Alas one of our redoubtable Samzdatistas is marooned at Newark Airport as all flights into the UK have been delayed due to the volcano eruption in Iceland.
I am still pondering some way to blame David Cameron for this…
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Volcano woesApril 15th, 2010 |
 19 comments to Volcano woes |
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…..or more sensibly Gordon Brown seeing as he’s had at least a couple of years to set it up.
It was not in the 5 year plan, boxes were not ticked, lessons were not learned, they did not know what to kiss and when etc etc.
It has been said elsewhere that the Leader demanded ‘cash’ from the Icelandic types, and they thought he said ‘ash’.
Progress in returning the UK and environs to the aviation age may be monitored here:
http://flightradar24.com/
I blamed George Bush/BigOil/Walmart/Goldman Sachs/Globalisation……….
Seriously, it will be interesting to see the climate effects of all this stuf in the atmosphere, not to mention the effects on health.
Newark? Great goblins, that is more like a prison sentence from Gaia.
The Samizdatista should take advantage of being marooned and apply for refugee status.
Surely you have to be joking. With that Marxist SOB in the Whitehouse the US is more likely to get decent people leaving rather than arriving.
As with the UK most of the ‘Refugee’ applicants are really illegal economic migrants. It is only the ineptitude of the legal process in both countries that prevents this.
Newark? Great goblins, that is more like a prison sentence from Gaia.
I do recall the Unix fortune cookie once informing me that “An exotic journey in downtown Newark is in your future”.
Seriously, though, how is JFK any better?
Seriously, though. JFK, Newark, Heathrow, Narita. Why do the world’s greatest cities have such awful airports?
My favorite airport of all time was that of Montreal (didn’t get to see the city though).
Without doubt The Grauniad will prove that it’s all Maggie’s fault.
I look forward to seeing their argument.
My favourite airport of all time is (privately owned by Bangkok Airwaiys) Koh Samui. No walls, only roofs.
As for this volcano, I think the Icelanders set it off deliberately to get us back for that business with the banks.
Too late, Rob:-)
Well if you are going to get stuck in an airport, I recommend Palermo myself, especially if you are a smoker. I had to wait there for 6 hours not long ago, for a flight to the little Italian island of Pantelleria.
You smokers know how it is at Heathrow and Stanstead etc, you feel you have just re enacted a Proclaimers song trying to find a door to the outside so you can have a quick drag. Not so Palermo.
It is a sweet little airport with a whacking great open air terrace along the whole front of it, and you are never more than 20 feet away from access to the main bars and restaurants.
So you can get yourself a seat, a Peroni and a slice of pizza and light up and people watch to your hearts content.
You dont want to stand out as an uncool unfashionable Brit though, so what you must do first off, if you are wearing a long sleeved shirt, is to roll the cuffs back, just so. It is de rigeur in Italy, I have seen even 8 year old italian kids do it…
Question: All this volcanic ash filling the air recalls to mind the “nuclear winter” fear which was all the rage (in certain fashionable quarters) 30 years ago. As I recall, that was going to make the planet colder for a generation or more. So will the Eyjafjallajoekull eruption offset the dreaded global warming that is today’s panic du jour? Is Gaia taking care of us?
Well in a couple of words Laird, probably yes. Gaia is.
You only get to hear about volcanoes when they happen like this and cause a lot of fuss. They arn’t like earthquakes which are sudden events, usually Vulcanologists see them coming and people can get out of the way of them.
But there are a hell of a lot more of them than we generally realise.
It’s the SuperVolcanoes that we have to be worried about. The one that is under Yellowstone Park is estimated to have the power to shut down civilisation entirely. And it’s not a question of if, but when.
But even the ordinary ones that go off regularly every few years have the capacity to significantly alter the worlds climate in a colder direction, so why the hysteria over a little CO2 in the atmosphere is completely beyond me.
Human arrogance I suppose. The belief that mankind can control everything, when it is blatently obvious that we cant.
We are about as powerful as fleas on an elephant as far as the forces of nature are concerned.
Bugger! Forgot to include the link, interesting article here…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7596395/Ash-cloud-reminds-us-that-we-should-all-be-afraid-of-volcanoes.html
You can blame it on Cameron – or at least the EEC.
Taken from Witterings from Witney: http://witteringsfromwitney.blogspot.com/
As with BBC ‘fair reporting’ generally, what it does not tell you is that air traffic movements over all of the European Union are now controlled by Eurocontrol – in other words Britain does not have the final ‘say’ over the use of her own airspace.
“You dont want to stand out as an uncool unfashionable Brit though, so what you must do first off, if you are wearing a long sleeved shirt, is to roll the cuffs back, just so. It is de rigeur in Italy, I have seen even 8 year old italian kids do it…”
Now I’m confused: I’m a Brit and I’ve been rolling my shirt cuffs back for years without giving it a second thought… yet a new dimension to my personal oddness.
There may be other interesting repercussions, depending on precisely what damage the ash does to jet engines and how quickly, at its various concentrations over UK airspace.
It’s been said about the ash cloud, with a very broad brush, that “prop-engined planes can fly, jet’s can’t”. Whether this is purely a matter of altitude and likelihood of intersecting the cloud, and just how much damage would be done to a jet as opposed to something internal combustion, I admit I don’t know, as I’ve heard arguments about both. Still, I’m glad that airlines are investigating this independently, for a particular reason…
It’s well-known (reported in the press, anyway) that the Russians have been “knocking on our door” again recently, by popping over in Backfires on a course headed for UK airspace. We typically pop a couple of Tornados or Typhoons up, to say “not today, thank you”.
Now, the Russians still have Bears – cold war-vintage bombers which are, crucially, prop-driven – either still in service or only retired very recently (there’s photos of Typhoons flying alongside them). So, if the Russians were to employ a Bear to knock on our door, what could we sensibly do to answer it?
With tongue firmly in cheek, of course, how many flight-ready Spitfires and Hurricanes are there in the UK, which could be temporarily pressed back into service?
On the “airports to be delayed at” front, while I may not be as well-travelled as many of you, Amsterdam Schiphol isn’t bad – it has a mini-Rijksmuseum in Terminal 2, which is a lovely place to while away maybe an hour, and a place to go, to subconsciously make you think you’re not at an airport.
I spent 6 hours stuck in Budapest on 9/11 while Germany had its airspace closed – although while there wasn’t much in the way of amenities, they had a TV news feed, so nobody was anything approaching bored…
Dave: I don’t think the Russians will be flying any Tu-95s over to Scotland – perhaps the prop engines will work, but how are they going to prevent damage to the aircraft’s instruments from the ash? I’m no aviation expert, but surely that would be like flying blind?