Tin hat, anyone?

When we lack something useful to do, we tend to drop into Flightradar24 on't internet to see what's on its way over us wherever we happen to be.  When the wind's in the south west (ie most of the time) we're under the final into Gatwick.  In Lagrasse, we are close to the corridor used by most stuff from the UK to the Balearics and southern Spain, destinations much loved by the package tour operators.  One such is Jet2.com, and Flightradar24 is ever ready with data on the aircraft being used on each service.  The average age of their fleet is somewhat north of 20 years, so whichever of us spots one first, the comment tends to be 'got your tin hat handy?'.   Not that we have the slightest evidence that the airline or its fleet is less than 100% safe and reliable, of course, and we make no observation in that regard, express or implied.  Hereabouts, the veterans tend to be the few remaining British Airways 737s, some of which are creeping up to 22 years old.  The record lately was held by a McDo-Douglas MD-something or other - a late version of the old DC-9 before it became the Boeing 717.  This one was from somewhere in the Balkans, and was well into its thirties.  I used to fly on the type frequently when I was the firm's man in the Nordic region: SAS and Finnair were loyal Douglas customers back then.  Excellent aircraft: quiet and comfortable, and strongly built.  My most remarkable experience of the type was one day when I'd narrowly missed a flight out of Zürich - I forget where to.  The Swissair office in Zürich Hauptbahnhof blithely said, 'oh, we can get you there via Basel'.  Arrived at Kloten (Dutch speakers: kindly stop sniggering.) and installed in the MD-whatever, I was told that they had to change a wheel, which they proceeded to do.  I collared a stewardess to say that I had a very tight connexion at Basel, and, to cut a long story short, was to be seen sprinting across the concrete at Basel pursued by a taxi-ing 737.  The flight from ZH to BS took all of ten minutes.  The onward flight in a noisy Saab took an hour and a half.

Kent got a bit of a shaking the other day when an elderly Latvian Antonov entered UK air space without clearance.  The RAF scrambled a couple of Typhoons, which, to catch up with such a racehorse of an aircraft, had to go supersonic, laying a sonic boom path over much of the county.  I've heard the occasional rumbling turboprop sounds, and they have proved to be from aircraft of this type.  But neither Wednesday's Antonov nor its Eurofighter obligato registered with me on the day, though had they decided to shoot it down, matters might have been different.

A possibly elderly Thomas Cook 757 shed a dollop of overwing escape chute close to the Kent-Sussex border on Friday.  The crew didn't identify the problem until the plane was over Belgium, whereupon they turned back to jolly old Gatwick.  It has subsequently been found lying - no doubt peacefully at rest - in the churchyard of our parish church.  Glad to report that neither detachable Boeing bits nor shot-down Antonov fragments  landed on our sitootery.

Meanwhile, the grass is cut after a fashion, and we have planted out some winter colour.  With the help of a birthday present of a garden voucher, we've acquired some instant colour (pansies that look like Groucho Marx) for the box by the front door and some daffodil bulbs, which Martyn has planted out in borders and containers.