I keep noticing a new face in the game; Vertir Airlines, of Armenia, founded last year has been flying routes from the UAE into Afghanistan. Not much information has been available, but we know a few things; the only known aircraft, Antonov An-12 EK-12221, serial 7345201, is the old ER-AXE, which flew for the now-banned…
Read More Dig the new breedAn extra titbit on Nimrod: XV230 was the airframe that had refuelled from a TriStar the most. In second place was XV235; and on the 5th November, this aircraft experienced a fuel leak from one of those 38-year old rubber seals. In other news, apparently the decision to stop Nimrods air-to-air refuelling had little effect;…
Read More XV230 UpdateThe XV230 Board of Inquiry has travailed, and brought forth many PDFs. And some appalling numpty discposter has printed out the clearly wordprocessed documents, tippexed classified information, and scanned them chunk by chunk as huge uncompressed graphics files, before pdf-ing them into a round dozen fat-arse documents. Still, anything to keep google out, right –…
Read More XV230 Accident Report is OutRemember when the Airbus A380 was delayed and it was an example of the total bankruptcy of socialist Europe’s way of life? Look what’s happening with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner (and BA’s fleet)… Boeing blamed the delivery delay on continuing problems with flight control software, being produced by Honeywell International, and integrating other systems on the…
Read More 0x05B7Y: Out of Bolts ErrorIf it looks right, it probably is right, as they say. So LockMart is looking into a seaplane design…but how did they come up with this? Surely that’s too ugly to fly? (hat tip: Aviation Week.)
Read More If it looks right…I don’t know why Danger Room is so surprised about this; apparently one of the Hungarian Air Force’s new Saab Gripens managed to claim a shootdown of a Eurofighter Typhoon during an exercise (is that the first encounter between 4th generation fighters?). The first point is that the Gripen isn’t second-rate at all, as DR…
Read More Gratuitous Dogfight BloggingSo, there’s this new Kyrgyz airline called Galaxy Air; started by people from TAPOAvia in 2006. It’s been on the EU blacklist since March, 2007, and it ain’t coming off any time soon. On the 29th of August, its Ilyushin-18 EX-786 was seized by the Pakistani authorities in Islamabad. Why? Well, the 142 passengers, of…
Read More Pass Down The Plane, PleaseIn the light of renewed War! War! War! fears, it’s clearly time to check out the indicators; currently, there is one US Navy carrier group in the Middle East (Enterprise and Co). This is down from two for most of this year, and is the lowest for some time – although not quite, as there…
Read More Even More CarrierwatchIt’s quite surprising literally no-one during the recent reopening of the missing Iraqi guns story has thought fit to mention the delicious kicker that the shipment travelled in an aircraft chartered by a company that had just been shut down for cocaine-smuggling. Except for various random forum users. Jet Line International, for it was they…
Read More 99 Tonnes of Guns, ReduxThe Board of Inquiry into the loss of the Hercules C-130K XV206 on landing at Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan on the 24th of May last year (see here) has reported (pdf link). More documents are here. After much effort, and extensive exploration of all sorts of other options, the Board concluded that (as was blindingly obvious…
Read More Reading the Documents: XV206