I want to take a moment to mention The Crew Lounge, a group of flight attendants doing a weekly podcast on a variety of subjects.  Hosted by Sara of the Flying Pinto blog and Bobby from Up Up and a Gay blog, The Crew Lounge talk about subjects ranging from how to become a flight attendant, sultry encounters in the air and industry news both quirky and serious.

I’ve been following both of their blogs for a while and I had been aware of their podcast being done for several months but I had not taken the chance to listen until a few weeks ago.  I had to take a series of long car trips to South Texas and took their library of podcasts along with me.

Both my wife and I found them entertaining, informative but most of all very funny.  Both Sara and Bobby are clearly professionals who see this business with both an experienced eye as well as a sense of humour.

I’ll admit that after listening to 4 or 5 podcasts, I turned to my wife and said: “If these guys ever talked to me they’d want to kill me.”  Never before have I been so conscious of my own opinions on the airline world being a bit in conflict with someone else’s. 

They are a fresh breath of insight into what it takes to be on the front line in the airline world and worth taking the time to listen to them.  You can find The Crew Lounge HERE and I hope you’ll take a moment to listen to their show.

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There are reasonably easy ways to find out the answer to this but I hope you’ll use your brain instead.

Twice a week a Russian made airliner transits across US airspace.  Usually it is a Tupolev Tu-204 aircraft.  It doesn’t come from Europe either.  Can you guess the country and airline operating it? 

Hint:  This airline also flies the Airbus A320 over the United States on a regular basis.

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An airline and some ads you just don’t see very often over here in the United States:

Virgin Atlantic

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This marks my 500th post to this blog, FlyingColors and it is quite the milestone for me.  I thought I would take this chance to reflect a bit on the blog and what I’ve been writing about.

I started the blog in July of 2008 or a little over 2 years ago.  I went from zero visitors (except family and friends) to about 800 monthly individual visitors in October of 2009.  Frankly, I was pretty impressed that that many visitors came to the blog then. 

In October of 2009, I decided to up the stakes and made it a goal to write something for every day of the week.  I wasn’t sure I could or would even want to but it was an interesting goal for me and I went about doing it.  I started with doing a post for every weekday and finally moved into doing at least one every day. 

In January, I had 1600 individual visitors and for the month of September, I had over 3600 individual visitors.  Repeat visits put the numbers in the tens of thousands but I’m more interested in the individual visits because it represents the true growth in my view.

One odd thing on this blog, to me anyway, is that it never seems to stir many comments.  There are  a couple of semi regulars who make comments here but I’ve wondered at times if I fail to stir controversy.  Other times, I wonder if someone is playing a joke on me and found a way to bump my visitor counts on my web analytics software. 

The average visitor to this blog that isn’t referred from a search engine stays on the site for over 5 minutes / visit.  Those referred by a search engine remain on the site for an average just a touch over 2 minutes / visit.

Frankly, I wondered if I could keep writing about the airline industry for even a few months.  More than two years later, I’ve learned that just when I’m running out of ideas, airlines will cooperate and do something stirring.  This is where I tip my hat to Southwest for surprising the hell out of me last week.

In two years, a lot has changed in the airline industry.  We got two SuperLegacy airlines and now we’re seeing the first truly large merger of two LCC carriers.  I think we’ll see one or two more sizeable mergers in the next two years if conditions continue as they are. 

I’ve really struck out at American Airlines in the last year and I think it is because while virtually every other airline in the US has become a pretty dynamic enterprise, American continues to work furiously at maintaining the status quo.  For such a large and legendary airline, it’s a disappointing era to watch. 

I really thought that we would see the 787 in service by now.  I believed it would take longer than the original predictions of going into service but I also believed it would be well into service with a number of airlines by now.  It’s disappointing that it appears it will not hit that milestone until next year.   It is remarkable that this airliner was first announced as the 7E7 in January of 2003. 

It’s also remarkable just how much discipline airlines have shown in the last 2 years.  I am a bit in awe of the restraint shown when it comes to capacity growth.  That said, I don’t believe for one bit that it is the new order for the US airline industry.  Someone is going to blink some time soon.

This year has found some interesting developments for the blog.  Imagine my surprise when I noticed a huge jump in visitors from France and discovered it was being quoted and debated heavily on a French aviation forum.   Just as I finished chuckling over that, there was a sudden jump in visitors from Norway.  In the last week, FlyingColors has suddenly found an audience in Indonesia of all places. 

In the past 12 months, there has been an interesting development in Google referrals.  The top 10 international Google search referrals come from (in order):  France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Poland, Italy, Spain and (oddly enough) the Phillipines.   The next largest group of referrals come from US military bases with the Air Force bases leading the pack. 

Another source of traffic is other bloggers.  I really enjoy the others out there blogging about aviation.  I like the Cranky Flier because he doesn’t pull punches.  I thoroughly enjoy the pilots on FL250 and Flight Level 390 and if you don’t read Aviatrix at Cockpit Conversations, you should if only because she’s a thoroughly intelligent and entertaining read.  You’ll find no better honest brokers of airline news than on the Dallas Morning News Airline Biz Blog.   No one is more enthusiastic and geeky about airlines, aircraft and in-flight entertainment than Flightblogger and Runway Girl.  I thoroughly enjoy Randy’s Journal over at Boeing’s website (both Randy’s) and I’ve really enjoyed posts by Randy version 2.0 in the last year about what is happening at Boeing.

What I hope for in the next year is more comments from readers.  I’ve enjoyed the few debates I’ve had and more than once someone has managed to make me revisit an opinion later on.  The only comments I’ve ever rejected are spam and I’ve never edited a comment and don’t plan to for any reason.

So, if you’re visiting today, thanks for showing up.  I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have and I’m off to write the 501st post and I’ve got to find a worthy subject first.

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The Consumerist has this short story about a group of passengers being asked to stand during a 5 hour flight in Russia on Tatarstan Airlines.  The half dozen passengers boarded the 737 in Turkey and were flown to Ekaterinaburg, Russia. 

Let me caution that while some awfully odd things happen in Russia on aircraft, I’ve also found that a lot of things can get lost in translation when it comes to Russian news stories.  It might not have actually gone the way it was described.

See the story HERE.

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I sometimes enjoy the obscure routes one can take to save money going someplace.  I have family in the NYC area and flights from DFW to EWR (Newark) are generally very expensive.  You see, this is what happens when you let one airline dominate the non-stops between two large business cities. 

But I’ve always been surprised at just how cheap you can fly to Philadelphia from Dallas.  Stunningly cheap.  In fact, you can fly into PHL from a lot of places cheap.  As a result of some flight research a few days ago, I discovered you can fly from Portland, OR to Philadelphia for as little as $137.  That’s cheap. 

Well, if you are traveling for leisure and on severe budget, you can fly to PHL and take 2 trains to NYC.  Surprisingly, they aren’t too expensive (about $6 and $16 respectively to take me from PHL to Hoboken, NJ in about 2 hours.)  And you get to take a train which is a pretty low impact experience all in all.   You can do it similarly to Baltimore / Washington, D.C. but I’ve found that you usually can find reasonable air fare to D.C. from most cities. 

It’s an option for you bargain hunters out there.  I’ll seriously consider it the next time I want to visit NYC.

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Air New Zealand has a new safety video for its 737 aircraft.

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Here is a very strange Asian television animation of what they interpreted to have happened during the jetBlue Flight Attendant Incident.

No, jetBlue hasn’t purchased any 747s lately and, yes, I thought the return to home scene was just stupid.

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This flight attendant is an extremely good sport.  I suspect that if this had happened on a US legacy airline, the aircraft would have diverted and everyone arrested.

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When I saw the 787 land at the Farnborough Airshow, I was very impressed at how fast and cleanly it stopped.  Even if it was relatively empty.  So I found a few videos of aircraft making impressive stops around the world.

The 787 at Farnborough and courtesy of FlightGlobal.

South African Airways 747SP – notice how narrow the landing runway was.

747SP landing at Lexington, KY

Evergreen Airways Boeing 747 Tanker

Continental Airlines 737 in Cozumel

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We often read stories about companies and businesses going green and being happier for it.  We see governmental regulations aimed at being cleaner “emitters” and taxes and credits being structured to force people to be pollute less.   A few years ago, the airline industry was being targeted by various “green” groups for being big polluters and being particularly damaging to the atmosphere.

So, is going green really good? 

As matter of fact, it is.  At least for the airline industry.  One reason you see a variety of airlines embracing the idea of being “green” and becoming involved in a variety of experiments is that, for the airline industry, almost every “green” effort translates into cost savings for the airline.

American Airlines discovered several years ago that by being just a little bit more proactive in their engine maintenance, they could extract a 1 to 2% gain in fuel efficiency.  Less fuel burned translates into less emissions in the atmosphere. 

Several airlines have participated in experimental flights using various “bio” fuels to see what does work and how well it works.  Interestingly enough, several of those experiments have revealed that the “bio” fuels often are *more* efficient than the petroleum based fuels.  They have more “energy” and therefore an aircraft burns less fuel per mile using the bio fuel.   We only lack the technology to mass produce some of these fuels at a cost effective price. 

Other airlines have been experimenting with continuous descent approaches to airports.  In the simplest sense, this is an airliner “gliding” from the top of its cruise altitude all the way to the runway.  Currently, airlines have to make “step” approaches to airports where they lose a few thousand feet of altitude and wait.  Then they are cleared to another lower level and when they reach that, they wait.  This results in a lot of throttle “jockeying” that wastes fuel.  Continuous descent approaches have been shown to reduce emissions by *tons* on a long haul flight.  And they are one reason why airlines are embracing the idea and pushing on the FAA hard to find ways to employ these at airports. 

Every time an engine manufacturer manages to eek out another 1 to 3% fuel efficiency these days, the gains aren’t just in reduced fuel burn but also in reduced toxic emissions.  Essentially, these gains come from burning fuel more completely and the more completely the fuel is burned, the fewer toxic emissions that result. 

Some airlines have discovered that just by washing their aircraft a little bit more results in a little less drag and that results in a little less fuel burn which then results in fewer emissions.  Others have figured out that aircraft sitting at gates running their APU (Auxiliary Power Unit aka a small jet fuel engine producing electrical and hydraulic power) units is wasteful.  Now they hook up ground power and ground airconditioning to the aircraft and that means fewer emissions.  Running a jet fuel engine to produce power on the ground results in lots of dirty emissions and its wasteful of fuel. 

Every “green” movement in the airline industry yields costs savings.  In this industry, even tiny savings on a per mile basis can result in millions of dollars saved every year.  That’s why you don’t hear about airlines protesting about being pushed towards being more efficient and less polluting.  The same is true for aircraft manufacturers and engine makers:  every effort made in this area means their customers save money.  A customer that can save just a few dollars per flight using your equipment potentially saves millions of dollars each year and that’s a huge sale advantage.

At the end of the day, being “green” has literally no downside for the airline and it’s a model industry for looking at ways to embrace it further.

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You’ve never heard of David Warren, have you?  Well, Mr. Warren was the inventor of the flight recorder.  The so called “black box” that is actually painted flourescent orange on most aircraft today.   Mr. Warren passed away last week in his native Australia.  You can see a photo of him HERE.

Mr. Warren, a radio and electronics nut, was invited to participate in a probe about one of the first jetliner crashes in the world and during that probe, he suggested that with a recording of what was going on in the cockpit, finding out what happened would be a lot easier and much more accurate.

His first prototype was capable of recording about 4 hours of voice and cockpit instrumentation.  After a few years, his invention was being installed on virtually every modern aircraft.  I would argue that this invention has contributed more to safety than any other single invention in the industry.  Flight voice and data recorders have made it possible to find out exactly what happened prior to a crash and attribute an accurate cause of a wreck instead of leaving  it up to speculation. 

And how many times have we found out something else entirely was happening during an event versus what popular speculation focused on?  All the time.  There is no doubt that the things we have learned from his invention have improved air safety by an order of magnitude.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Warren, and thank you very much.

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I’m still a bit in awe deep down inside that an aircraft of this size can take flight.  Not only take flight but fly as many as 500 people for as much as 8000 miles.  It really is a wonder.  Here are some videos about the A380:

A380 Crosswind Landing in Iceland

The A380 Brake Test (laboratory)

The A380 lands hard in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

The A380 lands at JFK airport the first time.

First A380 landing at LAX airport.

And the first landing of the A380 at London Heathrow airport.

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It’s hard to find any video on the Boeing 727 that is truly interesting.   That’s a shame because if there is one commercial airliner that lights my fire more than any other it is the 727.  I’m prejudiced, however, because it’s the aircraft I flew for hundreds of thousands of miles as a child and teenager when my father was an executive at Braniff International.

Designed in the early 1960’s, the idea was to meet requirements for the trunk airliners in the United States which were pretty diverse.  Eastern Airlines wanted more than 2 jets so it could fly overwater routes longer than 60 minutes.  United wanted superior takeoff performance because of its flights to and from Denver.  American Airlines (and most other trunk airlines) wanted 2 engine efficiency.   The three engined 727 answered all of the requirements.

It would suprise most people to learn that it was the 727 that long held the record for most aircraft built and its production spanned 20+ years with 3 basic variants.  The original 727-100 (seating about 150 people), the 727-200 (seating about 180 people) and the 727-200 Advanced which seated the same number of people but had better range and take-off performance over the original -200. 

To me, the aircraft always had the same sex appeal that a sports car has.  It was sleek, slow the to ground and the very swept wings had a very racy look.   This aircraft, in all 3 forms, was the mainstay of the Braniff International fleet from the mid-1960’s until the early 1980’s and the time I spent on them remains a very fond memory.  Despite the fact that Boeing’s cabins from the 707 to the 757 are all the same in width and basic configuration, the 727 always seemed a bit “bigger” and “wider” to me.  Indeed, the only aircraft that feels similar to me is the 757. 

Designed with a clean wing and the ability to produce a lot of “lift” at low speeds, the 727 had a fairly high sink rate that caught several early 727 captains off guard resulting in accidents.   One captain said “You didn’t try to grease the landing, you just flew it into the ground.  If you did have a smooth landing, it was a complete accident.” 

Its take-off performance was equally fun.  A take-off resulted in being pushed *very* firmly back into your seat and then a very high angle of attack seemed to shoot you into the sky.  It was noisy too.  It was really, really noisy and I must say that it was these jets that really caused a lot of the pushback on aircraft noise.   Many younger people marvel at how loud a MD-80 aircraft sounds on take-off.  The 727 was far louder than that. 

The 727 was also fast.  Of course, in its hey day, pilots didn’t worry too much about fuel either.  Nonetheless, it cruised at a far higher speed than is typical of today’s mainline domestic aircraft.  I frequently flew between DFW and Chicago in the 1970’s, for instance, and that trip, gate to gate, was at or just shy of 2 hours flat.  I also frequently flew between DFW and PDX nonstop and those flights were often done in at little as just over 3 hours.  Today, those same flights take nearly 4 hours on an MD-80.

Its undoing was the 3-man cockpit and the 3 jets it had.  I think airlines could have survived the 3 jets a bit longer but the 3 man cockpit wasn’t a tolerable condition anymore and airlines looked elsewhere.   It’s next generation development was the 757 but I think it’s unfair to refer to it in that way as the 757 is clearly more than just another evolution. 

Here are a couple of videos that I did find interesting and I hope you do too.

Delta says goodbye on its last 727 flight.

The restoration of the 1st 727, N70001U.

A Boeing 727 Rocket Assisted Take Off (RATO) Test.

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Just a quick link to an article about hanging a Harrier Jet in the Tate Museum.  Read it HERE.

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 You can find a lot of aircraft videos but the 707 videos just seem to evoke a very special emotion in people.  Enjoy.

Early American Airlines turbo-jet 707’s

6 1/2 Hours of Magic

Canadian Armed Forces CC-137 Take-Off  (Dramatic)

The Famous Dash 80 (prototype 707) Barrell Roll

VH-XBA (ex-QANTAS) 707-138 (cousin to John Tavolta’s 707)

N707JT – John Travolta’s 707-138B  (ex-QANTAS, ex-Braniff)

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This Sunday, amusing airline commercials from around the world.

Braathens SAFE

Gol (Brazil)

Indian Airlines

1985 Air Cal commercial

Silverjet (and I think I know why they went out of business)

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USA Today’s Today in the Sky blog reported on an American Airlines flight attendant who stepped in as a First Officer on a 767 flight when the regular First Officer was suddenly afflicted with severe stomach flu-like symptoms.  You can read the story HERE.

According to American Airlines, protocol is to search for off-duty AA pilots first and then the next best alternative.  Flight attendant Patti DeLuna (61) was qualified as a commercial pilot some time ago and while her pilot’s license wasn’t current, she was able to help fill in for the ill first officer.  The plane landed without incident.

American points out that it is perfectly possible to land the 767 with one pilot and I’m sure that Ms. Fagan helped the captain of the flight with his checklists and monitored speed and altitude during the landing.   American Flight 1612 was flying from San Francisco to Chicago on Monday, June 14th.

It really is just like something out of the movies.

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Southwest Airlines discovered dozens of human heads being shipped by someone at their Little Rock, Arkansas operation and seized them.  Southwest contacted local authorities, including the county coroner who are investigating.  The heads were being shipped to a local firm in the DFW area.  You can read the MSNBC.Com story HERE. 

I can only imagine the reaction of the cargo handlers when they discovered what was in the package(s).

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I’ve kind of enjoyed finding videos to show so I thought I’d dig up a few more for today.

British Airways departing Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport.

Another British Airways Concorde Depature.

A cockpit point of  view for take off on the Concorde.

A moving video of the final JFK-LHR departure.

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