At a secret asian airport in the late 70s…

Andy

2B is pretty hopeless for views – limited number of a/c on the terminal visible from the boarding gates (which aren’t that nice) but the north facing aspect means no views of the south side runways and terminals 1 and 3 and the north runways are somewhat obscured by other buildings.

Andy

Yet more 1:400 scale models arrived at Chateau Skymonster whilst I was away last week… 🙂

1. Air Atlanta 747-200 TF-ARG “Olympic Torch Relay” (Dragon Wings?)
2. Novair DC-10-10 G-GCAL (Phoenix Models)
3. Olympic 737-400 SX-BKD “Olympics 2004” (Phoenix Models)
4. Saudi Arabian Cargo 747-200F HZ-AIU (BigBird 400)
5. Boeing 367-80 N70700 (Dragon Wings)
6. Air Portugal A.319 CS-TTJ “Euro 2004” (Phoenix Models)
7. US Navy C-9 4607 (Seattle Model Aircraft Company)

The two Gemini AN-124s also arrived, but have been covered here already. I particularly lie th Saudi Arabian Cargo 747 – it looks excellent – and the 367-80.

Andy

The BMI LHR-BOM schedule would put a MAN-LHR-BOM arrival into LHR at about the slackest time of the day for the MAN-LHR route in isolation, and I can’t see them operating it from MAN just for MAN-BOM traffic (they’d want to fill it up on the short leg with domestic traffic and that just won’t happen). On the other hand, the BMI schedule is far better timed for connections than is the Virgin operation on the same route. Actually, MAN-IAD might work well for UA, using something like the three class 757s they’ve just introduced on their US domestic trans-cons NYC-LAX and -SFO.

Andy

He might be referring to those ‘preprinted’ laminated cards that are reused again and again, as opposed to proper paper boarding cards that are printed individually for each passenger.

He might be, but such cards are only of any use on airlines that don’t allocate seats, because if seats are allocated some punters will forget which seat they have to go to between handing back the card and reaching the airplane.

Andy

I bet they’re secretly gutted its not daily. No way will they ferry the A330 up and down from MAN, so its going to sit idle at LHR or they’re going to have to find another use for it ex-LHR on three days a week. Given pretty much all of BMI’s current services ex-LHR are daily and they’ll probably need to raid an existing route for a slot, I’m betting they’ll find another destination that will support a three-times weekly A330 service at the same time as they use for the four-days weekly Mumbai. As to equipment, my guess is that rather than acquire more this will unfortunatley kill the MAN-IAD route.

Andy

I feel this will be a very long time coming… There are still many places that have not even caught up to with the current system so a high tech smartcard future is a long way off.

Despite the technology being available now, as I said in my first post in this topic “But because of the need for global standardisation and because so many players are involved, its going to take quite a long time!”

Andy