Here's a review of Thompson's first long-haul flight.

You can ignore the pictures of the pretty young lady, or not.

Wow. Did "Our man in the sky, Nigel Thompson" get paid for rehashing the Boeing and Tompson sales pitch??? :yuk:

We don't know, largely because jet lag affects everyone differently. It also depends how tired you are when you start the journey work/food/sleep etc. from the previous couple of days and what you have to get over - as well as the jet lag. Lastly, it depends what you do in the first 24/48 hours when you may be in jet lag. :hmm:

Just in case you didn't pick up on it, a couple of paragraphs later:
Actually, I'm not sure what else he has to say:

• He makes no truly personal observation, only states what the PR peeps have being saying for months
• There is no word of criticism
• Links to Boeing YT about building the thing

But since the web 'front page' of the Mirror has no news stories at all, only tittle tattle and adverts, there is no suprise that there is no news elsewhere. :rolleyes:

Since he does not mention his own jetlag or the return flight - did he actually travel on it?

As I was saying ... Pax used to know two words 'Jumbo' and 'Super Jumbo' now they know 'Dreamliner'.

It does not matter that the issue is on the ground - pax don't like this kind of news. The precautinary early returns are all going to get counted too.

Boeing made more than one mistake with this machine.

How pompous. You know nothing about this plane except some reports of battery problems. Read the aviation herald.

Every day planes have problems, albeit fires are serious and it's been fixed; but if you want to change, pay yourself. I doubt there is anything in the contract in relation to aircraft type. Since I'm pretty sure the airline doesn't rank their own planes' reliability scores

Get off your soap box and read some reports. Try starting with the Convair built DC10 cargo door that was "fixed" and went on to kill hundreds more. The B747 cargo door that was "fixed" after the Pan Am incident then opened over the ocean on a United aircraft causing someone to be sucked into an engine.
Or how about the Concorde tyres that were "fixed" after the 1981 fuel tank puncture departing Dulles.
The B787 has recurrent problems with fire and smoke, with billions riding on it, I'll reserve judgement on when to decide that it's "fixed".

nimsu1987Of course I would have to pay if I wanted to change!!!! That was made clear within the first five messages of the thread. But perhaps you didn't have time to read that far ...

Many people in the world choose not to use the 'Mk.I' of anything - be it software or hardware. I choose my carriers and their aircraft with care as, doubtless, do you,

I would say that in general terms if one is a very frequent flyer and for their sins knows more than the majority of the passengers about technical aspects of a company and it's aircraft, then you can make informed decisions about which airlines/routes/airports to use and those NOT to use. The 787 is a fantastic aircraft, billions invested and tested, new systems, new materials and on and on. It experienced problems earlier in it's development, was delayed a few times and finally brought into service. However, since then there have been way too many incidents, both major and minor covering different airframes and airlines. If there were not SO much riding on it's continuing introduction to service it might well have been wise to complete further intensive testing.

I have the feeling that some of the agitated posters are working for airlines that have the 787 in their fleet. If PAXboy feels with his extensive travelling experience that he'd prefer to not travel on a 787 until the recent faults are remedied then that's his choice. It's not personal against Boeing/engineers/pilots/crew/et al, but it IS a personal decision, and not without merit.

Re the 787 the main concern for me is how well they can be repaired. Taking China Airlines 611 as an example, there are others.
That aircraft was damaged 22 years before it crashed but at the time of the first accident it was not repaired correctly even though
the damage was very clear.As I understand it the composite hull of the 787 might not easily show damage, damage which could cause
a major crash in a few years time. Now that is the reason why I don't wish to fly on a 787 not the battery issue.
In spite of my very original PPRuNe post moaning ( over the top on reflection 2 years on :O:O ) I like Air NZ. Snag is now however that
they are buying several 787's so I might have to fly with another non 787 airline.

It's really interesting that a hypothetical question is asked, and professionals leap in to tell passengers (or "customers" as we are now called by too many airlines) have no right to make choices, or that preferences are irrational, as if that meant anything. On the one hand we are invited to make choices about airlines, and presumably about aircraft too, if the makers' publicity campaigns are anything to go by, but then told we're a bunch of :mad: if we do so. Sometimes I get worried by the contempt for passengers that some pilots feel; not so much that it affects me, but that sort of personality could be a problem on the flight deck.

I think it's much the same in any industry. Those that are in it for a long time know the risks and benefits so well that they become desensitised.

Many people work in different lines and so get a new perspective. For example, whilst I worked in telecommunications for 27 years, I was in small companies, local govt, retail, financial, cargo etc. I also worked in different countries and was a freelance consultant so I met numerous clients and situations - which helped me to continue to think about the end user.

Pilots, mostly, have only ever worked in the piloting business and many stay with one company for extended periods of time. Thus they can easily get distanced from the those in 56B.

I now work in a field where customers are usually first time purchasers. A few are second or third but most do not purchase more than three times in their lives. Conversely, many have worked in the business all their lives - so I see some of the 'old hands' getting casual. I was discussing this just yesterday with one of the best in the business that I have met in 22 years.

I'm now off to work with clients who are first time purchasers ...

ps I'm not that old, my two careers overlapped!

There seem to be a lot of people using the "trust X, they know what they are doing" argument, despite the fact that many incidents are caused by people that "know what they are doing". Train crash in Spain - caused by someone who "knew what he was doing", Comet hull losses - caused by people who "knew what they were doing", battery problems on 787 - the same people.

There isn't much that would get me on a 787 at the moment, especially for an over-water flight. There is too much that has gone wrong with one essential subsystem - the electrics. There *is* a time element to this - once a couple of years have gone past without an electrical fire, it may be safe to assume the problem is understood and sorted. Until then, I don't want to be a paying guinea-pig, thanks very much.

You seem to have put your finger on the source of the problem - We simply can't (and shouldn't) trust people who know what they are doing. In my experience, it is always better to trust people that don't know what they are doing.

Unfortunately, aviation history is littered with fatal examples of people who knew what they were doing, but carried on regardless:

The DC10 had a known weakness, established before it flew, with regard to the impact of an explosive decompression on the floor, and therefore on control lines. But nothing was done, and the aircraft was certified. In service, a problem emerged with the cargo-door latching mechanism, but nothing was done and the aircraft continued to fly. An American Airlines DC10 suffered explosive decompression over Windsor, from a faulty cargo-door blowing off, but the pilot brilliantly saved the day, and still the aircraft remained certified. It wasn't until the THY crash out of Paris with the loss of all souls, that those who knew what they were doing acted. A lot of the current actions being played out over the Dreamliner problems looks suspiciously similar to what happened with the DC10.

And also on the DC10, presumably the AA engineers that re-attached an engine using a fork-lift truck rather than the approved cradle also knew what they were doing.

because then you expect things to go wrong and can prepare accordingly . . .

People's willingness to ignore statistical inference demonstrating the safety of flight on all types of modern equipment, developed by entities incomprehensibly more knowledgeable than themselves, in preference for personal superstitions and conspiracy theories knows no bounds.

If you are personally uncomfortable, don't fly on it. Just don't claim that your basis for doing this is because you possess superior knowledge about its safety.

Hear! Hear!

How true these words are, even today.

I hope you never will, but should you ever need any urgent brain surgery just PM me I'll pop over and do it, and I promise I will absolutely not know what I'm doing.

As a much wiser person than me once said, "If you think education is expensive - try ignorance."

My, my, there are some smart alecs on here, aren't there. I am educated to PhD level, I work in universities, and I've worked with experts in several fields, including engineering, medicine, and law. From them I know that very few true experts will say "Trust me, I know what I'm doing" when it is something new, especially when something unexpected has happened, and *especially* when it has happened more than once. I know very few people who would say, with the current level of mishap affecting the electrical systems on the 787, "trust me, I know what I'm doing" - they would have significantly more humility than that, unlike some moderators and others here who *do* claim to have better knowledge than others, when in actual fact, they are as in the dark as the rest of us.

Yes, as I've posted elsewhere, I know that the overall risk from flying is very small, but presumably those folks killed on Comets thought the same. Call it superstition or whatever you like, but I'll stick with my plan to wait until a couple of years problem-free before flying on a 787. (Though, to be fair, I tend to wait at least a couple of years before buying/using anything new - I want enough information to evaluate it first. I did fly Heathrow to Paris and back on an A380 a couple of years back when Air France first got their's - at £10 each way (I think), it was something I wasn't going to miss!!)

Peak:

No one is being a smart alec. I, too, have academic and work credentials that I am quite sure are at least equal to your own. But like yours, mine are not in aeronautical engineering. Boeing, Airbus, the NTSB, the AAIB, the JAA, the FAA and the major airlines have a degree of understanding of these issues that simply does not compare with mine -- and their track record seems to indicate a very strong rate of success in their judgments. While this rate is not 100%, I am quite sure that adding my own technical knowledge to their knowledge will not push this rate to above what it is.

I, too, have quirks and superstitions (we all do). And while I may act on these (and other) things, I do this because they make me feel better (which is the purpose of life), not because I have performed a serious analysis that allows a dispassionate conclusion that the real situation has now been improved.

Thank you, SeenItAll. I wasn't intending to suggest that I am especially gifted - one of the problems with doing the enjoyable things in life (such as reading PPRuNE) late in the evening is that posts are inadequately proofed. I'm actually surprised that the mods let the post through - I visited at this time to try and post the same ideas in a better way!

My point was that I am an intelligent person with what I consider to be a good grasp of risk:benefit. I sit on a research ethics committee, which means I have to consider whether the actions of others would adversely affect the lives of other people. If someone came to my REC with a proposal that involved a repeating problem that no-one fully understood and claimed that there solution involved what I consider to be a bodge of Series LandRover enthusiast proportions ("put the battery in a box: the same thing might happen again, but at least we'll keep going"), without any extra information as to the root-cause, it wouldn't get passed by me or anyone else on the committee. The risk to the passengers and crew is too high for the benefit (which isn't to the passengers - they can fly on anything) to the share-holders.

Throughout my life I have looked to the airline principle of "zero harm" (now being touted by the NHS leadership) to help guide my decisions. I do not consider that the decisions regarding the 787 meet these criteria. My point about experts was that they can only be expert with full information. This cannot be the case here since they cannot point to a root-cause, i.e. they don't have the information to be make any reliable action. They cannot, therefore, credibly say "Trust me". There is a poster on other threads here (a chap called "amicus"), who makes a very compelling case that the Dreamliner is an accident waiting to happen - I choose to believe him, who has no obvious axe to grind, than those who stand to benefit financially.

Of course, I accept that others may do a different cost:benefit analysis, and choose to believe other people, though I could wish they wouldn't - the fewer people that express reservations about the 787, the more all manufacturers are going to regard us SLF as accepting of anything. Since the regulatory authorities seem to be failing (as I said, a REC wouldn't pass this, so why are they) it is up to passenger-power to try to get some balance here.

I hope that is a better posting :)