The Anonymous Widower

Advice to a Friend

Whilst at the races I phoned a friend to see if he was at Newmarket.  He wasn’t because he was in Tenerife on holiday.

When I got home, I felt I ought to send him a text to keep him up-to-date on the situation with the flights.  He knows that I used to fly a lot and I’d flown with him several times, so he would have thought I could have a bit more information.  So this is what I said.

I wasn’t on the ball this afternoon.  You’re in Tenerife and the planes aren’t flying. So I rang an old flying friend at Heathrow Air Traffic and asked him what he thought.  He reckons that the weather is stuck and the volcano will get worse and planes are unlikely to fly to the UK for at least 14 days. Phone for more details.

I think he swallowed it.  At least he phoned friends at home and told them he’d be back late.

I hope that I didn’t get the 14 days right.

April 16, 2010 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , | Leave a comment

I Can Drive, But I Can’t Fly

I cycled to the GPs this morning and she looked up the rules about driving after a stroke on the DLVA web site.  Click that link and then download the PDF to get the up-to-date status.

As of today, the 15th of April, the rules for driving and strokes are as follows.

Must not drive for 1 month. May resume driving after this period if the clinical recovery is satisfactory. There is no need to notify DVLA unless there is residual neurological deficit 1 month after the episode; in particular, visual field defects, cognitive defects and impaired limb function. Minor limb weakness alone will not require notification unless restriction to certain types of vehicle or vehicles with adapted controls is needed. Adaptations may be able to overcome severe physical impairment.

So I got my driving licence back.

But I can’t fly!

But neither can anybody else in the UK or Ireland.  First the Icelandics take our money and now their volcano takes our airspace.

Perhaps, we should lob a few missiles.

April 15, 2010 Posted by | Health | , , | 1 Comment

Suicide Bomber hits the IRS

A disgruntled software engineer has flown a plane into the IRS building in Austin.

Judging by the pictures of the damage, I thought it must have been something quite large.  But no, it was just a small Piper Cherokee, which weighs about a tonne.

I used to own and fly a Piper Arrow, which is just a Cherokee with a retractable undercarriage.  It was a fine aircraft that had a sorry end as a few years after I sold it, it crashed killing all on board at Oban. 

I also flew another Arrow all round Australia with my late wife.  We visited Sydney, Mildura, Adelaide, Cooper Pede, Yulara, Alice Springs, Mount Isa, Cairns, Dunk Island, Mackay, Brisbane and Goondiwindi before heading back to Sydney.

That was real fun!

February 19, 2010 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , | Leave a comment

Rubbish Green Fuel

Or more correctly British Airways are going to buy aviation fuel created from London’s rubbish.

British Airways and the US bioenergy company Solena are to establish Europe’s first green jet fuel plant in the East End of London.

When it is up and running in 2014, the factory will turn 500,000 tonnes of landfill waste – including household and industrial rubbish – into 16 million gallons of carbon-neutral aviation fuel every year.

It will produce enough fuel to power all of BA’s flights from nearby City Airport twice over. And with 95 per cent fewer emissions than traditional kerosene, the plan will be equivalent to taking 48,000 cars off the roads.

It all sounds very feasible.  Even if it doesn’t end up in aircraft, because perhaps of safety concerns, it will still save a lot of landfill and the fuel can always be used for other purposes.

This will be one to watch.  But as it was published in the Independent rather than a tabloid, I would suspect that the story will be a success.

I also looked up the company mentioned, Solena.  This is their mission statement.

Solena is a next generation zero emission bioenergy company that has developed integrated end-to-end solutions that would help satisfy the world’s growing energy demands while reducing the greenhouse gas emissions and high expense normally associated with the usage of fossil fuel-based energy. Solena’s suite of integrated solutions includes patented plasma gasification technology that is Six Sigma optimized after more than ten years of development, an integrated plasma gasification combined cycle process, and a CO2 capture-to-algae growth and harvesting system. The core of Solena’s solutions is its patented Solena Plasma Gasification Vitrification (‘SPGV’) technology which is capable of producing a synthetic fuel gas (“BioSynGas”) from the thermal conversion of bio-based hydrocarbons with the highest energy conversion efficiencies in the industry. Solena’s SPGV-produced BioSynGas can be used as a natural gas replacement to power combustion gas turbines (CGT) for power production (“biopower”) or catalytically converted into synthetic liquid biofuels, such as biodiesel or biojetfuel.

Solena addresses two significantly underscored energy problems: the need for (i) for baseload renewable energy sources; and (ii) carbon harvesting solutions. Through its highly efficient, thermal conversion technology and ability to gasify whole algae species into biopower or biojetfuel, Solena addresses these issues. Solena works in close collaboration with leading industry participants as strategic partners to help develop various projects promoting the Company’s design and systems expertise and the sale of its proprietary equipment and services. Dr. Robert T. Do, M.D., founded Solena in 2001 and brought more than a decade of gasification experience to Solena.

A company to watch?  I hope so, as if they can solve the baseload requirements with renewable energy then they have got something.  After all wind power only works when the wind blows and it often blows harder a long way from where the power is needed.  But as rubbish is usually produced where power is required, they would seem to have a strong distribution advantage.

A word of warning on cost though is contained in the report here. 

I suspect though as this project is backed by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, that BA/Solena will be paid to take the rubbish.  After all there will be large costs for the disposal of that amount of landfill.  Then there is the employment that the project will create in the East End of London, a place where it is needed.

It just shows that in any project like this you should bring all of the parties and costs together before making a judgement.

February 17, 2010 Posted by | World | , , , | Leave a comment

Eco-Hypocrites

I laughed when I read this article in The Times.

But with global warming it isn’t quite so funny! 

I used to be a private pilot.  I say used to be advisedly, as flying an aircraft is a bit like riding a bicycle or riding a horse, in that once you’ve done it, you never forget.  So if I’m on a flight, when both pilots eat the fish that makes them ill, then hopefully I’ll be able to do the hero bit and save everybody.  I say hopefully, but as I said in a piece in The Times some years ago, the important thing is being able to work the radio, so someone can tell you which buttons to push!

I could claim the moral high ground and say that I don’t fly for ecological reasons, but that is not strictly true.  It is just too expensive these days and I prefer to spend my money in other ways.  I also flew before the low-cost airlines were about and that made a difference to the cost benefits.  Perhaps one day, I’ll take to the air again for fun, but now I look upon it as just an enjoyable phase of my life.  Sadly, there are few pictures of either of my aircraft and the wonderful places I took them.

But I was no Harrison Ford.  As the article in The Times says.

Harrison Ford, who is vice-chairman on the board of Conservation International, voices public-service messages for an environmental federation called EarthShare, and once shaved his chest hair to illustrate the effects of deforestation, is another hobby pilot. He once owned a Gulfstream but now makes do with a smaller Cessna Citation Sovereign eight-seater jet, four propeller planes and a helicopter.

Or John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Opray Winfrey etc.

The sad thing about these people, is that so many celeb-wannabees want to be like them, with multiple homes, private jets, large 4×4’s, the ability to fly your hairdresser all the way from LA to Europe and all sorts of other energy wasteful processes.

On the other hand I heard a story about another rich and famous couple, who did a similar horse-riding safari to myself in Kenya.  They turned up with their enormous entourage of just two friends, mucked in with the other guests and had a very good time.  So did all the other guests!  Often you hear of celebrities and politicians ruining holidays for everybody else.

What we need is an index of celebrities eco-credentials.

They’d love all the publicity!

Or would they?

December 1, 2009 Posted by | Transport/Travel, World | , , | Leave a comment

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart has been one of my heroines ever since I heard a docu-drama about her on Radio 4, many years ago.

So when I saw that Hilary Swank was starring in a biopic, I though this might be a good time to go to the cinema.

But, then I read this review in The Times.

In Amelia, a Hollywood biopic about the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, it’s not just the aircraft that are made of wood. This is a stilted, studio-bound film that fails to achieve lift-off in spite of its subject matter. As Amelia Earhart, the two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank is forced to deliver dialogue that sounds as if it was written in Chinese and then translated into English by a computer: “I’d rather face a watery grave than go on living as a fraud.”

The script is credited to Ron Bass (Rain Man) and Anna Hamilton Phelan (Gorillas in the Mist), but they’ve plumped for pure hack work here.

Oh dear!

November 13, 2009 Posted by | World | , , | 1 Comment

Kirsty Joins the Red Arrows

Reports over the last few days, have announced that Kirsty Moore has joined the Red Arrows as the first female pilot. I’ve searched the Internet and can’t find any adverse comments, even in some of the more feisty red-tops.

It just shows that it really isn’t a problem.

As I’ve said in this blog before, my father was something to do with Beaverbrook in the Ministry of Aircraft Production in the Second World War.  He once told me a tale about whether female pilots were to be used by the RAF in combat.  He seemed to imply that Churchill had vetoed it on the grounds that if one was killed it would indicate to the general public, that things were desperate and it would be bad for morale.  But of course, the RAF used any capable female, disabled and elderly pilots they could find to ferry aircraft from the factories to the front-line airfields, thus releasing the fit male pilots for combat. One in eight of the pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary were women.

But the exploits of female pilots on the western front against the Nazis, were nothing compared to what happened in the east.  I have read the excellent book, Moscow 1941, by Rodric Braithwaite, which describes in details the role of women pilots in that battle.  Wikipedia has some more information on Soviet women pilots and a whole section on the Night Witches.

Good luck, Kirsty, you’re following a lot of brave women.

November 12, 2009 Posted by | News | | Leave a comment

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