Flybe Collapsed

[martin-w 3,234]

8 hours ago, Chock said:

It's the FlyBe staff I feel sorry for

 

Feel sorry for me too. I'm stranded. 🤔

[fluffyflops 1,845]

Don't worry the other airlines (easy, Ryan, TUI, Norwegian) will happily help the pilots and cabin crew get jobs,but as normal the office staff will be told to go to Asda to get a job.  There will now be 250 people in Exeter looking at jobs in Asda, there career in Aviation industry done for. 

No one cares the about office staff, no ones sees them nor knows about them.   It's brutal. 

 

 

Edited March 5, 2020 by fluffyflops

[fluffyflops 1,845]

5 hours ago, G-RFRY said:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/news/wizz-air-cuts-flights-and-costs-as-coronavirus-sends-demand-nosediving/ar-BB10IKu5?li=AA54rU

Another one at risk.

cargologicair also went under the week before last.  I know a few people there.  Thats another 150 people out of work.

[fluffyflops 1,845]

4 hours ago, Jude Bradley said:

Sorry to hear that, Chock. Ryanair? Urghhhh. Still, if it puts bread on the table.

Funny how, in the sim-world, Ryanair and Easyjet are more popular than they are in Real-life, but then again, it's all about planes in the sim, not customer-service.

its because most people have the ngx/u or the aerosoft/fsl  airbuses.

 

[fluffyflops 1,845]

13 hours ago, Chock said:

Well that's not good. I lost my job with Aviator last year when Thomas Cook went under, so I went to work at Menzies Aviation, and guess which airline they do? Yup, that'd be FlyBe. Gonna be a fun day at work tomorrow I imagine.

swissport ??  jet2 ??

i imagine its a summer only 20/30 hour contract ??  but anythings better than Asda.  stay positive.  something will come up.  

Edited March 5, 2020 by fluffyflops

[Chock 17,769]

3 hours ago, Petraeus said:

You've mentioned that before. I'm intrigued - if you could share your reasons some time; I always enjoy your practical insights.

It's entirely for practical reasons. When you work on various aeroplanes, some of them are easier than others mainly because of the physical size but also of the equipment and features of them. So, here's a bit about all those:

The Boeing 737, as everyone knows, was built to be easy to work on on the ground with minimal equipment, by essentially being very low to the ground. Making it easy to access the engines and the cargo holds. Another plus point of that structurally, is that the shorter landing gear is extremely strong because it does get a lot of leverage imparted on it (same with the ATR 42/72). The holds are fairly small height-wise but they are long making it sometimes a bit of an effort to get bags from the cargo door all the way to the bulkheads on something like the rear hold of a 737-900, but they do have a smooth shiny metal floor which helps with sliding bags down it and some of them have a rubber conveyor floor with a moving bulkhead which can be operated from the doorway, so you can stack a row of bags and then press a button to slide all those back a bit and repeat the process until the bulkhead and floor is slid all the way back. Unloading is the reverse of that, so one person can easily unload a 737 with a sliding floor and the only thing which is a bit of a pain is that the height of the hold makes it slightly cramped, but it's not terrible except when you are near the (inward folding) cargo door and you smack your head on that. The low stance of the 737 means you can load any late bags into the doorways of a 737 hold without any equipment (such as a belt) at all and you can easily open and close the doors when stood on the ground and this speeds things up because you can get GSE clear of the aeroplane early. The bad point (for Boeing) is that the low stance of the 737 was decided upon when the JT8D low bypass turbojet engine was the powerplant of choice, and being narrow, it fitted under the wings easily, but the CFM 56 on the NG was a bit of a squeeze and the newer CFM LEAP 1B engines on the Max even moreso, which altered the thrust line of the engines to a point that they had to design that MCAS thing and we know what happened there. The Max variant sits a bit higher than the originals, classics and NGs as a result, but it is still pretty low to the ground. This is another one of the many reasons why lots of people like the 737, it is a great design.

The Airbus A320 is a much more sophisticated and larger aeroplane, with hydraulically operated cargo hold doors which open outwards. This means the hold is more roomy than on a 737 and they can take bulk (loose bags) or be fitted to take AKH ULDs, although they also have a manually operated small rear bulk hold door which does necessitate the use of a belt loader. But the main cargo holds either need a belt loader (if it is utilising bulk bags) or a High Loader platform for the ULDs, so generally speaking, there is a bit more of a need for GSE with an A320 than with a 737, but aside from that, it is a bit easier to load it from a physical standpoint when actually in the holds themselves. A bad point with all that sophistication however, is that if the APU breaks on an A320, you have to manually pump the hydraulic doors open using a little handle which is stowed in a panel on the starboard underside of the fuselage. It takes a lot of cranks to open the door and you need two people to do it as well, since someone has to hold the door control lever in the open position whilst the other poor person is pumping away like mad.

Small jets and turboprops such as the CRJ, EMB 145, ATR 72 and Dash 8 all have small hold in terms of capacity, but ironically, most of them are not below the cabin floor as is the case with the 737 and A320, so despite their lower cubic volume, you can stand up in them. The exception to this is the lower forward fuselage holds on the CRJ, which can be loaded with no equipment at all. The rear holds on the EMB 145, CRJ and Dash 8 do all need a belt loader to work on them, but the holds themselves have a lot of headroom. The ATR 72 can be loaded by simply passing bags up to someone in the hold, so does not need a belt loader vehicle at all. Most of these aeroplanes only have maybe at the most, 50 bags going on to them, so they are quick to load and unload.

Bigger stuff such as the 747, A330, 777, 757, A340, 787 etc usually have big cargo holds, so it's not a squeeze in those and for the most part they use ULDs too. Having said that, reaching up to operate cargo doors and plug in GPUs etc can be a bit of a pain, requiring engineer's steps to reach a lot of stuff.

Then we have the EMB 170 and 190. This is quite a big aeroplane in comparison to those aforementioned regional jets and props, but it's nowhere near as big as a 737 or A320, being of a fuselage diameter which fits four seats across as opposed to the six seats across on the A320 and the 737. But in spite of its smaller capacity, it still has the front and rear cargo holds under the cabin floor like on those bigger jets. This means the 170 and 190 have really cramped holds. What makes this worse, is that all cargo hold on airliners have pressure relied blow out panels in the ceiling of the holds and also a halon fire suppression system in the ceiling of the hold. This is why airliner cargo holds often have a load line limit of a few inches below the ceiling, so that any bags on board do not prevent the blow out panels from functioning and there will be enough room to allow any fire suppressant release to circulate throughout the hold. Since these are a bit fragile, they are usually covered with a grille so that you don't accidentally knock them when in the hold, but they seem to be designed to make you bang your head on them repeatedly in the 170 and 190. Not only this, but the cargo door opening system on the EMB 170 and 190, is a real heath robinson affair, with a convoluted and clumsy way of working. 

The blow out panels, if you are curious, pop out to relieve any pressure imbalance between the holds and the cabin should there be a decompression in the cabin or a cargo door opening in flight. You may recall that the DC-10 (and the Boeing 747 to some extent too) had a design flaw whereby the rotating claws which lock the cargo doors shut could sometimes not fully engage when the cargo hold was closed (and appearing to be closed and locked properly), leading to the doors opening in flight causing a large pressure imbalance between the cabin and the hold. This would cause the cabin pressure to press down on the cabin floor and break it, which on occasions had caused structural damage to the fuselage skin resulting in some passenger seats being torn out from the aircraft whilst in flight, or worse, the floor buckling and breaking control cables and hydraulic lines, making the aircraft uncontrollable. The door design was altered but what was also added, was loads of pressure relief vents designed to gently ease out any pressure imbalance from a decompression incident.

As an aside and for anyone curious about all this malarkey, this week I've been filming operations at work and will be making a video about it all for my youtube channel. One of the things you will see me do on that video, is carefully check that the tiny viewing port windows on the A320's cargo doors are displaying a green coloured flag: That indicates the doors are correctly closed and latched. If you are interested in any of this operational stuff, that video will be well worth a look.

Edited March 5, 2020 by Chock

[jon b 2,041]

This sucks and is happening all across the globe at the moment.

Chock, I’m wondering how Manchester airport is going to deal with this, they’ve got the 737 max parked down at J1, Thomas cook 330s parked off the new pier and now there’ll be the Flybe fleet to park up.

It’ll soon be the case that Manchester has more grounded aircraft parked up that live movements

[Chock 17,769]

Yup, I reckon today is going to involve a lot of aircraft tows, although as you say, I dunno where to. I start work at 14:30 and will report back later on the ensuing fun and games. Fortunately, the EMBs and Dashes of FlyBe are not big aeroplanes, and if what we had to do with Thomas Cook's aeroplanes is anything to go by, I reckon they'll be parked up on the remote stands (66-70) alternating nose to tail with the wingtips overlapping to fit perhaps five aircraft on two stands. That's fun towing things into those kind of jigsaw puzzle positions lol.

Just had my old boss call me about a job with Stobart Aviation, he asked me to fire my CV to him (not that he really needs it) so we'll see. He just told me, for the plane spotting nerds out there, that the Thomas Cook A330 which is still in the TC big hangar on the Fairey Apron, is being pulled out tomorrow and it will be flying to Copenhagen, so if you live near the airport and want a pic of a TC-liveried A330 flying, that'll be one of your last opportunities to do so.

On the subject of FlyBe, a big problem for the UK is that they are effectively the only big airline which flies domestic stuff around the UK. I've flown with them up to places such as Aberdeen when doing training courses up there, which is about 45 minute flight. The train trip, depending on when you go and via what route can take up to six hours and the price is about the same for the flight as the train ticket, so it's a big loss for the UK in terms of business travel, and especially to Aberdeen, where the oil and gas industry is based. Those FlyBe Dash 8s up to Aberdeen and back are always full of rig workers.

Edited March 5, 2020 by Chock

[G-RFRY 1,707]

If you have more plans parked at Manchester airport than you can handle just tow them outside they will be gone in a day, anything metal will be stripped down and weighed in.😁

[tamsini 278]

46 minutes ago, Chock said:

Just had my old boss call me about a job with Stobart Aviation, he asked me to fire my CV to him (not that he really needs it) so we'll see.

Alan, just paste what you wrote in your summary of individual plane-loading into your CV - no one would be stupid enough NOT to hire you. Good luck, big guy.

[fluffyflops 1,845]

1 hour ago, jon b said:

This sucks and is happening all across the globe at the moment.

Chock, I’m wondering how Manchester airport is going to deal with this, they’ve got the 737 max parked down at J1, Thomas cook 330s parked off the new pier and now there’ll be the Flybe fleet to park up.

It’ll soon be the case that Manchester has more grounded aircraft parked up that live movements

parc aviation will be moving them I guess.  but not sure who would want to buy Flybees fleet or if they go back to the leasers ?

[ckyliu 1,749]

@Chock Sorry to hear about the impact this has had on your job, thank you for your insights to ground handling of the A320, 737 and E-jets. I hope things work out for you with stobart

15 hours ago, F737NG said:

They've been struggling for some time based on a slew of poor management decisions ever since Jim French stepped down from the helm. Virgin and Delta clearly have no confidence in its viability as it currently stands, so are letting it fold.

Flybe is currently Europe's largest regional airline, so hopefully other airlines (Easy, Loganair, Eastern, among others) will rush to step-in and take on the profitable flying bits that are about to become available.

I think Jim French has a share of the blame here, before leaving in 2013 he'd signed Flybe up for £850m of E-jets that were to prove a significant liability - the deal was done on the basis they'd cost no more than a Q400 to operate but then the fuel price went up (who'd have thought that, fuel prices going up!) and that's before you even consider the purchase costs. Given the size of Flybe's network, unless someone buys a lot of their assets (read: Q400s) and attempts to restart their operations, the UK's going to lose a LOT of routes. I can't see any of the airlines you named having the necessary airframes, nor inclination given the current uncertainty in the market to cover even 20% of flybe's network. It's a very sad day indeed.

I'm anticipating a lot of airport fallout from this, at 8 airports Flybe took up over a quarter of all their slots, so I expect some will enter financial difficulties as a result

 

Edited March 5, 2020 by ckyliu

[ailchim 206]

Obviously we all all sympathise with the employees affected and their families.  

However, there a big implications for the UK economy and especially for the regions.  The Govt is full of talk of "levelling up" prosperity between London and the South East and the rest of the country with transport links high on the action points.  A cynic might interpret "leveliing up" as meaning "buying votes in the North" but Flybe is vital in linking businesses in Scotland to the South and the South West to Manchester and so on.  Not only are the railways overcrowded and unreliable, they are often more expensive than flying.  This is a big blow for everyone outside London and the Home Counties.

[Petraeus 147]

1 hour ago, Chock said:

It's entirely for practical reasons. When you work on various aeroplanes, some of them are easier than others mainly because of the physical size but also of the equipment and features of them. So, here's a bit about all those:

Many thanks for that, something we probably don't realise when sitting in the passenger seats. I look forward to your video.

[martin-w 3,234]

Well it looks like I missed a rescue flight this morning at 10.

Just come back from Guernsey airport. Looks like there MIGHT be another rescue flight in the morning.