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No-frills airline Ryanair is looking east for new aircraft.
On Tuesday, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary signed an agreement with the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China to help the company develop its C919 twin-engine airliner. With the C919 Comac plans to challenge the Airbus/Boeing duopoly for single-aisle aircraft seating between 150 and 190 passengers. Read More…
At last, I get to fly on Airbus’s much-over-hyped A380 double-decker routesmasher.
This is an aircraft I’ve been as shy of as horses are of snakes. It’s that fly-by-wire thing I like the least, not to mention a few episodes that made the news recently such as when an engine on a Qantas A380 self-destructed in flight.
So, when I saw it waiting at my gate in Frankfurt, I was not much amused. Read More…
If you’re afraid of flying, here’s something to chew on. Read More…
Michael O’Leary, the outspoken boss of no-frills airline Ryanair, has got pilots and passenger lobby groups all hot under the collar by asking whether it’s necessary for commercial airliners to have two pilots on the flight deck. Read More…
Brendan Odell has one of the best jobs ever. Right now, the globe-trotting Dakota mechanic (not many of those around in the year 2010, I can promise you) is in the glorious and balmy Kingdom of Tonga where he is finishing up work on a Douglas DC-3 “Dakota” which is about to go back to work doing what it was built to do more than 60 years ago: hauling passengers across the skies. Read More…
The Ethiopian government claims Lebanon is hiding details about the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing into off Beirut and has asked the International Civil Aviation Organization to intervene in the investigation, Bloomberg News reports.
Last week, a preliminary accident report said the crew of the Boeing 737-800 were to blame for the crash which killed all 90 people on board, but Ethiopian officials have rejected this. An unnamed Ethiopian Airlines source, quoted on a Lebanese website, said reports that the crew were at fault were “just a guess”.
The number of incidents in which birds hit aircraft in flight last year could top 10 000, according to US aviation authorities.
Associated Press reports that this figure would represent around 27 strikes a day in the US alone. Read More…
Is the world really digging itself out of the financial crisis? Well, the airline industry – and 13 million jobless Americans – would probably say “no”. Read More…
Dakota ZS-GPL in full cry against a hazy Joburg skyline.
PHOTO African Pilot, courtesy Springbok Flying Safaris
The Dakota is the aeroplane that gave us real air travel. It revolutionised flying. Built to last, the Dakota has worked in every tiny corner of the world where any kind of airstrip could be hacked-out of jungle, bush, mountainside or ice, and at least 400 of them are still doing what they were built to do. Not one of them is younger than 63 years old.
Read the feature story, Tough Love, or check out the slideshow The Dakota Years, a collection of photographs of this incredible aircraft that just won’t quit.
Over the next few weeks on this blog we will be publishing The Dakota Years, a colourful, funny and sometimes frightening series about the people who flew and loved the Douglas DC-3.
This photo, courtesy of Flickr, shows the US Airways Airbus wallowing in the Hudson River after its engines swallowed some geese during take-off and ditched in the river. Read More…
