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Enter this caption competition to win a copy of The 100 Greatest Women in Aviation by Liz Moscrop and Sanjay Rampal, which includes profiles of the first woman to have a pilot's licence, Elise Raymonde Deroche, Amelia Earhart, Nancy Bird Walton and Amy Johnston.

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More on Women in Aviation: 

• PICTURES: Women in aviation gallery on AirSpace 
• PICTURES TO PURCHASE: Women in aviation gallery
• VIDEOS: Women in Aviation - The ATA girl and the display pilot

 

Looking in the archive we can see how Flightglobal used to celebrate the festive period. Here are a couple of discoveries.

1942   the second year of lighthearted breaks in the serious business of wartime aviation

2000 Uncle Roger's festive quiz

After Christmas lunch, why not escape more indulgence by putting your aviation knowledge to the test with this year's Unlce Roger Festive Quiz.

Artist Fiona Banner unveiled her latest exhibition yesterday at the Tate Britain, of two decommissioned fighter aircraft models of aircraft the Sea Harrier and the Sepecat Jaguar.

Banner, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002, is better-known in the art world for her "wordscapes", or hand-written and printed texts that retell in her own words entire feature films or sequences of events.

Information on the Tate's website says that "[her] personal transcriptions, which began in 1994 with the film Top Gun, highlight the way actual or imagined events are fictionalised and mythologised."

Banner says that the aircraft represent the 'opposite of language', used when communication fails.

In this exhibition she "explores the tension between the intellectual perception of the fighter plane and physical experience of the object by bringing body and machine into close proximity".

Suspended from the ceiling of the Duveen Gallery at the Tate Britain, the Sea Harrier transforms machine into a "captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake; the Harrier Hawk".

 

A Jaguar lies belly up on the floor, its posture, she says: "is suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy".

Banner remembers "long sublime walks in the Welsh mountains" with her father.

She recalls: "Suddenly a fighter plane would rip through the sky, and shatter everything. It was so exciting, loud and overwhelming; it would literally take our breath away. The sound would arrive from nowhere, all you would see was a shadow and then the plane was gone.

"At the time harrier jump jets were at the cutting edge of technology but to me they were like dinosaurs, prehistoric, from a time before words."

Aircraft profiles with information collated from Flightglobal and the rest of the web:

Sepecat Jaguar

Harrier

 

 By Joel Foreman from Sutton Grammar School currently doing work experience with Flightglobal 

 Image credit © Fiona Banner, Photo: Tate p>

Pilot and actor John Travolta flew into Lanseria, South Africa, in his Boeing 707 from Buenos Aires into the ExecuJet facility. With him were wife Kelly Preston, and daughter Ella, to support the Australian national team in the World Cup.

ExecuJet South Africa is set to do record business during June and July. Its FBO facility handled 197 business jet movements in the first week of the World Cup.

Business jets are being parked on the ExecuJet apron, the Lanseria freight apron, as well as on the parallel runway 06R.

Approximately 160 different aircraft and over 350 movements are already confirmed to arrive at ExecuJet's Lanseria FBO for the duration of the soccer tournament.

By Joel Foreman, currently doing work experience in the Flightglobal office from Sutton Grammar School. 

No, it's the not the 1970s (you're on the internet after all) and nor are you looking at Braniff's fluoro jets. It's the A340 Swiss used to inaugurate its new route to San Francisco.

As the airline's photos (here and here) and video (below) show, a lot of effort went into making the grooviest aircraft in the sky.

Emirates may be the official sponsor of the World Cup, but that hasn't stopped other airlines--who cannot promote the World Cup--from quietly giving support to and promotion of soccer's (football's) biggest event.

In 2006 Lufthansa painted the nose cone of an A340 to replicate a soccer ball (football) and now British Airways has joined in with its A319 G-EUPX bearing a soccer ball on its nose.

Yannick Delamarre captured these photos of G-EUPX at London Heathrow last week.

Data from around 06:30 today (15 April) shows a virtual absence of aircraft in the northern UK as a result of restrictions on air traffic.

A big thank you to the Planeplotter and John Locker for this great graphic highlighting the quietness above.

An ash cloud originating from a volcano beneath the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in southwest Iceland is currently causing havoc in northern European airspace.

Here are some images from this unusual environmental event:

What's the first thing you think of when you hear 'Russia'?

Chances are sunflowers aren't one of them.

But that's exactly the motif sported on Kuban's new livery, designed by UK-based Honour Branding. The livery appears on two B737s leased from ILFC, Honour Branding says. The B737s are at East Midlands Airport awaiting to fly back to Russia. Kuban services the Krasnodar or Kuban region of Southern Russia. The region will host the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games.

Kuban is owned by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, the CEO of Basic Element, an investment firm with interests in natural resources but also financial services and aviation.

Honour Branding says:

The rebranding is part of an investment programme aimed at making Kuban one of top ten Russian airlines on domestic and international routes as it seeks to capitalize on the growing popularity of the region's resorts and upcoming Olympics. The strategy includes a complete renovation of Kuban's fleet, with ten brand new Boeing 737-700 NG (New Generation) and another ten state-of-the-art Russian-built planes to be added over the next three to five years. Kuban also plans to extend its international network, flying to new destinations in Europe and Asia.

As part of the first phase of investment, Kuban is leasing four Boeing 737-300 from ILFC for a transition period of three years, needed to retrain pilots and prepare Kuban's maintenance base to service the new fleet.

Honour Branding says of the livery:

People of Krasnodar are extremely proud - proud of the region and its agricultural output, the spa resorts and Sochi ( 2014 Winter Olympics) as well as its growing business centre, so it was an obvious choice for them to choose their regional flower as a symbol for their airline's identity.

They wanted to shift perceptions of the brand and the region, and for customers to be uplifted by the new livery rather than be oblivious of yet another indistinctive 'corporate flag' scheme.

For thousands, there's no better day to marry than on Valentine's Day. And if you're into aviation, there's no better way to celebrate than in some of these fashions:

1. Have your wedding photos taken at the airport
In Kuala Lumpur, one couple had their wedding photos taken at AirAsia's low-cost terminal. They chose the airport because they met at AirAsia.

2. Marry at the airport
Amsterdam Schiphol offers four types of marriage services, including the "ready for take-off" and "ticket to paradise".

3. Marry on an aircraft. In zero gravity.
Last June weightless flight provider Zero G said it hosted the first ever weightless wedding.