Linking three of the North Sea's great oil towns in Scotland and Norway this is a pretty standard solid regional route, albeit one powered by a niche demand. But the interesting thing is what's happening to the equipment that SAS subsidiary Wideroe uses on the route - and in particular how they're marketing it.
I've just taken part in a BBC Watchdog discussion of the airline industry from the passenger's viewpoint which was aired last night and is on the web today. It's attracted 47 comments and the thing I'm struck by is that hardly any of them mention Ryanair. In fact it's mostly the mainline carriers that come in for a kicking. And the programme itself didn't get bogged down in Ryanair either.
One of the points I made in the recording (not used in the end), was that Ryanair set itself the challenge from day one of re-educating the public's expectations of what was possible for the industry to reliably deliver. Everyone's doing the same thing I think, but for Ryanair the tactic was absolutely fundamental to its business case. I think that's a good thing but, as I've said before, I think they've gone about it in an absurdly obnoxious way.
But what's interesting about the experience of this Watchdog episode is that there is a hint of a suggestion that Ryanair may be winning its war.
Watchdog has an excerpt from the programme here. I'm at 4min 22s if you care.
And so it has come to this: the first quarterly loss at Southwest for 17 years. It's that famed fuel-hedging programme they have and that everyone envies that has now caused the problem. Without the $247 million loss from that they'd be trading comfortably in the black.
Swedish accident reports - produced by the Statens Haverikommissionen as you will all know - make unusually educational reading. For whatever reason the agency is notably inclined to explore what investigators call the institutional factors in accidents. They don't in any sense go easy on the individuals on the day who they think underperform. But they do investigate in considerable detail how come those individuals, often very capable, did what they did on the day.
Nothing all that odd about this route, which is a subsidised US Essential Air Service (EAS) link now flown by Cape Air joining the city of Boston with what looks like the rather attractive Rutland. What's interesting about it is what has happened on it since Cape Air, with its Cessna 402B fleet, took it over from Continental Connection carrier Commutair.
Boston.com - the website of The Boston Globe - reports as follows:
But Cape Air has succeeded with its year-old Essential Air Service route between Boston and Rutland, Vt. Using an aircraft half as large as the plane flown by its predecessor, CommutAir, has allowed Cape Air to slash fares 50 percent and boost flight frequency 75 percent.
As a result, Cape Air attracted 143 percent more passengers between November 2007 and August 2008 than CommutAir did during the same period a year earlier, Cape Air said.
"Instead of using the subsidy money to fly more empty seats, which is what happens with the bigger planes, we're using the subsidy money to offer lower fares," Wolf said. "When you offer fares like that, you can stimulate the market."
That's part of a longer story on Cape Air - a rare happy tale in these troubled times.
From deep in English bomber country comes confirmation of my prediction that the re-makers of The Dambusters movie have duly got round the issue of Guy Gibson's dog's name. Which is Nigger.
Courtesy of the Standard series of newspapers in Lincolnshire - then home of the RAF's 617 Squadron - we learn that the name has been dropped. It's been replaced, obviously, with Nidge.
Australian investigators have come out with their initial findings on the in-flight upset of the Qantas A330 last week. The cause is so far narrowed down to a fault in inertial reference system in the number one air data inertial reference unit (ADIRU) which had predictably nasty results. Turbulence had nothing to do with it.
The end result was that the crew was trying to control a fly-by-wire aircraft which didn't 'understand' what it was doing or what was happening to it (the aircraft I mean, not the crew). There were some slightly odd comments floating around the web last week to the effect that this was not really such a bad situation. I'd suggest that in fact the crew's performance in the circumstances was absolutely outstanding.
There's an unconfirmed suggestion that the aircraft was overstressed with negative g. I'm not surprised to hear that.
Below is the full text of the ATSB press release. And here is the audio of the press conference.
Pretty graphic pictures have turned up of the cabin in the aftermath of the Qantas A330 in-flight upset earlier this week. Quite horrendous damage.
In the case of this incident at Stockholm Arlanda Airport the answer of all concerned is probably a resounding 'yes'. Here is one of the many interesting sentences in the report. Pix below.
When the driver of the pushback tow vehicle sat down in the forward position to start the vehicle engine and drive it away, he heard the sound of the aircraft engines get louder, and could see from the corner of his eye that the aircraft was starting to move towards him.
You may have read the news item about the United Airlines flight from Boston to LA that diverted to Chicago after a couple of passengers became ill, sparking off some sort of ghastly on-board chain reaction. Surely an overreaction - can't have been that bad???
Well, here's the actual message from United's despatch department chronicling the event:
FLT 167 BOS/LAX A/C 4664 DVRT ORD
MULTIPLE ILL PAX FROM TOUR GROUP
VOMITING AND OTHER ISSUES LAVS CANNOT
HANDLE AMOUNT OF ILLNESS. 14 SO SICK OUT OF 35
DOMESTIC EVENT NETWORK CALLED NUMEROUS
EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT TO MEET FLIGHT
Windy City indeed!
Details still coming in at time of writing, but this sounds particularly nasty. Something like 40 people hurt in a Qantas A330 that suffered some kind of in-flight upset. Probably turbulence, maybe something else. But there are apparently multiple broken bones, which is pretty clearly indicative of a serious incident.
Not wanting to nag but, if you do nothing else, strap in. Otherwise this may happen to you too. 
The Boeing machinists' strike has, for obvious reasons, been well publicised worldwide - but more sporadic action by Airbus workers in the last few weeks has not had the same coverage. However, fact is that for a while various bits of both companies were at a standstill.
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