Electronic logbook

I feel so sorry for the relatives of MH17

Yesterday, the Dutch safety board, the governmental agency responsible for investigating accidents or incidents in aviation, industry, transport, healthcare, etc in the Netherlands, made public its conclusions regarding the crash of MH17 last year on 17th July.

Having read about the release of this report and watched the computerised animation of the downing of flight MH17 the Dutch safety board produced to accompany their conclusions on Yahoo News (yes, from time to time I still check the email account I have with them), I was a a little curious as to how this would be presented on the BBC's website.

A passage struck me in the BBC's article on the Dutch safety board's release (entitled ‘MH17 Ukraine disaster: Dutch Safety Board blames missile’, BBC, 13 Oct 2015):

The report says the three crew members in the cockpit were killed by the missile explosion instantly.

However, it adds, it was unclear at which point the others died, and the possibility of some remaining conscious for some time during the one-and-a-half minutes it took for the plane to go down could not be ruled out.

How awful it must be for the relatives of the passengers killed in this air crash to be reminded of this possibility after having watched this highly voyeuristic animation of the downing. Although the BBC's article should also be put into the context of the present bombing campaign ongoing in Syria (‘Syria conflict: US-Russia air safety talks after "near miss"’, BBC, 14 Oct. 2015), the quote I inserted above probably has as much to do with some atavistic fear of altitude and therefore flying as with the present geopolitical context – after all, I can recall an article I read in late July of last year on the website of the South China Morning Post, entitled ‘Death is mercifully quick when a rocket hits an airliner mid-flight’, 27th July 2014.

Whatever the reason for the inclusion of this passage I quoted earlier (politics, voyeurism, etc), I feel so sorry for the relatives of those killed in this crash as it must be so horrible to be reminded of the particulars of this accident. If only news broadcasters or purveyors of news could be a little more sensitive to the feelings or pain of others...

Lausanne, 14th October 2015


Electronic logbook to be tagged by month from now on

I must acknowledge that to keep an electronic logbook is more difficult an endeavour than I had anticipated when I published the first log in this new section of my website on 9th September.  Even though I took a week-long break in Northern Italy (during which I did not even access the Internet or retrieve emails) last week, the writing of my thoughts in an HTML editor and publishing them online are two activities which are more time-consuming than I had expected. With not even a month behind me, it is too early to consider pulling the plug on this special form of ‘weblogging’. However, if I really want it to become a kind of repository for my musings or rants, I need to put more effort into my ‘weblogging’...
As I intend to do so, I have decided to use a new taxonomic format for my ‘web logbook’: instead of cramming everything onto a single page, I am going to ‘store’ my musings based on the month during which they were published so as to avoid what otherwise might become the electronic equivalent of a very long scroll – well, at least I hope that this month's web log will end up being much longer than last month's.

Lausanne, 6th October 2015