Author: David Learmount

Solution to cabin air contamination looms

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aircraft cabin air contamination, a persistent issue for airlines because their crew and passengers face the risk of consequent neurological harm, may soon be alleviated by advances in chemical science, according to a new scientific paper published in the UK-based Journal of Hazardous Materials.

The study, sponsored by French industrial lubricant manufacturer NYCO, says: “The research underscores the urgency to replace hazardous industrial OPs [organophosphates] due to their documented neurotoxic effects and associated risks.” The study states analysis of OP chemical structures reveals that “one of the identified clusters had a favourable safety profile, which may help identify safer OPs for industrial applications”. Those applications include aero-engine lubricants, which at present are proven to be the source of contaminants released into aircraft air conditioning systems when “fume events” occur. NYCO has, for years, been researching the possibility of producing aero engine lubricants that are as effective as existing ones, but less toxic.

Findings and consequences from the paper, entitled “Organophosphate toxicity patterns: A new approach for assessing organophosphate neurotoxicity”, will be revealed at the 17-18 September 2024 Aircraft Cabin Air Conference at Imperial College, London.

Also to be presented at the conference is the detail of new tests on passengers and crew that can reveal “biomarkers” in their blood proving that they have been exposed to toxins specific to aircraft cabin air contamination, enabling appropriate remedial actions to be taken by those affected.

In terms of mitigation options while the OP risk to airline passengers and crew remains at its present level, also presenting at the conference are Sweden-based CTT on the subject of cabin air humidification and active carbon filters; BASF on dealing with volatile organic compounds and ozone conversion; and PTI Technologies which will reveal its latest bleed air filtration capabilities.

Will “coming home” do the trick for Boeing?

David Learmount Aircraft manufacture, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There are those who attribute Boeing’s ongoing quality control scandals to its decision to move its HQ out of its Seattle engineering base to Chicago in 2001. Others blame the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas for a dramatic change in company culture in favour of cost-cutting and upping shareholder pay-outs.

Kelly Ortberg, formerly of Rockwell Collins, is Boeing’s new CEO

Whatever the arguments, Boeing knows it has to get a grip, and part of the plan has been appointing a new CEO who started on August 8. Kelly Ortberg is a 64y-old engineer, and was recently CEO of avionics company Rockwell Collins, where he built a reputation for being a “man of the people” as well as a diligent executive with an eye for detail.

He says he is going to base his family in Seattle, and explains why: “Because what we do is complex, I firmly believe that we need to get closer to the production lines and development programs across the company. I plan to be based in Seattle so that I can be close to the commercial airplane programs. In fact, I’ll be on the factory floor in Renton today, talking with employees and learning about challenges we need to overcome, while also reviewing our safety and quality plans.”

It was only four months ago, on 16 April this year, that Boeing’s board blocked a shareholder proposal calling on the company to move its HQ back to Seattle. The question now is: will moving back to Boeing’s historic base and its main assembly plants be the silver bullet that will slay the company’s demons? Sceptics abound, but it seems the new CEO is not one of them.

The HQ move 23 years ago was a result of priority shifts driven by the merger with MDC, but it reinforced the culture change away from engineering prioritisation by locating the board 2,000 miles from the engineering front line. As if that wasn’t enough, in 2022 Boeing moved the HQ another 1,000 miles east to Arlington, Virginia, closer to Washington DC, lobbying opportunities, and the Pentagon.

So what? With today’s communications, distance should be no barrier to good management.

Well, that might be true for many big companies, but for an engineering-based manufacturer producing complex, high-tech machinery for a safety-critical industry, this move physically separated the engineering from the managers, accountants and policy-makers. The expression “safety-critical” – in the case of the airline industry – is not a piece of marketing-speak, it is a crucial selling point for the operators. In the early 2000s when fatal accidents happened significantly more often than they do now, airline reputations could be broken by a single crash, and they knew it.

Of course it’s not as simple as that. It never is. Much has happened to the commercial air transport and aerospace industries in the 27 years since the Boeing/MDC merger. The need for corporate adjustment to today’s business environment would have driven changes anyway.

To understand the forces at play around the turn of the 21st century, its helps to look back to the late 1970s, when the process of US domestic air travel deregulation – set in motion under the Carter and Reagan administrations – brought painful change to US airlines in the form of unfettered competition. At that time the US domestic airline industry alone represented 45% of the whole world’s air travel activity.

It took a couple of decades for the industry to adjust fully to deregulation, in the process waving goodbye to giants like Pan American and TWA, and ushering in a process of consolidation among the survivors that saw names like Eastern Airlines, Braniff, Continental, Northwest and multitudes of others swallowed up.

A little later, and more gradually, deregulation within the European Union single market began, and by the mid 1990s early examples of today’s ubiquitous low-cost carriers were spawned both sides of the Atlantic.

About the same time, aircraft manufacturing consolidation in Europe resulted in the creation of what would become a powerful multinational consortium, Airbus Industrie. Its gentle beginnings in the late 1960s led to the entry into service – with Air France in 1974 – of the world’s first twin-engined widebody, the A300. It was unique and very good, but conservatism among potential buyers meant it sold slowly. Nevertheless, its arrival signaled change, and its engineering standards would see the eventual demise of the confident US slogan “If it ain’t Boeing I ain’t going”. Gradually it became clear that the USA was no longer unchallenged as the world’s supplier of big jet aircraft.

Today, however, Boeing and all the other manufacturers should be laughing all the way to the bank. Air travel is doing well. By 2019, the year before the global covid pandemic hobbled air travel everywhere, the size of the global airline fleet and the volume of world demand for air travel had grown to be a multiple of the size of the 1990s market. Now, in 2024, covid is under control, the global demand for air travel is powerfully resurgent, and that demand shows no sign of being tempered by economic dark clouds nor environmental considerations.

If the industry and business environment are so different now, why the persistent calls for Boeing to get back to its roots? The manufacturer’s serious underlying problems became dramatically visible when, in 2018 and 2019, two of its new 737 Max aircraft crashed out of control, killing all on board. One crashed in Indonesia, one in Ethiopia. The cause of both accidents was a control software change developed by Boeing to modify – in a modest way – some of the new 737 marque’s handling characteristics.

External aerodynamic data input to the system – known as the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) – came from sensors near the aircraft’s nose that measured the aircraft’s angle of attack (a crucial measure of the wings’ lift-generating performance), and MCAS accordingly applied nose-down force – if required – by adjusting the horizontal stabilisers at the tail. But in both crashes, damage to the external sensors meant they sent incorrect signals to the MCAS, and it repeatedly pushed the nose down despite the pilots’ control inputs. The pilots did not know or understand what they could have done to counteract the nose-down force, and the aircraft dived to fatal impact.

The crux of the matter is that, in designing the MCAS and its associated sensor hardware, the manufacturer had ignored a basic maxim that aircraft designers are expected to adhere to, like the Hippocratic Oath for medical doctors: Boeing had not designed the MCAS to “fail safe”. That is, to work out what failures could occur, and ensure that if they did fail it would not lead to disaster. This could be done either by duplicating or triplicating the system and setting up a voting system to isolate a fault, or designing the system so the effects of failure can easily be overcome by other means. Boeing ignored this philosophy, and its only excuse at the time was that it did not see the MCAS as a safety-critical system.

The two official accident inquiries (Indonesian and Ethiopian) and the many parallel US institutional post-mortems uncovered shocking evidence about attitudes at Boeing – and at its overseer the Federal Aviation Administration. After the crashes it took about three years to discover that Boeing did not have a formal safety management system (SMS), a jaw-dropping fact that must have related to a belief within the company that although everyone else needed one, Boeing didn’t. It has one now.

For those who, like me, had watched Boeing for nearly 50 years as an aviator and professional aerospace journalist, this was breathtaking. It was not the Boeing we thought we knew.

That question again: would a move back to Seattle cure all the ills?

The Boeing Field, Renton and Everett locations around Seattle wield a powerful symbolic and historic influence, and a move there would signal a faith in the engineers, mechanics and Boeing traditional values. Ortberg clearly knows this. But what of the philosophy that drove the HQ relocation to Chicago, and eventually to Arlington? Does that need to die too?

At the time of the Boeing/MDC merger, Boeing’s Phil Condit remained the CEO of the merged company and MDC head Harry Stonecipher was appointed chief operating officer. Stonecipher, together with former MDC chair John McDonnell, owned a larger shareholding in the merged company than the senior Boeing men. The MDC influence on subsequent developments was dominant.

Soon after the HQ move to Chicago, Stonecipher confided to the Chicago Tribune: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” He was signalling the developing business philosophy of the new era: shareholders were king. Despite the banking crash of 2008, which should have imparted a message, that philosophy prevails today, along with CEO remuneration packages that launch company chiefs into a different galaxy from the one that their employees and customers inhabit.

Meanwhile Ortberg says he is moving his family to Seattle, with Boeing Commercial Airplanes, but the corporate HQ looks as if it is to remain in Arlington. How does that work? And will Ortberg, the “man of the people”, inhabit the same galaxy he does now?

Contrail cure? Nearly…

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Having recently revealed in Learmount.com that air travel could easily be rendered less of a global-warmer than it is (see previous article Airline climate harm can be halved), another significant discovery enabling further advances on that front has just been chalked up.

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), if used at 100% concentration rather than a mix of about 50% with fossil-derived aviation fuel, appears to be able to reduce – by more than half – the global warming effects of high level cirrus cloud formed from persistent aircraft contrails.

Use of SAF is, at present, the most tangible action airlines can take to reduce their global warming effect, although its production is nowhere near sufficient to power the entire world fleet. Deriving from waste vegetable oil and production processes that consume global warming gases, its sustainability is its most obvious benefit. It is turning out, however, also to have unpredicted advantages, like a higher energy output per unit weight as well as a much cleaner burn.

This clean-burn effect has come to light as a result of trials conducted by Airbus, using one of its A350-900s, fueled with 100% SAF and cruising at 35,000ft over the Mediterranean Sea, trailed by a Dassault Falcon 20 chase aircraft carrying out contrail sampling. The trial has found that burning 100% SAF produces 35% fewer soot particles per unit burned than normal aviation kerosene, and an even higher reduction in ice particle formation, at 56% less. Visible contrails result from the water produced by fuel combustion condensing on soot or other particles in the atmosphere, and it is when high level aircraft contrails consist of ice particles that they persist longest in the upper atmosphere, creating cirrus cloud that would otherwise not exist.

Air travel has recovered vigorously from the dip experienced as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic. Indeed the pandemic lock-downs seem to have heightened travellers’ desire to fly, so any progress the industry can make toward reducing its climate change effects is more than just desirable, it is essential.

For greater detail on the Airbus trials, and more on the science of contrails, see David Kaminsky Morrow’s article on FlightGlobal.com and the Learmount.com article immediately preceding this one.

“Airline climate harm can be halved”

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If the world’s airline industry were to agree to take the necessary action, commercial air transport could cut its global warming effects by 50% within a week. Permanently, and at virtually no cost.

Do I hear gasps of disbelief?

Disbelief would be understandable, because politicians and the media as a whole are ignorant of the causes of aviation’s climate-changing effects beyond production of the well-known global-warming gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), a by-product of burning fossil fuels in jet engines. It transpires, however, that CO2 is only half the story.

For aviation, finding alternatives to fossil fuel for power is particularly difficult. Electrically powered large aircraft are creatures of the distant future, and even the hoped-for widespread use of SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) may not be the answer that everyone dreams of, because its true sustainability has yet to be proven. CO2 will be with us for a while yet.

Yet the world needs aviation. For business, for trade, for government, for diplomacy. Also for leisure, for education, for tourism, to expand people’s minds and make isolationism less likely. Meanwhile the world is warming dangerously, so if they can, why don’t the airlines act to reduce their contribution to that warming?

Artificially curtailing leisure flying would seriously damage the economies of countless small or impecunious nations, no matter how virtuous the motive for grounding it. Large, rich countries would suffer too. Frankly, therefore, flying will continue. As Professor Ian Poll, Emeritus Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the UK’s Cranfield University, put it in a recent presentation on Aviation and the Environment, “In terms of the environment, aviation is both part of the problem and part of the solution.”

So, if there is an immediate way of halving aviation’s malign environmental impact without stopping people flying, what is it? What does the industry have to do? Why hasn’t it done it already.?

The necessary information to make this transformation is in the public domain, according to Poll, but it exists mainly in scientific papers. Scientific understanding of non-CO2 emissions, says Poll, is incomplete but “developing rapidly”. The data is there for politicians and the press to see, but no-one has picked up the ball and run with it. Perhaps no-one believes it?

Then on 29 November Professor Poll delivered his presentation on the subject to members of the Royal Aeronautical Society. I was among those who attended thinking I’d probably heard it all before.

Anyway, the specialist audience – gathered in the historic clubhouse at Brooklands Museum – despite being mostly aeronautical engineers and pilots, had never heard before about the potential for positive environmental action that Poll had just revealed to them. A few boffins at the Met Office definitely do know about it. Airline boardrooms, on the whole, don’t.

Yet.

Poll summarized the problem before proposing a solution. Global mean temperature (GMT), which has been rising for decades, is driven by the difference between incoming solar radiation and outgoing thermal radiation from the ground – the net result of which is known as radiative forcing (RF).

Anything that reduces the outgoing radiation – eg increasing the level of a greenhouse gas – increases both RF and GMT. Anything that reduces the incoming radiation – eg increasing Earth’s reflectivity to sunlight – decreases both RF and GMT. The key to global warming reduction – or at least its control – is action to reduce human-generated radiative forcing.

Contrails – or at least controlling them – contain the key to beneficially influencing aviation’s effect on RF. It is a more complicated issue, however, than the widely-held (wrong) belief that “condensation trails” are purely the result of the jet engines’ production of visible water vapour in the combustion process.

Professor Poll revealed that the current scientific consensus on aviation’s contribution to GMT rise is that one sixth of it is caused by the secondary effects of two combustion products – nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide (NOx); one third by CO2; and half of the total by contrail-induced cirrus cloud.

If the airlines knew what to do to avoid generating this cloud, according to Poll, they could eliminate that 50% of aviation’s malign global warming very quickly, and at very little cost.

To act effectively, all the individual effects of aviation on the environment need to be understood. These include:

  • Aviation adds CO2, water vapour and particulates to the atmosphere.
  • Combustion produces NOx.
  • In very cold air the water vapour sticks to the particulates and freezes, forming an ice contrail.

All the above factors contribute to RF.

Key to the solutions in this case, Professor Poll revealed, is identifying the precise location of “ice-supersaturated” regions of the atmosphere. These phenomena have a lateral extent of tens to hundreds of kilometres, but their vertical extent is only 2,000-3,000ft. Their characteristic is very cold air with a low level of natural particulates, and within them water remains in the invisible vapour state at temperatures well below those at which ice would normally form.

Inconveniently, these phenomena occur within the height band of cruising levels that commercial jets use. When a contrailing aircraft encounters ice-supersaturated air, it precipitates the supercooled vapour into ice, and a persistent contrail forms. A persistent contrail may last for hours and even develop into cirrus cloud. This, Professor Poll emphasizes, can have a major effect on climate.

The effect of persistent contrails depends on the time of day or night that they are formed. At night, outgoing radiation can be reflected back to the earth by the ice cloud, causing net warming. In daytime, some outgoing radiation is absorbed, but solar radiation is reflected back into space, sometimes contributing a net cooling effect.

If airline operations continue precisely as they are flown now, the long term net effect, Poll points out, is a “large” amount of warming. If airlines were able to eliminate all contrails, the total net global warming effect would be halved. But if they were to eliminate only the warming contrails and keep generating the cooling ones, the total net global warming effect would be reduced by 60%.

Such a course of action, Poll states, is within the capabilities of the airlines, whose most obvious tactic would be to vary the aircraft’s cruising level by a couple of thousand feet, which would have very little effect on specific fuel consumption. Military operators like the Royal Air Force have known for nearly 100 years how to avoid creating contrails, which is essential to avoid being spotted and attacked. Poll describes adopting this course of action as “simple, safe, ethical, cheap, instantly effective, and available right now.”

The naysayers among scientists make the rather muted point that the “uncertainty” in the science is too big. Professor Poll fires back with the undeniable point that the experiment could be abandoned instantly upon the observation of any unpredicted ill effects.

For aviation, there are no other short-term solutions to its net global warming effect. So, this reduction will have to do, for now. The science about this effect has mainly been developed in the UK but, as so often happens with new science, it is beginning to look as if the first action based on it may take place in the USA.

Meanwhile, any editor out there who is churlish enough, at this precise moment in history, to headline on the fact that aviation has simply discovered that it was causing twice the global warming effect that everybody already knew about, has missed the point.

PS: Journalists please note that this is the first release of this information – apart from Professor Poll’s presentation – in a digestible form, so if you run it without acknowledging its source as Learmount.com, your work will be identifiable as plagiarism.

Surly bonds

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , ,

“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings…”

You what?

Poet John Gillespie Magee, who wrote this, was a pilot. A long time ago.

Meanwhile for a passenger, flying short haul economy class today (even short-haul business class) is utterly dire. All of it.

From the experience of online booking to being “processed” by the airport, and finally injected – as if hypodermically – via a windowless jetway into a claustrophobic cabin.

A good crew can lift the experience marginally, but the excitement of flying is dead.

The combined ideas of getting airborne and travel to faraway places once had an element of romance. The imagination, given just a little space, could soar. The soul could breathe.

Back at home, the travel brochure still paints sunlit, azure pictures, the airline promises onboard service and a welcome.

Travel reality then suffocates the images. Every aspect of the “service” is individually commoditized and charged for.

Toward the end of October I booked a flight from London Heathrow to Malta, with Air Malta. All the above comments applied. Punctuality was not a problem. But there was more.

There was something totally dead about the trip once the pax were on board. The cabin crew delivered everything, from the safety briefing to the cabin service, as if they were zombies.

The flight deck crew did not make a single announcement at any point. There were no flight progress displays, and zero information was provided about the destination weather and the arrival.

Air Malta, in its current manifestation, is not long for this world, so crew morale was almost certainly a factor. A successor will duly arrive, but any existing crew who are re-employed know they will enjoy less beneficial terms and conditions. Like the employees at their competitors.

Flying is indeed cheap. It has never been cheaper. But it is joyless. For crew and passengers.

You get what you pay for.

A Messy business at RAF Scampton

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

An official recognition of architectural merit and historic significance have combined to proffer a glimmer of hope to many who want to stop one of the Royal Air Force’s most famous stations – now closed – becoming a compound for asylum seekers in rural Lincolnshire.

The Officers Mess at RAF Scampton has been accepted as a Grade II listed building, which means that it, at least, must be preserved.

RAF Scampton was home to No 617 Squadron, famous for the highly risky but successful May 1943 Dambusters raid, night-flying at ultra-low-level deep into industrial Germany. More recently the base – and the Mess – were home to the RAF’s Red Arrows aerobatic team.

The Mess itself is a classically simple Edwin Lutyens design, a template repeated at stations all over the country during the expansion of the RAF in the 1930s. There are many others similar to it. The thing that has motivated the local council’s listing of the building is an appreciation of what happened there.

RAF Scampton Officers Mess, now fenced and boarded up.

In World War 2 Lincolnshire, its low fens wide and flat – perfect for aerodrome construction – was facing Germany across the cold North Sea. This predominantly agricultural county had one of the densest populations of RAF stations anywhere in the nation, so it would be fair to say that the RAF itself is part of its heritage.

Politics muddies these waters, of course. The local council does indeed want RAF Scampton to be given a more “appropriate” use, and has been granted a legal injunction to halt work on the process of converting buildings for asylum-seeker accommodation. Many would prefer to see at least part of the base become a national RAF heritage centre.

Meanwhile the Westminster government, struggling with an embarrassing backlog of asylum seekers to process, needs cheap accommodation for them, and the local press, who know a good story when they see one, cite evidence that the government is ignoring the legal injunction and work is continuing on the base.

RAF Scampton Officers Mess is the building in which 617 Sqn’s commander, Wg Cdr Guy Gibson VC DSO* DFC, and his colleagues slept, ate and drank, celebrated and commiserated. Many took off from Scampton’s runways into Lincolnshire’s huge skies. Far fewer returned to land. From the 19 Avro Lancasters on the Dambusters mission, eight did not return, 53 crew were killed and three taken prisoner.

Grade II listed status does not prevent a building being used for other purposes, but it lays on the owner a duty to preserve its fabric and respect its historic purpose. It would make a difference if the government at Westminster provided some indication that it cares one way or another, but there isn’t any such evidence right now.

It will be interesting to see, at a time when the incumbent Conservative government is casting around desperately for disappearing votes, whether it heeds local sentiment, or hardens its planned cheap accommodation objective. The official opposition party, the Labour Party, is on the Scampton political bandwagon, promising a reversal of the Conservative decision if it wins power next year, even if the base is, by then, housing asylum seekers.

Aviation changing warfare

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

About two years ago I posted a nine-episode serial about early military flying called “Leonard’s War”.

This story follows an RFC aviator on his journey from flying lessons at Brooklands, Surrey in 1915 to Squadron Commander over Flanders in 1918. Once in France, he flies with 7 Sqn over Ypres, returns to UK in 1916 to command 15 (Reserve) Squadron in Doncaster – a mission training unit – and commands 22 Sqn over Passchendaele and Cambrai.

If you missed “Leonard’s War” at the time, I recommend you try it. Even if you did read it then, I suggest you re-visit, because – following extensive research – I have added much new material and corrected earlier detail.

It has struck me that, in many accounts about military aviation in the Great War, there seemed to be two separate battles going on: one in the air where gallant aces shot each other down in dogfights, the other on the ground where soldiers crouched in trenches and emerged to die on muddy battlefields. “Leonard’s War” – as now revised – describes how the airmen and soldiers learned to cooperate, and how aviation changed everything about a war that began in 1914 with cavalry charges in Flanders and ended with airborne stereoscopic photo-reconnaissance and close-air-support to troops on the ground.

Click here for “Leonard’s War”.

The glamorous ghosts of early air travel

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

Now called Airport House, this building was one of the world’s first purpose-built air terminals/air traffic control towers. It is on this Croydon site that – until the 1950s – London’s main commercial airport used to be. It now houses a museum full of fascinating artifacts that evoke the exciting – and rather dangerous – adventure that was air travel 100 years ago.

The very first commercial airline flights in Britain – just after the First World War – took place in noisy, uncomfortable aircraft, carrying between two and four passengers in machines converted from their wartime role as bombers.

But toward the 1930s, when Croydon’s new, modern airport terminal was built, things got a lot better, and the glamorous and wealthy flocked to be among the first to fly to Paris in the promised three hours.

Ordinary people could mostly only afford to watch, which they eagerly did from the observation deck on the roof of the terminal, overlooking the grassy aerodrome and watching film stars and royalty walk out to their aircraft.

Everything about aviation then was still so new, so experimental, and the public attended air shows in huge numbers, watching daredevil aviators carry out gravity-defying feats in their flying machines.

The Historic Croydon Airport Trust does an excellent job in bringing all this aviation history to life.

For those curious about how early aviation – and particularly early air traffic control (ATC) – actually worked, this is the place to discover it. As it happens, just a few years ago – in February 2020 – Croydon airport celebrated a century of ATC, because this is the place where it was invented and developed.

Indeed, ATC is something about which even today’s frequent flyers know very little, and learning about its origins – the very basics of early air navigation – will serve to bring to life the essential aspects of modern ATC, because the essentials never change.

In the 1920s the aircraft flew very low by today’s standards – only a couple of thousand feet above ground level. At that height, geographical features like rivers and coastlines, or man-made features like railway lines, could easily be seen if the weather and visibility was good, making navigation by map-reading possible. But if it wasn’t, help from ATC following the advent of radio-direction-finding (see link above to “A century of ATC”) was very welcome to the crews. In marginal visibility, getting lost was quite common, because it was easier than you might think to end up following the wrong railway line!

Pilots now are still expected to do their own navigation, and abide by the rules of the air. ATC’s task is principally to ensure that the flow of air traffic proceeds in an orderly fashion in today’s much busier skies, and that conflicts between aircraft are avoided.

But if pilots do need assistance, ATC is there to help them. Indeed it was at Croydon Airport that the international emergency call “Mayday Mayday Mayday” was first proposed and adopted.

Par Avion, but not as we know it

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

Amazon has been promising drone package delivery for a while, but the British Post Office is doing it.

This exercise has a certain experimental feel about it, with the remote Orkney Islands to the north of Scotland as its testing ground. Not exactly a high-rise urban environment, but a good start.

Brazilian drone manufacturer Speedbird Aero is working with operator Skyports Drone Services and Orkney I-Port, a partnership involving Royal Mail, the Orkney Islands Council Harbour Authority and regional carrier Loganair. Together they will conduct a three-month inter-island parcel delivery service trial. Speedbird’s DLV-2 cargo drones will be able to operate often in weather that confines the normal ferry services to harbour.

It will be easy to extend the trial period if necessary, because it is being carried out under existing regulations permitting extended visual line of sight operations.

Skyports has also been carrying out operations with California-based UAV maker Pyka using its Pelican Cargo electrically powered, fixed wing autonomous cargo drones.

Happy birthday to the Whale. Where now?

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , ,

The Airbus A380 is 15, and Emirates, the world’s largest operator of the type by far, is celebrating the success it has brought.

While aviation geeks delight in comparing its looks with those of Boeing’s great classic, the 747 – which usually wins in the popular beauty stakes – nobody who has flown the A380 as a passenger doubts that it provides an unparalleled travel experience. The first operator of the type, Singapore Airlines, and the biggest – Emirates – both quickly discovered that regular passengers would ask for the A380 departures on their chosen route if they could get them.

But will this last? I think so.

By the time Airbus stopped the A380’s production in 2021 it didn’t have anything like the sales success that the 747 had chalked up. As a result there aren’t many A380s out there. Because there are so few, the travel cognoscenti seek them out, and Emirates has most of them. It might even get to the point where A380s become collector’s items among the airlines. There’s nothing like scarcity to generate envy.

Simply put, the cabin is much quieter. It’s unnerving, because you can not only hear that fellow travellers are talking, you can hear what they’re saying. During mealtimes you can hear the chink of cutlery on plates.

The sheer size changes things. The A380 feels more like a ship than an aircraft, the internal space more like a deck than a cabin. The spaciousness makes you feel like taking a walk – priceless on long-haul routes. In Business Class you can stand at the bar and chat to the bartender.

Emirates will say things have been updated since 2014 when I took this photo

Airbus stopped production of the A380 in 2021 having sold 250. Compared to the 747’s sales of 1,500 (albeit over 50 years), it looks like a failure.

It was not a failure, more a misjudgement. At the time Airbus was developing the A380, Boeing was watching sales of the 747 gradually reduce and orders for the big twins burgeon. The US manufacturer forecast – correctly as it turned out – that the big twins would provide viable direct services to secondary cities, bypassing the big hub airports that the Jumbos had so ably linked, and making the great trunk routes less-travelled.

Meanwhile there has been a massive resurgence in air travel since the pandemic. People want to get out again. And for airlines lucky enough to be based at the world’s natural travel hubs, like Singapore, Dubai and London or Paris, the A380s that had been put into storage are out there working again.

Many competing pressures will vie to determine the future shape of long haul travel: consciousness of climate change is one of them, and in fuel-burn per seat the very latest big twins do better than the jumbo quads.

But all the signs are that people want to travel, for pleasure and for trade, and on the big trunk routes the A380 comes into its own. And when it’s full, it does achieve good unit fuel efficiency.

Given the A380’s advantages – popularity with passengers, and its sheer carrying capacity – watch this space to see how the A380’s place in modern air travel develops beyond its first 15 years.