John Macilree MRAeS

Every time you fly anywhere on earth. It traces back to Croydon. ✈️ South London. 1920. The world's first international airport. The world's first air traffic control tower. The world's first airport terminal. The world's first airport hotel. 🏨 And the word Mayday. In 1923 senior radio officer Fred Mockford needed a distress call. Most flights went to Paris. So he chose the French for help me. Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Used by every pilot. Every sailor. Across every sky and sea. 🌊 Charles Lindbergh landed here in 1927. One hundred thousand people came to meet him. Amy Johnson took off from here in 1930. The first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia. Winston Churchill took flying lessons here. George VI got his wings here. 🇬🇧 It closed in 1959. The building still stands. In Croydon. Every international airport on earth. Every air traffic control tower. Every Mayday call. Traces back to South London. This is the kind of history we were never taught. 📚 Proud Of Us UK is funded entirely by the community watching it. No sponsors. No broadcaster. No institution. Just people who believe British history deserves to be told. If you watched this and felt something... That's exactly why we exist. Join the people keeping it alive: proudofus.co.uk/support 🇬🇧 Be Part Of Us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

My understanding is that, because we don't have significant storage capacity, as long as tankers are on the seas to us, we may as well use fuel [if we can afford to] ... what we need to know is when the tankers are not coming, and then we need to save/conserve/minimise usage.

New satellite imagery from @SoarAtlas shows 3 large tankers loading at 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia’s Al Muajjiz Terminal on the Red Sea The East-West Pipeline is now running at full capacity of 7 million bpd, up from 2.2 million bpd in the first 9 days of March.

The movement of fuel tankers shows how high the demand for energy is in the UK. Sky's economics and data editor @EdConwaySky looks at how the Iran war has forced the world into a race for energy. Read more Iran coverage on Sky: trib.al/1F0YlpH

BP service station owner in Sydney: -petrol tanker response times for an order to a delivery have blown out from 24 hrs to 6 days. -Tanker orders only accepted if a fuel type has already run out. -There is no fuel hoarding any longer, fuel tanks are full, and kept full, sub $60 top ups. -Sales volumes are now back to what they used to be pre-crisis. ⚠️This is no longer a demand issue. Service stations in Sydney are now suffering from a lack of supply.

Eye opener... #Funny #Humor

The difference between UAE, Dubai and Abu Dhabi

🚨🇴🇲🇸🇦🇦🇪🇮🇷 Someone just found a way around Iran's toll booth... Three tankers loaded with Saudi and Emirati crude and LNG exited the Persian Gulf today through an unconventional route hugging Oman's Musandam coastline, completely bypassing Iran's checkpoint between Larak and Qeshm islands. Satellite imagery confirmed it. No spoofing. Real ships, real cargo, real breakthrough. These are the first fully insured, sanctions-compliant supertankers to leave the Gulf since the war started on February 28th. Four million barrels of crude on two ships alone. The route tells the whole story. Oman, which has quietly maintained relationships with both Iran and the West throughout this war, appears to have brokered a safe passage corridor through its own territorial waters. Iran either agreed to let it happen or couldn't stop it. If this corridor holds, it changes the entire economic calculus of the war. Gulf states can start moving oil again without paying Iran's toll or waiting for a UN resolution that Russia and China just blocked. The chokehold that gave Tehran its strongest leverage starts loosening without a single shot being fired. Three ships is a trickle. Normal traffic is 75-85 tankers a day. But every flood starts with a trickle, and energy markets are watching these three vessels like the world depends on it. Source: @TankerTrackers, ESA Satellite Imagery

The large number of international students at @AucklandUni has helped it become New Zealand's largest university by a mile. Student numbers are up 71% since 2000. AUT has grown even faster (+82%) and is now the second-largest university. By comparison, Massey has gone backwards.

Past oil shocks had massive effects on our economy and politics. And the current one—caused by Trump’s War in Iran—is nearly two times larger. @Morning_Joe

‘The golfer from Mara lago’ 🫢

Never gets old watching Louis Oohsthuizen's hole in one. One of the coolest aces in Masters history.

Airlines provide public transport

As a kid growing up in Northern Ireland, I dreamed of winning all four majors. Being able to bring these trophies home was truly surreal.

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next. Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades. George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks. The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order. No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide. A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute. The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no. The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

There is literally no way to understand what any of these road signs mean without an encyclopedic knowledge of Te Reo.

The supermarket has rearranged itself again. I spent ten minutes searching for olive tapenade and reflecting on the quiet collapse of civilisation.

Bahrain, supported by the GCC and Jordan, has proposed a Security Council Resolution on the Strait of Hormuz. More info on the resolution below ⬇️

My kinda store!! 🐶

We are pleased to have authorised the new Moseley Village, Kings Heath and Pineapple Road stations on the Camp Hill line in south Birmingham. Passenger services are set to return to the line for the first time in more than 80 years on Tuesday 7 April ⬇️ orr.gov.uk/search-news/or…