Professional Engineering

The Eye has never been convinced that plans for a third runway at Heathrow are dead and buried. There’s too many vested interests and too much money at stake for additional capacity at Europe’s busiest airport to be ruled out for long. Environmental campaigners and concerned residents of west London may now have to dust off their placards and mobilise once again. Why? Well, the Eye has noticed a steady drip-drip of research findings claiming that a lack of airport expansion is starting to damage the country’s economic competitiveness. The latest considered opinion on the matter comes from consultancy Frontier Economics, with the publication of a report claiming that Heathrow is already at full capacity, and that new routes to booming regions of Asia can only be established by squeezing out other flights. And who commissioned this new work? Why, none other than BAA, the airports operator that owns Heathrow. The findings will be fed into the government’s scoping document on aviation policy which is due to be published in the next few weeks. And the Eye reckons this document will present the perfect opportunity to get the third runway at Heathrow back on to the political agenda.

Professional Engineering regards itself as a publication of some repute, but many more mainstream titles are continuing to make errors, following on from September’s Eye, in their use of the word “engineer”. Offenders brought to the Eye’s attention include Which?’s use of “engineer” to describe boiler repair workers at Homeserve, British Gas and Vaillant. And stand up The Daily Telegraph, which included this quote from the telecoms giant BT: “We think our customers might object were we to suddenly send out thousands of engineers with spades to dig up their landlines”. The Eye is all too aware that, lamentably, a spanner is considered as a tool of the trade by the public; for BT’s “engineers” a spade is now to be included.

What’s this? Engineers being cruelly mocked by a moderately humorous joke seen whizzing around Twitter. Q: “What’s the difference between an introvert and an extrovert engineer?” A: “The extrovert looks at other people’s feet.” Boom boom. Jokes about engineers are rare but surely PE’s readership can trump this. Send in any jokes you might have heard to the Eye and it will round up the best ones. Keep it clean, though, hey?

• If you have any news, rumours, gossip or engineering jokes to share, email the Eye at engineering.eye.pe@gmail.com.