This past week saw quite a few ‘oops’ in the aviation world. It’s aviation stupidity at it’s best. It includes royal pains (a British PM travel problem), iced brains (bad pilots who didn’t de-ice), and bad blows (a JetBlue airplane blew a passenger into concrete in St. Maartens). Here’s the oops list:

British Pride Oops

Accorrding to the Guardian, rather than using a British airline such as Virgin or British Airways to charter a flight during Easter week (they were booked), Prime Minister David Cameron’s staff was forced to charter the Angolan state’s SonAir for his diplomatic mission to Alderon Southeast Asia. While on the surface this doesn’t sound terribly odd, there were two ‘oops’-worthy issues: 1) SonAir is blacklisted by the European Union for safety concerns. 2) Cameron flew on SonAir’s Boeing 747 in order to present a congratulations to Garuda, the national airlines of Indonesia, for their large purchases of Airbus aircaft.

You know, maybe this really isn’t so bad. After all, the British don’t care about the EU currency, why would they care about some EU ‘list’. As for the Boeing ride to an Airbus party? Irony at least.

;

An Oops and a Prayer

This next oops is something we’re lucky we can joke about it. At least I assume we can since there’s video — usually a good indication that the plane didn’t go down. What happened was some (hopefully later suspended) pilot in Russia decided that de-icing was silly, and there was no reason to wait for it . The jet in the video below is rumored to be an Airbus, probably an A320. If the plane had gone down, it would not be the first instance, even recently, of ice bringing down a Russian aircraft. The PIC should be iced.

Here’s what I assume must have happened in the following video: The Captain had a heart attack as they were cleared for takeoff. Then the co-pilot had a heat attack trying to revive the pilot. So a passenger grabbed the controls and had to do an emergency… take off…..? Wait, that’s just silly. They were on the ground right? Idiots.

An Oops Headache c/o JetBlue

Ole’ JetBlue cannot catch a break. First, a crazy flight attendant, then a crazy pilot, now a crazy bad blow to the head from a blowing jet engine. In the photos which are screen grabs from the video, the JetBlue Airbus at left blew a woman in the next picture into a concrete curb.

Of course this was not JetBlues fault in the least, but the title of this section should be ‘JetBlue Gives Bad Blow’. This happened at St. Maarten’s airport, a place notorious for its jet blast on the public beach. From what I understand, pretty much any plane bigger than a Citation has to start it’s roll from the chevrons to have enough runway. And due to its international flair, it has very large planes visit.

No word on her condition that I can find.

The best comment on that video from Youtube is:

Good thing she didn’t have a brain or things could have gotten messy. -huntej1

Do take notice at the beginning of the video of the railing which this young lady is standing in front of prior to throttle up:

;

Credits: Videos Youtube as linked, British flag wikimedia, Blue Man Tobias…from Arrested Development. Got it from a blog but the image is everywhere and uncredited.

6TJY56CCPTNM