Earlier this year, we heard China would be building almost 100 new airports by 2020. But they'll be worthless without enough planes connecting them. So instead of wait on Airbus and Boeing, the Chinese ACAC Consortium is making its own new aircraft.
So what's up with these native jets and turboprops? Plans call for one of them to be tested as early as this year. The other is further down the line--but it could be flying by 2012. We're just hoping that a Shanghai-based Charles Ogilvie can stock 'em with tricked out in-flight entertainment!
Click through our slideshow for a closer look at the future of Chinese aviation.
The past 24 hours have been filled with some pretty unhappy landings. Earlier this morning in Ormond Beach, Florida, a small passenger plane was forced to make an emergency landing on Interstate 95 after it inexplicably lost power. Southbound lanes on the highway had to be shut down to accommodate the plane just before noon.
And yesterday in Phoenix, a Southwest flight coming in from Austin, Texas caught fire on the runway at Sky Harbor Airport. All 127 passengers aboard the plane had to be evacuated after the back right landing gear burst into flames. A spokeswoman for Southwest said "another plane will be put into service as soon as possible." Good idea!
Sadly for all you pyros out there, this incident didn't result in any cool photos like the ones we saw after the infamous flaming JetBlue landing in 2005.
Finland's national airline Finnair, has got something to celebrate: 85 years in the air. That's longer than many airlines, and the carrier's come up with a neat way of celebrating.
Finnair's going retro. Not all the way back--and we're grateful for that--but back to the strangely cool 1950s. They're painting up one of their A319 aircraft to look just like an Aero Convair plane that Finnair (then Aero) flew in the 50s. Add to that crew dressing up in fifties clothing and passengers might come close to thinking they're time traveling.
We're wondering if reverting to 1950s prices would be beneficial or not. Then again, perhaps the best thing about Finnair back then was that it didn't need the fake pandas to sell seats.
Russia's new plane, the Sukhoi Superjet, may be running behind schedule, but apparently it does actually fly. The manufacturers arranged the first test flight earlier this week in secret. The CEO said it was all hush-hush because:
The Superjet is our child, and its birth is sacred. A pregnant woman would never invite the press and guests to watch how she delivers her child.
Others suspect the company was afraid something would go wrong. The 75-95 seat planes are being produced to replace the Tu-134s used by some Russian airlines, since they're so noisy they've been banned from EU countries.
Aeroflot already has its hand up for the first Superjet, which now looks like it'll enter service in early 2009, at a cost of $29.9 million. That's one hell of an expensive child.
It seems like an idea that's been a long time coming, but a German manufacturer is ready to put men's urinals into airplanes, including 747s and A380s. Apparently they've realized that not only is it a smart idea to reducing queuing time in flight, but statistics show that the majority of coach passengers are men.
The new one-man urinal cubicles take up much less space than conventional toilets, of course, and they also save water since they don't need to be flushed so regularly--according to the manufacturer. No airline has yet owned up to ordering any, though.
Somehow, our immediate thoughts went to that other common use of airplane bathrooms, joining the mile high club. But if these cubicles are even smaller than regular toilets, it'll have to be a mile high club for highly acrobatic passengers.
We've always thought that if we died on vacation we'd at least have had our last moments doing something we loved--that's much better than keeling over after a hard day at the office. But after the recent death of a passenger on an American Airlines flight, we've been reading a lot about that rather icky situation of a dead body being on a plane.
Most airlines keep their procedures for such situations secret. Keeping bodies in a confined space like the bathroom is a no-no, so finding a spot where the least amount of passengers are affected is key. That's tricky on a plane, of course, where every bit of space is utilized in the most efficient way.
But don't worry too much. Experts say that we have just a 1 in 7,600,000 chance of dying on board a plane, so there are also long odds of being on a plane when it happens. We have warned you before to travel prepared, with a note stating what you want done with your remains, so perhaps before your next flight you can write down your request to be moved into first class. For some of us, that might be the only time we get to fly there.
Some of us jump on and off flights so often, it's easy to forget that plenty of people might never get the chance to set foot on a wobbly set of aircraft steps. But an enterprising retired Indian Airlines engineer named Bahadur Chand Gupta has come up with a neat solution to help spread the joy of sitting in a cramped airplane cabin eating horrible food.
Gupta bought an old Airbus 300 a few years ago and has now assembled it in a Delhi suburb. Now he, his wife and a few staff pretending to be airline stewards don their uniforms every Saturday for the flight that doesn't fly. They sell tickets for about $4 to people who want to experience life on an airplane but can't afford to get airborne.
Gupta makes pilot announcements (including turbulence warnings), his wife and friends serve airplane food and push their trolleys up and down the aisles and the plane goes nowhere. It's better that way: The aircraft's missing a wing and half its tail. But that doesn't stop the enjoyment. We're wondering if they make the experience more authentic by throwing in the odd vomiting passenger or screaming child.
Airplanes are magical things. You know the old problem: You depart late, but the pilot puts the foot down and you end up arriving on time, and everybody wants to know why they don't fly faster all the time. There's more than fuel economy issues slowing down our planes — traffic, just like on our roadways, backs things up in the air.
The big news is that flights from Europe to Asia are about to get faster, thanks to a bunch of clever Thai guys who've figured out a better air traffic flow management system that they've dubbed Bobcat. For some reason, however, the only thing the Aerothai gang's theory can do better is manage the congestion over Afghanistan between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. This will mean you could reach Paris from Bangkok a whole hour earlier. Seems like magic, and we wanna know why they can't do this everywhere.
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