MBX Airways to take delivery of first all-metal Boeing 787 Dreamliner

You read it here first: in order to get its delivery schedule back on track, Boeing took the dramatic decision to abandon the use of composite materials in its next-generation Boeing 787 airliner and instead revert to a traditional construction technique known as die-casting. In a statement, Boeing indicated the impact on take-off weight and payload would be "marginal".

MBX Airways took delivery of the first all-metal Dreamliner, a move that surprised even seasoned industry observers who had always assumed launch customer All Nippon Airways would get the first production 787 to roll out of the Everett assembly line.

Qantas executives were seen walking the aisles of the Woolworths supermarket in Neutral Bay, Sydney, but would not comment on when they expected the Dreamliner to enter service with the Australian flag carrier.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce further refused to comment on whether using the corporate Everyday Rewards card to purchase the all-metal Dreamliner from Woolworths would constitute double-dipping, and denied seeking a 4c a litre rebate on jet fuel.

Aviation in New Caledonia

Nina and I spent ten days in New Caledonia over Easter. While the trip was not aviation-themed, one cannot avoid airports and airplanes when travelling from a very big island to a smaller island and eventually to an even smaller one.

We flew from Sydney to Nouméa in an Aircalin Airbus A320 codeshared with Qantas. While Air Calédonie flies domestic routes, Aircalin connects New Caledonia to international destination such as Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, South Korea and Japan. The Airbus A330 below was about to leave Nouméa Tontouta airport for Tokyo Narita as flight SB800.

This 300,000-inhabitant island in the Pacific has two airlines, and the capital Nouméa has two airport: Nouméa Magenta right near the city for domestic flights and General Aviation, and Nouméa Tontouta far from the city for international flights.

We spent a few days driving around the main island, taking in the sights, feasting on fresh seafood, deer meat and untreated tropical fruits and arguing politics with a few strongly-opinionated Caldoches.

For the last part of our trip we entered an Air Calédonie ATR-72 for a 20-minute flight to the Isle of Pines. New Caledonia being a French overseas territory, airplanes are F-registered, such as the two ATR-72 F-OIPN and F-OIPS below and the one ATR-42 F-OIPI above. The ATR-72 is the stretch and re-engineered version of the ATR-42, in the same way the Qantas fleet has both old Dash-8 and new Q400 aircraft.

The last two letters of the tail number refer to the three districts that make up New Caledonia: Province du Nord, Province du Sud and Province des Iles Loyauté.

All three twin turboprops were on the tarmac at Magenta airport that morning, boarding and unboarding a mix of tourists and locals.

The tail art uses traditional Kanak elements. In the middle of the circle is a flèche faîtière, a totem-like pole structure found on the apex of most traditional dwellings in New Caledonia, as can be seen on the traditional hut represented on the left of the rudder.

Magenta airport has a local flying club called Aéro Club Calédonien, with the usual fleet of Cessnas and Pipers but also a Mooney M-20J and a couple of TB-10 Tobago. Not bad at all when you consider that there are only 15 airfields in New Caledonia. Fiji is a bit far, but I wonder how often single-engine airplanes attempt the 100-nautical mile crossing to nearby Vanuatu.

We flew back in a Qantas 767. Tontouta airport has a long runway but no parallel taxiway, which forced our airliner to backtrack the whole length of the runway so that we could depart to the south-east on runway 11.

The airport is surrounded by hills and mountains, so finding an elevated point to build the control tower wasn't too hard:

Tontouta is a joint civilian-military airport, with units of both the French Navy and Air Force stationed at the Base Aéronavale de Tontouta. No jet fighters though, only helicopters and transport turboprops. That's their hangars on the photo below.

The thing that I found absolutely astonishing aviation-wise is that a small airport such as Ile des Pins (NWWE) has a control tower and rescue vehicles on standy at the airport even though it never sees more than four commercial flights a day. By way of comparison, Wagga Wagga airport in Australia sees about 10,000 RPT movements a year and had its tower closed down in 1996.

The stark contrast between these two approaches to the provision of air traffic services stems from the two very different business models Airservices Australia and the French DGAC operate under. Airservices Australia is a government-owned corporation that charges fees, makes profits and even sometimes pays dividends back to the Commonwealth. The French DGAC is a government department and as such is more concerned with spending money than making money. There are pros and cons to each approach obviously.

On a more touristy note, New Caledonia is a gorgeous location with a fantastic mix of landscapes and cultures. It is also poor value for the region and the infrastructures for tourism are not as developed as one may wish. If you're looking for a resort-style holiday on a Pacific island, go to Vanuatu or Fiji.

If, on the other hand, you speak French and want to discover a fascinating place fast approaching a turning point in its short history, New Caledonia is for you. The country is still struggling with de-colonisation and reconciliation and will have to decide in a few years wether to become fully independent or remain a French overseas territory. From our very short stay, we could see that opinions on that last point are very much split.

Spot the airfield: Armidale

On a Qantas flight from Brisbane to Sydney aboard a Boeing 737-800, the cloud cover turned from broken to few soon after we crossed the state border, which allowed me to spot Armidale airport. That's all part of the game of spot the airfield which I like to play from the back of the airliner.

The town centre is to the right of the shadow cast by the cumulus cloud, while the aerodrome is to the top-left of the photo, near the New England Highway .

Armidale airport (YARM) has a main 05/23 sealed runway with a comfortable length of 1738m, and a shorter 09/27 grassed gravel runway. The elevation is 3556ft, which is very high by Australian standards and is easily explained by the location of Armidale on a plateau in the middle of the Great Dividing Range. I guess local student pilots learn very early on the importance of computing take-off and landing distances.

After Armidale "our" airliner tracked in the direction of Scone, passing over lake Glenbawn and the Hunter River.

Just a minute later, an open-sky mine (of the type sung by Midnight Oil before its lead singer chose an alternative career path) could be seen south of Muswellbrook. That's still the Hunter River in the background

And for a slightly more challenging game of spot the airfield, what about photographing Boeing's factory from the International Space Station?

Spot the airfield: Canberra

On a flight from Sydney to Melbourne in a Qantas 767 we flew over Canberra airport. Which is not terribly surprising since Canberra is on a straight line between Sydney and Melbourne.

It is actually for this very reason that Canberra was chosen as the Australian federal capital in 1908 since neither Sydney nor Melbourne would accept the rival city as the federal capital.

The longuest of the two runways at YSCB is 17/35 with a length of nearly 3300m while runway 12/30 is about half the length. There's a great video taken from the control tower of a Russian IL-76 using every single inch of runway 17 on take-off. I'll let you decide how much chance and careful planning were involved in this successful take-off.

Right near the left edge of the photo above you can see two concentric ring roads around Capital Hill on top of which sits the Australian Federal Parliament.

It took me a while to realise which airport this was. I had only been to Canberra once before, it was at night and it was a disaster. For previous photos of airfields I took from airliners, you can start here.

It feels good to know I'm not the only one filling up blog posts with photos taken through the windows of airliners: don't miss this awesome photo of Grand Canyon taken by Rob Bremmer, the blogger behind why2fly who nicely captured the two pillars of spotting things from the sky: always carry a camera and look out the window often.

The Robert Brothers' Flying Flea

I discovered the amazing life of George Roberts by reading his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald. A very gifted person with all things mechanical, George Roberts was the oldest living former employee of Qantas where he had contributed in a major fashion to aircraft maintenance and flying safety before, during and after World War II.

Other national and local newspapers also carried the story and the forum thread on pprune has a photo of George Roberts as well as messages from people who crossed paths with him and unanimously remember him as a gentleman and a great bloke.

His dedication to the Flying Kangaroo did not stop when he retired in 1970 as he went on and volunteered his time to preserving the history of the early days of Qantas. Such a priceless treasure trove of information he was that a book was written about the pioneering years of Australian aviation seen through his eyes.

I would like to expand on one particular story from his very rich life.

In 1935, one year before he joined Qantas at Archerfield near Brisbane, George together with brothers Norm and Don built a Flying Flea aircraft. Building anything from plans was certainly no challenge for the three brothers who grew up building cars in the family's motor shop in Ipswich.

The aircraft only flew once and is now on display at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane. The fact that no-one got hurt in the maiden flight is more than many can say about the Flying Flea. On a recent visit to the museum I took a few photos of what was probably the first aircraft design in history made available to amateurs who wanted to build and fly it themselves.

As these photos unfortunately fail to show, the Flying Flea has two staggered wings. The pilot controls the angle of attack of the larger wing above his head by moving the stick forward and back, while the smaller wing behind the pilot is fixed and is actually more of a horizontal stabiliser. There are no ailerons, which explains the very large rudder: roll is obtained indirectly as a secondary effect of yaw. There's nothing wrong with that: the first-generation ultralights in the 70's were designed this way.

The text next to the display has this to say:

The ultra-lightweight Flying Flea was designed in France by Henri Mignet for hobby builders. Considerable numbers were constructed throughout the world. This example was built by members of the Roberts family in Ipswich in 1935. Due to the large number of crashes of Flying Fleas, particularly in England, the Roberts' aircraft was not officially allowed to fly. After one unofficial test it was stored under their Ipswich house, until they donated it to the Queensland Museum in 1982. The aircraft is constructed of plywood and fabric, and is powered by a 23 h.p. (17 kW), 4 cylinder Henderson motorcycle engine.

Note how the lateral movement of the stick controls both the rudder and the tailwheel using external cables, very similar to a billycart. Legend has it that Mignet failed at flying regular 3-axis airplanes because of his lack of coordination between hands and feet, hence the absence of rudder pedals in his design.

Later designs of the Flying Flea solved the aerodynamics problems that killed many flying enthusiasts in the late 1930's and convinced the Roberts brothers not to attempt a second flight in what people started calling the Crashing Flea. In the video below Henri Mignet can be seen showcasing his airplane in England after flying across the English Channel, 26 years after Louis Blériot.

The video also shows a Flying Flea built by a young English pilot by the name of Stephen Appleby, with sponsoring from the Daily Express. After an unsteady take-off, the footage captured his airplane performing a somersault after landing in a ploughed field. The pilot was unhurt and went on to rebuild the machine, again with sponsorship from the Daily Express.

The Flying Flea today serves as a reminder of a time when flying was new, trendy, accessible and dangerous. An era nicely captured in the 1958 French film Les Copains du Dimanche and plenty others.

Homebuilt aircraft are now on the come-back. Safe designs are available as pre-built kits. Some use wood and fabric, others are all-metal or even composite airframes. And enthusiasts can still be found who build and fly Flying Fleas.

It is a big understatement to say that aviation safety has come a long way since the time of the pioneers. Every single aspect of aviation, from weather forecasting to pilot training and from engines to airframes and instruments is now many orders of magnitude safer than it was back then. Something we have to thank people like George Roberts for.

First go-around in a commercial airplane

Tuesday morning, about 7:30AM. I am half-awake in a window seat on the left-hand side of a Qantas Boeing 737-400 on approach to Brisbane airport. We just flew past the tip of North Stradbroke Island, and in a minute or two the airplane will touch down on runway 19. The landing gear goes down, soon followed by flaps. We make a left turn onto final. More flaps.

This is a beautiful Queensland winter morning, with high clouds and amazing visibility. I can see Brisbane CBD very clearly, and in the distance the towers of Swanbank power station, some 50km away. The sight brings back memories of screwing up majorly in this very area on a PPL navigation exercise about a year ago. But back to our story.

My seat is a perfect vantage point for observing the trailing edge of the left wing. We're now aligned with the runway. The flaps move down a little more and then stop. They're about half-way down, definitely not extended as they should be for landing. A few seconds pass and then we pitch up for a go-around. Some power is applied, but not full take-off power, or at least it doesn't sound like it. The rate of climb is moderate.

We make a series of left turns back to the Mud Island area. The captain makes an announcement saying that we went around because of a problem with the flight controls, that this is a routine procedure, no need to worry, we will be on the ground shortly, and sorry for the inconvenience. The flaps haven't moved at all since final. We come back for a very uneventful landing on 19.

As we taxi to the gate the flaps are still in the same partially extended position. They only come back up a few minutes after we reach the gate. The flaps actually come up very slowly, possibly because the backup electrical flap retraction mechanism was used, rather than the normal hydraulic one. That's my guess based on those notes, and I'll stop here with the armchair incident investigation.

As I was walking out of the narrowbody airplane I noticed the captain standing at the cockpit door saying goodbye to passengers, which is rather unusual for Qantas. I asked him if this was a flaps failure and he confirmed with a wink.

So that was all for the adventure. Nothing spectacular really. Sorry for indulging in Gonzo journalism, but that's la loi du genre. The fact that this was my first go-around ever on a commercial flight after hundreds of flights on airliners I guess should be taken as a testimony to the reliability of airline flying.

Speaking about journalism, I found this article about a similar incident on the same type of airplane in Alaska. They quote an FAA person as saying that they do not regard the failure of flaps to be a safety hazard. Which makes a lot of sense. Some airplanes do not have flaps at all. Student pilots perform flapless landings routinely. Flaps are a very convenient luxury.

I was momentarily impressed by how a local newspaper actually sought qualified technical advice when reporting about an aviation incident that didn't even involve injured passengers or a bent airplane. That was before I read the final two paragraphs, where they quote a local ham radio operator who describes the radio transmissions as "dramatic and alarming to hear" and offers a piece of definitive advice by saying "I would definitely be watching and questioning. I would be kind of apprehensive". I guess the opinion of the FAA person was too sensible to end an aviation story with.

Spot the airfield: Southport, Queensland

On a flight from Sydney to Brisbane in a Qantas Boeing 737-800, I spotted Southport aerodrome (YSPT) as we were on descent into Brisbane International.

Southport (YSPT) is a private aerodrome run by the Southport Flying Club. Unless in an emergency, the approval of a club member is required for landing there. The runway is 01/19 and all circuits are on the west side of the runway, on the far side of the photo. This, I imagine, as a way to limit noise pollution over the nearby houses.

Prior to our descent into Brisbane, we made one turn in the hold above Gold Coast airport. This is how I got this nice shot of Cape Byron, the easternmost point on the Australian continent.

Earlier in the day, we took off on 34R at Sydney airport, right behind a Saab 340 from Rex which performed an intersection departure from taxiway T5 holding short of T4. Our airplane was on T6.

The departure to the north was glorious as usual, offering great views of the city.

My plan for my next flight to Brisbane is to spot Heck's Field, a small airfield just north of Southport. Thanks to Qantas online check-in, I know I will have a window seat on the left hand side that's not obstructed by the wing. I wonder though if I should bring baby wipes to clean the window beforehand.

Spot the airfield: Lombadina

On a Qantas flight from Brisbane to Singapore, right as our flight was about to leave the Australian continent, I spotted the Lombadina airstrip (YLBD) in the Dampier Peninsula.

Between the airstrip and the beach is the Lombadina Aboriginal community. According to the Lonely Planet guide, this community has a church built from mangrove wood. The local Aboriginals are the Bardi people.

In the larger picture below, the airstrip is the red line in the bottom-right corner. Lombadina used to be a simple red dirt strip and was upgraded to a sealed runway in 1998, at a cost of $800,000. Another airstrip can be seen near the leftmost piece of land, it is Cape Leveque (YCLQ), close to the Kooljaman wilderness camp.

Identifying the airstrip was made very easy by the use of the GPS functionality of my smartphone. OK, that's cheating, I know. I had a window seat, and putting the phone against the window was enough for the GPS receiver to pick up five satellites and give me a fix. And if you wonder, an altitude of 10821m means FL350. Computing the area QNH is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

I have to say I hesitated a bit before starting the GPS in-flight, being not really sure if it was allowed or not. So I had a look at the safety section of the Qantas in-flight magazine, which says pretty much the same as what can be found on their website:

Flight mode capable mobile phones and portable digital assistants (PDAs) may be used inflight provided the phone has been switched to flight mode before take-off. Flight mode enables you to operate the basic functions of your mobile phone or PDA while the transmitting function of your phone is switched off. You cannot make phone calls or send SMS whilst in flight mode.

My phone was obviously in "flight mode" and still allowed me to start the GPS, so I took that as an indication from the phone manufacturer that it was safe to operate the GPS in-flight. In addition, the GPS functionality is clearly not a "transmitting function" since it is only a receiver.

Writing this post I came across a list of airlines that explicitely allow the use of GPS receivers on board, and those who don't. Qantas is listed among the GPS-friendly airlines. The Web page makes an interesting point about GPS receivers generating less radiations than most portable devices, and certainly less than laptops whose users forget to turn Wifi or Bluetooth off. I even remember using Wifi Internet once in-flight on Singapore Airlines, before they shut down the service for commercial, not technical, reasons.

In related news, Qantas finished a trial phase for texting from mobile phones in-flight. Apparently everything went well, the avionics of the 767 used for the trial didn't suffer any disruption from the cell phone signals, and Qantas may start rolling out in-flight text messaging (during cruise only of course) as soon as the end of this year. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the set-up consists of a base station on the plane that uses a satellite link to connect to the telco wired backbone, similar to what was used to provide in-flight Internet access.

Sounds like the days of the extortionately-priced, credit-card-activated in-flight phone that one can find in the armrest are counted. In twenty years of flying airlines, I've only seen a passenger use this functionality once. But maybe that's because almost all of my flying as a passenger is done in economy class.