Brave or crazy? The pilots who’ll land at the world’s scariest airport
By the year 2036 it is estimated that up to two million people will be travelling by plane at any one time. the challenges that will present to airlines — not least fuel demand and a worldwide shortage of pilots — will be huge.
But in 2016, challenges don’t come any greater than trying to land a jet at Paro airport in Bhutan.
In the final episode of City In The Sky (BBC2, Saturday) we saw precisely why there are currently only 26 pilots in the world qualified — or prepared — to fly into Paro.
the airport lies in a valley in the himalayas, but with peaks of up to 18,000ft all around, pilots can’t see the runway until they are virtually on top of it.
If that isn’t bad enough, the runway is extremely short, meaning a pilot has to then slam on the brakes or crash nose-first into a mountain. No wonder the airport only hosts a handful of flights a week.
Despite hairy landings like this and increasing numbers of passengers, flying is still the safest way to travel.
In this show, presenters Dr hannah Fry and Dallas Campbell explained why boarding a plane is 50 times safer than getting in your car — and it all boils down to the most amazing advances in aviation technology.
technology like the handy little gizmo that can detect a crack — not even the width of a hair — in an aircraft’s bodywork months before it would become visible to an engineer’s naked eye.
Meanwhile, at a huge control centre in Derby, Rolls-Royce workers were able to map, on radar, all of the company’s jet engines that were in the air or preparing for flight at any given time. At the merest whiff of a problem, an alarm sounded.
everything looked good until a red light flashed somewhere over northern europe. Were the passengers in trouble? No, it was just some bozo of a baggage handler who had reversed his truck into a plane’s engine on the tarmac.
Needless to say, the search for a more environmentally friendly form of air travel is paramount.
Leading the way was a team in Bedford with a huge Airlander 10 hybrid craft. It used a third of the fuel of an average commercial jet and looked like something Captain James t. Kirk would pilot. there was only one drawback: it had a maximum speed of 90mph.
City In the Sky has been such a fascinating series that it has run the risk of making nerdy plane spotters of us all.
Failing miserably to be fascinating was Penelope Keith At Her Majesty’s Service (C4, Sunday). Last night, Dame Penelope was in Northern Ireland retracing the Queen’s footsteps from her Coronation tour and visiting her official residence, hillsborough Castle in County Down.
Considering the castle is by far the lesser known of any of the Queen’s residences, you wouldn’t have thought it would be too hard to conjure up some intriguing, historical facts.
Instead, we learned that the house is thoroughly cleaned before her Majesty visits and that the Royal Family and their guests like to dine on fine food. you don’t say? And there we all were thinking she arrived to a pile of dust and ate out of a tin.
‘this must be the throne room,’ said Penelope, as she walked into a room with absolutely nothing in it apart from two, large velvet thrones. that was shortly after telling us that 21-gun salutes were ‘rather loud’.
the only glimmer of interest came when we were shown old newsreels of a very young elizabeth visiting on one of her first solo tours as a Princess.
She was accompanied by her aunt Rose (the Countess of Granville, the Queen Mother’s sister) and it was touching and sweet to see a nervous elizabeth face the huge crowds in 1946.
‘you must be very proud, I know I would be,’ her aunt wrote to her sister.
It’s a shame the material Dame Penelope was given to work with was so dull by comparison because, unlike some celebrity presenters, she is actually very engaging, competent and likeable.
Christopher Stevens is away.