Ben Sandilands
Editor of Plane Talking @PlaneTalking
Ben Sandilands has reported and analysed the mechanical mobility of humanity since late 1960 - the end of the age of great scheduled ocean liners and coastal steamers and the start of the jet age. He’s worked in newspapers, radio and TV in a wide range of roles as a journalist at home and abroad for 56 years, the last 18 freelance.
Avtex has now been exposed for having an appalling record of unsafe practices by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Pilot bullying, deliberate rule breaking and corner cutting were amongst the unsafe practice allegations.
Two days after nearly losing a 144-seat jet that narrowly avoided a collision with a military target practice jet near Newcastle, Virgin Blue has finally won approval for an alliance with Etihad, which gives it faster flights than Qantas to many parts of Europe.
The big bang, 13.7 billion years on, and we are still in a place that is infinitely large, but roomier, with no starting point and no ending point.
Passengers flying economy who make connections from full-service airlines to Jetstar will continue on "selected" flights to get meals and the same free baggage allowance as they took for granted on their non-Jetstar flights.
A cabin decompression on Qantas flight QF670 between Adelaide and Melbourne this morning pushed the terrorist attack at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport off the top of this morning's radio bulletins.
If Boeing didn’t deliberately lie, it had to have been totally ignorant of the true state of the project for which it was raking in mega-bucks.
If the Air NZ purchase of 14.9% of Virgin Blue is a blocking move to prevent, say, Etihad from acquiring a significant interest in the carrier, it may well be thwarted by "unintended consequences".
Qantas has a crisis of perception that became worse overnight when a faulty fuel valve caused one of its aged Rolls-Royce-powered Boeing 747-400s to make a precautionary landing in Fiji.
Something momentous in the development of Australia-China trade connections this Thursday has so far slipped under the media radar.
Qantas played the American Airlines alliance card hard today when it announced it would stop flying to San Francisco in favour of new flights to Dallas/Fort Worth.
