They have added a page about it under the “news” section. But it only mentions the dead crew and not the passengers.

Some of the photos are quite poor. Adds to the overall “dodginess” factor of the airline.

Leave accountants out of this though. Good ones don’t make false economies.

Possibly, yes.

The RJ’s don’t have the same cargo capacity which means airlines can’t carry cargo on their passenger flights to enhance revenue.

This size of aircraft is a crossover point – do you go for a large regional jet or a small mainline airliner? There are lots of pros and cons each way depending on the structure of the airline in question.

If you are mainly a RJ operator (like Flybe) then you’d probably go for a large RJ – if you’re mainly a big airliner operator you might stick with a cut down mainline airliner.

Well done, they’re more interesting than the usual a.net stuff.

I’ve seen the green fire trainer a lot – much better than the mouldy rotten ravaged Trident they have at MAN.

I’d say it was competing for 717 business.

It is bigger and heavier than the 717 (less efficient), but also has better range. So it may be better suited to “long thin” routes whilst the 717 would be better for frequent short hops. The A318 also has A320 commonality whilst the 717 doesn’t have any commonality at all.

In the case of launch customers, Frontier have some long thin routes and they also have the A319/320 in their fleet, so it would be the most appropriate choice for them. Air France would buy it regardless, bring an Airbus!

Like Kabir said, I think most Russian aircraft are well made and probably would last forever. Likewise, pilots look like they have been well trained.

However, the FSU seems to have a very poor maintainence culture. Also, Russian engines appear to be sub standard. Even with the good standard of airframes and piloting, the engines and maintainence let the side down.

So what you are sayin Kabir, is that we need to look at “incidents” other than just crashes?

Not sure about Twickenham, but it wouldn’t surprise me as it is fairly near to Wembley. Certainly, flights into LHR used to fly over the old Wembley site and you could see a lot of detail.