I sympathise with you Leftofcentre2009 on discovering you were about to travel on G-OOBK. A couple of months ago, I friend of mine was on Air Transat, LGW~YYZ. Flight Radar 24 showed the flight progress and there was something familiar about it's reg: C-GITS. Yes it was AT236 that glided into the Azores in 2001. Obviously all went well as the machine has been plying it's trade all the while. I didn't bother to tell her afterwards!
slight thread divergence
Leftofcentre2009
I still think it shows a bit of perspective and that the media for some reason latched onto the 787 issues.
I think it's because Boeing made such a successful publicity launch. They were so keen to make a splash because the A380 took lots of limelight and got dubbed 'Super Jumbo' by the press. 'Jumbo' had been a Boeing 'word'.
To fight back on the corporate front, they created the name 'Dreamliner' to differentiate and started pushing the computer image of the machine aloft in the Boeing 'wavy line' paint job to make it look interesting. Actually, it's just another large twin, but with some different technology some of which may make a more pleasant flight but it's waaaay too early to tell.
The Boeing press office people pushed out every little detail during manufacture, they ensured that documentaries got made and stuffed things down Your Tube (or UP the tube as you wish
) and made sure that everyone knew that Boeing were doing something different to the A380.
Then they had problems and the wide publicity came back and bit them on the butt because everyone KNEW about the B787. Airbus were lucky in that the nature of the 380 gave them publicity on a plate, Boeing had to make it. My guess is that neither Boeing nor Airbus will hype a new machine in this way ever again.
Not least because - 99% of pax don't know what the machine is and don't care. It was corporate
PR eating itself - nothing new there. In my opinion, they should have said nothing at all. they wasted their money because anyone who wanted to know about the machine - would know. But corporates get a real buzz from seeing their name up in lights.