Heathrow slots

The excellent travel website Head for Points recently reported that Norwegian had been allocated slots to operate three flights a week at Heathrow for Summer 2020

Whilst the other headline was the denial of JetBlue's request for slots, the document itself is a useful reminder of who gets what at the UK's most important (and profitable) airport.

When looking at the document you need to remember that it's based around slot *pairs* - so each airline needs two slots to operate a return flight.  So every number in the file needs to be divided by two !

https://www.acl-uk.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/LHR-S20-INITIAL-COORDINATION-REPORT-FINAL.pdf

Lots of airlines requested extra slots - almost all were denied.  A couple of the airlines that I was surprised by were Aurigny and Loganair - I wouldn't have expected them to waste their time on such applications.

And FlyBE even requested an extra 62 pairs - on top of the 204 pairs that it already has.  I had no idea that they operate nearly 15 flights a day from Heathrow in their little Q400s.  It seems like such a waste to operate those tiny aeroplanes from such a congested airport.

What also surprised me about the requests was the number of different airlines from China that put in requests - both existing operators and would be operators.  From all those different requests, Shenzen Airlines goes from two return flights a week up to three, and China Southern increases from 12 to 14 return flights a week.

The report also includes ranking by both Movements and Passengers.  I hadn't appreciated just how much European airlines dominated the Movements rankings

1. BA
2. Lufthansa
3. Virgin Atlantic
4. Aer Lingus
5. AA
6. United
7. SAS
8. FlyBE
9. Swiss
10. Air Canada
11. KLM
12. Delta

Of course the long haul operators with their bigger aircraft dominate the Passenger rankings - with 11 airlines due to operate more than 1m seats over the Summer 2020 season.  Whilst many airlines are increasing the number of seats with the same number of slots, Emirates is showing no change.  Hard to get any bigger than the six A380s that they operate each day !

1. BA
2. Virgin Atlantic
3. Lufthansa
4. AA
5. Aer Lingus
6. United
7. Air Canada
8. Emirates
9. SAS
10. Qatar
11. Delta

And finally on a point of trivia - in the glossary they define CTA ... but it's not actually used anywhere in the report !

The Residence - how long will it last

Etihad's top bod, James Hogan, gave a talk at the RAeS last week - with most of the press coverage focusing on the battle between the US airlines and the ME3 over subsidies (amusingly he only mentioned the words Emirates and Qatar during questions).

Following reports that Etihad's premium Residence product was suffering from a lack of bookings - I asked him how long he would persevere with the suite if it continued to lack sales.

Of course he didn't directly answer the question!  But he did claim that on the London to Abu Dhabi route, it sells two or three times a week (presumably out of 14 possible slots), and repeated the claim that he is very pleased with sales.

He did however make some interesting points: firstly that it doesn't actually take up that much space - and seemed to congratulate his media team for getting so much coverage for such a small suite !

He also pointed out that the space at the front of the upper deck couldn't be used for passenger seats (it was too cramped) - and that Emirates choice of putting in a shower meant that it was only actually occupied during about 25% of the flight.

James Hogan's main defence seemed to be around the positive publicity that The Residence gave the airline - he talked both about the "halo effect" and that the Residence website had received millions of hits during the few months since it was launched.

It sounds like this premium product is here to stay - at least whilst Hogan leads Etihad.

Fleet within a fleet - dangerous ?

Squadron Leader Glen Willcox (A400M Flight Test Commander for UK Test & Evaluation) and Flight Lieutenant Dave Arnold recently gave a talk at the RAeS about the introduction of the A400M Atlas into RAF service.

It was a very interesting presentation, and it's a very impressive aircraft.

One thing that surprised me was the fact that each new aircraft the RAF receive from Airbus has different/improved capabilities - and there is no expectation of a stable platform even in the mid future.

I questioned them as to whether this might be dangerous - a pilot could get confused, or the wrong aircraft could be taken out on a specific mission.  My concerns were batted away, as Squadron Leader Willcox emphasised that they wanted to be able to use all the toys in the box.

Just after the talk, the dangers of operating a "fleet within a fleet" were brought home by American Airlines flying the wrong A321 to Hawaii.

Hopefully the RAF will not suffer the same problem - the consequences could be rather more serious.

Saint Maarten landing - real world vs. FSX

interesting comparison of landing a plane in FSX and landing for real ... on the luscious looking Saint Maarten ...

http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/sim/microsoftflightsimulatorx/video_player.html?id=JnBlxWH65bsFvj_Y

Helios Crash report

a guardian newspaper report says that a series of human errors led to the Helios Airlines B737 crash on August 14th 2005

unfortunatley the list of links at the end of the report has rather unfortunately juxtasposition ...

List of airlines banned from UK airspace
American Airlines
United Airlines
British Airways
BMI
EasyJet
Ryanair
Virgin Atlantic
Boeing
Airbus
International Air Transport Association