Monarch restores Manchester - Gibraltar flights, BA flight times change.

Monarch Airlines have reintroduced their service between Manchester Airport and Gibraltar.

Despite reports of very good loads, the route was suspended 2 years ago by Monarch in protest over the higher than typical landing charges at Gibraltar Airport. Landing charges were at the time set by the MOD who operate the airport as RAF Gibraltar.

The reintroduction of Manchester flights follows a deal struct between the Government of Gibraltar and the MoD whereby the Government would contribute to the costs of the airport but would be able to reduce charges.

Flight times:

Depart MAN 0715, Arrive GIB 1115
Depart GIB 1200, Arrive MAN 1400

It will operate on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 12th September.

[Monday services operate 20 minutes earlier at 0655 and 1140.]

Interestingly it is currently planned to be operated as a simple out-and-back service, previously it operated as a W pattern from Manchester to Gibraltar and back with Luton Airport in the middle.

British Airways schedule change for winter:

Due to BAs currently highly stretched fleet as they try to cover a GB Airways sized hole in their operation (following easyJet's purchase of the local owned franchise operator) British Airways has been limited to just one daily service from London, departing in the morning.

From Sunday the 26th October, it will switch to the afternoon:

Depart LGW 1330, Arrive GIB 1720
Depart GIB 1800, Arrive LGW 1950

Reflecting heavy fleet commitment it had earlier looked like the morning service might have to go red-eye for winter with a circa ~6am departure.

However the fears were not justified as BA have manged to rearrange their schedule to support the lucrative premium traffic on the route

(The Real) Operation Felix: Hitler's Plan to capture Gibraltar - by Joe Garcia

The title of this post has been prefixed with 'the real' because - utterly by chance - Operation Felix was referenced in the title of the unrelated previous post).

Operation Felix: Hitler's Plan to capture Gibraltar
by Joe Garcia
New and enlarged edition, 2008
Panorama Publications, Gibraltar




This new expanded edition of Joe Garcia's study of Operation Felix has just been published.

Not only have a lot of new archive documents been released since the original publication but also new finds in Gibraltar have been made. When this text was last edited, Stay Behind Cave - the plan to entomb a contingent of British soldiers in the event of a successful German invasion - had not yet been rediscovered.

The book focuses heavily on the logistical concerns faced by the Germans during their planning and the need to plan for an attack both with and without open support from 'officially neutral' facist Spain under General Franco.

Some knowledge of the local area and the surrounding countryside in Spain is certainly required though to really follow the events - a map would certainly not have gone amiss - if the book is to be enjoyed by a wider audience. Also the rate of change and redevelopment in Gibraltar itself needs to be factored in, particularly if you've not seen photographs of Gibraltar before the post war reclamation. The actual detail of the Gibraltar wartime story is rather underknow further affeild and I couldn't help thinking someone should repackage this excellent study for a wider audience.

However if you do have some background knowledge or can sufficiently pick things up as you go, it is a facinating read. [Not least for obvious land transport 'issues' that have continued to face Spain until almost this day.]

The book is priced at £9 and has a slightly larger print of text that would suitable for both advancing and younger eyes.

Book link on Panorama website.

Operation Felix - Google thinks we are in Germany

Are you in Gibraltar? Have you had Google offer you content from Germany yet? Or perhaps, quite out of the blue, another google site - such as blogger.com - has suddenly starting to speak to you German?

- Well its been happening for about a month now to some of us and as it hasn't sorted itself out, perhaps it is time we took a look.

GeoIP location is what has gone wrong here. Every machine on the internet has an IP address (a unique number) that says where it can be located. [This is what makes the internet work, the domain names are just the pretty bits sitting on top.] Websites then cross reference a visitor to their location and provide targeted adverts - well at least that is the theory.

It appears that at least some Gibraltar IP addresses are, as far as Google is concerned, in Germany.

Actually I can be more specific, Google seems quite confident they are in Frankfurt am Main.

Now IP addresses are all centrally allocated in big blocks to national country authorities and also entities such as universities, etc. The only problem is the world is running out of them, and in order to make room some rather generous older allocations need to be revisited.

That is most likely what has happened here. We have been given a block that used to be allocated to Germany.

The problem is certainly occurring for me as I type this, and I'm using Gibtelecom ADSL which has given me an IP address in the block: 217.65.48.*

According to the RIPE database this is within a block allocation to Gibraltar (occasionally you might cross the internet privately before entering it publicly in another country - but that's clearly NOT what's gone wrong here).

Concerned that this might affect lots of other sites, I've tested the Maxmind database (Maxmind are the biggest suppliers of this technology), however they have us set-up correctly, as do the bbc - who detect their UK users from other nonUK users.

At first I therefore though it might just be the main code at google.com to offer a localised version, and further that code might not get updated very frequently.

However it is also being used on their award wining visitor statistics program, Google Analytics. (The screen shot above comes from Google Analytics.).

Given the speed at which we are running out of type4 ip addresses, the need to review and reallocate blocks will only increase. It is therefore a pity that website are starting to make increasingly daft use of them.

The mobile phone company O2 in the UK is crazily using GeoIP to prevent nonUK users for even looking at their web shop (shop.o2.co.uk). The reason they give? - We don't delivery and can't sell to people outside the UK. What a daft reason, recently I was trying to advise a UK based relative on mobile phones, O2 lost a purchase because they would let me in to look are and advise someone else.

The futures exchange EURONEXT LIFFE has even more amazingly been using it to determine what information people get. Not what language they want to use, nor what information they want as the default - but what information is available to them full stop. It is hard to think of a more international business than financial markets.

At least this error makes a change from the websites who have correct GeoIP tables and know that we are in Gibraltar, but then have wrong country profiles and default to assume we should be spoken to in Spanish by default.

I don't know yet if it is affecting others outside of 217.65.48., but we will do more tests later.