Seems like the best solution to me would have been to decend to 10,000′, depressurise, open one of the doors, and chuck the body out :diablo:

Andy

Well, considering that the Conservatives are making a fuss about this at the moment, its very difficult to find any real information about their thinking on their website – in fact, I can’t find it. Typical headline grab with no substance then! 😮

Anyhow, taxing frequent travellers will not reduce air travel but will simply move the extra costs to the consumer – as a regular travellers on business, my travel is viewed as a necessity by my company (we do have to justify our travel), and what we charge our customer will simply be adjusted to reflect increased travel costs. The ultimate end consumer is you and me, so at the end of the line we will all pay for this stupidity. I also cannot see how an individual can be taxed for business flying – it will be the business that will have to pay. Can you see a scenario where a person who has to travel for work then, as a result, has to pay much more tax to go on holiday? No, so business flying and personal flying will have to be treated seperately, which will create an interesting administrative challenge for the government.

I am concerned that targeting domestic UK flying in particular will simply move more travel back to cars, as in many cases the train isn’t a viable or price realistic alternative. Is moving people back to cars a good idea – oh, I forgot, they’re going to tax that more too! :rolleyes: And anything that actually REDUCES air travel (rather than just constraining its growth) will put jobs at risk, which again I don’t think is a good thing – of couse, the tree-huggers will say that a few job losses are worth taking to save the planet, but I’m not so sure…

And taxing fuel is totally meaningless unless it applies globally. There are agreements on such matters anyway, but in any case most airlines will simply tanker fuel from the continent if fuel costs are substantially higher here than elsewhere – that in turn increaes fuel burn and creates more emmissions.

I suppose that the good news is that, if less people travel then slots at LHR will be easier to come by – with the possible ending of Bermuda II later this month, I guess that’ll make new trans-Atlantic entrants happy! 😮

Andy

The aircraft looks excellent (there’s a picture of it on UKAR in sunshine) but the photo is horrible. Why a.net is accepting photos with such poor contrast and colour management is beyond me – goes to show how broken their process is.

Andy

Watched “The Queen” (surprisingly watchable actually, especially considering I’m not a royalist) and “Casino Royale” (crap except for the chase scene at the start) on Luftwaffe flying Vancouver-Frankfurt earlier this week – ah the joys of J-class and VOD!!! 😉 Now I’m just about to take a look at “Borat” here at home.

Andy

To obtain Blue Plus status, you need to earn 20,000 miles on your Blue Diamond Card.

Diamond Club members only need 18,000 for silver… I believe that the correct figure is 3000 miles.

Andy

More “boozers and shaggers” (someone who works in the airport’s words, not mine!) infesting the EMA terminal… :rolleyes: Great – NOT! 🙁

Andy

Actually, I’m going to Vancouver on Monday! 😎

However, no Zoom for me – I’m flying j-class with Luftwaffe, sorry Lufthansa… 737-300 then A340-300 :p

Andy