You see Chennai Metropolitan Buses daily….
Bus no. 21H runs on OMR passing Karapakkam …. It originates at Broadway and
winds its way through Kamarajar Salai; LB Road ; OMR for
Kelambakkam with scheduled time of 85 minutes for the 21 stops in between …
some of you will remember the history that it was ‘Pallavan Transport’ (PTC)
for long… incidentally, do you know or remember the route no. 1 ?
Sadly Flight MH370, carrying 239 people, took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am on Saturday [8.3.14], bound for Beijing . Authorities
initially said its last contact with ground controllers was less than an hour
into the flight at a height of 35,000 feet, when the plane was somewhere
between the east coast of Malaysia and Vietnam. The 'unprecedented mystery'
behind the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 deepened when some
relatives claimed they were able to call the cellphones of their missing loved
ones. According to the Washington Post, family of some of the 239 people on
board the vanished Boeing 777 said that they were getting ring tones and could
see them active online through a Chinese social networking service called QQ ~
but by now all hopes have vanished – though the aircraft is yet to be
traced.
Some reports suggest that the missing Boeing 777 jetliner
changed course over the sea, crossed Malaysia
and reached the Strait of Malacca — hundreds
of miles from its last position recorded by civilian authorities, Malaysian
military officials said on Tuesday, citing military radar data. The development
only added confusion and mystery into
one of most puzzling aviation incidents and has raised questions about why the
Malaysia Airlines flight apparently was not transmitting signals detectable by
civilian radar & why no distress calls were sent after it turned back.
Theories floating around assume that there was some catastrophic event on the flight — such as an
explosion, engine failure, terrorist attack, extreme turbulence, pilot error or
even suicide.
Away from the aircraft - Cyclone Nilam
brought along its tide MT Pratibha Cauvery – the tanker vessel to the coast of Chennai . It was
a Tanker vessel of 1981 built with 16949
GRT ; Length overall (LOA) 174.05
(MTR); Indian flagged with call sign:
VWQU and IMO: 7920754. That IMO is
Ship’s Identity. The name of Ship can be changed, the
ownership can change, so also the flag of Registry i.e., where the vessel is
registered but this IMO number will not change. This IMO No. would remain
unchanged upon transfer of ship to other flag(s) and would etched through its
lifetime incorporated in the Ship’s Certificate which has been made mandatory
under SOLAS.
Years ago it was a Boeing 747 named after the Emperor Kanishka that made
the entire nation sad. Air India Flight 182 was operating on the Montreal–London–Delhi
route. On 23 June 1985, the aircraft operating on the route – a Boeing
747-237B– was blown up by a bomb at an altitude of 31,000 feet (9,400 m). It
crashed into the Atlantic Ocean while in Irish
airspace. A total of 329 people were killed, including 268 Canadians, 27
British citizens and 24 Indians.
More turbulent was IC 814 the Indian Airlines Airbus A300
en route from Tribhuvan International Airport
in Kathmandu , Nepal
to Indira Gandhi
International Airport
in Delhi , which
on 24.12.1999 was hijacked. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistan-based group, was
accused of the hijacking and the aircraft was forced to land in Kandahar , Afghanistan .
India 's lack of recognition
of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan
complicated negotiations between Indian authorities and the hijackers. Taliban
moved its well-armed fighters near the hijacked aircraft in an attempt to
prevent Indian special forces from storming the aircraft. The hijacking lasted
for seven days and ended after India
released three militants — Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and
Maulana Masood Azhar.
This post is more about identification of
the aircraft – just as the route No. in MTC and IMO in ship there is IATA
codes. The International Air Transport
Association (IATA) is the trade association for the world’s airlines. It
represents some 240 airlines or more than 84% of total air traffic. IATA
supports airline activity and helps formulate industry policy and standards. It
is headquartered in Montreal , Canada with Executive Offices in Geneva , Switzerland . IATA airline designators, sometimes called
IATA reservation codes, are two-character codes assigned by it to the world's
airlines. The standard is described in IATA's Standard Schedules Information
Manual, and the codes themselves are described in IATA's Airline Coding
Directory. Airline designator codes
follow the format xx(a), i.e., two alphanumeric characters (letters or digits)
followed by an optional letter. Although the IATA standard provides for
three-character airline designators, IATA has not used the optional third
character in any assigned code.
IATA airline designators are used to identify an airline
for commercial purposes in reservations, timetables, tickets, tariffs, air
waybills and in telecommunications. A flight designator is the concatenation of
the airline designator, and the numeric flight number, plus an optional one-letter "operational
suffix" .
Malaysia Airlines says it has retired the
missing jetliner’s flight code as a sign of respect to the 239 passengers and
crew on board. The airline says it will no longer be using MH370 and MH371, the
same codes used by the Boeing 777 that vanished from radar screens on its way
from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on Saturday. MH370 was used for Kuala
Lumpur-Beijing route and MH371 for a return flight. Starting on Friday,
Malaysia Airlines says it will use flight codes MH318 and MH319 for the same
route.
Though not operational now, Route No. 1 used to
connect Triplicane OT with Royapuram and then Tondiarpet … now we have 1A which
runs from Thiruvotriyur to Thiruvanmiyur without connecting Triplicane !!
With regards – S. Sampathkumar
13th Mar 2014.
I really really like studying and following your publish as I discover them incredibly useful and exciting. This publish is similarly useful as well as exciting . Thank you for details you been placing on creating your website such an exciting. I provided something for my details. Airline Codes
ReplyDelete