March 2008 Archives

Flight has just announced that we've bought JP aviation directories. The flagship product is the annual JP Airline Fleets Directory. A lot of you will know it - it's a pre-internet doorstop of a book that has thrived post-internet among the huge community of users that need a robust and reliable directory and can't justify paying for the type of high-end, realtime industry data that we also sell. You see it in control towers all over the place for example. And these days you can also get it electronically with updates.

JP is one of the grand old brands of the aviation information business and it's a real privilege to be associated with it.

As part of the deal we will also come to own the JP Biz Jet directory and the Buchair (UK) online shop, which is a particularly interesting diversification for us. The full details are a bit more complex - I've pasted the announcement below for those of you interested.

What it does for us is fill in another piece of the jigsaw as we seek to provide information solutions for the entire global aerospace community - all the way from the enthusiast to the power-user in industry. And what it does for the JP operation is secure its future in a competitive world.

It also shows that, even though we're up for sale ourselves as part of Reed Business Information, it really is business as usual.

It's not really the same situation, but the UK has today finally signed on the dotted for the EADS-supplied, Airbus A330-based Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft. It's buying a princely 14 of them from the Airtanker consortium. But the contract is worth £13 billion ($26 billion) because of the way it's structured.

Sulako's Blog is still my favourite aviation blog. Sort of Ernest K Gann meets GQ Magazine meets Psychologies (which my wife reads, but whose website has infamously collapsed.)

And now meets Mills & Boon!

So will Sully and Lisa get together? (Well yes, obviously we know the ending.) But will Sully's full-on pilot's romancing style work out? Will Lisa prove a pushover? (Nope.) What is Sully's plan-B? (OK, plan-C?)

A legion of pilots awaits the outcome.

Congratulations to them, and thanks for the opportunity to run their pix of a Vickers Viscount making the carrier's first scheduled flight - from Vienna to London - on 31 March 1958; and also of the flight attendants.

Austrian Airlines Group CEO Alfred Otsch says in a statement: "With its successful Focus East strategy, uncompromising insistence upon quality and hugely dedicated workforce, the red-white-red tailfin of Austrian is perfectly positioned to enjoy an independent future."

Not so long ago a flag-carrier CEO would have been thought quite eccentric to specify in an anniversary announcement that the company expected an "independent" future. Not any more though. In Austrian's case time will tell.

This is a first, right? Boeing has gone public with a blog spreading the word on the KC-X protest. I don't recall any company using a blog in the context of a live competitive procurement. (Could be wrong - it's not really my area.)

Who was this telling my colleagues at Airline Business less than a year ago that the legacy Gulf carriers wouldn't be among those developing low-cost carriers in the region? "The low-cost market is almost 100% point to point. We have a network." And adding that Emirates plans to stick with an all-widebody fleet.Why that would be executive vice-president operations Ghaith al Ghaith, newly appointed to head Dubai's low-cost airline project. This, as the Dubai government rather tied itself in knots explaining, is not part of Emirates. Fair enough.

In the same Airline Business article last May, James Rigney, vice president at Emirates' indecently close rival Etihad in Abu Dhabi said a low-cost unit "has not been considered". Bet it is now though.

Mark Pilling at Airline Business thinks Ghaith al Ghaith is being lined up to head Emirates one day. Maybe, maybe - what is for sure is that there are few more important management priorities at Emirates than succession planning. Somehow the leap has to be made from Flanagan, Clarke et al to a new generation of leaders. It's no criticism to say that the transition will probably mark the airline's most vulnerable period.

I've asked before who it is that the Bombardier CSeries competes with. My thesis being that, while nobody yet properly understands the answer, one way or another that aircraft is going to shape what happens in the narrowbody sector big-time. Reason being that those undetermined competitors are going to have to react, and quite possibly not just with yet another aircraft - more likely something a little more structural in the industry. There were some hints over the last few days from two of the players - Embraer and Boeing.

Like any journalist worth his salt I'm always leery of using the word 'first' - as in the first time for anything to have allegedly happened. But it does rather look as if Emirates has become the first airline in the world to offer in-flight, mobile phone, voice calls.

They're using the service from AeroMobile - which in turn is owned by Arinc and Telenor.

Not the most obvious career move, but Nick Lappos is joining Bell Helicopter. If you regularly follow rotary matters I won't have to explain the remarkable nature of this (and in fact you'll no doubt be aware of the story already), but if you don't, here's a quick rundown.

As usual on this sort of thing the numbers are a little fuzzy, but the fact that remains that British Airways pilots put on a pretty impressive demonstration at Heathrow over OpenSkies this weekend. And they really have been pulling in at least some degree of US-based support.

You'll remember that we're for sale, as part of Reed Business Information, by our parent Reed Elsevier.

You must need nerves of steel to work in Southwest Airlines comms department right now. Once you mount the corporate-blogging horse there's no getting off it again. And Southwest is learning enough about what can then happen to write the ultimate book on the subject.

Today I've been putting together a podcast with my colleague David Field, who's Airline Business US Editor based in Washington DC, and Addison Schonland of IAG who's created quite a few of these now and is producing some very slick material. I'm asking them about what's happening (or not happening) with US airline consolidation and what on earth's going on at Southwest Airlines; they're asking me about Airbus and EADS' financial results that I reported on from Paris. We're going to do this for the next few weeks at least - take a listen and tell us what you think.

As luck would have it Boeing's announcement of its protest of the KC-X award to Northrop Grumman / EADS came on the eve of EADS' annual results press conference in Paris. I got in late to Paris last night for the event which kicked off at 07:00 today, so woke up to news of the protest. And I'm blogging from this room in the Westin Hotel, which beats the office.

There are so many conflicting statements involved in the story of the safety allegations concerning Southwest that I can't work out for myself who's the villain, if in fact there is one. But it's perhaps the first case I can remember of an airline using its blog to defend its safety record.

Talks to settle the dispute over terms and conditions for pilots at British Airways' planned OpenSkies subsidiary have broken down say BALPA. And there's been an outbreak of utter poison over at Pprune which we can all only hope is not representative of the wider reality.

Boeing was debriefed by the USAF on the KC-X loss to EADS yesterday. They're not happy - here's the statement they released afterwards.

ST. LOUIS, March 07, 2008 -- The U.S. Air Force has completed a debriefing for The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] during which acquisition officials sought to explain why they selected a team of Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) for a contract to replace aerial refueling tankers.

"Our plan now is to work through the weekend to come to a decision on our course of action early next week," said McGraw. "It will be a very rigorous and deliberative process to ensure we're balancing the needs of the warfighter with our desire to be treated fairly. For decades Boeing has been recognized as a defense company that never takes lightly protests of our customers' decisions."

But there's no statement on the 787 situation, which is not looking good.

Flt Lt Michelle Goodman's frankly rather good-looking features (bear with me - that is relevant) are to my surprise all over the front pages of several British tabloids this morning. It's all to do with a medium-sized dust-up over orders given to servicemen at RAF Wittering not to wear their uniform 0ff-duty in public in the local town. That came after some were abused by civilians.

Getting women into RAF combat aircraft was a long, hard struggle against numerous objections - some reasonable but surmountable, some unreasonable and much harder to surmount. They got there in the end, and today comes news of a little bit of history that chips away at some of the remaining unreasonable ones.

Flt Lt Michelle Goodman, an Agusta Westland Merlin helicopter pilot has become the first woman to win the DFC. It follows an operation at Basra in Iraq.

Here's Flt Lt Goodman:

And here's the DFC.

She was one of 184 British servicemen and women decorated today.

That's 27.7in for you mercurial Americans. Here's the BBC chart for the UK Monday lunchtime.

Here's the Reuters story. Analyst Richard Safran is forecasting first deliveries in July 2009 at the earliest - that's six months later than the current delay acknowledged by Boeing.

Boeing's problem is that it's been steadily spending its credibility-equity with the financial community. As often observed, the market doesn't like surprises. Actually hardly anyone will be surprised if this latest development comes to pass because for whatever reason Boeing's most recent update on the 787 was greeted with considerable scepticism anyway.

But while not liking surprises, the market absolutely loathes complete uncertainty. And that would be where this situation was heading. That's if Mr Safran is correct. (And I know for a fact that he's not the only one who thinks there's trouble ahead.)

Update: Scott Hamilton tells Seattle radio station KIRO that the delay relates to the installation of wiring in the second airplane.

Boeing is due to be debriefed today on the outcome of the KC-X contest. But from 3,000 miles away it's noticeable how the PR war is slipping away from it day by day.

Time magazine says "Air Force snub good for Boeing". A Washington Post op-ed buy Steve Pearlstein claims a lot of people have had enough of Boeing throwing its weight around. The New York Times (yes I know, what is it with these liberals) recommends the nation should simply "Buy the best tanker". And Business Week points out some of the more obvious holes in Boeing's case.

Meanwhile in Europe, doyenne of Airbus watchers Andrea Rothman of Bloomberg points out that EADS would put all the jobs it could in the US - purely to mitigate the dollar crisis that is squeezing the life out of it.

And here's a source I thoroughly recommend you read. This is Scott Hamilton talking about the plausibility of the competing 'American jobs' arguments. It makes a lot of sense to me.

It was just a month after I joined Flight in 1988 that the existence of the Lockheed F-117 was made truly public. So it's a poignant day day coming up next week when the type finally retires. The 'stealth fighter' as it was commonly known when it first turned up - to distinguish it from the B-2 'stealth bomber' had in fact been in highly secretive service for some five years by the time its existence was confirmed. But I think it's still the first significant type that I've seen enter public service anyway and retire during my writing career (I think). And it's had quite a life - seen repeated combat, and even suffered a combat loss.

At Holloman AFB next Tuesday there will be a ceremony to mark its retirement. Loads of movies around - I quite like this one.

Very interesting post on Pprune about the probable cause of the American Airlines Boeing 777 incident which initially looked like it was related to the British Airways 777 crash. It's clearly not a definitive finding yet.

The post is claimed, plausibly in my view, to be an American internal memo. And yes, both aircraft were Rolls-Royce powered.

Hard to tell for sure, but could be.

This is an image of the controller's screen of the situation off the south-east coast of Ireland at 19:51 on 23 September last year. Ryanair 907 is heading west and descending through FL286. Flightline 1174 is heading north at FL280. But due to the strong wind, Ryanair has a groundspeed of only 351kt and Flightline has a groundspeed of 517kt. The two aircraft are highlighted in red because the short-term conflict alert (STCA) system has been triggered.

Scott Hamilton at Leeham has followed the KC-X about as closely as anyone in the commercial aviation world and his background with big airplanes means he has talked more sense than a lot of the military experts. He's used the contract award to launch his new website as a Wordpress blog - much more elegant - and has lots of analysis on the KC-X. In particular he points out the relatively small direct financial value of the gain to EADS (or loss to Boeing, depending on how you look at it.)

Scott argued at length and in detail that the Northrop Grumman offering was the best deal. I bet he's kicking himself for not going the whole hog and predicting that it would win. He'd look nearly as smart as the Malaysia Sun.

Scott highlights this Business Week article from yesterday which raises the same sort of questions that I have done as to the wisdom of Boeing protesting.

I've written before about how it seems that helicopter procurements seem to go wrong a disproportionate number of times.

The Australian upgrade of the Kaman SH-2G Super Seasprite is the latest in a long line. As of this morning, the new government wants out.

It has been a dire story, Extensively discussed on Pprune.

Bouquets to the independently minded team at the Seattle Times who are graciously running this Boeing-flagellating op-ed by Frances Coleman of the Press-Register of Mobile, Alabama - forthcoming home of the USA's second heavy-iron production-line. Alabamians dust off their tricycles and get ready to head off to work is the headline. Sweet home indeed.

And brickbats to the ever so mighty International Herald Tribune which you would think could spell Northrop by now. You know, $32 billion company, make military stuff, those guys.

The scene: the marketing department of the International Airport Authority of Ottawa / L'administration de l'aeroport internationale d'Ottawa.

OK guys, we need a nice modern, environmentally friendly, aircraft image for the top of our homepage. Stressing our go-ahead thinking while simultaneously emphasising our good-neighbour credentials. Probably best to paint out the airline logo - just keep it nice and neutral. Something Canadian - you know, Bombardier - that would be great.

Sure boss, I know just the thing. Leave it with me.

(...thinks...this'll really wow him...)

Thanks to my colleague Max Kingsley-Jones, chronicler of all things Tridentine.

Ah De Havilland....

Mount the all-guns-blazing, protest-to-end-all-protests obviously. Well it's obvious to plenty of residents of Kansas and Washington state - but I doubt if it is to anyone in the Boeing boardroom. Still less obvious after the publication of this paper by Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute. This material is clearly blessed by the Air Force and carries a straightforward message: Northrop Grumman/EADS won comfortably on the merits of the proposal. Please don't argue. Well, they would say that wouldn't they, but ignoring heavy hints from big customers is a perilous strategy.

They did this just before they won the KC-X deal, but EADS has hired yet another PR firm to help with its image. They do this quite a lot.

I'm as astonished as everyone else about Northrop Grumman/EADS' win in the KC-X contest. It's only February and this may yet be the aerospace story of the year. The Pentagon is stressing that it's going to talk to Boeing on or around March 12 before it talks to everyone else about the detail of why it's done what it's done - but in fact at the same time it gave some pretty strong pointers about what went on. I've listed the key quotes from the Pentagon press conference below...