Plane Talking

Angry Flyers Lounge-How Qantas took a full service fare off the Cotton family and gave them low cost quality

July 3, 2009 – 5:36 pm, by Ben Sandilands

Nick Cotton and family who live near Sydney were ripped off by their Qantas experience this year and want their correspondence with its Customer Care office published.

This is his story, told in letters to and from Qantas Customer Care,

I purchased 4 tickets on Qantas to Johannesburg for my family (2 adult children + wife) flying 26th Dec 2008 returning 23rd Jan 09. We are Australians, going on a holiday of a lifetime and our experience was atrocious.

To cut a long story short, on the way out the in flight entertainment was broken on the whole plane for most of the flight. On the way back in our section of the plane everything was down, no entertainment, no lights no call button, no acknowledgement, etc etc. I have corresponded with Qantas and they offered me $400 voucher to be spent on Qantas. That’s for all 4 tickets. I have exchanged more correspondence but that is all they will offer.

I attach my letters and their replies. My complaint tried to make them aware that it was not just the lack of entertainment. Staff attitudes were poor, and my feeling was that because this route has no competition on the direct flight, the planes are old, crammed and Qantas are milking it to maximize profit.

I am disgusted.

Customer Care
Qantas Airways Pty Ltd
Level 5 - Building A
203 Coward Street
Mascot NSW 2020

27 January 2009

Dear Sirs,

My family and I have recently travelled to Johannesburg with Qantas Flight QF63 26/12 and back on QF64 23/1 and have some customer service issues that I wish to raise with you.

On the outgoing flight the whole aircraft suffered from breakdown of the entertainment system. The flight crew did advise over the PA that they were trying to fix it and frequently closed the whole system down to reboot it. Eventually however the interactive part of the system was closed down and we could only access audio and some visual on TV.

On our return flight we encountered further issues of service which began at the check in. We checked in about 2.5 hours before the flight departure and our family of four adults were unable to get seating together. I know this happens but we were disappointed to find that we were put two and two in rows 69 and 70 against the window with extremely large people on the aisle seat in each case. These people had also been separated from their families so no-one was happy. To say we were crammed is an understatement. How can one avoid this? Are people being allocated seats prior to arriving at the airport because if this is the case we were not told this option was available? When we arrived at the gate we were met by more security, taking all containers bigger than 100ml regardless of contents. In our case this consisted of empty water bottles which we wanted to fill on the plane to avoid the tiny plastic cups which usually run out and also some virtually empty hair product (pump spray) and some unopened body creams which had been purchased at an airport shop. We refused to hand these over and returned to the shop (The Body Shop) to get them sealed in a bag with receipt attached to demonstrate where they had been purchased. We were told this draconian procedure and confiscations were on the strict instructions of Qantas but since this did not happen on our departure in Sydney we are confused about the lack of consistency.

Once on the plane we settled in as best we could given the extraordinarily cramped conditions and tried to watch the entertainment system. This lasted less than an hour I think and then crashed. Our section never came back on. No announcement was made and eventually when I asked was told they were working on it. I became aware that nothing worked in our section. No seat lights, handset did not operate the service light etc. When the lights were dimmed for people to sleep I had to stop reading. The steward advised after I got his attention, that I could sit in the crew seat and read if I liked. I declined. Later on he came back to me and said ‘you paid top dollar for this flight. I strongly urge you to write to customer care.’ About half an hour before arrival in Sydney the chief steward wandered down our side of the plane apologising with what I thought was a very carefree attitude.

As feared the water cups on the plane did run out and our consumption of fluids was restricted. No hot towels came round as advertised and not once were we offered a drink other than with the meal. I asked for a beer with the meal but it never came despite a promise that she would come back.

As the steward noted I paid nearly $13000 for these four seats for my family to go and visit my terminally ill sister and am extremely disappointed with the service. I will certainly be encouraging V Australia to speed up their entry to this route and when I travel again next year will be examining all other options. Because there is no competition on this direct route I suspect the planes used are the older ones in your fleet. The current alternative is to fly cheaper but for 21 hours or so through Asia or The Middle East. I think, in hindsight, for comfort and economy that may well have been the better option.

I look forward to your response and whether you might consider some compensation for our inconvenience. You have failed to provide full service as advertised, and have also failed in your obligations to me and my family as customers.

Yours faithfully.

N Cotton

qf-1a1qf-1b

12 March 2009

Dear Sirs,

I refer to my letter dated 27th January (6 weeks without acknowledgement) and your letter of reply dated 9th March ref BF/93307777.

I am grateful for your enclosed voucher to the value of $400 usable only on Qantas and Oneworld airlines not Jetstar. However, I note that this represents only 3% of the value of the original tickets.

I presume I did not properly make clear the agony of these flights. The outbound flight to Johannesburg was nowhere near as bad as the return. We only suffered from no interactive audio visual throughout most of the flight. The staff was, for the most part courteous and apologetic about the situation. By the return flight all that had changed.

My wife and adult children, when reading my first letter to you, reckoned I had understated the situation. They reminded me that many people on our section of the plane staged what was almost a mini revolt and carried their trays back to the galley because they waited so long for them to be removed by the crew. No apologies or explanations were forthcoming regarding the lack of lights, call bells, TV, film etc. is it normally Qantas policy to keep customers in the dark? The service in general was atrocious and did not just involve the breakdown of equipment. Not providing people with adequate hydration is a health risk and surely is something that you should have a basic service. I have noticed a letter in the press from another dissatisfied customer who recently travelled this route so I am aware my experience was not an isolated case. Frankly, I dread flying with Qantas next time I need to go in 12 months time. 14 hours is a very long time to spend in such circumstances.

Bearing in mind that we are a family of 4 looking for compensation I believe $100 each will go nowhere. I look forward to hearing from you with an alternative offer, and sincerely hope that it does not take a further 6 weeks.

Yours faithfully.

N Cotton

qf2aqf2b6 May 2009

Dear Sirs,

I refer to my letter dated 12th March (a further 6 weeks without acknowledgement) and your letter of reply dated 23rd April ref BF/93319604.

You are correct in your assumption that I am still unhappy with your offer.

Rather than just state that the offer was appropriate, I would appreciate it if you could address and comment on the points I raised. Specifically, how can $100 compensation per ticket be appropriate? If we could use the voucher on Jetstar then it may have some value, but restricting us to just giving the money back to Qantas seems to be insulting. Please try to actually visualise yourself in our position on those flights. Would you not be angry and frustrated if you had been forced to sit in the dark with no diversion and no information for 10hours? What action have you taken to avoid this in the future? Very little it would seem as I have another similar incident to report in the paragraph below.

I am not normally keen on pursuing such matters but I feel so strongly about this that I can assure you I will be persistent and in due course will explore what third parties may be able to assist me. I am unfortunately reinforced in this by news from my sister and her husband who flew business class to Hong Kong last week from Sydney and they also suffered the breakdown of the in-flight entertainment system. They however, were lucky enough to have lights and cabin service; a luxury not delivered on our flights to and from Johannesburg. They also assure me they will avoid flying Qantas next time they fly. My brother in law flies every week from the UK on business and in his case his dissatisfaction and his contacts will result in loss of business for Qantas.

I look forward to hearing from you very shortly.

Yours faithfully.

N Cotton

qf3aqf3b1Nick Cotton thinks Qantas will fail if it continues to deliver low cost service at full service prices.

He is not alone in having such thoughts.

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AF447-Preliminary report into Air France disaster contains hints of an epic struggle for control

July 3, 2009 – 3:13 am, by Ben Sandilands

AF447 an Air France Airbus A330-200, struck the mid Atlantic ocean just over a month ago ‘in flying position’ going straight ahead but falling so fast its underside was forced upwards toward the ceiling with ‘great compressive force’.

There was no mid air breakup.

The accident, which killed all 228 people on board the Rio de Janeiro to Paris flight on 1 June, when it was beyond radar 1500 kilometres from the Brazilian coast, is outlined in considerable detail in the preliminary report by the French air accident investigation authority the BEA released in Paris overnight.

Those details invalidate some earlier criticisms of the report, based on a televised press conference. The report has been also been released in English.

The flight path of AF447. (BEA)

The flight path of AF447. (BEA)

The investigation’s leader Alain Bouillard told the news conference that “Between the surface of the water and 35,000 feet, we don’t know what happened.

“In the absence of the flight recorders, it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions.”

However the preliminary report, made a day after the 30 day timeline required by international convention after a major air crash, says the jet didn’t break apart before it hit the sea, and appeared to have struck the water belly first after gathering speed while dropping thousands of feet through the air.

distortions

The report contains little new information yet Bouillard pointed out that none of the life vests recovered from the crash zone were inflated, suggesting the passengers had not been able in the circumstances to be prepared by cabin crew for a crash landing.

Although the inquiry has not received the results of autopsies carried out on the 51 bodies retrieved from the search zone it noted that they were well preserved and retained their clothing.

This is further evidence no mid air breakup with a consequent destructive air blast took place inside the Airbus.

While taking reporters through the preliminary report Bouillard said faulty air speed readings from the external air pressure pitots on the A330-200 were not the cause of the crash but had not been “excluded from the chain that led to the accident.”

Which on one reading means that the pitot manufacturer, Thales, and Air France which knew they were unsatisfactory, face some serious law suits in the future.

The report confirmed that one of the automated status messages sent from the flight to the operations centre in Paris indicated inconsistent speed data was coming from the pitots which could destabilise its control systems.

Faults in the pitots, including a susceptibility to icing, had lead Air France to decide in April to replace them with improved units as a matter of urgency but that work had only just started when AF447 crashed while crossing a notoriously stormy zone stretching from the tropics of South America to Africa.

The search for the two ‘black boxes’ carried by the jet, a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder, has been extended to 10 July, even though the locational beacons fitted to them should have run out of power by now.

Without them, the riddle as to why this particular flight, experiencing faulty air speed indications amid known turbulent and potentially ice forming conditions should have ended in disaster when so many others have not will go unanswered.

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Hello Sydney-Welcome to the Tiger experience

July 2, 2009 – 2:52 pm, by Ben Sandilands

Here is a taste of what Sydneysiders can look forward to when Tiger turns up tomorrow (Friday, 3 July) on the Melbourne route, courtesy of the 7 network’s sneak peek at its new reality show Air Ways.

Just another day on Tiger Airways

7 wants you to visit the page rather than see an embedded video, but all starts well...

7 wants you to visit the page rather than see an embedded video, but all starts well...

....until a 2 hour delay goes to 4 hours goes to 6 hours goes to....

....until a 2 hour delay goes to 4 hours goes to 6 hours goes to....

....goes to 10 hours and people start having anxiety attacks, and ...

....goes to 10 hours and people start having anxiety attacks, and ...

....the only passenger to turn up in a suit asks the check in Nazi if the riot at the other end of the terminal is normal and is promptly threatened with arrest for being a smart arse

....the only passenger to turn up in a suit asks the check in Nazi if the riot at the other end of the terminal is normal and is promptly threatened with arrest for being a smart arse.

Air Ways is shot in Tiger terminals and jets with the airline’s full cooperation.

What on earth were they thinking!

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Airbusophobia versus reality plus a few things to keep worrying about

July 1, 2009 – 9:01 pm, by Ben Sandilands

There is no possible connection between the crash of an the Yemenia Airbus A310 a day ago and the 1 June crash of an AirFrance A330-200 in the mid Atlantic with the loss of 228 lives.

But that won’t stop the Airbusophobia which seems to rule the air waves at the moment. They were both Airbuses. It is like linking a crash by a Boeing 707 and a Boeing 747-400. They are both Boeings. And in each case decades apart in their design.

The 30 June crash of a Yemenia Airbus A310 on its second attempt to land at the Moroni airport on Comoro Island had all the classic early jet age pre-requisites for an air disaster.

It was a crappy airline flying an old jet in the middle of the night in bad weather into a strip with a short runway where the approaches are impinged upon by big hills.

The flight sounds like a re-run of any of too many 60s and 70s British charter holiday catastrophes involving killer carriers like Dan-Air, which became gruesomely infamous for its clean up processes involving large common graves, bags of quick lime and platitudes in the cut throat budget package market it dominated, despite its record, in those times.

The Yemenia jet is reported as having abandoned an attempt to land in bad weather and crashed into the sea on its second approach. Of the 153 people on board only one passenger, a 14 year old girl, has been found alive surrounded by bodies and floating debris.

The EU has been running a name and shame campaign against these sorts of carriers which hang on to the fringes of the travel market.

The Yemeni national airline jet in question had been banned from EU airspace for maintenance irregularities and the airline itself was on notice to lift its game or have its entire operations prohibited within Europe, and put on the same no fly list which includes dozens of small carriers and Garuda Indonesia.

The Airbus type involved, the A310, is a derivative of the first Airbus jet the A300 and has none of the computer linked fly by wire systems found on contemporary Airbuses and to an extent on later Boeing designs.

However there are good reasons for continued scrutiny of the modern A330 design involved in the Air France flight AF447 disaster.

Similar incidents have been reported on other A330s, including two in recent weeks, in so far as the flights experienced violent thunderstorms and issues with faulty air speed indications and in each case temporary but manageable control problems.

Both are being investigated by the US National Transportation Safety Board as announced below.

ntsb

The second incident has already been massaged into something it isn’t in the form of a widely circulated hoax email allegedly coming from a senior captain concerned about Airbuses in general.

Nevertheless the NTSB needs to probe such incidents to find out of there is something in them that can require a change in recommended operating procedures to make air transport safer than it is.

There were also two incidents in August and September last year to Air Caraibe A330-200s which closely followed but not to a tragic conclusion the known problems on board AF447 of bad weather, turbulence, and unreliable speed readings.

In those cases the airline took Airbus to task over the difficulties its pilots had in following its recommended procedure for dealing with unreliable speed indications including ambiguities or contradictions within them.

At last report Airbus had not responded to the airline’s concern, even though it said it understood the problem.

These air speed issues, associated with icing problems with the external pitots that provide air speed data to the pilots and the control systems are different to the inertial air data unit errors being investigated in the double temporary loss of control experienced by a Qantas A330-300 flight forced to make an emergency landing at Learmonth in WA last October.

But all of these incidents, unlike the AF447 crash, saw the pilots regain control of the jet by ‘first flying the plane’, that is, maintaining its attitude, and engine power levels to as close as possible to the recommended settings rather than attempt to deal with screens full of rapidly scrolling error messages.

A similar response is seen in last year’s two gravely serious 747-400 incidents involving Qantas flights, one an emergency landing in Bangkok in January  and the other the Manila emergency last July, in which the pilots ‘flew the plane’ rather than deal with a similar mass of warnings about multiple failures affecting critical systems.

The lesson from all of these incidents may be that whether it is an Airbus or a Boeing, their differences in design and control features still give pilots everything they need to save a jet in trouble

The question remains, what extra element or circumstance undid AF447?

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Angry Flyers Lounge-Jetstar’s New Zealand offensive

July 1, 2009 – 5:48 pm, by Ben Sandilands

Jetstar’s entry into the NZ domestic market has so far been three weeks of picking fights with its customers.

Jetstar NZ meets yoof market in the Twitterverse as posted on Whale Oil@whaleoil.co.nz

Jetstar NZ meets yoof market in the Twitterverse as posted on Whale Oil@whaleoil.co.nz

All the carrier has to do now to cap it off is to affix murals showing the underarm bowling incident to the cabin bulkheads.

In the most recent reaction to the ill-will it has generated, Jetstar is proposing a campaign of ‘public eduction’ on the use of the low cost carriers, according no doubt to the Jetstar concept of very cheap, but also tricky, rude, unaccountable and chronically unreliable.

Will the public education of Kiwis be voluntary or compulsory? You would have to wonder after spokesperson Simon Westaway was quoted by NZ media as blaming it mainly on the media and the airline’s customers.

Which is a reminder of rule Number 1 of the Jetstar model, which is that the customer is always wrong.

New Zealanders have not taken well to 30 minute minimum check-in cut offs, no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’. Nor to widespread allegations that people can be stuck in an inefficiently processed Jetstar queue for up to half an hour before the cut off time, only to be cut off and told its all their own fault.

Which raises the rule Number 2 of the Jetstar version of low cost customer disciplinary techniques which is that it decides when 30 minutes is 30 minutes, even if its 35 minutes. And it shuts down the electronic kiosk check ins at the same time, just to lock the customer well and truly out of the flight.

Westaway has been giving interviews in NZ explaining that the 30 minute cut off rule is there to ensure flights depart on time.

Well, it isn’t working. At least half of its flights have been running over an hour late, which in a country which measures about 8 minutes wide by 80 minutes long in a jet is very, very late.

So, rule Number 3 is that Jetstar can be as late as it bloody well likes, a trick it learned from parent Qantas.

Australian travellers have already been there for the five years Jetstar has performed admirably as the carrier that drives them to Virgin Blue.

NZ’s Pacific Blue could just be so lucky. In fact it has been. The media has been full of accounts of people stranded or cut off by Jetstar who have gone across to Pacific Blue, which usually costs more than Jetstar but less than Air NZ.

One of them was the Prime Minister John Key, who was on a Jetstar flight that couldn’t depart from Queenstown in fog.

Air NZ, which came to the ‘rescue’ has jets equipped with a precision navigational system that allows flights to use the tricky airport in poor visibility, which Jetstar’s A320s haven’t been equipped with.

What Jetstar was thinking when it made Queenstown a key part of its early network without this landing system is anyone’s guess. But it cripples its network whenever Queenstown is socked in .

New Zealand is going to be a good test of whether a low fare airline being confrontational in a small market where the distances are short and the alternatives on Air NZ and Pacific Blue are many will work.

Maybe it will switch to a charm offensive.

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Some last statistics from Qantas and Virgin Blue before things get even worse

June 30, 2009 – 5:27 pm, by Ben Sandilands

The May provisional traffic statistics from the Qantas and Virgin Blue brands are the last insights into their operations before black Friday, 3 July.

keyThis Friday is the day Delta, the world’s largest carrier, enters the Australia-US market on the Sydney-Los Angeles route, and Singapore Airlines’ Jetstar clone, Tiger, takes on everybody and Jetstar in particular on the formerly golden Melbourne-Sydney route.

Delta may not be as big a worry for the Australian carriers as Tiger, since it has neither the product reputation nor brand presence to compete at this end of the trans Pacific routes.

But at the other end, in its own briar patch, Delta is a very powerful and respected brand.

Tiger is arguably the bigger challenge to the Qantas and Virgin brands.

qf-may

The figures, and especially those for the 11 months to 31 May, show that the Qantas group brands are shrinking in combined market share and the Virgin brands are growing. It is a trend that has been very obvious in recent months.

But because Virgin Blue doesn’t reveal yield movements, it doesn’t cast any light on which group is suffering the most, relatively speaking, in their all important cash reserves, or in Virgin’s case, give any clues as to how much domestic and regional Pacific operations are lessening the drain of serious start up costs for V Australia on the Los Angeles routes.

For the Qantas group, the ’shock’ in the May figures is from Jetstar reporting its first significant step backwards since it began flying just over 5 years ago.

Jetstar’s passenger numbers in May were down by -1.6% compared to a year ago.

This added to a poor month by Qantas domestic with the full service brand loosing -4.7% of passengers compared to May 2008.

The figures also show continued divergent flight paths by the Virgin brands (Virgin Blue, Pacific Blue and V Australia) which grew total passengers by 10% in the 11 months to the end of May, compared to -1.6% declines in aggregate by the Qantas brands (Qantas domestic, Qantas regional, Qantas international, Jetstar domestic and Jetstar International).

vbatable

The Qantas filing to the ASX this morning says total domestic yields have fallen by -4.7% for the 11 months to the end of May, with the international yields off by -2.6%. Both metrics exclude foreign exchange gains or losses.

Successive Qantas managements have declared Jetstar to be the key to the group’s survival, and it will on all the indications fiercely defend itself from Tiger, which plans to roll out major incursions into other key domestic markets in the coming year.

Put in perspective, the latest Qantas figures are stellar by world standards. In the Australian context, they show its market share, as reported yesterday, is in decline despite growth in the Jetstar operations (May domestic aside). Virgin Blue grew its domestic share in the 11 months to the end of May by 5.1% while Qantas domestic lost -4.5% or nearly one in twenty passengers in the same period.

But the full picture depends on the profit and loss statements for this financial year which will be released in August.

And by the time they are released, Delta and Tiger will have changed and toughened things in critically important markets.

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V Australia adds Hong Kong to list of possible new routes

June 30, 2009 – 9:46 am, by Ben Sandilands

A leak that says Virgin Blue is asking for slots at Hong Kong airport for its V Australia subsidiary isn’t surprising, except for taking so long.

The two factors in this move are the caustic losses being made by all carriers on the crowded trans Pacific non-stops to the US, and the synergy of a Brisbane or perhaps even Melbourne service to Hong Kong that connected reasonably well with the established daily flights between Sydney and London via Hong Kong flown by Virgin Atlantic.

Toward the end of this year V Australia will have enough 777-300ER availability to maintain a daily frequency to Los Angeles from Sydney, with maybe a few Brisbane flights, and a daily schedule for Hong Kong.

Virgin Blue has already signalled its interest in routes to Japan and South Africa for V Australia. It can’t do all of these things with a small fleet, but it adds to the evidence that it is scoping routes where Qantas is vulnerable, or has in the case of Japan, shunted its customers off onto Jetstar, which can mean loosing them for good as they react to this by choosing from non Qantas group alternatives.

It is also yet another reminder of the self inflicted wound by Qantas in not acquiring Boeing 777s. Qantas will never get back the billions of dollars wasted in excess fuel burn by hanging on to tired old 767s and earlier model 747s rather than acquiring advanced model 777s mid decade. Especially as competitors like Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines demonstrate the flexibility and efficiency of what sadly may be the last great Boeing airliner ever built given the problems of the 787 project.

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Attempt to lessen legal obligations of airlines blocked in Senate by pilot unions

June 30, 2009 – 6:27 am, by Ben Sandilands

A back door attempt to water down the absolute responsibility of airlines for the actions of their employees and criminalise pilots has been blocked in the Senate.

The government attempted to use the device of a Select Legislative Instrument (SLI) to amend the Aviation Transport Security Act 2005 to place off-duty airline flight crew outside the ‘class of person’ who can legally enter the cockpit and transfer criminal responsibility from the carrier to the pilot-in-command.

The rights or wrongs of that move are irrelevant to the precedent it would set in breaking the universal code by which airlines are responsible for everything a pilot does.

The Australian & International Pilots Association bulletin to members circulated last week says:-

AIPA certainly recognises that flight deck access for off-duty pilots is a significant issue. However, the precedent set by the transfer of criminal responsibility is an even greater concern and something which the Association simply can not leave unaddressed. Airlines control flight operations, standards, training and checking and have always borne the responsibility for the operational actions of their flight crew; any other approach would allow airlines to claim they were blameless for accidents and incidents. This is an important global principle and AIPA must do all it can to ensure Australian pilots do not undermine it.

AIPA combined with the Australian Federation of Airline Pilots AFAP in its AusALPA negotiating entity to win the backing of the government controlled committee to file a notice of intention to disallow the government sponsored SLI by pointed out that it had failed to meet its consultation obligations under the Legislative Instruments Act.

If AIPA (AusALPA) can convince the Opposition and one independent Senator that the regulations are flawed the changes to flight deck access regulations will be scrapped and cannot be resubmitted in similar form.

This would be a vital win.

If the precedent for transferring criminal responsibility away from airline managements is set it enables a future when Australian airlines, in terms of diminished safety and skills oversight, could legally get away with murder.

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Dreamliner-An Impossible Dream?

June 28, 2009 – 9:21 am, by Ben Sandilands

The most alarming question to arise from the Dreamliner fiasco is whether high composite airliners are doomed to fail.

Not fail as in fail to reach production, although that is a possibility even at this stage, but fail as in start crashing after large numbers of the two high composite airliners in question, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and its supposed sequel, the Airbus XWB A350, enter service.

lonely

The critical issues include thin gauge, load bearing, flexible components made from carbon fibre reinforced plastics and in places, their interactions with metal alloys.

The ‘lonely scientist’, Hans van der Zanden, has published a draft version of his book ‘The Impossible Dream’ on these issues online.

This draft was not written in response to Boeing management’s abrupt about turn involving the now cancelled first flight of the 787 Dreamliner announced last week. Van der Zanden’s website was last updated on 9 June, well before the evasive announcement of a ’side of airplane’ minor, easily patched issue by Boeing suckered much of the media for all of 24 hours.

In some regards, the book will drive readers to distraction with irritations like referring to these high composite designs as all composite designs.

The 787s and less clearly defined A350s are already burdened with tonnes of extra metal to make them work. They are far from ‘all composite’ and it seems, further than ever from coming to pass. They aren’t producing the claimed benefits.

The author is primarily concerned with how these designs take composites where they have never been used before, and how this involves leaps of faith more than reliable predictive models of their behaviour in such applications.

It was the failure of a static test wing under stress at ridiculously low levels that sharply highlighted the modelling problem that wiped out the 787 first flight and any lingering vestiges of credibility in those charged with the project’s management.

If Boeing doesn’t know how the materials will handle aerodynamic stresses now and over the lifetime of the investment the airlines are, or were, making in 787s, the foundations of proper certification of the type and its maintenance in terms of fatigue and damage are washed away.

Certainty is required. Dreams and hype are one thing, a real airliner is another.

The early chapters of ‘The Impossible Dream’, are interesting, but probably overdone as context for the technical critiques which make gripping reading from Chapter 5 through Chapter 7 followed by the important Sudden Impact testing proposal which is found in the tool bar on his website.

The draft book dissects the main issues with composites. Have the executive branches of Airbus and Boeing been engaged by these issues, or have the key decisions been made by marketing and sent to the design and engineering departments for implementation rather than consultation?

How many of the airlines have engaged themselves with these issues in Dreamliners and XWB A350s? Most airlines have long severed any real connection between management and technical knowledge of aircraft design and engineering.

“Oops, that’s interesting” is not a plausible defence after tens of billions of dollars worth of these types have been ordered.

In a sense the design issues that now arise are those of the management classes of recent decades, as in a post modern re-invention of Taylorism, versus the rude mechanics (or designers.)

It is a divide between hype and reality which may have lethal relevance to the future of these projects.

Update: Hans Van der Zanden has responded to a request for more information about his study and assures us that he is not involved with any of the interested parties in use of composites or their alternatives in airliners. The 3000 hour study is self financed and driven by safety concerns over the materials dating back to the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in 2000.

He says introducing a new construction material at this scale in airliners is a very dangerous undertaking.

In relation to the now cancelled first flight of the 787 he says, ” I was very nervous about the first test flight and it came as a relief when problems surfaced in time and finally at last engineers apparently found the courage [to say] that ‘enough is enough’.”

Van der Zanden says he will launch a more detailed web site concerning his study in the near future.

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Where might the Dreamliner fiasco take Boeing and Airbus?

June 26, 2009 – 7:35 pm, by Ben Sandilands

It needs to be recognised that the 787 project has the potential to ruin the Boeing Commercial Airplane business and force the company as a whole to re-organise its defence, space and other technologies activities into a separated entity.

Such thoughts are probably already being entertained in EADS, the owner of Airbus, as to how it might excise the parallel but financially much smaller debacle that has overtaken the A400M Airbus Military project for a short and rough field lifter should that project fail.

The Airbus A400M is a calamity at the moment. Unless everything goes incredibly right for that project over the next two years EADS itself has recognised that it might collapse because of a withdrawal of support by key partners.

However today is not about the A400M but the 787 Dreamliner, for which there are more than 800 orders.

Many of the orders would be liable in some manner to liquidated damages claims against Boeing if the project is cancelled or delayed by another two years, or results in an airliner which delivers too few of the benefits that were claimed for the wide bodied twin engined medium capacity jet.

None of these outcomes can be dismissed outright.

However the more likely, indeed necessary early outcome will be the removal of the management responsible for the 787 project.

The airlines who are looking for daylight in relation to their Dreamliners need to be able to talk to people who do not dissemble or trivialise the issues.

Taking the wider perspective on this, none of the claimed benefits of an electric-plastic 787 have been demonstrated. One core element of the Dreamliner design advantages is claimed to be the replacing of the functions powered by bleed air in conventional jets with electricity generated directly by the engines in the Dreamliner, resulting in a net fuel saving and simpler maintenance needs.

The other element was the claimed lighter, stronger, corrosion free and low maintenance features of carbon fibre reinforced plastic glued together in laminates and baked in giant ovens. Which started to break apart prematurely when stressed in a static test Dreamliner.
It the five and a half years since Boeing claimed the necessary technology was in place to achieve these benefits the result is one prematurely broken wing test assembly and a prototype of a jet it is unwilling to fly.

And this is the initial, smaller 787-8 model, not the stretched and improved 787-9 which is the version Qantas will now first take delivery of for Jetstar in 2013.

The 787-9 is supposed to be available to airlines around two and a half years after the 787-8.

Boeing has an astonishing amount of work to do in order for 787-9s to be ready for Jetstar service non-stop across the Pacific or one stop to Europe in four years time. Qantas knows that. It is applying its own stress test to Boeing, announcing earlier today that by mutual agreement the 787-9 will be delivered to its leisure and low cost brand Jetstar from mid 2013.

The lethal clause in the Qantas statement, that the decision was not influenced by this week’s revelation of a design fault and postponed first flight, has been widely misunderstood.

Today’s announcement came after weeks of haggling and was a done deal before the 787 prototype was done over in the last ditch announcement of the cancellation of its first flight.

A subsequent decision by Qantas on fleet matters will take these issues into account, once Boeing tells it what is going on, what the design changes are, and how long it will really take to get the Dreamliner certified.

Where does this possibly leave Airbus?

Bear in mind that Airbus was stampeded by the early sales success of the Dreamliners, and a distinct lack of interest in its evolutionary proposals for an A350 that was just a tarted up A330. So it came up with its own super plastic extra wide body or XWB A350 line up.

There have already been some hints that this XWB A350 offering, although also very successful in gaining early orders, is more than likely going to slip by some degree behind a target entry into service in 2013.

These hints may have much to do with the intelligence Airbus gathered in recent years from the supplier base for the 787 about how overweight and under performing various aspects of the Boeing project were proving. They could have given Airbus cause to slow down some of its own work on the A350 to reconsider how composites are used in some of its sections.

It would be very surprising if somewhere in Airbus a rather extensive review of its approach to a high composite design isn’t already underway, even though the A350 is to be manufactured quite differently to the Dreamliner.

That in turn could lead to entry into service delays in the A350 family, offset only by the continuing success of the A330 family, which is unbeaten in the efficiency stakes over flights of up to around 9 hours duration in the larger -300 version, and much further in the smaller -200 model.

Some analysts see the incremental improvements Airbus is offering in the A330 line up as introducing in a low key way at least some of the functionality promised for the original A350 model that didn’t excite airlines in 2004 and 2005.

I was at a Boeing Christmas party in 2005 shortly after Qantas chose the 787 over that version of the A350. The Boeing executive based in Sydney who clinched that order said he had mixed feelings about the win even though it saved him from certain dismissal had he failed.

His reasoning was that if Qantas had ordered the first version of the A350, Airbus would not have gone ahead with what became the XWB version, and this would have removed the threat they would come back with an all new design to rain on the Dreamliner’s parade, which was in part a correct prophesy.

But as it turns out, that version of the A350 would already be close to beginning flight testing now for service in 2011, and matching or surpassing the 787s on current indications if that jet makes even makes it into service the same year.

Airbus, in this hypothetical, would have blunted the 787’s early introduction, and followed it up with something larger in capacity and amenity in the middle of the next decade, which is fairly close to where the revelations about the Dreamliner this week have left the big jet rivals.

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