SkymonsterThere used to be a very good website http://www.cactuswings.com but its been taken down. Does anyone know if its been re-hosted elsewhere?
IIRC, Cactus Wings turned into a yahoogroups, with files of residents at Kingman, Victorville, Mojave, Pinal/Marana and Roswell (NM) hosted on the yahoogroups site accessible only to members of the group. May have changed again since then though!
Andy
SkymonsterNearest airliner “graveyard” to Las Vegas is Kingman, AZ. Its about 100 miles south east of Vegas heading off towards Phoenix, but allow a good couple of hours to drive there as the route is over the Hoover Dam. Best for photos in the afternoon, main residents are a good bunch of BAe Jetstreams, some Dornier 328s, a handful of 727s (DHL, etc), a couple of TWA TriStars, and a DC-8 plus other assorted junk. If you’re also going to the Grand Canyon (south rim) you will drive through Kingman and pass only 5 miles or less from the airport/
Next nearest is Victorville, CA. Its maybe three hours drive south west of Vegas on the road to Los Angeles (in fact, its nearer to LA than to LV). Lots of old Delta (TriStar, 727) and United (727 in particular) birds there, plus lots of other more unusual airlines. Its a bit harder to see the airliners fairly close at Victorville, but you can drive around the western perimeter (4×4 may be recommended on part of the track as its rather sandy).
Mojave, CA is about another hour or maybe slightly more driving further beyond Victorville heading away from Vegas (its actually not far off 90 miles north of Los Angeles). Less stuff there nowadays, but some Air Canada (767, DC-9), Aerocalifornia (DC-9) and a few wide bodies (KLM 747, Delta L1011, ex JAL DC-10s) still there. It has been known for tours to be available at Mojave – the fueller, named Javier, MAY do a drive around the air side for $10 per person but its not bookable and wouldbe tourers need to go to the airport office and ask politely – tour will only be possible if Javier has no other duties at the time.
Finally, Pinal Air Park (aka Marana) is just north of Tucson, AZ – maybe five or six hours drive from Vegas, past Phoenix. This is at present by far the busiest and most occupied of the “graveyards”, but nothing much can be seen from the outside of Pinal – if you want to see in you need to hire a Cessna and a pilot in Tucson and fly over it (quite possible for maybe $100-$150).
For all these locations, to get an impression of what’s there probably best to search for the locations on airliners.net
Andy
SkymonsterI believe SBS-1 can pick up most GA stuff, whereas I’ve heard a whisper that Air Nav Radar Box can’t, is this true?
There is no requirement for GA in the UK to fit Mode-S transponders before at least 2012 and maybe beyond that, and currently no requirement even beyond to fit ADS-B. Until both are done, GA (or any other a/c not carrying the kit) won’t plot on the “radar” of either SBS or Air Nav.
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SkymonsterShame, I like their MD-90’s, one of the smarter British orientated paint schemes!
MD-90 – singular, only ever one, HB-JIB (or “Hib-jib” as we knick-named it at EMA). But it did look good – it was a regular at EMA and last showed up on 2nd January – shame we won’t see it again in British Jet colours.
Andy
SkymonsterOver the past year the cost of flying has gone up because of the government finding more ways to charge airlines for different things meaning they have to put the charge to us so they make us pay by paying for things like bags and seat allocation and extra leg room etc etc but at the end of the day its to put us off from flying in a way to tackle climate change, but I really dont the point in this because airlines have to keep their prices because there is so much competition between them.
So can anyone think of a reason these taxes are nessasary and any ways that could actually put people off flying?
You’re very mixed up with all of this. As has already been said, government imposed taxes are the same, regardless of airline. The bag charges, seat allocation charges, extra legroom charges, are merely an instrument used by the cheap end of the market (ChavAir aka Ryanair et al) to recover additional revenue that they don’t gather as a result of finding the need to advertise and particuarly low “head line” (i.e. £0.01) fares in the first place. Basically, the ignorant punter sees the headline £0.01 fare and thinks “great, really cheap” and fails to consider all the extras Con-Air (sorry, Ryanair) will try to impose to bump up its monetary take. It can sometimes be the case that the regular full-service airlines can be as cheap or cheaper than Chavair, if you take into consideration all of the extras the supposed low-fare airlines can snag you for. As far as the UK government is concerned, they don’t have any interest in stopping people flying due to concerns about global warning – their interest is much more directed towards gaining another taxation stream that can be used to swell the treasury coffers. As to whether this will stop people flying – I doubt it, and I think its more likely that Chavair (O’Leary Air) will score an own goal by imposing too many add-on charges that discourage travel than will government imposed taxes.
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SkymonsterGood old Ryanair – pay peanuts, get monkies! :rolleyes:
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SkymonsterIndeed, all the more impressive given the day hasn’t even started yet! :diablo: :rolleyes:
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SkymonsterGulf Air have been long since based in Bahrain. Originally GF was the national airline for several Gulf states (Bahrain, Oman, Abu Dhabi…). The Abu Dhabi government got out when Etihad was started, and now the Omani government is throwing its all in with a now-expanding Oman Air that has started long haul. That leaves only the Bahrain government left, so Gulf has become the national airline of Bahrain with the natural consequence that the aircraft are moving from the A4O- register to the A9C- register.
Andy
BTW: Just a little bug-bear of mine… The prefix for Oman is A4O (Alpha Four Oscar), not A40 (not Alpha Four Zero)
SkymonsterA part of the no-frills airline’s advertising and rhetoric armoury is attempting to portray, to the casual travelling public, that they the no-frills sector are cheaper than the full service airline competition. Clearly this is not always the case – I’d go as far as to say often it is not the case, particularly when all the added charges the no-frills sector can impose are taken into consideration – that’s why I don’t call them “low-fare” carriers, by the way. The casual traveller, without either the time or wherewithall to research, is suckered by the no-frill’s sectors messaging, and sometimes that costs them money or convenience. I think that the primary message must be “buyer beware”, and certainly don’t believe all of the hype coming out of certain airline offices in Dublin and Luton (amongst others).
Andy
SkymonsterEuropean has agreed to donate the aircraft,sadly we do not have space for the Herald
To be honest, I’d far rather you saved the Herald than the 1-11
SkymonsterThe website isn’t exactly helpful to anyone who DOES want to help:
Donations for Mike Foxtrot
DETAILS WILL APPEAR SHORTLY
Payment by Cheque
GBP (£ Sterling) cheques should be made payable to “” and sent to:
It’d also be informative to understand how much has to be raised – I don’t mind giving to worthy causes that have a finite financial objective, but I don’t tend to donate to bottomless pits.
Andy
SkymonsterKiwi Airlines operated a 757 on trans-Tasman services.
Andy
SkymonsterOne other comment – I find that my EOS350D gives “softer” images (i.e. less “sharp”) than I achieved using the same lens(es) on my older Canon 35mm film SLRs – possibly this is simply due to the fact that the PC screen is somewhat larger than a typical 6 x 4 ” enprint, and so shows up the lack of sharpness more readily? Or maybe I just haven’t yet set the 350D correctly – there are so many user settings that you can adjust once you move out of the “Auto” mode.
Canon leaves in-camera images deliberately slightly less sharp by default. You can increase the sharpening that the camera does with a menu option, and it’ll have an effect on jpegs produced by the camera (but not on raw format images, if you start shooting raw).
ALL quality digital images need sharpening, but the amount and type of sharpening varies depending on whether you view on the web or send to a print (typically web images need less sharpening than a print) – hence why Canon does not agressively sharpen images in camera by default, and why relying on the camera settings to sharpen images is not always a good idea – its impossible to de-sharpen an over sharpened image.
Simpistically, do not expect any DSLR to produce images straight out of the camera – there is an expectation that you will do a little bit of tweaking of any you want to use, in PhotoShop on your PC. In reality, 6×4″ prints may be OK but for anything else you really need to learn about the sharpening (and unsharp) tools in Photoshop.
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SkymonsterSo just out of interest, what happened to the passengers of the Edinburgh flight, do they then become delayed? Does an airline sacrifice one delay for another?
Don’t know about this specific case, but yes sometimes they do “sacrifice one delay for another”. They might elect to delay the flight with the least passengers or with the fewest connections at destination (especially if a tech delay is going to go overnight and they need to hotac the pax – not an issue in Ryanair’s case! :p ), they may delay one flight in preference to another because of a night-time airport closure, or crew hours (wanting to get a crew back to base in hours), or a maintenance input, need to have an aircraft at a specific base overnight (especially if one flight needs to be cancelled), etc, etc. That’s what Ops Control do – try to find the solution that disrupts the operation as a whole the least, not only for those immediately affected but also for the follow-on operations.
If I remember correctly, a pitot heat problem usually precludes flight into known icing condition and limits to VMC only (was on a Delta flight some years ago with a similar problem and the captain said they’d dispatch if a bit of cloud in the LAX area disipated – it didn’t!), so the broken aircraft was probably not a practical proposition for either EDI or BRS until fixed.
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SkymonsterI was merely pointing out that Ryanair do make an effort for their passengers despite the extra expense involved with sending a different aircraft to BRS.
Don’t even think there’d be any extra expense – nothing significant anyway. Aircraft-A was going to BRS whilst Aircraft-B was staying in DUB, and the situation was reversed. As both are 738s, no cost change there. And the standby crew were being paid a salary anyway (maybe they get sector/hours pay, but the late running crew would have got less as they didn’t operate to balance it out). The only extra expense I could see would be if the original crew were BRS based and the standby crew were DUB based – in that case, two lots of hotac necessary for the crews. However, even that cost more than offset by having an aircraft in BRS ready to do the next flight.
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