Does anyone have the runway lengths of our main airports; including the three NE airports in LBA, MME and NCL?

Yes folks the investiagtion will get to the bottom of it; until then this is a discussion form and there is an interesting topic to discuss and speculate on. Providing nothing written is bordering on illegal, then I believe we should all be able to speculate in the knowledge that whatever we type will be proved right or wrong at some point in the future.

The one interesting point for me is the big bank that apparently happened not long before touch down, according to the BBC last night. Does this imply that the aircraft wasn’t on the normal approach and joined in very late? In which case ATC must have known and also the passengers? Also, if the pilot knew he was in trouble, wouldn’t there have been a brace command to the passengers? Or would he be too busy to do this? Seems strange that the passengers knew little about this (probably a good thing with hindsight).

I believe the M11s are all being re-fitted or have been re-fitted with the new WBC seats and PTVs in economy. They’ll be around for a few years yet, though they’re not the most reliable in the fleet.

This is indeed horrible news.

I spend a reasonable amount of time in Brazil with work and the culture is incredibly different to many other western countries. The country is very corrupt and unwanted decisions can be easily be overturned with a threat to kill or the handing over of a big wad of Reals! This is common practice.

Now we are some way away from knowing what happened here but we do know that a judge banned certainly aircraft types from this field earlier in the year only for that decision to be overturned the next day. If this has anything to do with the crash, the fallout could be significant.

This is made all the more eerie for me as I was in Sao Paulo a couple of months back and flew from GRU (the other SP airport) on a TAM A320; it was ship MAR.

I think it may depend on individual airlines, though the majority that I have travelled with say you can use electronic equipment providing the flightsafe mode is on; that applies to wireless laptops as well as mobile phones.

I’m sure I saw a 400 recently, so I believe so Ren.

I’m not a big believer in the man-made global warming debate so I love to get involved in this “political” discussion (I believe this is a political issue rather than a science one I’m afraid).

Anyway, this bio-fuels idea. All good in that the fuel would come from a sustainable source whilst oil is a finite resource. However, the amount of fertile land to generate bio-fuel crops is apparently huge, such that if bio-fuels become a mass-market product, there is talk of us using land to grow fuel instead of land to grow food. All interesting….

P.S. I work in the oil industry and I’m now getting told than Saudi’s reserves are 250 years and a new field in Iraq could potentially have another 250 years worth of reserves. That’s 500 years. I was always told at school there would be no oil by 2010! Don’t believe everything you read or hear.

Sorry if this is partly a thread hijack….