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Golf Hotel Whiskey: for pilots and aviation enthusiasts

British Airways

The wow factor: Red Arrows and a BA A380 do a flypast

Hat tip to the Digital Aviator for finding and posting this amazing picture of a BA A380 and the Red Arrows doing a flypast at the recent Royal International Air Tatoo at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire:

GolfHotelWhiskey.com - BA A380 and the Red Arrows

A quick search of YouTube reveals the following videos of the flypast:

The Daily Mirror also has some great shots of the flypast while RAF Squadron Leader Mike Ling told the paper:

“Putting our Hawk jets behind or alongside an aircraft of the size of the Airbus A380 obviously involves a great deal of precision but the task is essentially the same as the careful flying required for air-to-air refuelling with a big tanker aircraft. Flying in formation with the Airbus A380 was a highlight of our year.”

The gargantuan aircraft costs £270million and can carry 469 passengers – nearly double the number of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. British Airways will put the A380 into service on its routes to Los Angeles and Hong Kong some time in early autumn. Moreover and by 2016, the airline intends to have a dozen A380s in its fleet.

British Airways rolls out its first painted A380 livery

Last weekend, the first fully painted Airbus A380 for British Airways rolled out of the Airbus’ paint shop in Hamburg. The Rolls-Royce Trent 900-powered aircraft has 469 seats and will be flown to Toulouse for final checks before handover.

The livery is the first of 12 A380s for British Airways that are scheduled to be delivered in July. The aircraft will initially be used on shorter training flights before being used for long haul services to Hong Kong and Los Angeles starting in October and November.

Apparently, it took some 10,000 individual dots on the tailfin to produce the Union flag and some lucky worker had to peel off the thousands of little dots from a stencil.

Source: The Bangalore Aviation blog

Are airline pilots being killed by toxic fumes or aerotoxic syndrome?

Boeing has grabbed recent headlines for having battery problems in the new 787 Dreamliner, but some British papers (including the Mirror and the Daily Mail) are printing allegations that two British Airways pilots died within days of each other and after complaining about exposure to toxic fumes in the cockpits of passenger jets.

The families or lawyers of Karen Lysakowska (who was buried four days ago) and Richard Westgate (who passed away last month) say both had complained about cockpit toxic fume events. In fact, Westgate’s lawyers think they can prove the existence of aerotoxic syndrome, a physical and mental condition which they claim could be seen as the “new asbestos,” with one of his lawyers saying:

I see this as an impending tsunami for the airline industry – it has been hushed and ignored for so long.

The Mirror article pointed out that no airline has air quality detection systems installed because of a 2011 government-backed study which concluded that cabin air was safe, but records from the Civil Aviation Authority show that pilots and air crew have to put on oxygen masks at least five times a week to combat suspected “fume events” while the UK Committee on Toxicity claims that “fume events” occur on one flight in 100 – meaning pilots and air crew are at a greater risk of exposure than passengers.

And while its thought that low doses won’t lead to severe symptoms, campaigners claim that toxic chemicals used in engine oil can also enter the cabin despite safety features and cause symptoms like fatigue, blurred vision and seizures. The allegations also remind me of a recent documentary about World War I where it was mentioned that the crews of British tanks could only spend about a day them before having to be sent to a field hospital in the rear to recover – namely because they were in the same space as the engine breathing in all of its fumes.

With the above in mind, we would like to ask any readers who are commercial airline pilots the following question: Have you ever experienced a “fume event” on your aircraft or know of a commercial airline pilot who came down with “aerotoxic syndrome?”

British Airways biofuel plant set to open in 2015

It appears that a British Airways jet biofuel plant known as the GreenSky project is set for take off by 2015 with the airline recently announcing that it has committed to buy the 50,000 ton output of the facility at market-competitive prices over a 10-year period. The deal had originally been announced back in 2010 with US based Solena who would construct a biofuel plant in East London by 2014.  The plant would then produce 16 million gallons of jet fuel annually from 500,000 tons of waste that would otherwise end up in British landfills. That’s enough biofuel to power all of British Airways flights from London City Airport. 

Forbes contributor Peter Kelly-Detwiler has written some detail about the process known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis that will be used to make the jet biofuel. That process was discovered some 90 years ago by German scientists and involves converting a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide into liquid fuels. During World War II, the process was used to keep the German war effort going (accounting for an estimated 9% of German war production of fuels and 25% of the automobile fuel) and later it was used by South Africa when it was under sanctions during the apartheid era.

The facility itself will be the first of its type in the UK and British Airways chief executive Keith Williams says it will help the airline achieve its vision of making sustainable aviation fuel a reality by 2015. In addition, the plant is part of British Airways’ goal to have “Carbon Neutral” growth from 2020 with biofuels making up 2% of the company’s fuel.

British Airways is not the only airline looking into biofuels as KLM, Lufthansa and United Airlines are also apparently taking the plunge as well. No word on when biofuel may start powering British general aviation, but certainly the GreenSky project is a step towards more sustainable commercial aviation.

Just the facts please…

Our headline ran: "Virgin screws British Airways." We’d have rather preferred “British Airways screws Virgin,” but we had to run with the facts…

— News Editor, “The Sun” newspaper.