Safety: January 2008 Archives

As a journalist I'm usually the one being accused of misquoting, quoting out of context, making up quotes, etc, etc, generally by people who said something to me that they afterwards regret. Well, I've got reasonable shorthand and I don't often get a quote wrong - but once in a while I have misunderstood what somebody meant, and in that case I hope I've always done the right thing and corrected it. But now I'm on the receiving end. And I really didn't say what the Cape Times of South Africa says I said.

London-based tabloid The Sun has got hold of a remarkable picture of the moment of the impact of the British Airways 777 as it touched down short of the runway at Heathrow last week. The story that goes with it will give you a chuckle.

Way back in my early blogging days I wrote about the BA crew who suffered a near total loss of flight instruments in an Airbus A319 near London and happily carried on to their destination in Budapest when the fault mysteriously fixed itself. British investigators were, ahem, a mite surprised by the decision and even more so by the fact that nobody told them about it. Their report is out.

Iberia at Bilbao. Tengo control!

Whole sequence of pictures at DEIA.com

And so is the A380, and the Boeing 747, and the A320, and....well, you get the idea. Everyone is suddenly interested in this question because of articles like this one on Associated Press which were sparked by this FAA regulatory filing. Some pretty staggering nonsense has been written about the issue since, including by people who should know better. There has also been the occasional sensible comment.