Saturday, January 19, 2008

The Morning Star on Brown and the Heathrow crash landing

The Morning Star is an extraordinary newspaper. Year after year, it keeps going as the one national daily newspaper which does not normally pass the consciousness of most people. Whenever I see it on a newsstand, I snap it up - if only for rarity value.

Today's edition leads with an interesting take on the Heathrow airliner crash-landing. Under the headline, "The shape of things to come" it says that anti-airport expansion campaigners described (the accident) as a "wake up call to the dangers of expanding an airport in an urban area". Good point.

The Guardian has some excellent detail on the accident. What I find very spooky about some of the modern generation of aeroplanes, such as the Boeing 777, is this:

Rather than relying on cables to move ailerons and rudder, wires carry electrical signals from the pilot controls to its primary flight computer.

That scares the living daylights out of me. We've all been in a situation of a power cut when everything goes. And computers? Don't get me started...

The Morning Star has an excellent cartoon by Martin Ronson. With the title "China flight crash latest", it has Gordon Brown as a BA Boeing 777, crash landed on a runway amongst discarded tyres labelled "Northern Rock" and "Looming recession". To puzzled Chinese officials, Brown says: "Greetings Comrades! Let's Trade".

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