Something interesting on the Air Cocaine story. A lurker dropped off this: El avión, Boeing 727, siglas J5-GCU de Guinea Bissau, aterrizó en el aeropuerto internacional La Chinita de Maracaibo a las 11:00 pm del 16 de octubre, procedente de Panamá. Allí permaneció poco más de una hora, mientras llenaba los tanques de combustible. Antes…
Read More a technical stopThis might have been a bigger story than it is.
Read More fatigueThere’s quite a lot of buzz about this story, in which a DHS report into criminal use of aircraft over the South Atlantic gets rehashed. The “Air Cocaine” case in Mali has given the whole thing another layer of sexy, of course, and it’s good to know that the problem is recognised – even better…
Read More the all purpose al-Qa’ida argument applied to aviationMore mystery jets. In the last couple of weeks there’s also been some progress on the 727 abandoned in North-Eastern Mali. For a start, it’s a 727, which is something. And, finally, there are pictures. The National of Abu Dhabi – a newspaper that is developing into a surprisingly useful source – has a good…
Read More mystery jet update: Malian 727OK, so there’s a recently wrecked aircraft on an airstrip in northeastern Mali and the UN reckons it brought over 10 tons of cocaine into the new West Africa-Southern Europe smuggling route. However, no-one seems to know what type of aircraft it is or what the registration was. All sources I can find – which…
Read More I should really think of an Ali Farka Toure lyric title for this postOld friends Avient have got it wrong, losing their newly acquired MD-11F in an accident on take-off from Shanghai. We’ve blogged about this lot here, here, here, and here; I also happen to know they sometimes read the blog. There is much material on PPRuNe as well – try here. The weird bit about Avient…
Read More Avient; still tolerated, but for how much longer?What’s happening on the Viktorfeed? Something called “Skyway Ltd”, using the ICAO code DGD, is doing quite a few flights into Iraq and Afghanistan; so is “Transaviaservice” or FNV. This last is the current owner of Antonov 12 ER-AXE/7345201, which we’ve had here before, both with Aerocom and with a shortlived project involving routes from…
Read More it’s the new Middle East, or somethingOther things I disagree quite strongly with Charlie Stross about. James Nicoll asks what happens if/when Moore’s Law is exhausted. Charlie has a well-known theory about this, based on the aerospace industry’s recession in the early 70s. The CE industry is inherently deflationary — Moore’s law conceals this because we double the number of transistors…
Read More no progress since 1970, except in minor fields such as cost, safety, reliability, capacity, efficiency…Much-discussed article; American goes to Holland, finds welfare state actually quite OK really! I was amused by the pleasantly clueless quote below: I asked a management consultant and a longtime American expat, Buford Alexander, former director of McKinsey & Company in the Netherlands, for his thoughts on this. “If you tell a Dutch person you’re…
Read More no ponyIt took a while, but somebody finally acted on those 38-year old gaskets. The BBC is reporting that the RAF’s Nimrod MR2 fleet has been grounded for the replacement of the engine bay hot air ducts, the famous pipe involved in the loss of XV230 over Afghanistan in September, 2006. According to my own sources,…
Read More XV230 consequences