Steve’s out sick (he must have eaten the fish :) so Grant’s flying solo on this one and cheating madly by assembling a few interviews and a slightly modified version of the Australia Desk segment we recorded for the Airplane Geeks’ Thanksgiving episode. The interviews include:

• Matt Hall & Nigel Lamb
• Carlo Santoro from Flight Experience Melbourne
• Nick Brau on flying hot air balloons over Melbourne city

The news items we covered include:

• British Airways again discussing a merger with QANTAS
• The US FAA wil be conducting an Air Safety examination of Australia’s air operations
• 30th Anniversary of Air New Zealand’s DC10 crashing on the side of Mt Erebus in Antarctica
• Virgin Blue likely to have a profit in FY09/10
• QANTAS to purchase additional aircraft and will be assigning more of their 787s to Jetstar
• QANTAS introduces the airport of the future concept
• Airport capacity in Sydney and the need for a second airport
• Australian Transport Safety Bureau provides interim reports on the QANTAS A330 ADIRU issues and QANTAS 747 oxygen bottle incidents
• RAAF to purchase 14 F-35 fighters even though Lockheed has admitted the project is running late
• The first two Wedgetail AEW aircraft have been delivered
• Last flight of the Caribou in Australia & it’s potential replacement

We hope you enjoy the show and we will return to our usual levels of interviews, discussions & opinionated news reviews in a week or so.