Ozwitch

A public service announcement of a sort

I was driving home listening to Virginia Trioli on the ABC Drive programme today (local radio 3LO Melbourne), when she brought up the subject of a Virgin Blue flight that was delayed in Sydney last night, because a mobile phone had been detected turned on (or ringing - I missed that bit) in the cargo hold. They had to find the phone, and subsequently missed the curfew and had to stay in Sydney overnight. Lots of grumbling, people missing their business appointments, etc etc. major expense to the airline.
You won't find this incident by Googling (I've already tried), so you'll have to rely on my recall of Virginia's programme concerning the above. But it raised the question of why do aircrew ask us to turn off our mobile phones and cds etc when the aircraft is taking off or landing.

John Howe on Flying

This arrived in my inbox a while ago, from Tolkien illustrator John Howe's newsletter. It's worth sharing:

On the Inherent Serendystopia of Modern Travel...

Getting to the U.S. was no trouble, the only letdown being that I did want to try the new biometric PortPASS portal, which in theory lets you skip the endless lines in L.A.X. and scoot through in no time. Much to my disappointment, there were no lines at all, and their Stargate-style portal was out of order. (I think U.S. Immigration is due to upgrade to Windows 3 sometime soon and the system was down.)