I know what Ship741 is saying and he has a good point. Published range figures for an aircraft are true in the sense that that is how far they can fly, but if you draw a range ring on a map to match that figure it’s unlikely the aircraft will actually reach some of the destinations inside that ring.

Routing in the US is pretty easy, there are thousands of airways going in different directions and it’s normally quite straight forward to fly very close to the Great Circle route. However, in Europe you probably fly about 120% the Great Circle route a lot of the time. So an aircraft that can supposedly fly 1000nm might only be able to reach places approx 800nm away on the Great Circle route.

Nice work Lance, I don’t supposed you managed any shots of our Mustang GLEAA or Kingair GBYCP? They were both up there that day.

Excellent work mate, a really enjoyable set of shots! I hope that I can get out there myself one day, hopefully next year.

Fantastic set of pictures! First time I’ve seen Blink’s C510 anywhere outside of FAB….I’m looking forward to my flight on one tomorrow 😀 Also not sure what G-SUEA was doing all the way up there, she’s based at Stapleford!

Jeez that was close! There’s only about 50ft between the threshold and the fence at ACE and so it wasn’t much of an over-run, but still could have been nasty had it gone through the fence. At that time of morning there’s usually a big group of spotters (including me several weeks of the year!) standing right on the other side of that fence. There’s then about 100ft across the beach before you hit the runway approach lights. It’s very rare for them to land on RWY21, due to high terrain at that end of the airport. In my 12 times on the island the only aircraft I’ve seen land on RWY21 are the Binter ATR’s. Will be interested to hear how it happened…

But what worrys me is, how can Rynair get a Boeing 737-800, ok it is a short hop, up in the air for 0.00. Surley they cant, or do they make there money from Emergency Business Men who will pay £450 to get to DUB the next morning.

Exactly, you hit the nail on the head there yourself. Like most businesses, Ryanair have ‘deals’ where they often make a loss, but then make a gain on people who don’t have much choice. Last week we had a couple of pilots stuck out in Faro…..TAP was £400 single because only seats available were in business, the charter carriers were full-up, so we had to pay about £120 per person for them to get back on Ryanair. So what? Every business has to make money some how. Supermarkets do it….they sell certain products at zero profit, but then make a profit on other items due to the fact that people are unlikely to bother going to two different supermarkets for their weekly shop.

What an absolute nightmare, caused chaos in ops today. We only have 20 or so aircraft and that was a big enough problem, god knows how the big carriers sorted out so many flights! In the end we had aircraft taking ridiculous routes to avoid the London FIR….so a plane from Corsica-Dublin ended up tracking up the North sea, over Edinburgh then down again! Looks like delays are reducing at the moment, but I imgaine there will be lots of planes tomorrow sat in places that they’re not meant to be.