Well, well! BAA is not flavour of the month. Having been told to sell off Gatwick they now have another crusty jewel in their crown to sell. Stansted is seen by the Competition Commission as the second airport BAA should not have. But it doesn't end there. The hapless airport company is also told to sell either Glasgow or Edinburgh as well. This is all a bit like the ditty Ten Green Bottles, or, in their case, seven. They did have seven. They could end up with only four. And if Heathrow doesn't get better than Calcutta Airport, they might have none.
BAA once was the "British Airports Authority" and did have some authority. Then they were privatised and stuck with the BAA monicker, but were definitely no longer an authority. At this rate BAA could mean Bugger All Airports, but that would be terrible. They're not that bad. They just need to get a grip of things. Like many corporate businesses they put themselves first, the shareholders second and the customers come a poor third. If they don't want to have their airports picked off one by one they should figure out how to put all three - customers, bosses and shareholders - in a happy win-win situation.
Unless that happens they can expect to circle the planes as the passengers may be on the warpath!
Belfast International Airport is investigating an embarrassing lapse in security. Or more accurately, just a typical example of the lack of attention to detail that seems to pervade British society these days. It beggars belief that nobody thought to ask about the car, which had a pipe bomb in it. The vehicle was in a long-stay car park and airport parking firm Q Park said "it was confident that car had not been there for a year".
The reports of this only suggest that police are investigating the possibility that the car was there for almost a year. I suppose someone just suggested the possibility. But the real problem here is the need to investigate such an error. So many horses bolt from so many stable doors. I think a lot of our problems stem from bored staff, doing tedious jobs and not really bothering. After all, is it such a fantastic job wandering around a vast array of cars, watching planes zooming off to different climes, letting your mind drift off into fantasies. Honestly, if it were me, I'd not be too sure if a car was there for a year or a day. If the system has flaws (the company said this vehicle was not pre-booked so was not on the number plate recognition system) then who knows what car is what?
One only has to thank the chances that came about to render this bomb a virtual dud.
All flights out of the UK have been grounded at least until 01.00am tomorrow. Most people accept that such an act of nature is something that happens and it is far better to be safe than sorry. However, whilst accepting the weather patterns and natural phenomena they find it hard to accept the attitude of those running travel businesses today. And it's not just travel companies. Customer service is appalling in Britain.
This morning I saw two women being interviewed at Birmingham airport. "It's just that nobody tells us anything," one said, with an air of passive acceptance. But why is that? Is it beyond the commercial understanding of businesses to realise that this lemming-like approach to customer avoidance just heaps up the resentment of passengers?
It should be a prerequisite that staff are on hand to explain what is going on. What is the point of having a board of directors if they just run away as soon as something difficult happens? I'll vote for the person who suggests mandatory customer liaison lessons for British businesses. Goodness knows we need it.
Come on you travel industry types. Get down to those airports and tell your customers exactly what's going on! Oh, and they know there's a volcanic cloud in the air.
There's been an awful lot of talk about body scanners recently, mainly from those who think it unseemly that their private parts and other bits may be seen by ogling airport operatives. Personally I'm not bothered by that aspect. I'm more concerned by the burgeoning industry that is making a fast buck out of terrorism. How much are these body scanners? Apparently they cost $150,000 to $200,000 a pop. Then there are all the other ways to make people part with their cash in the name of fighting terrorism, such as dawdling in front of airside stores for a couple of hours.
I remember during Ted Heath's three-day week arrangements of the 1970's how people made money out of us, such as selling candles or flogging portable gas heaters. Now everyone is entitled to earn a living, but I think this modern day saintliness proffered by government agencies in the name of fighting terrorism is a lot more sinful than they would like us to appreciate. After all, if they eventually got round to spraying that poppy crop in Afghanisatan it would bring tears to the eyes of the arms traders. Am I being too cynical today?
I see that complaints to airlines have gone up 11% in a year. 12,307 people complained. A whole load more just grumbled, swore and stamped on the floor. In a way, I'm with the 12,307. At least they did something about it. The airlines are so busy giving us cheap seats, which is what we demand, that most everything else goes hang. It is a miracle some days that people don't explode more often.
I'm a great fan of Meet the Parents. Greg Focker had his problems flying to meet his future father-in-law. In this quote from the film, Greg is trying to fit his large bag into the overhead bin -
Flight Attendant: I'm sorry, sir, you're gonna have to check that. Greg Focker: I got it. Flight Attendant: No, I'm sorry, that bag won't fit. Greg Focker: No, no, I'm not - hey, I'm not checking my bag, okay? Flight Attendant: There's no need to raise your voice, sir. Greg Focker: I'm not raising my voice. THIS WOULD BE RAISING MY VOICE TO YOU, okay? I don't want to check my bag, okay? And, by the way, your airline? You SUCK at checking bags, okay, because I already did that once and you lost it, and then I had everything screwed up very badly for me, okay? Flight Attendant: Well, I can assure you that your bag will be placed safely below deck with the other luggage... Greg Focker: Oh, yeah? How do you know my bag will be safe below with the other luggage? Huh? Are you physically going to take my bag and put it beneath the plane? Are you going to go right now outside, with the guys with the earmuffs, and go put it in there? Flight Attendant: No... Greg Focker: No? Okay, then shut your piehole and listen to me when I say that I am FINISHED with the checking-of-the-bags CONVERSATION.
Not a suggested conversation dialogue for real life, but one can appreciated the scene. However, some passengers can be really obnoxious and cause a lot of problems for other passengers as well as the airline crew and staff. I have to say, in my time on planes (30-odd flights in as many years) that it is not the staff but the passengers that I would complain about. Several times when "deplaning" some have behaved as if they were the Gadarene Swine. Pushing and shoving par excellence!
If you're going to have a crash landing, banging into a row of portable toilets may be a way of effecting a lucky escape. A pilot did just that in Washington State. It has been said that the toilets had "kind of cushioned things". So that's alright, then.
My mind went to what it would be like if someone was actually using one of them. In my experience, they are now something to be wary of. All levers and pedals with violent flush mechanisms and a whiff of strange chemicals. Assuming that you had overcome that to settle down to a relieving experience, the last thing you would want is to be rudely interrupted by an errant pilot. This one appears to be lucky and unhurt. Thank goodness nobody thought of using one of the toilets.
Geoff Hoon only got his feet under the desk as Transport Secretary this week. He now comes up with the idea that expansion is a good thing for Stansted Airport. That remains to be seen, but none of this airport growth is joined up. Each airport is competing with the next for passengers, most of whom will come out of thin air in order to make the numbers game work.
If you added up all the passengers that are supposed to be rushing though UK airports in 2020 you would have around 500 million. Just like all the baloney babble that the banks have been talking about, so the airport industry comes up with the same sort of nonsense.
Birmingham Airport talks of 30 million, Stansted is slightly more conservative at 35 million, and the rest keep piling on the numbers. If it all really did add up we'd be forced onto planes just to make up the passenger totals. A kind of pressganging for airlines!
Common sense? Doesn't it tell you that in the present financial climate, people are going to cut back on air travel (just a bit?)? It's all so crazy. Airlines are going out of business, people are cutting back on holidays, but Geoff Hoon and the airport chiefs are on the yellow-brick road!
I'm due to take my wife to Luton Airport soon. It couldn't be Birmingham because the route to Berlin doesn't exist. However, Luton it is.
Do you think airports are for providing services to airlines? Or are they in the retail business? Or is it car parking?
I'm beginnining to think it all starts with car parking and ends with the airlines. If you look at the Luton site, there is something very telling about all this. In the Short Term parking area you could (I can't imagine anyone so foolish) pay over £500! Long Term parking is £80 a week. OK, you can book online and get discounts, but the parking fees must be raking in tens of thousands a day!
I realise that parking needs to be paid for, but this scale of charging is higher than renting an average one-bedroomed house. It seems crazy that we are paying more to park the car than fly in the plane!
It's something that is not unlikely to happen, although the likelihood of such a thing happening is not usual. However, today it happened. Two planes had a minor collision at Manchester Airport due to being too close to each other on the taxiway. An airport spokesman said that "this kind of thing shouldn't happen" and I thought they never really do.
However, David Learmount, of news service Air Transport Intelligence, said incidents of aircraft being damaged at airports were relatively common. "It's a serious problem in terms of expenses, but it's very rare that it involves people getting hurt." I then thought that maybe we don't hear of the bangs and bumps unless they are so blatant as to be publicly witnessed, as today. If Mr.Learmount says it's "relatively common", and he should know, does this imply that pilots are not that good at driving a plane, more the expert at flying the things?
Sir Alan Sugar has been involved in a minor plane crash. More accurately, his four-seater light aircraft hit the end of the grass strip with its propeller. Sir Alan was unhurt. This is not mega news, I know, but the response by the media seems to be mega by proportion.
The BBC flag this up as - Alan Sugar 'survives plane crash'. You'd think this was some terrible accident with a jetliner going down in the middle of Manchester. Instead, it was a minor incident.
City Airport Manchester has a grass runway. Light planes tend to bounce around a bit when landing on grass. Nothing normally to worry about. The BBC hyped up the headline, but Sir Alan put the reporter right. "As far as 'life-threatening' is concerned, to put things in perspective my friend and I had as much chance of dying from the incident as we did in dying from food poisoning from the tuna sandwich that a very nice lady made us in the clubhouse whilst we waited for a mate to pick us up and take us home." Which is his way of saying there's nothing in the story.
So the headline doesn't fit the narrative. How many times have we seen that? If the media was subject to the same labelling laws as the retail sector, we might get nearer the truth in our everyday lives.
