Scott Towers is located in village about 5 minutes from the beach. It is also just 35 minutes from the English end of the channel tunnel (even less from Dover). So short breaks to mainland Europe are just a short drive away.

Last weekend we set off to see the Tulips at Keukenhof and on the way stock up with bargain Belgium petrol. 

I love gardens, especially those that I don’t have to maintain. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a reluctant gardener – I won best Garden in Milton Keynes one year. Seeing the labours of others is another thing, and lovely thing at that.

The Netherlands are famed for tulips even Max Bygraves sung of them and Amsterdam. I have seen the displays of tulip bulbs for sale at Schiphol Airport and at the flower market in Amsterdam. What I was not prepared for were the field upon field of vibrant coloured tulips, a crop for picking as cut flowers or to mature into bulbs for people to grow in the following seasons. Nothing though was preparation for Keukenhof Gardens. Wall to wall people, wall to wall flowers

Well that title can be taken many ways. It could be a plaintive “get your act together, Thanet!” or perhaps an appraisal of the issues that make Thanet a bit of a mess. I suppose it’s up to you to decide which.

Historically, Thanet is a real place, it was an island sitting on the corner of the Thames Estuary; the Wantsum Channel and the end of the river Stour forming some 600m of separation from the “mainland”.

Thanks to silting the island is no longer an island. It is hard to see those boundaries now. Metaphorically, we also have political silting. The lines of government are clogged with rubbish. This of course a problem of years back. Thanet has three major towns: Ramsgate, Margate, and Broadstairs and when the local government changes of 1974 kicked in the three local councils and the rural district council that looked after the villages and fields around were forced to become a cohabiting family. A family with squabbles, squabbles mainly about whether Ramsgate or Margate should wear the trousers. Broadstairs sits at home tutting about her dysfunctional family and thinking “why me?” Being dysfunctional, nothing really gets done, or rather what gets done is too late and shambolic.

Worse still Ramsgate and Margate seem to have invited their grandparents to share the granny annex. They sit there gazing out of the window, wistfully wanting the return of the days of red East Kent Road Car Company’s coaches bringing loads of Londoners to the beach for their summer break; even the charabancs of day trippers with their crates of brown ale. Oh, and the paddle steamer from London. Sadly, the people that made those trips are long gone. So what is the point of hoping that ladies in stripy ankle length bathing dresses will return to take the waters from their bathing machines? The world moves on, and so should we.

It is the bickering of the two spoilt child-towns that really drags Thanet down; neither being willing to concede anything that helps the whole. Silly ideas and impulse buys stretch the family budget, and more bickering over whose fault it was, and it was never “me”.

Thanet should function as whole, but something is missing, and this some form of cohesion linking the bits together. Some might argue that Westwood Cross is at the centre of things,a hub that is the focus of moving around Thanet, but that too is silted up. Five shopping complexes (7 if you count outliers like Farmfoods and the new Sainsburys) all linked together by a traffic jam. A traffic jam that makes the short distance from Ramsgate to the hospital a life-threating age.

How can a shopping centre be the most important part of a community? In truth, it can’t!

What is needed is an attitude to get things done, to create sustainable real jobs that brings new money into the community. If we want that kind of future we need a vision and a plan to get there; and, of course, a way to avoid all those snake oil sellers and frauds that attempt to sell you the moon for sixpence, people whose business plan is to extract money from communities with no risk or effort on their part, be they seaside landlords or property speculators. 

A functional council needs a functional plan and a leadership that leads, and one that remembers that councillors are there to implement the will of the electorate and not follow some faulty dogma that wants the world return to a past glory. We want a council that grows and prospers over successive council terms, not one that just rearranges the deck chairs on Titanic District Council as there is no need to anything since a election is coming.

If Thanet had an “our song” would you want it to be “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late”?

This year is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War 1. This was not the war to end wars it was said to be, instead it was the transition from the direct man-on-man combat of earlier conflicts to a scientific, engineered, calculated way of killing people efficiently, and not just military personnel. Explosives became more destructive, weapons more accurate (or more terrifying) and war became more exposed to people at home – either through direct attacks or more so by the loss of sons, brothers, lovers, husbands to the battlefield. Some 16 million people died from the effects of this war.

It is the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that we commemorate, the ending of battle (but not the war), the return of peace, but this is no jingoistic outpouring of past victory, instead it is solemn remembrance of the ultimate sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of servicemen from all parts of the globe. Unlike some countries in Europe, the UK collective remembrance is on the Sunday before the 11th of November, this year I was in London, visiting the Tower of London, Westminster and Whitehall.

I live a short drive from the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France – wherever you drive you see roadsigns pointing the way to immaculate War Graves, some just a small corner of village churchyard, others are massive sites with row upon row of neat graves and vast walls naming the fallen. The Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Tyne Cot near Passendale in Belgium is the largest of these with almost 12,000 burials. Such is war, however that not all of the fallen where buried in known graves.The Menin Gate in nearby Ypres the names of soldiers with no known grave are listed; recording and honouring the missing is so important. The Menin Gate is a massive structure close to the centre of Ypres. Almost 55,000 names are carved on the gate walls. Each night there is a ceremony where the last post is played. Although the gate is large it was not big enough to take all of the names of the missing, 35,000 more names had to be inscribed at Tyne Cot.

Sunday we went to the Tower of London to see the now almost completed layout of ceramic poppies, one for each of the British fallen, we had seen it a couple of times earlier in the year as the poppies were being installed, this time we would go inside the tower and view from the inside looking out. We arrived just before 11 and observed silence marked by the bosun’s pipe calls from HMS Seven (moored alongside HMS Belfast).

We stood outside the Tower to hear the last post before taking the river bus to Embankment to see the projected falling poppies on the Elizabeth Tower of Parliament and then home via the Cenotaph.

Living here on the Kent Coast we are quite blessed with the number of castles within half and hour’s drive of our cottage. English Heritage manages several nearby castles or forts. The nearest, Richborough, is out and out Roman. We had a lot of Romans roaming around here, they even strolled past my cottage along the adjacent Roman road linking their major ports of Richborough and Dover. More about Richborough another day.

Talk of local castles and you probably speak of places like Dover, Deal and Walmer. By far the biggest is Dover and that is heady mix of Roman (the lighthouse), Saxon, Norman, Tudor and of course the fortification for World War 2. This is a major site and requires several hours to visit (and a blog of its own)

Walmer and Deal are much smaller sites. They are both Tudor from a time that Henry VII feared a French invasion to quash that new found Anglican religion. Both castles are of the same basic design a short “clover leaf” of round walls bristling with cannons  to sink invading ships; the squat round walls made it a hard target for enemy guns. Of the two Deal is closest to the original design. It looks and feels like a Tudor gun platform. Walmer is now more like a house, it became the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. The massively thick castle walls are there, the moat, the cannons but the rooms are more akin to stately homes. The history of Walmer is the narrative of the wardens. Pitt the Younger, Wellington. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Winston Churchill and many others.

Walmer is busy getting ready for next year’s 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo – so Wellington is big next year!

If Manston Airport is up for sale (and the current owner’s motivation to make money may mean that she has other plans) I’d buy the place. The price has to be right though as a lot of extra money will need to be invested to give a chance of success. Sadly, I can’t stretch to putting my hand in my pocket and starting out on the road to becoming a major force in aviation facilities. What I can do is write about what I see would be needed to make a profitable and sustainable airport.

First off lets deal with a couple of terms. The public has a tendency to confuse Airlines with Airports; a carrier goes bust or routes are pulled and it is a “failure of the airport”. We also confuse the big subject of “Aviation” with fare-paying passenger flights (either scheduled or chartered); there is a world of other aviation out there: freight,aircraft maintenance, business flying, public services (Air Ambulance, Police, Search and Rescue etc) and that’s before we start to cover private pleasure flying, flying schools, gliding and the military. They all need some form of airfield to service them. I am not saying that Manston is suitable for all of these, just that there is more to life than passenger flight.

True, for many people, their only exposure to aviation is as a passenger, however, a lot of the confusion of terms comes from the media. Headline writers conflate airports and airlines; journalists pull out old archive material on airline failure and weave it in to stories on airport closure (this is one of the laziest forms of journalism – only trawling social media such as Facebook and Twitter is worse); “expert” opinion is sought from the wrong experts – ask a travel writer about airports and he can only speak from the point of view of someone going on holiday and probably just those in his readership demographic, which is often “middle-class metropolitan” and thus an hour or less from a major international airport (but not under the flight path), he can’t speak about airports as a business, and, oddly, that is exactly what an airport is.

Since man discovered barter or invented money, business has worked by person ‘A’ having something that person ‘B’ wants and the ability to trade something that ‘B’ can give ‘A’ in exchange. The same goes for airports. Airports trade the ability to use their facilities with aircraft operators, and usually (in modern times) that is for money. Airports make their money by charging people to land and take off and for other less obvious things such as “parking” planes (by the hour), unloading freight (by the kg)  and processing passengers (per person). There is also the possibility of selling fuel. Airports also have costs to cover from this revenue, air traffic control costs, fire service, infrastructure maintenance, runway lighting and that is before we even get to costs of the people that interface directly with passengers and freight. For a sustained business model an airport ‘A’ needs have a steady stream of customers ‘B’ paying for services over the years. Critically, this is just not one customer ‘B’ but a whole host of customers with a mix of operating pattens. Seasonal flights for holiday makers, year round flights to major hub airports, private aviation, and freight. I used to co-own a specialist IT company that had 15 of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies as customers; over time, mergers and consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry reduced our customer list to just two. We still did the same amount of business but were very exposed to loss of a customer, when that happened we had to fold our company.  Likewise, for an airport, having just CargoLux and KLM as principal sources of income is a business risk.

Making an airport attractive for air operators is more than just having a catchy name, though the wrong name can certainly harm things on the passenger side. Putting “London” in the name is dual edged. It worked for London Luton as a lot of their passengers come from overseas and may not have heard of Luton but know they want to go to London, it didn’t work out well for Oxford – as people just laughed about the fact that “Oxford isn’t that near London” I do much the same when Ryanair pass off Charleroi as Brussels South. Given the time to get to Central London from Manston, I am not convinced that a London moniker works. Nor does using the word “Isle”, you just give potential passengers the idea that they need to use a boat to get there. For freight operations the airport name is not that important. They have a pragmatic view on where to fly to. This is based on airfield size (can it take their large freight aircraft?) Are there facilities to quickly offload or load cargo (aircraft make money flying, not sitting on the ground), how likely is my flight to be delayed by air traffic congestion, what happens if my flight is late arriving (can I still land) and is there a reasonable infrastructure to get freight to market.

Which brings me to the subject of access to the airport, obviously it is accessible by air but what of getting to or from the airport, and perhaps more importantly, what is the catchment. For whatever reasons the major road network from the M2 to Sandwich is pretty good, nice dual carriageways, no traffic lights. The poor bit is the last section getting around the airfield to the freight and passenger facilities. A new road access from the A299 or the Haine Road would help a lot, moving the building to the south of the runway may not as there is a lack of space on the current airfield. Travel to Dover is not too bad once you have navigated the single lane section from Sandwich to Eastry, that said I rarely get held up there. Getting to Canterbury by road suffers from the fact that Canterbury is Canterbury and it’s definitely not the city of the car. Ashford road journeys are not good as Canterbury is in the way and the alternative routes go a long way out of the way.  Ironically, one of the worst places to travel to airport by road is the Thanet towns themselves. Through traffic is routed by way of the major shopping complex at Westwood Cross, there is no alternative other than narrow country tracks. As a town, Ramsgate is well served by rail routes to London, it is not well served by fast trains though – even the HS1 Javelin trains just amble along at low speeds between Ramsgate and Ashford or Broadstairs and Ebbsfleet. Substantial rail improvement work would be needed to boost line speeds, better power supplies, better signalling, track improvements and the removal of level crossings to reduce risk associated with higher line speeds. Ramsgate station could handle a bus shuttle to the airport, an airport parkway station would be an option but the investment is only worthwhile if the car-parking acts as a magnate for London commuters to avoid the limited near station facilities or has a steady stream of airport passengers throughout the day. Freight rail is currently not an option, the network is geared for bulk-freight (minerals, oil, steel etc) or container traffic and not the sort of freight that might be consolidated at an airport. In terms of catchment in is relatively simple; is Manston more convenient to get to than any other airport? Personally, it takes me 10 minutes or so to get to Manston, I’d have to allow 3 hours+ to get to Heathrow. For all people there is a balance point between whether the journey time + check-in time for one airport is more attractive than another. Other factors come in to play such as quality and reliability of journey, the “how much margin to allow to make sure I am on time” thing. 

For a passenger airport,it needs to have flights that go to places people want to fly to and at times they want to go. Price comes into it too whether the flight cost + cost of getting to the airport is reasonable. To be honest most of my flying is on business, for me I want a feeder to service to a major hub airport with good connections to onward flights – I often change planes in Amsterdam and a wait of couple of hours relaxation in an airport lounge or bar is a less stressful part of travel than spending that time getting to Heathrow. Two flights a day from a single carrier is not enough to sustain an airport. The airport should do more to encourage more flights to hub airports, I’d love to get to Paris Charles De Gaulle as that would give me direct access to more destinations, albeit with the same AirFrance KLM carrier. Likewise Frankfurt or to a lesser extent, Brussels would give me great European access and ability to meet many of my worldwide customers after a simple change of plane. Flights to UK hubs would be good, but superficially only Manchester and perhaps Birmingham seem viable, the London airports are too close and also at capacity, and other regional airports lack international flights. Passengers flying for leisure tend to take only a few flights a year and are driven by cost and a desire to maximise the time at the destination. They are often less interested in hub flights. Leisure routes are a harder market to bring in. Operators make their money by maximising the number of paying passengers per aircraft per day, to do this they work the planes hard an minimise hours not flying. These operators often fly early and late to ensure they get the most revenue per day. For them an airport must have the facilities to economically process passengers, have rapid turnaround times and allow flight slots to fit their business. They are heavily driven by cost and do their utmost to minimise airport fees, They also willing to axe unprofitable services, which is a risk to a company that relies on a service for income

Freight is an simpler offer and is usually predicated around being able to land large aircraft, have ground services to prepare the plane for departure, and most importantly get the goods on or off the plane quickly.

To be viable the airport needs to build the number of operators using it – freight is an obvious choice as the catchment area is greater as is the scope of poaching from other airports on the grounds of costs or more reliable turnaround, Airport hours need to be extended to make it more attractive to flights landing or taking off in the margins of the working day; I would not want my freighter diverted to another airfield because the plane is 30 minutest late. Passenger flights would also benefit from extended hours as this could reduce the number of overnights needed for aircrafts and aircrew. For sustained passenger development there needs to be a mix of carriers and destinations, and flights at more times of the day, that however comes at a cost of providing more police and border control staff.

It is said that aviation is in the blood (or in the genes). My partner worked as cabin crew with Air New Zealand before becoming their senior HR manager responsible for all off-shore based Air New Zealand staff; her cousin is a senior pilot with Cathay Pacific; of her uncles, one was managing director of Heathrow (when BAA was still civil service) another flew V-bombers during the cold war. Once you are involved in flight you always want to return to it; It becomes hard to imagine an employment without being close to aircraft and breathing aviation fuel. Even working landside at airport gives a buzz that you just don’t get working in ‘normal’ job

My involvement in flight was less direct (although I had a government posting to LHR for a while and KLM, Virgin Atlantic and Manchester Airport are customers of mine) – my first flight was in rearward facing seats back in the ‘70s and I became hooked; since then I knocked up a lot miles as a passenger in a variety of planes from de Havilland Beavers and Fokker Friendships through to modern wide-bodied jets. My work often takes me abroad, I am world authority in my field, I get invited to speak at conferences around the world or do some troubleshooting (and often at only a couple of days notice). I need reliable access to air transport just to do my job. The globally accessible internet virtual presence ideal just does not cut it when you are speaking to a hall-ful of people or need to sit down with people for several days to diagnose problems.

So, when it was proposed to close my local airport at Manston I was appalled. Knowing how my partner thinks, I was appalled by the prospects for the staff losing a way of life that becomes part of their soul. The prospect of skilled ancillary workers either having to move great distances or leave an industry they love, the prospect of customer-facing staff not having pax to deal with. The human costs of closure are not light ones.

As a local, I know too of the history – few places have an aviation pedigree going back a century to the early days of combat flying; have links to many other significant periods of history during wars and peace, and even into the space age as a designated emergency field for the space shuttle, though, thankfully, never used.

Physically, Manston has a lot going for it. The length and width of the runway makes it capable of handling the largest aircraft; its location outside of the congested London area can give advantage to carriers running on tight schedules, the distinct microclimate of Thanet can mean the airfield is useful for diversionary use when the London airports are shutdown or compromised by weather. True the passenger facilities are basic, but they work, and efficiently so.

But for me it is the access to international flights without having to travel for hours to get to an airport that appeals. It takes me 10 minutes to get to Manston’s car park; to get to LGW or LHR takes hours by road and much the same by train; add too the time to drop bags and get airside (even with frequent flyer priority) and a journey from LHR would need to be three or four hours quicker than changing in Amsterdam to make it worthwhile. London City is an option for me but even with the HS1 to Stratford International it is still about 2 hours by rail. Recently I had work in Johannesburg, flying on the early flight from Manston via Amsterdam I could be in South Africa in about 13 hours – flying back via Paris and Amsterdam would get me home an hour or so sooner than travelling non-stop to London. Even on shorter flights such as Manston to Helsinki I save an hour or so by changing in Amsterdam on my door to door journey time.

If Manston were to close I’d be forced to make longer and more stressful journeys to the airport, I don’t need much contingency on a ten minute drive. How many people have been stuck on the M25 for an hour or more. Going to Gatwick almost forces you to travel up to London and across as East-West roads in the South East are poor as traffic planners assume that everyone goes to London. Lydd, if it had flights, is over an hour by road, Southend would be an option if there were a hydrofoil link to cross the Thames at speed. As for rail, since HS1 started the Eurostar service from Ashford to Paris and Brussels has been curtailed to just one or two trains a day. Perhaps when DB starts operating Germany to London via the tunnel we might get a more frequent service to Europe.

I have become use to flying from Amsterdam, I hope I can continue to be used to it.

Well actually 3 (almost 4) years since I last blogged here. So it is high time to write some new content for my personal blog and perhaps change the nature of the content.

When I started blogging (on Blogger) many years back it was mainly a technical blog on Data Warehousing with an Oracle slant. A lot was drawn from my experience working as a manager at a global IT management company. Over time I migrated my blog to wordpress.com but carried on writing technical stuff on topics such at deadlocks, partitioning, DWH design and modelling interspersed with non-technical stuff about gardens, kids and holidays. When I joined Rittman Mead I took the chance to copy the technical stuff to the company blog (but leave it in place so any links might continue to work) Most new technical stuff is published on the company blog as it has a bigger readership. The odd April Fool posting appears here, partially so that it less likely to be believed, which was an embarrassment we had one year on the company blog where a vendor cited our ground breaking methodology; we had hoped that people would realise that we could not make ETL faster by making the data flow down hill and get a performance boost from gravity.

In the past years there has bee a lot of change in my life. My children have grown up, graduated and work for a living with a place of their own, I have moved to a cottage near the beach (just a bike ride away or 5 minutes in the car) I can commute to London if I need to. Amsterdam (by air) and Northern France and Belgium (by road) are even shorter journeys. The house and garden here are still in need of love and care and the next few years of free time will easily be consumed by various projects around the house. The occupants of my house have changed too. The core “family” is KG, my New Zealander partner and Tosh, the Burmese-cross cat with loads of attitude and claws. Sadly Rob, 65kg lump of New Zealand Huntaway passed away; the Robster was taller than me and had a bark that could carry for miles. He was also well travelled – he flew over from New Zealand to live with me (OK he was KG’s dog and came with her!)

 

So, my return to personal blogging has started – I will write on technology occasionally, especially if it does not fit with my corporate stance, but mainly it will be about life here, and the odd social rant where society is on the wrong path.

 

But for now, bye-bye from Ham Sandwich.

 

 

 

Today my normally silver car has a more golden-bronzy tinge, or a thin film of volcanic dust. Part of Iceland is now travelling around the streets of Milton Keynes attached to my car, a sort of grimy hitch-hiker.
I should not really know about the dust on my car as I should not be in England, I should currently be mid-Atlantic on my way to speak at a conference in Las Vegas. But that is not to be. Optimistically, I followed the hour-by-hour announcements from the airline and the NATS air traffic service right up to the time I was texted with my flight cancellation. I have now cancelled the flight booking (there was no point rebooking to arrive after the conference finished) cancelled the hotels, briefed a colleague in the hope that he could give my talk. I have even been to the supermarket to buy food (what is the point of food in the fridge if you are away?)
There is no point ranting about a volcanic eruption blocking air travel to or from north-western Europe, these things can happen (obviously). I am one of the fortunate people, I am still at home, my journey, although long anticipated, is not critical in course of world history. Yes, I was invited to speak at a conference in the USA; yes, I would be representing and publicising my company; yes, delegates have told me that they would like to meet with me and talk; but my not being there will not stop the conference. And, as I said an American colleague at the conference may be able to give my talk for me.
I am a lucky one; I have friends and colleagues in the USA trying to return to Europe, friends in Denmark (amongst other places) trying to cross the Atlantic to get home, and friends dotted around northern Europe just trying to make it home to the UK. One friend is in Northern Italy singing with a choir, tomorrow she should fly home to be with her children and ready to return to the school she teaches at on Monday – but that won’t happen, and I can think of no quick way for her to return from the wrong side of the Alps.
Some might think that having no flights is as if aviation had not been invented and we can proceed with a more sustainable, low carbon-footprint, way of life. True, it is technically feasible for me to do my job by the wonders of telephony and the internet, I could video-conference my presentations, I even could go to the pub and phone my colleagues so that I can take part in social interaction outside of the office over a few beers. But powered flight has been invented and the suddenly switching it off for several days is not the same thing; people have not planned there lives in anticipation of this and the event causes big problems to those who just need to get home, those that would not be where they are if a plane had not taken them there.

I am sitting in a train travelling to the North West of England and using the at seat wifi connection. This service is provided by T-Mobile, a brand with a global presence an major UK mobile operator. “So what?” I hear you say, the problem is that the internet connection from the train surfaces in Germany – and hence I get Google Deutschland, LinkedIn and Facebook with German Language content, all of which I can cope with – but what drives me nuts is that I for some sites content is blocked that is not relevant to the ISP location and that is not my location…

I am very conscious that I have not posted much on this blog recently. In part the technical stuff has been surfaced through the company blog – I get in to trouble if I say Mark’s blog because it is the company one now, an in part because of a load of domestic events have stifled my available creative time.

Still, on-site with a customer in Greece has given me an unexpected amount of online-in-the-hotel-in-the-evening time which I can fill with research or just writing this stuff.

I had always wanted to visit Greece but as I am not a sand-n-sea person it would not be for the islands and beaches, but more the ancient history. So working here and having a weekend in Athens (and not one where I am scheduled to fly to London or San Francisco – which is the case for all the other weekends before Christmas) gave me the ideal chance to see the Acropolis and other historic sites nearby. Put simply, I was stunned by it all. The scale of things, the age of things… the sophistication of the art and the science. It makes you wonder why or how Western Civilisation did nothing from before the fall of Rome until, well, 160 years ago.

I think I can understand the concept of the Grand Tour now!