You'll never guess who I (nearly) had in the back of my cab last week

Thankfully, due to the fact that there were no serious casualties from the crashed BA Boeing 777 flight at Heathrow last week newspaper headline writers were free to "play" around with the fact that the Senior first officer's name was Coward, and that he rather than the Captain (whose name was unhelpfully Peter Burkill) was the real Hero.

"Real Hero was a Coward", being the most common offering.

On first hearing of the crash on my car radio on Thursday afternoon, I was struck, initially with incredulity, by the comments of a taxi driver who had been on the airport perimeter road at the time of the crash and who had recounted that the plane had "...just missed the roof of my cab".

I imagined that this was both extremely unlikely and also a ruse to enable this London cabbie to be able to recount in future - in true cabbie style - "...You'll never guess who I nearly had in the back of my cab the other week....not only a Boeing 777 and its 152 passengers and crew, oh yes!..."

However, it appeared as though, having just missed the perimeter fence before crash landing, that this cabbie's tale was not as exaggerated as I first thought.

I am however waiting for the Green "lobby" (WARNING: - don't say this word over and over again, as you may end up in a retirement home with Noel Edmonds - Deal?) to draw the connection between this, near catastrophic event and the pollution caused by aircraft taking off and landing at one of the world's busiest airports.

Campaigners were out in force last week protesting (and presumably campaigning) against further airport expansion at Heathrow, claiming that both the noise and pollution from aircraft, particularly in communities within two miles of the airport, were having a damaging effect on both the people who live there (sorry, by "both" I don't mean to make it sound that there are only two people who live there) and the environment.

Once they connect their view with those of the Air Accident Investigation Branch's findings that all had gone normally until the aircraft was just 3km (two miles) from touchdown and at a height of 180m (600ft). At this point it appears as though the plane had lost all power.

So, it is therefore possible (almost) to land a plane after shutting off the engines in the final 2 mile approach, thereby significantly reducing pollution in the process. Had the plane been at a height of 700ft rather than 600ft, nobody would have known about the incident!

Now whilst this innovative idea, works for landings, it doesn't quite transfer as well to take-offs.

So I was thinking that we could either: -

• harness the power of prayer, (from those thousands of passengers that would in future be praying that their "gliding" planes would land safely), thereby utilising the theory that for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction, or


• combining/joining together the red elastic bands that the UK's postmen discard in front of every house in Britain every day and making several giant catapults to project the planes skyward.

If the above "ideas" don't "prove" that necessity is truly the mother of invention, I don't know what does.