Qantas axes first class on some routes
With the decline in demand for first class, Qantas has decided to eliminate first class on some routes.
Qantas said it had temporarily taken first class off the San Francisco, Buenos Aires and Melbourne-Hong Kong-London routes, offering business, premium economy and economy classes only. “As a result of the economic downturn Qantas, like many other international airlines, has experienced reduced demand in premium cabins,” Rob Gurney, Qantas Commercial’s executive manager, said in a statement.
Plane Answers: “Chit-chat” did not doom Colgan flight 3407
Kent Wien, a pilot based in New Hampshire and a contributor to Gadling, says that while the press was quick to point to “chit-chat” as a determining factor of the Colgan Air 3407 accident, he feels that it was both pilots’ incorrect responses that led to the crash.
When the stick shaker activated on Colgan flight 3407, the autopilot turned off automatically. Somehow the captain let the nose of the airplane reach nearly 30 degrees, and even though he correctly responded with full power, it wasn’t going to prevent the continued loss of airspeed as long as he had the nose pointed up between 20 and 30 degrees.
[The copilot] very well may have associated her flap selection with the stick shaker, and if a movement in the flight controls results in something going wrong, I could see most pilots tempted to move the flap handle back where it was before the problem began…which made the recovery much more difficult for the captain, since an extra 20 or 25 knots would be needed to fly at the reduced flap settings.
WestJet, Southwest delay code-share implementation
Because of the economy, Southwest and Westjet have decided to delay their codesharing agreement.
Southwest has decided to re-direct some of its resources dedicated to the code-share project towards other near-term revenue opportunities, WestJet said in a statement.
The statement quoted Bob Jordan, Southwest’s executive vice-president, strategy and planning, as saying: ‘We remain absolutely committed to our partnership with WestJet, and to code-sharing in general, and will do all we can to minimize the impact on our previously stated code-share plans.’
