The more people who are discouraged from booking Ryanair, the better

IMO, the full evacuation seems to have been an overreaction by the PIC. I can understand the decision given the recent events, but it was still an overreaction. If I wanted to evacuate every time I smelled something strange on a plane, I’d never fly!

If there’s been a fire indication, and the source of the fire has not been identified and/or it’s not been possible to positively confirm that the fire is out, there’s no choice but to treat the fire as still present. It doesn’t come down to PIC over reaction – it’s SOPs

Originally “Plastic Pig” was the nickname for the Reliant Robin three-wheeler car – body made of fibreglass… Hence the connection to the 787… I’ve flown on a United Airlines 787 and the flight didn’t have any problems, though with the spate of problems the type is having I do wonder whether Boeing have yet to get over their production problems with the airframe

So the wooden blades may have prevented serious damage to the engine but do we know yet wheather just one leg retracted or was it ?

Both main gear legs

Andy

http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/local/12009527028440/report-of-smoke-on-airplane-at-logan-airport/

Saw it in Vegas in November… It’s a good movie, BUT its not an air-crash movie and if you go expecting that you’ll be disappointed. It’s a movie about a pilot struggling with additiction of alcohol and drugs and the impact they have on his life and his relationships and his work. Yes, it is loosely based around the Alaska MD80 crash, but that’s not the point. Watch it if you have interest in what the movie is really about and you’ll probably enjoy it (and forgive some of the dodgy aviation sequences and the MD80 with winglets) – go expecting a diehard movie for airline purists and you’ll not get much out of it.

So it does beg the question, can you tell how poorly an airline is doing by how many hours its fleet is sat on the ground?

No! But don’t let your armchair airline scheduling expertise get in the way of missing the point.

For what it’s worth QF airplanes also sit in LAX all day – usually two A380s and a 747… It’s all to do with scheduling flights at times when passengers want to depart and arrive, and ensuring the point-to-point flights allow convenient connections to other cities not directly served.

Take QF1 SYD-LHR… It’s scheduled to block on at LHR at 06:20 – great for onward travel either by air or land, and good for business travellers who need to go to work when they arrive and not waste time. If they turned it straight around at LHR, QF2 would likely be leaving LHR again around 10:00. That’d put it back into Sydney sometime after 19:00 which, by the time they’ve allowed passengers to get through immigration and customs, would be too late for a lot of onward connections to the rest of Australia and the Pacific. Depart QF2 from LHR when it does and it arrives in SYD at 06:50, and not only is it good for connections in SYD, it also means business travellers can be in town at the start of the business day rather than having to waste an evening.

Same is true for South African (and Kenya) flights – they are scheduled to depart London after the end of a business day in the UK, and arrive in South Africa before the start of the next business day – same is true in the opposite direction. That’s when passengers – especially the high-yield business and first class passengers – want to travel. And passengers don’t waste a daytime in flight – they have a full day, depart late, sleep on the flight, and arrive in time for another regular day.

If you think Qantas – and South African and Kenya – are missing a trick, look at the times BA schedule their flights to the same destinations and you’ll find that they are at broadly similar times for the same reasons – it’s when passengers want to travel. Airlines have tried to shift these very long haul schedules to improve utilisation but it doesn’t work – if the schedule doesn’t workable hers take an alternative (like Emirates) that allows them to depart and arrive when they want rather than go for an inconvenient schedule.

That’d be me then… Really, I do wish Collett and the CAT every success in Newquay, I really do. It’s just not a venture I want to support any more. I think Airbase is great – aside from donating monthly, I’ve been to Airbase many times, always pay (even though I could get in for free as a CFC member), often do a pleasure flight and have paid full price rather than the CFC reduced rate, eaten in the DC6, and attended events like the night runs. I just enjoy being around something I’m contributing to. Shame Airbase has not worked out or been viable.

To be honest though, I couldn’t give a stuff about the Meteors or Vampires or Canberras, and whether they still fly… My interest was always in the big-props like the DC6s and DC3s and the Twin Pioneer. So aside from the move to somewhere I can’t get to easily, its become evident those aeroplanes aren’t really where CAT’s interests lay. In future I’d rather support another Midlands organisation rather than support CAT in some way out remote location with some aeroplanes I’m not too botherd about.