Todays news.

Druk Air Will replace its fleet of 2 BAe 146s with 2 Airbus A319 between Jul04 and Dec04.

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Air New Zealand Flight NZ405, a Boeing 737-300 en route from Auckland to Wellington, suffered a loss of cabin pressure as it was in cruise at FL400. Oxygen Masks were deployed and the aircraft made an emergency descent to FL100 and returned to Auckland International Airport.
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Southwest Will add performance-enhancing Blended Winglets to its current and future fleet of Boeing 737-700s.

For more on this story go to: http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2003/q2/nr_030617g.html
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MyTravel Flight MYT718, an Airbus A320 (C-GTDK) en route from Corfu to Bristol, suffered a tailscrape on landing at Bristol Airport on Monday. The exact damage to the aircraft is not known however it was taken out of service.
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MSPs are expected to support calls to bring one of the UK’s seven Concordes to the Museum of Flight in East Lothian.
The attraction at East Fortune, near Haddington, is one of 30 museums across the globe asking British Airways (BA) to donate a Concorde.

John Home Robertson, MSP for East Lothian, is staging a debate in parliament on Wednesday as part of the campaign to bring one of the supersonic planes to Scotland.

BA and Air France made simultaneous announcements last month that they would be permanently grounding Concorde this year.

Concorde grounded

The plane’s wings were designed by a Scot, Sir James Arnot Hamilton, and the early test flights took place at Prestwick.

Concorde also flew over the Scottish Parliament when it opened in July 1999.

The only cloud in the sky is the cost of maintaining one of the planes – even as a museum piece – in the style to which it has become accustomed.

In a statement last month, BA said Concorde would cease flying in the autumn because of “commercial reasons, with passenger revenue falling steadily against a backdrop of rising maintenance costs for the aircraft”.

Passenger numbers have never recovered since a crash near Paris in 2000 and the aircraft no longer makes a profit.

A spokesman for BA said the company was determined the aircraft would go out in style.

The plane operates daily out of London Heathrow and Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport to North America.

It cruises at 1350 mph and an altitude of up to 60,000ft (11 miles), which means a crossing from Europe to New York takes less than three-and-a-half hours.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/2999058.stm
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Gulf air finally get an A320 into the new c/s…. Not keen myself, looks better on the bigger aircraft.

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