>A patient being carried All photos courtesy Samaritan Aviation. Mark Palm thinks he knows what Jesus might do if he were a pilot. He might climb into the left seat of a Cessna 206 Amphibian and fly the 700 mile long Sepik River in Papua, New Guinea helping transport the sick to the region’s only hospital. It must feel a bit like being God, and not in a good way, when Palm and others with the medical transport charity Samaritan Aviation have to dispassionately triage passengers before giving them a ride on the air ambulance.   Only those at risk of death– but not so close to… Read More…

One of my Facebook messages today Not long after my eyes opened this morning I enjoyed reading some of the early birthday greetings posted on my Facebook page. (Don’t judge me.) It is heartwarming to be remembered by friends and family of course. Then I noticed something else; the remarkable number of countries from which those greetings came. I counted eleven even before 9:00 o’clock. My host family during my 2006 stay in Syria, my daughter’s former boyfriend in New Zealand, an au pair from Spain, a tour guide from Morocco, a pre-teen acquaintance from Australia, a septuagenarian from Japan, business associates from Norway, Italy… Read More…

>A350 arrives in Brazil photo courtesy TAM What a difference a week makes. Early this morning, TAM Airlines happily welcomed its first Airbus A350 when it touched down uneventfully in Brazil after a flight from Airbus HQ in Toulouse France. Earlier this week, however, it was quite a different experience when a Qatar Airways charter flight with aviation writers enjoying a look at the fancy new wide body, attempted to leave New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.   >Honig’s blog post on the Qatar experience In that case, what appeared to be a normal takeoff roll was suddenly aborted. Zach Honig, The Points Guy… Read More…

>US Carrier profitability takes off It will be a merry end of the year for North American airlines which will earn nearly $20 billion in profits in 2015, according to numbers forecast today by the International Air Transport Association.  That’s more than half of the $33 billion profit expected to be generated by the world’s passenger carriers for the year about to come to a close. “North American airlines are way out ahead of the pack and producing good operating margins,” said Brian Pearce economist for the trade association in a presentation to journalists in Geneva. But in an industry more comfortable with and more… Read More…

Pop singer Meghan Trainor’s momma may have told her “not to worry about your size” as she sings in her adorable hit, All About That Bass, but when it comes to your travel suitcase, size and weight definitely do matter. Airline bag fees and tougher security at transportation hubs are the two most obvious reasons to pack light. But there are other incentives. To experience a destination like a local means getting out of the cab and onto the bus, bike or sidewalk and who wants to haul a heavy bag up the steps of the subway or down the cobblestone streets? So if you wanna… Read More…

The blast that took down a Russian Airbus A321 over the Sinai last month, had to be triggered by a bomb, an experienced explosives expert said today. “If the information about the plane being at 31,000 feet is reliable, it’s not a fuel air explosion,” Merritt Birky, a former safety investigator with the NTSB told me. Lacking any indication that a missile hit the airplane, Birky’s conclusion eliminates the other possible scenario, that the plane came apart mid flight due to an explosion in the plane’s center fuel tank. >Birky (L) in 1996 Birky, now retired, was the principal explosion and chemical expert in the… Read More…

>UK Prime Minister Cameron Government photo All over the news today is the story of the UK and Irish governments canceling flights out of Sharm el Sheikh. British Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters “ a bomb was more likely than not” to have brought down the Airbus A321 flown by the Russian charter airline, Metrojet. But be cautious about drawing conclusions based on the reaction of government officials concerned about protecting the lives of citizens flying out of the Egyptian resort town. It is the job of Prime Ministers and other political leaders to be prudent and investigate what could have happened to determine if a… Read More…

It never ceases to amaze me how often senior airline bosses will prattle on regardless of what they know about the subject. The latest you’ve-got-to-be-kidding remarks come from Alexander Smirnov, the deputy general director of the airline, Metrojet whose Airbus A321 crashed over Egypt’s Sinai peninsula on Sunday. “We rule out a technical fault of the plane or a pilot error,” the executive said at news conference in Moscow on Monday and adding fuel to the speculation that the Airbus A321  was brought down by a terrorist. “The only possible (sic) could be a purely mechanical external impact,” Smirnov said. >Smirnov news conference photo from Poskotanews Well he can… Read More…

Too often air travel is an antiseptic experience for the passenger as we sit in tile-floored, waiting rooms, our heads down and our minds in cyberspace. It is so rare and so thrilling to actually smell the jet fuel and hear the whine of the engines at the few airports that still encourage a love of the journey. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is one of them and it’s the perfect place to reflect on commercial aviation’s first century since KLM Royal Dutch is, at 96 years old, the oldest airline still in operation under its original name. (And what a nice name it is.)   Schiphol Airport… Read More…

You got to hand it to the folks at Taiwan’s EVA Airlines; they’re taking the hypoxia threat seriously. Each of its pilot cadets learning to fly airliners at the University of North Dakota’s Mesa, Arizona flight training center will take a ride in a hypobaric chamber before leaving the USA to go back to Taipei and fly the airline’s big jets. Nearly a decade ago, air safety officials in Greece suggested that that all airline pilots undergo hypoxia training, following the loss of a Boeing 737 on a flight from Cyprus to Athens that killed 121 people on August 14, 2005. Neither the captain nor… Read More…