DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Now give payouts to flight fiasco families
How is it possible that a solitary rogue piece of data could trigger the complete meltdown of the air traffic control system?
The UK’s National Air Traffic Services is supposed to have sophisticated computers capable of handling high volumes of flights from across the globe. Its inept performance on Bank Holiday Monday would have shamed the operators of a sun-baked mud airstrip in remotest Africa.
If just one badly filed flight plan can, as reported, cause days of disruption – thousands of cancellations and holidaymakers stranded abroad – it shows the whole system is terrifyingly vulnerable.
This shambles will be studied by hostile nations who would relish crippling Britain by grounding our aviation sector.
Pressing questions remain. Didn’t Nats have a proper electronic back-up? Has there been a failure to invest in the most robust and technologically advanced systems?
DAILY MAIL COMMENT: This shambles will be studied by hostile nations who would relish crippling Britain by grounding our aviation sector
Those who say bungling bosses should fall on their swords as a result of this humiliation certainly have a point.
Yet chief executive Martin Rolfe, who now insists measures are in place to prevent another such failure, trousered £1.3million in the year to March. To the casual observer, that looks like an obscene reward for failure.
As ever, the victims of this crisis are the ordinary, hard-working people who saved up for a summer holiday. In the scramble to get back home, many will be left out of pocket. Some are sleeping on airport floors, others are running out of medication.
It is to the aviation industry’s enormous credit that air travel remains, statistically, one of the safest means ever devised of getting from one place to another.
But today, the sector stands accused of abdicating its responsibility to customers embroiled in this mayhem. If fair compensation is not paid, passengers will have been badly let down.
Carnival of violence
The Notting Hill Carnival is supposed to be a joyous celebration of Britain’s Afro-Caribbean community. What a shame, then, that these days it has become more of a byword for knife crime and disorder.
Last weekend, eight men were stabbed, thugs brandished machetes in the streets and 75 police officers were attacked. If such wanton criminality occurred, say, at Glastonbury, there would rightly be uproar.
So why did the violence not warrant so much as a mention on the BBC’s News at Ten – nor even its London bulletin – on Tuesday, once the grim tally had been collated? Presumably because the narrative didn’t fit with the Corporation’s achingly woke, diversity-championing agenda.
DAILY MAIL COMMENT: It is ludicrous that convicted serious criminals such as serial baby killer Lucy Letby can refuse to attend court to hear the judge pass their sentence
Scotland Yard has called for the carnival to be held in Hyde Park in future to make it easier to police. The latest violence makes that plea increasingly difficult to ignore.
No hiding place
It is ludicrous that convicted serious criminals such as serial baby killer Lucy Letby can refuse to attend court to hear the judge pass their sentence.
So we welcome the Government’s promise of a new law that will compel murderers and other serious offenders to appear in the dock, including by force if necessary, rather than hiding in the cells.
These monsters have destroyed lives. Their victims’ families deserve the justice of looking in their eyes as they learn their fate.
- According to the polls, the Tories are set to lose the Mid-Bedfordshire by-election – a constituency they have held for nearly a century. That would be less a defeat than an abject humiliation. But the party should take inspiration from last month’s Uxbridge poll, when opposition to Sadiq Khan’s Ulez expansion led it to a shock victory. The lesson? To throw the kitchen sink at retaining Nadine Dorries’s vacant seat – not throw in the towel.
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