LAX actually run suicide ops at night sometimes. Planes taking-off westbound (i.e. over the bay) while incoming planes land eastbound.

Thanks, Littlegirl! Yes, I had my doubts about this when it was being shouted about at the time, but had thought that the practice had gained broad acceptance/implementation. Thanks for clarifying.

Yesterday I was flying on an A321 in mid haul config, in the WT cabin. I had a row of three to myself, so I put the middle table down, placed my phone on it and plugged it into the USB charging point so it could charge during the flight.

One of the CC came along and said - quite abruptly - "if you're not using that, unplug it".

Why would this be?

The risk of a lithium battery fire is a real and significant one onboard. The power supplies onboard are not as reliable in terms of voltage and frequency as the plug in your house, this increases the risk of an onboard battery fire. Consequently if a device is just being charged it must be monitored. That is why we insist that a charging device is visible and monitored by the person whose device it is. You cannot be asleep or out of sight of your device. In order to prevent endless circular arguments with passengers about this issue we say that unless you are using a device it must not be being charged and not in use.

Travelled Dub-JFK on Wednesday in J. I'm on liquid medication for a cough and I forgot to pack a spoon when transferring the liquid into a small bottle to bring on board. Cabin crew very kindly gave me a CE spoon and said I could take it with me.
Fast forward to security at flight connections and my bag gets taken out for a hand search. The agent asked me if I was carrying any knives or sharp objects in my bag to which I obviously said no. Imagine my surprise when he pulled out the BA spoon I had been given on the DUB flight and said the sharp point on the end of the handle was a concern!
Not being overly bothered I surrendered the offending spoon and continued my journey. Afterwards it made me think that if 1 spoon from the new cutlery presented a concern to security at LHR, how do BA manage with a whole cabin full of potential weapons?!
On my return to Dublin last night I did examine the handles of the new cutlery and they do seem rather sharp although I'm not sure they would be sharp enough to be considered a weapon!!
I am sure that this was nothing more than an overly cautious security officer as I presume any new design of on board items such as cutlery have to checked for this sort of thing or does the airline have free reign to do as it wishes with the design of such things?

As you say this is a real risk. paul4040 see the LAX Fire
for a real world example. Lithium battery fires are dangerous because they can generate their own oxygen, and pouring water on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRKK6pliejs

is a very bad idea as the reaction produces hydrogen which is bad m'kay, especially when you already have a flame present.

And here in London we sometimes have an odd situation when there is a changeable or short term light wind.

Clearly a runway change at LHR is a royal pain, and the runways are long enough for a slight tailwind to be acceptable - so you could have operations using the 27 runways despite a modest easterly wind if it was expected to change back or drop to still before much longer.

At LCY, changing the runway in use is much easier, and the runway being much shorter having any tailwind is quite a bad idea. So, in the same situation, the airfield would always change to using runway 09.

So - you can sometimes see the planes for LCY and LHR simultaneously coming in over London...

... with both approach routes going over where I live.

Same, I love watching it on a warm evening. LCY approaches swooping at 2000ft, LHR making a big arc at 4000ft-ish. FlightRadar on the iPad seeing where they've all come from, a relaxing way to spend the evening if you're a first class geek.

Yes, I think that qualifies as geek ... and why not?

LHR stays on westerly ops in a light easterly wind mainly due to noise issues resulting in the 'Westerly Preference'. End changes do cause delays, so we do try to minimise them, but only within the wind parameters we have (dry runway we can run up to a 5kt tailwind on westerlies.

One for the cabin crew if I may?

Is it a documented policy that the only passengers allowed upstairs on the 747-400 are those with seats on the UD?

I flew BA271 from LHR to LAS on Friday 6th and we were plagued with non-stop foot traffic from both the downstairs Club and WT+ cabins. It got so bad (loud, raucous laughter, general noise and disturbance, plus bad language) that I had to complain to the Senior Cabin Crew Member (as the CSM was on his break). The only way they could get passengers back into their seats in their respective cabins was to put the seatbelt sign on for a while. The crew on the UD were then given strict instructions to turn back interlopers and not allow them upstairs.

The crew in general seemed young and one of the two crew on the UD was working her very first Club cabin and had only been in the job for six weeks. As an example of her naivety I had to ring the call bell three times to get a bottle of water (as none were handed out after the meal service) and when I mentioned that I'd pressed the bell three times she commented that she'd heard the "boing" but didn't know what it was.

Equally, when the seatbelt sign came on earlier in the flight due to turbulence it took her a good 3 - 4 minutes before she checked whether people were in their seats and strapped in. All of this was fed back to the CSM on the plane at the time and to Customer Relations since then.

All in all not a good flight but after speaking to the SCCM it improved markedly. I have no doubt that over time the CC on my flight will become more astute and assertive but the whole experience left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.

Not really sure who to ask, but my sister who runs a Scout Group near Cardiff wanted to go to Cardiff Airport with her Scouts for a tour and I suggested that they could look in on the BA hanger to see a stripped down 747. Any idea who to ask? She reckons she can get some free publicity in the local papers as they cover much lesser events.

I don't have any direct contact details, but I'd say it would be unlikely for a scout group (age 10.5-14 I think) with all of the health and safety risks in a hangar. I organised for a group of school children interested in aviation careers to come to the Heathrow hangars three or so years ago and it was horrendous to organise! I had to do so many forms and it ended up being limited to over 16s, plus a 1:4 supervision ratio from BA staff, and one of them got left outside the gate when they produced a photo oyster card as 'government ID'...

I have in the past gone out and run 'air activities badge' lessons at scout groups in the community before but I'm LHR based unfortunately.

A better bet might be the airport itself - I know Liverpool airport do tours, you can have a go at spotting things on the x-ray at security and all sorts!

Best of luck with it though!!

Oh my

Hard not to laugh at this though.