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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You may remember the Air India crash of June 12th, 2025 just after the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had taken off from Ahmedabad. The one where one passenger, a Brit Indian on his way to Gatwick, walked away unscathed but nobody else survived.
The date is significant because by world aviation rules, the final report on the crash has to be published 'within a year' and they've just announced it won't be. This may only be because India is notorious for getting anything official done on time. But they are also notorious for not accepting blame for anything Indian i.e. pilot error and bad maintenance.
So it looks like they're having difficulty pinning this one on Boeing. (Though that's my guess since the Dreamliner has a track record of problems with fuel cutoff switches.) However there's an AE angle. I keep looking but nobody ever mentions the landing gear hadn't been retracted.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Episode One
Ever flown on a tuppenny-ha'penny airplane journey in America? You know, from super-hub O'Hare, Chicago where you've just landed on a 747 from Heathrow and you're boarding a plane for your ultimate destination, One Horse, Idaho. Grim, wasn't it?
| There's a reason for this and its initials are ALPA. |
In the nineteen-seventies you flew that second leg in a brand new Delta turboprop and had a whale of a time. Turboprops are cheaper and all round better than jets for limited passenger, short haul flights.
But apparently Americans didn't trust aeroplanes with propellers any longer so Delta had to buy a small jet or local passengers wouldn't get on a Delta plane at all. So Delta bought a brand new jet and quite shortly thereafter they weren't flying to One Horse at all. It just made no economic sense going there using a jet.
Nobody could make Chicago to One Horse by jet pay. So One Horse's airport closed for passengers. You had to fly Chicago to Boise and your friends had to drive three hours to pick you up. They never invited you again.
End of Lesson One.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Episode Two
Eventually near-economic small passenger jets came on the market and the major airlines--American, Delta, United and South-West--wanted to get those passengers from the One-Horses of this world on to their long haul flights at their hubs--Charlotte, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas.
'Near-economic' because of the cost of cabin crew. Two pilots earning $200,000 a year each could not economically fly small numbers of people anywhere. So the majors either bought, created or twinned with minor airlines to fly them in small jet planes from spok(an)e to hub flown by pilots on a forty-thousand dollar screw. There's no shortage of them.
| 'We're not having any of that,' said ALPA, the airline pilots' trade union. |
On the other hand, ALPA didn't want to lose all those... er... junior pilots either. So tortuous negotiations back in the nineteen-nineties resulted in an agreement that you could put up to eighty-six people on a plane with cheap pilots but anything more and you had to employ rolls-royce pilots.
That's still the position today and, since the world's aircraft manufacturers found there was no point in designing planes with such restrictive requirements, everybody in Nowhere, USA is still flying in nineteen-nineties aircraft.
Here endeth the lesson
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So, Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire thanks to the SpaceX flotation on the stock exchange. I had confidently predicted this would be a fiasco since nobody in their right mind would buy stock at $135 in a company that has never shown a profit in its twenty-five year history.
Not only was $1.7 trillion worth of stock snapped up, the share price was at $165 by the close of dealing. This is my one point seven trillionth incorrect prediction when it comes to Mr Musk's career.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You probably agree with me and think steel wheels on steel rails is pretty Victorian and I'm going to suggest hovertrains or something. Heaven forfend. No, rubber tyres on steel rails. Nobody's thought of that, have they? Apart from Mexico City, Paris, Santiago, Montreal etc etc. They have advantages and disadvantages. Being quieter being the main one.
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