I don't keep up with what goes on in Parliament, but the St. Helena Independent has confirmed the conclusions I came to in my most recent post on the St. Helena airport: the extended period of test flights to prove the viability of the design never took place, or to be more precise, they were condensed into a single day in 2006. Also the flights recommended after the completion of the airport were not considered necessary because, according to Baroness Anelay, the new DfD Minister, the runway had been extended by 150 metres. Neither the Independent nor I can figure out how this was supposed to remove the problems of windshear.
In one of my favourite episodes of Fawlty Towers a group of German tourists visits Basil Fawlty's shambolic hotel in Torquay, and at the end of the visit one of them asks how on earth the UK won the war? Following the Brexit fiasco, no plan if the country voted to leave, the Chilcot report on Iraq, no post-invasion plan whatsoever, and now the St. Helena Airport fiasco, I am despairing of the amateurism which seems to encapsulate the way the UK and its dependencies are governed. I can understand why the U.S. Secretary of State found it hard to keep a straight face at the joint press conference held with our new Foreign Secretary.