November 2008 Archives

An A380 visited Air France at the weekend for the first time to try out the airline's new hangar in Paris. That's the good news.

So what we seem to have here is a Spanair MD-83 lining up on the runway at Glasgow a bit more than a month before another one crashed fatally at Madrid.

The interesting thing is the point at which the crew gets round to deploying the slats.

 

It's always the little stuff that gets you. Many years ago Virgin Atlantic took the major step of putting on-board medical datalinks on its long-haul fleet after an A340 had to divert to, I think, Gander when a passenger seemed to have heart trouble. Turned out to be angina. On the ground the aircraft got dinged by a truck or something (apologies, I'm struggling to remember the story), was stranded and it all cost a reputed £5 million.

I was reminded of that by the events of last night which saw a Virgin A340-600 unexpectedly turn up in Wilmington, NC. 

 

Obviously the people being laid off are more important, but United is also in the process of grounding an extraordinary number of aircraft and it's a painful experience for many of those involved. This account which came to me below is a particularly poignant tale from an angry captain who writes of the distress involved in parking one of Boeing's magnificent beasts in the desert.

I suppose there are plenty of pilots who could do this sort of thing, and probably have done, without so much as a look over their shoulder. But this guy is clearly not one of them. I've previously mentioned the great Robert Prest (in fairness a bit more of a poet than our United friend) and his account of shutting down an F-4 Phantom for the last time. It was in print in Pilot magazine some years back and if anyone from Pilot or elsewhere could post the text on the web it would be terrific to see.

The 747 story relates the end of this flight here it seems. And that's the aircraft pictured above

Meanwhile, here is the start of the 747 story, continued below via the link. The author is pretty cross - if you're Glenn Tilton, you might want to look away now:

Goodbye B-747-400 #8196

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On Thursday I had the sad duty of being first officer on a one-way flight
from San Francisco International Airport to Victorville Airport in theMojave
Desert. The purpose of this flight was to retire a low-time perfectly good
747-400. I was called out for my last day of reserve for this dubious ferry
flight.

Someone claiming (plausibly, I personally think) to be the father of one of the pilots in yesterday's Ryanair Boeing 737 accident at Rome Ciampino has turned up on Pprune with a highly illuminating version of events.

I'm not exactly clear how this happened, but Airbus appears to have pulled off quite a PR coup in China by getting its aircraft on the country' stamps.

From America's National Public Radio - the station that makes the BBC World Service seem recklessly frivolous - comes a great story illustrating how tiny snags have the potential to put Airbus/Boeing on the front of Newseek (as the man involved puts it.)