Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

So, four and a half pints later, and I'm back home. I have no idea why I am not totally blitzed as normally 3 pints puts me well on the way to blitzville, but it could possibly have something to do with the vast amounts of food I ate :) Sausage and mash and onion gravy and, umm *blush* the side order of fries probably soaked up a lot of it.

Anyway, I had a very good evening with thalinoviel, yakking happily about nothing in particular. And drinking cider :) Hurrah for fun evenings with friends.

I ordered the above CD yesterday morning, having read that it was available on d_floorlandmine's LJ. It arrived this morning! I'm seriously impressed and will have to go and rate my amazon marketplace seller very highly indeed.

It's still as wonderfully funny as I remember it :) For the interested, it's a recording of an after dinner speech by David Gunson made in 1982. He was an air traffic controller for 23 years and his talk about the ins and outs of the profession and flying a jumbo jet is just deliriously funny. A few quotes for your amusement.

"I want to tell you some odd facts and figures about airplanes which you possibly didn't appreciate and b) to alleviate any fears the next time you fly."

"....Airfields, however, are difficult to hide. You can put billboards round them, that sort of thing, but people will notice the odd jet going in and out. Consequently, the Government knows where 80 per cent of the airfields are...."

"We have not had an air-traffic controlled crash in the last 16 years in this country. We still get crashes on landing and take-off, but that's the pilot's problem. If he can't get it right for the first and last three minutes of the trip, well it's a pretty poor show."

"My job is extremely simple as an air traffic controller. All I have to do is stop the airplanes banging into each other and I've won. If they do bang into each other, I've lost. The only redeeming feature is if it's a really good bang, at the subsequent board of inquiry, I'm the only one there."

"If you go back a short period of time before we had air traffic controllers, if you wanted to go from here to France, you'd get into the airplane, point it at France and go. You were likely to meet someone going Paris-Birmingham coming the other way and the crash occurred somewhere around the half-way point. This was bad news for the passengers....."

"It is a fact that on Concorde at 1500 mph you're doing at 25 miles a minute, which is faster than a bullet from a gun........Which is why we've never made a military Concorde, because if it opens fire, it shoots itself down."

*giggles*