In an attempt to get some different content on the blog, I’ve decided have a bit of fun, and post safety videos.

Why you may ask?

It’s darn important. When flying in any plane you need to know how to get out, what features are unique to an aircraft and what rules there are to follow.

Last week (unintentionally) it was the new Air New Zealand Rugby video.

This week, something a bit cuter – Thomson Holidays/Airlines Safety Demo. With Kidlets.

Well done kids!

Another video next week – might have *some* relevance to who I’m flying with

Well Mexicana is heading to oblivion, with the entire airline being grounded (inculding all subsiduaries) from Midday Saturday local time

This action includes Mexicana main line, Click and Link.

The airline flew 220 routes to 65 destinations including London, Madrid, Montreal, Chicago and cities in Central and South America.

To quote the Mexicana front page

Mexicana Airlines (Grupo Mexicana) suspends its operations indefinitely

The current administration received the company seven days
ago under Business Reorganization (Concurso Mercantil) and
technically bankrupt.

Financial deterioration and lack of agreements force Grupo Mexicana to stop flying.

Grupo Mexicana deeply regrets all inconveniences caused to
its passengers.

Further information about how to get money back is at http://mexicanainforma.com/cma-informs/

However, that’s it for Mexicana it seems. Volaris and AeroMexico will have to fill in the holes. And it’s a blow for OneWorld in that region too with the loss of their carrier there.

Will Mexicana restart? It’s really impossible to say. A lot of discussion and dealing will have to be done, and I don’t know if it can be done.  For 8000 people, it’s serious worry time now.

In a not totally unexpected announcement, Boeing and ANA have announced that 787 entry into service had been pushed back to March 2011, with international use put back to June 2011.

These dates are subject to the aircraft arriving in February 2011.

ANA says the delayed entry into service is “regrettable”.

Issues have emerged with both the horizontal stabilisers and with the Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines which have pushed back this entry into service, forcing Boeing and Rolls Royce to step back and fix the outstanding issues.

Currently, plans are afoot to use the 787 to replace 767 routes, so Beijing and Shanghai could be the first routes to see the 787 in action. Meanwhile there is serious consideration to operating long haul services out of Tokyo Haneda Airport.

Meanwhile Qantas, Air New Zealand, and Air India are getting to the point where they are demanding compensation from Boeing over the delays.

The continuing setbacks for the project should be another warning to Airbus, who have started work on their A350XWB which itself is slipping into 2014.

From the airline that brought you a flight attendent who wags her finger at you, Delta are hell bent on increasing their capaicty at Heathrow by bidding for the slots that have come up due to the OneWorld Joint Venture.

Their proposals are to increase LHR-BOS to 2 flights a day, and LHR-MIA to one flight a day.

Delta bleats that it’ll benefit SkyTeam as it’s the smallest alliance at Heathrow (Oneworld carriers hold 47% of Heathrow slots,  followed by Star Alliance at 25% of Heathrow’s slots. SkyTeam, however, only has a 5%)  – which is true, however, if you just care to cross the channel, there are two major SkyTeam hubs there – Paris Charles De Gaulle (and Air France hub) and Amsterdam Schipol (a KLM/Delta hub) – so that argument doesn’t wash with me alas…

If Delta succeeds in gaining necessary approvals for the proposed service, flights would begin on 27 March 2011.

Is there room for another entrant in the market or will Delta gain from OneWorlds loss? We’ll know soon enough….

The consumer magazine “Which?” have been accused of being masters of the art of confusion with each operator deciding “what is peak time travel”. The dfact is every operator in the UK has their own definition of “peak time” (both in the morning and the evening)

For example, peak time on the core trunks of the West Coast and East Coast Mainlines (Operated by Virgin Trains and East Coast Trains) start about 15:30, and last for the next four hours – or more), whilst in some regions, it’s defined after 16:30 to 18:00, and some lines don’t have peak evening times

Throw in the quite frankly amazing amount of variations of tickets, restrictions and everything else that makes some of the UK network a nonsesne, and it’s confusing.

The Assiociation of Train Operators say “Most people are happy and 4 out of 5 are doing fine”, and that “You can’t compare operators side by side due to local demands”.

Which doesn’t help when you’re trying to buy a train ticket – For example, off the top of my head (not counting all permutations) there are at least 10 different types of standard class tickets between Birmingham and London.

By resdesignating trains as peak trains, operators can also get away with charging lunatic fares without asking permission from the regulator. In other words – an easy way for an operator to print money, charge penalty fares and moan “we need more trains to provide a service” whilst squeezing the cheaper end of the market.

Yes there is more demand out there. Because people are sick of traveling in cars to cities. However if you price them off the rails and don’t invest you’re stuck in a bit of a black hole

And to me – it doesn’t wash. Least of all with trains trying to merge to a Yield pricing model akin to airlines, they are NOT the same service or offer the same standards of service.

Which brings us to interesting questions – when was the last time members working high on the rail industry 1) travel on a train and 2) paid out of their own pocket without a PA to help them plan the trip?

I wouldn’t lay money on them being recent.

So sorry ATOC, this doesn’t wash with me. Prehaps you should be buying emergency tickets from London to Birmingham out of your own pockets before understanding how much it hurts the consumer eh?

Heer Prock-Schauer has announced a revamp of the A321 fleet and a few other titbits as part of the restructuring of BMI.

Speaking to Flight, some announcements have been made which could make for interesting times in BMI land..

So whats up for work?

• A321 going for refurbishment works, with new business class seats and IFE being installed. In addition, they will finally be getting round the painting the aircraft they inherited from BMED and the ones still in old British Midland colours into the White/Blue colour scheme that I still think is very fetching (what he refers to as “The Whale Colour Scheme”).
• UK Domestic - BMI is basically rolling over to it’s competitors, by reducing frequency to the regions, but running bigger aircraft. Expect the spare slots to be utilised for more European and Middle Eastern routes
• Long Haul - Attempt Number 2? I’ll leave you with this food for thought:

“We are evaluating certain projects on the North Atlantic. That could be a complementary offering because of the huge traffic flow from the Middle East, via London, to North America.”

It’s common knowledge that a mixture of market environments and poor leasing costs for the A330′s contributed to the closure of the Manchester
USA routes, combined with BMI’s revenue management unable to manage… well anything if I’m blunt.

If BMI is going to mount an offensive to the USA, it’s got to be planned carefully with United, Continental and even US Airways, and it’s got to put big paying passengers on seats. And have the aircraft to match.

Unless BMI really doesn’t have the fight in it thanks to Mutti Lufthansa, and will just roll over and instigate more code shares that don’t make sense.

And of course – no further announcement about the Diamond Club to Miles and More oncoming merger.

Flight international – http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2010/08/26/346686/restructuring-bmi-plans-a321-revamp.html

Well in a few short days I’ll be undertaking one of my most intresting runs that I have attempted to do – and that’s to Seoul and then onto Hong Kong.

I’ll be explaining a lot more in my trip report that I’ll be knocking together, over the next few weeks, but here’s a quick overview – and some of this can be laid at the doors of BMI.

Why?

With the uncertainty of BMI’s Diamond Club growing every day, I decided to take my own advice for once – and burn through a pile of my miles.  But to be honest, there are not many places on the limited BMI network that appeals to me. Thankfully, BMI is part of the Star Alliance, opening up a “few” options where to go to in the world. There for I’ve selected Asiana Airlines and Thai for this trip.

As well as Lufthansa for a positioning flight

Keeping up: Of course, visiting this tag will help http://www.ghettoife.com/search/label/SELHKG as it will filter out the rest of GhettoIFE.com whilst I talk about this. You might want to also hit the Photoblog for the latest photos of the trip (which as usual will take a few weeks to push out fully).

And all this kicks off… soon!

I’ll let the video do the rest…

Well the Identity and Passport Service has rolled out it’s new Passport design.

Now we’ll do the spin from IPS then we’ll rip it apart…

The new 10 year passport will be issued from October,

• The paages of the passport containing well-known UK scenes, including the White Cliffs of Dover, the Gower Peninsula, Ben Nevis and the Giant’s Causeway – well lets face it – it’s got to be better than the birds in the current design.
• The use of these images, recreated through special printing techniques, is just one of a number of enhanced security features contained in the passport, which will give UK citizens added protection from identity theft and fraud and ensure speedier travel across borders – that explains why the paper looks so messed up when you see odd stray fibres.

Moving onto the “security” features:

• moving the chip which stores the holder’s details to the inside of the passport cover where it will no longer be visible. This gives additional physical protection as well as making it much harder to replace the chip without damage to the passport cover being spotted – We’ll see as they say – considering the chip only has a 2 year warranty (and a passport is issued for 10 years – I have issues with this) 
• Secondary image of the holder printed onto the observations page – so people can see you mug twice now! How lovely!
• New designs now stretching across two pages – which is madder than the current design but at least the birds have gone (and the bird is NOT the word in this case)
• a new transparent covering which includes several holograms to protect the holder’s personal details – more security again

The fact that you should really consider an RFID Passport holder so it isn’t scanned isn’t mentioned for some bizare reason by IPS – as has been proved it is possible to scan passports from a short distance and extract the content in them – and theorecticly clone them.

There is some spin about lower costs, but this is IPS – the one branch of the goverment when emptying your wallet and them not happy is common.

Or to put it graphicly – here is the cost of passport prices in the past 20 years.

Data: Wikipedia.

The BBC has an excellent history of passport images – personally I still remember the old blue passports. Now that does date me

Dear Successful Exam Student.

On this results day, you’ve got a mixture of feelings – be it joy, happiness, anger or despair depending how your results have gone today.

From someone who has been all four at once (and at 16, I was pretty much written off by my old school), some words of advice:

Joy – You’ve got the result at last.
Celebrate – And seriously, I mean that. 2+ years of hard work on any subject is enough to drive anyone bonkers. And well done
Don’t be angry – At the end of the day, you did the best you could on a set of conditions on a day.
Despair - of what to do next. 

FINALLY - I PLEAD WITH YOU -

• IGNORE THE ARROGANT PEOPLE IN THE PRESS
• IGNORE THE PUNDITS WHO SAY EXAMS ARE GETTING EASIER 
• IGNORE THE POLITICIANS WHO HAVEN’T SAT A PAPER IN YEARS
• IGNORE THOSE WHO HAVE FORGOTTEN WHAT IT’S LIKE TO STUDY HARD
• IGNORE THOSE WHO ACTUALLY HAVE GROWN THE YEARS AND FORGET THEY LEARN AS THEY GROW UP
• AND IGNORE THOSE WHO SAY “THAT WASN’T HARD”

Because I remember how hard it was.

Remember, Even if you got an F, You still passed the exam. And more than that. You’ve given your all and done your best.

Congratulations.