May 2006 Archives

BMI's inaugural flight from London Heathrow to Jeddah last Thursday matched the customer profile the route is likely to attract in future. British Muslims travelling as pilgrims to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina took up a large share of the 767-300 aircraft, and business travellers seemed to make up the rest.

BMI has already demonstrated which part of the market it expects will be the most lucrative, upping its business class capacity from 24 to 42 seats on its new route, as it has already done on the London to Riyadh route it launched in September.

Chief executive Nigel Turner describes BMI's decision to launch the service to Jeddah following BA's withdrawal of the service last year as a "no-brainer." The Middle East looks set to become an important part of the company's long-haul expansion strategy.

With GDP growth of 6.5% in 2005, and forecasts of even stronger growth this year, the Kingdom's status as a business destination seems assured.

With the news that BMI is studying a third destination in Saudi Arabia - Damman - it is clear that BMI regards the Kingdom as a key part of its strategy and is not put off by the complicated market it represents. Turner says the Jeddah route is just a "toe in the water," and adds that this service could increase in frequency to a daily service if demand is sufficient.

But the Saudi officials we met during our three day visit to Jeddah are adamant that there will increasingly be a third category of passengers on this three-times-a-week flight: tourists.

Some of the obstacles in the way of this goal are melting away: for example visa applications - which have proved problematic in the past, even for BMI staff - should now be easier and quicker than they have been.

And there's no doubt that Jeddah is keen to set itself up as a tourist destination. There's plenty to see and do and the Saudis we met were friendly, welcoming and keen to share their culture and customs with us and answer our endless stream of questions.

On the other side of the coin, while Jeddah is seen as Saudi Arabia's most liberal city, the restrictions, in particular for women, are significant. The female journalists in our party were required to wear an abaya at all times in public, were barred from the hotel gym and swimming pool and could only take part as passengers in the off-road driving event we attended: women are banned from driving in Saudi Arabia. Last but by no means least, alcohol is illegal, which will presumably put off all but the most dedicated culture-vulture Western tourists, although it may be easier to sell the region to Muslim visitors as a holiday destination to be tacked on to the end of pilgrimage.

As well as the practicalities, which we all agreed were relatively easy to overcome, the Kingdom suffers from a negative perception by foreigners on many counts. BMI chief executive Nigel Turner admits that a "hearts and minds campaign", not to mention the promise of excellent accommodation and facilities were necessary to convince his crews that the destination was not as problematic as perceived.

Whether Jeddah's tourist industry will get a boost from the arrival of BMI remains to be seen, but whatever the passenger profile, one thing is certain: the return of a UK-based carrier with a direct flight from London to Jeddah has been warmly welcomed by Saudi Arabian and expat residents alike.

I'm just back from ILA in Berlin and for a show that often gets dismissed as little more than a local air fair, there was plenty going on, with flying displays by the A380, the thrust-vectoring MiG-29, and a replica of the Messerschmitt Me262, the first operational jet fighter. For the journalists among us, there was also plenty of news, including more woes for Airbus over the A350, which we'll be reporting in the 23-30 May issue of Flight International, content of which you can view here. We also launched Flight TV at the show. You can watch it here.

The show is certainly bolstered by the big-time presence of EADS and Airbus and their associated companies, such as Eurofighter, Europrop International and Eurojet. And, despite the absence of Boeing and some of the other big defence players, such as Dassault Aviation, the presence of a huge Russian contingent and a good showing from a number of niche sectors, including helicopters, spaceflight and general aviation, means the show has a bustling, cosmopolitan feel.

Doing Flight TV was great fun - a very different experience to doing the weekly magazine or even our show dailys Flight Daily News and Flight Evening News. For those of us brought up in print journalism, it was an introduction to a whole new way of conveying a message...where pictures tell the story as much if not more than the words.

Getting the stories was often a challenge. Two of my colleagues were detained by over-vigilant US military police when they slipped past a cordon they shouldn't have and started filming USAF hardware close up.

I was also in one of the strangest locations ever for a press conference - the inside of a Ilyushin Il-76. It must have seemed a good idea at the time, for cargo carrier Volga-Dnepr to announce the start of commercial flights using the new generation Il-76TD-90VD inside that very aircraft. The problem was, they probably hadn't counted on the number of people that would turn up - twice as many as they had seats for - or the warm weather. After 30 minutes of presentations and question-answering from the five executives sitting behind a table at the front of the cabin (which had to be translated each time by the PR man), the atmosphere at the back of the aircraft - where a few of us were trapped, standing in our suits - was getting decidedly tropical. The trouble was, escaping meant barging past the entire audience and squeezing past the top table to get through the only available exit and down the steps. 

The biggest disappointment of the show for me - and many people I spoke to - was that the A380 wasn't painted in Lufthansa colours. Lufthansa is the biggest customer for the A380 after Emirates and the first European carrier to take the aircraft. Still, there are rumours, as I write, that the superjumbo might make a flying appearance this weekend carrying the temporary livery of the German airline.

It's a windswept day at Heathrow (more on that wind later) and the great British media is camped in the new Pier 6 at Terminal 3 ready for the A380's first visit to the UK, let alone London.

Frankly it's about time. The first of several A380 mega-events was the opening of the production building at Toulouse in May 2004 - I was there and remember vividly that the UK was effectively airbrushed out of the programme, receiving not a single mention all day. And certainly not in French Prime Minster Jean-Pierre Raffarin's rambling speech about the state of French industry.

Then there was the famous "reveal" at Toulouse when British noses were again put out of joint when Airbus declined to have Rolls-Royce logos on the Trent engines. Followed by the first flight with no Brits in the crew.

As a reminder, British industry builds the wings and, for Rolls-Royce-powered aircraft, the engines - plus a host of sub-structures and sytems.

There'll probably be trouble over this post, but I should point out that I'm basically Irish and more or less neutral about Anglo-European relations. The Franco-German domination of the A380 marketing effort is pretty heavy-handed though.

However, as BAE Systems is now trying to sell its Airbus stake to EADS, things are unlikely to change!

But at Heathrow everything is different. The day starts off with a wobble - BAA, whose airport it is, has been taken hopelessly by surprise by the media attention and makes seriously hard work of getting the press pack, never the chirpiest of groups on a Thursday morning, airside. But we get there in the end and morale picks up. There are actually rather a lot of media, a small part of which you can see below. And the rather more distinguished looking silver-haired gentleman in the middle of the picture is of course Emirates chairman Maurice Flanagan, who's buying 45 A380s.

The Pier 6 building, specially constructed to accommodate the A380 at Heathrow, is impressive and should be able to embark and disembark 500+ passengers from A380s, using both decks simultaneously, in about the same time as a 747-400. (We shall see...)

There have been so many millions of words written about the A380, including by Flight International of course, that it's becoming hard to think of new stories - but anyway there's a press conference. with these gentlemen below.

L-R: Robert Swan, BAA head of major projects; Tony Douglas, Heathrow managing director; Charles Champion, Airbus chief operating officer and head of A380; Iain Gray, managing director Airbus UK; Fernando Alonso, VP Airbus flight test.

I've decided to ask my question (wake vortices) discreetly to the Airbus execs afterwards in the hope of a (very) minor scoop, but Kevin Done of the FT asks it instead and so the story's going to be all over the British newspapers. Ho, hum...

Anyway, I'm primarily at Heathrow to act as an on-air interviewee for BBC World Service TV and BBC News 24. So now it's off to the roof of the building to meet the crew. It's blowing a gale, but happily not raining so we get stuck in.

The first bit is simple enough - 10 minutes or so live to the planet answering the World Service's typically astute questions from Philippa Thomas.

 But after that it's a long hour and a half in the wind trying to keep saying something intelligent about the A380. Philippa's really good and has done some great research, so we somehow manage to keep going. Eventually the monotony is broken when UK chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown - the hot bet to succeed Tony Blair - turns up with industry minister Margaret Hodge to meet a dozen Airbus UK apprentices. Philippa seizes her chance for an interview.

And I seize mine for a picture. Brown's minders eye my obviously non-professional camera suspiciously and try to get me thrown out. My BBC minder gives them a hard time in return and all is well.

Then the A380 is reported to be on finals. We all get ready and...a British Airways 747 lands. We relax. And then it really does start to happen. Phillipa and I are gabbling like lunatics (well, I am) and out of the corner of my eye I can see the A380 touching down. There is a great movie of the landing here. As you'll see, there was a pretty fearsome and gusty crosswind leading to a less than elegant arrival - I'll be interested to see what pilot Ed Strongman has to say about it when he is eventually asked - as he will be.

The aircraft taxys in flying a Union Jack flag - this Airbus picture below is much better than anything I could take - and arrives just behind us. We're now yelling even louder over the noise of the wind and four Trent 900s.

At long last the aircraft moves into place on the ramp behind me and shuts down. There's an Emirates 777 tucked behind it which gets the airline a few million pounds worth of free worldwide advertising. Maurice Flanagan swears to me it's conincidence "although I don't suppose we were in a hurry to move it" he concedes. Finally we can go back down inside.

I arrive downstairs in time to hear Brown congratulating everyone and celebrating a great day for British industry, European co-operation, etc, etc. Which it is of course. Once he's done, so am I, and an hour later I'm sitting in London's dire traffic with my head full of aeroplanes. Here are a few more pictures:

As ever I'm acutely conscious of having had a privileged view of the proceedings. But driving through Heathrow I pass hundreds of enthusiasts and spotters camped all over the airport at risk of being moved on by the police as they watch the A380. (Although quite a few are in the beer garden of The Green Man and not at risk at all of being moved on until closing time.) It's not quite Concorde, but it still has a magic of its own and I'm sure there's plenty of excitement to come.

The UK aerospace community's leading lights were out in force last night at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel to attend the Royal Aeronautical Society's glittering annual banquet. Nothing unusual in that, you might think, but for a fair number of the guests there were other, more burning matters to consider beside the fine wine, oriental crab and keynote speech from Thales chief executive Denis Ranque. The big question of the evening was, of course: what was happening in the Champions League final - a tantalising battle of wills between Arsenal and the mighty Barcelona?

Strangely, not everyone in the audience appeared to be behind Arsenal, although Emirates - sponsors of the club's new Ashburton Grove stadium (which has already earned the nickname "Dubaibury") were doubtless "gunning" for the English team.

I can reveal that a number of the EADS representatives present were actively pleading for a Barcelona win. This was not necessarily because the company is more protective of its Spanish interests than its UK operation, but because the final could have a catastrophic impact on the main British news event of today: the first landing of an Airbus A380 at London Heathrow. With a huge media scrum anticipated at the airport to witness the arrival of Europe's headline-grabbing "Superjumbo", the last thing EADS wanted was to have half of the assembled journalists and camera crews go sprinting after the returning Arsenal team, which was scheduled to arrive back from Paris around the same time.

Luckily for EADS, Barca's late brace did more than perhaps bring to an end Thierry Henry's remarkable Arsenal career (although I doubt he will leave). It also made sure that all the headlines will go on the UK's first opportunity to have seen the giant A380 up close and personal. The company must be relieved that the World Cup will be well and truly out of the way before the aircraft gets to wow the crowds at July's Farnborough air show.

Following my request for information on Enplaned I have news. At least I assume I have anyway.

I received a personal e-mail from a pretty anonymous Yahoo address saying thanks for our concern and stating the following:

We stopped doing the blog because:

1) it was time consuming
2) it was non-remunerative
3) it didn't live up to our standards

I've no reason to think it's not from the people behind the blog. So I guess that answers the question.

Fact is that there are still huge questions about the value of business blogs despite what the hard-core faithful would have you believe.

When I first started blogging there were hardly any aviation blogs worth reading, but eventually Enplaned came along and was always worth reading. You needn't bother clicking on the link though, because one day a couple of months ago it suddenly disappeared. There's been no explanation, and the really odd thing was that even in the incestuous world of air transport, nobody seemed to know who the author was.

Lots of people, including me, want to know what happened. Actually, I suppose I'm at least a little bit concerned for the author's health. You can see some of the comments here, here, and here.

Surely somebody knows what's going on. If the guy (or gal I suppose...but I don't think so) wants to stay anonymous for whatever reason then that's up to them. But it would be good to know that everything's OK.  

Last week at EBACE in Geneva, Embraer unveiled its latest business aircraft - an executive version of the E-190 regional jet. You can read how we reported it in Flight Evening News, our unique show evening newspaper, here. The Brazilian manufacturer cannot put a foot wrong at the moment as far as business aviation is concerned. Its strategy is two-pronged: at the small end, it has launched its Phenom very-light and light jets into a suddenly burgeoing market and where, other than Eclipse and Cessna, the competitors are small, unproven players. The air taxi concept could still all go horribly wrong, in Europe and in North America, but the potential rewards are huge. A Swiss start-up ordered 50 Phenom 100s at the show and there are many others waiting in the wings.

At the other end of the market, Embraer now has two large-cabin aircraft, its ERJ-135-based Legacy and its E-190-derived Lineage 1000. Priced at $41 million, the aircraft could seriously knock Airbus's A318-based Elite, currently the smallest large cabin business jet, in terms of price. In terms of size, it has an obvious advantage over the long-range, large-cabin offerings from Bombardier, Dassault and Gulfstream. Yes, you might say, but Embraer has no brand heritage or kudos compared with a Challenger, a Falcon or a Gulfstream. They are established European and North American corporate jet brands. Embraer is a regional aircraft maker from Brazil. It's like comparing a Mercedes with a Kia.

But, in the new frontiers of business aviation - Russia, India and the Middle East - buyers have a lot less respect for brand than they do in Fortune 500 boardrooms and corporate aviation departments and a lot more interest in what an aircraft can offer in terms of price, room, range and extras. At least that's the spin Embraer are putting on it.

Embraer have got the other advantage of starting from a low base and having a successful family of regional aircraft from which to develop business jet cousins. While they haven't got much of a brand in the business aviation sector, neither have they had the opportunity over the few years they have been in the market to do their brand any damange either.

So the rumours about the UK Labour Party's strategy to drag itself out of a crisis of its own making have been proven right, with perennial safe pair of hands John Reid having been moved on to the Home Office after serving less than a year as defence secretary. A feisty Scot with a penchant for tobacco and Celtic Football Club, Reid arrived in May 2005 as a breath of fresh air after his predecessor Geoff Hoon - newly appointed Minister for Europe, by the way - had thoroughly oustayed his welcome at the head of the UK armed forces.

One of Reid's first actions as defence secretary was to host a drinks reception for defence journalists in the Ministry of Defence's magnificent Henry VIII wine cellar, where he voiced an ambition to improve the previously adversarial relationship between "us" and Whitehall. He gained a lot of respect for that, and his obvious delight at having secured the job he had always wanted was also encouraging to see. Likewise, it was on Reid's initiative that UK Minister for Defence Procurement Lord Drayson produced the MoD's Defence Industrial Strategy white paper, which could make a real and positive change to how the armed forces acquire, operate and support their equipment in the future.

The woes which have recently afflicted several of Labour's Cabinet ministers had not completely passed Reid by, however, with recent criticism having been pointed his way over the MoD's slow speed of response to the Royal Air Force's loss of a C-130K Hercules transport to enemy action in Iraq in January 2005. Continued opposition to UK involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also persisted throughout Reid's tenure, but his passionate belief that British troops are making a real difference on the ground never waivered. He was also willing to admit when the MoD had got it wrong, recently approving a fuel tank safety upgrade to the RAF's deployed Hercules - an enhancement which will cost ｣600,000 ($1.1 million) per aircraft - and also extending a detachment of Harrier GR7A ground-attack aircraft at Afghanistan's Kandahar airfield into at least 2007. The latter decision was announced during one of Reid's last actions as defence secretary, while visiting British troops on the frontline in Afghanistan (pictured below).

So what next for UK defence? Des Browne - another Scot - also only spent one year in his previous position as chief secretary to the treasury, and arrives with no prior experience in military matters. Curiously though, he previously served as parliamentary private secretary to Adam Ingram, who will now serve beneath him as armed forces minister.

Browne will be required to get up to speed on his new defence portfolio in double-quick time, with 3,300 British troops to be in place in Afghanistan's Helmand province by July and tough decisions still to be made on numerous massive procurements, such as for the RAF's Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft and the Royal Navy's two Future Aircraft Carriers. But perhaps given his treasury background Browne will find it easier to convince chancellor Gordon Brown to dig deep for defence? If today's Cabinet reshuffle is extended soon to include a change of resident in Number 10, maybe that wouldn't be such a terrible thing.

So it's good luck to Des Browne and to John Reid goodbye: I for one am sorry to see you go.

It's an odd thing but, although Boeing was very publicly involved in the design of Sukhoi's Russian Regional Jet (RRJ), the aircraft has actually come out more Airbus-influenced. I'm not yet sure how important that is, but it's possible that it could matter more than you might imagine.

In particular the aircraft has sidestick controllers rather than control yokes - and that represents an explicit decision by Sukhoi to go with Airbus thinking rather than Boeing.

I've been talking a fair bit to Russians and Westerners involved in the RRJ recently and here's the story. Boeing, as I've mentioned before, has always been pretty ambivalent about the RRJ and got itself tied in some PR knots trying to explain in Russia that it was an important contributor to the programme, and in the West (and to shareholders) that its involvement was strictly limited. I think everyone knew what they meant, but it was messy, and the reason was that their interest was driven by the campaign to sell 737s to Aeroflot. That failed (and Aeroflot is going to need many more narrowbodies than the A320 it has so far ordered, so it was expensive) and ever since Boeing has been playing down its RRJ role even further. (It's also winning the Aeroflot widebody contest in which the airline is fighting to take 787s against government-level forces that are insisting on the A350. I know that much is true, but I'm not pretending to understand what's going on.)

Anyway, at the same time it was talking to Boeing, Sukhoi was put in touch with Air France by Aeroflot for heavyweight airline advice on the RRJ design. They also spoke to other European airlines including at least Iberia and SAS who were all being briefed by Airbus on the Thales-designed A380 cockpit by then and were hugely impressed with it. As a result, as we revealed at the time, changes were made - one of which was the switch to sidesticks in a cockpit also designed by Thales.

The upshot is that the RRJ will have substantial cockpit-commonality with Airbus aircraft. Is that important? Well, an awful lot of narrowbodies and regional jets are going to be sold in Russia and the CIS. How many and how soon is a very difficult question to answer - and Boeing and Airbus are both cagey about it in their forecasts. But Aeroflot went with Airbus (and is committed to taking the RRJ) and now Sibir/S7 is going the same way.

I hear the Russian government is also leaning on Vietnam Airlines, which like Aeroflot has Airbus narrowbodies and Boeing widebodies, to look at the RRJ. And more worryingly still, Sukhoi, backed by the army of French suppliers on the RRJ, is now targeting China where the indigenous ARJ21 is making little headway, and where the narrowbody market is of course gigantic.

The large regional jet sector just below the smallest Airbus and Boeing narrowbodies, is a very big deal and both of the big airframers are uncomfortable with it. They don't really want to address it themselves, but they don't want the players in it to grow into new competitors - which is why they were quick to rubbish Bombardier's CSeries.

Two years ago Randy Baseler said to me that Boeing was probably going to have to go and duff up Bombardier (or words to that effect) because they couldn't afford not to. What he actually said was: "Embraer and Bombardier really have to go up into the bigger market, because when the scope clauses go then everybody is going to move up. We are not so much concerned about the initial entries there, but about where they go from there. Do they go into 130, 150, 170 seats? Are we concerned? Well, partially."

On the other hand, Boeing would probably rather see Sukhoi - Airbus-influenced or not - in the market than out because they will hurt both Bombardier and Embraer. My enemy's enemy....