Classic British Flight Sim

Shalom and greetings all my pals,

Interesting aviation question for all of you!! Why did England's prime minister use A400M Atlas plane instead of official prime minister A330 plane to fly to visit my native country Israel??

Regards,

Aharon

The A400M's would likely have been at Cyprus already, so did he maybe fly to Akritori first and swap to the A400?. Given the current situation, I'm guessing it may have been deemed better for him to fly the short hop from Akritori to Tel-Aviv with the RAF.
EDIT - it looks like G-GBNI has been at Southend for a few weeks after some sort of incident on a flight out of Stanstead where it lost 3 windows and suffered stabilizer damage, so maybe he did fly direct in the A400M.

EDIT 2 it seems the former offical aircraft (G-GBNI) has been returned to Titan - previously the official PM aircraft was G-GBNI, Airbus A321-251NX owned and operated by Titan Airways on behalf of the UK government

EDIT 3 it further looks as though G-GBNI reg has been swapped to a different A321 owned by Titan. G-POWT has been re-registered G-GBNI.

Anyone have any insight on this? I didn't think the CAA permitted the re-use of aircraft registrations in the UK? Or has that changed? Or is it because its for the Government so anything goes

Purely a guess on my part, but since the PM is essentially flying into a war zone, a RAF A400 would have counter measures in case something gets fired at it, while the leased A321 would not.

TSR2 wrote: ↑

19 Oct 2023, 22:48

Anyone have any insight on this? I didn't think the CAA permitted the re-use of aircraft registrations in the UK? Or has that changed? Or is it because its for the Government so anything goes

I think, like anything, power and/or money get you what you want. Lord Bamford has had G-BJCB on two different aircraft.

Thanks all for kind answers.

I do not know why A320 and A321 came into this discussion when I was asking why was the British prime minister NOT using brand new A330 for his state visit to my native country Israel?

Regards,

Aharon

Because he doesn’t use an A330 any more. It hasn’t been used for some time.

TSR2 wrote: ↑

23 Oct 2023, 07:31

Because he doesn’t use an A330 any more. It hasn’t been used for some time.

huh?????? Brand new A330 is not used anymore for government of United Kingdom?????? I do not understand???

Regards,

Aharon

As far as I know Aharon, ZZ336 is still configured as transport /refueling (Voyager) which it does so when not required by government. As for it being brand new, ZZ336 is 11 years old. As for why it wasn't used for Richi's visit to Israel, I guess it was thought expedient not to fly one guy 2000mls at what, 25 tons fuel each way, when most of us would prefer our ruling elite fly Easyjet like the rest of us.
Dale

Hi Aharon,

As Dale pointed out, the A330 is expensive to run and is a tanker, so taking it out of service for a PM trip isn’t good use of the equipment in most circumstances. It was a bit of a vanity project for a previous PM. Leasing the A321 is more cost effective, although as mentioned above, I don’t know if thats still an option as it looks like the Falcon 900 (also operated partly by a 3rd party, in this case Centreline) seems that it may have been used for part of the recent trip. https://raf.mod.uk/aircraft/envoy-iv-cc1/