October 2007 Archives

Five years and eleven months after a regional jet crashed at Zurich killing 24 occupants, six officials of the airline involved - Crossair - have been charged with negligent homicide. This will be the second major trial stemming from a dark period in Swiss aviation history when just about everything seemed to go wrong. Nobody was convicted over mismanagement charges relating to the collapse of Swissair. I'm not sure that this new trial will end as well for the defendants.

Congratulations to Tony Elwood. He's 75, is married to a 51 year-old babe called Julie, divides his time between Australia and British Colombia, and had the sound taste to blow $50,000 on a ticket for the A380's first revenue flight. (Congratulations to Julie too for that matter.)

He kept a low profile while Virgin America was being forced to beg for the right to do business, but now CEO Fred Reid is happy to talk. There's a short but educational interview in Fast Company.

My colleague Mary Kirby is blogging as Runway Girl. If you look carefully you'll notice differences between her blog and mine.

It must be a great job - being one of those guys in the FAA or CAA who keeps an eye on the safety of things like DC-8s, 707s, DC-3s and Fokker 100s. The latter, for example, have an irritating habit of losing their wheels - must drive the pilots nuts.

This is the oldest Flight International story I can find on our website about what became the A380. It was written by somebody called Guy Norris, which tells you how long ago it was.

Scott Hamilton's pages at Leeham are the only place to be checking out today. Buried deep down in them is the remarkable news that the head of the 747 (including -8) programme has moved on after a year. This, as far as I can make out, was never announced by the company. Scott's also dug up Canada's first input into the Boeing/Airbus WTO saga. (They're backing the US.)

Understanding what Boeing and Airbus are up to is child's play compared with making sense of the regional aircraft world these days. Not so long ago it was a question of Bombardier battling Embraer on jets and ATR on props. And everyone trying to find a respectable way out of the props. Now everyone's talking to everyone, props are selling like hotcakes, the French and Italians both want to hang onto ATR, and the Russians are coming! (Maybe the Chinese and Japanese too.) Only this afternoon Bombardier placed another 10 new Q400s. What will become of everyone?

For the first time in 14 years an Avro Vulcan is back in the air. The UK-based group of restorers behind the project have overcome extraordinary obstacles to get this wonderful machine flying again. It made a 34min flight from RAF Bruntingthorpe yesterday. There are several movies rattling around but I think this is the best one.

You can read more about the project at the Vulcan to the Sky Trust site. Lots of V-force veterans shedding a tear and sharing a tale on Pprune of course. And a particularly nice pic of the Vulcan flying here. Addison Schonland talks to BBC journalist and Vulcan devotee Sean Maffett in this podcast.

All of this comes a bit over a year after I first wrote about the project. I still think there are questions to be asked about this sort of thing, but I'm massively impressed by the determination and organisation of the team who knuckled down and made this happen. Some of the Pprune folks are now discussing what aircraft should fly next.

Tomorrow it's the Rugby World Cup final in Paris. England vs South Africa for those of you who haven't realised (which I suppose is today's dictionary definition of an American!) If you're in London then somewhat amazingly you can still fly to Paris tomorrow (although you'll look long and hard for a roof over your head). Right now it'll be £404 one-way with well-known low-cost carrier Easyjet, but a tempting £390 in business class on British Airways or, even better, £375 business class with Air France. Eurostar is all but full. The French, naturally enough, are celebrating with a strike. And the Irish, like me, aren't celebrating with anything.

Laugh, I nearly wept. Northwest EVP strategy Neal Cohen is boasting about the youth of Northwest Airlines' fleet. Yup, that's the Northwest with the 110 DC-9s, dozen or so 747-200s, and recent home of the DC-10. Truly the darlings of East Hartford, but not really the rest of the world.

The UK government and its agencies have never, to put it at its gentlest, embraced the concept of transparency. So it's no surprise that the CAA is refusing to tell anyone - such as passengers for example - why it has pulled the ETOPS approval of leisure airline Flyglobespan. Apparently the first such action in 15 years.

This serves no useful purpose and is positively bad for all concerned. It damages Flyglobespan's credibility, hurts business, insults passengers, and ignores the legitimate interests of other operators.

I realise his departure coincided with that of Mike Bair, but the lack of blog-focus on the announcement of BAE Systems CEO Mike Turner's planned departure is an amazing thing. This is the man who led the company to become the fifth biggest aerospace defence contractor in the world, took it out of Airbus, latterly spearheaded its really extraordinary push into the USA, and oversaw the Typhoon sale to Saudi Arabia.

Jim Wallace at the Seattle P-I has got hold of departing 787 programme manager Mike Bair's farewell note to his team. It's a model of its kind.

Meanwhile, Boeing's VP and general manager of global partners, Steven Schaffer, gets an award.

In any normal industry it would be obvious that the hugely differing skill-sets required during the life of a global engineering programme would require you to appoint different leaders as it progressed. Not so in aviation - so now it's hard for Boeing to move the hugely respected Mike Bair with the sort of dignity he deserves. Slightly amazing how a move to being head of strategy for the world's biggest airliner maker can be seen as a bad thing to happen to you. The Seattle newspapers are talking the most sense on this.

Apologies for not posting a follow-up from the Singapore Airlines A380 handover yesterday. That's partly because I got bogged down in boring old mainstream journalism, but also because of the epic queue to tour the aircraft and in particular to lay eyes on the now legendary double-bed version of the Singapore Suites.

Today's the latest of the great A380 extravaganzas in Toulouse - and it's arguably the one that matters most - the delivery of the first aircraft to Singapore Airlines. I've been in Toulouse since yesterday and out here at the site since early this morning. As usual it feels like everyone I've ever met is here, this time including a hefty contingent from Asia and Australia courtesy of SIA.

Not entirely of course. But we've been talking to a senior person at Marsans today and he makes clear that a major motivation for this utterly unexpected piece of business was the desire to make Iberia look like a poor relative.

Well British Airways has now confirmed that it is indeed behind the mysterious Project Lauren which I wrote about earlier.

A spokesman tells my Air Transport Intelligence colleague Victoria Moores: “The company will be a wholly-owned subsidiary and will have its own set of terms and conditions for its employees, separate to BA’s mainline activities.”

Over here at Pprune not everybody is happy.

I'm not in the habit of buying aviation stock (tends to be a bit too close to home) but once in a while I cover a story and know I should be getting a piece of the action. One was the flotation in the mid-1990s of what was then Air London and became Air Partner. Actually if you'd bought the stock a year ago you'd be more than happy. But anyway this great financial story is highly informative about what's going on in air travel.

My Zoom UK flight discussed here was unusual in being a transatlantic run without the benefit of ETOPS. On a London-New York run that adds as much as an hour to the flight-time and takes you up to the Far North. But it's not always a bad thing.

Once in a while the airlines do something right for you, and as I had sort-of, kind-of good experiences with Jetblue and Zoom UK this summer, I thought I should record the fact. In both cases it was recovering from tricky situations that made the difference.

Speaking of Go as I was below, the splendid Barbara Cassani is back in the airline business.

A slightly odd way of going about business, but it seems activity is underway at British Airways' planned operation between mainland Europe and the USA.