November 2006 Archives

Obvious you may say, but the point is, as a thoughtful and well-researched UK study has just shown, that the LCCs almost certainly haven't been responsible for the growth in European traffic since the mid-1990s.

The study - No Frills Carriers: Revolution or Evolution? - by the UK CAA's Economic Regulation Group finds that the LCCs' gains have come essentially from two sectors: primarily leisure travellers switching from charter carriers to them; and also small businesses, which previously didn't do much flying at all, discovering that they can now afford it.

Result: the rate of growth in traffic before and since the advent of LCCs is barely changed. You can see that on the graph below, and my colleague David Learmount has written about it in the magazine. There is a lot more interesting stuff in the story and the report.

You can see what's happening: the sort of comfortably off folk who used to take one or two overseas holidays a year have seen their total trip costs drop (plus times have been good in general) and so they're taking two or three, or perhaps four. Maybe buying a little property. And they're booking flights and hotels individually on the web rather than through the sort of middlemen that kept the charter carriers in good shape.

And small businesses can now fund sales-drives in European capitals instead of just the domestic market - which they need to do because they're finding leads via the web.

I'm curious about the implications of this for the idea, beloved of environmentalists and quite a lot of British politicians, that you can use taxes to reduce air travel.  Clearly you can, but this suggests they will have to be very hefty taxes indeed to make much of a dent.

On the other hand, it suggests that the usual objection to such taxes - that they unfairly hit the poor - is somewhat irrelevant, since the poor aren't flying anyway.

Sometimes press conferences are boring, sometimes they unexpectedly turn interesting. Delta's executive VP sales and customer service Lee Macenczak is in London today mainly to launch the airline's London-New York service and also generally to talk about getting out of Chapter 11 and so on.

This morning we all sat politely taking in his Powerpoint and then my mobile phone rang. I shut it off, it rang again, I killed it again, and it rang again. So I thought I had better go outside and find out what was going on: it was a journalist in the US asking me what I thought about US Airways' bid for Delta. Huh? So he told me all about it...

I went back into the press conference and discreetly told one of the Delta public relations folks the news. She thought about this and after a few minutes her colleague handed Mr Macenczak a note telling him the news as he stood at the lectern. His expression barely changed, which was impressive, considering.

Then he invited questions. Suffice it to say the conversation rapidly strayed away from New York-London, lie-flat beds, etc and onto weightier matters. Bearing in mind that the rest of Delta's execs were thousands of miles away and mostly asleep I was also impressed that he took it upon himself to single-handedly rebuff USAirways' bid.

I went and filed my copy, was interviewed on CNN, and he did some interviews. An hour or so later Delta got its formal statement out to the media. Mr Macenczak and I read it together - he was mightily relieved to see his employers were saying what he'd already said they'd say. And I was relieved that they said what I'd said on TV they would say. All good fun (though pretty serious for him of course.)

A deep rumbling rolled across the cloudless sky and I looked up to see the black triangles. Twelve of them flew from left to right in my field of view in four formations of three. The Lockheed Martin F-117A Nighthawks, based at Holloman Air Force Base nearby, were going somewhere and en masse. Beneath my feet and stretching out to the horizon the eerie whiteness of the White Sands National Monument gave a other worldliness to the experience.

The Tularosa basin, in which the monument sits, is perhaps the second most secret, most talked about location for conspiracy theorists after Nevada's Groom Lake, Area 51. Security was certainly evident driving through the desert towards the home of the US Air Force's most secret weapons. But it wasn't what you'd think. Although I was deep in New Mexico I came across a border control point on the route north from Las Cruces to White Sands.

The border guard informed me that the Mexican border was only about 40 miles (64km) south of our location but forgot to mention that at the time we were also only three weeks away from an election for state governor. Still it seemed odd to me to have a border control point so far into the country. After all, Mexicans haven't been the kinds of aliens most people have associated with the New Mexico triangle of Roswell, Socorro and Alamogordo.

I know, I know, don't say anything. SN Brussels Airlines and Virgin Express aren't rebranding as Sabena. They're rebranding as Brussels Airlines. And I think the image looks pretty snappy. Wasn't my story anyway - just my blog, and you know how reliable they are!

There's a great deal of interest in blended wing-bodies (BWB) all of a sudden. Yesterday the Silent Aircraft Initiative people unveiled a chunk of their work, which we wrote about. There is plenty of other work going on, such as this at Cranfield University. And Boeing will fly the X-48B model early next year.

I suppose there are two broad motivators behind all this: the potential for carrying very large passenger loads economically, and other environmental issues, especially noise. There are compelling reasons why this really could become reality.

But here's a paradox. The main objection that is raised to the idea just about wherever it is discussed, here for example, is the increased likelihood of passenger airsickness mainly owing to a) their distance from the longitudinal axis b) the absence of windows for many of them. The paradox is that, as far as I can see, in all the public domain literature on the subject (and there is a lot) that issue is scarcely or never mentioned. I don't know if that's because the researchers have already concluded that it's a non-issue, or perhaps they can't do any useful research without a full-size aircraft.

Anyway, if it is a problem then it does seem extremely difficult to fix it - a potential showstopper. But I wonder about the logic of the argument. Hardly anyone ever seems to be airsick these days, which I suspect (just my guess) is mainly down to improved ride, particularly on fly-by-wire types. That's even though plenty of passengers are yards away from a window, and in any case there is often no visible horizon.

On a BWB the big differences are that a) some people have no window at all and b) perhaps more important, many will be a long way from the centreline of the aircraft and so subject to much greater vertical movement than usual during turns.

Now if this really does cause widespread airsickness than that is a big problem and it's not obvious what the solution is. But will it? It seems to me that it's only as the aircraft is actually rolling into the turn that the situation is much different from now - once you're established in the turn then it doesn't matter how wide the aircraft is or where you're sitting. And the general ride will be incredibly smooth.

(I've got a personal obsession with windows - but it's nothing to do with airsickness and I'll save it for another post.) If you've got thoughts on the BWB issue leave a comment.

For those of you not familiar with Exeter, it's what can only be called a pleasant city (pop 118,000) in the middle of England's gorgeous Devon countryside. It's got a rather nice airport which most people only ever see as they drive south past it on the way to what passes for the sun in Britain. And it's headquarters to an airline which is on its way from being the sort of tiny regional operation you'd expect in the circumstances to a carrier that will operate not much short of 100 of Bombardier and Embraer's finest about three years from now.

I'm talking about Flybe - previously British European, Jersey European Airways (JEA) and, further back, even smaller entities - which this morning announced agreement in principle to buy British Airways' regional subsidiary BA Connect. As a result it's about to firm up all its remaining options on E-195s and Q400s, which will give it 26 of the jets and 66 of the props by spring of 2009.

This is not going to be a trivial thing to pull off, but BA, which is desperate to offload an operation that has little to do with its core business these days, is temporarily taking a 15% stake in Flybe to help smooth the way. An IPO is in the offing. But the fact that Flybe has even got this far is an astounding achievement.

In June 1995 we wrote that JEA had recorded a net profit of ｣1.8 million on turnover of ｣56 million after making losses for several years. Think what's happened in the airline industry since then (and who's gone bust). That includes the post-911 meltdown and the low-cost transformation of the UK short-haul market. The man running the airline - Jim French - could have been forgiven in late 2001 for sincerely wishing he was doing just about any other job at all.

What he and his colleagues actually did was continue the then embryonic reinvention of the airline into something that pretty much defied an easy description. It was to be a low-cost, domestic and European regional, flying jets and props, from assorted UK regional bases. A lot of people just thought Flybe had lost its way and didn't give it much chance of survival. Boy were they wrong!

On the whole Jim, who's chairman these days, could care less what the media thinks. (Although he's happy to talk, and I think this piece pretty much sums him up.) But I've got a lot of time for him. What the Flybe team has done is a lesson for anyone in the business - I wish them luck.

Evidence of flight-testing of a long-rumoured robotic insect-like surveillance micro unmanned air vehicle (UAV) developed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been demonstrated exclusively to Flight.
 
Developed during the 1970s, the CIA has displayed a mock-up of the micro UAV in its museum at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia since 2003. However until now no media organisation has been given access to the material that proved that the artificial dragonfly had been flight tested.

It's not terribly often that a Boeing vice president discusses her maternal instincts in public, but the charming Marsha Bell (pic below), VP first officer program(me) at Boeing's Alteon training division was doing just that in London today. Let me explain...

Alteon is currently hard at work devising a programme to train pilots to obtain the newly developed ICAO-approved Multi-Crew Pilot Licence (MPL). This is a licence for which pilots would be trained from scratch to be qualified airliner pilots so long as they fly in a multi-crew aircraft - which of course they all do anyway. It's a very big deal in China and India because it could enable them to produce the staggering number of pilots that they will need over the next 20 years quicker than is currently possible. We've written about it in the magazine and will be doing so again a lot I suspect.

One oddity of the MPL is that there is no ICAO requirement for the pilot ever to fly solo. And, as a large part of the whole idea is to cut training time, Alteon don't really intend that their curriculum - which is still under development - will include a solo flight. Although their customers could request it of course.

Alteon are going to use the Diamond DA40 four-seat trainer for the early part of the course, intending that on each sortie there will be on board: an instructor, the primary student acting as pilot-flying, a student acting as pilot-monitoring, and a student observing. Arranging for a true solo would obviously be an interruption.

However Ms Bell concedes that individual airlines may well decide that the value of the solo is worth a little extra cost, and individual regulators may conclude that they'd be happier if everyone goes through that "rite of passage". She sympathises with them, commenting: "Maybe it is the maternal instinct in me but I want these guys to have a first solo and cut their ties. But people who are perhaps less emotionally engaged always explain to me that it is just not necessary."

And she reflects, that maybe actual flight-time is truly overated, saying: "I have been around simulators for about 20 years and there are plenty of times that pilots emerge soaked in sweat from the simulator with a renewed appreciation of what can go wrong."

Alteon's first MPL course will be run in Brisbane and, as it happens, the Australian regulatory authority - CASA - is still thinking about whether it wants true solos or not. Perhaps you've got a view on that - leave a comment.