Kieran Daly: March 2006 Archives

It's 132 years since the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky wrote his famous orchestral work "Pictures at an Exhbition" (a simple version of which you can listen to here - isn't that neat) and he had very different images in mind from the ones that we've just put on display in Moscow.

The photographs that we are exhibiting with our partners Domodedovo International Airport might better inspire a composer such as Sir William Walton who composed my favourite theme in the movie Battle of Britain.

What we've done is take about 30 Flight International covers dating back to 1909 and put them on display in the elegant surroundings of the international departures hall at Domodedovo. The work was commissioned by East Line Group-owned Domodedovo and I was enormously privileged to travel to Moscow to open it with the airport's deputy director general Alexei Raevsky.

My good friends in Domodedovo's PR department - director Anna Krasnova and manager Vladimir Gushchin - did a wonderful job of putting the whole thing together and it looks superb. I arrived to find that they had created a very nice catalogue, hired musicians, and rustled up a 30-strong audience from Moscow's aviation, travel and media community for a champagne opening. Not a bad way to spend a Tuesday morning.

Should you happen to travel through Domodedovo in the next two months then I very much hope you'll take a look at it. And we're looking at possibilities for relocating it afterwards.

Here are some pictures of the exhibition and ceremony.

A Boeing 737 sneaks into the display

Anna Krasnova and Alexei Raevsky of Domodedovo International Airport

Tatyana Khoreshok of the Moscow office of VisitBritain

Yours truly and Alexei Raesky open the event

Neil Cooper, Russia Director, Russo-British Chamber of Commerce

Thanks to everyone who read, and better still commented, on my earlier account of experiencing the A380 evacuation up close and personal. As promised, there will be a more detailed story in next week's Flight International which will of course appear on www.flightglobal.com as usual.

Among other things, it will describe just how I personally got out of the aircraft - and perhaps spark an interesting debate about game theory and actions that are good for an individual not necessarily being good for a group. You'll see what I mean.

But I did immediately want to clear up one loose end that I left hanging in my first post and which I've since been able to discuss with Airbus. That is the mysterious question of what happened to evacuee number 737.

You may recall that I mentioned previously that this was a woman who was escorted off the aircraft a short while before the evacuation - this was important because it appeared to leave only 852 on board and not 853 as planned. Other passengers said she looked ill and we assumed that was why she'd gone.

Well, I am assured that in fact the poor lady needed the bathroom and furthermore that, categorically, she did get back on. Fact is that I didn't see her return, but it is quite true that there were a lot of comings and goings by various programme staff and I'm happy to accept that I just missed it. Hey, I had a lot on my mind!

As it happens, I've just followed my colleague Helen to Domodedovo myself  - mainly to open an exhibition of Flight International magazine covers at Domodedovo airport, which I'll blog separately, but I think Moscow deserves its own despatch.
I'm blogging this on the flight home after a three day refresher lesson in capitalism in the raw, and feeling better for it.
I love places like this where you can directly observe trade in action, see business cases work or not, and watch some individuals succeed for often subtle reasons and others fail. That is much harder to do in mature Western economies which can be impenetrably complex and where the true reasons for success and failure are not always obvious.
(For the same reason I like the airport at Istanbul where I saw a whole terminal level covered with pallets of portable goods watched over by lone traders of unguessable nationality in black leather jackets, and wearing expressions that suggest they've trodden a a rougher path through life than I have. I wouldn't fancy my chances haggling with them.)
Moscow is rather more sophisticated, but the rules of the aviation sector are not so different from those governing the Istanbul entrepreneurs. The one big difference is the interfering hand of the Russian state of course.
I flew Lufthansa into Sheremetyevo - Moscow's oldest, biggest and least pleasant airport. Exactly why Lufthansa, which has perhaps the widest aspirations of any Western carrier in Russia, uses it I don't know. But Shermetyevo-based Aeroflot, which is still very much the 65 tonne gorilla of the sector with its wide domestic network, can and does make life very difficult for airlines that talk about switching to Domodedovo.
There are finally stirrings of change at Sheremetyevo - they've grudgingly put in some lighting so it's not quite so depressing (but still miserable), and a railway link is planned, which will be a blow to the legions of piratical taxi drivers who are allowed to aggressively hassle arriving passengers until they manage to get out of the terminal. (Yes, like JFK, but very much worse.) The immigration line for both Russians and foreigners is a one-hour disaster area which makes the worst of Washington or London look positively attractive.

I flew out on Transaero from Domodedovo, which is about as different as can be imagined. Functional, light, airy, already with a rail link, and generally the very model of a modern airport. No surprise to find Emirates choosing Domedovo or to see a gaggle of 'Singapore girls' leaving the frozen airport in their renowned SIA frocks, but wrapped in rather less-marketable SIA greatcoats.
Both airports still play host to an exotic and colourful collection of Soviet-era aircraft in various states of repair and disrepair (a couple of which Helen photographed), and leased and occasionally new Boeings. Airbus is pretty much restricted to the new Aeroflot fleet - otherwise this is the land of the leased 737.
Taxying around Domodedovo provides a wonderful view of this eclectic display. Despite long-standing predictions to the contrary, Russia still has some 230 airlines and counting (unclear whether upwards or downwards), ranging from Aeroflot down to one- or two-aircraft fleets from all over this vast land.
How they all stay in business in their ultra-niche markets remains unexplained, but no doubt partly lies in the lurid stories of what often happens if you try to set up in competition to them - that first involves overcoming a mysterious series of local government-inspired obstacles which, if you don't take the hint, are followed by some alarmingly personal attentions from representatives of the incumbents themselves.
It's anybody's guess who designed some of the liveries, but they certainly had fun. No-one more so than the folks who came up with the eyeball-searing green of Sibir/S7 Airlines which I have only ever seen elsewhere on my 11 year-old son's bedroom walls - and even he eventually thought better of it. Leaving that room left you with a slight orange afterglow to your vision for an hour or so, but in the grey-white Russian winter, the same green with red trim works superbly.
We pass numerous examples of the ubiquitous Il-76 freighter, now largely banned in Europe on noise grounds, a few Tu-134s including one pretty snappy-looking one with a huge KD on the side that I rather fancy for myself, plus Tu-154s, a surprising number of Il-62s, plenty of Il-86s and the odd Tu-204.
There is also a cornucopia of registration prefixes - Russia, Ireland and assorted Caribbean tax-havens are of course well-represented, but Libya's 5A- is in evidence and somewhere that owns 4K- also has a presence. (I used to know that sort of stuff - please leave a comment if you still do!)

It's Sunday morning and as usual I'm wearing a numbered bib and doing agility tests in an aircraft hangar with 1,000 Germans I've never met before!

As you'll have guessed, the one thing we had in common is that we all thought it sounded interesting to be a volunteer in the first - and probably only - evacuation trial of the A380.

So here we are on a miserable, wet airfield in one of the biggest hangars in Europe at Airbus' Finkenwerder production facility next to the River Elbe.

I'm number 873, proud of it, and with a white bib numbered in black to prove it. We hand in everything in our possession which, though I don't realise it then, is going to make the next five hours pass very slowly indeed.

First the agility test. Line up, run along the wobbly board, bounce on the trampette, up on the vaulting horse, through the maze of cones without falling over and you're in. Immediately a tall, blond chap who looks like a candidate for the German decathlon team vaults about a metre over the horse.

No, no, no  says the supervisor sensing a long day ahead, you have to stand on it. We chuckle, the decathlete gives us a dark look, then grudgingly clambers onto the horse. He passes, we all pass.

We've handed in our watches and there then passes an interminable five hours or so while the 1,000 or so volunteers get whipped into whatever mysterious order Airbus, EASA and the FAA have decided. I don't speak any German - everyone else in the hall is speaking German. It's no fun at all.

We're all sitting at endless trestle tables, with neon lighting and a concrete floor, drinking soft drinks - the whole thing looks like a church-hall coffee morning on a gigantic scale.

An a capella group comes on and sings Lollipop, in English. It's cute. Then a sort-of comic comes in and talks in German. I laugh when everyone else does. The a capella group comes on again, with suits - I think the first performance was actually a sound-check.

We get fed two choices of near-indistinguishable creamy pasta that make us crave airline food, but presumably set us up with our slow carbohydrate fix for the afternoon's activity.

Finally we're on. We get an epic briefing of which I understand not a word. When the blonde with the number next to mine moves off, I follow her. We all warm up properly, now looking like a church-hall yoga session, and then it's through a sinister elevating steel connecting door to the other half of the hangar.

What we see is the nose section of an A380 in zinc-chromate green with one upper-deck door and one main-deck door exposed, and stairs leading to them. The rest of the aircraft is shielded by a huge black curtain so that we can't see which of the upper-deck slides has been pre-deployed, as agreed with EASA for safety reasons. The void under the aircraft is stacked with cardboard boxes so that we can't see through for the same reason.

We board the aircraft and are greeted by a Lufthansa cabin crew treating us as if we were all off across the Atlantic.

Boarding is painfully slow - the 853 seats are just numbered like our bibs from 1 to 1,200 and something with no indication of where they are across the aircraft. We're first on the top deck and have another interminable wait while all the other groups board. I'm in an aisle seat immediately ahead of what should be the lavs, the nearest door is immediately the other side of the lavs - no problem choosing the door anyway.

To get that many people in, the aircraft is of course in all-economy configuration with extremely basic seats and definitely no IFE. The window shades are down to stop us looking out at the slides again. The clocks came forward the previous night and I have the quick snooze I've needed for a couple of hours.

The cabin crew brief us with Airbus' first attempt at an A380 safety card, apparently showing the aircraft being strangled to death by 16 escape slides. The good news is that there is only one type of door on the aircraft - look, lift up the swing handle, hit the button, look again, jump onto the slide if there is one. I can do that I think.

We all sit in economy class for another half-hour or so. Where the lavs and/or galley should be there is actually a wooden cubicle with two letterbox shaped slots in it through which two pairs of eyes - one male and scary, the other female, sexy, and also scary - are blinklessly watching us. (I made the blink-bit up, but you get the idea.) I start to feel I know how lab rats feel.

A woman is led out of our cabin looking faint and doesn't return. Ironically she's got bib number 737 (for you conspiracy theorists.)

Two anonymous guys, presumably from the regulatory authorities, wander through throwing blankets and simulated baggage - lots of it - in the aisles. They also make notes about all of us on clipboards. I start to feel a hint of adrenalin. How we all behave in the next few minutes has very serious ramifications for the A380 programme one way or the other.

The lights are dimmed in a pre-take-off sort of way. We sit for a while and I start to lose focus. With no warning it goes totally dark, but there's no other indication of anything being amiss. I hear shouts in German, which as usual I don't understand, but I get the message.

I'm out of my seat like a snake and reach my favoured door just in time for the male flight attendant to turn round and tell me it's not working. I knew the regulators had disarmed half the doors, and now I know at least one of the ones they chose.

I know it's irritating, but I'm going to have to save what happens next for my feature piece in Flight International next week. Suffice it to say that a short while later I'm standing in the pitch black hangar looking back at the utterly surreal sight of the towering bulk of the A380 with slides hanging from it everywhere, bathed in a pale yellow light from the slides' LEDs, and literally hundreds of shadowy black figures plunging down them.

The simulated ground rescuers are screaming at them to run, the flight attendants are screaming at others to jump. Suddenly I realise the people coming down the slides are wearing uniform - it's the cabin crew and it's all over. I feel the adrenalin drain away and wonder why I also feel utterly exhausted after not really doing very much. I suspect I'm getting a tiny inkling of what the real thing must be like.

I'm certain it's been fast and, sure enough, already Airbus programme officials in their bright green tee-shirts are punching the air and hugging each other. One senior manager who I know mutters something about 75 seconds as he passes and we shake hands.

Finally it's all over, a German debrief that I don't understand, and off I go to hear Airbus and EASA give the rest of the media the official line.

Airbus CEO Gustav Humber, A380 programme chief Charles Champion, and a party of other Airbus execs have flown up from Toulouse this Sunday to see all this and I'm gently reminded that, had it gone wrong, they would all have been back in Hamburg to do it again next week. And if that went wrong then this multi-billion dollar programme would be in serious difficulties.

Journalistic objectivity aside, I'm pleased as Punch for them. And I forego the €60 that each volunteer gets. Sometimes it's worth it just to be there.

This thread  over with our good friends at Pprune prompts me to warn our pilot readers not to read Flight International while flying. It's the contribution by username Klink that got my attention.

The debate there is over the question of whether it is OK for airline pilots to read while in the cruise. Klink says you shouldn't read novels because they get too much of your attention. Stick to something lighter, he recommends.

Excellent point. As responsible publishers we're urging you not to read Flight International either - because if novels grab too much of your attention, then think what this cracking magazine will do! Especially the jobs section!!!

I'd be interested to hear suggestions as to suitable cockpit reading material which takes so little mental effort that it does not pose a hazard.

And I'm happy to point readers (who contact me privately I think) at publications that carry no risk of distracting their attention at all, leaving them bright and alert and ready to respond in an instant to their next TCAS RA. (Not that they'll need to be for much longer it seems.)

I've argued before that blacklists do little to help aviation safety, and the publication today of the European Union's long awaited list of banned and restricted carriers has done nothing to change my view. Here's the list in full.

The news is that any of you who were considering flying to or from Europe on the airlines of Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone or Swaziland will now find that impossible. It's also going to be even harder to put yourself in the tender hands of North Korea's state airline, and you can tear up your frequent flyer cards on a handful of carriers from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, and the Comores. There's more detail, but you get the idea.

The EU says this will make a substantial contribution to air safety in Europe, but I can't for the life of me see how. A miniscule contribution perhaps - anyway, I hope nobody spent too much time producing the list. I rather fear they did, but maybe they just looked up the US FAA's IASA list which would have largedly saved them the trouble.

Perhaps most significantly for the people of Europe, the methodology that appears to have been employed would not have prevented any of the accidents that resulted in all the political furore that culminated in the publication of the list.

Well, perhaps predictably, Concorde is the winner of The Great British Design Quest run by the BBC and London's Design Museum. As readers of this article , of which I was the author, may have suspected - I don't agree with the outcome. Still, no fewer than 200,000 people voted so I'm not in a position to demand a recount.

But it should have been the Spitfire. I think the contest is about form and function - the Spitfire definitely wins on the second criterion, and I personally think it's also ahead on the first.

Fact is that the Spitfire did what it was designed to do better than Concorde did. Now it's true that the odds were stacked against the Concorde team, who were exploring a design regime way beyond anything that had gone before. But in the event RJ Mitchell's Spitfire was, I think, as good as it could possibly have been at the time - and in combat proved enduringly triumphant.

Aircraft aesthetics of course are largely a matter of taste, but it's not quite as simple as that. I think much of Concorde's attraction is to do with its photogenicity (such a word as that???). In the flesh there are plenty of angles from which it's not quite so pretty. The Spitfire on the other hand looks superb in any airborne pic (taxying, it often looks like an accident waiting to happen, and sometimes was), but it's also virtually impossible to find an ugly line on it even close-up.

Furthermore, aesthetics aren't just visual. There has never been anything that sounded quite as thrilling as a Rolls-Royce Merlin and I doubt there ever will. (Although the Olympus is not bad at all.)

I knew I was asking for trouble as soon as I produced my non-comprehensive list of aviation folks included in Forbes magazine's list of billionaires. So here's a couple of additions.

The obvious howler was not picking up Steven Udvar-Hazy, who Forbes credits with $2.4 billion, and whose life is an inspiration to everyone in aviation. After creating International Lease Finance (ILFC) with a reputed $150,000 plus a $1.7 billion bank loan, he sold it to AIG, continued to run it, and built it into the leasing colossus it is today. Famously, he found $66 million to create the Steven Udvar-Hazy Center at the National Air & Space Museum.

Around the time ILFC was becoming what it is now, an Irish entrepreneur called Tony Ryan was creating Guinness Peat Aviation (GPA) in Europe. That didn't end so happily and it essentially disappeared into ILFC rival GECAS, but Ryan and his family have done just fine out of aviation, most recently through their interest in Ryanair. Forbes doesn't mention Ryan, but in the UK he has been reported as having a fortune in the region of €1 billion. His interests are tied-up with his family, however, and it's hard to tell. But he could well join Udvar-hazy in the select breed of true aviation billionaires.

My colleague Nick Ionides in Singapore also mentions Naresh Goyal, the founding owner of India's Jet Airways which is now expanding into an international carrier. Goyal has interests in other forms of transport, but Forbes puts his fortune at $1.5 billion and it seems that most of it is from his airline. He's so well-liked we'll have to give him the benefit of the doubt!

Heard the one about the guy who got into a pilot-induced oscillation (PIO) in an A380? Well, it was me.

For non-pilots, a PIO is what happens when your brain gets out of synch with the aircraft's movements in one axis or another, so that all your corrective actions end up neatly timed to make its undesired behaviour get even worse.

I guess every pilot that ever lived has been there, but in modern Airbus types its quite hard to achieve because if you command the aircraft to fly somewhere, broadly speaking it will then do exactly that until you tell it to do something else. The way you generate a PIO in such an aircraft is to try to fly it like a 'conventional' type - hence my difficulty, which was happily short-lived once I stopped abusing Airbus' fine aeroplane.

It was all a bit of fun - but fairly serious fun as I was fortunate enough to visit the CAE-built A380 simulators at Toulouse. They're not perfectly representative of the aircraft's in-flight behaviour, because new in-flight data is constantly being input into the simulator as it is generated, but the first machine is now pretty good.

I got the chance to perform a daytime take-off, (huge) circuit, and night-time landing. I suppose I should say now my actual piloting experience is limited to about 200 hours of light jets and single-piston types, most of it more than 20 years ago.

I came away with two major impressions. First the ease of preparing for flight and then 'managing' the aircraft is truly remarkable. Airbus' menu-driven check-lists allied to the clever keyboard cursor control unit (KCCU), with its roller-ball and clicker falling comfortably to hand, makes the process a joy. Programming the flight management system, aided by a QWERTY keyboard, is similarly convenient.

And second the aircraft, like Airbus narrowbodies that I have handled in the simulator, is stunningly easy to fly, with the A380's inherent inertia being the only substantial differentiator from others in the family.

That said, my landing involved striking the runway a mighty blow a distressing distance past the piano keys, although at least on the centreline. As for most widebody novices, judging when the main-gear is going to touch down while your cockpit is still high above the runway is the tricky bit even with the synthetic voice altitude call-out. But, courtesy of Goodrich's landing gear and/or CAE's software we were safely down and staying there. I was wise enough to apply the parking brake and get out rather than explore the simulated grass while I figured out how to taxy the colossus around Toulouse's taxiways.

Over the next few months dozens of pilots will be learning to fly the A380 in the same simulator for real. I predict they are in for a terrific time.

Forbes magazine's annual list of the world's billionaires gives plenty of support to the old chestnut that the way to become an aviation millionaire is to start out as a billionaire.

Turns out there are 793 dollar-billionaires that Forbes has managed to identify, so scanning the list is not a quick task - but I can't find anyone who made all that much of his or her pile out of aviation. There are a good few who have played around in it though, and some just starting.

Sir Richard Branson in Britain is the closest thing to an aviation billionaire I can find - and he isn't really one. But at 55 and, says Forbes, sitting on $1.8 billion, he has created about two and a half airlines with another one in the works. Plus he could be the first space tourism operator and has made the occasional balloon trip you'll recall.

Less well-known, but vastly richer, is Carlos Slim of Mexico who with $30 billion could no doubt afford to see his new low-cost airline Volaris go bust without losing much sleep.

But India's Vijay Mallya is taking more of a risk to his mere $1 billion with start-up Kingfisher Airlines and its order for Airbus A380s.

I think London City Airport must have contributed a fair proportion of Irishman Dermot Desmond's $1 billion - it's been a terrific business for him and makes far more sense than losing money in airlines.

Mind you, 70 year-old Carl Icahn, who one way or another has picked up $8.7 billion, showed with TWA that you don't actually have to have a successful airline to come out on top.

And in fact it's probably people like Paul Allen, who Forbes has in sixth place on its list with $22 billion, who is getting most satisfaction from his expenditure in aerospace by also exploring space on a private basis.

Last word from me goes to the man who, with $42 billion is number two on Forbes' list - Warren Buffett. The Sage of Omaha did not get into that position by indulging himself in aviation for its own sake, and his investments in FlightSafety and NetJets have got to be two of the canniest ever made in aviation. (Oh, and in the end he did succumb by shelling out on a business jet that he has admitted is essentially because he wants one.)

I'm sure there are others on the list - drop a comment below if you can find any and tell us what you think about investing in aviation.