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Ansett New Zealand is acquiring a second-hand de Havilland Dash 8 through Bombardier’s Aircraft Trading Unit. The new Dash 8 will join three others already in the Ansett ### Nz fleet and will allow the airline to start services between Wellington and Hamilton and to increase frequencies on other routes. The Dash 8 is scheduled to enter service in late March. Pictured is current Ansett New Zealand Dash 8 fleet member ### Zk-nev at Palmerston North. (Peter Clark)
Newsdesk — Commercial Aviation
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Commercial Concorde Speeds On
Concorde celebrated 20 years of commercial service in January, and British Airways is planning to keep the world’s only supersonic transport in service for another two decades. Since the inaugural service from London Heathrow to Bahrain on January 21, 1976, BA’s seven Concordes have made some 42,000 flights, logged more than 120,000 hours (of which 100,000 have been supersonic) and flown over 200 million kilometres. As the airline says, it has more experience of supersonic flight than all the world’s air forces combined, and its passengers can enjoy a glass of champagne at twice the speed of sound and 60,000 feet without having to don a G-suit!
Concorde’s relatively low utilization and the heat generated in the airframe by flying at Mach 2 (which dries any moisture which may have gathered in the structure) have combined to keep the airframes very young. The Concordes are almost completely free of corrosion and their condition is equivalent to a subsonic airliner which is only three or four years old. This in combination with the stringent checks and rebuilds it undergoes ensure Concorde’s long-term future. A static test airframe has been taken to the equivalent of 21,000 flight cycles without problems — the most used of BA’s Concordes has fewer than 6,000 cycles logged while Air France’s aircraft have even lower figures. The story of the Concorde and two other pioneering airliners of the postwar era — the Vickers Viscount and De Havilland Comet — is told in the third of Stewart Wilson’s Legends of the Air book series, available this April.
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