BuckinghamshireBoy

Neat. I followed up with the September St Louis clip presented just after that one finishes (a bit longer, admittedly) but well worth watching.

scrubbedexpat091

Alaska Airlines has a few Disney theme planes, and now they have Pixar Pier, which is themed for Disneyland.

Aircraft is N537AS

https://prnewswire2-a.akamaihd.net/p.../100011/type/1

Steerpike

What airport / airstrip is that?

scrubbedexpat091

Pretty sure it's Victorville Southern California Logistics Airport, and looking at Flightradar it appears to be the case, the aircraft flew VCV-SEA on October 6th arriving just before 1am into Seattle. They unveiled the new paint job on October 7, and the aircraft did some non-scheduled flights from SEA to San Francisco onto Orange County back to Seattle and today it's back in regular scheduled service.

Steerpike

What do Alaska airlines planes get up to doing 'non-scheduled flights'? Sports teams? private charters? Just curious. Why would it have been at that Victorville airport? I've driven past it a few times and wondered what goes on there.

scrubbedexpat091

Maintenance and to get the new theme, there are maintenance and paint facilities there airlines use, as well as storage. Example Southwest Airlines has parked its grounded MAX aircraft there to store while out of service.

Non-scheduled can be charters (could be sports, could be a private charter etc) or for maintenance purposes/painting aircraft purposes, pretty much anything that isn't part of the airlines regular schedule. Just a term to indicate the flights are not regularly scheduled flights.

Steerpike

So the maint. facilities you see at major airports are pretty lightweight, for 'day-to-day' tasks, or light repairs, perhaps, while these non-passenger airports are for 'bigger' projects? I've seen some other pretty big 'non-passenger' airports near Mojave, I believe - I presume they are similar? Actually, I'm not sure which airports I'm referring to now; they are airports clearly visible from the major highways, and I saw them as I drove from SF to PHX. I did that drive so many times, I used to vary it though that region (Mojave, Victorville / US 395, etc). Looking on the map now, I see 'Mojave Air and Space Port', and 'Mojave Commercial Airliner Storage'. I remember reading that the desert areas are 'perfect' for airline storage - very little corrosion.

scrubbedexpat091

The deserts of California and Arizona have a few different aircraft storage type airports. Pinal Airpark in AZ is another example, I think there is a small museum there are well. Desert is the best place to store aircraft long term.

Different airlines do maintenance different, most are a mix of in house maintenance and outsourced maintenance.

The linked article is 2 years old but provides some insight.

https://www.mro-network.com/maintena...smallest-share

scrubbedexpat091

Pilot ejected safely and luckily the plane landed in a pasture and nobody was hurt. Canadian snow birds lost a plane today in Atlanta prior to an air show performance.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6027962/s...6uzIIxURqfghZ4

scrubbedexpat091

Spirit signed a MOU with Airbus to order 100 A320 NEO family aircraft (consisting of A319, 320, and 321 models) as well as options for 50 more.

Press Release - Spirit Airlines, Inc. – IR Site

They currently have 138 A320 family aircraft in their fleet.

civilservant

What exactly is going on at Boeing? They are taking a real beating trying to get the MAX fixed and it's taking far longer than I thought it would.

scrubbedexpat091

Boeing hasn't been providing a ton of specifics lately but from what I can tell.

Boeing is hoping for approval so the MAX can fly in the US by end of year, the US airlines have said it will take several months to get all their MAX aircraft airworthy and pilots trained so they wont have the planes back in the air the day of approval, most I believe have removed the MAX until February 2020 from their schedules.

European regulator said last week January at the earliest for them, with test flights scheduled for December.

During test flights in June another issue was found and that issue seems to be what is holding things up.

Boeing CEO has mentioned if they don't have approval by end of year, they will likely have to shut down the production line temporarily, building 42 planes a month that cannot be delivered, I imagine they are running low on storage space.

johnwoo

I would be more than a little apprehensive about flying on a 737 Max. anytime soon.

johnwoo

One of the things I had to do during my N.S. in the RAF was periodically changing the propellant in ejection seats. You might be surprised by the number of explosive devises in a modern fighter, well modern in 1961.

markonline1