AvTalk Episode 321: Global gets off the ground

AVT 321 Transcript
EPISODE 321
[EPISODE]
[0:00:07] IP: Hello and welcome to episode 321 of AvTalk. I am Ian Petchenik, here, as always
with –
[0:00:15] JR: Jason Rabinowitz. Proud to bring you the Airbus A321, pick your variety of the
321 episode of the podcast.
[0:00:23] IP: We really should have had them sponsor these set of episodes.
[0:00:26] JR: But this is the last one they get for a while, at least.
[0:00:29] IP: Well, then we’ll come back around, and yeah, and put something.
[0:00:31] JR: We have someone else with us today.
[0:00:32] IP: We sure do. Gabe Leigh, welcome back to the show.
[0:00:35] GL: Thanks so much. It's good to be back. Feels like it's been a long time.
[0:00:38] IP: It has been a long time. You've been busy.
[0:00:39] GL: I have, yeah.
[0:00:41] IP: Well, we're all here in the same room in Stockholm.
[0:00:46] JR: Weird.
[0:00:46] IP: Drag Jason across the Atlantic. I dragged myself across the Atlantic.
[0:00:49] GL: I even came across the Atlantic, even though I live here.
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AVT 321 Transcript
[0:00:52] IP: Came back across the Atlantic.
[0:00:53] JR: We'll get to that.
[0:00:55] IP: Yeah. We're in Stockholm for the spring gathering of the FlightRadar24 Folk,
where we get the entire company together. We're actually one room over from what will be the
karaoke later on. Watch out for that. That won't be part of the podcast, I promise.
[0:01:10] JR: No. It's a very different vibe here in the spring. I've only been here in December
previously, and May is very different. Well, there was sun. It was warm. It was nice. Now, it's
raining.
[0:01:20] IP: You got one good day.
[0:01:22] JR: I got one and a half good days.
[0:01:22] IP: There you go.
[0:01:24] JR: We should talk about the gathering and what we did. I don't think we should plan
to do that, but we should.
[0:01:28] IP: We should.
[0:01:28] JR: Because it involves airplanes.
[0:01:30] IP: Yeah, exactly. It involves airplanes. It involves aviation, so we should talk about it.
We went out to an airfield west of the city that had a surprisingly vast collection of general
aviation aircraft. We got to do a little flying. That was a lot of fun for, I think we had 68 people
sign up to go up in a few groups of aircraft. We had a Cessna 172, couple Diamond DA40s. The
Piper Cub wasn't flying. It was there.
[0:01:59] JR: It was there.
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AVT 321 Transcript
[0:02:00] IP: We used it as shade.
[0:02:01] JR: It was given us the shade. Yeah.
[0:02:02] IP: That's right. Piper. The Chipmunk, that was the highlight for –
[0:02:06] JR: An AN2 was present.
[0:02:08] IP: An AN2 was present. No one's sure why it's there, though. That's the best part.
[0:02:12] JR: The origin story is very unclear. Apparently, over the decades has become less
and less clear.
[0:02:17] IP: Yeah. At some point, someone knew why and how, but no longer.
[0:02:21] GL: There's airplanes at Orlando like that, that there's not a clear origin story for.
[0:02:24] JR: This is true. They just showed up one day.
[0:02:25] IP: That DC-8's still there.
[0:02:27] GL: Yeah. There's all these myths around that. It’s super fun to speculate. I think there
is an actual story that some people do know that they prefer to leave it in this – It was an African
king who ran out of money and was detained.
[0:02:38] JR: The AN2 I heard was owned by the mafia, apparently. The Swedish mafia, and it
just appeared there one day. Don't believe that story at all, but I like how it just takes on a life of
its own, because it's never flying again, and they're never going to get rid of it, so it just lives
there till the end of time.
[0:02:52] IP: They've bolted a trailer hitch to it, so they can tow it around. But I don't think it's
moved in years. The grass around it's pretty tall. But that was a lot of fun.
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[0:03:02] JR: Yeah. Which aircraft did you get to go?
[0:03:04] IP: I was up in the Diamond. Now, I'm definitely going back to working on my license
after having flown that for a little bit. The bug is definitely back in me.
[0:03:15] JR: Well done.
[0:03:16] IP: Yeah. That's going to be an expensive journey. Flight school sponsored by this
podcast.
[0:03:22] JR: Frederick?
[0:03:23] IP: Yeah, exactly. I'm sure he'll go for it. It'll be fine. Jason, what did you go up in?
[0:03:28] JR: I went up in the Cessna 172, a 48-year-old, but –
[0:03:32] IP: Oh, a young one.
[0:03:32] JR: A young – only 6,000 hours on it –
[0:03:36] IP: Oh, wow.
[0:03:35] JR: - when they picked it up. It's very young. I sat in the back. I didn't get a chance to
fly because I graciously handed over the left seat to one of your colleagues, because I've been
up in planes before, and he is not. Yeah, it was comfy back there. At one point, they turn around
like, “Are you okay back there? You haven't said a peep. We haven't heard from you.” I'm like,
“I'm just looking out the window and enjoying myself. It's nice back here.”
[0:03:54] IP: Looking down at the Viking Island.
[0:03:56] JR: Yeah. It was nice.
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[0:03:58] IP: Then, Gabe, you were in the Diamond as well?
[0:03:59] GL: I did the diamond as well. Yeah. Yeah.
[0:04:00] IP: The other Diamond. Oh, wow. Was the registration of the aircraft that you were in.
[0:04:04] JR: Oh, wow.
[0:04:05] GL: It was OWOW. Yeah. They had some good registrations there, I noticed. That
several aircraft had – you know, they picked those.
[0:04:10] IP: Yeah. They were specific. Some of them we're not going to mention, because this
is a family-friendly podcast.
[0:04:14] GL: Yes. Yes.
[0:04:15] IP: I was talking with the daughter of the owner of OWOW, and they actually, he wants
to buy a new plane, but he doesn't want to get rid of the registration.
[0:04:25] JR: It's a Finnish registration in Sweden. He keeps re-registering it, I guess. He
refuses to re-register it in Sweden, because he doesn't want to give up the reg. Who can blame
him? OWOW.
[0:04:36] GL: Absolutely. Yeah.
[0:04:37] IP: That was a lot of fun today. We've spent more time under the gray skies, because
you have to temper your excitement and enjoyment.
[0:04:44] GL: This is what Sweden does to you, I can tell you. The one thing you can count on
is that there will be long daylight. That doesn't change in this time of year.
[0:04:51] IP: It'll just be very light gray.
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[0:04:53] GL: Yeah. Light gray through much of the night. Yeah.
[0:04:54] IP: Yeah. There you go. We've got Gabe here this week in between world travels to
God knows where.
[0:05:04] GL: I'm not even sure.
[0:05:05] IP: Yeah. Exactly. Your most recent trip was a few years in the making, and rather
interesting. Let's start there and talk about where you've been most recently.
[0:05:19] GL: Yeah. I joined up with the first transatlantic flight of Global Airlines. First
transatlantic with paying passengers anyway.
[0:05:26] JR: Or, is it some of the first any flight with paying passengers onboard?
[0:05:30] GL: True.
[0:05:31] JR: I don't think they had any prior flights.
[0:05:32] GL: They had some prior flights with passengers technically, but they were invited and
it was not paid. It was a bit of a surprise flight. They did it without. Yeah. We didn't really know
who was invited and why. Yeah. This was the first real flight with paying passengers.
[0:05:43] JR: “Revenue” First revenue flight.
[0:05:46] GL: Yes. It was done as a unusual approach to start off. They did it as this charter
flight. The first one was out of Glasgow. I went up to Glasgow after finishing up another shoot in
Zurich, which we can also talk about. Went up to Glasgow, caught this flight and it turned out to
have a lot of YouTubers on there, people that do these videos, flight review videos. It became a
bit of a party of YouTube creation, as well as this first flight, which also had some people who
had just booked a holiday to New York for four days, which was funny. Because it was a lot of
people that were invited, friends of the airline, friends of the founder, a bunch of YouTubers
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making videos. Then, just a handful of people who were like, “Oh, yeah. Let's go to New York.
What is this airplane again?” It was just amazing.
[0:06:23] IP: That's crazy.
[0:06:24] GL: Yeah. Yeah. About 95 passengers was the count that I heard on an A380, which
is obviously not that many, which is really fun, because I was in economy and it was great,
because we had empty seats around me. Not to mention the festive atmosphere of a brand-new
flight like that on a brand-new airline that people have been talking and speculating and
wondering, because it can be difficult to figure out exactly what they're going for with this. It was
amazing to see it actually do a flight with people and go to New York and it all went great.
[0:06:51] IP: You put together a video and that video is out now.
[0:06:53] GL: Yeah.
[0:06:54] IP: We'll toss that link in the show notes for sure, so that you can watch that video and
learn a bit more about the airline and what that was like on the first flight, people in suits doing
pushups at the bar and all.
[0:07:06] GL: That happened. One YouTuber wore a suit and did pushups in the sky pub.
[0:07:09] IP: As one does.
[0:07:10] JR: Sure.
[0:07:11] IP: I mean, we've talked about Global Airlines. We talked about them when they first
announced their intentions to create an all A380 airline, so multiple A380s, that would have five
classes of service, including what they termed gamer class, which was going to basically be
flight simulator rooms for a certain number of passengers. That was their introduction to the
world.
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[0:07:39] JR: Yes. When the pitch deck that Seth Miller got his hands on went public, it was
laced with all sorts of, I'm just going to call it nonsense to keep it family friendly.
[0:07:48] IP: Yeah, let's do that.
[0:07:49] JR: Because it was nonsensical. Of course, none of that was going to happen. In
reality, none of that did happen.
[0:07:54] IP: What did they do to the aircraft? Now that you've been on the plane and seen the
changes that they made.
[0:08:00] JR: Give us a percentage of zero to a hundred, how China Southern was that aircraft
still?
[0:08:05] IP: Because that's where it came from.
[0:08:06] GL: Right. I mean, what you're getting there in terms of seats, hard product,
everything is China Southern as it was. Business economy first. What they've done is they've
done some reupholstering. There's some logos here and there. There's some stickers. Then
they've turned this forward section just above the stairs into what they call a sky pub. It says sky
pub on it. It's basically just a place where they display some drinks. In theory, you can go up
there and have some drinks.
[0:08:28] JR: Because China Southern never had an actual legit bar on their 380, like you might
have seen on Emirates, or even Korean where they had their Duty-Free shop. This was just a
galley space that they repurposed?
[0:08:38] GL: Right. Yeah, they're using that forward section of the upper deck, is a little bit of
an awkward space. Yeah, it's just difficult for you to do with it, so they're using it in this case to
turn into the sky pub. The only thing is that if you get too many people milling around in there,
they have to tell you to go, because there aren't enough oxygen masks. It's quite a crowded
space, too. It's a bit of a shame, because actually, it turned into a bit of – It was nice to stand
there and there were some cabin crew handing out drinks and it was a good atmosphere, but
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very small. Then the founder, James, showed up and people were asking him questions, but
then it just became too many people. The very stressed Hi Fly cabin crew were coming up and
saying, “I'm so sorry. I know this is a special flight and everything, but you guys have to sit
down.”
[0:09:15] JR: We'll talk more about the cabin crew and who actually operated the flight in a little
bit, I think. The A380 is definitely a special aircraft, because when you're on Emirates, for
instance, it's not just a bar where they put a fixture there and they have a bunch of drinks. Like
you said, Gabe, it's engineered to have passengers there. There are seats with seat belts and
there are extra oxygen masks and all that, so they can accommodate those extra passengers.
But I guess this aircraft doesn't really have that, so they ended up just shooing you away, which,
I guess, is good from a safety point of view that they were actually doing that since this isn't an
aircraft equipped for that outfit, I guess.
[0:09:47] GL: Yeah. You could see that the Hi Fly people, they are serious people who operate
aircraft, so they want to keep that happening in addition to making it a fun flight. I did hear that
the cabin crew onboard had been instructed to never say no to request from passengers.
[0:10:01] JR: Well, that's a terrible idea. That's an absolutely terrible idea.
[0:10:03] GL: That is just hearsay. I don't have a direct source for this. But it was an interesting
idea. That meant in practice, I don't think they were getting so many crazy requests. It meant
like, you could get extra drinks in economy and if you missed the meal time, you could ask for it
when you wanted, that kind of thing. It wasn't anything crazy.
[0:10:18] IP: Can I fly the plane?
[0:10:20] JR: Can you finish the meal service? No. Well, I guess, we could talk about that, too.
But I want to talk about the Hi Fly bit, because it would be wrong of us to say that this was
Global Airlines' first flight, because it was not. In my book, it was not Global Airlines' first flight. It
was their aircraft being operated by Hi Fly, which is, I guess this isn't a wet least, or they just –
[0:10:42] IP: It's a damp lease.
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[0:10:43] JR: It’s a damp lease. There we go. We're talking about damp leases again. Someone
else with a certificate of operation, they operated this flight for Global Airlines. Global Airlines, as
far as we know, do they have trained flight crew for the 380? Because the aircraft’s flown before,
but again, was that a Hi Fly crew, or their own flight crew?
[0:11:04] GL: Yes. It's interesting, because from what I could gather speaking to some of the
cabin crew, there are five cabin crew. There were five cabin crew working onboard who were
hired directly by Global and are trained on the 380, and the rest are Hi Fly. I've never heard of
such an arrangement before. I don't know how it works. But at least one of them that I spoke to
said, he's a Global Airlines employee. That's all he does. He's waiting around to see what his
next missions are after Manchester.
[0:11:25] IP: That's got to be –
[0:11:26] JR: Weird.
[0:11:27] IP: I mean, there's no announced –
[0:11:30] JR: If there are plans. If they have plans, they have not made them public.
[0:11:34] IP: Right. If he's saying he doesn't know, I mean, unless he was playing coy, or
something like that, but that's interesting to me. They don't have any flight crew. It's all Hi Fly
flight crew, right?
[0:11:45] GL: Correct. Hi Fly crew, Hi Fly, 100%. Yes. We had onboard the famous Captain
Mirpuri, who is also the chairman of the Hi Fly group and flies all the cool flights, and is
typewritten on everything.
[0:11:57] JR: Yeah. Hi Fly will do pretty much anything.
[0:11:59] GL: Yeah. He captained the A340 that I took down at Antarctica last year. Yeah. Pretty
cool guy, actually.
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[0:12:05] IP: I mean, it's not a bad job if you can get it. I fly all the biggest stuff to all the coolest
places. Let's talk about – we talked about a little bit about the backstory. We got some info on
the first flight. Let's talk about what's next. Did they offer any ideas, or inklings to what comes
next?
[0:12:23] GL: Nothing. It's more a speculation hearsay. They're talking about maybe they'll do a
flight to Honolulu, or maybe they'll go to Bali, or these sort of things, but who knows who's
actually said that, or if it's in the plans at all. When I asked James, the founder, about what's
happening next, he said, “Look, right now, we need to just be a little bit like, we've talked a lot
and now it's not time to talk with. Now it's time to go back and plan the next steps.” I honestly
got the sense that they don't even know.
[0:12:47] IP: Your video, especially, is I think the most fair of the chronicles of this particular
flight, specifically. Between Jason and I on the podcast, we've tried to keep an open mind but
also, be realistic about their prospects, which I think everyone agrees aren't good. The
economics of operating a single A380, or even multiple A380s.
[0:13:15] JR: Even Hi Fly itself dabbled in this a little bit years ago, with a 9H-MIP AND the
other A380, and that quickly ended. Even high flight itself with its own A380s that it took from
Singapore, I think, even they operated a few times on behalf of Norwegian, back when
Norwegian was still doing long haul and needed aircraft, and it was such an operational disaster
that they tossed it aside and said, “Even us as Hi Fly, the specialists in doing the weird stuff with
the weird airplanes, we don't want them anymore.”
[0:13:44] IP: Global's plan, unless they completely changed it, but their stated goal is to operate
transatlantic A380 service with a premium product in all classes. Admirable goal, but the
prospects, speaking realistically from all available human knowledge are not good. That's been
interpreted by some within the airline as a personal attack, which has led to some interesting
exchanges with not only us, but others as well. Gabe, do you want to talk about that a little bit at
all?
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[0:14:22] GL: Yeah. I mean, to not go too deep into the weeds with it, but I think we have seen
even on in public forums that we've seen that clearly, James, the founder, seems to be very
defensive about what he's doing there and all the criticisms, right? There's been years of
criticisms, say what you will about whether those are valid or not, and doubt, I guess. He would
say hate, right? Now, a bunch of YouTubers came on and did a video about the first flight. Of
course, there were teething problems. There were issues to figure out. Service delivery was
really slow. It was a lunch service blended into the dinner service. In many ways, actually, I think
economy was the best product on the first flight, because it was a bit simpler and they were able
to deliver it more or less. It was premium. If that's what they're looking to offer and that's what
they do offer, it was impressive. We got a little champagne to start off. We had a nice drinks
menu. We got two full meals. I mean, this is a really nice product for a six-hour flight in
transatlantic, right?
We have seen that when people have criticized, including in these videos that were put out
pretty quickly after the inaugural, the leadership at the airline has not been happy about it, has
been very vocal about it, both in private messages and publicly. It just doesn't seem like that's
where the attention should be going. It should be going into making this airline work, if that's
your intention. Yeah, it's an unusual one in many respects. That's one way that it feels very
unusual.
[0:15:36] JR: Yeah. That was well put. If you do something like this, that's clearly grabbing
attention. You are seeking attention and you have a bunch of influencers, YouTubers onboard,
you need to expect and just accept the hate, or whatever comes your way, because this didn't
seem like hate. It was just, here's what happened onboard. Unless, you're editorializing, which I
know you did not, you just have to accept what happened, because you're reporting on what
happened onboard. If the meal service was so long that they had to suspend it, that is a thing
that happened onboard and reporting on it and talking about it and sharing that, it's not hate. It
is simply, this is what happened.
As the airline or whatever, they just have to own that and accept it, and fighting it as if to pretend
that it didn't happen, it's only going to perpetuate that. It's a Streisand effect. It's just going to
make it worse and worse. I don't know. Maybe if they had come out with a pint of, here's what
we're going to do next, rather than just going, “I don't know. I don't know what we're doing next,”
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maybe that would have diverted the attention a little bit. But if you truly came off that flight and
have no idea what the next steps are for the airline, that's on them. You're naturally going to
focus on what went wrong.
[0:16:38] GL: I mean, I think some of the YouTubers, for example, did play up the negativity, the
bad side intentionally, because they wanted to get more –
[0:16:45] JR: This is why I don't watch YouTube reports on the flight, or a present company
excluded to a degree. I try not to watch these things, because you can't tell what's fact, or what's
fiction. In your case, I know you're not doing that.
[0:16:57] IP: This is also why our channel doesn't do a lot of these.
[0:16:59] JR: Right. But if you have these people onboard, you know who they are, you know
what they do, you need to expect that.
[0:17:05] GL: Yeah. It's an interesting one. I mean, yeah, I tried to go into it with an open mind,
you say. I was saying to you earlier, say, it would be easy to go into that already preloaded with
snark in your head. It's like, “Oh, what's this airline? Let's make fun of it.” I think it was important
not to do that and just to show things of face value. I had quite a good experience. I think,
overall, people onboard had a good experience from what I could see, even in business class
where the meal service was a bit more messed up.
[0:17:27] JR: If that's the worst thing that happened, like –
[0:17:29] GL: Exactly. Some people got cold steak. I mean, it's the first fly. They're figuring it out
with this mixed crew. I mean, to me, it seemed like a success. I thought they pulled it off nicely.
Say what you will about the prospects for the business and all that. I thought that wasn't my
place to really speculate on.
[0:17:44] IP: Yeah. I mean, that's what the podcast is for.
[0:17:46] GL: Exactly. Yeah.
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[0:17:47] IP: Let's talk about what the business is right now. It's, as we speak, as we’re
recording right now, they're operating their third revenue service with a flight from Manchester to
JFK. The plane's going to then sit again for a few days before it returns –
[0:18:02] JR: Expensive.
[0:18:02] IP: - back to Manchester. Yeah. The aircraft sitting at JFK for 40. The figure that I've
seen is roughly $50,000 a day to park an A380 at JFK.
[0:18:11] GL: 50 a day. Is that what you saw?
[0:18:12] IP: Yeah.
[0:18:12] GL: Very interesting.
[0:18:13] JR: It is one of the most expensive places in the world to park your airplane, which is
why nobody in their right mind does it.
[0:18:18] IP: Yeah. Parking it for four days, even if they're getting a deal, it's still pretty
expensive.
[0:18:22] JR: You have to be a head of state during UN week to get a deal to park at JFK.
[0:18:27] IP: Even then, most of them head off to Stewart.
[0:18:30] JR: All of them now, because there were some illicit deals being made back in the
day. Even the port authority had to crack down on that.
[0:18:36] IP: Well, you know things are bad when the port authority is cracking down. They're
going to operate Manchester to JFK right now, and then JFK back to Manchester. Then after
that, we don't know. There has been no announcement of what they're going to do next.
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[0:18:49] GL: I'll definitely be setting a FlightRadar alert for the registration to see.
[0:18:52] IP: Yeah. To see –
[0:18:54] GL: Where it goes.
[0:18:54] IP: - where it heads. I guess, most likely, it'll head back to Hi Fly’s base in Portugal,
and then we'll see where they go from there.
[0:19:00] JR: Maybe they actually refurbish the aircraft and actually do the things they were
going to do. Who knows? Reintroducing that thing with the original pretty beat-up China
Southern interior within the inflight entertainment system that was dark, because it was an old
system when it was new, because of all the way back when A380 delivery delays. Maybe they'll
surprise everyone and put in gamer class and do all that stuff that they're not going to do.
[0:19:26] GL: I can say for sure, that gamer class is not happening.
[0:19:28] JR: They're not going to do that.
[0:19:28] GL: I heard that from James. That's no longer a thing though.
[0:19:30] JR: We'll see. We'll see what happens. But surprise us.
[0:19:34] IP: We'll wait and see. Gabe, while we've got you here, what else have you been up
to?
[0:19:38] GL: Yeah, the shoot that I did just before the Global was a really nice one. We hooked
up with Edelweiss, which has just taken recently its first A350, actually a used A350 from – it
was originally LATAM. It was parked for a while. That's how they were able to get A350s before
Swiss, kind of.
[0:19:52] IP: Ha. They made a big deal about that when they took delivery, because it was the
first Swiss registered A350.
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[0:19:59] GL: That's right. They really like to point that out.
[0:20:01] JR: Same team, guys. It's all the same team.
[0:20:03] GL: Exactly. Except it's not. Yeah.
[0:20:06] JR: It's complicated.
[0:20:07] GL: It is very. Yeah. That was nice. We hooked up with them. We took a bit of time to
convince them that we should do this. They agreed in the end that we do a flight deck video on
their A350 and do a little bit of stuff about the cabin on social media, too. We flew out to Pristina,
Kosovo, which is, I thought that was a very cool flight as these European familiarization training
flights go. Usually, you get them to places like Palma, Ibiza, they've been sending it. That's cool,
too, actually. Pristina is a sort of, wow. They said, it's somewhere actually Edelweiss flies a lot
with a 320. That's a big market for them. It's an interesting approach in there. It can be a little bit
more challenging in bad weather, so I think they like it for that reason. It's also a nice hour and
40-minute sector. Yeah, that was cool. We did just a turnaround. The only shame of it was not
getting to check out Pristina at all, but that's how it goes sometimes. It was more interesting for
the video to do a day with the crew. Yeah.
[0:20:55] IP: Then, there was a good bit of trivia that you quizzed me on earlier. I'm going to let
you quiz Jason, because I don't think he was there for that.
[0:21:00] GL: Did you hear me talking about it before? This flight level thing?
[0:21:02] IP: I don't think he was there.
[0:21:03] GL: Okay. So, tell me if you've ever heard this, because this was new to me and I've
spent a lot of time in flight decks, including A350 flight decks, quite a few, which they often fly at
these higher flight levels, right? You get the 430, flight level 430, which is the ceiling for the 350.
Often, you're well above the other wide bodies in the area. What was interesting about this one
that I learned after asking the captain was, so for those who don't know, when you're flying
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eastbound, you fly at odd flight levels. When you're flying westbound, to put it simply, you fly at
even numbered flight levels. In this case, we flew out east at 410, 41,000 feet. Then we came
back west and we climbed up to 430, which is obviously an odd number. I said, “Captain, why
are we flying at an odd number going west? Why is that? Okay.” He pointed out to me that
RBSM air space, which starts at 290, actually ends at 410. RBSM has reduced vertical
separation –
[0:21:56] IP: Minimums?
[0:21:57] GL: Minimums. That means that between those flight levels, you can fly at
separations that are 1,000 feet. You have the accuracy of technology, altimeters, everything that
you can safely fly separated by 1,000 feet. Above 41,000 feet, it becomes a 2,000-foot
separation minimum once again. As a result, the next flight level up from 410 is 430. There's no
such thing as flight level 420. You cannot fly at that flight level anywhere. For that reason, the
even numbered flight levels actually swap to odd numbered flight levels when you get up there.
[0:22:29] JR: Love when a standard is suddenly not a standard.
[0:22:33] GL: It's amazing. I had no idea about this. You were flying west at 40,000 feet, level
400, the next step up would be 430. Then there are higher ones than that, but there are very
few aircraft that are flying at those levels.
[0:22:44] JR: Yeah, not much competition up there.
[0:22:46] IP: A couple of bizjets, maybe.
[0:22:47] GL: Yeah, exactly. That was quite fun to learn. I even have a cool little chart that you
can look at to see how they break down.
[0:22:53] IP: Oh, neat. What's next?
[0:22:57] GL: We're going to do a couple of cool ones, a couple of good flight decks. We're
going to hook up with Discover Airlines out of Germany to go do their inaugural flight from
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Munich to Bodø, northern Norway. That's always cool, because that part of Norway looks
amazing. Any time of year, it's gorgeous. I've mostly flown up there when it's covered in ice and
snow. I don't know how it'll be in early June, but it should be really cool. It's also interesting,
because a lot of airlines are adding these routes up to the far north. There's a lot of demand to
go north, away from the extreme heat of southern Europe. You have this shift in tourist appetites
that airlines like Discover are looking to serve. We'll do that. We'll do some helicopters up there.
Then actually, the thing I'm most looking forward to is finally doing a Condor A330neo flight
deck. We'll do Mauritius. I'll join the crew for that layover. I'll come back with the same crew,
which is an excuse to be in Mauritius for two and a half days as well. I've done a lot of Condor,
but so far only single-aisle and on the ground delivery flights, things like that. It's always nice to
work with Condor. They're a fun bunch.
[0:23:59] IP: Yeah. Those have been some great videos. The one into French Hall was a lot of
fun to watch.
[0:24:05] GL: Yes.
[0:24:06] IP: I mean, just the landing there from the flight deck is always something incredible.
[0:24:10] GL: It's amazing. That one, I did a Lufthansa one where we had perfect weather
coming in. That was very disappointing, only for me, right? Everybody else was happy.
Passengers’ happy. Pilots have an easier day. I'm the only one that's sad that it's not super
windy.
[0:24:22] IP: Hoping for a go around.
[0:24:23] GL: Exactly.
[0:24:23] JR: You got nothing.
[0:24:25] JR: Then, we got on to the Condor one to French Hall. That was the second time I
would do that. They were saying, “Ah, the minimums, it's pretty. The visibility is marginal. We
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may have to plan for a diversion to Tenerife.” I said, “Great. Let it get worse.” In the end, it was
right at the – we just were able to see the runway. It has a higher minimums than many,
because of the challenging terrain conditions. Yeah, always really fascinating to see.
Also, to hear the ATC there, the controllers there are really, really good. They're really on top of
their game, because it's so demanding, especially if you get these stacks of people holding and
having to divert. Yeah.
[0:25:00] JR: Can we recruit them to Philly area C?
[0:25:02] IP: I was just about to shoe horn us into that transition.
[0:25:06] GL: Yeah. Let's do it.
[0:25:08] IP: All right. Let's talk about Newark.
[0:25:09] JR: Hey, oh.
[0:25:10] IP: For hopefully the last time for a while.
[0:25:12] JR: You know it’s bad when even SNL is doing an entire 10-minute sketch just on
Newark.
[0:25:19] IP: Ouch.
[0:25:20] JR: It's not good. You should watch it. It's good.
[0:25:22] IP: Yeah. I mean, we’ll, I guess, put it in the show notes.
[0:25:24] JR: Yeah.
[0:25:26] IP: Jason, what's the news from Newark? I know we've got some changes.
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[0:25:30] JR: Yes. The FAA with the DOT has finally decided to do something about the
catastrophic operational issues at Newark, though it's kind of, I'm not going to say too little, too
late, but it is really, really late. Since the current full runway closure at Newark ends on June
15th, as of May 20th, the FAA has put new up flight by hour limitations in place at Newark,
ratcheting it way down from, I think it was 38 flights per hour, or something that was completely,
oh, I'm sorry, 77 flights per hour was originally the targeted schedule limit. That has been
ratcheted way down to, I think, what was it? The 38 figure? I can't.
[0:26:16] IP: Yeah, it was 38. Well, 38, now it's down to 28.
[0:26:19] JR: 38. It was 38. Now, it's 28 until the runway reopens on June 15th, I believe. Then
for the summer season, everything is good, at least runway construction-wise. Then, this picks
up again September 1st, only on weekends. It's not a 24-7 thing. It's only 11 p.m. Friday to like, I
think, Sunday morning. Basically, Saturday only thing, they'll have this in place again. It's pretty
much too little, too late at this point, because the damage is done.
[0:26:48] IP: They ran out the clock.
[0:26:49] JR: The damage is done.
[0:26:50] IP: It doesn't matter anymore.
[0:26:52] JR: They met with the airlines. The airlines have presumably come out with some plan
about reducing the number of flights, but I haven't seen any airline come out and say, “Here are
our cancellations, here's our plan, here's what we're going to do.” Presumably, United will have
to make the most cuts since it's their hub, but I have not seen anything from anyone about what
they're going to do. Maybe they just cancel flights, spin the wheel of Newark flights and cancel
whatever comes up.
[0:27:16] IP: Spin the wheel of Newark.
[0:27:18] JR: I don't know. This is probably something they should have done from the
beginning, because we talked about this before. The FAA knew that there were going to be
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delays, because of this runway construction. They knew their number was unrealistic and it
hinged upon having the secondary runway, the crosswind runway to hit that number, which for
any number of reasons, there are a whole bunch of conditions, be it weather, or wind, whatever,
that limit the use of the crosswind runway. More often than not, it's not being used and it can't
really be used for departures, more often than not. This was an inevitability. Here we are with
less than a month left in the runway closure and they're taking some.
[0:27:56] IP: Well, they’ll have a lovely month to figure things out. Are you looking forward to
your flight back to Newark later next week?
[0:28:04] JR: Yeah. We didn't talk about how we got out here, actually. Way back when in
February when I booked this, I almost always fly SAS out of Newark, the nonstop to Stockholm,
Orlando. This time, for some reason, way back in February before Newark had any hint of a
meltdown more than it already was melting down, I decided to book a one stop through
Copenhagen out of JFK, because SAS recently started serving JFK for reasons last year. Don't
really know why, but I'm enjoying it. I lucked out there.
Actually, SAS's flight seems to operate pretty normally every day, even gets out faster than the
JFK flight, which is an interesting twist, because it's early enough in the departure evening. It's
like a pre-6 p.m. flight. It's really when you get to 7, 8.00 where things fall apart, or in the
morning hour, when everyone's trying to get a 9 a.m. departure. You can't all do that at the same
time, it turns out. Yeah, I'm not thrilled about going to Newark, but it seems operationally, knock
on whatever this table's made out of.
[0:29:04] IP: Or some would somewhere.
[0:29:05] JR: We crossed paths. Literally cross paths.
[0:29:07] IP: We did. We literally crossed paths.
[0:29:08] JR: It’s in Copenhagen. I was on my connecting flight to Orlando on a 320 CO, as you
were on the opposite taxiway having just landed from Chicago, so literally crossed paths. That
was nice.
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[0:29:21] IP: That was good times.
[0:29:22] JR: You just took the train into the office.
[0:29:24] GL: Today, yes. I did fly from JFK two nights ago.
[0:29:28] JR: That's true.
[0:29:30] IP: Let's talk about Etihad, because as we recorded last week, we were talking about
the orders coming out of the big Middle East Airlines, basically timing those orders to Donald
Trump's visit to the Middle East. Of course, we needed to add another order to that, which is
Etihad’s order, which happened on Thursday, of course, right after we stopped recording.
They're going to take 28 Boeing 777X and 787s.
[0:30:01] JR: They give a date, at least. Unlike the Qatar order where they're just like, “Yeah,
we're ordering planes, period.” Etihad said, “These aircraft are expected to join the fleet from
2028 and onward.” Pretty vague there. We don't know if it's the 78s they're taking, or that 777X.
But, I mean, 777X 2028, I'm still not confident that that's a thing.
[0:30:20] IP: Maybe. Maybe.
[0:30:22] JR: Maybe. But hey, at least there's some numbers there as Etihad continues to
reinvent itself to be a stable and actually profitable airline, shockingly.
[0:30:31] IP: They had quite the quarter. A record profit this quarter. But they also announced a
new route. That was both a surprise to customers and the airport that they're going to serve.
[0:30:47] JR: That's a new one. Yeah. Haven't heard that, but Etihad will serve Charlotte, North
Carolina, beginning at May 4th, 2026 on 787, 4X weekly. Much to the surprise of Charlotte,
which is interesting, apparently, an article out by Ted Reed on Forbes, apparently, I believe he's
local in Charlotte, or at least in North Carolina, I think dug into it. Apparently, the timeline went
like this. Etihad called the airport on Wednesday. It's the first time Charlotte had ever heard from
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Etihad, which is interesting. On Thursday, Trump visited Abu Dhabi. On Friday morning, Etihad
announced that it intends to fly the 787 between Abu Dhabi and Charlotte, and then tickets went
on sale later that day on Friday. That is outstanding, outstandingly fast work going from
Wednesday, we've never heard from you before to Friday, tickets are on sale. Because even
typically for long planned announcements, you'll have a new route announced and then you'll
hear nothing for a while and then four months later, the tickets will go on sale. This was like,
“Here's what we're doing, we're going, we're announcing, tickets on sale. That never happens.”
[0:32:00] IP: Charlotte's going great.
[0:32:01] JR: Yeah. Okay.  This is their first flight.
[0:32:03] IP: This is fantastic.
[0:32:03] JR: First route to the Middle East, or the region at all, Charlotte does not have a ton of
international service, so this is a huge get for it. Not the only surprising long-haul route
announced this week, was it?
[0:32:15] IP: Yeah, slightly less surprising, but I think equally exciting, Starlux is headed to
Phoenix. That'll be fun.
[0:32:22] JR: Its longest route in the entire network.
[0:32:26] IP: You’ve the flown Starlux, right?
[0:32:27] JR: I have a couple of times, I think. Memory is putting it together, but yeah, at least
from Taipei to Osaka, I flew them once on – Pretty sure, I've flown them twice. Yeah, it's really
nice. Those were all shorter flights, all into Asia, at least on the 330neos. Yeah, it's really great.
As any new startup airline with brand-new airplanes is probably going to be – It was very nice,
but the service was outstanding. I guess, this makes sense in the context of, they do a lot of
semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan, and Intel is looking to do that in the Southwest as well.
They're building fabs there. I guess, it makes sense in that regard, and this is not a total surprise
because Jeremy, a friend of the podcast, who's been on a number of times, they told him
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directly, Phoenix is, when he flew, Phoenix is one of the city's we're looking at, and there you go.
Taiwan to Phoenix. Again, Phoenix is not an airport that gets a whole lot of intercontinental
service.
[0:33:22] IP: Especially from Asia.
[0:33:23] JR: Yeah, not much at all. This is their only Asia route, I believe.
[0:33:25] IP: There you go.
[0:33:26] JR: Hey, they've got a lock on the market.
[0:33:28] IP: Yeah. Let's go back, not to the Middle East, but to Middle East Airlines for just a
moment, because we finally know what Qatar Airways paid to take 25% of Virgin Australia. It's a
lot less than we thought it would be. It's only 500 million dollars to take a 25% stake in Virgin
Australia. They say that it's mostly because Virgin Australia had negative net assets, because of
all the accumulated losses.
[0:33:55] JR: They’ve had a really rough-like decade or so.
[0:33:57] GL: Especially if you think about what they're getting with that investment. I mean, the
access to Australia –
[0:34:02] IP: Exactly.
[0:34:02] GL: - it's such a good deal. Also, that 500 million dollars in Qatar is like, what is that?
Pocket change.
[0:34:10] IP: One 747-8 intercontinental.
[0:34:12] JR: With some change back.
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[0:34:13] IP: With some change back. Yeah. An interesting note there, they're still conducting
what they say is a financial exercise to understand what intangible assets they can take out of
their acquisition. That'll be interesting to follow.
This is not new news, but we do have a report from Spanish investigators now about a
Lufthansa A321 flight that the captain left the flight deck to use the restroom. The first officer
was alone on the flight deck and suffered a medical episode, which incapacitated him for a
number of minutes, over 10 minutes. Within that time, the Spanish investigators report the first
officer had a seizure. They're calling it a, “sudden and severe incapacitation.” That the seizure
led to flight control manipulations during this period that the captain was locked out of the flight
deck. Some of those were, one of the spoiler elevator computers was disconnected,
deactivating four of the inboard spoilers, which was the two on either side, or on either wing on
the interior, which triggered warnings on the flight deck. The operating mode of the weather
radar was changed and an audio control panel was, a switch was activated.
[0:35:40] JR: None of these controls are near each other either. This was all over the place.
[0:35:45] IP: There was also a sudden increase of force in the right rudder pedal, enough to
generate a stop rudder input warning from the flight computer, but it remained short of the
threshold to disengage the autopilot, very faithfully.
[0:35:59] JR: That was lucky.
[0:36:03] IP: The pedal input resulted in a 5-degree roll and a 2-degree heading change. The
autopilot was able to compensate for both of those maneuvers. As they approached a sector
boundary over Spain, air traffic controllers attempted to contact the crew three times, were
unsuccessful. The captain attempted to come back into the cockpit. The first officer was not
responding. Requested reentry. Was entering the code, wasn't working. They finally went to an
emergency backup code, which involves a time delay lockout, but the first officer was able to
allow the captain to reenter the cockpit during that time.
10 minutes elapsed between the first officer taking control of the aircraft, the captain leaving the
flight deck and the aircraft reestablishing contact and communication with air traffic control.
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Medical attention was provided by a doctor onboard and the cabin crew to the first officer. They
diverted to Madrid. The first officer says, he remembered flying over Zaragoza and then coming
to being attended by a doctor. The inquiry found that he had a neurological condition that was
undiagnosed, that would have prevented him from securing a medical license to become a pilot,
which I mean, I guess, good thing they found it now. Good thing nothing bad happened, but that
leads me back to this is a Lufthansa flight, which is the parent company, Lufthansa Group being
the parent company of German Wings. German Wings being the airline that led to the policy of
having two people in the flight deck at all times.
[0:37:44] JR: However.
[0:37:46] IP: However, the carrier had been instructed to assess security risks associated with a
single pilot being left alone in the cockpit. They had changed their procedures by requiring that
two authorized people, so usually, a cabin crew member would come into the flight deck while
one of the flight crew members was in the restroom, or anything else. The airline subsequently
found to their findings that that did not in fact increase safety and quietly discontinued the policy.
[0:38:16] GL: Sort of, anecdotally, I think is true across Europe. That was happening in quite a
few airlines across Europe, instituted this after the German Wings crash. Then, I've just, from
what I've seen, it doesn't seem like many are doing it anymore. This is, I mean, yeah, like we
were saying before, there may be very little risk to security, but it's not zero, as evidenced by
something like this.
[0:38:38] IP: This might not be a security risk, but it's certainly a safety risk.
[0:38:41] JR: It's like saying, the fire extinguisher out in the hallway doesn't really help us at all,
because we've not had a fire recently. Well, you'd be really happy about that fire extinguisher if
this room burst into flames. That's just terrible reasoning on their part.
[0:38:55] GL: How much additional resources does it really take to have a cabin crew member
sit in the cockpit while the captain, or the first officer is out?
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[0:39:01] JR: The most I can think is if they're doing service, they have to suspend it briefly and
that would lessen the sales of onboard beer, and whatever. That's the only thing I can think of
that could possibly say like, this isn't efficient. Yeah, that's just the thing you do, because you've
identified it as something you need to do to enhance safety onboard. When did this incident
occur? Because this is not recent.
[0:39:23] IP: No, this is not recent. This is a final report from Spanish investigators. The incident
occurred February 17th, 2024.
[0:39:32] JR: Okay. It's been over a year. We don't really know when the two-person in cockpit
rule at Lufthansa rolled back.
[0:39:42] IP: Right. The German Wings crash was 2015.
[0:39:44] JR: Yeah. It's been a long time.
[0:39:46] IP: We're 10 years on from that now. The recommendations from the Spanish
investigators says that EASA should share this information with airlines, so that they might be
able to conduct a reevaluation of their security assessments. We'll see if that happens. Let's
close out with some updated information on the 747 that’s supposedly worth 400 million dollars,
that the Qatari government supposedly wants to gift the US. As it turns out, the United States
approached the Qatari government about this particular plane.
[0:40:20] JR: Oh, what a twist.
[0:40:23] IP: There are multiple reports now that this was born out of President Trump's
frustration with the length of time it has taken to modify the two already slated to become Air
Force One aircraft. Boeing said, “Here's a list of other airplanes that are out there.” They looked
at the list and said, “That one seems fine. Let's go ask the Qataris if we can have this plane.”
Then who knows what happened in the mind of the administration and in the minds of the
Qataris? We ended up last week talking about this gift that is certainly no gift.
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[0:41:05] JR: No, it still doesn't make sense, because even if Boeing said, “Here all the 747-8,
IBBJs out there in the world, go get one from them.” We talked about this last week. We'll still
have to take those aircraft and refit them and refurbish them exactly the same way they're
already doing with the two ex-Transaero aircraft. I mean, short of putting the seats and all the fit
and finish, which I guess, the Qatari aircraft already has, that there is a multitude of things that
take many months, if not years, to do to those aircraft, as well to operate, I guess, this would
operate as Air Force One. You can't just acquire it and throw it into service. I would hope not.
But who knows these days?
[0:41:47] IP: None of this makes much sense when you scratch below the surface, with the
amount of work that it takes to turn any aircraft into suitable for the US's head of state transport.
It just doesn't go very far. We'll see what happens to planes in San Antonio. I guess, we'll see
what happens.
[0:42:06] GL: So bizarre.
[0:42:07] IP: It is bizarre. We will see if they in fact acquire it, if it gets a US registration. We're
going to keep an eye on that, and if it flies, or if it just hangs out there for a while, and the
Qataris are glad to be no longer parking it in Doha, just to not have to –
[0:42:24] JR: Who knows?
[0:42:24] IP: - have it on the way.
[0:42:24] JR: They may not have any intentions of this being a bribe, or anything.
[0:42:28] IP: They just want to get rid of it.
[0:42:28] JR: They’re just like, “Get it away from us.”
[0:42:32] IP: They’ve been trying to sell it for five years. Maybe that's what this is.
[0:42:35] JR: It could be that easy. We finally found the fool foolish enough to take this airplane.
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[0:42:39] IP: Please take this plane. We just want to be done with it. All right. Well, we should
end this podcast, because we have to go get ready for karaoke, or something.
[0:42:49] JR: It's too early for karaoke. It’s 3.22 pm.
[0:42:51] IP: It's never too early for karaoke.
[0:42:53] JR: Okay.
[0:42:54] IP: That's it for episode 321. We'll work on coming back around to the Airbus numbers
in 11 episodes or so. Until then, I am Ian Petchenik, here, with –
[0:43:05] JR: Jason Rabinowitz.
[0:43:06] IP: And?
[0:43:07] GL: Gabriel Leigh.
[0:43:07] IP: Gentlemen, thank you for joining.
[END]
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