Royal jet chief quits after near-disaster - By Andrew Gilligan
                        Electronic Telegraph
     THE chief of maintenance for the Queen's aircraft has resigned
 after a damning official report into a near-disastrous engine failure
 on one of the royal jets.
     John Blackman left his job after RAF investigators uncovered ser-
 ious weaknesses in servicing procedures for all the Queen's aircraft,
 which make hundreds of flights a year with members of the Royal Fam-
 ily and senior politicians on board. The mechanic who handled the
 failed jet has also left his job.
     Mr Blackman's resignation comes amid a series of damaging main-
 tenance errors on the Queen's aircraft. The RAF is holding a further
 board of inquiry into a second dangerous failure in the maintenance
 of royal aircraft.
     Aircrew of a Wessex helicopter - from which the Prince of Wales
 had only just alighted - were horrified to find that they had been
 flying with a "foreign object" stuck in the engine, which had caused
 significant damage to the engine blades.
     A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "There was an incident in-
 volving a Wessex of the Royal Squadron on March 10 and a board of
 inquiry has been established. The problem was discovered during a
 routine turnaround investigation. A member of the Royal Family had
 recently been on board."
     The RAF is investigating whether cleaners employed by FRA Serco,
 the Royal Squadron's privatised maintenance contractors, were to
 blame for leaving a rag in the engine. Prince Charles had used the
 helicopter to fly to an official engagement in Bridgend and was due
 to return in it. The Wessex has a second engine which it can fly on
 if necessary.
     Mr Blackman had already left his post by the time of the March
 incident. His resignation came after a BAe 146-100 aircraft of the
 Royal Squadron was forced to make an emergency landing at Stansted
 after all four engines developed major faults in the first 15 minutes
 of a flight last November. No member of the Royal Family was in-
 volved, but the Duke of York had flown on the same plane two days
 earlier.
     The investigation, by RAF Strike Command, blamed FRA Serco for
 the "incorrect fitting" of plugs on the engines designed to stop oil
 leaks. Without them, all four engines rapidly ran out of oil and
 started to fail. But in an even more damning verdict, the Armed
 Forces minister, John Reid, has said the specific failures were
 "compounded by approved maintenance procedures not being completed
 correctly". He said: "FRA Serco have accepted that they were at
 fault. They have committed themselves to correcting the weaknesses
 identified . . ."
     Mr Blackman, the contract manager, was in overall charge of the
 maintenance of all the aircraft at Northolt, including the three
 BAe-146s of the Royal Squadron. Serco has provided engineering sup-
 port for the royal planes since 1995 and day-to-day maintenance
 since April last year.
     A Serco spokesman said last night that Mr Blackman had resigned
 voluntarily, but well-placed sources at RAF Northolt said that Mr
 Blackman was "put in a position where he had no choice but to
 resign".
     Mr Reid's comments will add to the concern at the involvement of
 private companies in what was once exclusively RAF work. Another
 private contractor, Airwork Services, caused an estimated 100 million
 pounds worth of damage to 16 Tornado fighter jets it was servicing.
 The errors could have resulted in the loss of the aircraft in flight.
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         Smaller world airports win good passenger ratings
     GENEVA - April 19, 1998 10:13 a.m. EDT - Smaller world airports
 generally win the highest ratings from passengers for traveller
 convenience, although Singapore's Changi is seen as the best,
 according to a survey published in the journal Airports World.
     The following are the listings for the top five recorded in the
 survey for the overall category and for airports handling more than
 25 million passengers a year, between 15-25 million, and up to 15
 million.
     The survey was conducted late last year by the world airlines
 body IATA. Airport World, organ of the Geneva-based Airports Council
 International, carried a summary in its latest issue for April-May.
 Overall convenience for all airports:
  1. Singapore 2. Helsinki 3. Manchester 4. Melbourne 5. Geneva
 Airports handling over 25 million passengers:
  1. Amsterdam 2. Orlando 3. Atlanta 4. Chicago-O'Hare
  5. Minneapolis-St. Paul
 Airports handling 15-25 million passengers
  1. Singapore 2. Zurich 3. Copenhagen 4. Cincinatti 5. Sydney
 Airports handling up to 15 million passengers
  1. Helsinki 2. Manchester 3. Melbourne 4. Geneva 5. Montreal-Mirabel
 A total of 62 airports were included in the survey -- including 24
 in North America, 16 in Europe, 13 in the Asia-Pacific region, and
 nine in the Middle East. The views of 78,000 international passen-
 gers were sought.
     Airport World did not provide the exact scores of all airports,
 calculated from passenger evaluations on a scale of 0-10, but in-
 dicated what they were in the form of graphics.
     Manchester, northwest England's booming international hub,
 finally processed more than 15 million passengers in 1997. Airports
 World said it would have been placed second in the 15-25 million
 category.
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