The best aviation forum on the planet is www.pprune.org . I've got no vested interest in that at all - it's just a fact. If you don't currently follow it then now would be a good time to start. And this thread is as good a place to begin as any.
London Heathrow this week has been a hideous embarrassment to the UK. Take my word for it, we've got serious fog over here. It's nasty and it hasn't lifted all week - this is not much fun. And, the way technology currently stands, fog is a big problem at capacity-constrained airports. Heathrow is down to about 60% of normal movements, which is catastrophic.
It's catastrophic for technical reasons which, depending on who you are, may be obvious or not very obvious at all. There have been plenty of people in the industry who, through their public pronouncements on the web and even TV this week, have shown that even they don't understand the effect of fog on an airport.
So, asking passengers to understand is not a trivial thing. But, as is its usual way, the air transport industry has treated those people with utter contempt. (Just to be crystal clear, I'm not flying this week and the affair has had no effect on me or anyone I personally I know at all.)
At Heathrow today there were hundreds (I think thousands actually) of people who turned up to find not only that there were tents erected outside the terminal to house them, but that there was no room in the tents! (The airport calls them marquees - everybody else calls them tents, because that's what they are..)
Courtesy of former Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief-Alan Mulally's Ford company, I know from the little gauge in my Ford Mondeo that it was 0 degrees C this morning. His former industry thought it would be a reasonable thing to make people with tickets that cost hundreds of pounds/euros/dollars queue at dawn, with their children, in the street!
Well, indirectly I make my living from the air transport industry and I'm ashamed of it. But, as you'll see from the link at the top of the post, there are plenty in the industry who just don't get it.
Recent Comments