{"id":2628,"date":"2012-02-03T09:47:10","date_gmt":"2012-02-03T14:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=2628"},"modified":"2012-02-03T09:47:10","modified_gmt":"2012-02-03T14:47:10","slug":"goodbye-malev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=2628","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Mal\u00e9v"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hungary’s flagship airline is no more: after 66 years of operations, Mal\u00e9v unceremoniously stopped<\/a> flying after two of its airplanes were grounded in Tel Aviv by a demand for advance payment for fuel and services.<\/p>\n

Though the news is not unexpected (Mal\u00e9v has been in deep trouble ever since it was ordered to repay several hundred million dollars worth of state subsidies that were deemed illegal by the European Union), I am still saddened. My first ever professional contract<\/a> in 1979 (yes, I was still in high school) was to write code to simulate the take-off of Mal\u00e9v-owned TU-134 aircraft at Budapest’s Ferihegy airport under various adverse conditions, calculating the maximum safe take-off weight. I also have other memories, such as nearly missing a Mal\u00e9v flight in Bucharest in 1983, as in Ceausescu’s capital by that time, fuel was scarce, public transport was unreliable, and taxicabs fueled by natural gas were not accepting passengers to the airport due to the chronic fuel shortage and rationing. (I hitchhiked and caught my flight with only seconds to spare.) Ferihegy Airport without Mal\u00e9v is just not the same.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hungary’s flagship airline is no more: after 66 years of operations, Mal\u00e9v unceremoniously stopped flying after two of its airplanes were grounded in Tel Aviv by a demand for advance payment for fuel and services. Though the news is not unexpected (Mal\u00e9v has been in deep trouble ever since it was ordered to repay several […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,21,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aviation","category-hungary","category-personal","category-37-id","category-21-id","category-35-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2628"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2630,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions\/2630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}