The Air Current

The potential for optimization in a network airline schedule is practically infinite. The time available to network planning and scheduling analysts is not. This fundamental discrepancy is what Alaska Airlines and UP.Labs aim to address through Odysee, a startup revealed last week at the 2024 UP.Summit in Bentonville, Arkansas and officially launched on Oct. 8 at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam....

Alaska Airlines startup Odysee taps AI to build better schedules With Hawaiian and its widebodies in hand, Alaska will give AI tools the opportunity to optimize the new network.

When the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration published initial vertiport design standards in 2022, the agency presented the guidance as foundational for enabling operations of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. On Sept. 20, 2024, the FAA released a proposed update of those standards in the form of Engineering Brief (EB) 105A, which is intended to serve as a stepping stone to a standalone vertiport design advisory circular (AC) by the end of next year....

Momentum builds against standalone eVTOL vertiport standards Maybe eVTOLs and helicopters shouldn’t have separate infrastructure standards after all.

Vertical Aerospace today released its own high level preliminary report on what caused its VX4 prototype to crash. The company also went into considerably more technical detail about what happened with our senior editor, Elan Head, and the big lessons for the eVTOL industry.

As with all our air safety reporting, this in-depth article from
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Vertical Aerospace details failure sequence that preceded VX4 crash Disclosure comes just weeks after flight testing mishap with the eVTOL prototype in the U.K.

(via ) Both houses of the U.S. Congress approved a $1.7 trillion year-end package of legislation that includes an exemption for Boeing’s 737 Max 7 and 10 to continue the Federal Aviation Administration’s ongoing certification process without a major overhaul of each aircraft’s crew alerting systems. The bill will go to President Joe Biden’s desk for signature.

The controversy, born from politics and good intentions by those seeking to make significant reforms to the aircraft certification process, played out over the past year with political theatrics intended to force the action taken by Congress.

Boeing’s CEO David Calhoun in July threatened to cancel the 737 Max 10 if an exemption or extension wasn’t granted. A take my marbles and go home approach to stakeholder discussions has long been part of Boeing’s and broader U.S. corporate legislative strategies.

Those directly familiar with Boeing’s internal development said that the company was extremely unlikely to cancel the Max 10 (and the Max 7 by extension) principally because it needed the Max 10’s revised design to validate and certify the new safety systems that it planned to eventually roll out on new production Max 8s, 9s, 8200s and 7s and later for retrofit.
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With no new airplane on the drawing board until at least the 2030s, certification troubles for the 737-7 & -10 that could mean billions of dollars in new required equipment and training, a 777X that will likely enter service nearly 6 years after originally scheduled, what does Boeing’s future in the commercial airplane business look like? The Air Current’s editor-in-chief Jon Ostrower joins Ian and Jason on this week’s AvTalk to shed some light on where the aircraft maker goes from here. https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/avtalk-episode-189-looking-into-boeings-future/