Originally posted by wysiwyg
I The most dissappointing thing is that despite a father of two losing his life it still wasn’t deemed important enough by Air France pilots to use a common language.

I think the look on his wife’s face at the end of the interview said it all. The AF pilot’s argued that they were being forced to abandon their mother tongue, (or perhaps that the accepted international language wasn’t to their liking) . I think that’s arrogance in the extreme. Presumably if international ATC language was French they wouldn’t have been so upset about it.

I also felt the French authorities acted in extreme bad taste when they arrested the other Streamline pilot in hospital whilst still coming round from the operation that saved his life. Needless to say the charges were dropped and ATC eventually took the blame for the accident.

Back to the Saudi/Khazakstan collision. I thought the two planes were flying at a distance of 10,000 feet apart, The inbound Khazak Ilyushin was cleared to 15000 feet and the Saudi 747 was cleared to climb to 14000 so yes a 1000 foot gap doesn’t leave much room for error. 😮

The account of the collision as given by a nearby USAF transport pilot was particularly harrowing I felt.

Re: EL AL Emergency

Originally posted by steve rowell
An EL AL cargo flight that took off yesterday from JFK New York heading for Frankfurt was compelled to make an unscheduled landing in Amsterdam as a result of landing gear problems detected after take off.

Why did they cross the Atlantic if they detected the problem after take off ?

These little beauties arrived in the post this morning from the BA Concorde shop on their website. Made by Corgi, they are diecast and come with stands as opposed to undercarriages. The old colours one is G-BOAA and the new is G-BOAC. 2 for a tenner !

I like it, at least it’s not all white with a logo stuck on the tail like most these days.