The Flemish newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws (which of course means “the latest news”) is a unique beast: tabloidy in the range of news items it chooses to cover, to be sure, but at the same time lacking that sleazy tinge common to most of the world’s gutter-rags. Even better, it can be relied upon to catch and publish those bizarre tid-bits flowing on the wires that more established papers usually choose to leave alone.

A case in point is the recent attention it has paid to the operations of Southwest Airlines, no less. That American low-budget airline would seem to have little of interest to residents of Belgium. Nevertheless, it is covered by HLN in some recent stories whose common denominator is the apparent resiliance of its planes towards a variety of threats.

Like a well-endowed female passenger displaying rather too much endowment. This happened at the airport in Las Vegas (where else?), where the lady wanted to board a plane for New York, but was told by Southwest officials that her bosom was just too visible. Somehow the woman (known only by “Avital”) managed to board the flight anyway – maybe she used them as a battering-ram – and later recounted the experience to the website Jezebel.com, exclaiming “And what do you know, the plane did not fall from the sky!”

Then, a little earlier, there was that other grave threat to flight safety: mobile telephone use. This involved a Southwest flight from Phoenix, AZ to El Paso: a man who rebuffed requests from a stewardess to switch off his phone while the plane was landing was promptly arrested once it was down on the ground. As the HLN article explains, “The [telephone’s] signals can create disturbances, and the pilot’s aids during bad weather can be influenced by a gsm telephone.” But this assertion has of course been debunked repeatedly, such as here.

NOW IT CAN BE REVEALED, specifically by Valérie Collet in the French paper Le Figaro in a piece entitled “The anti-terrorist struggle passes through airplanes’ toilets”:

For three weeks the toilets of French airline companies have been at the center of a genuine anti-terrorist combat undertaken with the greatest discretion.

What’s this all about? Well, you might remember those oxygen-masks that are supposed to drop from the panel above your seat on a jet airliner when cabin pressure drops for some reason. Ah, but what if you happen to be in the bathroom at the time? No worries, most advanced airliners have a system of chemically-fabricated oxygen located in that room’s false ceiling to take care of your breathing needs there.

Until now, that is. To the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that contraption in the bathroom is not just an oxygen system – it’s something there ready for cagey terrorists to set fire to, explode, and thereby bring down the plane. So it has to go.

Leaving aside for the moment here the technical validity of the FAA’s objection, the most impressive thing about this affair is the way that agency has shown it can impose its will on the rest of the world’s airliners. As Mme. Collet points out, there are 12,000 planes to which this directive applies flying for American and European companies alone, and many more beyond those that are based in Asia. Yet all of them – one assumes – want to have the capability to fly to the American market and therefore need to get rid of those bathroom oxygen devices. One reason it seems this matter is finally being brought to public attention in a French publication is that, surprisingly, the French are being particularly quick to accede to the FAA’s demands; whereas the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has left it up to national airline authorities to react to the FAA’s demands as they will, the French agency (the DGAC) decided at the beginning of the year to carry out the FAA’s instructions as quickly as possible.

OK, but where does that leave those unfortunates who find themselves caught in the bathroom during a depressurization? Such incidents are certainly not unheard-of: Mme. Collet cites here figures from the French pilots union that there have been 19 of them within the last eight months in European airspace alone, and when they happen, pilots know they’re supposed to descend as quickly as possible to an elevation where there’s enough air pressure for people to breathe normally (around 4,200 meters). But from the usual airline cruising altitudes of around 10,000 meters that takes at least three minutes or more – and, meanwhile, you’re certain to have people stuck in bathrooms, unable to breathe or really to do much at all (except hold on to that cabin’s roof) as the airplane finds itself in a steep dive.

At least they won’t be able to blow anything up, either. And that’s the important thing.

“Not again!” That was surely the reaction among recent travelers to/from airports in Ireland, Scotland, and even some parts of Northern England upon finding that, once again, flights had to be canceled for a brief period due to airborne ash from that Eyjafjallajökull Icelandic volcano. In the meantime, Scottish government officials issued predictably annoyed statements aimed at the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority for taking such action, just like on a larger scale it had been loud complaints from all across the affected area that had hastened the lifting of the continent-wide flight ban that paralyzed air travel within Europe for more than a week last month.

Central to the European complaints had been assertions that the flight-bans were too extreme, that the ash really did not pose enough of a danger to justify the considerable economic damage that the bans caused – after all, a number of airlines actually went ahead and flew test-flights on their own responsibility (manned only by crews and observers, of course) up into the grit-cloud and everything seemed fine. Now the Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny reports on how Europe’s scientific community is finally getting its act together with some direct research aimed at setting firm norms for when it’s safe to fly in volcano ash, and when it is not. (more…)

An interesting incident of the beginning of last May is just now coming to light, initially out of reporting from the Spanish newspaper El País but then picked up by the major Danish dailies. All this makes sense, since it concerns a Boeing 727 from the Spanish charter-airline Air Europa which started to misbehave last May 1 as it crossed Danish airspace. Specifically, it did not respond to attempted radio contact by the Danish flight-control authorities, something that is a big no-no in this post-September 11 world. Alarms were sounded; military fighters were scrambled. (more…)

Sorry, this has nothing to do with Athens, but just in case you were wondering . . . Remember last April when a small private plan flew into the Pirelli building in Milan, and people naturally tied it to the infamous events in New York City of September 11, 2001, and to terrorism generally? Well, according to the mainstream Danish newspaper Politiken, you can rest easy: investigators have reported to Reuters that pilot Luigi Fasulo’s up-close-and-personal encounter with that building’s 32nd floor was simply an accident. They didn’t even judge it a suicide, as Fasulo’s son had maintained. Now, you might further recall that, even before that, some kid just learning to fly had flown an airplane into a building in what I recall was Tampa, Florida. I still haven’t seen any final report explaining that incident – in the Danish press, or anywhere else.