Friday Fun – Ryanair Business Class Services…

Mr. O’Leary, the CEO of RyanAir had a few words in a German Press Meeting about the upcoming business class on the future Ryanair long-haul operations… Simply put it’s not going to be a “Bed & Breakfast”, but will be classified as “Bed & Blowjob” according to his explanations. Attila, thanks for the link!

by balint01

Friday Fun – Future Airline Safety Message

With the record high fuel prices these days, airlines are trying to get extra revenue (actually getting back some part of their lost revenue) by charging for services that otherwise used to be free (included in the price). Here is a funny vision of how our safety messages may look like in the future, if the current trends in in the pricing of airline services continue.

by balint01

Friday Fun – Airport Security

It’s been a while since our last Friday Fun post, so here we go again.

Is this how airport security really works? It would explain a few situations, I guess…

by balint01

Emirates Looking for A380 Crew

According to ATW News, Emirates has initiated the next phase in welcoming the Airbus A380 superjumbo into its fleet in August: hiring flight crew!

Here is a video of the Emirates livery A380 flying above Dubai:

The Aviation College of Emirates will begin accepting A380 personnel to its crew training program in early June. Emirates will have 489 seats in its A380, and plans to operate it with 24 cabin staff onboard a normal flight meaning that there is one flight attendant for every 20 passegengers. Just as a comparison, a regular narrow-body Airbus A320 or Boeing B737 flies with around 4-5 flight attendants per 150 passengers meaning that there is one flight attendant for every 30-35 passengers only. It is interesting that they plan to have a little more than about six complete crews for every aircraft. There will be 158 employees trained for the first four A380s scheduled to arrive in 2008 and they will be selected from current Boeing 777 and Airbus A330/A340 staff, Senior VP-Service Delivery Terry Daly told ATWOnline in Dubai. This also shows just how complicated of a process it is to introduce a new aircraft to an airline’s fleet.

In average, 90 new flight attendants join Emirates each week and the carrier currently employs 9,200 cabin staff from 116 countries. “Four years ago, the number of cabin crew was around 4,000. By 2012-13 we will have a total of 18,000,” Daly said. The carrier is sending recruiters throughout its worldwide network to hire more staff. He said just 5% of applicants eventually are hired.

by balint01

Friday Fun – Red Bull Helicopter

The 2008 Red Bull Air Race Series have just gone underway last Sunday with the season-opener in Abu Dhabi, and in recent years, the Red Bull Aerobatic Helicopter has visited most of the races as well. So watch out for this customized Eurocopter BO-105 CBS 4 Twin engine helicopter that has a Rigid Rotor system (fixed rotor) why it can do aerobatics. We hope it will be present on the Budapest Race as well, following last year’s amazing and really breathtaking show. If you attend any of the races this year, try to keep your head up all the time even in between the rounds of the actual Race, to see this helicopter piloted by Chuck Aaron.

one from Budapest in 2006:

And the last one including Chuck’s comments live while doing the loops:

You can find a lot more videos on YouTube if you like these just search for the Red Bull Helicopter and enjoy your Friday!

by balint01

Red Bull Air Race 2008 – Abu Dhabi

Red Bull Air Race is the most well known stunt flying competition in the world. It started in 2001 based on the idea of the Hungarian pilot Peter Bessenyei, who is still among the racing pilots and we at Airline World Blog keep our fingers crossed for him. 🙂

The race is always a spectacular show for fans of stunt flying. The series consist of 10 different races. This year the scenes are the following:

1. Abu Dhabi – United Arab Emirates
2. San Diego – USA
3. Detroit – USA
4. Stockholm – Sweden
5. Rotterdam – The Netherlands
6. London – UK
7. Budapest – Hungary
8. Porto – Portugal
9. Spain (exact location not clarified yet)
10. Perth – Australia

Each race lasts 2 days and includes the following sessions:

• Training
• Qualifying
• Point One
• Super Eights
• Semi Finals
• 3rd Place Fly off
• Final

In 2008 this means that all pilots can fly on both days, but only 3 times a day, which is necessary for their safety as such an 1 – 1,5 minutes flight is very tiring and requires huge concentration. Thus the first three events take place on the first day – for all pilots, and the last 4 events on the second day – for the 8 quickest pilots.

There are air gates – blown up balloons that define the track of the race. Thus this is a kind of a figure flying race.

The first race this year took place in Abu Dhabi. Here are the results and the total points of the pilots so far:

1. Paul Bonhomme (GBR) – 9 points
2. Hannes Arch (AUT) – 8 points
3. Mike Mangold (USA) – 7 points
4. Peter Bessenyei (HUN) – 6 points
5. Kirby Chambliss (USA) – 5 points
6. Alejandro Maclean (ESP) – 4 points
7. Steve Jones (GBR) – 3 points
8. Nigel Lamb (GBR) – 2 points
9. Nicolas Ivanoff (FRA) – 1 point
10. Sergey Rakhmanin (RUS) – 0 point
11. Michael Goulian (USA) – 0 point
12. Glen Dell (AUS) – 0 point

See a video of last year’s race in Abu Dhabi:

You can read more about the race on the Red Bull Air Race website.

By Szafi

(photos: http://www.redbullairrace.com)

Small Jet Crashes Into a Home – 5 Killed

At least 5 died after a Cessna Citation I crashed into two homes in Farnborough, England. The plane took off from London Biggin Airport and was heading to Pau, France. Shortly after take off the pilot reported vibration in the engines. Some minutes later there was a Mayday call and the plane crashed into two houses. One of them was completely destroyed.

There were 5 people aboard. Three of them have already been identified. They were all known people from motor sports: David Leslie, a former tourign car champion, motorsport executive Richard Lloyd and Mike Roberts – the pilot.

Luckily the destroyed house was empty as its owners are on holiday, thus there were no more victims on the ground.

Watch video about the crash here.

Read more about the aircraft type here. 

By Szafi

Friday Fun – Foo Fighters – Learn To Fly

I received this link from a good friend of mine. It’s really funny. It is the music video of Foo Fighters’ Learn to fly. I hope you’ll like it.

Thanks Emonk for the link!

Happy Easter to everyone!

By Szafi

Friday Fun – Building Large Jets

We usually have funny posts in our series of Friday Fun, but for this week I was pointed to a very interesting – and fun (but not funny) – video, that shows how an Airbus A340-600 is manufactured.

Just to see the competitor as well, here is a similar video of a Boeing 777-300ER being put together.

by balint01

Crosswind Landings – Video

After a Lufthansa plane had a hard time landing in very strong cross wind last week, we received a video with a collection of crosswind landings.

As you can see, other planes also have a hard time landing in such cicumstances.

By Szafi