Flying
Flying is wrong for me. It's fine for everyone else, but if I fly again I will die. I cannot stress this enough - especially to the people who say "Oh yeah, I'm scared of flying, just have a pint beforehand". NO! That is not a fear of flying, that's an excuse to have a pint. Flying will kill me. If I ever drink enough to get on a plane again I will die of liver failure before we get off the ground - and it'll all be the plane's fault.

The bigger the plane the worse it is, I might at a push get in an engine less glider about to be pushed off a cliff (go figure) but the moment more than 4 people can get on board it's completely wrong. Just the image of the inside of a plane has me recoiling in horror, the real thing causes a full on panic attack. And don't get me started on the A380, words fail me it's so terrifying.

For the record, my dad's a pilot and I fully believe flying is perfectly safe for everyone else (except in the A380, that's a coffin waiting to plummet).
(MsZuzu, Fri 11 Apr 2008, 12:58, 6 replies)

A380?
Well it's big and it's an aeroplane.

However, being an Airbus project leads me to conclude that Italians are involved in building bits.

*shudders*

If they wire the A380 together in the same Beadle handed, Katona brained way the wired together as my Alfa Romeo then a hell of a lot of these will be falling out of the sky like confetti.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Fri 11 Apr 2008, 13:08, closed)

A380
Wasn't one of the reason for the delay in production of the A380 that the wiring loom was too big for the space allocated for it? They have since solved this. Presumably they're either using thinner (inferior quality) wire or have just done away with some that weren't deemed to be quite so important!
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 11 Apr 2008, 13:26, closed)

A380 & Italians
Well, judging by the approach to reliable wiring in my Alfa 156 they probably got someone to say "Mam-ma mia!" before randomly chopping piss poor quality wire away, stuffing it in an approximation of where it ought to go and then fucking off two hours early for tortellini.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Fri 11 Apr 2008, 13:29, closed)

PJM
Not bitter in any way about Alfas, then?

Mind you, there's an Alfa engine in my wife's Fiat and in my Vauxhall. The first needs the engine taking out to do the cambelt which is eye-wateringly expensive, and the second has a 'sport' setting that makes you go very fast past hidden speed cameras. Whoops.
(osok Rebel without a clue, Fri 11 Apr 2008, 13:47, closed)

I know someone
who used to drive a Lancia. He parked it in the supermarket car park one day, got out, locked it, and just as he was turning to walk away, the driver's door window started to go down by itself.

Then the rain came on.

To fix it, he had to take the door trim off, in the car park, soaking wet!

Mind you, I drive a Laguna, which is little better. On one of its many trips to the garage, the bloke giving me a lift to the station so I could catch the train to work told me of a difficult problem they'd had with a Laguna. It necessitated bringing in a team of technicians from Renault in France. One lunchtime, he had gone into the workshop to find the four of them sitting eating their lunch, complete with a little tablecloth and four glasses of wine!

Just a shame this classy attitude didn't extend to their engineering.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 11 Apr 2008, 14:05, closed)

Exactly!
Actually, I'm not that bitter about Alfa Romeos I'd definitely buy another.

The Alfa 156 had to be redesigned very early on in its life to get the electrics to work properly. Post 1999 cars (the 156 was first sold in the tail end of 1997) have Bosch electrics, designed by Germans who know what they're doing and presumably closely supervise excited latins to make sure they do it properly - in the manner of the WW2 axis, the Germans come to the rescue every time the flaky Italians fuck it up.

Early 1999 cars have Magnetti Marelli electrics, which are cheaply built, hugely, outrageously, massively expensive to buy and have the longevity prospects of Paris Hilton's further education ambitions.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Fri 11 Apr 2008, 14:22, closed)