3 Links I Love: Lufthansa Needs Another Subsidiary, The Atlas Mystery, A Lost Airplane

Links I Love, Lufthansa

This week’s featured link

Lufthansa’s second approach at low-cost, long-haul will have new brandRunway Girl Network
Apparently Lufthansa will never learn. After realizing it had overextended the whole Eurowings frankenairline, it said it would pull back and stop flying long-haul. If you thought that meant Lufthansa was rationalizing, you thought wrong. Instead, it’ll just launch a new brand to fly long-haul as a low fare carrier. The idea is to be like Edelweiss in Switzerland. Why not just use Edelweiss? Well that would be too simple. This company….

Image of the Week: This is a 737-800, but it’s not just any 737-800. It’s the very last one delivered fresh from the factory. It arrived into Amsterdam on December 20. Boeing is now done with all versions of the civilian 737NG. Now it can produce… nothing. But you know, eventually the 737 MAX will fly again.

Accident Docket DCA19MA086 – Atlas Air 3591NTSB Docket Management System
Remember that Atlas 767 that crashed outside of Houston? Well, the report isn’t issued yet, but the docket is now publicly available for those who want to comb through it. It’s still not entirely clear exactly what happened, but the first officer is definitely a point of focus. He washed out at three previous airlines including Mesa. One of the documents says a trainer at Mesa referred to his training experience as a “train wreck.”

Team rediscovers how a 1964 Long Beach woman was the first to pilot a solo trip around the equatorLong Beach Press-Telegram
This is a great read for a quiet holiday weekend. It’s a long one, and it talks about the mystery of the airplane that was the first to circumnavigate the globe at the equator with just one pilot onboard, Joan Smith.

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3 comments on “3 Links I Love: Lufthansa Needs Another Subsidiary, The Atlas Mystery, A Lost Airplane

  1. I can tell you for a fact there are pilots out there who are worried that the Atlas crash is going to be “Colgan: The Sequel”…where a bunch of new restrictions come out of this crash…ostensibly to improve safety but the end result will be more barriers for prospective pilots and put the squeeze on an an already too small pool of pilots for airlines to draw upon.

    1. I just glanced over some of the copilot info in the docs, and – full disclaimer – I am neither a pilot nor an NTSB investigator – but boy, the guy seems to have failed tests left and right. And didn’t mention in his Atlas job application that he was employed by two (!) regionals where he didn’t complete the onboarding successfully?

      If this is not extremely uncommon, I’d really hope we do see some further thought put into pilot requirements.

  2. The fact that Boeing will go for months without delivering a narrowbody aircraft is beyond mind-numbing.

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