April 2007 Archives

A comforting story for any of you who despair over working in the chronically value-destroying, customer-disappointing, economically perverse world of air transport.

I may have this wrong (if you read the link above you'll sympathise with me) but it seems that the private-sector leasing company that provides coaches to British train companies has so much market power that because it's now subject to a monopoly investigation it's declining to provide enough coaches. This, by the way, is a company whose customers have their purchases guaranteed by Her Majesty's Government! Not even British Airways gets that.

Fortunately, here in Flight's office, I have colleagues on Railway Gazette International who have been able to explain to me what's going on.

A comforting story for the poor guys at Airbus in Hamburg who found the A380 wiring coming up a metre or so short. Things could be much worse - as the Indian Navy has reportedly just been told by the folks refitting the Russian aircraft carrier Gorshokov for sale to them.

Seems the engineers underestimated the quantity of wiring required by about, oh, 70% or so. Result - a two year delay and 10% cost hike. India, unsurprisingly, is "sending a senior officer to Moscow to assess the situation".

By Helen Massy-Beresford

The answer is that they will all represent aircraft registered on the Isle of Man aircraft registry once it begins operating on 1 May.

The Blue Angels crash last week has provoked extensive debate and I was interested to see this comment turning up regarding the durations of military and civil investigations.

It's not the most important story in the world, but I've got personal experience of this story in The Times regarding strange goings-on at the Ryanair operation at Girona in Spain.

It's official: the 19 April night-time fire at Gulf Aircraft Maintenance's hangar in Abu Dhabi was brought under "quick control" and "contained expeditiously", a line dutifully repeated by the Arab press later that day, thereby sparing Gamco the indignity of having to wipe too much umm ali off its face.

But in a world where large hangars - even those protected by closed-circuit television - can co-exist with small mobile phone cameras, the truth inevitably will out. The truth in this case being that the Qatar Airways A300-600 in Bay 1 (for those unfamiliar with the layout, that's right next to the huge 'No Smoking' sign) was practically reduced to ashes, as these pictures obtained by Air Transport Intelligence clearly illustrate.

Such was the intensity of the blaze that it almost saved painters the job of de-identifying the fuselage. Given that five other aircraft were strategically crammed into the same space, Gamco can consider itself lucky not to have suffered the same misfortune as Sabena Technics and become a beacon of the local economy for all the wrong reasons.

JD O'Malley (right) is teaching an "old" training aircraft some new -- and lethal -- tricks.

O'Malley is a company pilot for Hawker Beechcraft, the aircraft maker formerly known as Raytheon. He was in Washington last week as part of an extended campaign to introduce military brass, politicians and journalists (like me on the left) to the virtues of the AT-6, an armed and net-centric ISR version of the Hawker Beechcraft T-6B turboprop trainer...

This week in the world financial centre that is New York a meeting of investors and space technology development companies quietly made the commercial exploitation of space a little bit more realistic.
While Virgin Galactic is a public relations cheer leader there is a range of companies pushing ahead with their own ideas with Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) close behind Virgin in terms of publicity.
Rocketplane Kistler (Rpk), a company with the same goals as both SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, is developing its Kistler(K)-1 rocket and the XP suborbital spaceplane. It attended this event to present itself to investors with president Randy Brinkley doing the meet and greet.
The promise RpK, SpaceX, Virgin and their cohorts hold out is the realisation of all of us being able to go where only a few highly trained professionals have gone before. Watching the Apollo astronauts go to the Moon people everywhere could imagine that the year 2001 would be a universe of space hotels and lunar excursions.

Ryanair's chief executive Michael O'Leary is well known for his bombastic public persona and ruthless management style, but what's he like when you meet him on business?

One regret that Cold War watchers had with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the end of Kremlinology, the "science" that attempted to ascertain Soviet intentions from the few photographed appearences and statements of the then ruling Communist Party's leadership.
The era of Yeltsin and the rather chaotic form of democracy that embraced Russia in those final years of the twentieth century seemed to end forever the characteristics of Russian society that led to the western perception of it being "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" - to quote UK primeminister Sir Winston Churchill.
But the rise of Vladimir Putin and the return of the country's security-military complex, that largely ran the Soviet Union, as the central organising power within Russian society has returned many loved emblems of "the old times", for example the year 2000 return of the National Anthem of the Soviet Union, originally called the Anthem of the Bolshevik Party, as Russia's official national song.
One other emblem is the mysterious rise and fall of individuals and factions within the higher echelons of Russian society, whether they be involved business or politics.
The Russian space industry, like the nation's oil companies, falls under both, having increasingly heavy government interest in its fortunes while operating in a commercial market.
And its looking very likely that the latest victim of this will be Nikolai Nikolaevich Sevastianov, president and designer general of the Moscow area based S. P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia.