Around The World In Flighty Ways Quiz

Answer: Short Brothers

That near-vintage aircraft was a Short SD 360. Short Brothers had a long association with Northern Ireland.

The brothers Horace, Eustace and Oswald Short set up the world's first aircraft factory, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, in 1908. Initially they specialised in flying boats and amphibious aircraft.

In 1936 they opened a new factory in Belfast in conjunction with the world-renowned Harland & Wolf shipbuilders. The company became known as Short Brothers & Harland. One of the most famous aircraft built by the company during WW2 was the giant Short Sunderland flying boat.

In the early 1960s, the company developed the Short Skyvan, a high-winged twin-engine transport aircraft. In 1974, it developed the SD330, a passenger-carrying derivative. This was followed by the stretched 39-seater SD360 in 1982.

The SD planes became passenger workhorses for short-haul companies the world over. Military versions were also developed. Production of the 360 ended in 1998. In all, 165 were built. According to 'Airliners Now', in 2018 about 40 360s were still flying.

All Short Brothers production had transferred to Belfast in 1947 In 1989, the Canadian aircraft-maker Bombardier acquired Shorts.

The giant yellow cranes referred to were in the shipyard. Nicknamed 'Samson' and 'Goliath', they towered into the Belfast skyscene.

Answer: Fokker 100

The Fokker 100 was a narrow-body regional jet that entered service in 1988. With a passenger capacity of 100, at that time it had very little competition in the short-haul jet market.

Over the next 30-odd years, more than 280 planes were built and supplied to 25 airlines internationally. By 2017, airlines had started to retire their Fokker 100s but many remained in service for several years after that. Many from European airlines were transferred to Australia.

The Fokker company went out of business in 1996 and the last airframes were made in 1977.

Answer: Dassault

The model Kyle was in was the Falcon 8X with a price tag on the windscreen (no, not really) of about $58m.

Introduced in 2014, the 8X had three tail-mounted Pratt & Whitney PW307 turbofans and could carry eight passengers and three crew clear across the Atlantic.

Big selling points for the $58m, Kyle learnt, were lower maintenance costs and greater fuel efficiency. Dassault offered more than 30 different floor plans for the 8X, and Kyle could not help but wonder if he could order one with some luxury kennels.

Answer: Piaggio

The six-seater P180 entered service in 1990 and was one of the most distinctive aircraft around.

It had two engines mounted on wings at the rear of the fuselage running out from the tail fin. The engines pointed backwards, hence the 'pusher' description. ('Tractor' aircraft have the engines pointing forwards).

The P180 also had a distinctive fin wing on the nose, making it look a little like a hammerhead shark.

In case you are wondering, yes, Fiat made a jet fighter that was in service for some 30 years from 1958.

Answer: Diamond

To digress slightly, Innsbruck Airport is rated as one of the trickiest in the world to land at because of the narrow approach.

The Austrian designer Wolf Hoffmann established Hoffmann Flugzeugbau. in 1981 to make motor gliders.

In 2017 years it was acquired by a Chinese company and became known as Diamond Aircraft Industries, with production facilities in Austria and Canada.

Since that time it majored in light aircraft, both propeller and jet powered.

Answer: Pilatus Aircraft

Established in 1939, Pilatus Aircraft became noted as a manufacturer of light passenger, and freight aircraft and flight trainers.

The company claimed to be "...the only Swiss company to develop, produce and sell aircraft to customers around the world".

While it had headquarters in Stans, Switzerland, the company also had outlets in Australia and the USA.

The wrong answers were all manufacturers of motor vehicles - what? you didn't know the Swiss made cars and buses...

(And apologies to any Swiss nationals for the appalling stereotyping in the question.)

Answer: Saab

The Saab 2000 was a twin-engined turbo-prop that entered service in 1994. It could carry up to 58 passengers.

Although production stopped in 1999, twenty years later 21 airframes remained flying with four airlines.

One of the problems with the 2000 was that it was just a little too late to the marketplace. By the time it was ready to fly, there were too many competitors in the same sector. Many of these were the new 'regional jets'.

While many airlines still use turboprop planes - Stobart Air, Logan Air, and FlyBe in the UK alone - passengers seem to look upon them as old-fashioned and want to fly in jets.

Answer: Tupolev

The company was founded in 1922 by Andrei Tupolev. Over the next century it built virtually every type of aircraft imaginable for commercial and military use.

In the early years it made aircraft based on the designs and principles of other aircraft companies, such as Junkers in Germany. Its most famous 'copycat' was probably the TU-144 that had more than a passing resemblance to the Anglo-French supersonic Concorde.

The three wrong answers were all aircraft manufacturers in Eastern Europe - with the most crimson of red herrings being Antonov, which was a company established in Ukraine in 1946.

Answer: Comac

China was a relatively late entrant into the world of passenger aircraft manufacturing. Other companies began making plans in the latter part of the 20th Century, but the airline world sat up and started to take notice with the establishment of the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, in 2008.

The company was based in Shanghai and with designs such as the ARJ21, it aimed directly at the likes of Airbus and Boeing.

Some observers have speculated that China could overtake the USA as the world's largest market by flight traffic in the mid 2020s.

Answer: Mitsubishi

The MRJ90 that Kyle boarded could seat 88 passengers and had a range of about 2,100 miles.

The Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation was established in 2008 Its main shareholder was the electrics and engineering company Mitsubishi Heavy Industries

In June 2019, MAC acquired Bombardier's CRJ programme.

Answer: Airbus A380

The A380 first flew in April 2005. It was a 'double-decker' aircraft that was designed to carry anything between 520 and 850 passengers, depending on configuration.

The A380 was so large that many airports the world over had to redesign terminal access to cope.

More than 230 A380s were built before it was announced in 2019 that production was to stop. The A380 was not the success that Airbus Industries hoped, finding favour with just a few airlines, mostly those involved in extreme long-haul flights.

The A380 programme, indeed, was considered in many quarters to be a failure.

As 'Forbes' magazine noted in February 2019: "From Day One Airbus's superjumbo was too big; way too big. And Airbus should have known that from its two sets of talks with Boeing in the 1990s about teaming up to build a jointly-produced superjumbo. Careful, dispassionate analysis of the global travel market also would have shown Airbus leaders why Boeing and most airlines and travel companies thought building a superjumbo was a really dumb idea."

Forbes opined that the future of international air travel over the next 30 years was likely to depend on mid-size wide-body planes that were consistent money makers on the routes where the 747 had struggled to be profitable and where the A380 simply could not compete profitably.

To give an idea of just how big the A380 was, it measured 72.72 m (238 ft 7 in) long - that is almost as long as an American Football field - and 24.09 m (79 ft 0 in) tall - that is six London double decker buses on top of each other.

Typically, it cost between $26,000 and $29,000 per hour to operate.

Answer: Dreamliner

The Dreamliner first flew in 2009, and Kyle hoped that early issues had been sorted out on his particular airframe.

The name 'Dreamliner' came as a result of a competition that Boeing held in 2003. At that time Boeing has been promoting the name 'Global Cruiser', so, yes, that was a red herring. 'Stratoclimber' was also on the short list that people from 160 countries voted from.

The first Dreamliner flew with Singapore Airlines in 2018 and cost an eye-watering $326m.

The Dreamliner could carry a changing number of passengers, according to lay out. The first Singapore plane carried 330.

The Dreamliner was hailed as being lighter, quieter, more fuel-efficient and more cost-effective than rivals.

In 2018, Qantas launched a new non-stop Perth to London route using the Dreamliner. At that time it was the second longest non-stop flight in the world, all 9,008 miles, but the longest on a 787.

(Okay, I know you just want me to tell you the longest non-stop flight at that time was Auckland, New Zealand, to Doha; 9,025 miles on a Boeing 777-200LR.)

Answer: Embraer

Established in 1969, Embraer was a manufacturer of short-haul and business jets. It was created as a government-owned corporation.

As well as making planes in Brazil, Embraer built aircraft in Florida and in Australia. It became the world's third-largest manufacturer of civil aircraft.

In 2018, it was announced that Boeing was seeking to take an 80 per cent share in Embraer. This was seen as a bulwark between Boeing and an Airbus/Bombardier collaboration that was making planes that Boeing did not, but which Embraer did.

Answer: Bombardier

Bombardier traced its history to 1934 when the founder Joseph-Armand Bombardier began to make 'snow coaches' to carry passengers. The company was involved in making snow-related vehicles and rail locomotives for many years.

In 1989 it began to make aircraft after buying the loss-making Canadair from the Canadian Government. Three years later, it rescued the failing Short Brothers in Northern Ireland. Within a few more years, Learjet and deHaviland Canada were added to the portfolio.

Over the years Bombardier made the Dash 8 and the CRJ series of regional aircraft. Going into the 21st Century, Bombardier began to develop the C Series, a larger mid-range aircraft that would compete with similar by airframes by Airbus. After a troubled gestation period, the C Series first flew in 2013 and entered operational services three years later.

Boeing, it is safe to say, were not impressed. They were unhappy with the level of government funding Bombardier was allegedly getting and tried to block sales through the courts to US airlines. This prompted Bombardier to sell 50.1 per cent of the C Series programme to Airbus. The C Series was renamed the Airbus 220, with planes to be made at Airbus factories in the US. This got around the 300 per cent duties imposed by the courts.

Introduced in 1984 by deHaviland Canada, the Dash 8 had several model variants over the years. This was a high-winged twin-engined monoplane that was still flying more than 30 years after its first flight

Answer: Douglas DC-3

More than 16,000 Douglas DC-3/C-47 were made in a range of variants. Many people, of course, know the aircraft as the Dakota.

The DC-3 began life as 'Douglas Sleeper Transports' with American Airlines in 1936.

During WW2, the Dakota became noted as a transport and troop-carrying workhorse. (Aficionados will know that strictly speaking this designation was not DC-3 but C-47.)

Around 11,000 were built in the USA and probably about 4,000 in the USSR.

In 2017, the US Federal Aviation Administration recorded that there were 1,400 DC-3/Dakota/C47 airframes remaining worldwide. Many have been placed in museums and a number of companies worldwide have flying examples they use for tourist appreciation.

The Dakota name was applied to the C-47 by the Royal Air Force.