July 2006 Archives

Normally I hate it when passengers clap on landing, as to me it suggests those people had doubts we would ever get to our destination safely. But on Thai Airways flight TG1881 on 29 July, I didn't mind so much.

That was because it was the first commercial flight ever to touch down at Bangkok's new Suvarnabhumi airport, which after years of delays is finally due to open in the coming months. Given that it took so long to get to this stage - the new airport project was first mooted around four decades ago - clapping seemed entirely appropriate on the occasion. (Only the first time, mind you. When the television people asked everyone in the last cabin to clap again so they could record it, it lost its charm).

On board the nearly full Boeing 747-400 were top Thai Airways execs along with plenty of dignitaries including the country's prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and members of the general public lucky enough to get a seat (I suspect most were mainly interested in the goody bag the airline gave out which included a t-shirt and obligatory "first commercial flight" certificate).

Journalists like me were in the cheap seats at the back, but I'm used to travelling economy class and seat 62K wasn't so bad on this flight. Not only was it an historic event that I was a part of, the flight only lasted around 15 minutes as it originated from Bangkok's existing Don Muang airport, which the new airport will replace.

It was the shortest 747-400 flight I have ever been on but it could have been much shorter. At seven minutes into it the captain pointed out that Suvarnabhumi was visible from the left side of the aircraft, although we did not fly in directly and instead made a couple of scenic flyovers. Rumour had it that was so we could touch down at 08:09, as nine is an auspicious number for Thais.

Into the terminal building, through a sea of welcoming Thai Airways and airport personnel, and on with a two hour tour of the airport, before pinning down Thai's new president for an interview. That done, several more senior-executive interviews followed and as a result a few of us missed the return flight back to Don Muang. The alternative was a bus to a taxi stand 10 minutes away, as taxi facilities have yet to be sorted out from the terminal directly.

Clearly there are plenty of teething problems that need to be sorted out before the targeted 28 September opening of the new airport. It may also have been just me but I couldn't find a gent's toilet anywhere - and for the sake of all male travellers I hope that is just because the signs have yet to go up.

It is not a bad looking airport, however, and once it is finally opened and the inevitable early problems sorted out it will be a welcome change over Don Muang, which claims to be the oldest international airport still in operation - and which certainly looks it in many parts. While I appreciate historical places as much as the next guy, I would much rather have departed from Suvarnabhumi for my return to Singapore, as the taxi ride to Don Muang took longer than I care to remember - nearly as long, in fact, as it takes to fly between Bangkok and Singapore.

There may be a big change coming soon to the airport scene in Bangkok, but other things such as the city's notoriously bad traffic situation will remain the same.

A rather ill looking NASA administrator Michael Griffin looked out across the crowd of a few hundred tightly packed people in the rectangular sort-of-conference room in the Farnborough air show Space Pavillion.

Despite the leader of the world’s largest and most expensive space agency being inattendance his organisation was notably absent from the show. In 2004 NASA was there in force and the pavilion, sat next to the behemoth Lockheed Martin building, seemed larger somehow.

But this year the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology was in town to show us that nation’s plans for its future rockets.

Yesterday's Farnborough air show saw a long-awaited and welcome boost for the UK Royal Air Force, with the confirmation of a production order for 12 of BAE Systems' new generation Nimrod MRA4 maritime reconnaisance and attack aircraft. Announced by UK secretary of state for defence Des Browne and BAE chief executive Mike Turner, the milestone ceremony was followed by the first public appearance of an MRA4, with prototype aircraft PA03 taking time out of its busy test programme to conduct two fly-bys. The contract's confirmation had been expected this week, as reported in the latest issue of Flight International.

I've been lucky enough to see the MRA4 up close at BAE's Warton site in Lancashire twice over the last year or so, but this was my first opportunity to see the RAF's future version of the Mighty Hunter airborne. Already easily distinguished from the service's current Nimrod MR2 by its increased size and by the range of exotic lumps and bumps which are set about its fuselage, the MRA4 is also markedly different from its predecessor by its engine characteristics. The most striking thing about the new aircraft is that it sounds like a large business jet on the wing, and gone too are the plumes of black smoke that betray the presence of the MR2's Rolls-Royce Speys.

My last visit to Warton on 4 July threw up a unique opportunity to get inside the belly of the RAF's largest intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance beast of the future, and to talk to the joint BAE and RAF flight test team which is assessing the type's capabilities. The aircraft features a new glass cockpit, with "the office" now to accomodate a flight crew of just two pilots.

Down the back, the MRA4's seven onboard operator stations bring a sophisticated look and deliver improved ergonomics for the weapon system's tactical operators.

But the tiny size of the platform's galley is a cause of concern to the test team, which could one day be called upon to demonstrate the aircraft's maximum 14h endurance. As one RAF officer notes with alarm: "How are you supposed to prepare a decent curry using this?" Unless this is sorted by 2009, the Nimrod community's reputation as a "formation eating club" could be in danger!

BAE will freeze the external design of the MRA4 late this year, and the programme's three prototypes - which will later be modified to the final production configuration - will complete flight test activities during 2008. The RAF will have to wait until 2010 to form its first squadron of new Nimrods at its Kinloss base in Scotland's Morayshire, but you know what they say about good things...

Boeing VP marketing Randy Baseler was in London yesterday to present the annual Current Market Outlook, but it also gave me a nice opportunity to talk to him about his blog. He obviously likes doing it and in fact seemed to enjoy discussing that more than talking through the mountains of stats in the presentation.

He says it started as "kind of a lark" but has "exceeded our expectations" (with 16,000-18,000 hits per month) and now he clearly regards it as an integral part of Boeing's marketing - letting them engage with people in a way that is otherwise difficult for a big corporation. In some ways though, you can trace its genesis back to Boeing's tactics to counter a perceived Airbus lead in marketing a few years earlier.

Anyway, I'll let Randy do his own talking: "We had a change of philosophy around 2000-2001 under Alan Mulally to engage the market more - the media, industry and customers. The whole idea was to get out more and tell our story. A lot of times if you asked Boeing questions then someone might answer, but we decided to get out more and tell our story.

"Airbus was always out there telling their story but also telling the Boeing story according to Airbus. So why were we letting Airbus tell our story? There was a conscious decision to get out and tell it ourselves. The blog was a natural extension of that change in philosophy."

Randy admits that when one of his communications team first suggested the idea, he had to have blogs explained to him. But the Dan Rather affair had just broken and he was interested.

Randy goes on: "That was the only thing I knew about blogs. So I said first of all you have to tell me what they are. It sounded like a great opportunity for us to respond to things that I would normally do in a conversation like this one but we could say it was interesting and link to different articles and show different considerations."

He readily concedes that Boeing launched with inadequate software and accepts some of the early criticisms he got from the blogosphere as a result. But he rejects the idea that the blog is somehow inferior because it's used to push Boeing's line and promote its products.

He says (and I sympathise with him on this one): "The first thing that was strange was that we were being told we were violating the rules of the non-rules blogosphere. So we decided to say what we were going to talk about and if you don't like that then you shouldn't read it. We do have a corporate fiduciary duty."

I've written before about Airbus' dilemma in knowing what to do about Randy's blog and, as it happens, he tells what he understands to be the story on that in Toulouse so far. According to Randy, Airbus' salesman in chief John Leahy considered the idea some time back, and eventually his colleague Adam Brown (by then vice president customer services I think, but recently retired) looked into it and produced his recommendation.

The proposal was that, yes, Airbus should have a blog. And there should be a four-person team to do it! Less than surprisingly the plan has never been implemented.

We've just had the press release in announcing Bob Johnson's appointment as chief executive of Dubai Aerospace Enterprise. Interestingly, colleagues and I have recently had conversations about who would be the first DAE CEO and what had happened to Bob Johnson after he retired from running Honeywell Aerospace last year. Nobody linked the two.

If you're in a market that DAE wants to get into - and with operations planned in aircraft financing, component manufacturing, airports, aviation training, engineering and services that's quite a few - be very afraid. The company may be little more than a shell at present, but they have massive ambitions and the funding of one of the world's richest and entrepreneurial statelets behind them.

Johnson has a proven track record with Honeywell and other leading aerospace companies. And DAE's decision to appoint a member of the American aerospace establishment is an interesting one.

If you rememember, Dubai Ports World was earlier this year forced to abandon its attempt to buy container ports in the US following a political furore in Congress. Some normally statesmanlike senators and representatives - including Hillary Clinton - resorted to some frankly ridiculous war-on-terror scaremongering about Arab-owned interests controlling some of the most important entry points into the US.

Johnson is probably a good bet to charm DAE's target customers, particularly in the US, and persuade them that, despite its hugely ambitious plans, it won't bite.

More on this in the 18-24 July issue of Flight International.

So the USA is going to call the Lockheed Martin F-35A the Lightning II. Great choice - but they'll never be true WIWOLers.

By now you either know exactly what I'm talking about, or you haven't a clue. Existing WIWOLers can stop reading now.

It works like this - at any bar in any RAF mess over the past 30 years or so - but mainly aircrew messes - the cry occasionally goes up: "weewoll, weewoll!" It's provoked by the use, by any drinker, of the expression "when I was on Lightnings".

The idea is to stop the offender from banging on about his experiences on Lightnings. But the fact that it's used is grudging recognition that anyone who's served on Lightnings has usually got more and better stories than the rest of us. We are talking about the quintessential Cold War, single-seat, Mach 2, manned rocket. It had a radar that today would be classed 'not fit for purpose', two (count 'em) missiles that had about a 50/50 chance of hitting anything, and it spontaneously combusted if the pilot so much as cursed (which he did as a matter of routine.)

Lightning stories are practically infinite. The best-known is perhaps the most widely repeated story ever in the RAF, and it's entirely true. You can read about it here.

A subtler story, but my favourite, which I've only heard about, is the techncial drawing of a Lightning that was on the wall of a squadron crewroom for years and entitled something like "The Pilot's Perfect Lightning". It was a true technical diagram but with the word 'fuel' replaced in every instance by the word 'foam'. Right down to the 'overwing foam tanks' and, best of all, the 'refoaming probe' on the nose.

When I was a teenage cadet I visited 92 Squadron at RAF Gutersloh in Germany in about 1976 - all of 10 minutes or so flying time from the East German border and a few thousand miles of Western Pact territory. The pilots there, who were on four-minute alert but could get it down to about 90 seconds, told me how they called up their opposing quick reaction crew in the East on Christmas day to say hi. I spent the next five years of my life desperate to fly Lightnings - which one way or another never quite happened.

But I salute the men who flew this 60's era fighter in the night over the North Sea watching the Bears, the radar and the fuel gauge with roughly equal attention for a couple of decades. The F-35A may turn out to be a great aircraft, but I doubt it will ever produce stories like the English Electric Lightning.

The smoke billows out and up and the orange tip seen above the tree line rises as the world’s only reusable space plane lifts off of its launch pad on the Florida peninsula. For the audience 2miles away the departure from the pad is silent, the light reflected from the most complex machine humanity has ever built reaches eyes minutes before the sound would.

That comes later, as we lift our eyes to the sky and the orange and white shape arches over our heads the pressure wave from the millions of pounds of thrust reaches our ears, and beneath our feet the viewing platform shakes, violently, we witness nothing less than history in the making, another successful launch of NASA’s oldest operational Space Shuttle, Discovery.

That was the scene on 4 July, but that wasn’t quite how it worked out for me. I had to get back to Europe on 3 July and on 1 July, as we waited for the first attempt to launch, I had some other more pressing problems.

One of the perils of writing for a weekly print publication is that events - rather irritatingly - have a habit of moving on between going to press on Friday and the issue appearing early the following week. So it was this week, when we penned a leader on why No︺ Forgeard could not stay on as co-chief executive of EADS on Friday afternoon, only to have him eventually quit on Sunday.

Okay, at least our leader got it right, in that we said that "anything less than Forgeard's resignation or sacking would be an insult" before Farnborough. But EADS has got it wrong - in my view - by missing the opportunity to jump straight away to a single chief executive structure, with German Tom Enders at the helm.

A press release has just arrived from Enders and his new French co-CEO, Louis Gallois which is incredibly contrite. After weeks of Airbus, EADS and Forgeard trying to brazen out what started as a programme delay (albeit a very serious one) and ended up a full blown corporate crisis, this humble attitude is refreshing. At least the EADS and Airbus teams can go into Farnborough in two weeks' time having purged the organisations of the individuals seen to carry the most blame for the debacle. But - with angry shareholders at both EADS and BAE Systems and equally angry A380 customers - they shouldn't expect anything less than a turbulent ride.

It's more than likely that next Sunday will see Germany and France meet each other in soccer's World Cup Final - but today in the macabre chess match that currently passes for management at EADS it was Germany that came out on top.

Consider: gone are the CEO of Airbus - the self-effacing Gustav Humbert who has fallen on his sword even though it is far from clear what role he played in the recent troubles; and also the co-CEO of EADS Noel Forgeard, whose limitless self-belief finally tried even the patience of his countrymen.

Humbert was allowed the dignity of a personal statement via his employers, Forgeard, who has come to embody French interests in the company, has gone so far without a public word.

And the replacements? For Forgeard, read Louis Gallois - as French as the man he replaces but one of the original architects of EADS, and brought back in surely as a reassuring presence to steady the ship. For Humbert, read Christian Streiff. Who? Well, Streiff's primary characteristic is the way his career has straddled France and Germany working for the French group Saint-Gobain.

And his hometown, if you read French, turns out to be in the distinctly German-flavoured Moselle region. More pertinently, however, he will report not to Gallois but to EADS German co-CEO Tom Enders, who has remained virtually untouched by the recent corporate and personal horrors that have poisoned the company.

The seat of power has shifted and as I write this it seems that there is a key development in the process of extricating British interests from Airbus - appropriate, given England's miserable exit from the World Cup last night. One way or another, Germany has flexed its muscles this week.