More on Vueling...and a couple of cool aircraft paint-shop videos

And yet another Vueling-related story...placing this blog at risk of becoming too Vueling-centric, but, shortly after publishing the latest story about the in-flight concert that took place on one of their aircraft,  I got a note from Vueling letting me know about the following video. It shows the aftermath of one of their other recent marketing campaigns, the Vueling Air Gallery, celebrating Vueling's 50 millionth passenger.

In the video you will see how an airbus A320 is painted with the Instagram photos submitted by people that participated in this contest.



For those of you with an interest in the topic, there are quite a few good time-lapse videos of aircraft paint-jobs on youtube, for example this one of a Northwest Boeing 747 becoming a Delta aircraft. Enjoy!

Allplane quoted at AirObserver blog: commenting the new scenario at Girona airport after Ryanair's massive route cancellation

In this blog I speak often about the constantly evolving situation at Barcelona and Girona airports. It is a very interesting case of interaction, in one single metropolitan market (Barcelona-Girona-Reus) of pure low cost players (Ryanair), airlines developing an hybrid model (Vueling), an airline trying to develop a hub-and-spoke operation (Spanair), a retreating flag-carrier (Iberia) and all of this while it is becoming an emerging destination for major global carriers (Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways, Delta Airlines).

This environment has not gone unnoticed to other European bloggers and AirObserver has just written a piece where it quotes me and presents my point of view about an hypothetic post-Ryanair Girona airport. This is a topic on which I am going to write a piece soon...In the meantime, great thanks to AirObserver for presenting my thoughts on the issue to its readers!

The A380 and the American carriers

While Airbus is racking record orders from the Middle East for its A380 giant plane and more modest orders from European carriers, such as Air France and Lufthansa, the US market seems to be out of bounds for this model. In fact, there is nothing new with this, the next-largest Boeing 747 was also popular in Europe and Asia, but not among American carriers.

It looks like the economics of very large aircraft are not attractive enough for a bunch of network carriers that for most of the last two decades have been focused in a dire financial situation. Moreover, the American air market with its multiple hubs might be better served with smaller planes providing more frequencies, whereas European, Middle Eastern and Asian flag carriers usually serve a single mega-hub.

Here is an interesting article in the WSJ Middle Seat Terminal blog that comments on the possibility that the last wave of consolidation among US airlines, with the mergers of Delta and Northwest on one hand and United and Continental on the other, could pave the way for fresh A380 orders from across the Atlantic...a move that would be certainly welcome in Toulouse, that is becoming increasingly dependent on one single airline, Emirates, to make its A380 programme break even some day in the future.