KEY POINTS:
It seemed a slow week after the swirling world of China and the swirling world of the Auckland Food Show, where I sold my Paul Holmes Extra Virgin Olive oil.
Well, flogged it, to be honest. Moving stock through is hard work.
Of course, it did not just
seem a slow start to the week. It was slow.
By Wednesday, the staggering cash bailouts in the United States seemed humdrum - $800 billion here or $800 trillion there, who cares?
All we can do is wait patiently in dread of the impending tsunami, which may or may not hit us.
The change of government seemed eerily smooth as Prime Minister John Key brought Act and the Maori Party into his camp.
There were no hissy fits or meltdowns, no interminable wait, no excessive posturing or game playing.
Key has taken to the premiership as to the manor born. He has shown himself easy in the job, relishing it and he started with a big week at Apec and meeting leaders of some serious countries. I interviewed him on radio and it felt odd calling him "Prime Minister" for the first time. I swear he said New Zealand instead of New Zilind. This is a major phonetic advance at least. He is like that. He works on himself, Key. He will grow into the job hugely, this man.
It was such a slow week the New Zealand Herald led on Wednesday with a development in Britain which the newspaper seemed to think signalled the imminent destruction of our tourist industry.
The British Government increased its airport departure tax to 80 ($224) for the next two years. Sorry, I could not find fear in my heart. No nation, as far as I know, has gone broke because another country increased its airport departure tax.
But news came suddenly, in a flood. Early Thursday morning, reports came in of an attack on a hotel in Mumbai. Within minutes there was another hotel involved and lobbies and restaurants being sprayed with bullets and grenades. Then it was a railway station under attack, then the police headquarters in the southern part of the city and then gunfire at a hospital where some of the wounded were taken. Mumbai was mayhem.
My radio producer, Nadia Tolich, learned her uncle and aunt, David and Vinka Clemmett, were holed up in the hotel where the young terror monsters had laid siege.
We put David to air from their hotel room as the couple listened in fear to the explosions and the shouting and the gunfire below. David had ripped the television from its perch and used it to barricade the door. The quandary they had, I guess, was not knowing whether anyone who came to the door was friend or foe. David was worried about others in their party who may have been downstairs in the restaurant he believed was attacked.
The television pictures began to reveal the horrible, insane carnage and chaos at the besieged locations.
The madrassa boys were at it again, brainwashed with a grotesque, murderous and distorted brand of Islam. As a Muslim doctor said when he phoned the radio programme off-air, why do so many Muslims think this is the way to heaven, inflicting such bloody cruelty on the innocent? He said he was ashamed. And, he said, you have to remember Muslims are doing this to Muslims every day in Iraq. When will it end? What is going to stop this? Why is there such hatred? How can an ancient religion be interpreted so savagely as to justify attacks such as this in Mumbai, Madrid, London and New York City?
I may have missed them but where were the condemnations from New Zealand's Muslim community? Has there been condemnation after any of the inhumane attacks since 2001? I suppose moderate Muslims, those who have chosen to start a new life in New Zealand, value a quiet life and may be scared to raise their heads above the parapets. But this revolting killing and wounding will stop only if the Muslim world condemns it. We in the West and in Asia will not stop it. It is only the Muslim leadership, the clerics and the followers who can shame the perpetrators and end this madness.
Tourists and Mumbai residents are not responsible for Israel or how the Israelis have treated the Palestinians since 1967 or for the United States being in Iraq. And I ask again, who started this nonsense anyway? The World Trade Centre may have seemed to some to be a towering monument to plundering Western capitalism, but the people inside them when Atta and the boys attacked had simply shown up for work to earn a living for their families. Those towers were a place where good people worked.
While the Mumbai atrocities stretched into their second day, while the Indians tried desperately to bring it to an end the news came in from southern France, on the 29th anniversary of the Erebus tragedy, that an Air New Zealand Airbus A320, with five Kiwis among a crew of seven, had crashed into the Mediterranean after leaving Perpignan on a check flight.
It is a temptation to wonder about the A320. We still have the picture in our minds of the Airbus in that French airshow in the mid-90s that took off, failed to gain height and sank with a smooth and dreadful beauty into the forest at the end of the runway. There was a feeling the A320 might be too smart by half but Airbus aircraft have since safely flown thousands of hours for the world's airlines.
Aircraft are tested exhaustively for every glitch and gremlin. Engines do not fail and these days aircraft do not fall by themselves out of the sky. Accidents are nearly always pilot error, or a result of what some investigators call the human factor. We all make mistakes but in aviation, even little human errors can produce a stunningly fast sequence of events that lead to fatality and destruction.
I read a book by an Englishman who began his flying in World War II bombers. He became fascinated by what he called the human factor in aviation accidents after he followed an Avro Wellington bomber being ferried down to North Africa. As the aircraft drew abeam the Rock of Gibraltar, he watched in amazement as its pilot turned out to sea and was never seen again. The world looks vastly different from the air than it does at head height, but the mistake by the trained pilot seemed incomprehensible.
At Tenerife in 1977, when a KLM 747 smacked into a Pan-American 747 on a foggy runway just before the Dutch aircraft lifted off the ground, it was human factor. The KLM skipper, the company's most senior pilot, was fed up with the weather delays and lined up for take off. Before he throttled up, he told his co-pilot he had clearance to roll. The co-pilot, very much the skipper's junior, asked him, doubtfully, "Have we got clearance?" The captain said he had heard the tower say so. The tower had said no such thing. The determination later was that such was the strict hierarchical structure within KLM, the co-pilot may not have felt he could contradict the senior man's judgment. At almost take-off speed, the Dutchmen saw the Pan-American aircraft crossing the runway and tried desperately to lift off but it was too late. Almost 600 people died.
We do not know what caused the A320 disaster and I mean in no way to besmirch the record of the XL and Air New Zealand pilots whose families will be grieving. There may have been a major aircraft malfunction. We will have to wait and see.
