Ship 741Hopefully, we’ll both be around to settle up.
And for the record, I meant individual airframes in service that long, not the type. Delta just retired some 1967 build DC-9’s it inherited from Northwest.
Ship 741It does seem unfortunate that more of these airplanes did not sell. By all accounts, it seems to be a very nice little airplane.
I think it got caught between the slightly larger A320/737 airplanes and slightly smaller but all new, light, higher tech large RJ’s like the E-190, which has an empty weight 5-6,000 lbs less than the 717. The 717 is an odd size, and based upon the older DC-9 structure which was heavier than the newer airplanes. Having said that, I’ll bet the E-190’s don’t make it 43 year in service like the DC-9s did.
Ship 741It’s especially perplexing because Boeing ran such a model program on the 777. It was on time, reliable, and safe (in the face of vociferious objections over extending ETOPS at the time). It made and continues to make money for Boeing and the customers seem to like it. In short, its a REAL commercial airplane program that is successful on multiple levels.
I wonder what happened at Boeing between the early 90’s and now to make them such an underperforming organization, or if you don’t accept that, at least an organization that is unable to meet their original goals?
Ship 741Its not beyond the realm of experience for an airplane to actually crash (with fatalities) during flight testing, and some airplanes go on to sell quite well.
http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19940630-0
Ship 741Hopefully it wasn’t a RR powered bird!
Ship 741It would be worth a mention to the people on the aircraft, most of whom would not be avaition experts able to laugh off an engine failure as something that happens frequently.
Actually engine failures are quite rare nowdays….many commercial airline pilots fly an entire career and never suffer an engine failure. It’s only due to the very large number of flights/aircraft in today’s airline industry that it seems frequent or common.
An uncontained failure (aviation speak for explosion) is much more rare, and always a major event.
An uncontained failure that causes engine parts to penetrate the fuselage or wing is even more rare, in fact it is a major event, thus all the conversation about this incident.
I’ve been in the industry for 25 years and have yet to see anyone knowledgeable “laugh off” an engine failure. IMHO, any “expert” who makes light of this incident is no expert at all.
Ship 741Agree with most of what has been said. The only thing I would add is that sometimes, when it is more economical to do so, airlines fly “random routings” north or south of the established track system. It all just depends on the city pair and the winds for that particular day, and of course where the track system is. The people who make the tracks try to take advantage of the most favorable winds for the bulk of the flights.
Ship 741With regard to containment, to the best of my knowledge, containment rings (normally made of composite materials) have only been added to the FAN casing on large engines in the last 15-20 years. The first generation of CF6/RB211/JT9 engines did not have fan containment rings, they only appeared on later iterations of these engines. Trivia question: which manufacturer was first introducing this feature?
Furthermore, Sioux City was a famous case of an uncontained fan, but there have been others. An Eastern Airlines L1011 lost a fan from number 2 engine (RB211) in the 70’s, which caused considerable structural damage but no deaths and no crash. An ONA DC-10 CF6 threw a fan from a wing engine which penetrated the fuselage and caused several fatalities. These are just the ones I remember off the top of my head; I am pretty sure there have been others.
I will agree with others who have stated that no commercial engine has any kind of containment system for a turbine….only the fan.
Finally, I reiterate my view (also stated after the RR for the 787 suffered an uncontained failure in the test cell a few months ago) that ANY uncontained failure is a very serious event indeed….thus the grounding.
Its hard to believe that in today’s day and age, after having so much experience designing and building other airplanes, that Airbus could have so many problems introducing this one type. Of course, this latest problem is the engine manufacturers fault, but its still very unfortunate, and they are lucky this did not cause a crash imho. The fact that the program seems to be a commercial failure only exacerbates the technical failings.
Ship 741Definitely a bad run of luck recently for RR.
Ship 741The big European airlines are becoming increasing vocal:
Pity the poor airline executives, beset by labor troubles (Vereinigung Cockpit and BA Flight Attendants for example) on the one hand and their own government funding predatory competitors on the other.
Seems pretty real to me.
Ship 741A question rather than a comment.
How do you get from “Western governments subsidizing foreign airlines in their purchases of Western aircraft” to “Airbus more important than airlines?” :confused:
Really not hard to connect the dots……the topic is being discussed very publicly in a lot of different places. But I will use the same source I used in post 1, Aboulafia, my bold:
“Emirates is an excellent airline that has won that traffic by offering great service at a good price (with some help from its home base). Europe would only hurt its consumers if it kept Emirates out of its air travel markets, and protectionism is a bad idea. But the A380 represents a publically funded way to help Emirates beat up on those European airlines. Europe is subsidizing the aeronautical rope that Emirates is using to hang European airlines in four ways:
1. Export Credit Finance. Many A380s exported to the Mideast enjoy European government export credit finance, which is particularly important as Dubai’s financial uncertainties affect capital availability. ECA finance, of course, is not available for the European carriers whose traffic is Emirate’s favorite lunch.
2. Landing Rights. According to many press reports, the latest round of A380 orders was announced in Berlin to curry favor with German authorities. The goal is to gain landing rights for Emirates at Lufthansa’s expense.
3. A380 Development Funding. The A380 itself would have been impossible without billions in taxpayer euros that will never, ever be paid back.
4. A350XWB Development Funding. Airbus might not need public cash for this new plane if it weren’t losing tens of millions on each A380 it delivers. Airbus now says that A380 production won’t turn cash-positive until at least 2015. Until then, losses on each plane delivered to Emirates will effectively be made good by A350XWB launch aid.”
This quote was extracted from here:
http://www.richardaboulafia.com/shownote.asp?id=318
Whats more troubling: that so many Europeans apparently don’t care or don’t know how their airlines are being asked to compete “with one hand tied behind their back” in order to benefit the golden child: Airbus Industrie?
Ship 741Someone has: Lufthansa and Korean.
But no one has bought 747-8 who had not already bought A380. The choice is not A380 or 747-8 – the choice is just A380 or both A380 and B747-8.
Actually there is another choice: Neither
Seems to me many large international airlines don’t want VLA’s, since they haven’t ordered any.
Ship 741When I first saw the title of this thread, I thought it was about Inez Sainz.
Ship 741When I first saw the title of this thread, I thought it was about Inez Sainz.
Ship 741I offer this up as something swear-worthy
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39265847
UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First
Published: Monday, 20 Sep 2010 | 7:57 AM ET Text Size By: Robin Knight
CNBC Associate Web Producer
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The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.
Sharon Lorimer
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The proposal by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.
Currently employers withhold tax and pay the government, providing information at the end of the year, a system know as Pay as You Earn (PAYE). There is no option for those employees to refuse withholding and individually file a tax return at the end of the year.
If the real-time information plan works, it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first.
“The next step could be to use (real-time) information as the basis for centralizing the calculation and deduction of tax,” HMRC said in a July discussion paper.
HMRC described the plan as “radical” as it would be a huge change from the current system that has been largely unchanged for 66 years.
Even though the centralized deductions proposal would provide much-needed oversight, there are some major concerns, George Bull, head of Tax at Baker Tilly, told CNBC.com.
“If HMRC has direct access to employees’ bank accounts and makes a mistake, people are going to feel very exposed and vulnerable,” Bull said.
And the chance of widespread mistakes could be high, according to Bull. HMRC does not have a good track record of handling large computer systems and has suffered high-profile errors with data, he said.
The system would be massive in terms of data management, larger than a recent attempt to centralize the National Health Service’s data, which was later scrapped, Bull said.
If there’s a mistake and the HMRC collects too much money, the difficulty of getting it back could be high with repayments of tax taking weeks or months, he said.
“There has to be some very clear understanding of how quickly repayments were made if there was a mistake,” Bull said.
HMRC estimated the potential savings to employers from the introduction of the concept would be about £500 million ($780 million).
But the cost of implementing the new system would be “phenomenal,” Bull pointed out.
“It’s very clear that the system does need to be modernized… It’s outdated, it’s outmoded,” Emma Boon, campaigner manager at the Tax Payers’ Alliance, told CNBC.com.
Boon said that the Tax Payers’ Alliance was in favor of simplifying tax collection, but stressed that a new complex computer system would add infrastructure and administration costs at a time when the government is trying to reduce spending.
There is a further concern, according to Bull. The centralized storage of so much data poises a security risk as the system may be open to cyber crime.
As well as security issues, there’s a huge issue of transparency, according to Boon.
Boon also questioned HMCR’s ability to handle to the role effectively.
The Institute of Directors (IoD), a UK organization created to promote the business agenda of directors and entreprenuers, said in a press release it had major concerns about the proposal to allow employees’ pay to be paid directly to HMRC.
The IoD said the shift to a real-time, centralized system could be positive as long as the burden on employers was not increased. But it added that the idea of wages being processed by HMRC was “completely unacceptable.”
“This document contains a lot of good ideas. But the idea that HMRC should be trusted with the gross pay of employees is not one of them,” Richard Baron, Head of Taxation at the IoD, said in the release.
A spokesperson for Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was not immediately available for comment.
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