SATS want someone - possibly one of the regional SATSlabs formed by forward-minded state aviation officials to work on the project - to pick up the ball and run with it; to set up a SATS "model airport" and prove over an extended period of time that the concept is usable, reliable, profitable and safe.

With all the frustration over scheduled airline travel these days, and with all the interest generated by the new breed of very light jets and all the entrepreneurial energy and equity being spent on developing air-taxi business models - surely there is some community of like-minded aircraft makers, service providers and airport owners out there that is prepared to take this idea one crucial step forward?

But don't look to NASA. It's mind is on more distant things.

"The Apollo programme got it right", NASA chief Mike Griffin said on 19 September at NASA head quarters, as he explained why 46 years after the first man stepped out onto the lunar surface the return trip to the Moon was going to be done the exact same way.

What he didn't say is that the other aspect of that Cold War race to the Moon the Apollo programme got right was funding. From 1961, when President John Kennedy announced the plan, to the historic flight that was Apollo 11 in 1969 NASA spent about $105 billion, with one lunar flight in 1968 and two surface missions following the first landing in 1969.

From Ferrari to Armani, Vespa to Versace, the Italians take their brand names seriously, so it is interesting to see where Finmeccanica bosses have taken that brand since the company began to morph from anonymous Italian industrial holding company a few years ago to one of the world's biggest aerospace and defence giants.

Rumour has it that Finmeccanica bosses came within a whisker of ditching the brand entirely before the Paris air show - it came with a lot of baggage in Italy as a cumbersome, state-owned conglomerate with an equally cumbersome name: Società Finanziaria Meccanica or Finmeccanica for short.

Roughly translated that means Finance and Engineering Group. Word was they were going to "do a Thales" - in other words, come up with a whole new brand name for the company that shed any reference to its heritage businesses. However, instead they kept the name and brought in some Italian brand designers and came up with a vibrant bright-red corporate identity that makes Ferrari look like some sleepy, provincial engineering concern.

The new look debuted at Farnborough last year in the chrome and red, sleekly curved shape of a chalet. But this year at Paris, the company went one further and the Finmeccanica stand, a vast red and chrome arena which dominated an entire side of one of the main halls, looked like the sort of thing a Formula 1 team would erect at a motor show.

At the DSEI event in London last week, they went further again, with the Finmeccanica corporate identity on the stand of the now 100%-owned AgustaWestland (Finmeccanica previously shared ownership with the UK's GKN).

The significance of this move should not be lost. In the 1980s the row over who should invest in the then-Westland Helicopters, to keep the UK's defence helicopter champion afloat, led to the resignation of a Cabinet minister, Michael Heseltine. When Finmeccanica completed its 100% purchase of the Yeovil business last year, making the Italian company one of the UK's biggest defence contractors at a stroke, it barely raised a murmur.

Now - if the DSEI stand is anything to go by - the Westland identity appears to have been completely subsumed into that of the Italian giant. Although the Westland web site www.whl.co.uk still has the old logo, it cannot be long before it too catches up. And nobody in the UK is seeing red.

I absolutely support European Commission moves to protect the rights of passengers - it's good for the passengers and good for the airlines. The fact is that entry hurdles to the airline industry are amazingly low, which is why so many go bust. It's true that the constant flow of new entries keeps fares down, but financially insecure airlines do not make for a sound air transport system, and I have no doubt that overall they reduce safety levels.

Furthermore, airlines frankly don't offer a great service to the travelling public, and they're not getting better. If you love aviation then you'll put up with a lot because, at least sometimes, you like to go flying. If you just want to get from A to B then air travel is a lousy experience and the contractual terms hugely favour the airlines. That needs fixing.

But that said, the Commission does some stupid things too - and it's the regional airlines that have most cause to complain. The Commission has got it wrong in applying the customer-rights rules on cancellations and delays to the regionals in the way it does. The regionals really are exposed to the risk of ludicrous compensation claims under the current legislation - and, unsurprisingly, they're off to court to fight that. Good luck to them.

This week the Commission has got it wrong again. It's proposing legislation that would let passengers demand not to fly if an airline wet-leases in an aircraft to operate a flight - particularly if it does so at the last minute. It's worrying enough that the Commission staff has sufficient time on its hands to be fiddling around in this sort of micro-detail, but the idea is daft anyway.

It primarily affects the regionals again, as they are much less likely to have their own back-up aircraft, and so much more likely to hire in extra lift. And why not? If the substitute aircraft is certificated and the crew legal then that's the airline's right. Indulging some know-all who's got strong opinions about flying on ATR 42s rather than Dash 8s (or vice versa my Canadian friends) at the gate is just ridiculous.

There are very sound operators that provide these wet-leased aircraft - pretty much as their core business in some cases - and do a good job without which the mainline industry really would be in difficulties. There is no justification for hurting their business.

I hope the proposal dies, but it's perilously close to the parliamentary stage and may still sneak through. Too bad.

Craig Hoyle / ParcAberporth

Justin Wastnage / Stapleford

A spillage from a paint truck as it overturned leaving Staines was the joke on Thursday's breakfast show on London's Capital FM radio show, inspired by a real blockage to the city's ringroad highway, the M25.

Capital's aerial traffic reporters, the Flying Eye, were dispatched to investigate the real accident and were able to get from the Woolwich fly-over in the city's east end to the blockage in the Reigate exit in the south west in 12min by flying down the Thames. Select Air, the air taxi operator last year awarded the contract to fly the radio station for its travel slots is the only operator except the police and ambulance services to have a 'Whiskey' (W-class) licence, granting permission to fly anywhere in central London.

Select Air's chief pilot Colin Dobney took Flight International's senior reporter Justin Wastnage for a spin in the new Twin Star (pictured), while explaining the unique challenges the Flying Eye service requires. Hugh Broom, the station's travel correspondent coordinates activities at the Leicester Square headquarters of the station, from 06:00 when the radio's controversial Cockney presenter Johnny Vaughan starts his show. "The public texts, emails and calls us with news of accidents or blockages and we investigate them with the police and authorities before putting together a list of possible locations for the plane to fly over," he explains.

At 06:50 the voice of the Flying Eye, Louise Pepper receives her final brief from Broom and sets off from Select Air's base at Stapleford airport north east of London. The normal traffic build-ups start by 07:00, she explains, with the names QE2 Bridge, North Circular and Dartford Crossing familiar to all frustrated peak hour London drivers.

The aircraft flies at around 2,000ft (600m) for most of the flight, but can go as low as 1,000ft to get a close look at incidents, says Pepper. "You can see in five minutes all the surrounding roads and see where the gridlock starts, whether the police are there and judge when it's likely to clear," she says. Listeners stuck in the jam are reassured to hear the Flying Eye, as they feel part of a bigger event, she adds.

The Flying Eye deals directly with air traffic control centres to amend its repetitive flight plan. Unfortunately for ATC, the infamous traffic black spot the Blackwall Tunnel lies in the control area for London City Airport, so some cajoling is required to take a peek, and usually only one pass is allowed, Jacqui Dobney, the Flying Eye pilot. Otherwise few restrictions apply and the aircraft passes freely only a few hundred metres above some of London's best-known landmarks, although Buckingham Palace and Westminster are still off-limits, as is the stretch of the M25 close to Heathrow. "We'll never tell someone we were flying over the M4/M25 junction [near Heathrow] as it wouldn't be true, so we have to use ground-based information, except when the ATC computers went down and they let us have a buzz over just because we could," he says.

The aircraft comes down at 09:00 and is used for occasional charter during the day before taking off again at 17:00 for the Richard Bacon drive time show until 18:40. Pepper tried out the Twin Star just after Flight International and says the wide, open view of the diesel-cycle twin will allow much clearer views of the jams than peering over the wedge-like wing of the Seneca. The words: "queues on the clockwise section after junction 17 due to an earlier accident" and "only the outside lane open" will no doubt sound even more soothing as a result.

It gets a great deal of media coverage and typing hydrogen economy into an internet search engine will see over 1.5 million page returns, but the enthusiasm for the subject does not reflect the technological reality. The myth of hydrogen is that it is a clean fuel, with no emissions when used to generate power, and is an alternative to our hydrocarbon sources of energy. None of this is correct.

The collapse of the semiconductor business and Korea's economic woes in the late 1990s left Wales with more than one big empty shed: factories built with taxpayers' money and opened with a huge fanfare, only for the tenant to up sticks before or shortly after moving in.

Now the Welsh government is worried it might have another "Millennium Dome" on its hands. The just-opened Defence Aviation Repair Agency's 45,000 sq m superhangar at RAF St Athan, near Cardiff, is half full and getting emptier by the month after the Ministry of Defence announced it is shipping out the repair of many of its combat aircraft to operating bases and back to industry.

Opening a showpiece hangar that would put the pride of most private MROs companies to shame at the same time as taking a decision to remove half its business indicates that Tony Blair's much-vaunted mission to "join-up" government is not even working within one ministry in Whitehall.

The superhangar dominates St Athan, a sprawling military base occupied by both the air force and the army. The Welsh Development Agency - charged with finding tenants for much of the 140ha site to create an aerospace centre of excellence - thinks the fact that you have to flash your pass to machine-gun toting military police to enter the facility will be a draw, rather than a drawback, for potential occupants.

Apart from space in the superhangar, the agency says the site's great advantage is that it is full of empty aircraft hangars and other redundant workshops. There is also a large military runway. The fact that most buildings date from the 1950s is not a problem, says the man charged with attracting aerospace companies to St Athan, David Swallow. Companies looking for a new site tend to want to move in quickly, and there is plenty of room for them to build new premises or expand once they are there, he says.

The WDA is confident it can attract high-value industry to St Athan. The rather depressing alternative is McDonaldisation: turning it over to high-density housing and retailing, the fate of many former UK air bases.

The agency's problem is that - even in an flourishing industry - aerospace is not exactly awash with companies looking to relocate either to or within the UK. The MRO sector, if anything, has too much capacity in Europe. St Athan's biggest selling point is not its space - and there is plenty of that. It's people. Hundreds of former DARA technicians - with experience of repairing fast jets - are desperate for work. The WDA's race against time is going to be to bring in potential new employers before these technicians leave the industry or the area.

For a look at what's on offer go to www.wales-uk.com/aerospace