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Posts Tagged ‘Air transport’

Hoax plan to pave over Central Park

July 24th, 2009 | No Comments

Is the hoax campaign to concrete over NYC’s favourite green space and build an airport a satire on incompetent transport policy or another product viral? Watch this space

“Environmentalists rally in support of Manhattan airport”. That got your attention, didn’t it? And that was precisely the intention of the Manhattan Airport Foundation, a mysterious organisation that has outlaid its proposals to bulldoze Central Park in New York city and build an airport instead.

The foundation put out a press release earlier this week saying that the “Triborough Association for Fair Treatment” – a group it says lobbies to get legislation drafted to help protect migratory birds from aircraft strikes – was putting its full support behind the building of a new airport in the heart of Manhattan as it would reduce the kind of bird-related incidents that brought down US Airways Flight 1549 back in January causing it to bellyflop into the Hudson.

It’s all nonsense, of course. The whole thing is a hoax – one that’s been getting plenty of attention all week and managing to snare a few suckers along the way, too. The Manhattan Airport Foundation is pure fiction, as are its plans for an airport. Only a few nanoseconds of consideration lead you to realise the last place on earth that would ever be concreted over to make way for an airport would be Central Park.

But who is behind the hoax? And why have they spent a considerable amount of time and effort (and, presumably, money) creating such a professional-looking website? Chances are the site will soon morph into an advert for something or other, as has happened with other web hoaxes in the past. Or it could be some web-savvy comedians looking for some viral marketing?

No one yet, though, seems to have undercovered the real identity of those behind the Manhattan Airport Foundation, or their motive. The website’s domain name was registered back in April (even though the foundation claims to have been founded in 2006), but the identity of the domain’s owner has been withheld. The foundation’s Twitter page has only been live since 8 June, and its address is listed as being on the 58th floor, 233 Broadway. Yet the building only has 57 floors.

A press release dated April of this year says the foundation is to receive “significant financial backing over the next five years” from the “Waalwijk Charitable Trust”. In addition to this, the “Tokyo-based holding company Yamanote Ltd” will be making a “substantial gift”. Again, both these organisations are fictional – Waalwijk is the name of a town in the Netherlands and Yamanote is an affluent area in Tokyo.

The only person’s name mentioned anywhere on the site is a press officer called “Audrey Cortlandt”. Again, nothing of note shows up online for that name, although it does throw up some interesting anagrams – “Lady Dancer Tutor” being one of them. Not that this really helps us, though.

The plot thickens.

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Emergency landing closes Gatwick runway

July 24th, 2009 | No Comments

Passengers on Paris to Cardiff plane evacuated and flights diverted to other airports after crew report fault

Haroon Siddique

An emergency landing of a plane en route to Cardiff closed a runway at Gatwick airport this morning.

Flybe flight BE1432 flying from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris was diverted to the West Sussex airport after the crew reported a technical fault, with reports suggesting smoke on the aircraft.

The airport’s fire and ambulance services were deployed “as a precautionary measure” but no one was injured, according to a Gatwick spokesman who said the passengers were able “to exit down the steps in the normal way”. The Dash 8 plane, carrying 46 passengers and four crew made the emergency landing at 12.25am. The runway reopened just before 1pm, after the plane was moved.

Eleven flights due to land at Gatwick were diverted to other airports, while another 15 were put in waiting-to-land “stacking” positions.

“Three other flights have been held on the ground,” the Gatwick spokesman said. “This is a busy day but it’s not our most busy of the summer. We’re hoping that delays will be kept to a minimum.”

A Flybe spokeswoman said alternative travel arrangements were being made to transport the passengers to Cardiff as soon as possible.

The Bombardier Dash 8 is a twin engined medium range turboprop aircraft. In February a Continental Airlines Dash 8 Q400 crashed into a house in suburban Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 passengers. In 2007, Scandinavian airlines, SAS, removed its Dash 8 Q400 type aircraft from service permanently after three safety scares in two months. The company cited “diminished” confidence and customer doubts.

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We will protect air travel – Miliband

July 14th, 2009 | No Comments

Mass air travel will be preserved even in a low-carbon Britain because the government will find deeper emissions cuts in other areas, the climate change secretary Ed Miliband said today.

Dismissing demands for punitive sanctions to curb flying, Miliband said the government was determined to ensure that airline travel remains affordable for ordinary people.

In a Guardian interview, ahead of the publication of a white paper on climate change, Miliband said air travel would become more expensive as Britain tries to meet a G8 target to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050. But he said it would be wrong to impose the target on airlines, which will be covered by the European Emissions Trading Scheme from 2012 if they fly to and from the EU.

“Where I disagree with other people on aviation is if you did 80% cuts across the board, as some people have called for on aviation, you would go back to 1974 levels of flying,” he said. “I don’t want to have a situation where only rich people can afford to fly.”

Miliband spoke of the importance of flying for his constituents in Doncaster which has benefited after an RAF airbase was turned into an international airport in 2005. “People in my constituency have benefited from being able to have foreign travel which, 40 years ago, the middle classes took for granted,” he said. “There are sacrifices and changes in lifestyle necessary. But the job of government is to facilitate them and understand people’s lives and what they value.”

The pledge by Miliband echoes remarks by Tony Blair in 2007 who said it would be wrong to impose “unrealistic targets” on airline travellers. Britain has pledged to bring its aviation emissions down to 2005 levels by 2050.

Miliband’s remarks are designed to illustrate the government’s overall approach to meeting the 2050 target which will not involve imposing a blanket 80% cut on all areas of the economy. The white paper is expected to build on government plans to tolerate relatively high emissions in one area if action is taken in other areas by, for example, lagging lofts and driving less. Carbon levels have already been brought down from 1990 levels, the benchmark for global climate talks. So far they have been reduced by 22% and are due to come down by 34% by 2020, with a target of at least 80% due in 2050.

The government has already announced that will be achieved by dividing the economy into a series of sectors. The biggest is power, with others including transport, homes, work places and agriculture.

Miliband will outline on Wednesday how much carbon Britain is emitting in each area and will suggest steps to bring them down. He refused to outline the details of his white paper out of respect to John Bercow, the new Commons speaker, who has demanded ministers make announcements first to parliament. But he said his philosophy is to outline a vision of “green hope” – with jobs in green technology and a safer country – not “green despair”.

“If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare’ people would not have followed him,” Miliband said, quoting someone he met at the Guardian’s recent Manchester climate change summit. “You have to persuade people that, yes, there are costs of not acting but also there is a vision of society at the end of this: more secure, more prosperous, fairer better quality of life. All those things are crucial to persuade people to take the leap.

“All our research indicates that people in Britain are not climate change deniers. But now they are persuaded it is a problem, you have to start offering them a vision about how you tackle the problem.”

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BA pilots vote for 2.6% salary cut

July 13th, 2009 | No Comments

• Pilots agree to take salary cut and work longer hours
• Chief executive expected to be barracked at AGM

Willie Walsh, the embattled chief executive of British Airways, faces a mauling from shareholders and his own staff at the airline’s annual meeting, tomorrow despite securing a crucial pay deal with the fleet’s pilots, which will see them accept a pay cut and longer hours as management tries to slash costs.

Unions representing baggage handlers, cabin staff and ground crew will mount a protest outside the AGM in London over management plans to lay off thousands of workers. Shareholders are also expected to barrack Walsh during the meeting over the dramatic downturn in the flag carrier’s fortunes, which has already seen the company stop paying dividends and looks set to result in an emergency cash call.

Walsh, who has agreed to forgo his £61,000 wage for the month of July to show he means it when he says BA is battling for its survival, is looking to stem the airline’s losses, which are running at nearly £3m a day. In May, BA revealed that the recession has turned record profits of £992m two years ago into a record pretax loss of £401m last year.

A deal with BA’s 3,200 pilots is a small victory for Walsh, but his battle to reduce the company’s overheads as it suffers a plunge in lucrative business travel is by no means over. Management is still locked in talks at the conciliation service Acas after a self-imposed deadline of 30 June passed without any deal with cabin staff and ground crews.

BA’s bosses want unions to agree to a deal that would freeze pay for two years and result in the loss of 3,700 jobs – or almost 10% of the workforce – including 2,000 voluntary redundancies from its 14,000 flight attendants. They also want staff to agree to wide-ranging changes to their terms and conditions.

Management this year asked staff to consider working for free or taking unpaid leave, and nearly 7,000 employees applied for voluntary pay cuts, including 800 who said they would work for nothing for up to a month. The move, which will save the carrier up to £10m, was attacked by some union leaders who feared staff were being bullied into signing up.

Unions will hand out letters to shareholders outside today’s meeting pointing out that staff are proud to work for BA and it is bosses who are out of step, making doom-laden pronouncements about its future just a year after it produced record-breaking profits.

“All BA employees are ready and willing to pull together to secure a vibrant future for the company, but they desperately need to see that BA senior management want to work with them towards this objective, not blame them for a situation which is not of their making,” the letter reads. “The staff are willing to listen and respond, but feel under pressure to agree to measures – like working for free – that they simply can’t afford. There is also no merit whatsoever in management adopting unrealistic and intransigent positions during discussions with staff representatives.”

Protesters will have a dozen live lemmings with them outside the meeting and placards bearing slogans including “British Airways deserves better than to be led by lemmings” and “Willie, time to head to the departure gate?”.

Walsh, however, is likely to take heart from his success in persuading BA’s pilots to accept a pay cut. The British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) said that 94% of its members who voted were in favour of accepting a 2.6% salary cut to help the cash-strapped airline save £26m. As part of the deal, BA’s pilots have agreed to an increase in annual duty hours, a cut in turn-around times on short-haul flights and reductions in the flight-crew arrangements on certain long-haul routes. There will also be 78 redundancies. In return, pilots will be able to pick up BA shares in two years’ time worth about £13m.

Balpa’s general secretary, Jim McAuslan, admitted that it was “an unaccustomed position” for a union to be calling on members to support a drop in pay but said: “We are satisfied that this step is necessary to help BA recover its position as one of the world’s most successful airlines.”

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Airport passenger numbers fall 5.9%

July 10th, 2009 | No Comments

• 12.7m passengers pass through company’s seven airports
• Lowest figure for nine months
• Edinburgh bucks the trend

The number of travellers using major UK airports declined to its lowest level for nine months in June, BAA said today.

The airport operator said a total of 12.7m passengers passed through its airports last month, a reduction of 5.9% on the same period last year.

But the firm, which saw a 7.3% fall in May, said this was the best underlying figure since last September.

BAA had posted a 2.3% decline in passenger numbers in April but this rose to 6.8% when the effect of a late Easter was stripped out.

Heathrow recorded a comparatively modest fall of 3.1% because of its large number of transfer flights.

Stansted, the base for several low-cost carriers including Ryanair and easyJet, was the worst affected airport, falling 11.5%.

In the six months to June 2009, the Essex airport is down 14.4%, compared with the same period last year, as carriers have slashed capacity at the airport.

Domestic traffic was down 8.1% in June, European scheduled flight passengers were reduced by 2.8% and travellers on North Atlantic routes were 9.4% lower.

Long-haul flights were the most resilient sector, almost flat on last year at a 0.2% reduction.

Edinburgh was the only airport to register an increase in traveller numbers, at 1.4% – its third month of growth.

Gatwick had 7.6% fewer passengers in June, while Glasgow and Aberdeen dropped 10.9% and 9.8% respectively.

BAA is embroiled in a battle against the Competition Commission’s decision to make it sell three of its airports.

The commission ruled earlier this year that BAA’s ownership of seven UK airports was anti-competitive and ordered the firm to sell Gatwick and Stansted airports as well as either Glasgow or Edinburgh.

BAA had already decided to sell Gatwick in West Sussex and said last month the sale process was continuing.

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Air France plane crashed vertically

July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments

Flight 447 went down so quickly that passengers had no time to react, says French head investigator

Air France flight 447 did not break up in the air but plunged vertically into the Atlantic Ocean, according to the French head investigator of last month’s crash, which killed all 228 people on board.

Alain Bouillard said life vests found among the wreckage were not inflated, indicating the accident happened so quickly that the passengers had no time to react.

Speed sensors on the Airbus A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were not to blame, he said, though “we are far from understanding the cause of the crash”.

“The plane seems to have hit the surface of the water on its flight trajectory with a strong vertical acceleration,” he said, adding that investigators have found “neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives.”

One of the automatic messages emitted by the plane indicates it was receiving incorrect speed information from the external monitoring instruments, which could destabilise the control systems. Experts have suggested those external instruments might have iced over.

No information was being given out from autopsies of the bodies found, Bouillard told a news conference at the headquarters of the French air accident agency BEA in Le Bourget, outside Paris.

The chances of finding the flight recorders are falling as the signals they emit fade. Without them, the full causes of the accident may never be known. The automated messages sent by the plane before it fell gave rescuers only a vague location to begin their search. Bouillard said the search for the plane’s black boxes has been extended by 10 days and would continue untill 10 July.

Families of the victims had been briefed before the media on the findings so far of the BEA investigation.

Earlier, Christophe Guillot-Noel, head of an association for the crash victims’ families said they wanted all the facts, “above all to be able to avoid this eventually happening again”.

“We have just one demand: transparency. We have just one expectation: the truth,” he said.

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Yemeni plane crash teenager ‘doing well’

July 1st, 2009 | No Comments

• Girl, 13, escapes with cuts and fractured collarbone
• Black box located in ocean near Comoros islands

The teenage girl who survived the Comoros plane crash by clinging to a piece of debris is recovering well in hospital. Bahia Bakari, a 13-year-old Franco-Comoran who lives in Paris, escaped with only a fractured collarbone and cuts to her face after the Yemenia Airbus A310-300 carrying 153 people plunged into the Indian Ocean at 2amyesterday .

Bahia’s father, Kassim Bakari, told France’s RTL radio in Paris that he had spoken to his daughter, who can barely swim, about the moments after the crash.

“She couldn’t feel anything and found herself in the water. She heard people speaking around her but she couldn’t see anyone in the darkness,” he said. “She’s a very timid girl, I never thought she would escape like that.

“I asked her what happened and she said, ‘We saw the plane fall into the water. I found myself in the water. I was hearing people talking but I couldn’t see anyone. I was in the dark. I couldn’t see anything. Daddy, I couldn’t swim very well. I grabbed on to something but I don’t know what,’” said Bakari, whose wife was on the plane and is presumed dead. Bakari said that his daughter asked what had happened to her mother but that she had not yet been told the truth.

At the hospital in the Comoran capital, Moroni, today Alain Joyandet, France’s minister for international co-operation, decribed Bahia’s survival as “a true miracle. She is a courageous young girl”.

He said France wanted to send Bahia home. Her mother, who was also on board, is presumed dead along with the rest of the passengers and crew.

One of the rescuers told Europe 1 radio that he spotted Bahia in the sea at about 4am and dived in to help after she was unable to cling to the lifebuoy tossed towards her. On board the rescue boat she was wrapped in blankets and given warm sugar water.

The ageing Yemenia Airbus was on the last leg of a journey from France to the Comoros, a former French colony off Africa’s south-eastern coast. With winds howling, the plane twice tried to land at the airport in Moroni before crashing in deep waters about nine miles from the island of Grand Comore.

Among the 142 passengers were 66 from France, many of them with dual nationality. Most of the other passengers were Comoran.

French and US aircraft are assisting with the search for survivors, along with numerous boats and navy divers. One of the plane’s black boxes appeared to have been located, according to the French government. It could be crucial in helping determine the cause of the crash, amid much speculation over the condition of the 19-year-old aircraft. Passengers who started the journey in France were transferred from a more modern Airbus A330 to the A310 during a stopover in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital.

The doomed plane had been banned from operating in France following an inspection in 2007 that identified numerous faults. The EU was also closely monitoring Yemenia over safety concerns, although it is not on a blacklist of airlines barred from Europe.

The crash has caused widespread anger among the 200,000 immigrant Comorans living in France, some of whom have complained of overcrowding and a lack of seatbelts on Yemenia flights, particularly on the legs outside European airspace.

A protest by Comoran youths at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport today delayed the departure of a Yemenia flight to Sana’a, with only 60 of the scheduled 160 passengers making it on board.

Yemenia, which is jointly owned by the governments of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, said the plane had passed a safety inspection in May. Poor weather may have been to blame for the accident, it said. The crash was the second involving an Airbus plane in a month. On 1 June, an Air France A330 crashed into the Atlantic shortly after leaving Brazil for Paris. All 228 people on board died, including 72 French nationals.

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