Back in November 2012, I wrote a blog entry titled The City of Dallas Hates Love Field, a story about one party trying to re-use the Braniff International Maintenance Building and the City of Dallas trying to tear it down so it could continue with its plan to make Love Field a non-airport.

Since that time, there have been many people leading a fight to get the Braniff Maintenance Center listed for eligibility into the National Historical Register for preservation.  In fact, I’m delinquent in writing a follow up to encourage people to contact The Texas Historical Commission to urge them to find the building worthy of preservation.

Frankly, with what I know about Dallas politics, I didn’t have much hope for saving this building.  When Dallas politics decides it wants something, it usually finds a way to have it regardless of who objects.  We’re not a corrupt city but we’re a cold blooded one when it comes to business.

But, hey, guess what?

Those guys did it.  The Texas Historical Commission has issued the Determination for Braniff OMB 7701 Lemmon Avenue and the building has been deemed eligible for inclusion into the National Historic Register.  Now there is a year long process called a Section 106 review that is performed to actually put the building into the National Register.  The real mountain, apparently, was getting it deemed eligible.

Congratulations to the group who went to work on making this happen.  You have managed a very rare victory in my opinion.

And that sound of something being unwrapped?  That would be the Airport Director getting out some antacid tablets because his deal to turn Love Field Airport into a non-airport just suffered a major setback.

Filed under: Airline History, Airports by ajax
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Brian Lusk of Southwest Airlines’ own blog has passed away.  I didn’t know him and I had to find out on the Cranky Flier website but I wanted to make my own mention of it because Lusk really did some great Flashback Friday blog entries for the Southwest Blog over the years.  They never once failed to suck me into their time capsule and take me on a cool trip through aviation history.

My sympathies to his family and to his Southwest Family.

Curiously, Lusk’s last entry had recently drew me in (again) because it had the covers of various SWA corporate annual reports.  I have some about 15 year’s worth of Braniff’s.

Here is his last entry:

Filed under: Airline News by ajax
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Just as Boeing pursues an interim solution to the 787 battery problem, battery maker Yuasa publicly disagrees with the issue behind the battery failures.

Nice.

Boeing believes their interim solution solves a battery failure problem.  That is, they believe by containing the battery, they solve the safety of flight issue.  This does suggest a belief that the battery design may be at fault.

Yuasa, on the other hand, believes that the batteries it has examined show clear signs of an over-charge which pushes fault outside the battery itself and onto the control system(s).  Boeing says that their quadruple redudant systems would prevent such a thing from happening.

My thoughts:  If this were a fundamental battery design flaw, I think we would have seen more battery problems much earlier in this program.  The charging system and other power systems are complex and reportedly do cause some pain to the operators.

Why would a charging system fail now as opposed to during test flights?  Conditions.  Operating aircraft will be subjected to greater loads, real world power consumption profiles, etc.

The greater issue is this:  The battery maker and airframe maker are disagreeing in public.  Goodbye interim solution, in my opinion.

Filed under: Aircraft Development by ajax
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