Flight International

Flight International blog has moved to a better place

The good news today is that this blog has moved. It's now at this location.

We're switching to Movable Type as our blogging platform and you'll see that the result is more elegant for you, and with better functionality built in for you and us. Searches, trackbacks, comments, and feeds all work better.

All the archived content has been painstakingly migrated to the new site. We'll keep it here for a while, but this site won't be updated from now on and I urge you to bookmark the new location immediately.

Naturally we'd love to hear what you think of the new format.

First media flight in the A380

I get up at 04:30 and leave my house soon after where it is -6deg C. At Gatwick I find I have written down my booking code wrong and have to plead with Easyjet to be allowed to board. We take-off from Gatwick at 07:15 and Easyjet runs out of its special 'breakfast toastie' despite the aircraft being barely half full. At Airbus HQ in Toulouse I am ritually humiliated in front of just about every aviation journalist in Europe when I am called to the stage to be presented with my passport and boarding pass which I have dropped on the floor somewhere. It's still only 10:30 and it's been a long day.

But do I care? I do not - today I'm privileged to be flying on the A380 for the first time. A world exclusive - just me and about 200 other journalists!

So here we are at the Airbus delivery centre in Toulouse...

...and here are my colleagues and rivals...

Airbus is slowly recovering its confidence and is in no mood to be pushed around by the media. The company wants to talk about how wonderful the A380 is; the journalists would quite like to ask impertinent questions about other matters. Finally the Airbus execs lose patience, the press conference is politely but firmly halted, and we're invited to board. In fairness, practically the entire Airbus management is on the aircraft and happily agree to non-stop interviews for the duration of the two-hour flight. You'll see the results over the next 24 hours or so.

I am personally familiar with the aircraft - F-WWJB. This was the machine that was used for the full-scale evacuation trial in which I took part. I'm planning on using the stairs today. It's also been reconfigured from the all-economy layout used to pack it with 873 people for that exercise into a three-class layout with 64 business class seats and 136 economy on the upper deck; and 12 first-class with 307 economy on the lower deck - a total of 519. Unfortunately the furnishings are bargain basement and give no impression at all of what could, and will, be done with the cabin by airlines. Take-off weight is 361t.

Here's economy class...

...and here's business class...

There's chaos in the aircraft for an hour or so as everyone tries to film and photograph the entire thing at once. Finally we settle into our seats for take-off. Airbus has a new safety briefing card which helpfully notes that "final assembly of this airplane was completed in France". This, I assume, is in deference to this piece of legislative stupidity.

Then it's 13:18 and we're rolling on runway 32L at Toulouse with Brit pilot Peter Chandler in the captain's seat. The take-off run is notably short and everyone, but everyone, is later talking about how quiet the interior is. This really is a remarkably quiet aircraft both inside and out.

We lift off and half a dozen oxygen masks promptly deploy - this particular aircraft is pretty ragged round the edges, and nobody's much surprised. There are a couple of flight engineers on board and eventually everything gets stowed.

What is really extraordinary is the behaviour of the control surfaces as we climb out through today's very bumpy air. I'm astonished to see the three aileron sections on the left wing in furious movement, reaching something like half-travel in both directions, and all apparently competing with each other. It's no exaggeration to say they appear to be flapping. This of course is the flight control system working overtime to cushion the rest of the structure from the buffeting. The result is an eerily smooth ride which most people like, but some describe as "wallowing" like a ship. Once we're in the cruise the ride is quite superb though.

It's hard to say much about the flight. We wander around over south-west France for a while with an Aerospatiale Corvette camera chase-plane in attendance, the cabin is awash in champagne and hors d'oeuvres provided by the Lufthansa flight attendants, and it's interview-city for everyone. I stroll around alternately making my very bad movie which I hope we'll knock into shape for FlightTV and being interviewed myself by CNN, the BBC and assorted others.

One way or another I end up in the cockpit for the landing. I'm happy!

Chandler jokingly assures me that I won't need the shoulder harness for his landing. I remind him of his colleague Ed Strongman's, umm, 'arrival' at Heathrow when the A380 first visited London on a spectacularly blowy day. In fact the wind at Toulouse is uncharacteristically challenging today, with lots of shear and a surface crosswind component that is 20-30kt gusting. Chandler's brow remains uncreased throughout of course, we touch down on the centreline and rumble gently to a walking pace. The nosegear-mounted Airbus taxying camera is selected on the primary flight display and we track the taxiway centreline all the way to the gate. Very elegant.

"It really was very windy Kieran," Chandler comments. Yes, it was I agree. "Very windy indeed Kieran," he adds. OK, OK, I've got the message.

Then the show's over, more interviews, and we all sit down to write. As the afternoon light fades a rainbow appears, encompassing the parked A380 from nose to tail. Everyone sighs, and just for a moment all is well in Toulouse.

Iraqi Airways, Erbil Airport, and that three-mile long runway

Iraqi Airways’ designator code is ‘IA’ – that’s Insha’allah Airlines, whispers a Kurdistan Regional Government official with a smirk, because it’s God’s will whether the flight will arrive on time, depart on time, or even turn up at all.

Jihad, the blight of modern-day airline scheduling. Iraqi Airways flight-something-or-other (the indicator board at Kurdistan’s Erbil Airport enigmatically declares no number) is 90 minutes late departing to Baghdad, but the punters appear content that their shabby green Boeing 727-200 – belching soot and bearing a Sierra Leone registration which would send the European Commission apoplectic – at least has a wing on each side. Its pilot, waving from the cockpit window, is remarkably cheerful for someone heading for an airport whose arrival pattern features a corkscrew dive to improve your chances of dodging a SAM-14.

To this otherworldly place, far removed from Viennese order and comfort, Austrian Airlines has returned. It’s barely three weeks since Saddam Hussein was shown the gravity of his crimes (much of that gravity suddenly appearing beneath an open trapdoor) but so far there’s no evidence of resurgence in the violence that stalled Austrian’s earlier attempt to restart flights to Iraq.

Kurdistan’s capital is one of the oldest continuously-inhabited cities in the world but don’t believe that 50 centuries has been nearly enough time to agree on a name. The airport says ‘Erbil’. Immigration stamps my passport ‘Arbil’ and the breakaway GoogleMap faction insists on ‘Irbil’. The Kurds call it ‘Hewler’, and you’d think they’d know, but their opinion doesn’t seem to count.

Whatever. The KRG insists the place is safe, shortly after our press corps disembarks from Austrian’s A320, but our token, low-key security detail nevertheless includes a police car, close-quarter escorts with shades and earpieces, and half-a-dozen peshmerga troops riding shotgun. We couldn’t be more conspicuous if we were travelling by tank.

Passers-by look initially bemused, but then break into spontaneous beaming and waving with an infectious friendliness which seems to permeate Kurdistan. Downtown Erbil is a chaotic sprawl of cheerful bartering, taxi horns, peace murals, low-hanging phone wires, and labyrinthine bazaars where everything brightly-coloured that isn’t edible is covered in sequins. Under a kerbside tree an elderly gentleman, cross-legged on a rug, is selling mobiles while from a narrow entryway an industrial clothing-iron vents steam into the street. One shop’s facade is tiled with a selection of framed presidential portraits. For those who aren’t feeling particularly deferential, the commercial district contains dozens of other stores with wall-to-wall paraphernalia which manage to blend Middle Eastern mystique with all the strategic consideration of an eBay fire-sale. If sir cares for a brand-new copy of last year’s diary, sir has come to the right place. Welcome.

Kurdistan has a tourism minister. Don’t expect to see him on TV holiday programmes until the US Army stops parking Humvees in the market square. When a tourist’s guide to Erbil is finally written it will probably mention that the city has neither a postal system nor any cashpoints. Credit cards prompt apologetic shrugs. Even electricity is a luxury. Intermittently during the evening the grid hiccups and extinguishes every light in the hotel. On the bright side, a sign on the restaurant next door says the management has adopted a ‘no guns’ policy. So that’s all right, then.

Outside, the night air carries the whirr of generators powering kebab-and-chi cafes. Busier streets are lit. Those which are off-grid, and therefore pitch-dark, seem to have gaping drainage points in the middle of the pavement. Any residual concerns about being ambushed give way to genuine fear of spending the last ten seconds of my life falling into a Kurdish sewer, which would probably involve the same amount of swearing but with more bubbles.

Neither I nor my colleague could pass for being local. In parts of Iraq being so clearly foreign gets people shot. In Erbil it gets us an invitation to speak at the local English-language college and makes us fair game for a posse of giggling kids bent on charming us out of a few dinars. Their chief hustler is about six years old and in exchange for a crisp note from the Central Bank of Iraq he gives me enough Turkish sticky bandages to mummify a camel.

Northern Iraq nudges a ridiculous 50°C in summer. Which is why, as I wait outside President Massoud Barzani’s official residence in the Zagros mountains, it feels oddly novel to be sculpting a snowball. Briefly I wonder how high I’d score on the scale of diplomatic faux pas by lobbing it at the head of state, although interests of cultural exchange, I suspect, won’t stand up as much of a defence in the case of Kurdistan vs Kaminski, and the last journalist to find himself on the wrong side of Barzani was given 30 years.

That’s not to say the top man doesn’t have a sense of humour. Between questions on oil prospects, US troops’ storming the local Iranian consulate, tension in Kirkuk, spats with Turkey and even the likelihood of a Kurdish airline, he finds a moment to address the pressing issue of Iraq’s chances in the upcoming football match with Bahrain. If you care, it finished one-all.

Barzani delicately steps around the subject of independence, but public sentiment is reflected in the Erbil skyline. Notably absent from every building – from the brand new Jalil Khayat mosque, opened the day before our arrival, to the ancient raised Citadel which dominates central Erbil – is the Iraqi flag. In its place flies the sunburst on the Kurdish tricolour. Saddam Hussein changed Iraq’s flag in 1991, decreeing its three green stars to represent his Ba’ath party’s principles and scripting the Arabic takbir ‘Allahu Akbar’ across them.

“It’s no longer the Iraqi flag,” an official from the KRG says sombrely, effortlessly reeling off the ghastly statistics from Anfal, Hussein’s campaign to exterminate the ethnic population, and the notorious chemical massacre at Halabja. “It’s a Ba’ath party flag. We won’t fly it unless it’s changed.”

Erasing the former dictator’s appalling legacy is part of the impulse behind the $300 million reconstruction of Erbil International Airport. Once a launching point for Iraqi Air Force strikes against the Kurds, it’s being transformed into the region’s commercial gateway. An extensive new passenger terminal will replace the present cramped building, but the most prominent feature is the extraordinary 4,800m runway, one of the longest in the world: simple preparation for any eventuality, says the airport’s director. Erbil has to deal regularly with Il-76s and similarly-sized freighters – today there’s an An-12 performing lazy circles overhead – but it’s tricky to imagine what eventuality the architects had in mind, besides a premature Shuttle landing. Even the A380 can stop in less than half that distance.

In the business section of the terminal a glass of tea is mercifully complimentary, because I’m out of change and Turkish bandages, it turns out, are non-negotiable currency. From the doorway a few of us are watching passengers boarding a 737-200 of Lebanon’s improbably-named Flying Carpet. It’s the only aircraft here, but it’s here, and that’s the point. Beirut, Amman, Baghdad, Istanbul, Frankfurt and Vienna are tentative connections but connections nonetheless. No means, no market, goes a Kurdish saying. The new airport will be the means. If it stays quiet here above the 36th parallel – and that’s still a big ‘if’ – then the market might not be too far behind. Insha’allah.

Why bloggers are not citizen journalists

I was watching a documentay on UK television the other week about the impact that bloggers had on the race to become the US Democrat party's candidate for the Connecticut Senate election last year. Out of nowhere anti-Iraq war businessman Ned Lamont defeated sitting senator Joe Lieberman for the Democratic nomination last August but Lieberman, running as an independent, won the actual Connecticut senate election.
The documentary made the case that anti-Iraq war, anti-Lieberman bloggers had generated support for Lamont and the programme's production team followed the bloggers around giving an insight into how they work, what technology they use, who the individuals were. During the documentary one blogger made the comment that now he had got involved in covering the senate candidate race he didn't think what the media did was so tough and anyone could do it.
I am the first to admit that listening to what people say, asking them questions and then writing it up in a clear and concise form is not rocket science but the bloggers big mistake was to think that writing anything and publishing it on the internet makes you a journalist. By writing anything I mean only writing about one issue and approaching the subject with preconcpetions about what reality should be presented. For example these Connecticut Democrat party candidate race bloggers always wrote supportive reports about Lamont and always attacked Lieberman.
On journalism courses you are taught to try to be objective (although there is a never ending debate about whether anyone can truly be objective but lets not be pedantic), to be accurate and as you work in the industry you learn that you have to give people the right to reply to accusations and in disputes between two parties question each of them equally hard because without a perception of fairness and responsible reporting people will never speak to you again.
Many bloggers, probably most, do not even speak to the parties involved. I have encountered websites that purport to write about spaceflight and look very professional and even charge for access to some information but when you check with the organisations that they are making claims about, what is being reported isn't true and these websites' writers are not even bothering to check with the organisatons they are referring too.
NASA is often a victm of this and in the last few days I came across reports on two websites that claimed that Bigelow Aerospace's preferred orbital inclination for its future inflatable spacecraft is 41degrees. "That's news to us," came back the reply from Bigelow Aerospace when I rang them. Now 41degrees is a good guess because that orbit covers a large part of the globe's land but if these websites, one a blog, the other a site that paints itself as a bonafide spaceflight news organisation had bothered to check they would have realised that this is wild speculation.
The internet is ultimately a reflection of humanity, all of our species' obsessions, fears, wants, desires, and inadequacies. And it is inadequate to make claims without checking with the organisations concerned, without properly researching the subject matter and without presenting the information in a way that reflects the reality.
So bloggers are not journalists, they are presenting their own opinions and the theories about their favourite topic and will not follow the disciplines that professional journalists must adhere to to maintain good working relationships with colleagues, other media outlets, and the people and organisations they deal with on a daily or weekly or monthly basis.
But what of the mainstream media's inadequacies I hear some cry from the corners of the worldwideweb? My recommendation is vary your sources of information, assess everything you read for bias, but remember that real journalists talk to the people they are writing about and that access and the reporting of those conversations is what will deliver the information that sheds light on how the world really works.

Like a Gothic horror story, Swissair execs tell their stories in court

Throughout 2001 there were deepening signs of financial crisis at what was then Swissair and its parent SAirGroup. It looked as if they would be restructured with heavyweight funding from the usual suspects in the international banking community; the idea that the situation was already beyond saving seemed inconceivable.

Then on 2 October something happened that I remember almost as vividly as the first whispers of what would become known as "911". I was writing for our realtime news service Air Transport Intelligence and trying to leave my desk for a quick lunch. Suddenly our reporter Maria Wagland was saying that two Swissair aircraft had been impounded at Heathrow. We were still trying to check that out when our Turkish correspondent Tolga Ozbek filed a story saying a Turkish fuel company was refusing to refuel Swissair aircraft. The game was well and truly up, and the ghastly, prolonged death of Swissair was inevitable.

Its $13 billion collapse brought down Sabena of Belgium and other affiliates in France as well, and put 5,000+ staff out of work.

Connoisseurs of the macabre can now learn new details of the story as the trial of 19 executives, facing 100 pages on charges of mismanagement of one sort or another, winds its way through the court at Bülach near Zurich. One by one all the old names are popping up again - CEO Philippe Bruggisser; the man unsuccessfully parachuted in to save the day Mario Corti; and board member Thomas Schmidheiny. Those three have all given evidence, although it's reported that all or most other defendants are declining to do so for fear of exposing themselves to civil lawsuits threatened or underway by those who suffered losses.

The Swiss media is following events particularly closely. Here are some links detailing what's come out so far. The trial is due to end on or around 9 March.

http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/front/detail/Bruggisser_attacks_prosecution_in_Swissair_case.html?siteSect=105&sid=7465613&cKey=1169794451000

http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/front/detail/Corti_rejects_unfounded_Swissair_charges.html?siteSect=105&sid=7455675&cKey=1169541412000

http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/front/detail/Schmidheiny_breaks_Swissair_silence.html?siteSect=105&sid=7445499&cKey=1169200660000

http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/front/detail/Liquidator_says_Swissair_demise_was_avoidable.html?siteSect=105&sid=6384920&cKey=1142690621000

Also on trial is former LOT Polish Airlines CEO Jan Litwinski: http://www.genevalunch.com/node/2855

British commanders: more helicopters for Afghanistan? No thanks!

The fact that the British armed forces don’t have enough battlefield helicopters to make ends meet has been a known fact for several years now, but it had looked as though troops on the ground in Afghanistan would benefit from prime minister Tony Blair’s late 2006 promise – albeit extracted like a bad tooth – that senior commanders would quickly receive any additional equipment they requested to fight the Taliban.

But it now appears that additional aircraft are not among the items needed to do the job in war-torn Helmand province, as secretary of state for defence Des Browne revealed yesterday that “UK force commanders have not requested additional helicopters for operations in Afghanistan since 1 September 2006.” Responding to a written question in the House of Commons, Browne said: “Helicopter assets in both Afghanistan and Iraq are currently assessed by the military commanders in theatre to be sufficient to support operations successfully.”

How can this be? While a deployed force of eight Army Air Corps Westland/Boeing Apache AH1 attack helicopters, four Westland Lynx AH7 utilities and eight Royal Air Force Boeing CH-47 Chinook HC2 transports seems okay, last month’s highly publicised use of two Apaches to deploy four Royal Marine passengers highlighted that something is wrong with the current force mix. Where were the Lynx that are supposed to be operating in tandem with the Apaches? Struggling with the hot and high environmental conditions – even at night? Lacking the armour required to protect their crews? Or worse, operationally useless in Afghanistan?

Flight International reported this week on a formal Eurocopter proposal to supply the RAF with eight AS330 Pumas made surplus to Portuguese requirements by Lisbon’s acquisition of AgustaWestland EH101s. These may, as the EADS subsidiary claims, be fine aircraft for the Afghan theatre (despite the more than 30 years of operations already beneath their rotors) and good for another decade of use, but the time has come for the UK Ministry of Defence to bite the bullet and spend good money to acquire new helicopters, and plenty of them.

However, the MoD seems to be so awash with proposals that a decision could be hard to make: should it snap up shiny new EH101s from Denmark, field new transports under a proposed lease deal or – believe this when it happens – even provide money to get the RAF’s eight stored Chinook HC3s into a working state by about 2010-11? With mission commanders having missed a trick since late last year by soldiering on with what they have rather than demanding more, perhaps the sense of urgency felt by the frontline troops just isn’t getting through…

And the winner at British Airways is....Willie Walsh

Make no mistake, Willie Walsh is the big winner in the settlement of the British Airways cabin-crew strike, despite some very odd things being written in British quality newspapers.

Not only is the cost of the settlement to BA a minor one, but the BASSA arm of the T&G union representing the cabin crew has been publicly humiliated and is in internal disarray, and Willie himself did not put a foot wrong in the whole affair.

The game was up from the moment on BBC primetime radio news that T&G deputy general secretay Jack Dromey failed to respond to Walsh's declaration that average sickness absence among cabin crew was 22 days a year. Not news to anyone in the industry, but big news to the rest of the world.

Dromey repeatedly refused to address the point. Shortly after, his boss Tony Woodley took over the negotiations and he and Walsh quietly thrashed out the new deal over a period of days. I guess labour deals aren't negotiated in the proverbial 'smoke-filled rooms' anymore, but it was that sort of old-fashioned session that cracked it.

Upshot:: no protracted strike, sickness absence problem consigned to history, minor concessions on both sides, stock price rock-steady.

Nobody should be surprised. The characterisation of 'slasher' Walsh as the scourge of unions is simply stupid. It comes from his Aer Lingus days and ignores the context of what was happening at that company - which was nothing less than its complete reinvention from a stone-age, state-owned, flag-carrier into a reasonably modern business with a fighting chance of long-term survival. Employment reduction was just one piece of the jigsaw.

And I have to respect former pilot Walsh, he passed the Aer Lingus aircrew selection test in the same era that I failed it! Another story...

Big job fears at Airbus?

As the Airbus restructuring saga rumbles on, the European press is full of reports that workers at Airbus’s sites in Germany will be striking this Friday, in protest at what Power8 will mean for their jobs and factories. Airbus representatives insisted last week during a press visit to its Finkenwerder site that this is not the case – there will be no strike on Friday, but the German works council will hold an “information event” at which it will present its own proposal for restructuring to workers. This will not affect production, Airbus insists.

But the reports do highlight the increasing fears Airbus workers across Europe are harbouring about the future of their jobs, as EADS and Airbus seek to square national interest with production efficiency. And, in the UK, fears are growing that the UK may lose out on A350 XWB work because of its lack of composite expertise.

Meanwhile, last week in Hamburg, Reuters came up with the best story from the factory visit, after we were given the chance to see the equipment Airbus uses to test its aircraft lavatories. I wouldn’t be surprised if this got to at least number two on Reuters’ best-read list.

Plastic bag man rides again

The terrorists must be quaking in their suicide boxer shorts with this transparent plastic bag, for containers of fluids no greater in volume than 100ml, rule we are all now suffering under flying within the European Union and north America. And they would feel particularly thwarted in their evil attempts to drive all non-Arabs out of the Middle East (a stated aim of al-Qaeda by the way) and then convert Europe and America to their idiotic ideology (another al-Qaeda aim) if they got to Arlanda airport in Stockholm.

First of all the devious Swedes have ensured that if you arrive at terminal one you have no way of finding out what flights there are at the other terminals or even if there are other terminals until you exit to the kerbside. And to go one better, once you reach terminal four via badly positioned signs for terminals two, three and it, and the irritating slopes that are moving walkways a'la Paris Charles de Gaulle satellite silliness there are no signs to indicate that you are actually in terminal four, which of course logically follows terminal one, with terminals two and three at the end of a rainbow apparently. But the true fun is yet to come.

With my travel sized toothpaste, shaving gel, disposable contact lenses, shampoo/conditioner combo and deodorant stick in my London Heathrow (LHR) security staff provided "re-sealable" plastic bag I confidently walk towards another escalator in the alleged terminal four, to reach the x-ray machine and metal detector and accompanying munchkins.
"Stop", the young male airport employee says.
"Why?", I ask.
"You do not have the correct plastic bag," says he, sounding remarkably like the Swedish chef from the US children's show The Muppets - but not as coherent.
"What?"
"Yes, you need this one," he holds up the transparent bag. It is slightly larger than my LHR bag and instead of the adhesive sealant the LHR bag has, it has one of those lips arrangements that you force together: its the best description I can come up with, prizes for those who can do better, answers on a postcard please. I hold up my LHR bag, the employee, now joined by a colleague, looks blankly at me. I look back at them, thinking, "you have got to be joking."

This situation is another example of the way our societies overreact, where certain sections of the media whip up hysteria, politicians feel the need to be seen doing something, anything (and jobs worths enforce the silly rules), and other groups exploit such controversy for their own ends. For example where peoples in conflicts are divided by physical and cultural differences some seek to gag opinions about what one or both sides of a conflict are doing by using that catch-all term, racism. When we should be reminding people that tolerance, including a sense of humour, is the key to us living side by side. I have always found that people who throw around the word racism also use the word progressive to describe their politics. They love to liberally use words like racism to describe anyone with a different point of view. That and the word progressive is used to imply that only their ideas will advance humanity.

Back at terminal four it is still an impasse, checkmate, if you will, with an international incident only one Zidane head butt away. I eventually give in, life is too short, I tear my LHR bag and the airport chap kindly opens one of the "correct" bags and I drop my gels, pastes and fluids into it. I walk away struggling to seal the damn thing and as I float up the escalator I realise that in the airport's shops I have not seen a single packet of the Swedish confectionary called "Plop".

Damn, those terrorists have got us on the ropes already or Swedish standards really are slipping.

You couldn't make it up - Airbus A380 grounded by French civil service strike

Unfortunately for Airbus, the US denizens of the darker Francophobic corners of the web are going to be in near-ecstasy over this one...

The first media flight of the A380, due to take place from Toulouse early next month, has had to be rescheduled. The reason: the French civil service is going on strike.

Could just as easily happen to Boeing of course (OK, maybe not.)

European Court ruling should mean GE's move on Smiths Aerospace is OK

For GE, Smiths is the new Honeywell. There are plenty of people in both those companies (and more significantly, some now not in them) who would rather consign the whole ghastly memory of the failed GE-Honeywell merger of 2001 to a dark corner. But, thanks to the European Court of Justice, this time around, things should be different.

The GE/Honeywell affair was one of the most extraordinary events in contemporary aerospace history. A $41 billion acquistion (by Jack Welch's GE) that pleased most of their customers, appalled their competitors (including Rolls-Royce which fought it in the courts), and finally was struck down by mild-mannered EU Competition Commissioner "Super Mario" Monti.

It was pure theatre. From the moment that the buccanneering Welch swooped on Honeywell to snatch a virtually done-deal from under the nose of arch-rival UTC, to his final legendary conversation with Monti, each week seemed to bring another incredible twist.

At one point GE offered to sell one-fifth of its hugely successful GECAS leasing unit (but not to UTC/Pratt & Whitney or Rolls-Royce) to satisfy Monti. And there was Boeing vice-chairman Harry Stonecipher's public apology to Airbus CEO Noel Forgeard at the Paris Airshow after he wrongly accused Airbus of trying to block the deal. European journalists sat in grinning rows as Boeing's iron-man ground out the words at a press conference. Not a nice thing...schadenfreude.

Within months Welch was gone. But GE, as ever, was playing a long game and, despite having no intention of reviving the merger, appealed against the ruling. In December 2005 it lost the battle, but the detail of the court's judgement transformed the battleground on which the M&A war is now being fought.

In its ruling it explicitly dismissed many of the grounds for the original decision - crucially, including the European Commission's arguments against "bundling" - the idea of gaining an unfair advantage by acquiring a portfolio of products that could let one player use bundled pricing to provide more and more parts of any new aircraft.

That matters hugely, because Smiths' product line-up is heavily biased towards supplying OEMs like airframers. At the time of the Honeywell deal, for example, GE had won the engine deal for the Embraer 170 and there was much talk of what Honeywell kit it could bundle into that if the merger went through.

On the A350 XWB and the new narrowbody programmes to come, that will be very important. I don't think the courts will intervene this time.

Airbus market share - I was sort-of right

Well, the Airbus numbers are out and my prediction of a week ago that they'd get to 40% by net units sold was right, but a big chunk of undisclosed customers listed as December 06 orders means that I wasn't as close as I'd like to have been. In fact, Airbus's 790 net orders gets them up to 43% against Boeing's 1,044 net at 57%.

So that's one of their best years ever in absolute terms, but also puts Boeing back as undisputed champion for the year - for Airbus I think "bittersweet" is the word (probably something a little stronger inside the company.)

The additional December 06 orders revealed today are as follows:

Undisclosed - 5 x A320
Private - 1 x A319
MEA - 4 x A319, 4 x A330-200
AirBlue - 4 x A320
Private - 1 x A319
Undisclosed - 3 x A319, 7 x A320, 5 x A330-200
Undisclosed - 9 x A319, 18 x A320

If you know who the undisclosed customers are, then do tell...

So congratulation to Boeing on a really superb performance. And congratulations to FT Deutschland who got the correct Airbus figure leaked to them four days ago!

Finding a Unicorn or a British astronaut, which is easier?

Here we go again, the idea of a British astronaut is being touted but this time it’s not the usual suspects of high profile space enthusiasts but the UK government itself. Historically the UK has been against manned spaceflight in principle.

In the 1950s a debate in the UK was won by those that said that robotics would develop in such a way that space and planetary science could always be done more cheaply with robots.
However artificial intelligence has not progressed as quickly as people expected. An argument that has gained ground is that for the mass requirements of human spaceflight the spacecraft and landers would have a payload capacity sufficient to take substantial amounts of scientific equipment.

Combined with the in-situ intelligence of a human being and there is a growing acceptance that to advance our knowledge of the solar system substantially further manned missions are required. Incredibly even the Royal Astronomical Society agrees, producing a report saying just this last year. And it’s a society largely for astronomers who have normally hated manned flight for what they see as a redirection of funds away from the ‘real science’ possible with ground and space-based telescopes.

And so now Malcolm Wicks, the new UK minister of state for science and innovation appointed last November, has said that he would not be opposed to a UK astronaut. In his view if future opportunities came up, within the context of the global exploration strategy now being discussed by the world’s space agencies, then the UK could participate in manned spaceflight.
In other developed countries remarks by government ministers about the prospect of involvement in an astronaut programme would be viewed as a commitment that would be followed up by funding. Look at India, that country is showing all the signs of taking the manned plunge as it has apparently decided to enter into a race with China (whether China knows it or not) to become the pre-eminent billion people nation on Earth following China’s astronaut success.

Sadly I fear this UK Labour party government is engaging in the usual disingenuous rhetoric that we have had to suffer here in the UK since its election in 1997. For those of you reading this and not resident in the UK Tony Blair’s government has become as hated as the Conservative party was when it was in government up until 1997. However, where as the Tories, as the Conservatives are also known here, took 18 years to reach that level of unpopularity, the Labour party has managed it in nine. Although the Iraq war has contributed to this the government’s deeply cynical manipulation (beyond anything previously witnessed) of the political process and the media makes any announcement sound hollow. So how realistic is this prospect?

The UK is not going to start its own space programme with its own astronaut corp. Even the most ardent UK space fans won’t believe that. So the only other options are, the UK government funds one or more individuals to train with NASA or the Russian Federal Space Agency (FSA) or the UK joins the European space Agency’s (ESA) astronaut programme. But each of these has problems. NASA is to retire its Space Shuttle fleet by 2011 and each mission is now dedicated to completing the International Space Station (ISS). It’s unlikely that even the three British born astronauts who became US citizens and joined NASA will fly again on the Orbiter. The FSA is equally problematic as its astronauts only go to the space station. The Soyuz capsule they travel in is simply a transportation vehicle to the ISS, unlike the Shuttle that can be used for low Earth orbit based space science.

So what would a UK astronaut do? The only remaining option is to go to the ISS but this is also an idea strewn with obstacles. ISS was created through an international framework agreement and because of the perceived political kudos of having astronauts in space each participating nation gained astronaut ISS time in relation to its contribution to the station. This astronaut opportunity then has been well and truly sown up by the nations involved at the beginning. And for now there is no other human spaceflight game in town. Sitting in committee room eight in the UK’s parliamentary building, the Palace of Westminster, on 10 January I watched the director general of the British National Space Centre (BNSC), David Williams, row back from the science minister’s comments.

Under pressure from the UK members of parliament that sit on the science and technology committee that is reviewing UK space policy Williams spoke of time tables in decades. In his view if there is a global exploration effort being undertaken then the UK would “at some point…have to decide whether to join manned space in 20 or 40 years time”. No doubt he will have retired by then so its one difficult decision he can avoid. Sadly this 20 or 40 year timeframe, if adopted as policy, will doom UK astronaut hopes. What the global strategy being discussed will lead to, assuming all goes smoothly, is an International Lunar Outpost (ILO) that will probably come into being just as the ISS is finally de-orbited in the early 2020s – but that’s for another blog.

The key date here is the 2020s. To have an operational ILO up and running in 2025 the framework agreement that will have to be negotiated is going to be hammered out at least ten-years before because that is the latest date by which ILO hardware will have to be on the drawing boards. If the UK is going to participate in ILO as an ESA member state in the European astronaut corp it will have to join with its partners, probably Germany, Italy and France, to work out what it will do as part of the ESA share of ILO work. That will also take years of negotiation and very probably require an expansion in the UK space capability from today’s small satellites and robot sub-systems.

You can probably see where I am going with this, but if the UK is serious about having British nationals working as European astronauts then it has got to start the ball rolling now.
Later on 10 January at an ESA exploration strategy workshop press conference a BNSC official told me that the only way the UK could seriously expand its involvement in space was to create an agency with a significant budget. The UK’s civilian space budget is about $400 million, with the current fantastic exchange rate of almost $2 to the pound. So it can’t be stressed enough how substantial the funding increase will have to be for engagement in the global exploration strategy to lead to a British national presence on the Moon.

Yet this BNSC official’s boss, Williams, was telling the MPs that the voluntary, inter-department set up that is the BNSC was a good way of raising the profile of space as a key tool for those departments to achieve their goals. Neither the MPs nor the directors of the UK research councils involved in space science, who spoke after Williams, seemed convinced. One of those councils, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, has “set up an ad-hoc UK Exploration Strategy Working Group that will review global and European plans and establish UK interests and opportunities”. It is to report on the case for human spaceflight by August this year.

At the parliamentary committee meeting PPARC chief executive Professor Keith Mason spoke of a need for “an agenda of ambition”. Williams, although he deferred an astronaut decision almost to the middle of the century, also said that to do better BNSC required more funds to expand UK space activity. So it suggests that the PPARC working group will miraculously find that, on balance, the UK should engage in human spaceflight. No doubt in some language acceptable to the UK civil service mindset. So why are the UK’s scientists’ research organisations and societies suddenly embracing manned spaceflight?

The real reason is probably a perceived threat of fewer researchers and therefore less research and smaller budgets for the research councils, and dare I say it, rationalisation and, shock, horror, council mergers. The UK is simply not getting enough students involved in science and engineering. Science departments are closing down all over UK universities as our celebrity obsessed culture encourages children to opt only for the apparently glamorous arts.

The UK scientists and bureaucrats that once sneered at the US for what they saw as an indulgent exercise in national pride that was the Apollo programme are now realising that investments’ economic return and are feeling very sorry for themselves. Bizarrely the UK could have had an astronaut already. In 1997 the newly elected Labour government had an offer from NASA. The agency would provide a cut price astronaut deal to the UK if it wanted it. You would imagine for the media obsessed Labour government this would have been an open goal, cool Britannia, the popular cultural slogan at the time of the government’s election, could have chilled out in the depths of space. Yet nothing happened.

In May, just before this PPARC report is produced, Tony Blair is expected to step down as prime minister after ten-years in office. His chancellor, that’s secretary of state or minister for finances for those of you elsewhere in the world, Gordon Brown is the favourite to take over. So a UK astronaut is likely to be Primeminister Brown’s decision. In the cold harsh light of politics the decision to have a British national in the European astronaut corp could ultimately depend on whether Brown thinks it would be something positive that would set his premiership a part from his predecessor.

If any of you want to join a campaign to get the UK government moving on this issue you could start here;

http://www.bis-spaceflight.com/sitesia.aspx/page/1191/l/en-gb

Airbus and Boeing - it's that time of year and Airbus will hit 40%

Loyal followers of this blog will recall that on 5 January last year I stunned the world by correctly predicting that, contrary to all received wisdom, Airbus would still overtake Boeing's 2005 order total despite being way behind with only days to go. (OK, not stunned exactly, and possibly you don't recall exactly, but anyhow...)

Flushed with success, I'm going to have another stab at predicting what will happen when Airbus announces its 2006 figures in 7 days time. You'll know that Boeing has already put down its 2006 marker at 1,044 net orders (1,050 gross).

Airbus' problem, obviously, is that it can't possibly catch up (..I mean it can't...can it?) Its most recent figure was released 30 November and declared 635 orders in 2006 by then. In December it added these:

Qantas - 8 x A380
Singapore - 9 x A380
Silkair - 11 x A320
Lufthansa - 7 x A340-600
AerCap - 20 x A330-200

And in January, it has so far added these below which it put 2006 dates against:

Grupo Marsans - 12 x A330
SALE - 20 xA320
Pegasus - 2 x A350 and 6 x A330
Interjet - 10 x A320

So that's 105 more firm orders in 2006 - taking the total to 740. Take off a handful to give the Airbus net figure and you will end up with a figure just over a 40% market share (if the net figure is 730 then it comes in at 41.1%).

And my theory is that that is basically the figure that Airbus will hit. Why? Because for several years now John Leahy has very publicly said that Airbus wants a stable market share of "40-60%". So long as he hits the 40% then he can shrug off 2006 as Airbus' annus horribilis and return to the fray in 2007 - starting with the AirAsia order for 50 two days ago.

FSTA delays mean the RAF will keep its BAC VC10s how long!!!

One by agonising one the RAF has been getting rid of the assortment of made-in-Britian, and pretty much only-operated-in-Britain, aircraft that soldiered on through the sixties to the nineties. But the VC10, almost incredibly, is looking highly likely to hit 50 years of service.

Flight International this week reports that delays to the RAF's Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft (FSTA) mean that the current VC10 tankers should see service until 2015. One year later and the type (although not necessarily specific airframes I think) will have been in service for 50 years. Mostly as the service's resident 'airliner' in Shiny Ten - number 10 Squadron - more recently as a tanker.

I've got my own memories of the VC10. As a cadet I flew on one of the Shiny Ten machines on a training flight from RAF Brize Norton in the summer of '76. It was a memorable trip - I was in the cockpit as we did max angle of bank turns (60 degrees I think), an ear-popping max-rate descent, Mach-limiting runs (not sure what speed but it was high), and most dramatically - recovery from a Dutch Roll.

The Dutch Roll was spectacular from the cockpit. My recollection (might be slightly wrong) is that the drill was to disable the yaw-damper and give the rudder a nudge. With its swept wings and huge fin, the aircraft would rapidly diverge. I think the regulations allowed no more than two complete cycles before the aircraft had to be recovered with some hefty aileron input. By that time you had reached about 45 degrees of bank in both directions with lashings of yaw going on. Amazing stuff.

But then things got more exciting. I went and sat down in the cabin while my mate Richard Worrall went up-front. The cabin was configured with only about five rows of rear-facing seats and then a completely empty main deck all the way to the rear. At the rear was parked a galley trolley, of which more in a moment.

I sat down in the final row of seats and stretched out my 16 year-old legs. We began Dutch rolling again. At some point the nose went steeply down. The galley trolley, I rapidly learned, had been left unstowed and it began moving...towards me...very fast indeed. Strapped in, and under a fair bit of g force, I couldn't move. At the last second I managed to lift my legs high in the air and the trolley smashed into my seat an inch from my backside.

The aircraft quickly recovered, and a few moments later so did I.

I told the pretty, Welsh, female air loadmaster, responsible for stowing the trolley, what had happened. She begged me not to mention it to the captain. I promised not to and, aged 16, didn't even insist on a date! (I joined the RAF myself three years later and made up for that.)