I guess the Osprey MASC derivative is very much the outside choice as the Cash strapped MOD wouldn’t easily be able to afford it. However, if the will was there and it was chosen it would also fill the Carrier on Board delivery role as well if they purchased a handful of standard V-22’s as its payload and ferry range are not too disimilar to the C-2 used by the Americans.

A COD capability is very much a nice to have particularly as you could also land it on the helidecks of most of the other Amphibious vessels in the fleet, which the C-2 never could do.

Surely common sense would say, open it for half a dozen flights first day, 12 the next 36 the day after etc. Why go for a big bang :confused: I work in industry and you never just switch on a complex billion dollar project, you commission it step by step over a period of weeks or even months. This all seems very strange and something of a let down to be honest.

I hadn’t put 2 and 2 together and maybe neither had the Times but as Sarkozy is visiting then they probably needed to find something to announce that would play well in France :diablo:

There is some further breaking news and that is that the Government have scrapped the plan buy two aircraft for the royal /PM flight. Don’t know the details yet though.

I was hoping that one of these A330 based aircaft in the Tanker deal would cover that role, maybe when the story gets out we will know more.

Yet another thing is turn round time on the apron as the aircrafts size makes this increasingly tricky. Airbus went to a lot of trouble to get this down to the minimum, as the longer its on the stand the less money it earns. They issued a critical path analysis of the turnround times, and the biggest issue was not getting the passengers sorted as maybe you would think, but the fuel. With only one pump truck it can be done in just under a couple of hours for most journies, but the intention is that it should normally have two and hence take under an hour, but that is still the longest part of the turn round even then.

If I remember correctly there was also a scenario where if only single deck loading was available then this gave problems with the catering supply and an extended turnaround was needed, but they may have fixed that.

Anyway, I think typical turnround is about 130 minutes.

Incidentally I believe that the A380 needs an 88m wide by 81 long stand to give sufficient space for the dozen or so vehicles needed to service it, based on some notes I took about a year ago.

As an aside, the attached mentioned in todays newspapers regarding future issues of energy security in relation to the North & South Pole may well influence the C1/2/3 debate at the RN. Ice capable C3 anyone ? :diablo:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/10/eu.climatechange

Back to the original question as I can speak from a small piece personal experience. Surely all flaps are checked before flight albeit they may not be checked in the fully deployed position ? They tend to put them down to the take off position as they taxi to the runway so surely that counts as a check ? I was on a Dan air 1-11 many years ago that had a flap fault that was discovered while we taxi’d out, and back to the terminal we went to find another aircraft 😉

I believe the Naval and Marine refuelling requirement was probably key. Had this not been included in the requirement then the 767 would have been a far more likely winner. Becuase of the Naval fuelling requirement this would always mean range, uplift and loiter capability in theatre would become one of the more significant decision factors as carrier battle groups need to be able to operate nearly anywhere