Have to agree that ACE is one of the best abroad. If you stay fairly local you can have a pretty relaxing week with some good aircraft to spot.
Terminal is looking better now as well and the addition of a few Air Bridges is a good thing. Can get a bit crowded on a Thursday though!

Looks big, but then Concorde isn’t the biggest of aircraft itself really.

Be very interesting to see, have to be at LHR on the first day, if I don’t fly to Toulouse to see it first!

OK, got to stick up for the A340 here, its the best plane I’e flown on!

777-200 has already beaten A340-300

777-200LR beats A340-500
777-300ER beats A340-600

Any figures to back this up? Everytime I visited the Airbus website it said the A340 was the best selling aircraft in its class.

The fact the 777 has improved take-off (on all available engines)means very little I would have thought. The fact the A340 engines are small must mean they are very fuel efficient, there must be advantages to being slightly underpowered else it wouldn’t have been made this way?

How about ATC routings? I bet the 777 gets the best ones, because it can manouvre into them better.

I bet they don’t on transoceanic routes. The 777 will be restricted to certain ETOPS routings, where as the A340 can fly a lot more direct.

OK, back to the main question: Why bother with the A340.
It was developed (as said above) before the 777, I think basically to vill a void in the industry at the time for airlines that wanted long range, but where the 747 was simply too big.
Remember that at the time, the A330 wasn’t a great success, the -200 only came a few years later and the -300 didn’t have a very good range. Add the fact that it was cheap to develop and cheap to operate because of similarities with the A330 and you begin to see a point.

A340-600
If I’m not mistaken the A340-600 compared to a 747 offers:
Vastly improved efficiency
More Cargo hold
More Range?
With slightly less passengers

Looking at the aircraft, its still been very successful, is in operation with a lot of leading airlines and I’m sure if you took away the aircraft operated by the US carriers (who will always order Boeing) then I think you’ll find the numbers to be very similar.

Real shame to hear about the camera!

Lanzarote isn’t the best place for cameras after the trouble I had with mine as well!

Hope you enjoyed the rest of the holiday though.
Was a good place for German stuff, I managed to finish off the Condor A320 fleet and only need 1 752!

These seem to be getting about a bit more now, I was surprised to see one in Lanzarote a couple of weeks ago, EC-HUZ.

Makes a nice change, they are pretty rare in Europe!

True as said above. I think it works as if you were rounding to the nearest 10 degrees eg

265-274 would be runway 27 etc

Agree, this doen’t help one bit.

Comet – You should be alright, one report I read or heard somewhere said that the government should intervene and compensate peoples holidays if they do go under.

I know one flight doesn’t mean a lot but when I flew with them to ACE a couple of weeks ago there were only about 3 seats free on the A321 boths ways, seemed to be going OK.