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Thursday, 27 January 2011

More theatre or being practical?

While the MSM are short stroking themselves into an offence seeking orgasmathon over what a couple of old soccer players said about a female match official (about which I'll probably blog tomorrow) they're missing the opportunity to tell us how important it is in the wake of the Moscow airport bomb that airport security must be made even more ludicrous. They could have been pushing metal detectors in the car parks, fluoroscopes at check in, and the formation of orderly queues to see somebody with a vocabulary of under 100 words in his head and a speculum in his hand, just on the off chance that one or more of your body cavities are rigged to explode.* Frankly we should be grateful to Andy Gray and the other one whose name I forget for providing the perfect distraction. It's also gratifying to see that behind the security theatre there appears to be people ready to make a very hard decision if it came to it.
A man has been arrested after an Etihad Airways flight travelling from Abu Dhabi to London's Heathrow Airport was redirected when a passenger began making threats.

Two Royal Air Force Typhoon jets were scrambled to accompany the plane as it landed at Stansted Airport, north of London, about noon (UK time) on Monday.
Diverted north to Stansted and a fighter escort? Hmm. Looking at Google Earth and drawing a line (handily these are always Great Circles in Google Earth) from Abu Dhabi to Heathrow, which is apparently where Etihad flys into, I see they get very close to London, and I can well remember sitting in traffic on the A30 just by the airport perimeter and seeing the lights of three or four planes lined up to the east - over south London. Draw the line to Stansted instead and not only do you find it going well to the north of London but also over a much longer section of the English Channel. In other words if you really feel the need to shoot it down you keep it further from the capital and have nearly three times as much water into which to drop it.

Now maybe I'm reading more into things than there really is and going to Stansted is just to annoy the other passengers and because the nearest police station has the cells in the basement and those stairs, oooh, you wouldn't believe the number of times I've nearly come a cropper on them, I'd hate to think what it's like for someone wearing handcuffs, haha. But being terribly cold blooded and practical about it you'd hope that there is a plan of action in place in case someone does manage to take over an airliner and point it at prominent London landmark - David Cameron's forehead, for example.** Because if that's the plan then everybody aboard is dead anyway. They might be breathing and talking and wondering what's going on but their cards would already have been well and truly marked.

Obviously nobody wants to have to shoot down a passenger aircraft, and not least because at the moment the RAF would probably be forced to bounce a cheque for the fucking missile. Hopefully it never happens, but I'm glad that someone appears to have given it some consideration. That's awful but sensible. Now whoever it is, can someone get him to think long and hard about Domodedovo and look at the potential for casualties a similar attack would have in the shoe checking and gonad fondling queues in Heathrow.



* More than normal.
** Or possibly a high value target instead.

Comments (3)

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"Obviously nobody wants to have to shoot down a passenger aircraft, and not least because at the moment the RAF would probably be forced to bounce a cheque for the fucking missile."

Unless they manage to intercept it offshore and shoot it down before it crosses to land, what's the point of the jets? Shooting it down ANYWHERE over or even close to London is going to do every bit as much damage as if Ahmed had firewalled the throttles and pointed the nose down anyway....
1 reply · active 734 weeks ago
That's the idea of the Stansted diversion I guess. Stansted may be a London airport in the minds of its operators and people like Michael O'Leary but the reality is its nowhere near London. Sending a Heathrow bound plane there means more time to get planes in the air to meet it and more sea to shoot it down into. The geography works in favour of the RAF - even if it diverts as late as Dunkirk it'll pass well north of Chelmsford and have to cross 120km of sea before the British coast. If it diverts earlier, say while it's still over Germany, that's more like 160km of sea. In short it doesn't get anywhere close to London unless a hijacker leaves it until very late in the flight so there's no time to divert or get fighters up to intercept it, and from the hijacker's POV that's got a lot going for it it also risks not getting control of the plane in time to do anything. Presumably they would only get one or two virgins, and they'd be quite ugly.
That's the idea of the Stansted diversion I guess. Stansted may be a London airport in the minds of its operators and people like Michael O'Leary but the reality is its nowhere near London. Sending a Heathrow bound plane there means more time to get planes in the air to meet it and more sea to shoot it down into. The geography works in favour of the RAF - even if it diverts as late as Dunkirk it'll pass well north of Chelmsford and have to cross 120km of sea before the British coast. If it diverts earlier, say while it's still over Germany, that's more like 160km of sea. In short it doesn't get anywhere close to London unless a hijacker leaves it until very late in the flight so there's no time to divert or get fighters up to intercept it, and from the hijacker's POV that's got a lot going for it it also risks not getting control of the plane in time to do anything. Presumably they would only get one or two virgins, and they'd be quite ugly.

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