Hi,
Peter Loveday wrote:
>> One of the rules of flying internally is: no batteries allowed in the
>> passenger part of the plane. They have to go in the hold.
> I've heard of this before; do they try to present any actual justification
> as to why batteries in the plane are not allowed, or is it just one of
> those unexplained rules?
> Are tjhey afraid you might construct a battery-powered Taser driven by
> a couple of CR2's and zap the pilot or something? :)
Possibly. In these little aeroplanes it is in fact very easy to get
through to the cabin. When I was flying over Lake Tana I was rather
disconcerted when the cabin door rolled upon and revealed the pilot
peering at a fully-open map held against the windscreen. :o)
You must remember that Ethiopia was in a state of civil war until
1991, which had been going on intermittently for 20 or 30 years.
During most of that time there was a particularly blood-thirsty regime
- the Derg - in power. Most of the landing strips still had the rusting
hulks of bombed fighters littered across them; in some towns I saw
children playing on the dead tanks and artillery. In the north people
were armed to the teeth. Although they were very law-abiding. They left
their rifles stacked up in a pile on the porch of the bank in Axum, rather
than carry them inside. They've just concluded another war which lasted 2
years and cost over 100,000 Ethiopian lives. How many Eritreans I don't know.
And in 1996 an external flight of Ethiopian Airlines was indeed hijacked. It
crashed into the Indian Ocean and killed 123 people, including the photojournalist
Mohamed Amin who revealed the 1984 ('Live Aid') famine to the world.
Like the cliche says: even paranoids have enemies.
--
Cheers,
Bob
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