Photo by Katrin Bolovtsova via Pexels
Welcome back to this bi-weekly installment of What Just Happened?!, a semi-comical digest of the most important news from the UK, US and the World. Look out for us every now and again, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The World
Boom! And the future is gone…
On Tuesday afternoon, over the Mojave desert, for the very first time, a civilian, privately funded aircraft travelled faster than the speed of sound. Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator aircraft passed through the sound barrier three times whilst engineers gathered swathes of data about the aircraft’s performance. Boom is a startup that is determined to bring back supersonic passenger air travel with its Overture plane, and has so far garnered orders from American, United and Japan Airlines before any of its designs had ever even taken to the sky.
The one-seater demonstrator aims to do exactly what it says on the tin: show the world of aviation (and investors) that with “only” $600m a civilian team could get a plane through the sound barrier, and it’s fair to say they’ve definitely created some waves by actually getting this far.
Translating this success into a commercially viable passenger aircraft will be an altogether different game, and it’s an extraordinary show of how willing and able we are to ignore the climate crisis that investors are piling in behind supersonic flight, however… as an engineer and avgeek (aviation geek) your correspondent can’t help but admit this tickles his pickle.
A mere sideshow to the test flight, but certainly interesting and also a world first, was the marvel of Boom streaming live air-to-air footage of the flight from a chase plane at supersonic speeds. Made possible, astonishingly, by sucker-cupping a $500 Starlink Mini to the window!
A little Norse
Mette Frederiken, the Danish Prime Minister, has been on a whirlwind tour of European capitals in an effort to rally the Eurosphere in unity and presumably get some comfort that everyone else hears the United States threatening to annex Greenland (a Danish territory). Frederiken met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leader Mark Rutte in Brussels.
The United States operates a military base in Greenland called the Pituffik Space Base, better known as the Thule Air Base, which is the United States Northernmost air force base. Almost equidistant between the arctic circle and the North Pole (about 750 miles into the Arctic Circle and about 950 miles from the North Pole) it is a strategically significant base for early warning systems designed to detect InterContinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) launched at North America.
Outlandish military operations in Greenland are a longtime hobby of the Americans, Camp Century and Project Ice Worm describe a 1959 initiative to construct a mobile series of nuclear missile launchers under Greenland’s ice sheet, the project was scuppered 7 years later after the engineers realized that glaciers move (among other challenges related to running nuclear reactors in ice tunnels).
“It is summed up in this ambition that if the United States just owned the whole world, then everything would be under control. But that is not going to happen, so we have to find another form where we jointly accomplish these tasks” Danish Foreign Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen: Reuters
The UK
Build it and they will come… to Heathrow
The Labour government look set to finally approve the expansion of Heathrow with a third runway. The UKs biggest and busiest airport has been asking to build another runway since 2003 and there is a farcical timeline of approvals and denials that have bounced through successive governments for the last 22 years, but it does seem like Rachel Reeves is determined to get the approval through the parliament.
For context, Heathrow has been operating for many years now at absolutely full capacity, limited by a hard stop on the number of flights that it is physically possible to land and takeoff from two runways. As anybody who regularly flies through London knows, an approach to Heathrow that doesn’t involve at least a half hour of flying in circles in what are known as ‘the stacks’ is incredibly rare. (Actually on WJH’s last flight there it threw one off as one thought one had time to finish Monkey Man and then we just approached straight in, excruciatingly having never seen the last 10 minutes.)
The wider context hits all parts of the UK’s current struggle to find economic growth, 40 years of stagnation in infrastructure development, and the government’s seeming to abandon environmental targets. On the latter, there’s really no excuse for expanding aviation further, but the latest excuse is that having planes land quicker is better for the environment than circling over London, which is true, but also a little absurd (especially as the runway is unlikely to see planes before 2035). Whilst the same issues are echoed at London’s myriad secondary airports: Gatwick looks set to receive approval for a second runway, and Luton for an expansion to its passenger handling facilities. All of these projects are privately funded, but the many years of dithering approval from governments is thought to be one of the reasons investors have been scared of working with the UK, which is in turn one of the drivers of our economic stagnation.
The even wider picture though, is the general abandonment of principles or any semblance of spine by the Labour party: a single-minded focus on GDP growth is increasingly driving them to abandon realistic climate change commitments, whilst Starmer has taken to sucking up to and appeasing Trump… to what end?!
The US
The Exceptions that Prove the Rules (How strong are the Checks and Balances?)
Federal workers have been sounding the alarm that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is essentially undergoing a hostile takeover. Allegations abound on Reddit (r/fednews) that career civil servants (i.e. useful professionals who understand how to keep the government running) have been pushed aside to make space for Trump’s “yes” men (such as Elon Musk the Sieg Heil performing clown).
Usually, each US Federal Agency would be responsible for managing their internal communications, the OPM’s Twitter-style letter threatening all Federal employees was highly unusual. Warning that their jobs aren’t secure and encouraging them to resign, while promising funds that it is not at all obvious the OPM is able to promise, has been perceived as bullying and basically a slap in the face to America’s ~2 million long-suffering federal workers.
Metadata from PDFs reveals Heritage Foundation / Project 2025 wackadoodles to have originally authored memo’s being circulated by OPM; specifically one withdrawing protections for tens of thousands of Federal workers (see: Schedule F), essentially carrying on a theme of wanting to make it easier for Trump et al. to dispose of political opponents, or those not hellbent on governing based on bizarre prejudices.
One of the really bizarre aspects of these attacks is how severely they impact the perpetrators political base. 80% of the 5 million or so people who expect to enjoy Obamacare (otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act) in 2025 are in Republican states (states that voted red in 2024). Of the 2 million or so Federal workers in the United States, some 30% are military service veterans; compared to the 8.3 million veterans comprising approximately 5% of the civilian workforce in the US.
A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump White House’s efforts to pause federal funding for, well, apparently pretty much everything. An unhinged memo issued from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which oversees Executive Branch (i.e. Presidential) finances, was rescinded two days later after the Feds found themselves being sued by everyone and their mother (specifically, The American Public Health Association, National Council of NonProfits, and the Attorney’s General of 23 states). All this while scrambling to reassure anyone that Medicaid and Social Security weren’t among the things to be cut, despite the Payment Management System (PMS) that supports Federal Medicaid funding to states going down.
“This is an important victory for the American people whose voices were heard after massive pressure from every corner of this country—real people made a difference by speaking out. Still, the Trump administration—through a combination of sheer incompetence, cruel intentions, and a willful disregard of the law—caused real harm and chaos for millions over the span of the last 48 hours which is still ongoing” Senator Murray
Thanks for reading! We’ll be back soon; please let us know what you did and didn’t like.
If you really liked it, please consider supporting us from £2 on our Buy Me A Coffee, this will go directly into supporting our hosting costs!
What Just Happened? 