Aviation Anecdotes

After their relatively poor showing in the last elections, the Green Party needs to redefine itself. Next Monday, Yves Rochat will say how the Green Party views Geneva airport.

An aircraft making a U-turn to return to Geneva is rare but not exceptional. However, when other traffic is stopped to let it land then it is more serious than most.

In the plethora of gloomy predictions in "Le Temps" today, 24 January, was the news that Gulf Air is to stop its Geneva-Bahrain service. Hard times coming?

Last week's Sunday Times mentioned 20,000 British weekend travellers taking easyJet flights to Berlin. An easyJet advert seems to suggest that there are other nightclub places!

Last Tuesday, 17 January, the Times newspaper did not arrive in Geneva. Pity, because you could have read a journalist's 5 steps to happiness (and they don't cost a penny).

Yesterday, 18 January, TSR2 showed the beautiful film "Out of Africa", including some exquisite aerial photography. Meryl Streep was fantastic then, and still is now.

Yesterday, 16 January, the late easyJet flight to Nice was cancelled. An enquiry shows that this was due to a strike by Nice employees of Swissport, affecting many flights.

Berlin and Djerba need tourists for their economy, but in both places there are objections to the behaviour of these tourists: debauchery in Berlin and bikinis in Djerba!

A frequent visitor to Geneva and Zurich is a big Boeing 737 apparently belonging to the Safra Group, which has a private bank in Geneva. The bank has an interesting history.

All of the Swiss airports have seen strong growth in 2011. This means that the air traffic contribution to global warming is increasing. Could Geneva become like Beijing?

As Europe continues towards a Euro crisis, air traffic to and from the East seems to be growing. Scheduled passenger flights to and from Russia are an obvious example.

Last week this paper asked if Geneva airport was the principal polluter in the canton. The response of the airport spokesman was rapidly shown to be rather inexact!

This paper states today that the "Andrea" gale force winds caused problems at Zurich airport, but that there were (almost) no problems at Geneva airport. Not the whole truth!

Yet again the lack of a genuine spare aircraft causes some easyJet Switzerland passengers to suffer long delays. Yesterday, two flights to Gatwick left with almost 5 hours delay!

The Director of Sion airport is said to guarantee confidentiality for rich clients in private jets, including banning photography of passengers and the registration: more separation of "them and us"!