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

British Airways regional subsidiary BA CityFlyer expects to take delivery of its first Embraer E170 some time around September 10 and initially use the 70-seat regional jet for basic flight-crew familiarization and circuit training, according to flight-operations general manager Carl Phelan. Based at London City Airport (LCY), the airline plans to begin flying its first E170 in scheduled service to Edinburgh on September 28. The carrier has ordered six 76-seat E170s and five larger 98-passenger E190SRs, scheduled for delivery at roughly monthly intervals. CityFlyer has also taken options on a further three E190SRs.
BA CityFlyer has hired international flight-training group Oxford Aviation Academy (OAA) to train its more than 100 
<link news>Avro RJ85/RJ100 pilots over the next five years to fly the E170/ E190SR. It chose OAA from several European training facilities approved to offer flight-crew training covered by its Embraer purchase contract. 
The airline’s first course of three weeks’ ground school and three weeks’ simulator training to convert instructors to the new aircraft began at OAA’s center near London Gatwick Airport in July, said Phelan, who noted the first batch of line pilots would follow shortly. OAA will instruct them up to the E170 license level, after which BA CityFlyer will train them in company operating procedures for which the airline will dry-lease OAA’s E170/E190SR simulator.
Embraer obtained airworthiness approval in May 2007 for the E170 to operate the requisite 5.5-degree steep approaches into LCY’s short runway. It expects to gain European Aviation Safety Agency clearance for the E190 by year-end, ahead of services to begin with the larger aircraft next March. The manufacturer claims both ERJ variants offer more than 800 nm of range with full passenger loads out of LCY.
E190 flight testing at the docklands airport, some six miles away from London’s financial district, occurred earlier this year and included noise monitoring; the smaller E170’s sound levels fall “below [those of] current jets” operating there, according to the manufacturer. To perform the steep approaches, Embraer has developed additional fly-by-wire (FBW) software to operate two outer spoiler panels on each wing to generate increased aerodynamic drag and related higher descent rates. An initial plan, since scrapped, had considered introduction of a belly-mounted airbrake.
Embraer claims 90-percent commonality between the two variants’ FBW systems, which feature a single extra button on the pilot’s console to select “steep approach.” The manufacturer says the E170 and E190 will burn about 25 percent less fuel per seat than the BAe 146-200/Avro RJ85 and 146-300/RJ100 equipment they will replace at LCY.
To provide the E170/E190 training, OAA has acquired a dual-fit level-D full flight simulator (modified for steep-approach exercises), computer-based training equipment, flight-management system trainers and an integrated procedures trainer. The OAA group operates facilities in Australia, China, Denmark, Hong Kong, Japan, Latvia, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the U.S. 
OAA comprises a re-branding of the merged (or acquired) former BAe Systems Regional Aircraft Customer Training, GE Commercial Aviation Training, General Flying Services, Oxford Air Training School, Parc Aviation and SAS Flight Academy businesses and has almost 50 simulators and eight type-training centers worldwide.&nbsp;

CityFlyer preps to fly first E170 from LCY

British Airways regional subsidiary BA CityFlyer expects to take delivery of its first Embraer E170 some time around September 10 and initially use the 70-

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