Powered Up: Airlift AS
For over 30 years, Airlift AS has has honed its skills as a powerline helicopter operator, and has helped to connect Norway.
For over 30 years, Airlift AS has has honed its skills as a powerline helicopter operator, and has helped to connect Norway.
"Janet" is a callsign shrouded in mystery, for an airline that really isn’t an airline, with a fleet that bears no logos, based in plain sight at Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport.
Airlines don’t make money just from flying passengers: air cargo is a big business. It doesn’t fly just in dedicated freighter aircraft, but also in the belly holds of passenger flights. And right now it’s booming.
The magic of flight has fascinated us for well over a century. There are those who are content to sit on the ground and watch aircraft soar overhead. Many of us are excited to be passengers, modern-day jetsetters who travel the globe. But for some, the passion for flight is overwhelming, and the need to fly becomes a lifelong obsession. CNN Travel spoke to six pilots, who told us why it's cool to be a pilot.
When in the hands of an experienced test pilot, the LM-100J can execute a beautifully choreographed flight demonstration that will leave crowds in awe. And that's exactly what happened at this year's Farnborough Airshow, which took place just outside London in July.
Airplanes don’t make money sitting on the ground. That’s why the time from landing to takeoff is an efficiently choreographed dance of people and equipment. Known as a turnaround, or “turn” in industry parlance, it’s an airline’s version of a Formula One or NASCAR pit stop. The goal is to get an airliner back in the air as quickly as possible.
The aviation world is waiting to see if, or perhaps when, IAG’s CEO Willie Walsh will float a third offer to purchase Norwegian. The parent company of British Airways and Iberia already owns a chunk of the airline, and has been trying to buy the rest — leaving observers with a question: Why, and why now?
Captain James Basnett is at the controls of a British Airways Airbus A380 mega-jet, serenely cruising far above the stormy North Atlantic. More than 450 passengers are enjoying the inflight service, watching a movie or just sleeping away the overnight flight from Boston to London. Comfortably cocooned in the technological marvel that is a modern airliner, the passengers are blissfully unaware that their plane is just one of hundreds in a massive aerial armada heading to Europe from North America.
I’m a total AvGeek, and I happen to hold a very unique world record: I’ve flown on more inaugural airline flights of the “first of type” of a new commercial aircraft than anyone else in the world. This isn’t a record that I originally set out to claim; it’s thanks to good fortune, good timing and good planning that I was on board the first-ever Boeing 747, Airbus A380, Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Airbus A350 and Bombardier C Series flights.
It’s been almost a century since the first, primitive experiments with in-flight film projection took place in an Aeromarine Airways Curtis F5L aircraft. It was 1921, and the 11 passengers on a sightseeing flight over Chicago were shown a silent movie promoting the city. But it wasn’t until 1961 that David Flexer’s Inflight Motion Pictures brought regular in-flight entertainment to passengers on Trans World Airlines’ early jets.