Category Archives for Aircraft.
American Airlines President Robert Isom hosted a meeting separately with pilots and with flight attendants updating employees on the 737 MAX. At the final ‘Crew News’ employee forum of the year they walked through Boeing’s changes to the MCAS system in anticipation of the aircraft’s return to service. They’re confident in the fix to the underlying issue that occurred in both the Lion Air and Ethiopian disasters.
It is not the official position of any safety agency at this point, but regulators are discussing a whole different approach from Boeing’s software fixes as they consider what it will take to re-certify the 737 MAX.
At the Dubai Air Show Emirates placed a firm order for 50 Airbus A350-900s “at $16 billion in list prices. Deliveries will start in May 2023 and run until 2028.”
Great news for Airbus? No, not really.
The aviation world is excited about the 2020 release of Microsoft’s new version of Flight Simulator. But that’s not the only aviation game coming out soon.
The world is about to get a taste of Airplane Mode – a six hour trip as a passenger on board a transatlantic flight which occurs in real time.
I’m genuinely excited by this, although I worry I’ll spend way too much time on this. I don’t play video games, it’s not a part of my life. That might be about to change.
Self-certification dates to 1956. It is not part of a deregulatory push. It’s a system that has worked remarkably well. The FAA has approximately 400 engineers to work on aircraft certification. Boeing has 45,000 engineers. The FAA cannot possibly do all of the work themselves and we wouldn’t want to shift the best engineering minds away from creating product to oversight.
Delegation isn’t a strictly-U.S. practice, or one which was limited to the MAX.
Video from Chinese social media platform Weibo shows an Airbus A320, being transported by truck, getting stuck underneath a pedestrian bridge near Harbin, in northeastern China.
The truck driver deflated the truck’s tires in order to dislodge the plane and get past the bridge, and then re-inflated the tires them shortly after.
American Airlines CEO Doug Parker says that the plane is safe to fly today – with American’s 737 MAX and using American’s pilots – suggesting that the delay in bringing the plane back into service is so that it’ll be safe even when operated by other airlines.
He dishes on how they’re scheduling the plane’s return to service, and whether or not delays have been the result of politics.
We all know (or should know!) not to stick our hands down inside seat back pockets. Those are bigger germ farms than the monkey in Outbreak. All seats have them though, usually even bulkhead seats. So those seat back pockets don’t differentiate one seat from another.
The question is, if you want to avoid the plague, which seats are the most infected on an aircraft? Which ones do you want to avoid?
In 2015 we learned that Boeing 787s needed to be turned off and on every 248 days. The problem was that the plane’s generators, powered on for over 8 continuous months, could fail and cause lack of control. The FAA issued an airworthiness directive to use the universal IT fix and Boeing went to work on a more permanent solution.
Now though we learn that the Airbus A350 needs to be turned off an on too.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
