OPINION ROCKING CHAIR: K.I.S.S Mr President? Our resident Old Git, Ian Frow, considers passengercarrying drones, dead ships and rockin it in the digital age I t is not always easy to agree with the current US President. In March, when he overruled the FAA and grounded the 737 MAX in the US, he said, in his usual scrambled style: Airplanes [sic] are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but computer scientists from MIT often old and simpler is far better. President Trump added: The complexity creates danger I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control. Sobering thought: had POTUS read the last edition of The Log? As ever, the problem is money. Aircraft manufacturers are designing their products to be flown by the lowest common denominator (LCD) and cheapest pilots. Their aircraft are far easier to sell because the LCD conversion courses are much shorter and cheaper and when many pilots are now forced to pay for their own training, they too are sucked into this awful fallacy. The manufacturers engineers are keen to drive towards one-pilot aircraft and, eventually if the passengers allow to people-carrying drones. There are many large drones in operation now, both civil and military versions. Their accident rate (ifpublished) might be a cause for concern and not only for Mr Trump. Anniversary year This year marks the 50th anniversary of Concordes first flight, and the first flight of the Boeing 747 possibly the greatest of Boeings designs. It is also the 80th anniversary of the founding of the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) by Sir John Reith, who earlier in his career set up the BBC. Of all the current airlines, probably only KLM can genuinely claim to be 100 this year. All other centenarian claims are distinctly dodgy and based on tenuous earlier links with mini airlines that first staggered into the air in 1919. Digital rocking The Log has gone digital and some things have changed. In the digital edition, most articles are reproduced in old-fashioned black print on a white background. What arelief for the mature! No longer struggling to sort out the white print from the red background or read the red words on the dark blue background. Better still, the Rocking Chair picture has been updated andenlarged into an exotic creation. Freedom of movement? Queue to print boarding card; queue to have it checked against passport; queue to use boarding card to create a destination label for hold bag; mutter a prayer and consign bag to something looking like the back end of a refuse lorry. Queue again to scan boarding card to allow entry into the securitycheck; remove most clothing, raise hands above head and pirouette like a pole dancer while being security scanned in a glass booth; retrieve clothing and possessions; queue to push passport into a scanner; make face resemble the picture; and 90 minutes later freedom to go shopping in departures. This common experience has three causes counter-terrorism precautions, the accountants cull of expensive check-in staff, and the sheer volume of people travelling. Even if air fares remain as cheap as chips, will the customers continue to tolerate this, or might aviation choke on its own success? Dead ships When the city of Amsterdam decided on a new airport, it had to drain a lake, which is why the airfield is below sea level. Once the lake was dry, the sludge revealed the wrecks of numerous ships hence the name, Schiphol. It means dead ships or ships graveyard. Useful for a quiz question? *Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)