This episode of Av Talk we're joined by United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby to discuss the airline's push into sustainable aviation fuel and where he sees the industry going, and we finally get more details on the problems that have kept 13 Qatar Airways A350s grounded for months. Hello and welcome to episode 140 of Av Talk. I am Ian Pnik back as always with Jason Ben.
Hello, I'm back. I had a week off.
Why didn't you have a week off?
Because The Show Must Go On, good sir.
Ah, okay, okay. It was a good week. I'm glad you enjoyed the week. What did you do with your time off?
I wasn't working, so it was great.
Excellent. Yeah, anything exciting?
Excellent, that is a good report from a week off. That's the best four-day weekend report you can get.
I did nothing. Nothing. It was everything I thought it could be.
We had the shortened week I guess last week, although with when everyone's off school and there's cooking to be done, it just seems like it's longer. I don't know if that's a feeling that you ever get, but I felt like last week was perhaps one of the longest weeks.
We also had a stomach bug rip through the house and everyone but me got sick, so it was great.
Could have been worse. That's the cheery bright side, Jason.
I'm looking for when everyone else is sick and you're not.
It could be worse, it could be worse. We did that last week. This week we've got a sustainably sourced program for you. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit, and then next week we are headed to Stockholm for the Flight Radar 24 Global get together.
Yeah, I hope so. That should be a good time.
Jason, you're jumping the show notes.
And so that leads us to... we hope so because of these new, not I shouldn't say these, the new, please, it's just one right? It's just one, the new COVID variant, Omicron. I was thinking about this the other day. I mean if we're already on, how many of these variants did we just like name and then get rid of? Well I guess there must have been a few.
They also skipped over a few because of some confusion in naming that was too close to other things, but it does seem like a whole bunch of others just never happened.
It's like we got to the end of the alphabet and hurricane season, and you're like, wait, I don't remember half of these storms.
Yeah, the last one I remember is Delta, and suddenly we're at O. And I heard they skipped X because it's a part of a popular last name in China, but what happened to the rest of the alphabet?
I don't know. I'm not familiar with the Greek alphabet enough to say one way or another where the rest of them went. However, and I never want it to be...
Yeah, exactly. I don't want to become familiar with the Greek alphabet as much as this requires.
Maybe it'll be like taxiways when they have to double up, like make a left onto taxiway Alpha Alpha.
Like, are we going to have the Delta Tango variant?
Oh, I certainly hope not. I mean at some point, yeah, because this thing will just, you know, it's going to keep going. It's just going to keep going. I mean we're in this, it's an endemic disease now, and at some point, you know, I guess we just stop naming the variants and calling them something.
I don't, you know, they get rid of the Greek letters and go on to something else. I don't know.
But Thursday, so tomorrow, and what we're recording the first of December, and yesterday, if you're listening to the podcast, we'll find out what the new restrictions for traveling to the US are going to be. It sounds like it's increased testing frequency or shortening the time span between testing and flying. Sounds like that's what's going to happen.
And then in a few weeks we'll see where we go from there.
So yeah, it looks like we're going and I'm certainly still excited to go. Hopefully we can get back into the country. If we can't, next week's podcast and following week's podcast will be coming to you from Sweden as well.
Fantastic. So there you go.
But yeah, globally speaking there's been a massive retreat, a reversal, where the last few months has been about reopening countries, reopening to foreign visitors for leisure travel kind of on a global scale, except for Asia which really still hasn't opened, and this has further closed that door. But a lot of countries are now unfortunately swinging the other way. The US has banned non-resident travelers from a whole host of countries in Africa, which is morally and ethically, scientifically probably just the wrong move outright, since it's already here. It was later discovered that it was in Europe first before Africa. So hopefully, as they say, that's temporary and will be removed in a shorter span than the last ban, which was what, 18, 19 months?
Hopefully this is a blip in time and we can resume reopening to travel across borders, but right now it kind of feels like a degree of March 2020 all over again, where everyone's kind of panicking without all the necessary information and everything is kind of shutting down to a lesser degree. Thankfully, I think the panic is based on the fact that we don't have enough information.
In a couple of weeks we'll know a lot more about this particular variant and we'll either be talking about, you know, vaccine producers retooling, or it will be, well, okay, the vaccine is still thoroughly effective against, multiple vaccines are still thoroughly effective against this particular variant, so keep doing what you were doing, you know, do things that keep you safe and you'll be fine, and get vaccinated, that kind of thing.
But we don't know, and so in the absence of knowledge people tend to gravitate towards worst case scenarios.
And so I think that's a lot of what's happening here.
And, you know, and not to belabor the point, but since we don't know anything, we wait instead of, you know, saying, well, okay, now we need to shut everything down. And we just don't, we don't know enough to say that. So hopefully, like you said, these are short-lived restrictions, and when we have a bit more information we can make better informed decisions.
We'll see. Nothing we can do now but wait and let the smart people do their jobs.
And hopefully the less smart people in charge of making decisions on opening and closing countries listen to the smart people.
Yes! We finally, finally, finally, finally have more information about the issues that are affecting the Qatar Airways A350s, and as it turns out, multiple other A350s, A350s from multiple other airlines. And this Reuters report that came out this week with Tim Hepher and Alexander Cornwell writing, they got really into it because they found, or someone gave them access to, the A350 owners' message board, which is a pretty exclusive club that Jason and I do not have access to.
I don't have access to that, but I would very much like to see what else is posted there.
Yeah, I, or maybe not, as the case may be.
But yeah, we also are seeing pictures, it's the first time I'm seeing pictures of the described cracking of the paint. So 13 Qatar Airways A350s are grounded by the Qatari civil aviation regulator because of painting and cracking on the surface of the fuselage. So Airbus and the other airlines affected by this issue have said it's not a safety issue, it's just a cosmetic issue, and from the pictures, it's a pretty ugly one.
And the issue mostly affects aircraft that have had tremendous heat swings, which would explain why the Qatar Airways aircraft have been most affected, considering that when they're parked on the ground it's 30 to 40 degrees and when they're up in the air it's 60 to 70. So huge temperature swings there as far as the fuselage is concerned. Carbon fiber fuselages don't shrink or expand, the paint itself does. So the problem, as they've described it, doesn't seem entirely unexpected.
The problem, it sounds, is like it's happening too soon for their liking.
And then one of the other concerns is that the mesh underneath the paint, which conducts electricity in the event of a lightning strike, because carbon fiber panels themselves do not conduct electricity, that can become damaged if the paint is damaged. So that is what the concern is.
This has affected multiple airlines beyond Qatar Airways, including Finnair and Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, and not Air France's A350s, but Air France performs maintenance on the Air Caraïbes A350s, and they have also complained about paint damage.
This kind of opens up a lot of the, I guess I don't want to call it complaining, because now it seems very well founded. But it's very interesting to me that it took this long for this to come out, given all of the, a little bit of complaining that Qatar Airways has done.
Yeah, the other airlines at least have been private about it, but like you said, it's interesting. They've been complaining about this since 2016, I think, so half a decade's worth of complaining about this issue is not insignificant.
But they are all very much in agreement, except for Qatar I guess, that this is not a flight safety issue. That they can keep flying the aircraft, it will just look a little less desirable around, I guess, what is it, the static wick or what exactly is that part that the paint is cracking around?
But it's not so much the paint that's worrisome, because that's just cosmetic, but what's underneath the paint, that wire mesh that acts as a Faraday cage around the carbon fiber fuselage, exposing that will lead to rust, which is never good. So the paint is more than just cosmetic, it's there for protection for what's underneath the paint.
And if there's no paint it can't provide protection, so it could potentially eventually become a flight safety issue, but right now no one outside of Qatar is really saying that.
That's the thing right now.
Right. It's interesting to me that Qatar, it's not even Qatar Airways, it's the Qatari civil aviation, notice that I never said Qatar Airways, I said Qatar. So Qatar Airways has been doing the complaining to Airbus, the grounding of the aircraft is actually a regulatory issue, which is very interesting to me, considering that no one else has taken that step.
But it is interesting to me that given, now that we know a bit more about the nature of the issue and how the paint is peeling and what's being affected, if it is in fact, you know, just, not just, but is the problem enhanced or made worse really by the weather, and Qatar being located where it is, dealing with extreme heat on the ground and then extreme cold in the air, that seems to be a not great situation as far as the paint is concerned. And I guess it'll be even more interesting to see what Airbus comes up with as a permanent solution.
The Reuters report says that they've stood up a multifunctional task force, there it is, which sounds very impressive. So hopefully this gets solved sooner rather than later. I mean especially now that it's out in the open, we'll see. Stay tuned. Sticking with Airbus aircraft for a moment, Jason, you had a delightful name for this particular aircraft.
The people squisher. The people squisher Neo.
So, but is it, well, yeah, okay, I suppose they have been squishing people since before the new engines.
Yes, now they are squishing people even more.
Tell me what happened. Cebu Pacific, an airline well known for seeing just how many people they can put on board their aircraft, has leveled up with its first A330neo. How many people do you think can fit on this aircraft? Again, if you had to guess without looking at the number, because I didn't put it in the show notes.
No, you didn't. And I read it this week but I promptly forgot it. They didn't do 500, so I'll say 450.
Close. 459. 459 passengers on their A330-900neo.
That is a new record for the A330 family. It's interesting, it's actually not even close. The runner-up in this regard is Lion Air's A330-300 with 440 passengers.
And then right below that, Cebu Pacific again, A330-300, 436 passengers, and right below that is Lion Air again on the A330-900neo with 436.
