A US navy ship with specialized equipment detected signals in January which were thought to be from the plane’s flight recorder, when the ship was part of the search for the missing Adam Air Boeing 737 plane in Indonesia. Adam Air spokesman Danke Sudrajat said that crew from the salvage ship would first survey the area where the plane crashed off Sulawesi island. Efforts to recover the black box, which refers to the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, were delayed due to disagreements between the government and Adam Air over who should bear the cost. Experts said in January that retrieving the flight recorder, set up to give off a signal for 30 days to aid detection, may be difficult as it could be at a depth of up to 1,700 metres (5,600 feet). Locating the black box may be even tougher now as it may have shifted position or been covered by sediment. The 17-year-old plane was heading from Surabaya in East Java to Manado in northern Sulawesi when it vanished in bad weather. The plane made no distress call, although the pilot had reported concerns over crosswinds. Aug 23, 2007
Search Restarts For Crash Plane’s Black Box. A US-operated salvage ship has arrived at the coastal area where an Indonesian plane crashed with 102 passengers on board, and will try to recover the aircraft’s black box, an airline official said on Thursday. The Boeing 737-400, operated by budget carrier Adam Air, went down on New Year’s day in the sea off south Sulawesi in one of the country’s worst air disasters. No survivors were found, and while wreckage from the plane showed up weeks after the crash, the black box has never been retrieved, making it difficult to determine the cause of the disaster. Aug 23, 2007
Aeroflot To Buy Boeing 787s, Airbus A350s. Russia’s national airline, Aeroflot, will pay USD$5.81 billion for a total of 44 aircraft from Boeing and Airbus, a discount of about 17 percent, Vedomosti business daily reported on Monday. Aeroflot has agreed to pay USD$2.906 billion for 22 Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft and USD$2.904 billion for 22 of Airbus’s A350 XWB planes, the paper said, citing a report by Interfax news agency. Aeroflot announced the deals earlier this year but has never said how much it was going to pay for the aircraft in one of the biggest-ever foreign plane orders by a Russian company. Analysts told the paper the discount was so large because Aeroflot had managed to play off both companies against each other. Under the deals, Aeroflot will get its first Airbus in 2014 and the last in 2019, and its first Boeing in 2014 and the last in 2016, the paper said. Aug 20, 2007
Aeroflot Cargo currently operates four McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 Freighters. In addition to these two McDonnell-Douglas MD-11s, Aeroflot-Cargo has committed to lease three more MD-11 Boeing Converted Freighters from the Boeing Capital Corporation within the 2007-2008 timeframe. Boeing Commercial Aviation Services will provide detailed engineering design work and oversight of the Aeroflot-Cargo conversions, with SASCO, a subsidiary of Singapore Technologies Aerospace, providing touch labor on the airplanes. In total, Boeing has converted more than 100 MD-11 passenger airplanes to freighters. Aug 23, 2007
Boeing is helping Aeroflot-Cargo improve its operational efficiency and adapt to growing cargo market demands by converting two MD-11 passenger airplanes into freighters and updating their flight deck features and cargo-handling system so that they are consistent across Aeroflot-Cargo’s fleet. A converted MD-11 has a capacity of 205,400-pounds (93.2 tones) structural payload at a range of 3,486 nautical miles (6,456 kilometers) and is capable of 630,500-pounds (286,000 kg) maximum takeoff weight. The main and lower deck cargo compartments hold a total of 36 96-by-125-inch pallets or containers. Modification work will begin in November 2008. Aug 23, 2007