A cornucopia of news, opinion, views, facts and quirky bits that need to be talked about. Join our community and join in the conversation on all matters aviation. The blog includes our weekly round-up of the bits of European aviation you may otherwise have missed – That Was The Week That Was
The week ended with Easter, making one think of rabbits, and thus hops. Which is a neat way to start thinking about Monday; when Qantas’ non-stop service from Perth to London set out, and arrived. It was a non-stop service – a single hop. But to read the reports, including from a number of aviation sources, this was called a direct service. Does no-one now understand the difference? Qantas has been flying direct to London since the 1930s. This was non-stop. A direct service is on a single flight number, on a single aircraft. It is not non-stop. A non-stop flight is one that does not stop.
Nomenclature aside, it is an interesting development. In the end, the technology always wins and here is another example of ‘hub-busting’. The aircraft flies over all the traditional stopping points. The corollary is that it might make Perth a hub. Not a sentence you read every week that was.
By Tuesday all the excitement of using the wrong name to describe something was wearing thin, so it was back to normal. Or it would have been had we known what normal was…
Normal, of course, is a drone scare. Having lost its mantle as the most endurance-testing-place-to-fly-to, at least for the moment, Air NZ had to do something to get into the headlines and what is better than a drone scare for that? Well, a call for tighter regulation, obviously. Cue mad scramble as drone operators, drone manufacturers and all related parties tried to show that it was not them. The claim was that the drone was within 5 metres, a distance somewhat hard to measure when you are on short finals. Remarkably, it did not get sucked into the engine. The engine and its vacuum-like ability to get risky objects away from the fuselage can normally be trusted. It is almost impossible to image how that could have been the case.
Wednesday saw an interesting thing – normally, here at TWTWTW we like to see what is going on, but on this one, we are crowd sourcing. Have you noticed how suddenly, after leaving the formal agreements with both Canada and the US languish around unexecuted – but complied with – there has been an outbreak of tidying up. In the last few weeks both for the US and now for Canada, the open skies agreements have been signed and finalised. Loose ends neatly put away. Can Brexit be involved?
As we have had to remark in the past, thank heavens for the most honestly named union in Europe, the European pilots union, or the European Cockpit Association, as it wants you to call them. Easy to remember: European; an association; the pits; and you can probably guess the rest… Still, they were on hand on Thursday to give comfort to the comfortless, hope to the hopeless, joy to the joyless and wire to the fly-by-wire brigade, by noting that there is no pilot shortage in Europe. Sorry NO PILOT SHORTAGE. Indeed, pilots are not being paid enough and there are pilots leaving the pilot caper. No comment.
Friday was of course Good Friday, a time when traditionally in much of Europe, eggs are distributed by a bell – about as mechanically believable as a bunny doing it in the Anglo-Saxon world is physiologically believable. Mind you, as is so often the case with rabbits once introduced they become a invading scourge. Try finding chocolate bells this year.
That was the week that was and we take this opportunity to wish you all the best for Easter.
