An Airbus advertising campaign at the Farnborough Air Show stoked the fires in the debate between ... Two engines & four engines

Two engines versus four engines was a hot topic in media reports from July's Farnborough (U.K.) Air Show, where Airbus stirred the debate with a colossal billboard at the edge of a runway that read, "A340 — 4 engines 4 long haul." Similar full-page ads appeared in air show magazines and daily London newspapers.

While Airbus officials argued that the ads were not about safety, the prevailing opinion of industry experts at the show was exactly the opposite — the ads were meant to suggest that twinjets, such as the Boeing 767 and 777, were not as safe or reliable as four-engine airplanes, namely the Airbus A340, the closest competitor to the market-leading 777.

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FACTORY in the field

You are suddenly jolted out of deep sleep by the jangling telephone in the dead of night. As you fumble for the receiver, heart pounding, you glance at the clock on the nightstand — 2:30 a.m. Who would be calling this hour? You have a pretty good idea.

It's about a Boeing airplane.

The bad news is that the airplane is broken. The good news is that it won't be on the ground for long, thanks to the work you and the rest of your Boeing Aircraft Ground incident repair team will be doing. Within a few hours, your team will be on its way to the site to survey damage and call the information home. That phone call will initiate detailed planning and preparations to get the airplane repaired and safely on its way into revenue service again. Once authorized, a repair crew will head out to the work site with tools and parts it needs to do the job. Soon after that, another airplane will be back in revenue service, and another tired Boeing AOG crew will be headed home.

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Info at your fingertips

Boeing in recent years has launched major initiatives to apply digital technology across a broad range of information products and services supporting airlines, and the company is shrinking a mountain of paper in the process.

New digital tools arising from these initiatives help airlines boost productivity and fleet reliability while enhancing safety. Cumbersome paper manuals and microfilmed reference materials are being replaced, as a growing volume of airline support activity is conducted electronically.

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Clearing up muddy waters

Perhaps one of the students with mud under her fingernails, a pant leg covered with creek water and dirt on her knees said it best.

"I learned more in a few hours during a field trip than reading about science from a textbook in a classroom for a whole semester."

About 100 seventh graders from Coleman Middle School in Wichita, Kan., spent much of one day recently at Chisholm Creek Park in Wichita, getting wet in murky creek water, learning to spot poison ivy, checking core tree samples to learn the ages of trees, and studying living critters that call muddy creek banks home.

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