The Allplane Podcast

An old industry joke says that an aircraft is “a set of parts flying in formation”.

Parts and spares are, indeed, essential for any complex machine to work properly and this is precisely the area of expertise of this episode’s guest.

Alex Duran is the co-founder, together with Jasin Colar, of Nexspares, a consultancy firm based in Zürich, Switzerland, that helps airlines the world over source their parts and spares in the most efficient way possible.

We had a chance to talk about this area of the commercial aviation business, how airlines source parts when they need them, what sort of procedures are there in place to guarantee safety and prevent counterfeiting and, more generally, how aircraft parts and spares are traded in the global market.

Things we talk about in this episode:

How this record-breaking flight was planned

The practicalities and challenges of flying across Europe in an electric aircraft

How green mobility enthusiasts from across Germany rallied behind he project

The future of green flying and prospects for electric aircraft development

Things we talk about in this episode

How does the aviation fuel market work

Why arranging aircraft re-fuelling can be a messy business

What does the IATA Fuel Data Standards Group (FDSG) do?

What are IATA’s XML fuel standards and why they matter

What is Gazpromneft-aero and why it is an early adopter of IATA’s XML fuel standards?

Has Covid-19 accelerated the adoption of digital standards in the aviation fuel world?

Back in 2009 Maria came across a former Aeroflot Tu-104 that had been left on the ground at a local airfield in Siberia since the late 1970s. This sight inspired her to find out more about that aircraft and was the start of a journey to which she has devoted plenty of time and efforts since.

Together with a group of volunteers, Maria has been painstakingly researching and restoring this aircraft, taking care of sourcing original parts and components wherever she could find them on the internet and bringing the cabin back to its original state.

As the aircraft is nearing completion, she joins us today on the podcast to tell us her story and that of this very inspiring passion project!

Jordi Candela is the director of Airports of Catalonia, a government-owned company that manages two regional airports near Barcelona. What makes this small airport operator interesting for the rest of the industry? Passenger volumes at both these airports are admittedly low, yet, each of them presents an interesting cases of specialization in a very particular niche…

Over the last quarter of a century and mainly through donations and volunteer work, the Qantas Founders Museum, which is a nonprofit that is independent from the airline, has assembled an amazing collection of historical aircraft that, at one point in time or another, have been in Qantas service: these include a Boeing 747, a Boeing 707 and a Super Constellation, miraculously salvaged from an aircraft graveyard in the Philippines.

I spoke with the museum’s communication manager, Nicole Kuttner, to learn more about the museum, what visitors can find there and their current projects, as well as the ways in which they are marking the Qantas centenary and, more generally, the practicalities of getting to Longreach and exploring the surrounding region.

What perspectives are there in Africa for low cost airlines? How has the growing Chinese presence in the African economy affected route networks? Which are the favourite distribution channels for airlines in Africa?

We are going to answer to these and other questions on this episode of the podcast with Tendi Mutandagayi, a consultant based in Johannesburg with many years of experience working in aviation projects involving companies such as Ethiopian, Sabre and Terrapin.

Tendi knows the African aviation industry inside out and he is going to offer us a glimpse of its main trends and developments in today’s episode of the podcast.

In this episode we travel to the sunny shores of California to speak with experienced aircraft cabin experts and founders of boutique design firm ACLA Studio Victor Carlioz and Matt Cleary.

We speak about innovation in aircraft cabin design, the tasks and challenges of aircraft cabin designers and whether the Covid-19 epidemic is going to have lasting effects in the way we understand the airline cabin and the passenger experience.

Things we talk about in this episode:

What is the New Distribution Capability (NDC) pushed by IATA

Why NDC matters for airlines and their distribution channels

How airlines currently distribute through Global Distribution Systems (GDS)

Why adoption of the NDC standard has wide regional variances

What Airgateway does in the field of NDC

Why full service carriers are the primary users of NDC and it is less relevant for low cost airlines