You'd only have to turn several pages and read a long way into the accompanying article to work out that the pictures are a reconstruction for a cash-in documentary on a low-rent TV station, of what might have happened when a BA flight flew through an ash cloud…28 years ago. There were no injuries.
Strangely, copies of the Star were removed from airports today. As were some Star 'journalists'.
Meanwhile, the world gets slightly better, death by death. Juan Antonio Samaranch died today, joining his old friend General Franco in hell if there's any justice (which there clearly isn't, given that Samaranch parleyed his association with fascism into a long and corrupt career with the Olympic movement).
Sport seems to attract reactionaries, even fascists: Samaranch's predecessor, Avery Brundage, was an enthusiastic American supporter of the Nazis, though at least he didn't spend his career as a diplomat for an actual fascist regime. He dumped Jewish American athletes from the American team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics (best games ever, in his opinion) and allowed the Nazi salute - later expelling Smith and Carlos for their Black Power salute in 1968, and tried to have women banned from the Olympics.
My sport - fencing - spent the 1930s glorifying fascism, nowhere more than in Britain, where Oswald Mosley fenced for Britain in between leading the British Union of Fascists. The Black Shirt itself was based on the fencing jacket of the period. A research project into his sporting activities will happen at some point, but anecdotally, there's no sign that his views were anything other than enthusiastically endorsed by the sports governors. Other political fencers: Churchill, Himmler, Heydrich, Franco and, thankfully for me, Karl Marx. Aviators and mountaineers were also prone to fascism - it's all that stuff about being above and beyond the masses.
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