The flight

I put this on my Facebook page because I was quite shocked at the crash of flight 9525. Who wouldn't be shocked at the loss of so many people at the hands of one man? 

If you're a teacher who has organised trips and exchanges abroad, you probably shuddered and thought 'what if these were my kids - my colleagues?' The news that there were two babies on the flight was horrible too. You may even, like me, have wondered what happened to the co-pilot that he decided to take this action? And can you imagine his parents arriving at the scene of what they thought was a dreadful accident only to be taken aside, away from the other families, and told that their son is a mass murderer? 

Pilots, as far as I know, don't get trained for nothing. They finance the training themselves. It costs a huge amount of money and it takes years to build up the flying experience needed to enable a pilot to get a job with a company as prestigious as Lufthansa. 

Overall, it is a terrible event. So why were the UK media so anxious to ignore all the other people on the flight and just focus on the British victims? I don't know how many there were - three maybe? And, of course, we feel for them and their families. That goes without saying. But are we so crass as human beings that - as the media, including the BBC online news pages, seem to think - we can't sympathise with the victims unless we know there are British people involved? 

I don't have a high opinion of the British press at the best of times. This general election has destroyed any remaining respect for the newspapers that I might have had. We've had photoshopped sexist pictures of Nicola Sturgeon, Ed Milliband and that bloody bacon sandwich and others. Photos of anyone who is not a Tory seem to be chosen to make them look like fools. And I suspect the Daily Express will live to regret the number of adoring photos of Nigel Farage it has printed this year. 

They say you get the press you deserve but I'm more inclined to believe you get the press half a dozen billionaire press magnates want to give you. And their world view sees us, their British readers, as petty-minded and insular, so we get very little by way of European or international news in the papers and what we do get has to have something to do with the UK directly or apparently we're not interested. 

But we're all a lot more international than the UK press seems to think these days. We travel a lot. Often by plane. We've all been on economy flights which we knew were staffed to the minimum to keep prices down. And we've all been comforted by the idea that pilots are good people doing a good job and take great care of us because they don't want to die either in a metal tube hurtling through the air. And here we have one pilot prepared to kill 149 other people as well as himself, and for no reason that anyone can see at the moment...

I was glad to see the German police keeping the media (and those spectators who always seem to arrive when any disaster happens equipped with their camera phones) away from the home of the pilot's parents. They are victims too.