Seating (Journalists Guide to Aviation Part 2)

My old muckers at easyJet have worked out a new way to get money out of you. You can pay to have allocated seats, hoorah! What this means of course is that unlike the good old days, (before easyJet bought ‘Go’), when you bought an easyJet ticket and it had the seat number on it in a sort of ‘allocated’ styley, you can now pay for the privelidge of having that allocation. No big deal really just a cute way to make money on a LoCost airline.

This fact is needless to say lost on certain journalists whom are unable to string any coherent thought together. Ginny Weeks, whom unfortunately nails the ‘female blonde’ stereotype colors firmly to the mast with the following ‘thick as two short planks’ defining logic. Aided of course by the ability to put up for all to see a reversed image of an easyJet heavier than air machine, see below.

After a 19-hour flight from Bali trapped in seat 34E- an aisle seat three rows behind the ‘baby row’ where six (!) screaming children sat, I know all too well how a bad seat can make your journey hell… So it’s great news that easyJet is starting to make passenger comfort a priority. From November, each passenger will have a seat reserved for them, signalling a welcome end to the elbows-at-dawn, first-come first-served set up of old, which saw people scrambling for the best seats and creating stress for everyone.

Ginny darling, how the feck does booking seat 4a when you buy your ticket prevent you from sitting next to the screaming kid? All you’ve done is chosen where you are going to sit, not where anyone else is. I can imagine a few No1’s when being told ‘I didn’t buy this seat to sit near that bunch of screaming babies!’, to say, ‘I’m terribly sorry madam, but thats exactly what you did, you chose seat 4a’.

An easyJet aeroplane the right way round … (yesterday)

Mrs Smith complained about the rising fees, and said many families feel it is a “hidden charge” if they want to sit together. Mr Smith however, having closely read the terms and conditions at the time of booking, seemed satisfied with his seat allocation.

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Air Traffic Slots (Journalists Guide to Aviation Part 1)

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information

Unfortunately in NM’s experience far too many of them fall into the following genre

writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing

So not so long ago a piece appeared in a local rag bemoaning the fact that a reader posted a message on a local airport story, saying an airline could not get the ATC slots for summer flights because it does not have enough staff available to man the planes having made lots of cuts over the winter.

An ATC slot is produced via the CFMU, (thats a big building in Belgium, but thats not important at the moment,) as a function of airspace capacity. Naff all to do with airline staffing. So heres how it works …

Idiots guide to ATC slots.
Its very simple, if you have a room that holds ten idiots, you can’t put eleven idiots in the room. (much as you might like to)
Idiot number eleven has to wait until one or more idiots come out, or the room is made bigger, so the idiot (No11), gets a slot time. This is the time the idiot has to present itself to commence their journey to the room. If there’s only seven idiots in the room, then you can get three further idiots in there without restricting their progress at all, but the fourth idiot and any subsequent idiots will have to wait their turn. If that room is in fact a corridor joining two rooms, then you can only get so many idiots down that corridor at any one time, even if the room at either end has a limitless supply of idiot capacity. Therefore any idiot wishing to pass through the corridor may get a slot time for the corridor, depending on how many idiots wish to use the corridor at any given time. If there is another different corridor, joining the rooms you can send the idiots down those corridors, which may mean that the idiots will not be restricted at all.

So you can see using the above idiots guide, you should be able to see that ATC SLOTS, do not get secured by an airlines schedule, or their staffing levels, they are a tactical daily/hourly response to airspace capacity. But please don’t let inconvenient substance like facts get in the way

Get it Hot (well, warm anyway …)

Mr Munky has been busy of late, however, with today being a georgeous crisp clear blue skyed winters day, it’ll come as no surpise to find that NM has been ‘Thames Whaling’. It seems to be that shovelling shite comes on either a nice day when you’d rather be somewhere else, or a filthy, cold, rainy day when you’d rather be somewhere else. Dunno about you fellow readers but I find it odd that at stables you’ll get plenty of youngsters (gurls normally) shovelling horse pooh day in day out on the basis that they enjoy doing it, and on the chance that they’ll get to ride something a bit racey as a reward for the work.

I must have filled in the wrong forms or something because each time after an hour or so of septic tank turd wrangling, or pushing 20 yards of compacted shite through a tube, theres never been a sniff of a ride as a reward, mind you, theres been plenty to sniff at.

NM has, it has to be admitted, an interest in toy trains, and theres some ‘interesting’ stuff out there. On the subject of compacted shite one has found one or two web pages where the content could adequately be described as such. One ‘member’ has set up his own forum, nothing wrong with that, but due to a lack of visitors the towel is being thrown in and they’ll not be posting any more on the original forum as they have ‘nothing more to offer’. However, if you only receive 0.75 views a day on your web site, it’s safe to say that if your readers can only be arsed to nearly make a visit, then its a bit of a leap of faith to assume you actually have ‘something to offer’ and that what you’re producing isn’t actually X-Factor material. The above mentioned web site in X-factor speak, didn’t ‘deliver’ and hadn’t ‘nailed’ anything, not even the owners vegetables to a plank of wood. Someone does however ‘own it’. I do wonder about such terminology and how yoof see it, especially if you relate it to normal life, if Postman Pat ‘delivered’ your post and then ‘nailed it’ to your door you’d get a bit fecked off having to take a claw hammer to the front door just to retrieve your post, that’d be like, ‘random’.

Do the Maths …

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, apparently the UK’s MP’s have come to the conclusion that the UK now needs a ‘Snow Supremo’ because its mid May and someone in accounts has just knocked the calender over, it falling open at ‘December’. This group of MP’s examined the impact of heavy snow last December which shut Heathrow, Gatwick and major train lines, and left roads impassable. There’s an inevitability here that a load of people have sat around a table listening to people who don’t have a simple grasp of maths, talking to people who don’t have a grasp of maths. You rapidly come to the conclusion that we’d learn more factual and useful information if we’d paid them to sit around lighting and analysing their own farts. Don’t get me wrong re mathematical ability, despite my current employ, I was labelled early on as ‘Suitable for Parks and Gardens’. In retrospect it may have been an extremely astute careers teacher who thought, ‘this ones trouble’ keep him outside in the shit, rather than inside creating it, alternatively, they may have been as thick as pig muck. I know where my vote is.
We all know there are known knowns as Mr Rumsfeld would have us believe. For simplicity there are various impirical measures that we use, and we all understand what they mean as we can all relate to the sizes quoted. They are in no particular order, london bus, Wales, jumbo jet. These are helpfully rolled out by our ‘meejah mates’ so we, as simple folk can understand whats going on. Unfortunately our ‘meejah mates’ don’t stop to think about how to use the cumulative drivel they are seeping into the nations subconcious to provide a more ballanced outlook on life.

So lets look at out ‘stressed passenger’ at the airport that has just closed in heavy snow. Apparently airlines must give accurate information about delays out to the passenger and provide acommodation etc etc. So assume we’re on RyanJet, a low cost airline flying 150 seat airliners. Today we’re lucky all the aircraft are only 2/3rds full with 100 punters per flight. We are however at a busy single runway airport with 30 movements per hour. That means every two minutes an aeroplane departs. We won’t bother with arrivals it’ll get too messy, we’ll assume its the first wave banzai charge of the morning thats been culled. Unfortunately we are at the back of the queue of those wanting info. So in front of us we have 30 x 100 passengers all wanting information they can bellow into their crackberries that they’re ‘at the airport’. Thats 3,000 people/6 x jumbo jets/53.57 x london busses of people all in front of us. We have ten check in desks available to help answer our questions. Thats 300 people/5.3 london busses, per redcap per desk. Fortunately all the redcaps are as fast/helpful as the legendary Jane Boulton and either answer the query or shoot the passenger dead within one minute of them arriving at the front of the queue. So at the back of the queue we will be waiting ‘a while’ before we get seen or shot individually.

So one aggrieved passenger suggests …
Major airports and stations should have accommodation reserved for when people are stranded, and food in place.

Ok, Mrs Thickass-Hite at the back of the queue, lets look at the Abiss Hotel in Luton. 162 rooms, (we’ll assume they’re all doubles). That means one hotel can accomodate one queue each (for cash). So the airport/airline has to book for Mrs TS (in case it snows), ten entire hotels in the vicinity of the airport, just for one hours worth of departures at two thirds airframe capacity. For the benefit of Mrs TS that assumes they are fortuitously empty on that particular day, and that as if by magic, when it pisses down with snow, not one other non-airline traveller in the vicinity of the airport is going to consider booking into a hotel overnight because the weathers bad. Also no doubt she’ll want a personal taxi to the pre-booked hotel, or a coach, and she’ll insist on being at the front of the queue. Course with the snow falling and the roads a bit ‘busy’ you’ll be at any of the ‘pre-booked just in case and cost not passed on to you in increased ticket price hotels’, in a matter of minutes inside the taxi or coach that would have been doing nothing at that time of the morning anyway.

An ’empty’ hotel car park

Then there’s clearing the snow at airports. The most important thing is to get the runway clear, then you can land an aeroplane. And thats it, thats all you can do, because you haven’t cleared the taxiway or parking stand. Until you do that you’re cattled. Lets look at those times. The runway is 2,000 metres long x 50 metres wide. Your snow plough is 10 metres wide and can plough at 10kmh. So if the snow has stopped falling enough to allow the runway to remain clear after each pass, that’s an hour just to do the runway before you start on the parking stand and taxiways. Oh and the service roads because you’ll need to put fuel in the plane and food water etc etc, and no, you can’t use salt. One thing missing is the shamen whom are able to tell us exactly how much snow will fall, and where, and when it will stop, not terribly surprising the comittee didn’t find one either. So if you’re a punter at the end of the second hours worth of booking in/flights … well do the maths, and ask Simon Calder to do them too while you’re at it, then he can talk a little less drivel than normal …

Looking for Goddo

It appears from the web stats that lots and lots of people have been looking for Mr George Michael esq. I can not so exclusively reveal he’s been in the Kharzi. Not as some may erroneously think up to his back wheels inside a prominent ‘Third world’ leader, but in fact, in the bog.