Captain Speaking: "Why do you think United decided to call its new low-cost operation 'TED'?" Nigel Yessir: "Cos they think it sounds warm and cuddly?" Speaking: "Don't be ridiculous boy. It's what's left of UNITED when 'U' n 'I' have been fired."
Heard what the new Ted song is?
(To tune of The Teddy Bear's Picnic)
"If you come down to the plane today, You're in for a big surprise, If you come down to the plane today, You better come in disguise, For every airline exec that ever there was, Is gathered there for certain because Today's the day the poor passengers Have to bring their own picnic..."
(With apologies to John Bratton and James Kennedy)
And while I'm still on the subject...
New ad theme? "Welcome to the furry skies." New regional operator? "Little Ted." New long range low cost operator? "Farther Ted."
(That's enough Ted jokes. Ed)
Mystery wheels-upSo it seems the way to prompt responses these days is to publish a picture of an airliner in distress. My email box is positively bulging with answers to my "WIHIH" question about the wheels-up used the other week. They range from nephews and nieces who are convinced it may be a 707 they once saw at Stansted, to Charles Aufranc of Switzerland who claims it could be a Swissair CV-880 performing tests for the "retracted landing gear take-off performance [MEL] test". (Let's not start that again please - Ed).
However, the winner of the slightly used undercarriage is Nephew Hans Jenny who was actually head of the Swissair recovery team involved. Our mystery aircraft is EC-CNG, a CV-990-6 operated at that time (4 April 1978) by Spantax. The aircraft (unintentionally) made a zero-flaps landing without lowering its landing gear on runway 32 at 10.20 local time. "It was so smooth that most passengers realised the fact only upon leaving the aircraft." After ferrying from Cologne to the Fokker site at Woensdrecht, the aircraft's entire keel beam was replaced with the very last spare unit from Convair. Hans also mentions that five years earlier the SR Tech Department performed a more amazing feat when they spliced on a new wing to a CV-990-5 that had managed to land at Cognac after a mid-air with an Iberian McDonnell Douglas DC-9 over Nantes. The Convair landed minus its left wing outboard of engine No.1! The spare wing was flown over in a Lufthansa 747F from the USA where it had been salvaged from an American Airlines CV-990 destroyed by a cabin fire way back in 1963.
Thank you Nephew Hans, and as requested, the used gear will be sent to Christie's for auction with proceeds going to my favourite charity.
Source: Flight International
