Or perhaps not.

If it was a serious structural issue, don’t you think Boeing would have it hidden away in a hangar with its engineers crawling all over it?
They certainly wouldn’t leave it out in the open for all to see.

Assuming of course there is room in the hangars now, given all the other fault testing going on! :diablo: 😉

Wow, we have some old people on this forum don’t we!!

Didn’t some of the expressed philosophies disappear with BOAC? Some of you will be telling us next you always make sure you have a scarf because the open air passenger cockpit can get “darned drafty” at times.

I don’t ‘dress’ for flying, I dress for occasion. That is to say, I dress based on where I’m going from/to and for what purpose, regardless of travel class. For work that therefore means I’ll be in a suit, probably even if I’m not going straight to a meeting on landing. For leisure, it’s usually a pair of smart jeans and a t-shirt or shirt depending on my mood.

I think the bigger issue here is that someone chose to wear a tracksuit (and who wasn’t an Olympic gold medallist)! :dev2:

Prestwick only rebranded after RYR stared flying there,it has never been known or looked apon as Glasgow by anyone that I know ,and I have lived next to Glasgow Airport for over 40 Years

No, even in those times it was branded as Prestwick and no one in Scotland viewed it as Glasgow Prestwick or even Edinburgh Prestwick.

I’m fairly certain (though not 100%) that I have one of my many aviation books from the late ’80s which shows the schedules of major UK airports, and in that it features ‘Glasgow Prestwick’, but I may be wrong so apologies if I’m flogging a dead horse on this one. However, inline with Black Kettle, I always viewed Prestwick as a Glasgow airport as a non scotsman/glaswegian.

By road, ie bus will take you best part of 1 hour to get to PIK only 20 mins to GLA ,

I was comparing city centre to airport public transport, and the quickest train to Prestwick is 43 mins, which isn’t bad, and infact is quicker than sitting on the tube from Heathrow to central London. Admittedly GLA’s website says 15mins by bus to Glasgow Central, but my point is, 40mins on a train isn’t bad and comparable to STN to Liverpool Street. Furthermore, trains on the dot every half hour to PIK is pretty impressive and hardly makes it one of the Ryanair nightmare airports.

Can somebody please explain what is difference in business practices between say EasyJet and Ryanair.

In essence they have business models which work in two slightly different ways and this has shaped the way their businesses have developed, though both have their origins with the same original business model which was based on Southwest Airlines in the US.

These days, Ryanair is driven by load factor, regardless of ticket price and therefore yield (it is not fair to say they are completely oblivious to yield, but it is looked at in the context of the wider income from a flight). This is because they aim to make money from ancillary services and revenues and require the maximum number of hits on their website and seats on their planes in order to hit revenue targets from other sources. Obviously, compulsory charges, such as credit card etc means that infact the fare price is always higher than originally advertised, but those used to booking FR factor this in when comparing against other airlines.

easyJet follows a more conventional airline model in that, whilst load factor is very important, it yield manages based on fare income as much, if not now more than load factor. They still aim to make additional revenues from other sources, but this is not so important. The airline’s business model has in the last few years focused increasingly on higher value business travellers and as such they have broken ranks with other LCC’s by offering greater fare flexibility, such as the ability to take an earlier flight if you finish your meeting sooner. This puts them more directly in competition with the full service carriers, and this strategy has actually been relatively succesful for the airline. Many of the big firms in London view the new arrangements of easyJet favourably and many junior staff are being pushed that way. Consequently this leads EZY to serve more ‘mainstream’ airports, although that has not always been the case, but is increasingly in order to meet their business model needs.

Many feel that the service of EZY is superior to that of FR. I’m not sure there is much in it in reality. I do prefer EZY personally, but I think it’s because I generally prefer being on Airbus narrowbodies, though in truth their slower turn over of aircraft means that some of their A319s are pretty shabby compared to FR’s 737s. That said, I’ve never been on an FR or EZY aircraft which was so shabby as the Air France A320 I was on last week.

It is the unashamed reliance on ancillary revenues which get’s peoples goats with FR, and this is understandable to some extent. That said, I quite like their ‘pick and mix’ options for what you want to book, that way I am not paying a higher fare for services I do not want or need, such as baggage when I’m only going away for a day or two. I think it is a matter of preference, some people like the all in one ticket price whereas others don’t mind shopping around and quickly running through the FR website and comparing it to others.

RyanAir earns money with leasing out its aircraft. So if Boeing accepts a deal they end up handing out cheap airframes to RyanAir which itself leases it to airlines that otherwise would have shopped directly at Boeing.

Who does FR lease aircraft to, I’ve never known them to lease aircraft out (well not since they were reincarnated by MOL in the 90’s).

Personally I think it is about time they made this decision to favour BA/AA. The level of cooperation and the market share of the other alliances in their home European markets would have made a ‘no’ to this tie-up ridiculous.

have the bubble glass chaneliers being retained in the main hall

No, VERY sadly they got rid of them 😡 They were an icon of the Airport, and actually given how fashions come round again, I think would have fit in quite well.

I have to say im quite impressed with T1 at MAN. I thought they would make a hash of it, but no, its all good in my eyes. Well done.

Except for having to walk through a duty free shop with no clear way through, and mirrors all over the place to confuse you. They have seperated some of the display stands a little to make it slightly more obvious which is the way to the gates, but in truth, they need to go further and put clear signs/arrows on the floor to help guide you through rather than tricking you into looking at retail items.