March 2007 Archives

Boeing has never knowingly oversold the rival A340's slowness in its own marketing presentations for the 747 and 777.
The slowness of the A340-200/300 is indeed legendary - there's even a painting of a 747-400 in flight where the caption reads: "...and just below can be seen an A340 that is being overtaken". Imagine Airbus's unbridled glee therefore when on the first ever commercial route proving flight of the A380 to New York last week the opportunity came to settle some very high profile public relations scores.
The flight operated in collaboration with future A380 customer Lufthansa was cruising over the Atlantic at M0.85 and was about to slow down to coordinate with the LAX-bound A380 sister flight when the crew spotted one of BA's 747s plying its own lonely furrow to the New World. Never slow to acknowledge the broader irony of the encounter, the Airbus-Lufthansa flight crew accelerated to M0.87 and overtook it. The 747, not to be outdone, responded in kind and crept up to M0.87 as well.
The A380 soon had to drop back to M0.83 for the rest of the way however in an effort to co-ordinate its arrival with the LAX flight. It was still early ahead of schedule - landing at 12.10 at New York Kennedy and slightly ahead of the tandem LAX flight whose distinctly imaginative landing repertoire caused several raised eyebrows on either side of the continent.
By Aimee Turner
Photo by SIS Photos

Flight International celebrates its centenary next year and it's a rare day when you come across someone in aviation who's older than the magazine. Here's a truly wonderful example however: Sir Arthur Marshall, best known through his engineering firm Marshall of Cambridge, has just died aged 103.

There are some excellent obituaries in the British newspapers - The Times, and The Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph.

Although he's generally thought of as an engineer, his work in overhauling the RAF's pilot training system was extraordinarily far-sighted.

Even by the notorious standards of military procurement, there is something very odd about helicopter contests. Right now there are no fewer than three stories coincidentally running on the helicopter section of Flight's site about helicopter selections that are in difficulties.

Norway can't decide if it was such a good idea to opt for NH Industries NH90s for its SAR needs.

The USAF is in all sorts of trouble with its choice of the Boeing HH-47 Chinook for its combat SAR aircraft.

And the US Army has ordered Bell to stop work on the ARH-70A armed reconaissance helicopter.

Over at IAG, Addison Schonland makes this argument below following the US-Europe openish skies deal:

We expect British Airways to rethink its fleet plans now. Does it weigh the replacement fleet with more frequencies (smaller planes) or bigger planes using its slots more efficiently? The former, smaller planes, means slot problems as these are finite, after all LHR has only so much concrete. While this is attractive, it is not something easily achieved. Which means they need to look at bigger planes to use the current slots more effectively. This means 747-8s or A380s.

It's been hard for EADS to do anything right recently, but today they finally signed off on a deal with Russia that is truly historic. Politics has been hugely important in all of this of course - but the fact remains that EADS is now well and truly established in Russian aerospace in a way that must be pretty sickening to Boeing.

The headline deal was that Aeroflot finally committed (well, MoU anyway) to taking 22 A350 XWBs and ten A330s. Boeing at one point, remember, had this close to sewn-up.

So finally there's a deal it seems. You'd have to be brave to predict what will happen next - but a sensible analysis needs to start with alliances. (And then look at the people not in alliances.)

In all the excitement about Steven Udvar-Hazy's comments about China, less attention was paid to something he said about GE and the A350 XWB. His point was that Airbus really needed to persuade GE to get on board the -1000 version of the aircraft to ensure its competitiveness with the Boeing 787-10.

GE has been reluctant to commit to the -1000 because of its challenge to the 777-200ER/300ER on which it is sole-source engine supplier. But I think this raises a deeper question about the immense power of GE and Rolls-Royce in the market these days, and their resulting responsibilities.

You might want to mark Sunday 8 July in your diary, because there's a good chance that a certain US airframer will be opening its doors and proudly wheeling out its new toy.

"A little bit of a coincidence - imagine that," says Boeing 787 programme manager Mike Bair, referring with not-entirely-convincing innocence to the date as it appears on American calendars: 07-08-07. Given that roll-out of the 787 is scheduled for July, there can't be a single PR representative between Chicago and Seattle whose lips aren't quivering at the publicity potential afforded by this bit of chronological good fortune.

But with the echoes of hasty backpedalling yet to fade in Toulouse, Boeing is well aware of the pitfalls of leaving yourself with little margin to cope with unforeseen circumstances. I suspect that 'coincidence' will remain the official line right up until Boeing manages to pull its first polished 787 out into the Everett sunshine on the second Sunday in July, at which point, I'm sure, the scallywags will probably claim it was planned that way all along.

So, who would you trust on the future of the aircraft industry - Steven Udvar-Hazy or me?

OK, point taken, but nevertheless...I'm really not sure what Mr Hazy is suggesting when he talks of the Chinese threat to Boeing and Airbus. Taken literally I suppose he's right when he says Boeing and Airbus won't dominate the market "for ever and ever" - but I'd suggest they will for as long as most of us need to worry about.

In the James Bond film Moonraker the European villain Hugo Drax launches his perfect people carrying Space Shuttles from Amazonian launch complexes. The white spaceplanes lift off among the dense foliage of the rain forests.

The Europeans I was with in French Guiana were not villains and they were not attempting to take over the World but we were at a rocket launch complex and we were in the midst of dense foliage. But this was the European Space Agency's (ESA) new Soyuz booster launch pad, scheduled for operation in 2008. However at the moment it is just a big hole in the ground.

I have never been to a ceremony to open the construction site of a launch base, as the press release stated, and I probably never will again. What the construction workers who had already been toiling away in the heat for months thought of it being apparently opened is an ongoing mystery.