This article, reporting on further investigation into the tragic loss of Air France 447 in the South Atlantic in 2009, says that the pilots were “untrained in high altitude manual flying”. (So what, I have to ask, were they doing in the cockpit of a high altitude passenger jet?)
My instinctive, and no doubt infantile, response to this is, “Waaahhh!!! I want my Daddy!!!!!”
In November this year, it will be 50 years since the Juba river flooded, causing widespread devastation in Somalia. An international relief effort was launched, including an RAF airlift, which Dad commanded, as well as flying many of the supply drops himself.
And 50 years later, Somalia is in desperate need again, this time because of one of the worst droughts ever in the Horn of Africa, a drought which has gone on for several seasons and which has placed 14.5 million people at risk of death from starvation or thirst.
An airlift to ship the log books back to England for donation to the RAF Museum would have been the perfect fundraiser for Burning Blue. Unfortunately nearly all the airfields along the way have wars going on around them – Castel Benito and El Adem are both in Libya, Wadi Seidna is in the Sudan (near Khartoum) and there have been a couple of bomb blasts recently in Kenya, although Kenya is still far more stable than places further North. This has been quite a setback as all our planning was around a flying event, but all is not lost!
