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.
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