February 2006 Archives

This was going to be the first post generated in mid-air via Connexion by Boeing on a revenue flight. I wrote it on my Singapore Airlines flight back to London after the Asian Aerospace show using the free half-hour you get as a promotion at present. Sadly when the half-hour runs out the system simply disconnects without telling you, so I lost all my copy even though I was happy to start paying. Not amused. But it is a fantastic system and would certainly encourage me to fly with SQ rather than their competitors on a 13 hour flight.

Like the rest of our team out there I was tired and jet-lagged after the show and couldn't face doing it all again. So that little of moment of history passed by and this is now posted boringly from my laptop with wireless broadband while I sit on my sofa at home - something which would have seemed staggeringly cool less than a decade ago. 

Anyway, that's my sixth Asian Aerospace over. As usual in the parallel universe of journalism we're all complaining that it was a slow news week, but that's only if you discount things like the two hours we spent climbing all over the A380 for the first time (more on that next week), the $15 billion launch of Dubai Aerospace Enterprise, and a fair number of, mainly Airbus, orders. It's true though that the big companies tend not to announce big stories in Singapore, preferring Farnborough (all of five months away!) or Paris.

One of the best memories of this week is the launch of our own new Aviation Excellence Awards. It was a terrific night at the famous Raffles Hotel - a high spot being the first time we've ever had a standing ovation at one of our ceremonies - going to Thierry Fautrell who was the chief purser on Air France flight 358 which was burned out without loss of life at Toronto last year. Thierry accepted the award on behalf of the cabin crew on that flight. Vern Raburn, the CEO of Eclipse Aviation was another winner for his paradigm-shifting work with very light jets, and we enjoyed having representatives from the 169th Fighter Wing, Air National Guard in South Carolina, and Chautauqua Airlines of Indianapolis coming from more or less halfway round the world to receive recognition. The full winners' details are at the link above.

This was also an important week for us here at Flight. As I hope you've seen at our website, with a new URL www.flightglobal.com we've fairly radically rebranded the operation. You can read about how and why here. (Worth a glance just to see what very good-looking guys I and a couple of my colleagues really are.)

Between Flight Daily News and Flight International we will have produced many thousands of words on the show. I'm curious about what people who don't go to a show expect of our show-coverage. Drop a comment if you have some thoughts on that.

In Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey the 21^st century was a world of rotating space stations, Moon bases and spaceplanes and the passengers, national government and United Nations personnel.

Space was another location for nations to play out their political games.

But recent events suggest that Kubrick's movie, based on Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Sentinel, was no where near as fantastic as the reality that could be before us; air launched Russian and US suborbital rocket glider vehicles carrying tourists on flights into weightlessness from the Middle East and the US state of New Mexico.

by Max Kingsley-Jones, commercial aviation editor

The failure last week of an A380 wing during static testing has left many wondering exactly what it means for Airbus and the A380. It was also an interesting case study in how to manage a potentially damaging story about what is a fairly complex engineering exercise.

The failure happened last Tuesday inside a test hangar in Toulouse, but fairly rapidly the bazaars were buzzing with rumours that something had broken during static testing. The share price of EADS - the Airbus majority shareholder - took a tumble as it was unclear just what the impact would be on the ultra large aircraft programme, which is already six months behind schedule.

But some quick thinking by Airbus enabled the manufacturer to take control of the story, making the unusual step of contacting key trade magazines - Flight International included - to offer "instant briefings" before they rang Toulouse to find out what was going on. Without forewarning, we were thrust into a detailed one-on-one telephone brief on "the completion of A380 ultimate load static testing" from Airbus's executive vice president engineering Alain Garcia.

After outlining some of the mundane details of the test effort, Garcia explained that that the wing had suffered a "rupture" just before the test reached the 1.5 times limit load (LL) target required for certification. "This is within 3% of the target, which shows the accuracy of our modelling," he said, declaring the test a success.

Various journals have reported this as successful "test to destruction", but this is not strictly true. Senior, independent structures experts tell Flight that it is normally the intention to complete the ultimate load tests with the wing intact, and then go beyond the 1.5LL requirement until failure occurs. So last Tuesday's rupture at between 1.45 and 1.5LL was not in the original script.

But it is not a disaster either. Engineers tell Flight that the rupture occurred close enough to the target to be considered a success, and that it should be fairly straightforward for Airbus to validate its calculations with analysis from the test and satisfy EASA that the design meets requirements without need for any major re-evaluation or retest.

As Garcia said, Airbus "played the game" with its weight-saving programme and designed the structure to have "no margin at ultimate load". Had the wing sailed past 1.5LL like the 777's did a decade ago (before failing at 1.54LL), then that would have indicated that the modelling had been too conservative, and that Airbus had built too much unnecessary strength (and therefore weight) into the structure.

The failure of a wing below the 1.5LL target is not unprecedented. The A330's wing failed just below the target during static testing in 1992, and on that occasion Airbus managed to prove compliance through analysis combined with the fact that the aircraft's load alleviation system proved more effective than had been envisaged.

More significant was the problem suffered by British Aerospace engineers two decades ago when, according to one structures engineer, the BAe 146 wing ruptured well below the target. The failure is believed to have happened at around 1.3LL and that would have almost certainly required modifications to be validated through a retest. But it didn't stop BAe building 220 146s and another 170 Avro RJs.

There's been a sense of phoney war here on the press day of Asian Aerospace. This is the last time the show will be held at the Changi airport site at Singapore before the two show partners - Reed Exhibitions and the Singapore government - go their separate ways: Reed to a new civil aviation-only Asian Aerospace in Hong Kong in September 2007 and Singapore to its own Changi International Air Show around this time in 2008.

Since the split was announced, the two sides have been a bit like a warring couple staying together for the sake of the kids. Until the show is over, the Singaporeans have been banned from talking about their breakaway event. However, Reed held a press conference to announce details of the new Hong Kong event.

Now, I have to declare an interest here, of course, Reed Exhibitions being our sister company. But, to continue the marriage analogy, the press conference reminded me of the about-to-divorce spouse declaring that he or she, after 25 years of marriage, had never really liked living in the family house.

Poor old Singapore was made to feel sooo last century. With its towering skyscrapers, world-leading airport and bustling commercial centre, the confident city state certainly doesn't feel stuck in the past. But there are fewer cranes these days on the Singapore skyline and China (and India) are outpacing south east Asia in terms of growth. The message was clearly that Hong Kong - gateway to the fastest-growing aviation market in the world - is where it's at.

They have a point. As an exhibition site, Changi has never really cracked it. Compared with Dubai, with its plazas and modern halls, the Singapore exhibition site has always had a higgeldy-piggeldy, half-finished, pre-fabricated feel to it, with chalet lines skittering away from the central exhibition hall at awkward angles. Add to that the worst air show traffic jams this side of Le Bourget (although Dubai and Farnborough wouldn't win any integrated transportation awards either), and a climate that makes you feel and look like you've done 100 squat jumps in a steam room every time you walk between buildings, and it doesn't add up to the most user-friendly location.

Hong Kong's Asian Aerospace, of course, will have everything - a just-built, state of the art convention centre, great transport links to the airport and city and conference facilities. The only things it will lack are a flying display and virtually any defence element, China being out of bounds to defence contractors from Europe and the US.

That may not be a problem. While flying displays have been part of air shows since they began, more and more people are questioning their place in a business to business industry event. While the roar of a fighter display used to bring the crowds out onto the balconies, today it is more likely to disturb the hard negotiations going on in the chalet meeting room.

And greater China's - and the wider region's - massive appetite for civil aircraft and all the associated products and services that go along with that (MRO, training, airport construction, ATM and interiors) may well be enough to compensate for the lack of warbirds. It will be a different kind of air show - much more like an NBAA than a Farnborough - but it looks as if Asian Aerospace may be making its move at the right time.

But don't rule out Singapore. The Singapore government has a reputation for making things happen and it doesn't often get it wrong. It will pull out all the stops to make sure the big guns come to Changi in 2008 - particularly those interested in selling to the country's military or state-run airline in the future. Rather than one air show, Asia could actually end up with two strong industry events. So much for consolidation.

It's media preview day here at the Asian Aerospace show in Singapore, the usual slightly eerie pre-show atmosphere with a few dozen journalists and PR folks wandering around an exhibition site that tomorrow will have thousands of trade visitors. I've just witnessed two phenomena that are going to dominate life here for the rest of the week...

The first is the A380 practising its display and the second is the Flight Daily News operation once again rolling unstoppably into action. I'll come back to that.

The A380, as most of you will have seen here, is in SIA colours and its presence alone is a major story in Singapore. The question for show-goers however has been just what its display would include. When it first flew at the Paris show last year it had only just been cleared and the display was little more than a succession of flypasts, and at Dubai a few months later I hear it wasn't much different.

So the news is that this morning we were treated to something approaching the full Airbus routine for its other types, including something like a max-alpha flyby followed by a max power turning climb and then pushover into a descent and curved finals to land. For connoisseurs of this sort of thing - and aren't we all - it was pure magic. It's very difficult to see how anything else in the display this week is going to compete for wow factor. Here's a picture taken by Steve Nichols of Flight Daily News (he's a writer, not a photographer, as I'm sure he won't mind me pointing out.)

Going back to the other phenomenon - Flight Daily News is the daily magazine that we put out every day at all the major shows. It's an astonishing operation carried out by our long-time contractors Trident Communications. At each show from a standing start the team of writers comes together as if from nowhere, produces a hefty publication that on its best days has a word-count akin to a national newspaper, and then melts into the night like some strange band of ghostly journalist knights.

OK, I got a bit carried away there, but it really is a remarkable thing to watch, and has won numerous awards. You can read FDN's coverage of the show every day here starting tomorrow.

In an increasingly global aerospace industry, how important is it where a company is from? Very important, it seems. At least according to the people who police press advertisements which appear in the UK to ensure they are fair and truthful.

EADS has been banned by the UK advertising watchdog, the ASA, from running an advertisement that uses the slogan "I am British" and pictures the Airbus A330 tanker, centrepiece of the AirTanker consortium's bid for the Royal Air Force's ｣13 billion refuelling contract.

For years, EADS has been trying to be seen as British, and in many ways it is as British as it is German or French. It's certainly as British as it is Spanish. Let's examine the facts. Although EADS's main shareholders are German (30%) and French (30%), a huge proportion of the third of its shares that are traded on three European stock exchanges are owned by UK institutions. More importantly, around 13,000 of EADS's employees work in the UK at Airbus (80% owned by EADS), MBDA (jointly owned with BAE Systems and Finmeccanica) and its defence and space businesses. Its UK operations account for 8% of EADS's revenues and the UK Ministry of Defence is crucial to its defence fortunes.

"There are four home nations" any EADS manager will chorus if you suggest the company is Franco-German or Franco-German-Spanish.

And yet EADS has a devil of a job convincing UK public opinion and the Ministry of Defence of this. Part of the problem is the EADS brand. People in the UK know Airbus, they know "British Aerospace", they probably know Rolls-Royce makes aircraft engines rather than posh cars. But ask your granny who or what EADS is and she won't have a clue. A Reed colleague of mine - an avid planespotter in his spare time - had never heard of the company when I met him on a train and explained I was on my way to an EADS meeting.

That's why nearly five years after its creation EADS has been so keen to stress its Britishness, particularly when it comes to high-profile defence business. And it's why this ruling will come as a kick in the teeth.

Quite frankly, I think the ASA have got it wrong. Yes, in terms of ownership EADS is not a "British" company. But the A330 tanker - with UK-built wings and engines and most of the modification done in the UK- is as British as it is French or German or Spanish.

Safety aside, I do think there is a serious question over the impact of Ryanair's gratuitously confrontational service model on its business model.

CEO Michael O'Leary frequently likens Ryanair to America's legendary Southwest Airlines - and there's no question he based much of his model on Herb Kelleher's airline. (Ireland's bucaneering aviation community is extremely well-connected in America.) But everyone likes Southwest - even people who don't fly on it - and everyone dislikes Ryanair - even people who do fly on it.

Last night's Dispatches programme showed why. After three hours sitting on the ground in a locked aircraft, one passenger, showing Herculean self-restraint, very politely asked the captain if it wouldn't be possible for the passengers to get a non-alcoholic drink. The captain responded with a staggeringly rude, legalistic retort, revelling in his petty power, that no it was out of the question. The passenger, and I salute you sir, calmly informed the captain in measured tones that he wasn't fit to command an aircraft (or words to that effect.)

Of course, airline staff have the full weight of the law behind them and can behave as lousily as they like on board aircraft. But given the uniquely dysfunctional service model that the air transport industry provides 60-something years after it was invented, a bit more humility might be in order. (Some passengers behave appallingly of course. And sometimes I don't sympathise with them.)

As time goes by Ryanair has got more competition coming. Lots more. Most of it will go bust - but that's been happening forever and the phenomenon has ensured that, until recently, nobody ever made much money out of air transport. Some small UK low-cost start-ups have in fact survived and, more importantly, it turns out that there are entrepreneurs elsewhere in Europe - notably the new EU states to the east who have never known the statism of France, Spain, Italy and so on since they kicked the Russians out. They're inventing profitable new airlines, so are smart Germans and Swedes and, wonder of wonders, there are even stirrings in southern Europe. (France is another matter of course.) 

Ryanair's phenomenal growth so far has fundamentally come by re-inventing the airline operating model but, in the market, by grossly undercutting major airlines. It's a stunning achievement. But everyone else is catching up and Easyjet has already shown that you can do nearly as well without being as cheap.

Soon passengers are routinely going to have a choice which low-cost carrier to fly with. And then Ryanair will need to be liked, not just admired.

Well the much awaited Ryanair documentary on Channel 4's Dispatches programme in the UK aired last night and contained pretty much what Ryanair had cleverly already told the world it would contain. Smart move.

It was fairly unimpressive stuff - a decent 5 minute news bulletin stretched into a creaky 1 hour documentary after 5 months of covert filming. But it will hurt Ryanair.

Incidentally, Dispatches producer Steve Boulton yesterday suddenly started calling on a recent Flight International opinion piece on low-cost airlines in support of his programme. What we concluded in that piece was: "Now the Irish Aviation Authority should lead the world by commissioning an academic study of the human factors of low-cost operations." For the record, we don't share Mr Boulton's view of Ryanair and our view isn't based on the lightweight material his programme came up with.

Dispatches didn't make any safety charges about Ryanair stick, but it did highlight weaknesses in the aviation system that won't have come as news to anyone who works in it. Although the UK CAA may have told Ryanair it didn't plan any further action before the programme, I sincerely hope both the CAA and the IAA are planning on visiting the school that trains Ryanair's flight attendants after seeing the attitudes on display there. What we saw was evidence of a cavalier attitude to examinations and some weirdly inane remarks from an instructor in respect of passenger safety. I'd be having a very firm word in the ears of the individuals concerned.

The other serious issue is the checking of passports at the gate. But as everyone knows the idea is pretty nonsensical. Gate agents are not trained to recognise fake passports and are never going to be. It's nothing more than a final deterrent to the bad guys - but frankly if they've got that far then they're not likely to be caught at the gate. And it's a regulatory issue - not a Ryanair one.

The rest of the programme was a hatchet job on Ryanair's service product, supported by secret filming of staff members being rude about their employers. Well it's hard to have much affection for Ryanair's service model - but everyone, including me, flies with them at least occasionally. I don't look forward to it, but I do look forward to my week in the sun and I like the idea of giving my (fairly) hard-earned cash to Spanish and Irish seafront restaurants rather than the airline. Let's face it, in the UK you'd have to be a cave-dweller not to know what Ryanair's product is like - if you don't like it, don't buy it.

“Excuse me sir, I’m a federal agent, why are you photographing this building,” the voice called out.

As recently written I just had some time with American Airlines' management and, in this complicated business, it was a reminder of just how simple the apparently complicated air transport business can be. Just as simple for the supposedly 'different' JetBlue which yesterday recorded its first loss.

American would just about kill to have suffered the 2005 $20 million net loss that JetBlue reported - beats its own $861 million let's face it - but it's a horrible moment for Wall Street-darling JetBlue.

Down in Texas the several hours of briefings came down to just one point in the end: American needs to get and keep costs under control, and to get passengers to pay more while staying loyal. Everything they are doing is aimed at those two goals.

We talked a lot about whether the concepts of 'low-cost' and 'legacy' carriers would still make sense, say, ten years from now.  I think the feeling was that American would never be 'low-cost' and JetBlue for example would never be 'legacy'. But they also might not be as unalike as they are today.

And lo and behold, JetBlue chief David Neelman was yesterday saying things to analysts that could have come straight from the mouth of Gerard Arpey at American. Such as that JetBlue's profitability has been trashed by fuel prices and that passengers can look forward to increased fares as a result. That does not quite accord with JetBlue's brand values.

You can bet Neelman will be taking another look at Ryanair across the Atlantic. A carrier which buys fuel at the same price (well, less actually because it proved to be a master of hedging among other things) but is still looking to cut fares and is finding other ways to take customers' money, while also making plenty for itself.

In the midwest and south-west of the USA, aerospace is the new IT. Cities and states are falling over themselves to attract aviation companies. Visit Albuquerque, home to Eclipse Aviation, and Independence, the tiny town in southern Kansas where Cessna is building its Mustang, and you understand why.
In my last blog, I wrote about how a drive from Wichita - Cessna's home city - to Albuquerque takes you through a forgotten America, a dull, flat landscape devoid of tourists and business investment, where the odd agri-giant isn't enough to shake the abandoned homesteads and depressing trailer parks from their stupor. I talked about the vision of Eclipse's Vern Raburn of reviving these beleagured communities through cheap, accessible business aviation.
But from a manufacturing point of view, aviation is also manna from heaven for overlooked urban centres. While Ford and General Motors bow to the inevitable and shut plants in much of the old rust belt, south-western states like New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah have recognised the huge economic shot in the arm that an emerging aerospace player can provide by setting up shop in their area, and are going all out to provide incentives to make life as easy as possible for these entrepreneurial start-ups.
Albuquerque is by no means a dog-eared city. It has a smart, high-rise downtown and is on the junction of two interstates, and with some beautiful mountains and the stunning Spanish colonial town of Santa Fe on its doorstep, it is a pleasant place to live. But New Mexico is one of the USA's poorest states. There is little arable land and, outside Albuquerque, not much in the way of big business. When Eclipse Aviation moved in a few years ago, it brought with it high-tech, well-paid jobs for designers, engineers, marketeers and skilled assemblers. Today, the company employs 500. Soon it plans to have double that workforce. The benefit to the local economy is not just these salaries being pumped back into local businesses. A sexy, going-places venture like Eclipse raises the whole profile of the city, attracting other high-tech firms, college students and visitors.
In Independence, Kansas, it's a similar story. So small it's hardly marked on maps, the town was chosen by Cessna for its new piston single factory in the mid-90s. Now, with the decision to locate the Mustang entry level jet there too, the remote outpost has suddenly become an aviation centre. When I visited, I asked if it was difficult finding skilled staff in such a small town, even allowing for the fact that Cessna is prepared to train assembly line workers from scratch. Not a bit of it. Each job vacancy has several applicants. It makes for a willing workforce.
Walk into any state capital with a back of the envelope plan for a new business jet that's going to change the world and it's likely you'll be treated like a hero and offered every spare hangar going at the local airport, so desperate are the local politicos to embrace the next Eclipse. Trouble is, many of today's great ideas in business aviation are likely to remain just that: ideas. As Eclipse has proved, even with a great marketing plan and an mould-breaking manufacturing concept, the long road to certification and volume production can be bumpy and even ruinous. But providing these would-be pioneers with a start is a risk jobs-hungry cities and states in the great American interior are prepared to take.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia and its seven crew on re-entry and on 28 January it was twenty years since the Space Shuttle Challenger's ascent disaster in 1986, which killed its seven astronauts. Now the remainingfleet of three Orbiters is expected to be retired by 30 September 2010, 29 years and almost six months after the maiden flight of Shuttle Columbia in April 1981.