Back on Track with the 787

A neat picture of the second Boeing 787 aircraft being assembled in Everett, Washington.

Unlike the first 787 that got rolled out with much fanfare last summer, this one will apparently not require immediate reassembling, which I assume is probably a very good thing when you are building a state-of-the-art airliner.

I can't wait to see this bird fly. That wingspan is gorgeous!

Widebody flight factory

There is something very cool about airliner skeletons under construction. Thanks to Flightblogger, meet the new Boeing 787s lining up for duty.

A giant amongst the clouds

The Airbus A380 is now officially in service.

It is quite simply a technical and engineering triumph.

On my trip to Vietnam earlier this year, I experienced the juxtaposition of flying on a Boeing 777 transpacific, only to connect to a tiny regional jet here in the United States. It was a great way to be reminded of the genuine enormity and complexity of modern commercial aviation. In our little Delta Connection plane, we actually taxied past the Korean Air jet that had brought us to San Francisco, and we were dwarfed, even by just one of the engines on that plane.

The A380 is on a scale, pretty much all it's own. Airbus and Singapore Airlines, as the launch customer, have raised the bar when it comes to moving an enourmous number of people in a single flight.

I look forward to flying on one in the future.

Aircraft innovation is key as our world grows smaller and smaller. Anything that allows travel to be more efficient and available to more and more people is a flight in the right direction.

We can only gain by understanding the world we live in and our neighbors who share it with us.

"The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights"

There's a great story I heard years ago while working in Papua New Guinea about a helicopter landing in a remote tribal village. When it landed, the village elders gathered and first brought it food, lest it be famished after such a flight. Then they proceeded to walk from the back to the front repeatedly, trying to figure out if it was a boy helicopter or a girl helicopter.

Since then, I assume they figured out that helicopters don't eat yams.

I was reminded of this story, while coming across a small bit of news from Nepal today. The national airline there recently had some issues with an airplane similar to this one:


In Nepal, apparently, if your airplane doesn't want to fly, it must be the work of an angry deity.

So instead of just quietly fixing the plane to avoid drawing too much attention to mechanical issues, they chose a different path: Ritual goat sacrifices.

I hope they also had some good mechanics around, respectfully, as a backup measure.