News from the world of N-Registration

The idea of getting into an aeroplane powered purely by electricity is really quite exciting and probably extraordinary.

Traditionally probably we do not have sympathy with airlines; they somehow usually manage to fall on their feet and generally at the expense of the flying public.

Here we are at the end of August and basically the end of the summer holiday season.

When the word “airship” is used, no doubt it conjures up in our minds that dreadful accident in 1937 in New Jersey when the Hindenberg caught fire. It was probably the most famous aviation disaster ever caught on camera and basically brought about the end of airships as a realistic form of transport. Airships, also known as “blimps” have continued to exist but are a relative rarity.

With all the problems of Covid-19 and the significant reduction in airline travel at the moment, one may think that the question of drones is not a very important one. Well nothing could in fact be further from the truth.

The latest round of redundancies appears to be from Jet2. It would appear that 102 captains and first officers are to be made redundant, the leavers being those who joined the company most recently. Another report states that 380 cabin crew will be made redundant; it is not entirely clear whether this figure includes the pilots or not but the inference is that it does not.

“No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores…..” So said The Rt Hon the Lord Clyde, a judge in 1929 in a famous tax case. He went on to point out that the Inland Revenue quite rightly did its best to grab as much as it could and the taxpayer was entitled to be astute, albeit honest, to prevent the depletion of his means.

Both Airbus and Boeing have recently posted eye watering first quarter losses of €481m and $641m respectively. The CEO of Airbus, Guillaume Faury, warned earlier this month that it may take up to five years for passenger figures to be back at their pre-Covid numbers. But at Boeing, they have more than the pandemic to deal with.

In one of our earlier postings it was stated quite reasonably in an earlier posting that given the dire position in which civil aviation now finds itself (and frankly it has never been the most stable of industries), is it likely that we will see a third runway at Heathrow (LHR) within the next decade?