Eideard

A hoax bomber has been jailed for claiming his wife was carrying explosives aboard a transatlantic flight because he wanted to “humiliate” her after their relationship ended.

Kevin Flynn, a 31-year-old chef, phoned police to say a device was being taken on a New York-bound aircraft by his wife, Kerensa, from either Heathrow or Gatwick airport.

Flynn made the anonymous call from a phone box in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, after the couple decided to end their relationship and she was travelling home to the United States…

Judge William Wood QC said: “When there is a chance of large-scale disruption or evacuation of buildings or aeroplanes and airports, this class of misconduct is so serious there is no possibility to do anything but impose an immediate custodial sentence…”

Following the sentencing, a spokesman for Sussex Police said: “Flynn acted without care for any anxiety or disruption he might cause and our investigation and the sentence reflects the seriousness with which we and the courts take such hoaxes.”

RTFA for the details of the soap opera.

Fact is that if the coppers hadn’t been sharp and connected Flynn to an earlier call from his home they might have gone for an emergency evacuation of the plane and the nearby terminal. You don’t always succeed in something like that being safe and orderly. Some innocent person could have been injured in a fear-driven stampede – just for his anger at his wife.

This picture isn’t something you see every day, and it’s something there’ll only be one more chance to capture: a Space Shuttle launch photographed from an in-flight passenger jet. Stefanie Gordon shot this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s launch with her iPhone as her plane descended for a landing.

The shot itself is a rare enough event, but what happened next was an eye-opener for the photographer. According to Mashable, within a few hours of uploading the launch pics to Twitter from her iPhone, Stephanie was getting phone calls from ABC, CNBC and the BBC. Her follower count on Twitter went up by over 1000, and she was getting so many @mentions as a result of the pic that she had to shut them off so her iPhone’s battery didn’t get drained.

Other people on the plane took pics, but apparently none of them uploaded them to Twitter. The real draw of this story isn’t that the photo was taken with an iPhone — people use the device to take extraordinary pics all the time — but the colossal and immediate response the photographer got after sharing it. This scenario shows just how interconnected everything has become today thanks to devices like the iPhone, and it’s a trend that’s only going to become more powerful as more people start sharing information this way.

Go ahead. Tempt me to make something more than incidental use of Twitter and Facebook.

It’s pretty difficult to change a hermit into a sociable old curmudgeon.

Indonesian customs officials have arrested two men suspected of trying to take 40 snakes on to a flight to Dubai.

The two were about to enter the departure area at Jakarta airport when X-rays showed their bags were filled with sedated pythons…

The two suspects told investigators they planned to sell the animals to collectors in the United Arab Emirates, the AP news agency reports…

“People often use the flights to Dubai to smuggle illegal animals,” an official at Jakarta airport told AFP news agency.

“For the sake of flight safety and security, no animals are allowed to be brought on to aircraft without permission and special handling,” the official, Salahudin Rafi, added.

And if they get loose on the plane, it’s a remake of a not-very-good movie.

Britain’s embarrassing efforts to evacuate stranded nationals from civil war in Libya were condemned on Wednesday night. The Foreign Office finally managed to load 300 Britons onto a plane at Tripoli, but only after it had borrowed the jet from BP.

The plane the Government had intended to use to evacuate Britons waited on the runway at Gatwick airport for 10 hours before taking off late on Wednesday night.

Mr Hague admitted the efforts had been a failure and said he would establish a review to investigate. Portugal, Turkey, France and the EU had already pulled out thousands of citizens…

The attempt to organise an airlift of the 540 Britons stranded in the country stumbled. The first plane the Government chartered was delayed on the runway at Gatwick with a mechanical fault.

A second was due to leave later last night and a third, if necessary, today. HMS Cumberland, a Royal Navy frigate, was on its way to the rebel-held eastern city of Benghazi to rescue Britons trapped there.

Doesn’t really build confidence in the plane-rental biz in the UK, does it?

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The quiet neighborhood in Milton where the body was found

The teenager found dead on a Milton, Massachusetts, street last week is the 16-year-old who disappeared from his father’s house in North Carolina, authorities confirmed last night.

Police matched the fingerprint taken from the body, which was found Monday night, with samples taken from a personal item that belonged to Delvonte Tisdale, whose father reported him missing just hours before his body was found…No details were released about how Tisdale got to Boston or how he died…

The case has puzzled authorities since Monday night, when the body was found on Brierbrook Street, a secluded area of the town.

There was no identification on the body, except for what looked like a school lunch pass with what appeared to be Tisdale’s name on it.

Anthony Tisdale reported his son missing Monday at 5:48 p.m., according to a police report from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. The body in Milton was found at about 9:30 that night…The body had been found with broken bones and evidence of massive trauma, especially to the head. A preliminary autopsy did not specify a cause of death.

A 2nd opinion

Officials are looking into the possibility the teenager was hiding in the wheel well of an airplane bound for Boston when he fell to the ground…

Federal Aviation Administration officials said Tuesday jets headed for Boston’s Logan International Airport from the south drop their landing gear when they are over Milton.

And there was a flight from North Carolina the night the teen was reported missing, the Herald reported.

If this, in fact, was how this kid died, it’s a testament to the ignorance of urban legends. People believe this is a safe way to steal a free ride when 99% of the time it ends in death. Either you are crushed when the wheels come up after take-off or you freeze to death traveling at altitude in an unheated compartment – or you drop out of the sky when the wheels come down.

Seasoned business traveler Johnnie Tuitel, a motivational speaker who estimates he’s flown a half a million miles, experienced a personal air travel first last month. A US Airways employee told him he was “too disabled to fly” alone, Tuitel said.

Tuitel, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, had already settled into his seat when the airline attendant who helped him onto the plane escorted him off and delivered this news.

“Their argument was if something were to happen, I can’t help myself or somebody else, which is an assumption first of all. Second of all, the people that made the decision are not medical doctors,” said Tuitel…”They basically told me I was too disabled to fly and I had to fly with a companion and I had to purchase that companion’s ticket…”

The head of the American Association of People with Disabilities called the incident “outrageous.”

“In some ways, I’m not surprised that it happened because there are still a lot of folks that assume that if you have a significant disability that you shouldn’t be traveling by yourself,” said Andrew Imparato, the association’s president…

“There’s a general lack of understanding of disability amongst the entire travel industry, and I think that’s simply because they look at it as a compliance issue, rather than a customer service issue,” said Rich Donovan, who is the chief investment officer of IPS Capital…and has cerebral palsy.

The September 23 incident on a flight from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Kansas City, Missouri, is the only time Tuitel has been removed from a flight in his 20-year career, he said…

Tuitel said that after he was escorted off the flight, he booked a seat on Delta Air Lines and had no problems traveling alone on that flight.

Anyone surprised?

Perhaps TSA will be a thing of the past by then – and I’ll resume flying.

At least 65,000 U.S. airline flights shouldn’t have occurred during the last six years because the planes were maintained improperly, a USA Today survey said.

The six-month investigation found that below-standard repairs, mechanics who were unqualified and slack oversight by airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration weren’t unusual, the newspaper reported Tuesday.

The probe included an analysis of government fines against airlines for maintenance violations and penalty letters sent to airlines obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

“Many repairs are not being done or done properly, and too many flights are leaving the ground in what the FAA calls ‘unairworthy,’ or unsafe, condition,” John Goglia, a former airline mechanic and National Transportation Safety Board member from 1995 to 2004, told USA Today.

The airlines “regard safety as their highest responsibility,” and “their maintenance programs reflect that commitment to safety,” said Elizabeth Merida, a spokeswoman for the Air Transport Association, which represents larger U.S. airlines. The organization said its members haven’t had a fatal accident because of a maintenance issue since since Jan. 1, 2000.

“All these departures from the rules,” Goglia says, “raise the risk little by little until there’s an incident or a crash.”

“Please ignore that statue-looking thing on your left!”

Security rules imposed after the Christmas Day bombing attempt may diminish another one of the gee-whiz aspects of flying, the moments when the captain plays tour guide, pointing out landmarks to the passengers.

Immediately after the attempt to bomb the Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the Transportation Security Administration issued a directive to the airlines banning such announcements in the last hour of flight. The agency also ordered the airlines to turn off the maps on the in-flight entertainment system that show the plane’s progress to its destination.

The agency relented slightly on both issues a few days later, at the same time that it also removed an absolute ban on passengers standing up or using the lavatories in the last hour of in-bound international flights. It left decisions on all those activities to the captain…

A pilot on another international carrier said that he and some of his colleagues thought the caution against pointing out landmarks made very little sense. “The passengers can look out the windows,” he said.

Of course, those interviewed for the article were kept anonymous because – like most “security” directives since 9/11 – you’re breaking the law if you publicly acknowledge that there even is a directive.

The criminalization of the right to speak grows stronger by the day, regardless of which branch of the TweedleDeeDum party is in charge of the asylum.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

With a bend of the knees and an arch of the back, a Japanese engineer today set a world flight record for a paper plane, keeping his hand-folded construction in the air for 26.1 seconds.

Using a plane specially designed for “long haul” flights, Takuo Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima earlier, but achieved with a plane that was held together with cellophane tape.

Today’s flight, inside a Japan Airlines hangar near Haneda airport in Tokyo, was the longest by an unadulterated model. “I felt a lot of pressure,” Toda told the Associated Press after his feat. “Everything is a factor ‑ the moisture in the air, the temperature, the crowd.”

The record was all the more satisfying for having been achieved with a plane that stayed true to the traditions of origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. He folded his 10cm aircraft by hand from a single sheet of paper and did not use scissors or glue…

He will again try to achieve the origami plane equivalent of Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile: keeping his plane aloft for a full half a minute.

“I will get the 30-second record,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Bravo!