Not that it is very feasible, but one reason why I like the idea of a very fast rail connection between Gatwick and Heathrow is that I was saying ten years ago that we should have one. During the last government’s study of runway capacity and expansion there was a lot of talk about hub airports and how Heathrow with its number of terminals and runways could not compete with Schipol, Roissy and Frankfurt, but a shuttle that takes less than 10 minutes to get between airports effectively makes Gatwick and Heathrow a single airport. It took me longer than that to get from one gate at Singapore airport to one at the other end once.

It was always unfeasible, since it would need to be a deep tunneling operation like the channel tunnel and even then would be under a lot of the richest areas of the UK, also the greatest benefit would be if it was a free or very cheap service – who would be choosing London airport over Paris if there was an additional £20 to get from one terminal to another?

Such an idea would be a lot harder to do now than it was ten years ago when Heathrow and Gatwick were owned by the same company.

There were more B-24s made during the Second World War than there are currently large passenger jets in service in the whole world today!

I think so anyway. I looked at figures for production and numbers still in passenger service for all the Boeing and Airbus jets, plus a few others like the Tristar, DC-10, MD-11, Embraer E-Jet, Ilyushin, and ignored all the small and regional aircraft.

In just over 50 years there have been a total of about 22,700 large passenger jets made of which about 15,700 are still in service as passenger jets – a few thousand short of the number of B-24s built during the war.

Of course, bombers during the war were lost a lot quicker than airliners are for obvious reasons so there were nowhere near 18,000 B-24s in service at the same time, but that was only one model.  Add in the B-17, B-19, Lancaster, Halifax, and Stirling and you have at least 51,000 US and British heavy bombers built during and just before the war.

The most-produced civil airliner is the Boeing 737: 6687 built in 44 years, and 4500 still in service.  In 6 years we build nearly as many Halifax bombers (6178) and even more Lancasters (7377).    When it comes to the American bombers, there were more B-24s built between 1940 and 1945 than all the Boeing 707, 720,717, 727, 737, 747, 757, 767 and 777 planes ever produced between 1958 and today by a considerable margin.

Wow.  We talk about our crowded skies, and living next to Gatwick we see a lot of jets but during the time of WWII there were more than twice as many big military planes built as there have been big passenger planes built in all the years since – and bear in mind that the current fleet is truly global: at any time a lot of them are criss-crossing the Atlantic, doing coast-to-coat US flights, in South America, the middle East, Australia, etc.  During the war most of the big planes were probably in Europe or Japan.  OK, so the big bombers weren’t as big as some of our big airliners, but I find those numbers hard to imagine.

It really makes you think about the scale of manufacturing at that time – at the peak there were more B-24s produced in three months than there have ever been Boeing 747s!  We think the 747 is quite a common plane, but there are a few less than 800 in service right now.   On the first night of the Dresden raids there were two waves of Lancasters. 770 of them in total!

So in one night a single city was bombed by nearly as many Lancasters as there are currently 747s in service in the whole world.   I am finding it hard to get my head round that.  On the same night, a further 360 Lancasters and Halifaxes bombed Bohlen so we had 1110 heavy bombers over Germany in one night.  That is what you call crowded skies. Try to imagine every 747 in the world in one place and you more or less have Feb 13th 1945. Not our finest hour in retrospect.

They make the point that it is not fair to sell somebody a flight for £26 and then, if the return journey is disrupted, have to fork out thousands in food and accommodation for stranded passengers.  Sounds reasonable when it is put that way, but I prefer to look at it like this:

There are laws and conventions about this.  They probably existed before Ryanair did and certainly Ryanair knew about them.   If the air fares can’t cover insurance for such eventualities it just means that the fares were set too low to cover all the costs.  Basically Ryanair were gambling that flights weould not be disrupted, lost that bet, and then decided to ignore the law because it doesn’t suit them.

I have always thought that if something looks too good to be true then it probably is.

Mind you, I might be a little biased, ever since a Ryanair plane took 60 hours to fly me from Sydney to Heathrow, with the crew spending half the trip lying to us about the state of the engines until eventually we had to stop over for a night while one was replaced.  That sort of thing, along with being followed down the runway at Singapore by fire engines and men in silver suits tends to stick in the mind a bit.

But I digress…

Anyway, one thing led to another, as it always does on Wikipedia and we came across the story of British Airways Flight 9.  I can thoroughly recommend reading it for many reasons.  It shows why closing down all air traffic may not be as much of an over-reaction as it might appear to some as it explains not only the damage volcanic ash can do but why it is not detected by planes’ instruments.

What a story though!  Just reading it gave me goosebumps. The plane had all four engines cut out and had to glide for miles and miles, with the real chance of not being able to clear a mountain range if it dropped too far, so the crew had the contingency plan to ditch in the ocean.

There are also some fine examples of British understatement and keeping calm in a crisis. Not sure how calm I would have been if I heard a pilot make an announcement like this:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

After managing to get some engine power back they went to make an emergency landing but even that had problems because the instrument landing system wouldn’t work properly and there was no visibility as the ash had scoured the window completely.  The captain described the landing as being “a bit like negotiating one’s way up a badger’s arse”.  I think there is a special module in British pilots’ school that teaches them phrases like that.

He has not lost his magic way with words though. BBC News interviewed him today and asked him about that terrifying flight and he said “It was, yeah, a little bit frightening“.  A little bit?

I really can’t remember the incident, but at that time I was five months away from buying a television (I finally decided to get one when Channel 4 launched later that year) so wouldn’t have seen the TV news.  Probably just as well because I am pretty sure that when I went to Australia six years later I flew out on BA flight 009.

But back to the 21st Century.  Many people living under the flight paths of major airports are probably enjoying their first good night’s sleep at home for a long time.  When the flights start again I do wonder whether this brief reminder of what it would be like without all the air traffic will have a stimulating effect on the campaigns against airports and runways.

Looking forward to listening to this week’s SModcast!  The fact that it is called “SModcast 106: Go F— Yourself Southwest Airlines” on iTunes is a bit of an indication that he has not been mollified…

1. Top tip: try quoting that saying to the Toyota PR department if you want to see an example of spontaneous human combustion!

We saw the picture of the plane, nose down in the snow, and were more than a little concerned.  Was anyone hurt? we wondered.  There is no sound on the TV feed on these screens, but Jim saw the banner text going across it and passed on the news “all passengers were removed safely”.  While we were all breathing a sigh of relief he followed up with “but they’ll want their pound back!” and hilarity ensued.

I guess you had to be there, but it really tickeld me.

BAA’s owners have scotched rumours that the sale of Gatwick Airport could be imminent.

Before I had even opened the paper there were headlines on the screens at work, which display a tickertape of the BBC RSS feed, saying that the sale of Gatwick had been agreed. Oops This could be a good thing for Gatwick and consequently for all the local businesses that are dependent on it one way or another.  BAA have never really made any secret of the fact that they see Heathrow as their flagship, and it has always been obvious that Heathrow is their priority.

This is not just about expansion, but also about contraction.  With falling demand for air travel, you just know BAA would want to make sure Heathrow kept its critical mass and so would make sure that Gatwick suffered more.  At the very least it has always seemed to encourage the impression that Heathrow is for serious business travel and Gatwick is for lower-priced, lower-margin holiday flights.

In other words, exactly the sort of monopolistic, anti-competitive behaviour that led to the demand for BAA to sell off some of its airports.

This may mean that the new owners of Gatwick will press for a second runway, even if Heathrow and Stanstead build new runways – BAA would have hated the idea of a new runway at Gatwick if it made another one at Heathrow less likely – but that is another matter, and probably not a pressing issue the way civil aviation is at the moment.

What it could mean is that Gatwick will actively try and get more operators to shift routes from Heathrow which would be a boost here, and may even lead to a more balanced division of air traffic, which in turn could lead to less demand for an extra runway altogether.

Or not.  What do I know?   Whatever GIP’s agenda is for Gatwick at least it will not be such a hidden one.

Sometimes I would turn up at the airport 10 minutes before a flight was due to take off and have to rush through the terminal to catch it, although that was down to the Piccadilly Line rather than through choice.

Now you have to be there at least two hours before the flight to check in, effectively adding 90 minutes to a journey.

This time around the whole trip was a pain. Literally.  I don’t think that anyone at the airport or on the plane did anything wrong, its just the way it was.   Almost as soon as I sat in the seat I had a stiff neck, and knew it was not going to get any better after two-and-half-hours sitting there.  I had an aisle seat, which did not help either.  With such narrow aisles everybody who goes past nudges you, and the staff are backwards and forwards all the time.

Jayne had it even worse.  She was in the aisle seat opposite me and had a couple of incontinents sitting next to her so she had to keep getting up to let them out.  Charlie really drew the short straw coming home: he ended up next to a screaming baby.

Fortunately I wasn’t interested in watching the in-flight movies.  I think I would have been very frustrated if I had.  The films were shown on screens hanging from the centre of the aisles.  Every so often the film would freeze  whenever there was an announcement to be made.  When it came to meal time the trolley was parked by our seats while the crew dished out meals: had I been trying to watch the film, I would have been unable to see it for about fifteen minutes.

All in all the flight is now something to be endured rather than enjoyed.  I’m certainly thinking that my next holiday is going to be either in Britain or via a ferry or the Eurostar.   The ironic thing is that so many people still see air travel as a luxury, when it is no better than any other form of public transport.

The only upside was that the new futile security restrictions (futile because they only address the last terrorist attempt – not the next one) do mean a more stringent approach to hand luggage.  Even when I was only going somewhere overnight I would check a bag in with everything in it so I could travel very light.  Meanwhile anybody else going overnight was trying to carry everything on the plane with them.  They were coming on with suit carriers, suitcases, all to save a few minutes by not having to go to baggage reclaim.  It meant that I could hardly find room to put my coat in the storage because it would be full of luggage…