In the near future, they’ll probably have a way. Today, they’d probably tell her to send an e-mail and stay home. Seriously.
Sailboat
I still don’t know if that was all bunk, a specific deterrent, or a general rattling of sabres. However, if there had been missiles, it’s highly unlikely the terrorists would launch them actually from the airport, so tanks on the roads of Heathrow does seem a little bizarre.
I was standing outside the Radisson Edwardian in Heathrow having a smoke and got a bit of a surprise when 2 tanks and several armed foot soldiers went by the front.
The talk at the time was that the missile would have been launched at or around the fence to the airport on the flight path. The planes would be quite low as they’d be either coming in to land or have just taken off.
It all fizzled out though. Can’t remember well but there was some major political storm going on at the time so people became quite cynical about all the security but no arrests, no missile launchers etc. Just intelligence reports.
Hopefully this is a different animal. They are raiding some houses according to the news and Reid says that the "“main players” have been accounted for, whatever that means.
I heard somewhere the plan may have been to release some kind of aerosol into the airplane passenger compartment creating a fuel-air explosion. Don’t know if that sounds doable, it seems to me they’d need a lot of aerosol to be able to create an explosion in such a big compartment.
Apparently the CIA helped the British intelligence preventing the terror attacks,
I can only imagine the chaos at Heathrow right now. And Gatwick; just because it’s been “shut down” doesn’t mean someone said shazam and everyone disappeared. My sympathies to Colophon, and to MerryMagdalen, who is supposed to fly to London a few days from now, on a non-refundable ticket.
Well, as Tom Clancy once said during a speech to a group of journalists, “Conspiracies are extremely difficult to pull off because they require people to do really cool things and never tell anybody about them.”
I foresee a very high probability of you not being in Greece anytime soon - call your carrier and ask them if it is worth bothering to go to the airport.
This kind of thing is a nightmare for the airlines since all their aircraft end up out of position, there are huge backlogs, and even when (if) things get back to normal it can take ages to straighten out the mess. The occasional BA strikes at Heathrow caused chaos for days, and those were nothing compared to this.
Has anyone noticed that the British Home Secretary and the shoe bomber share the same surname?
Oh yeah, there are thousands of people stranded. And thousands of others have given up and left the airports.
Heh, the chief of police, being interviewed this morning on the radio, referred to “John Reid… er… sorry… Reid the shoe bomber”.
As frightening as this is, I have to say it’s been a bad year for terrorists. First 18 terrorists were caught right in my back yard (and are being tried right down the street from me at a courthouse I pass daily), now apparently some 21 have been caught in England and the US. While it’s scary to think that this much terrorist activity has been going on with (independent?) cells, it’s nevertheless a certain comfort that the authorities have been on the ball and have shut them down before they’ve managed to carry out their vile acts. (At least I hope they’ve nabbed everyone involved in the latest threat – I’m always paranoid that maybe there’s one or two they might have missed)
I hope no one has any flight plans for the next few weeks.
Yeah, I’m going to call them later today, when (hopefully) they should have a little more information.
Just to add to the fun, my girlfriend is – you guessed it – an insulin-dependent diabetic. From what I have read so far, sealed diabetic kit is exempted from the “no liquids” rule, so I don’t think that will be a problem. (How much could you seriously blow up with an insulin-vial sized amount of liquid, anyway?)
I need a holiday, dammit, and I seriously don’t need it to start with a whole load of stress.
On the plus side, at least this whole thing didn’t happen 24hrs later, as I would likely have been spending a very long time at the airport.
Apparantly liquid medications, such as insulin, have to be verified as authentic, so probably in their original packaging with original labels etc.
Singapore has restrictions on bringing pharmaceuticals over its border for other reasons, and a prescription form/receipt is advisable - and sometimes vital - there. I’d guess something similar wouldn’t hurt in the current security situation.
Well, looks like my holiday is still on course. The airline, in a touching display of optimism, has told us to turn up at Gatwick for the scheduled departure. They did say we “might want to leave home a bit early” though.
OK, well I went to the airport, and the flight was there as scheduled.
I queued for an hour, reached the check-in desk, and was told that the tour operator went bust yesterday afternoon. So I’m now out £55 for a taxi to Gatwick, and £85 for a taxi back home (gotta love that airport mark-up).
Nice timing, huh?
Shit. Sorry to hear that. Were they ABTA listed - or did you have trip insurance?
Yeah it’s ATOL protected, plus I paid for it on my Barclaycard so it’d be covered anyway. I’ll get my money back, but I’m now at home and it’s starting to rain. Just trawling through Lastminute.com but also considering just taking the tunnel/ferry over to France instead. Not sure I want to go back to Gatwick any time in the near future, it’s an order of magnitude more depressing than normal!
:eek: That just sucks enormously.
I think Gatwick have some kind of corrupt setup where there are only two cab companies allowed to run the rank there, who pay handsomely for the privilege and then ream you in turn. It drives me nuts. I know people who have paid £160 for a cab ride when they could have phoned for a chauffeur car and paid half that…
The new travel restrictions to and from the UK have effectively ended all business travel that me and my co-workers do there. Not one of us is going to sit in airports and on planes for half a day or more with no laptop, no phone, no music, no books, no nothing. Remember, if you must connect to get to the hopping off point, you would have had to have checked your bags - and all your electronics - at your first departure point. And remember as well that under the terms of carriage and the Warsaw Convention bullshit, the airlines will not reimburse you one fucking red cent when a baggage handler decides he wants a new MP3 player or laptop and steals it from your bag. Or your bag simply gets lost. And if my laptop gets “misplaced” at some point during the trip, I may as well just turn around and buy a return ticket, because there’s no point in me being there.
Shit like this is fucking insane: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TRAVEL/08/11/terror.passengers.ap/index.html
I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that this guy could not even bring a fucking book or magazine (the primary tool of the terrorists!) onto a flight, or that he has this bend-over-and-grab-your-ankles attitude in response to it.
You buy a ticket to England for $5000 and what do you get now? You get treated like a prisoner - actually worse, at least prisoners can have a bible or something to read from - you sit down to watch some shopworn second-rate in-flight movie or TV re-runs, you get a meal that’s hardly better than a Swanson’s “Hungry Man” complete with the elegance of plastic cutlery which snaps when you try to cut through the rock-hard steak. Wash it down with either cheap-ass fourth-rate wine or cocktails that smell vaguely of formaldehyde, and they’re very stingy on the refills (shit, the club lounge at Chicago wasn’t even serving free drinks the last time I was there! $5000 and they can’t spare a few bucks of alcohol?). Oh, but you do get a larger seat, and a stupid assed travel kit that usually goes right in the trash as soon as you get off the plane. Oh yeah, if there’s a line to the bathroom, you’re not allowed to use the bathroom in another cabin/section because of some new top secret “security provision” which I cannot find on the TSA website but which some carriers are doing. You tell a bunch of people paying $5000 a pop to “hold it in” because God knows walking back 10 feet to the bathroom at the front of economy class is a “security risk” and only terrorists would do something like that, right?
You can’t work on the flight because you have no computer, you can’t listen to your music, you can’t read, you can’t use a PSP…the flight from O’Hare to Heathrow is 8+ hours assuming you have no delays and aren’t sitting on the fucking runway in Chicago for 2 or 3 hours. This is the romance of air travel?
And I wish the “reporter” had challenged this timbertool in the article:
You dishonest little worm. How about at the barest fucking minimum making the airlines responsible for what we check if we’re forced to check it? In the past the bullshit argument that Congress used (one of them, at least) against compensating for electronic items lost or stolen in-flight was that “every passenger has the option of carrying them on”. Well idiot-boy, that option’s gone, so what is Congress going to do about it?