by B. N. Sullivan
The redesign and reorganization of Aircrew Buzz is nearly complete. If you are reading this on the blog's site, you already will have noticed the new appearance. (If you are reading this via the RSS feed, I invite you to click through to the site and have a look.)
Content from my two other aviation news blogs, Professional Pilot News and Cabin Crew News, has been merged into Aircrew Buzz. That's right, all the content from all three blogs now lives in one place -- right here -- and that's why the Aircrew Buzz archive looks like it gained some bulk! Going forward, I will be posting all aviation news for crews only on Aircrew Buzz.
The blog was redesigned not just to give it a fresher look, but also to make the site more user-friendly. The goal is to help visitors to the site quickly find what they are looking for. If you look at the sidebar, you'll see links that yield pre-sorted batches of posts.
Crew News
Some posts on Aircrew Buzz are inherently more interesting to pilots than cabin crew, and vice versa. Now you can choose to view all crew news; or only the posts of interest to pilots; or only those of interest to cabin crew. How this works: As a part of the blog's reorganization, all posts now bear tags that can direct them to separate streams for pilots or cabin crew. Some posts go to both, of course, such as those about a major accident.
Industry Sectors
You can now choose to view all posts relevant to one particular sector of the aviation industry, e.g., airlines, air cargo, business aviation. Again, as with the crew news topics, there is some overlap. For example, information about a given aircraft type may be of interest to both freight pilots and passenger airline pilots.
Labor Issues
You can select and view all posts about labor issues, or quickly find only those about a particular issue of interest, say, furloughs.
Aircraft Info
You can quickly find news and information about new aircraft models or types; type-specific safety issues; flight deck and cabin features, and so on. The listings are organized by the name of the airframer, e.g., Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, etc.
Carriers
There is a (long) list of air carrier names in the sidebar. Names are arranged alphabetically, but are not sorted by industry sector. There is a separate list for Former Carriers -- those that no longer operate, either because they were acquired by/merged with another carrier (think TWA or Northwest Airlines), or because they ceased operations for one reason or another.
Coming Very Soon
The menu bar under the Aircrew Buzz header will have tabbed pages where you can quickly find links to the blog's most popular posts; posts about high-profile accidents and investigations; and popular videos.
The refurbished Aircrew Buzz is still being tweaked here and there, but the bulk of the redesign work is complete. Now I can start posting news again!
