Economy Class & Beyond

Farnborough 2010 – Day 1 – The orders start flowing…

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It's day 1 of Farnborough 2010 air show, and the orders are off and running. So lets get down with the civil aviation big news...GE goes on a spending spree and buys 100 Aircraft(And I thought the Emirates story would be top today - I was wrong by a long shot). GE Commercial Aviation Services has been shopping today, signing up for for 60 Airbus A320s and 40 Boeing 737-800s. … [Read more...]

Going inside the 787

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Jon Ostrower reports inside the Boeing 787 and what we can expect from it, both in terms of crew and passenger experience.Looking nice - it'll be interesting to see the completed units once they start going into real revenue earning flights, and how the seating is configured. Much more coverage from Farnborough this week later, with an end of day round up at 19:00 each day from … [Read more...]

Airplane p0rn – JetBlue A320

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Another Saturday rolls past, therefore it must be time for some Airplane p0rn.Today, it's a JetBlue Airbus A320 at Washington Dulles International More Airplane p0rn of course - next week! … [Read more...]

Unite is picks another fight – this time with BAA.

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What's the term? It never rains, it pours. Unite is getting busy, with them to ballot workers on the most recently pay offer from BAA. With the usual lines of "Derisory and paltry pay rises".Unite is to ballot more than 6,000 members about possible strike action at BAA's six UK airports in a dispute over pay due to to a 1% pay rise, with a possible 0.5% more (which more than … [Read more...]

Dealing with Call Centres – Phonetics 101

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At some time or another we have to deal with a call centre - either to secure a reservation, set a seat... or sometime to spell our names. Therefore, it's good to use a common alphabet when dealing with them - and the "gold standard" is the ICAO Spelling Alphabet.Letters become words which are pronounceable by all, and understandable by all - which makes the ICAO Spelling … [Read more...]

LH: The year of crazy deployments continues: LH to run 747’s DOMESTICLY.

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It seems the year of crazy aircraft deployments is continuing apace, this time with Lufthansa putting some of it's spare 747 capacity to use, by putting on some domestic services with 747's.The deployment takes place over a three week period, with flight from Frankfurt to Hamburg, Berlin and Munich.Why? Who knows. It could be training runs or it could be an adversing wheeze. … [Read more...]

FR/U2: Ryanair in shock action – Makes an apology.

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When you're going to put an advert out, always make sure your backside isn't going to be sued. Although Ryanair tends to "Shove 'em out, worry about it later" attitude doesn't overly help in this direction. Yesterday Michael O'Leary had apologised "unreservedly" to Easyjet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou.Ryanair decided it would be good for business to run adverts depicting … [Read more...]

Project 787.. Possibly delayed?

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And here's a clanger you don't want to drop the week before Farnborough.Boeing has issued a "cautionary note" that the first 787 delivery could slip into early 2011, citing slower than anticipated instrumentation configuration changes and inspections of the horizontal stabiliser.It seems the test programme has ran into little issues and they have stacked up, which could see … [Read more...]

JQ: What’s that Skippy? JetStar are getting 787-8’s early? Down by Renton you say?

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It seems that JetStar is getting an early gift - 8 new Boeing 787's that will be delivered from the middle of 2012 onwards.This is part of the Qantas order, that has been brought forward some two years as some delivery slots have been made available of which 25 are going to Qantas itself, whilst the 25 are going off to JetStar. The first 8 will be assigned to Jetstar which … [Read more...]

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