[OT] Heathrow hires high-wire team to change ... light bulbs

[Nightjar]

There is always a sensible reason, even if it is not one you would choose yourself.

They are just as long as they need to be to get from one airport to another. Passenger kilometres are about the only way to make a meaningful comparison between different modes of passenger transport.

As the figures I posted show if I use my bus pass, I am generating far more CO2 than if I take a flight and it is quite difficult to get to somewhere like Madeira by bus.

I doubt there are many people who have been living in places that are under flight paths longer than the flight paths have been there. Why should they get preferential treatment over any other people who take advantage of the lower cost of housing that is blighted in some way?

Colin Bignell

[Nightjar]

...

Indeed. The ratios come from the IPCC, who believe in these things.

Colin Bignell

[charles]

I doubt if you'd find an extending ladder long enough. Have you been to T5?

[Adrian]

45mpg average here, since February over 10,000 mixed-use miles, from motorway cruise to back lanes to mile-from-cold local bimbling.

Petrol, not diesel. Not even high tech - carburettor, manual choke, 4spd box - and not even a cat to convert CO to CO2.

That's the 205, not the 2cv. That managed a little lower, about 42mpg.

Better not to ask about the v6 Shogun. 15 to the gallon from the last tank...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Which just shows there is no such thing as a true average (other than as a guide).

If you lived in London, you'd have very different results. And of course the majority of the population live in urban environments.

[Huge]

Hear, hear.

I worked in a building in Canary Wharf which had been designed by a world renowned architect and cost £750M. It was shit.

[fred]

In article , Adrian writes

Might be an idea to ask for some trainers for Christmas, it's not doing you any favours driving around on those lead divers' boots.

[Gefreiter Krueger]

I looked at the photo. Have you got a measurement?

[ARW]

This quote

A spokeswoman for British Airways said: 'We are working with the owners of Heathrow Airport to improve the lighting levels inside Terminal 5 due to concerns over the brightness of the terminal in the winter months. 'Work has already started on the lighting improvements and we are confident that it will be resolved to our satisfaction very soon.' She added that she could not confirm whether the email by Vicki O'Brien was genuine

[ARW]

125 feet

[SteveW]

Similar to the car parks where 2 out of 3 spaces have a column in them or some spaces have a bollard or trolley park right on the line, yet these spaces are no wider than the rest, so no-one can position vehicles in the spaces and be able to open doors both sides.

At the local shopping centre, the car park had an entrance/exit that was too narrow and too sharp, so a vehicle exiting (sharp left) could not do so without crossing over the centre line of the road. If a vehicle was waiting to come out, another could not come in at the same time, but the queue of vehicles waiting to come in made it impossible for vehicles to come out! For years everyone complained about it. Eventually they changed the car park layout, moved the entrance a few feet ... and built the same problem in all over again!

Pillars in front of the windows?

Where I am working now, the entrances to the toilets on each floor have two doors one after the other - so close together that they've had to put warning signs on to avoid accidents. The inner door also hits anyone that is using the hand-dryer and due to the washbasins and the unit they are intalled into, the person drying their hands cannot stand to one side. Anyone using the washbasins prevents access to the toilet cubicles.

SteveW

[Gefreiter Krueger]

Sounds fine to me.

[Gefreiter Krueger]

Ok, so you make a specially long one. Firemen get up to high buildings just fine.

[Dave Liquorice]

extending

The Daily Wail says "up to 120 feet" (37 m). That's not much for a decent cherry picker, plenty available from the hire shops with working heights above 37 m. They do tend to be diesel powered though so I guess the 'elfs don't want an engine running in a "confined space". But that's not insurmountable plenty of garages have exhaust gas dilution systems. Maybe the floor isn't strong enough for the point loads, but again that's not insurmountable with load spreading boards/blocks/WHY. 'Elfs again insisting on a 50 m "exclusion zone" around it in case it falls over? But surely the rope access people aren't going to work over the general public are they? Yes you can net off underneath to catch anything they drop but that needs to be able to catch a 10 mm washer to an entire light fitting. With that many fittings I wouldn't like to say that they are all properly fixed...

[SteveW]

I went to school in a building that won design awards in the 60s :(

1) Floor to ceiling glass, so freeze or bake depending upon the time of year. 2) Flat roofs, so numerous leaks. 3) Internal drainpipes, so more leaks - especially into the classrooms below the chemistry labs. 4) Design based upon a rectangular hall/dining hall, with a square building at each corner, overlapping one side to allow a doorway at each common wall section. The squares containing variously classrooms, labs, gym and engineering/woodwork block. Hence whenever exams were on in the hall, pupils had to move from block to block outside the building, no matter what the weather - there weren't even any pathways to the engineering block!

Adding to the design failings were the build quality failings. A school elsewhere collapsed and schools throughout the country were checked - ours was found to have been built on inadequately drained ground, the walls of the hall were slowly tilting outwards and the concrete main roof beams were only on them by 1/2" each side. The wooden block flooring in the dining area was forever lifting due to the damp under there. Internal walls were all painted breeze-block, so brushing against them took skin off.

SteveW

[newshound]

I'd have to disagree. I used to ride on a lot of logging tracks. The problem is that even tractors dig wheel ruts which get dug progressively deeper at sticking points, whether or not there is initially a lot of mud. And on stony ground horses actually help, they break up the larger stuff and compact the surface into a mixed-size surface which is both firm and well draining, whereas vehicles with driven wheels just dig holes through wheelspin.

I could show you a track which walkers never used, it was just very unfriendly scree. After I had been riding it twice a week for ten years, it became very nice to walk or ride on, and other people started to use it.

[Gefreiter Krueger]

Indeed. I'm convince Healthy and Softies will bring the world to a halt one day. Mind you places like India will then take over.

[tim......]

But it's not

There are no flights from about 10:30 until 6:00 so even if you add a couple of hours at each end for straggles/check in there's still 3 hours in the middle when no one needs to be at any particular place in the airport. Even if you do need to allow people on early flights to arrive at midnight and "wait" there's no reason why it can't be closed off a section at a time

tim

[Matty F]

Excuse me sir, why is the ceiling 125 feet high when the people in it are shorter than 7 feet high? And why not have a few columns inside to hold the roof up instead of huge expensive trusses that can fall down?

[Gefreiter Krueger]

In answer to your first question, it looks nice.

In answer to your second question, so stupid people don't bang their heads on the pillars and claim 15 million quid compensation because they didn't learn to walk properly.