UPS Airlines added its first 747-400F to its European fleet, replacing an MD-11 freighter. Aircraft is powered by CF6-80C2B5Fs and will operate a five-times-weekly Cologne-Hong Kong service.

Lufthansa confirmed to ATWOnline yesterday that it temporarily has removed four A300-600s from service as a result of reduced demand. "We have parked the aircraft for an unspecified time," a spokesperson said. LH has no current plans to park additional aircraft, but if further capacity adjustments are necessary it will consider removing A340-300s from the fleet, the spokesperson added.

Teledyne Controls won a contract with Wizz Air to provide its Flight Data Interface Management Unit for installation on 70 A320s and possibly 25 more. Technology will handle flight data acquisition, aircraft condition monitoring and data recording. Wizz also selected Teledyne's Application Generation Software to enhance aircraft condition monitoring capability.

Arik Air took delivery of the first of three Trent 500-powered A340-500s. Aircraft will be operated on flights to London Heathrow, New York JFK and Houston, Airbus said.

Malev Hungarian Airlines took delivery of the first of four former SAS Group Q400s. It plans to introduce four new Q400s beginning in 2012, replacing its F70s and CRJ200s.

China's ARJ21-700 made its first flight on Nov. 28, GE Aviation announced (ATWOnline, Oct. 10). The GE CF34-10A-powered regional jet reached an altitude of 9,000 ft. during the 1-hr. flight, which took place approximately 11 months after rollout. The aircraft is produced by Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China. A second flight is planned for this month, "followed by engineering flight tests in early 2009," GE stated.

A PASSENGER-TO-FREIGHTER AIRCRAFT conversion is not a simple matter. It's not the actual conversion process that is particularly complicated; there are a number of companies with the capability to do modifications. Rather, it is the process before the conversion takes place that is among the most tangled in the aviation business. An airline needs to ground an aging passenger aircraft and then determine a price at which to sell it. A lessor or another airline needs to be seeking to add a freighter and agree to pay that price.

There won't be any significant breakthrough [in engine emissions] for at least three decades. There's no technical fix. All we can do is reduce the amount we fly." So says Joss Garman, founder of the anti-airline PlaneStupid.com environmentalist website. But talk to Mike Benzakein, Wright Brothers Institute professor and chair of the Aerospace Engineering Dept. at Ohio State University, or Alan Epstein, former R. C. MacLaurin professor of aeronautics and astronautics, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you get a starkly different story.