Interesting Facts

6th February 1945 - Bob Marley was born. 1952 - King George VI died in his sleep aged just 56 and Princess Elizabeth became sovereign of Great Britain. (She wasn't declared Queen until February 8, and wasn't crowned Queen Elizabeth II until June 2, 1953.) 1958 - British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway at the Munich-Riem airport in Munich, West Germany. On board the plane was the Manchester United football team, nicknamed the Busby Babes, along with a number of supporters and journalists. Twenty-three of the 44 passengers on board the aircraft died in what was to be called The Munich Air Disaster.

Manchester Airport ran out of fuel today, delaying more than a dozen flights. (The airport gets through three million litres of aviation fuel a day. The fuel is pumped through a 30-mile pipeline, which is the airport's only source of aviation fuel, every day transporting the equivalent of 79 road tankers' worth of fuel, but suddenly the flow of fuel dried up as production problems at the the Essar refinery near Ellesmere Port in Cheshire meant that fuel stopped being pumped to the airport early this morning. Usually the airport has between 12 and 24 hours of spare capacity, but the Jubilee weekend had been very busy with about 300,000 people flying over the four days, and by 17:15 BST the fuel had run out.  I've only ever run out of fuel once, and it was hubby's fault.)

More than 12,000 laptops a week go missing at US airports. (According to a survey by the Ponemon Institute reported by the IDG News Service, an amazing 637,000 laptops are lost each year, most often at security checkpoints. Not very secure security checkpoints.)

If you wear a T-shirt featuring rude words, bombs or cartoon guns you can be prevented from boarding a plane in UK airports. (Brad Jayakody, was wearing a Transformers T-shirt, which showed a cartoon character holding a gun. He was stopped from boarding a flight by the security at Heathrow's Terminal 5. Better not wear a T-shirt with a frying pan either, Tom and Jerry reek havoc with them.)

The recent strike dispute between the BA's catering firm and its workers over job losses which caused the shutdown of all BA operations at the airport resulted in the loss of £30m and forced the cancellation of around 700 flights. (Sometimes I am glad I usually drive back to the UK.)