Daily Archives: May 18, 2013
Thatcher’s ‘achievement’
Lovely passage in John Gray’s Review of Jesse Norman’s book
As a consequence of her leadership, the Conservative Party is in some ways weaker than it has ever been. Turning it into an instrument of her personal will, she triggered a coup that has left every subsequent Tory leader on permanent probation. Alienating Scotland, she virtually wiped out her party north of the border and planted a large question mark over the Union. Within England, her indifference to the human costs of de – industrialisation deepened the north-south divide. The result is a hollowed-out and shrunken party that faces huge obstacles in ever again forming a government. For someone who has been described as the greatest Conservative leader since Churchill, it’s quite a list of achievements. If you wanted to shake up Britain and change it beyond recognition, Thatcher was, of all postwar leaders, the one mostly likely to have this effect.
Paper(less) aeroplanes
Well, well. The US Air force is buying 18,000 32G wifi-only iPads and expects to save $50M as a result.
Using lightweight iPads instead of heavy paper flight manuals will amount to $750,000 annual savings on fuel alone, a spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command said in an interview with James Rogers of The Street. And the AMC will no longer have to print those flight manuals either, which will save a whopping $5 million per year.
Major Brian Moritz, manager of the AMC’s electronic flight bag program, said the Air Force expects Apple’s iPad to help save $5.7 million per year, which would result in savings “well over $50 million” over the next 10 years.
“We’re saving about 90 pounds of paper per aircraft and limiting the need for each crew member to carry a 30 to 40 pound paper file,” Moritz said. “It adds up to quite a lot of weight in paper.”
Rogers was embedded recently with the U.S. Air Force and got to see Apple’s iPad in action. He revealed that the switch from paper manuals to the iPad could cut up to 490 pounds in weight from a C-5 aircraft.
They’ll never work on Ryanair flights, though. The pilots would have to turn their iPad manuals off for take-off and landing, and so wouldn’t have a clue which levers to pull.