Birmingham Airport greets big plane

Birmingham Airport is celebrating 70 years in the aviation business. Starting out as Elmdon Airport, it has grown to be a entry and exit point for many of Midlanders and their friends, relations and business partners. Today the world's largest commercial airliner is set to touch down at BHX. It will be a momentous occasion, not least for those on board. With a relatively short runway, stomachs could feel they were going in their own direction!

It will be the first time an Airbus A380 has landed in passenger service anywhere in the UK, other than London's Heathrow Airport. Emirates is certainly offering us an opprtunity to see the world. Only recently I spoke to an Australian who thought it so much better to be able to fly into Birmingham rather than be offloaded at Heathrow. Word gets around, if slowly, and has reached her travel agent in Sydney. But if he hadn't known, then she wouldn't have known. The more people know, the less likely BAA's expansion fantasies at Heathrow will materialise into fact.

I welcome this landing as it proves to us that London is necessarily the centre of the aviation universe!

SkyEurope airline goes bust

It's a hard life flying planes in a global recession. You can weather a storm, go through lightning, or even land on the Hudson River, but you can't fligh through a wall of bankers however hard you try. Of course it isn't just the bankers giving the airlines a hard time. The flying public can be very capricious when it comes to airline loyalty. The airlines have cut ticket prices so low that they are relying on funnelling the tax monies through bank accounts to make up some extra revenue. The latest casualty is SkyEurope.

SkyEurope probably had two problems. Not so many Eastern Europeans flying west and not enough Western Europeans taking advantage of holidaying in countries like Slovakia. When one hears the BBC continuing to talk of holidays in the UK being better value than the eurozone it only partly tells the story. Slovakia offers fantastic value holidays but that's generally lost on the British public. Slovakia's restaurants provide good meals for a fiver!

There's only so much to go around, I suppose. I get the impression that western capitalism is some kind of giant merry-go-round, with loads of loosely fitting horses. Every so often one shoots off into the crowd, getting broken in the process. Eventually the man in charge gets a new horse fitted, but it hasn't completely stopped his merry-go-round in the meantime.

So SkyEurope is the latest casualty to hit the decks. But it won't put the dampeners on the industry. Even as I type there are those with ambition and bully for them. Birmingham European Airways is hoping to launch one day, so the aviation merry-go-round at least is happy in the fairground of financial fortune.

XL goes X!

Another airline and travel company goes bust today. The XL Leisure Group is no longer, at least in the UK. The French connection is going strong as is the German. Anyone to blame? As the news sinks in, I don't think the chairman Phil Wyatt is particularly. He may have made a few errors of judgement over exterior forces, but he appears to be a man who tried to get his business back from the brink. I think the main culprits are the dodgy dealers in oil as a commodity, the CAA for being "not fit for purpose" as a regulator, and the general lacklustre approach of the Governor of the Bank of England to the spivs and speculators who he seems to be oblivious to. Mr.Wyatt can't battle against these people on his own, but I bet the stranded holidaymakers have him in their sights rather than the real creators of their misery!

As we went off for my family trip to France from Birmingham Airport, we were expecting our Air France plane to be just that, an Air France plane. Instead there was a brand new multi-coloured Baboo plane waiting. Baboo? Nobody knew who they were. It was a leased plane! No problems, but in these days of trouble and strife, it is probably best to check out things as best we can. So much that we don't know goes on. "Commercially sensitive" means "We aren't telling you!"

A man who is stranded on a Greek island said he read in the financial press that XL were stopping a route from the Caribbean. Don't worry, he was told by his tour operator, your holiday is OK. Perhaps we need a better organisation to look after the travelling public. One that combines the work of the CAA, ABTA, and the bank guarantees (on credit card payments but not debit cards!).There should be an end to the instant collapse, with all the rancour that causes, not to mention unnecessary additional costs. One man's disaster is another's benefit, but that is a crude measure. Let's have it all done in a more civilised way in future!