Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Feeder carriers in Europe saw record passenger loads last year as increased passenger numbers outstripped the growth in seats, according to the European Regions Airline Association (ERA). Member operators carried 7.5 percent more passengers in 2007 than in the preceding year, compared with a 5.2-percent increase in seat numbers.
The growth translated into record 65-percent passenger load factors as traffic (revenue passenger seat-miles/kilometers) gains of 9.6 percent came in comfortably ahead of changes in capacity (available seat-mile/kilometers), which rose by 7.5 percent. The higher capacity increase over that in seat numbers resulted from regional airlines’ longer average sector lengths in the first 10 months of last year, a factor that also accounts for the greater traffic growth over gains in passenger numbers.
ERA officials say load factors have been rising consistently for “several” years, having increased last year by some 2 percent over equivalent 2006 figures. September saw the highest loads, with just over 70 percent of seats occupied. ERA director-general Mike Ambrose attributed the higher load factors to an increased focus on yield control by European regionals.
With punctuality often dictated by air-navigation constraints in Europe’s crowded skies, the airlines reported an improvement of one percentage point in on-time dispatch reliability. The number of flights departing within 15 minutes of their scheduled time rose from 83 percent in 2006 to 84 percent last year. While just over 15 percent of services were delayed, numbers of flights canceled remained at the previous year’s 1.8 percent.

European regionals log record loads

Feeder carriers in Europe saw record passenger loads last year as increased passenger numbers outstripped the growth in seats, according to the European Re

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