General messages: October 2009 Archives

So Mike, I've babysat your editorship of Flightglobal for a week, writes Airline Business editor Mark Pilling. Thanks for the experience. No, seriously, I enjoyed it.

I would have liked to drive the news side a little harder, but like most of us these days I don't get to down tools on my day job (s) and concentrate on just the one thing.

I got lucky because the news did flow, as I noted in earlier blogs. That will mean traffic during the week should easily have gone past 1.4 million visits and could have nudged 1.5 million. Now that's not far off the Flightglobal record.

I won't claim any credit for that. It's simply a function of how broad and deep Flightglobal is becoming in terms of content. It's frankly big.

I've learnt a lot: how your team works (hard) and how the IT development team works (still a bit of a mystery I've got to admit). I've also seen a few of the cracks we need to fill to improve the site - but I am sure you are well, well aware of them already.

One of the biggest things for me about Flightglobal is understanding where to focus our efforts. Mike has got a pretty good idea I know, but my week at Flightglobal has shown me how tough that is to get a handle on.

Mike I'm glad it's your job rather than mine to get to grips with.

But after a week keeping your chair warm you know more than ever that I'll be keeping the Flightglobal faith.

Good bye but not good night - Mark

OK I'm beginning to get the hang of this web editing lark, writes stand-in Flightglobal editor Mark Pilling.

At least in the sense that I feel what it is Mike Targett, your favourite aviation web editor, feels when nothing is quite happening fast enough, nothing is quite working properly, your team is busting a gut to get a move on but being weighed down by the weight of "stuff" that simply needs doing all the time on Flightglobal. It's like swimming through mud.

Phew I've got that off my chest.

So what has been happening?

Well a lot has been around planning for how we will present our coverage of the ALTA Latin Airline Leaders Forum (next week) and then NBAA (the week after). That means preparing web landing pages to host all of our terrific stories, videos, blogs, Twitter feeds etc from these events.

Around that we've got journalists at the annual meeting of the Arab carriers, the introduction of Egyptair to the Star Alliance (those entail trips to Jeddah and Cairo for lucky Graham Dunn of Airline Business fame) and the European Regions Airline Association (Interlaken I recall).

A great news story today on Flightglobal was Max Kingsley-Jones hauling a nugget from his recent interview with Emirates airline chief Tim Clark on the carrier's thoughts on the 747-8 (no thanks says Tim) and an enhanced 777 (yes please says Tim).

One day to go - come back Mike all is forgiven!

Well today was kind of half in the chair and half in my "normal" Airline Business chair as there has been a lot of preparation going on for next week's ALTA Latin American Airline Leaders Forum, writes stand-in Flightglobal editor Mark Pilling.

In a couple of days we will put up a landing page full of Latin airline material plus the Airline Business Dailies that we will produce for the forum.

The half of the Flightglobal chair I occupied today was dominated by metal news. By that I mean stories that feature new aircraft metal:

* The continuation of Boeing's 747-8 delay news

* The roll out of Gulfstream's G250

* The first flight of Lufthansa's first Airbus A380.

I think the picture I found to illustrate Mike Targett's chair is from Big Brother. Pretty cool isn't it. Shame it isn't really the Flightglobal editor's chair - now there's a thought. 

Now I know why I liked magazines so much! writes stand-in editor of Flightglobal Mark Pilling.

You get say 40 pages to fill and when you filled them with good stuff you say job done, off to press it goes and you read the result.

Flightglobal is like having an infinite number of pages to produce, they are all instantly open to being updated and you never reach the deadline.

So where do you start editing a never ending conveyor belt?

After one of those scrums with the IT folk where I doubt I added much value I got down to a good old-fashioned news meeting.

That revealed that Niall O'Keeffe was preparing a story on the P&W GTF engine for the Chinese regional airliner. That made the lead slot on Flightglobal yesterday afternoon.

Another nice story was the context David Learmount put around the Day of Action European pilots were holding to highlight their concerns around flight time duty limitations. This is what Flightglobal journalists do so well.

Behind the basic news agenda Flightglobal has oceans of content that needs updating, moving around, highlighting etc etc. There are videos to edit and post, forums to monitor, blogs to write and a host of special features to present.

Some of the updates yesterday and today are:

* Mary Kirby and Jon Ostrower at the World Airline Entertainment Association - LIVE

* Flightglobal's new image shop is now OPEN FOR BUSINESS

* Visit the Airline Business blog and this special landing page for videos from the World Low Cost Airlines Congress last week in Barcelona

...Mark Pilling, the editor of Airline Business.

Hello All. I'm standing in for Flightglobal's Mike Targett this week as he takes a well-earned break (that's me on the right with the specs with Enrique Cueto the CEO of LAN at last year's Latin Airline Leaders Forum).

I will be the third "guest" editor of Flightglobal after my illustrious colleague Murdo Morrison, the editor of Flight International, and none other than Sir Richard Branson.

It's a busy week as I prepare for next week's ALTA Latin Airline Leaders Forum in Cartagena, Colombia.

We'll see how the week's news agenda unfolds, but today look out for our take on the action day that involves Europe's pilot unions and associations and we have some breaking news on the engine front.

Other features will be some advance stories for the NBAA business aviation show taking place from 19 October in Orlando and I've got to plug my team's excellent coverage of the World Low Cost Airlines Congress last week.

Plenty of video, Twitter and blog coverage in there for your viewing pleasure.

Wish me luck!

This weekend is your last chance to vote in the Flightglobal Achievement Awards.

Voting so far has been fierce, with over 5,000 votes already received.

All the categories are still in the balance - the nominees leading each category have changed places several times already as the voting has rippled around the internet via Twitter, email and numerous company intranets.

So if you haven't already done so - get your votes in now.

Voting closes at Midnight on 4 October.

Vote now