Three happy men and a spectacular aeroplane – the builder, the owner, the test pilot and G-TATR at Sywell on Friday

[ATTACH=CONFIG]220400[/ATTACH]

Heathrow Airports Limited are only interested in Heathrow Airports Limited… They won’t necessarily be promoting what’s best for the UK or best for air traffic… Really, the best solution for the long term is to rip up LHR and start again somewhere else (e.g. Isle of Grain / Boris Island). The real estate value of the land on which Heathrow currently stands will go a huge way to paying for a new airport. However, I recognise that the political will is unlikely to be there to “bulldoze” plans for a new airport through and as a result such a project will get bogged down in huge amounts of largely politically motivated inquiries… There’s anothe problem with sticking with Heathrow anyway which I believe NATS is concerned about – UK airspace in the south east is full for much of the day, and adding a lot more traffic at Heathrow won’t help and it’ll likely mean more airborne holding, further away from the London TMA. And more airborne holding means more delays, more fuel burned, more pollution…

Having said that – and as I’ve said before – there are what I think are viable solutions:

1. Route the High Speed 2 rail line directly under Heathrow and put a station there (forget about Old Oak Common – no one going to or coming from the north will want to double back there)

2. Provide airline checkin at the HS2 stations in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle. Provide secured “checked baggage” facilities on the HS2 trains, with checked baggage transferred from the HS2 station to aeroplanes without the passenger needing to lug it around again (it works for Frankfurt-Cologne where the trains have LH flight numbers – why not the UK?)

3. Make airlines offer pro-rated faring between train and air, and vice-versa, for domestic connections (much as domestic flight add-ons don’t cost the full rate now)

4. When HS2 is completed, ban all flights between Heathrow and Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle – and when HS2 gets to Glasgow and Edinburgh, same for those too. Just over one hour Heathrow to Manchester or Leeds by train would be better than air, two and a quarter hours to Newcastle very competitive with air. Even Heathrow to Edinburgh in just over three hours is fairly competitive with domestic air when the air check-in / transfer time, and the distance and time for travel from/to airport and city centres is taken into account

5. Re-use the domestic slots for more international services

If further capacity is still needed…

6. Kick the RAF out of Northolt

7. Build an airside-only terminal at Northolt – there isn’t space for all the landside infrastructure needed, such as parking, etc, and the ground transportation links to Northolt aren’t good – check-in, baggage drop and reclaim, security would remain at Heathrow. Trains would have segregated secure compartments / carriages for checked baggage checked at Heathrow or being reclaimed at Heathrow, maybe even take baggage ULDs directly

8. Build an “airside only” (i.e. beyond secturity) high-speed “maglev” style train between each terminal at Heathow and the new terminal at Northolt – a five minute frequency, ten minute journey wouldn’t take any longer than the transfer between the existing Heathrow terminals – Northolt’s terminal could be called the Heathrow North terminal, or something similar

9. Move some short-haul services to the new Northolt facility

A truly remarkable feat given all the others in the top five have 50%+ more runway capacity (and this number will keep on growing with the new T2 due to open in mid 2014).

Yes, LHR for the most part works right now when things run according to plan. It’s worth noting BBC also said “Heathrow achieved an all-time record passenger satisfaction score in a survey produced by the Airports Council International for the third quarter” and I pretty much agree with that… I far prefer to use LHR than most of the other large European hubs like FRA and CDG – only (maybe) AMS edges it although there are aspects of AMS I like less than LHR, and only a smaller scale I guess I like MUC. I prefer LHR’s terminals over those at airports like CDG and FRA, most processes are usually quicker (lines for security at FRA for example are usually far worse than LHR these days, and baggage is quite often good at LHR), and I’m even moved to say that for the most part the staff are more friendly at LHR these days. Honestly, anyone who says that LHR is the worst large airport in Europe – these days I don’t believe them unless they’ve had the bad luck to go through LHR in one of the days when things have gone wrong.

Sure, LHR doesn’t work well when things go wrong, but were are a nation of whingers and things like inclement weather also cause problems at other large airports, particularly FRA and CDG – but of course our domestic media doesn’t report on those. And so what if Johnny Foreigner, especially those from outside the EU, has to wait a while at LHR immigration – I have no sympathy when I’ve had to wait (for example) three hours in Chicago, two hours in Washington, two hours in Vancouver, and best not to mention how long it’s taken in places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat and in India. No way should we be spending lots of money to speed up LHR immigration when other counties do nothing in return.

On a more serious note, has anyone seen what the lack of runway capacity at Heathrow has done to the holding patterns? It’s not unheard of for 8 or 9 aircraft to be buzzing around each VOR hold at a time, barely separated by the legal minimum. Not only does this reduce the margins of error but it also means airlines burn a hell of a lot more fuel than they would otherwise need to.

Yes, and that’s why the 3rd runway is really needed… Not to allow extra capacity, but to stop all the holding at BNN, BPK, OCK and LAM that wastes huge amounts of fuel and creates significant noise and emissions pollution, and to stop the equivalent with long taxi holds for outbound flights. The 3rd runway should also be used to create “wriggle room” when one of the exiting runways is closed due to an incident or snow clearance. When I am Minister For Transport, I will allow the 3rd runway but I will limit its capacity so that LHR is not back in the same 90+% congested state within a few years f building it.

Yes, LOT have extended leases on 767s until October so have no need for their Plastic Pigs until then

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman said the board’s investigation of last month’s battery fire in a Japan Airlines 787 “Dreamliner” while it was parked in Boston shows the fire started with multiple short-circuits in one of the battery’s eight cells. That created an uncontrolled chemical reaction known as “thermal runaway” and spread to the rest of the cells, she said.

That’s at odds with what Boeing told the Federal Aviation Administration when the agency was working to certify the innovative aircraft for flight, Hersman said. The manufacturer asserted its testing showed that any short circuiting could be contained within a single cell, preventing thermal runaway and fire, she said.

Boeing’s testing also showed the batteries were likely to cause smoke in only 1 in 10 million flight hours, she said. But the Boston fire was followed nine days later by a smoking battery in an All Nippon Airways plane that made an emergency landing in Japan. The 787, Boeing’s newest and most technologically advanced plane, has recorded less than 100,000 flight hours, Hersman noted.

Seems like the basis on which the 787 was certified is brewing!

Furthermore, Ryanair levy a fee to cover this EU law…

http://www.ryanair.com/en/news/ryanair-to-introduce-eu261-compensation-levy-of-2-euro

As there have been relatively few volcanos or any other major natural calamities interrupting Ryanair’s operations since their levy was introduced (admittedly not collected prior to the 2010 folcano), some people may feel that the levy has been a nice little earner for Ryanair over the last couple of years. That they should object to the principal of accommodating this EU law whilst at the same time collecting money to cover themselves against such an eventuality almost beggars belief.

As has been said, its still in Charlotte… It needs an engine…

I spoke to Carlos Gomez, who was the main man driving the restoration work, last week whilst I was at Opa Locka. Essentially, he is too busy with other projects (his own DC-4 and DC-6 aircraft being placed on oil dispersion contracts in Florida and California, and the setting up of Great Southern Airways to operate up to five ex-USN Convair 340s/C-131s as freighters in the Caribbean) to be able to do much about the DC-7 even if all the other challenges weren’t there.

They need to raise money to acquire a flight-worthy engine for N836D – as I understand it, the four engines that came off DC-7 N381AA (which was also looked after and owned by Carlos – the one in American Airlines colours which is now being converted into a diner in New Smyrna Beach) were sold to the Swiss for use on their Super Constellation HB-RSC, and were shipped to Anderson Airmotive for overhaul / zero timed as and when needed… Whilst DC-7 N381AA will have engines hung on it when it opens as a diner, those would need overhaulling too and therefore weren’t much use for N836D.

I was also told that the flights they conducted with N836D didn’t really make enough money to cover the costs of keeping the aeroplane in flying condition – they made more money from charging folks $5 for walk throughs at air shows than they did from flight operations.

Overall then as far as I can tell the future for N836D isn’t that bright for N836Db – no time to work on it, not enough money to get a replacement engine, and a general feeling that the viability of the operation is not there long-term anyway… However, I sincerely hope that if the idea of flying of the aeroplane regularly in the future has evaporated, it’ll be looked after and placed in a museum that will take care of it on the ground in the longer term.

Flightradar24 and its equivalent Planefinder work primarily off of ADS-B signals transmitted by aircraft. These signals transmit information such as aircraft identity, location, altitude, speed, heading, rate of climb/decent etc to anyone with a receiver. They are primarily line-of-sght, and thus don’t get picked up by anyone when they are transmitted outside of the range of a ground station. Many thousands of aviation enthusiasts have bought their own receivers (typically, Kinetic SBS or AirNav RadarBox) to display real-time aircraft location and identification on their own computers. The operators of FlightRadar24 collect data from many of these enthusiast run devices when they are connected to the internet, and collate the data from multiple devices to present as on their website as a single view with in most locations aircraft being displayed in real time. One exception is in the USA, where the FAA releases radar imagery, albeit with a five minute delay.

ADS-B was primarily invented to (a) enhance the information presented to radar air traffic controllers as it transmits much more data than can be collected from a radar head and (b) to provide information from the transmitter to other aircraft as a means of enhancing collision avoidance. ADS-B will eventually be mandated on all aeroplanes that operate in controlled airspace, even GA. The secondary and initiallu unexpected side effect of ADS-B has been that enthusiasts have, through the acquisition of a cheap reciever that can be plugged into PC or through the internet, been able to track aircraft. For registration spotters, ADB-S has been a revelation. Understandably there are some concerns in the industry about the live tracking of flights, especially from a security point of view, and there is still a possibility that ADS-B signals could be scrambled in future, which would render websites such as FlightRadar24 largely obsolete.