Ryanair (in my opinion) only bought Buzz because the price was so cheap they couldn’t resist the chance to dispense of one of the opposition.

Kenneth, what’s the Monsun like? I’ve heard it’s very nice. I flew the Bolkow Junior about 15 years ago and thought it was decidedly average. The Monsun looks much better.

easyJet would have been a much better option. Of course the people at Buzz who were originally AirUK have now been Double Whammy’ed.

Kabir – It’s difficult to say as I don’t know how close to max weight a Concorde is with a full load of passengers and baggage. If it is then you could only load the same amount of freight so there would be no effective difference in speed. If there isn’t then yes there may be a slight reduction in speed if the same thrust setting is used. However this would be overcome by using a higher thrust setting and accepting the inevitable increase in fuel burn (as long as the range isn’t compromised, in which case it’s the wrong aircraft for the job!).

Dave, if I were you I’d get on the blower and get some confirmation (particularly for your return booking) that the ticket still has a planned flight attached to it!

Regards
wys

I am not personally very keen on the fact that low cost is becoming the standard way of life for short haul scheduled travel but I do at least believe that easyJet, etc. do follow a reasonable code of conduct. Ryanair on the other hand completely shafted not just the Buzz employees but ALSO all their passengers who had booked in April and somehow seem to have got away with it scot free!!! At least when easyJet took over Go no staff were made redundant and the passengers were not inconvenienced. I have a policy of never travelling with Ryanair as I refuse to put my hard earned wedge in O’Leary’s pocket.

Virgin have never leased them although they did try to buy them in the mid-90’s when I worked for them. The deal was nearly struck with Air France but failed towards the end of the bargaining. BA will NEVER let Virgin have their Concordes. They would think it tantamount to arming Iraq!

regards
wys

I agree that a single engine failure would not be the cause of the aircraft coming down but we don’t yet know what happened here. Pilots are trained for all the circumstances that you mention above and practice these every 6 months in a sim check that is so testing it puts your whole job (and lifestyle) on the line. Single failures are not a significant event, it is when the initial failure causes knock on events that the problems start to occur.

Let me give you an example – I did a recency check in the sim a few weeks ago where a tyre burst occurred at about 90 knots on the take off roll.

There is no cockpit indication of a tyre burst and when you have 10 tyres in total it doesn’t feel that significant apart from a juddering which could be one of several things, so the problem is not yet verified. We raised the undercarriage (as we had no indication that we shouldn’t) but unknown to us the spinning shredded tyre punctured a fuel tank, severed hydraulic lines and started a fire. Now we have three major problems caused by one relatively insignificant one. There is no wheelwell extinguishing system so the procedure is to put the gear down and let the airflow put the fire out. We put the gear lever down but because the hydraulic lines had been damaged the doors opened but the gear didn’t travel on the right main gear leg. The fire went out but now we had only partial gear extension. We tried the alternate extension but damage to the wheel well area still prevented extension.
We had departed Lanzarote for Gatwick so we had a lot of fuel onboard but obviously there was no way we were going in this condition. Lanzarote weather made a return to there unacceptable so we diverted to Gran Canaria with better weather, facilities and a longer runway to crash onto with just left main gear and nosewheels available. However we now have so much fuel onboard (without a fuel dump facility on the 757) that we would be significantly overweight for landing . Also you don’t want to crash an aeroplane with 20 odd tonnes of fuel on board for obvious reasons! On top of this our fuel leak is now causing the wing tanks to empty asymetrically causing a lateral imbalance which requires aileron input which is reduced because of damage to the hydraulic lines.
We made a crash landing at Gran Canaria and everyone went home for tea and medals but I hope you can see that something as simple as a blown tyre can soon accelerate into a major event because of knock-on factors.

regards
wys