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Lufthansa begins 747-400 retirements

airceo — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:08:00 +0000

Lufthansa 747-400 D-ABVA withdrawn from service

22 years and 7 months after entering service ship D-ABVA is being decommissioned and will soon be sent to the scrapyard. During its tenure the aircraft has amassed just over 112,000 hours of flight time and 15,724 cycles. What’s surprising is that she looks as good today as she did on day one – a testament to Lufthansa’s excellent maintenance practices. The ship bears the name Berlin, a name that will be passed onto the next A380 to be added to the Lufthy fleet.

Ever wonder where your bag goes once you’ve checked it in?

airceo — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:35:52 +0000

This great Delta video shows you a piece of checked-in luggage flying between ATL and JFK. Now if only I had a bag with this technology on board so that that I could find the bloody thing when the accidentally ends up in Timbuktu.

SFO Time lapse video

airceo — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:05:26 +0000

The busy parallel runways at SFO often make for good pictures and interesting window seat experiences. They however are eclipsed by this great little time lapse video. Can’t wait tot try this for myself at YTZ or YYZ.

SFO Planes Landing from TimeLapseBlog.com on Vimeo.

Man in jetpack race reals jets!

airceo — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:22:31 +0000

In my web travels this morning I stumbled on this video. Some people are crazy!

The new and improved WestJetVacations.com

airceo — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:20:46 +0000

Landing pages of the newly relaunched WestJetVacations.com

A year ago I was invited to Calgary to participate in a prelaunch preview of the revamped WestJet.com. After the session I was asked if I would be interested in coming back for future previews including that of the WestJet Vacations site. As I was saying yes to the question I realized that I had in fact never even been on the site. That lack of visibility is one of several things that are sure to change now that WestJetVacations.com has been re-launched.

The new WestJetVacations.com is now nestled right into the mother ship – WestJet.com. Given the strong brand image WestJet has it makes perfect sense to merge the two. I am told that this apparent synergy was not just conjecture and that a study of traffic to the sites showed that most visitors to the vacations site only got there after a visit to the main site. Fewer clicks to conversion can only be a good thing. Given its new surroundings it should come as no surprise that the look and feel of the new site exactly match that of WestJet.com – uncluttered, easy to read and easy to navigate.

While a less ambitious outfit might have been happy with just the above, the folks at WestJet wanted to go bigger. And they did. Several thousand pages bigger in fact. A key component of the newly launched site is a crowd sourcing-based review system. Guests can submit written reviews and multimedia detailing the ins and outs of their stays at resorts and hotels booked though WestJetVacations.com. The logic is simple; more in situ content, more user retention, more bookings. Obviously for this play to work the site needs to reach a critical mass of content to keep users interested. To get there more quickly the site is already cross-populated with reviews submitted to Trip Advisor. To grow this further, WestJet plans to incentivize its guests to submit their own reviews with a view to hitting that critical mass sooner rather than later.

Beyond the massive changes listed above there are some smaller additions on the horizon, including some interesting social media tie-ins. I’ll be watching with interest to see these take shape and so should you. In fact, while you’re watching, book me a trip somewhere nice; window seat, waterfront view, adults only. Go!

Some snaps of the new site:

I must have my own flight simulator!

airceo — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:11:06 +0000

WestJet 737-700 simulator

This week I was lucky enough to visit WestJet headquarters in Calgary. As part of my trip they treated me (and @AbFabSkyLife and @SarahDeveau) to some play time in a 737-700 simulator. This was my first time in a simulator and it was fantastic. It took a while to get to grips with the beast – sweaty palms didn’t help! I found getting a feel for the delay when banking especially tricky. I must have heard the “bank angle” prompt a hundred times. We got to experience flying in and out of YVR and HNL; by day, by night, in clear and overcast skies (aka flying blind) and with some interesting turbulence that caused an iPhone to go AWOL for about 5 minutes. When I win the lottery this Friday, CAE will definitely be getting a call from me. Thanks again to the entire @WestJet team!

The outside of the beast

Runway 26L at YVR

HNL approach info

LOT Boeing 767 makes an emergency landing in Warsaw

airceo — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:00:51 +0000

Chances are excellent that if you’re an aviation nut you have already seen this; yesterday a LOT 767 with 230 people on board made an emergency landing in Warsaw after crossing the pond from Newark. Dramatic stuff – tragedy averted by excellent airmanship.

Qatar Airways to start domestic operations in Iran

airceo — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:49:40 +0000

Qatar Airways expansion into Iran

In a move that few saw coming, it was announced this week that Qatar Airways had been granted 9th freedom permissions to fly domestic air routes within Iran. Iran – it seems – has found a silver bullet to its domestic air travel woes and Qatar Airways have blown the doors off a new market. At this stage little is known about these future domestic operations. What is clear from Qatar Airways’ announced schedule changes is that they have grand plans for Iran.

So far the following changes are set to take effect:

Route	Flight Changes	Effective Date
Doha (DOH) – Tehran (IKA)	2 daily to 3 daily flights	December 1 2011
Doha (DOH) – Mashad (MHD)	5 weekly to 2 daily	March 1 2012
Doha (DOH) – Shiraz (SYZ)	2 weekly to daily	December 1 2011
Doha (DOH) – Shiraz (SYZ)	daily to 10 weekly	March 1 2012
Doha (DOH) – Isfahan (IFN)	new daily route	January 11 2012

Qatar Airways themselves are billing this as a 150% capacity increase into Iran – massive no matter how you spin it. While we wait to see what comes of the domestic operations we can say that Doha has become to Iran what Incheon has become Japan – a domestic hub overseas.

Air Canada Top Tier: getting things done with Twitter

airceo — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:56:54 +0000

Replacement Aeroplan Elite Luggage Tags

While packing for a recent trip I noticed that my Air Canada Elite luggage tags had mysteriously disappeared from both my laptop bag and my wheel-aboard suitcase. After spending a few minutes trying to figure out what had happened I decided that it didn’t matter and that I would just jump onto aeroplan.com and request a new set. A quick search for “luggage tags” yielded three results – none of which were any help. I figured (correctly) that a search for “luggage tags” on AirCanada.com was a fool’s errand. I wanted replacement tags but did not want to go through the ordeal of calling a 1-800 number. It dawned on me at that moment that the best way to directly engage Air Canada for this particular need was through @ACTopTier on Twitter. Three DM’s later and I was all set.

Twitter exchange: @airceo and @actoptier

A few Tweets + first class postage + a couple pieces of plastic = happy customer. Air Canada may have been late to the game in terms of adopting Twitter but they’re certainly putting it to good use now.