My flights to Amsterdam and Sao Paulo were cancelled today because of the volcanic ash cloud, so I have been watching the news about the issue in the hope that I might be able to arrange to get away either this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Edinburgh Airport, unfortunately, has a way to go to catch up with Aberdeen and Glasgow Airports, both of which make good use of Twitter to keep passengers informed.
The last thing people want to see, especially those living in the UK or eastern US at the moment, is more pictures of snow-bound cars, but that’s exactly what I’m putting here. After spending 6 days in Riyadh and Dubai, where average midday temperatures were in the mid-to-high 20s Celsius, it was disconcerting for me to come back to the scene above in Lauder. I had seen some of the BBC reports emanating from my home town while I was away, and my wife, Jan, had of course kept me up to date with the continuing snowfalls, but it was still a rude awakening for me when I arrived home - certainly something of a contrast with the warm sunshine in Dubai (see below).
Like so many yesterday, I had a bit of a nightmare journey home from Dubai: the flight from Dubai to Amsterdam overnight was uneventful and on time; the problems began when my flight to Edinburgh was cancelled as we were lining up to board the plane (the aircraft was switched to Glasgow instead); KLM assured us we would all be re-booked onto later flights, but a quick call to Amex (Cisco’s travel agent) told me that the two later flights due out of Schiphol to Edinburgh were already fully booked; Amex found me an alternative route by BMI via Heathrow, and so I found myself in London late in the afternoon boarding a flight to Edinburgh; however, after sitting on the tarmac for 40 minutes or so beyond the scheduled take-off time, the captain announced a computer fault which, if it could not be fixed, would necessitate our disembarkation; thoughts of a second cancelled flight in one day were dispelled 20 minutes later when the announcement came that all was well; and so off we went.
I arrived in Edinburgh at 7.15pm and found myself back in Lauder at around 8.30pm after a slow and cautious drive down to the Scottish Borders in the back of a taxi. Even with the snow, it was a welcome sight when I finally arrived home!
I have to admit, as someone who depends on the skill of airline pilots around the world several times a month, the headline that popped up from the Guardian in my RSS feed stopped me short:
I felt some relief when I realised the headline was in the Education Guardian and that it was about this test-crazy government’s futile attempts to soften the deleterious effects of the ridiculous testing regime that schoolchildren in England have to endure. I can continue to fly safe.
The ultimate in low-cost travel. Isn’t it just a great story? As Tim notes:
“We have so much to be grateful for. We also have so much to fight for, to make the world a better place. It’s easy to fall into acceptance of the unacceptable. It is a good world where people can take joy in something we jaded few lament as a tiresome burden. But it is a better world where we can share what we have, finding more delight in achieving and in giving than in having.”
BBC Newsreader on the news that the Senior First Officer was piloting the Boeing 777 when it crash-landed on Heathrow yesterday: “The inquiry will seize on this revelation.”
It’s a fact, and a factor to be considered, but hardly a ‘revelation’: the Captain and First Officer (or First Officers) on every long-haul flight tend to share piloting duties fairly equally - it is standard practice.
Having just stepped off a Boeing 777 in Amsterdam this morning, after an overnight flight from Kuwait, I got home a few hours later, after a further flight to Edinburgh, to find myself watching the aftermath of the emergency landing by BA 38 at Heathrow. The Triple-Seven is a great aircraft, and one that I quite enjoy flying in, to the extent that one can enjoy any flight these days - not only can it land on one engine, and fly on one engine, it can, if necessary, take off on one engine!
Early indications are that the plane came in at a right angle to the southern runway, took a sharp left turn at the last moment towards the runway, and only just made it over the perimeter fence before landing hard on the grass a few hundred metres short of the start of the runway. The result, we can all see in the wall-to-wall coverage on the 24 hour news channels (BBC News 1 - Sky News 0, by the way - the BBC had clear and extensive helicopter images from early minutes while Sky spent ages talking over a couple of blurred phonecam pics).
Interesting snippet from the coverage is that, to date, there has NEVER been an incident in which both engines have failed simultaneously in a modern twin-engined airliner, not just in the case of the 777, but across all the major passenger jets. It is going to be interesting therefore to hear what has caused today’s hard landing - has something happened that has caused a loss of power across both engines at the same time? No point speculating - I’ll leave that to the news channels as they try to fill up the minutes and hours.
Postscript - The pilot of the 777 has just been quoted as saying that he “lost all power and avionics” and had to glide in for the final stretch before his dramatic landing. Not sure if that contradicts all those witnesses who have been quoted as saying that the engine noise of the plane as it came down was louder than usual.
I have taken quite a few photographs on my travels during 2007, none of them likely to win photographic competitions, but all of them reminders of a year like no other for me, a year in which I crossed the globe a few times (and literally on one trip). I have compiled some of my photos into a slide show and have loaded the result onto YouTube. Great memories for me and some nice music to accompany my nomadic year.
I will be catching a flight out of Edinburgh tomorrow morning to Zurich, en route to Skopje, Macedonia. Thence, to Bucharest, Romania, and on to Baku, Azerbaijan. I will be back home on Friday night, which will give me approximately 48 hours before I fly out once again, this time to Australia (to speak at the ASLA and ACEL conferences in Adelaide and Sydney, respectively).
Driving back and forth between my hotel (just north of Heathrow) and Cisco’s HQ (just south of Heathrow) I passed a forlorn looking Concorde sitting beside one of BA’s huge hangars just off the northern perimeter road. I wanted to stop and take a photograph but I would have been taking my life (and my liberty) in my hands by trying to stop on that particular road (the image is taken from ShultzLabs on Flickr).
It is still, for me, the most beautiful aircraft ever built.
Searching for some images of Scotland on Flickr yesterday, I came across some amazing aerial views of the west coast by Doc Searls, he of Cluetrain Manifesto fame. Looking through them I assumed he had chartered a plane especially to allow him to take the photos, but in fact he took them while on a scheduled flight from Heathrow to Los Angeles. The height the pics were taken from should have told me this.
But how many cloud-free days like this do we see over Scotland’s wonderful west coast? Precious few.
