Somewhere over the Atlantic

Been a few years since I've sent anything or posted anything from an Airplane, the last time seriously was on Singapore Airlines, probably 10 years ago, aside from the odd social media post since then.

Spent the majority of the years prior to the pandemic flying on BA, for reasons best known to BA they had this large global network but decided not to fit out the new fleet of planes with WiFi, opting to wait and see what everyone else did and then retrofit, seemed a bit of an odd approach to me, but apparently wasn't just driven by initial upfront cost but also the extra weight and the cost that incurred.

Now post the pandemic global business is very different and with people flying a lot less and relying on the technology I don't often get chance to use the tech that comes in planes.

Today I'm going from Malaga (AGP) to Newark, NJ (EWR) via Lisbon (LIS), the second leg of the flight has onboard WiFi, so I'm taking the opportunity to post something, albeit not very exciting.

TAP Air Portugal use A321LRneos on the route which seems to work, at least on the experience so far pretty well.

We are currently about 3 hours in at 33,000ft or around 10,000m.

Had this been available more broadly on the BA fleet I'd have definitely used it. On TAP Air Portugal is you just want to use simple message services like WhatsApp it is actually free.

The EU has released opened the possibility of using 5G on your handset whilst flying, can't believe it'll be included in yoiur tariff as the operators won't make any money if they do. 

The technology continues to evolve and it won't be long before video conferencing whilst flying is the norm along with streaming from the likes of Netflix.

 

Sad start to the 2022-23 ski season

After three years of a ski season blighted by COVID, resorts were hoping to get a good 2022-23 season and to be fair it started off well we had a good few days prior to Christmas. We went back to the UK for a few days over Christmas and as we left on the 23rd it basically started raining, it rained for days both in the Alps and in the UK, it was still raining as we headed back from the UK on the 28th.

Today the runs look more like Easter than January and based on the current forecast it'll be end of January before runs are closer to the normal for the time of year as the forecast for next few weeks, whilst it does forecast snow it really is not enough to recover the situation, the likelyhood of some of the lower resorts opening at all in the 2022-23 season is sadly looking unlikely. Some resorts have run out of the water supply they need for snow cannons as well, despite collecting it from meltwater and rain that falls.

It is already affecting professional skiing, with the Swiss resort of Adelboden resort planning this weekends Alpine Cup on artificial snow.

Investment in resorts has continued during the disrupted last three years with many new chair lifts and cable cars open, with what will amount to a forth year of disrupted seasons the hope is that that investment will continue, although some of the lower resorts may find it increasingly difficult to find the capital needed, often tens of millions of Euros for a new lift.

We have a weather station in the garden at our house in St Gervais and December was 3C warmer in 2022 than 2021, so far in January it is even worse!

People have been saying for years that resorts below 1000m will struggle increasingly, this year even those in the 1000-2000m range are struggling, to be sure of snow you have to go upto 2000m and then the quality of that snow is sadly questionable.

Ironically the Sierra Nevadas in Spain despite being the most southerly resort in Europe is having a good start to the season so far, by there standards, they are used to patchy snow and typically the quantity of snow picks up towards the end of January, an approach the Alpine resorts might have to get used to. They also have infrastructure to cope with regular patchy snow.

 

 

Global warming is proving itself to be even more of a reality that continues to affect more and peoples livelyhoods at a rate far faster than anyone could have judged. 2022 will for sure once the figures are finalised beat 2016 as the hottest year on record, the top 10 current hottest years on record have all been since 2010. It still baffles me how supposedly rational people can be climate change deniers, the facts are before your eyes, open them. Most of them of course are of a generation who won't have to live with the consequences (led by corrupt liars like hopefully soon to be proved to be a criminal Donald Trump, even the UK equivalent when he was in power didn't subscribe to that theory) so probably don't care either. Whilst I won't have to live with the worst of them, my children will, so be responsible. The world can ill afford yet more pressure on an already downwards economic spiral.

Windsor Christmas Lights and a bit of a rant about 2022

As mentioned previously we did manage to do a third set of Christmas lights and like the previous two, it rained! The lights themselves were OK, out of all three sets I have to say the ones we preferred the most were the ones in the Botanical Gardens in Malaga, but they have had a few years of practice!

 

2022 (aside from three sets of Christmas lights all in the rain) went down in history for so many things, frankly a lot of them not good and just when we all thought the world would improve after 2020 and 2021. 

 

Sadly it was a lot of the same, sure travel was easier, but the war in Ukraine drove up energy prices where so many people in the world are essentially in fuel poverty (when a household spends more than 10% of there income on fuel costs), politics in the UK was a total car crash and as result it has made a bad economic situation worse. It is clear large parts of the world will be in recession in 2023 and sadly my country of birth apart from Russia has the lowest predicted economic growth of the G20 and is the only member of the G7 whose economy is smaller than before the pandemic. We shouldn't kid ourselves a large part of this (4%) is down to the suicidal decision to exit the EU. The UK also exited 2022 closer than the 1930s to a general strike and definitely heading to a "Winter of Discontent".

Russia continues to commit war crimes in Ukraine and the sad truth is that the war in Ukraine will likely continue for years and become a proxy NATO vs Russia conflict, back to the days of the Cold War of proxy NATO vs Warsaw Pact. The rest of the world outside the UK has its challenges, US politics continues to be as divisive as ever with a number of countries such as Spain, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Finland (to name but a few) have some degree of national elections this year which will bring with it I'm sure the worst behavior in some people. The UK doesn't have to have one until 2025 as the Johnson government abolished the fixed term Parliament Act, sadly.

On top of that we lost some great people in 2022, from Mikael Gorbachev to Queen Elizabeth II, the best list I've seen of them is here.

Anyway on a slightly happier note I've shared within this some of the pictures of our trip to the Windsor Christmas lights.

 Happy New Year everyone lets hope 2023 is a step up.