"If God had intended man to fly, He would not have invented Spanish Air Traffic Control."

[peteryoung]

One of the great things about having an entire two and a half months off werk is that I don't have to constantly talk shop with colleagues: in the queue for immigration, on the bus to the hotel, in room parties (not that we have any these days), in the morning over hotel breakfast... sometimes it's very difficult to just Change The Bloody Subject. When I've spent all day working, I really don't want to have to spend all evening talking about it as well.

So I'll talk about it here instead.

What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery.
– Wilbur Wright, 1902.

The Hudson River A320 ditching was a textbook job well done, with an enormous amount of luck as there wasn't also a long list of extra hassles in the way of the crew getting the plane down and evacuated, and it appears they did not have a great deal of time to plan how they were going to do it, let alone properly brief the passengers. That is why it's actually worth watching that boring safety video. Every year I'm subjected to endless footage of planned and unplanned emergency landings/ditchings, most of which divert from the ideal and end in a very unfortunate and catastrophic mess, so I'm sure this one will be used as an example of how an emergency evacuation on water ought to go. But I do feel a bit for the captain... no pilot would take pride in seeing his/her wrecked aircraft on the cover of every major newspaper in the world.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, 'as pretty as an airport.' Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.
– Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Heathrow's 3rd runway expansion: in case anyone was wondering where I stand on this issue, apart from all the commonly stated reasons against, with which I'm largely in agreement, I've always been anti the proposal because with me it's also personal: the house in which I spent the first four years of my life will literally disappear under a runway, with those ugly-as-fuck A380s landing on it every day. Most of my life has in one way or another been connected to Heathrow Airport; in a few more years it will be able to deliver the final insult.

Maybe it's time I moved on. These days it ain't a fraction of the fun it used to be.

Comments

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I haven't quite grasped the headlock the airport had us in - "If we don't have another runway at Heathrow, passengers will change at X--- instead." Given transfer passengers hardly get out the terminal, it surely isn't that great a benefit to the economy?

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

The idea is that they transfer at Heathrow instead of Schipol or Charles de Gaulle, because it means they will then be flying BA/Virgin/BM etc instead of Air France/KLM or Lufthansa, and those airports and airlines will get all the revenue instead. But we've had twenty-odd years to now realise the economic benefits behind this argument were always overstated, and the idea of the 'transfer hub' is now of rather less importance to airlines, even though BAA still like to argue in its favour, given that they enjoy running shopping malls with airport terminals attached.

[drplokta]

Apart from the direct benefits to BA and BAA, the idea is that if passengers change at X instead, then there is a reduced range of destinations for direct flights from London, because some destinations are only viable if there are transfer passengers to increase the total numbers. People are thus less inclined to do business in/with London, because they have to change planes somewhere, which takes longer and is more hassle.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Remember BAA stuff all their airports with as many shops as possible which employ local people, and you'd be surprised how many people airports employ. That's what the thinking is. Unfortunately, they missed the "making changing planes a tolerable experience", on which Heathrow fails so spectacularly that the only reason we're likely to use it for the Melbourne Worldcon is because I want to go on an A380.

All other trips will involve DUB, AMS or CDG.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Heathrow still have that cross-runway they only use in emergencies, or has that gone in the last few years of building-siteness?

The place I did all my formative plane-watching, the old brickworks, disappeared under Manchester Airport's second runway. That's where I first saw a 747, rotating right in front of me it seemed, when they were still new and exciting. I also remember the Airbus guppies, which were regulars. At least at Manchester they built a shiny plane-spotting place cum mini aviation museum and spotters say the police there know who the first people to notice something odd will be and are therefore friendly.