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.