Civil aviation

• Textron Aviation today announced the delivery of a new Cessna Grand Caravan EX Amphibian turboprop to Malaysian property developer, Ikhasas Sdn Bhd, via its subsidiary company Oriental Sky Sdn Bhd.
• This will be the country’s first amphibious airplane operation in recent history after it gained necessary approvals from the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia to launch domestic operations in 2024.
• View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240216837400/en/
  Oriental Sky’s Grand Caravan EX Amphibian (Photo: Business Wire)
  The Cessna Grand Caravan EX Amphibian is designed and manufactured by Textron Aviation Inc., a Textron Inc. (NYSE:TXT) company.
• At the same time, we preserve the islands’ pristine environment and natural forests which would otherwise be felled for airport construction.”
  “We are honored for Grand Caravan EX Amphibian to be selected.

• Growing involvement of commercial aviation enterprises and government investments in infrastructure are stimulating competition and innovation of drone logistics and transport market.
• The Asia Pacific region is estimated to account for the largest share of 37.7% of the drone logistics and transportation market in 2023.
• Based on platform, the DLT market is segmented into freight drones, passenger drones, and air ambulance drones.
• Based on application, the drone logistics and transportation market has been segmented into logistics and transportation.

• The successful completion of these trial test flights in New Zealand demonstrates that safe, uncrewed flight operations are possible, today, in controlled airspace among other piloted aircraft.
• View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204323308/en/
  Through this trial program, the partnership has established a safe process for uncrewed aircraft to access controlled airspace and created a significant new understanding and capability for commercial autonomous flight operations.
• The flights took place at the Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre at Kaitorete, involving take-offs, landings, and uncontrolled and controlled airspace navigation.
• “The successful completion of this phase of testing demonstrates that it is possible to safely integrate autonomous aircraft into controlled airspace that is shared with piloted aircraft,” said Catherine MacGowan, Wisk’s Vice President of APAC and Air Operations.

• Several thousand passengers were stranded at airports, hotels and connection depots following the recent system-wide glitch of the UK air traffic control systems.
• So what was the glitch and how did it create so much chaos?
• The problems appear to have been caused by unusual data in a flight plan submitted into the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) system by a French airline.
• But, in my experience as a researcher of management, managers further up the chain can often pay more attention to immediate threats.
• They may therefore underestimate the impact of accumulated errors, or may not have enough time to monitor them.

Bigger picture

• “This system should be designed to reject data that’s incorrect, not to collapse,” Walsh explained.
• Lundgren said a review of the situation should determine whether NATs is “really fit for purpose, not only on the systems but on the technology, on the staffing levels”.
• Another point to bear in mind: many senior managers – particularly at chief executive and managing director level – are not necessarily technicians.
• Unfortunately, as long as the glitch is not salient and the machine still works, people usually ignore it.

Next steps

• But managers and authorities should also offer replacement flights, coupons or other objects of comparable value as compensation.
• Managers have been improving communication between technicians and non-technicians and should be praised for this change in attitudes.
• The risk for the industry is that passengers affected by the problems may look to alternative forms of transport in the future.