Non-Military Aviation

[Shyster]

Captain Joe provides an explanation of airline crappers. They're surprisingly complicated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akFjExzoSWA

[NTP66]

[Hopefully] some good news for PA and REAL ID:

As I poked around, asking different agencies different questions, I came up with a TSA spokesman who spilled some welcome beans.

“The extension has not been approved.” he said, “but they are getting it. That’s a foregone conclusion. The state will be good to go until 2020.”

I asked him if that was official. He said it was, even though he was not authorized to announce it yet, not even to PennDOT. He believes it will be announced early in October.

TL;DR - You should be able to continue using a standard PA drivers license to fly domestically until 2020. I was planning on renewing my passport next year, but I’ll be holding off once they officially announce this.

[Shyster]

Boeing may have stepped in it with the protests over the supposed "dumping" of the Bombardier C-Series on Delta's order for 75 of the CS100 models. Not only is Canada ticked off about the tariff imposed by the US Department of Commerce, but substantial parts of the C-Series—including the composite wings—are built at a plant in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and the Brits are royally (pun intended) ticked off that Boeing is threatening thousands of NI jobs, and in return the UK is threatening to scuttle billions of dollar's worth of military orders from Boeing:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-41397181

Boeing supposedly pursued its complaint based on illegal competition with the (very slow-selling) MAX7, but the MAX7 is much larger than the CS100 and doesn't even compete with that aircraft. In addition, one of only two major orders of the MAX7 so far is from WestJet—the second-largest Canadian airline behind Air Canada. None of those aircraft have been delivered yet. So there's a clear opportunity for the Canadians to retaliate by canceling a big order for the exact aircraft Boeing is trying to protect.

[NTP66]

I didn’t even know there was a MAX7 until I saw that story posted online.

[Shyster]

For whatever reason, the airlines are clearly going bigger with their narrowbody fleets. It's not just that the MAX7 is selling poorly; Airbus has thousands of orders for the A320neo and A321neo, but less than 100 for the A319neo. Things might change if oil prices were to go back up, but I'm thinking that airlines these days probably don't view the fuel savings of a smaller but less versatile aircraft as being worth it. One can always fly an A320 or MAX8 with empty seats, but you can't add seats to an A319 or MAX7 if demand for a route suddenly goes up.

[tifosi77]

[Hopefully] some good news for PA and REAL ID:

As I poked around, asking different agencies different questions, I came up with a TSA spokesman who spilled some welcome beans.

“The extension has not been approved.” he said, “but they are getting it. That’s a foregone conclusion. The state will be good to go until 2020.”

I asked him if that was official. He said it was, even though he was not authorized to announce it yet, not even to PennDOT. He believes it will be announced early in October.

TL;DR - You should be able to continue using a standard PA drivers license to fly domestically until 2020. I was planning on renewing my passport next year, but I’ll be holding off once they officially announce this.

I had completely forgotten about REAL ID until we started planning our overseas trip. What a pain.

[tifosi77]

For whatever reason, the airlines are clearly going bigger with their narrowbody fleets. It's not just that the MAX7 is selling poorly; Airbus has thousands of orders for the A320neo and A321neo, but less than 100 for the A319neo. Things might change if oil prices were to go back up, but I'm thinking that airlines these days probably don't view the fuel savings of a smaller but less versatile aircraft as being worth it. One can always fly an A320 or MAX8 with empty seats, but you can't add seats to an A319 or MAX7 if demand for a route suddenly goes up.

On its face, that doesn't seem to make sense. Even if airlines make the decision to run certain routes under capacity, the larger aircraft, by definition, will require more fuel to operate. It's not like an efficiency thing; the bigger jets weigh more to start. I don't get it.

[NTP66]

A 1:60-Scale Boeing 777 Built Entirely from Paper Manilla Folders by Luca Iaconi-Stewart

This is remarkable work.

[dodint]

They mispelled Boeing in the URL. Teehee.

[tifosi77]

'Bowing' lol

[tifosi77]

Every year, United Airlines is a major sponsor of the Fleet Week air show in SF. For many, many years, part of that support involved flying a 747 down over the Bay and making a couple low passes in front of the crowd. It's not like I don't see traffic departing SFO literally out of my bedroom window every day, but this is kind of a neat sight.

What made this year unique is that it was the last ever appearance of the 747 at Fleet Week, as United will be retiring the type by the end of the year.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fECuzZdXYA
(not my video)

[Shyster]

IIRC, the original plan for United was to phase them out next year, but I believe United accelerated their 747 retirement (to be replaced by Boeing 777-300ERs). Delta will also phase out its 747s by the end of 2017 (to be replaced by Airbus A350-900s). That will leave the four Boeing 747-400s operated by Atlas Air (a cargo/charter airline) as the only passenger 747s operated by a US-based airline.

One of those Atlas passenger 747s was just in Pittsburgh; Atlas is the charter carrier for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

[NTP66]

Confirming the rumors, Southwest finally announced that they'll be flying to Hawai'i, likely in 2019. They're going to be using their -800 aircraft initially to speed up the process, but intend to use their new MAX fleet from the west coast. I don't fly SW, and will likely never fly them, but I look forward to price and award drops due to the competition.

[RonnieFranchise]

Flew into/out of LGA this week. I know it is undergoing major renovation but how the PANYNJ allowed this dump to get this way in the first place is a total embarrassment. Not just that the infrastructure in the Central Terminal is awful but there is no good way to get there from anywhere.

We were going up to Fairfield County and had to rent a car. You take one shuttle bus over to the Marine Air Terminal where you get on another shuttle to your rental car company's facility. On the way back, the rental car bus leaves you off in front of an abandoned building in LIC where you get the bus to the terminal. Hello, we're not from around here....... please come and take our money and luggage.....

[DigitalGypsy66]

Good read on why airfare is cheaper in Europe: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wor ... n-the-u-s/

[dodint]

Cattle car to Hawaii sounds awful.

[NTP66]

The A321 is the smallest plane I've ever flown on to OGG. If I had to take a 737-MAX8, I certainly wouldn't be against it so long as it was leaving from LAX. I can't even recall the last time that I was on a Boeing aircraft, to be honest.

That said, I have no intention of ever flying Southwest.

[tifosi77]

I've flown SW a couple times, merely because of convenience and price of the BUR-LAS route. It's a 45 minute hop, so ultimately not a big deal. But I'd never sign up for anything longer than that on SW.

[Freddy Rumsen]

Adam Carolla flies SW all the time and does nothing but complain about it, but that's kind of his schtick.

[Shyster]

Nice 747 farewell video by United.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUbabyFKUvQ

Oh, man, those totally groovy 60s interiors.

[tifosi77]

Cool, I wonder if there's going to be any sort of escort for that last Friendship Flight. 11/7 is a Tuesday, which is a bummer, as I probably won't get to see it.

Most of the purpose-shot ground ops are SFO. At :06, there's a hill in the background: I live like two blocks south of the base of that hill, about a mile west of what's visible in-frame there.

[Shyster]

I just did a little research, and they would have had to film at SFO because all of the remaining United 747 routes actually go through SFO, namely:

San Francisco <—> Frankfurt
San Francisco <—> London
San Francisco <—> Seoul
San Francisco <—> Shanghai

[Shyster]

Big news today—and very bad news for Boeing. Bombardier and Airbus have announced that Airbus is buying a 50.01% majority stake in the Bombardier subsidiary that makes and owns the C-Series. In addition to the ownership stake, Airbus also announced that its factory in Mobile, Alabama (currently used as an assembly plant for US-bound A320-family aircraft) will be also used as a "second final assembly line" for C-Series aircraft headed to US customers.

Holy crap, Boeing really screwed up with its "anti-dumping" claims before the US Department of Commerce. Not only will the Mobile plant pretty much moot Boeing's claims of dumping because the aircraft will now be US-made (and something made in the US cannot be "dumped" in the US), but this will give Airbus an expanded lineup of narrow-body aircraft all the way from ~100 seats at the low end for a CS100 to ~240 seats at the high end for an all-economy A321neo. This is also bad news for Embraer, whose E190-E2 and 195-E2 jets are direct competitors for the CS100. Embraer's competition is now backed by one of the two giants of the industry—one that heretofore wasn't really involved in making jets that size.

http://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-re ... ement.html

[tifosi77]

Embraer jets are common on the LAX-SFO and LAX-LAS routes I tend to fly the most. They are poop.

[NTP66]

Most of the time, our flights to SAV are on an E-175. I would love for that to change in the near future.