Tracey reprises Amy Johnson's adventure

Tracey Curtis-Taylor has landed in Sydney.  The two weathermen flew with the news for a few moments.

Weatherman  1 : Tracey Curtis-Taylor has made it to Australia at last. It took her 3 months in that little bi-plane.

Weatherman  2 :  Amy Johnson got to the Darwin in less than 3 weeks back in 1930. That’s not a lot of technological progress is it? 85 years later you are 4 times as slow.

WM 1 : Well there’s probably all sorts of regulations about flying now. You can’t over-fly some countries lest you get shot down – and she did have a camera crew in another aeroplane. They’re making another film.

WM 2 : Film makers really test your patience. I bet she had to do reaction shots. That was it. She’d fly over a wonder of the world and the director said “now do it again so we can see the amazement on the faces of the people on the ground. Now do it again so that we can film your hair blowing in the wind. Now do it again...”

WM1 : Tracey probably flew three times as far as Amy. No wonder it took her so long. She did mention something about a hairdresser when she landed. It could be that she had to wait at various hairdressers in Karachi or Kuala Lumpa. A lot of people need a haircut, not just Tracey.

WM 2 : I saw a picture of her with Champagne and she was saying “I need a drink.”

WM 1 : Maybe she had some no-fly days due to a hangover?

WM 2 : Well whatever the reason, there was no shortage of support. It’s not like the good old days of pioneering. When those first balloonists went up there was no navigation, no life jackets, and no parachutes; nothing.

WM 1 : They are not the first. What’s the point? I suppose the originals were trail blazers. They were re-defining what man could do.

WM 2 : Cameras may be the point now. When Amy did it, no-one was there to watch the passage in such intimacy. Now we can re-live Amy’s adventure from the comfort of our armchairs.

WM 1 : My parents  explored the depths with Jacques Cousteau and the closest they got to being wet was spilling a cup of tea on their laps. Are there any great adventures left to do?

WM 2 : If it wasn’t for the invention of the aeroplane by the Wright brothers, Amy’s would have been impossible. If it wasn’t for the Montgolfier brothers, there would be no balloons. You need brothers with a good idea.

WM 1 : The Miliband brothers weren’t very successful at re-inventing the Labour party. It nearly crashed and burned. Perhaps we need new technology to be the springboard for new thinking around death defying stunts. What will the next one be?

WM 2 : We’ve already had the first round-the-world trip in a solar-powered aeroplane.

WM 1 : There’s Branson working on his space ship.

WM 2 : Yes, but he’s just using existing technology. It’s a break-through, but it isn’t like the birth of flight. We need real out of the box thinking for the next adventures. What’s left that we still aspire to?

WM 1 : We’ve done it all. We’ve gone up, we’ve plunged the seas, we’ve gone as high as possible, as fast as possible, as long as possible, as deep as possible...I suppose we could start under water weight lifting.

WM 2 : No one has walked a tight rope between London and Paris yet.

WM 1 : We can zipwire from the back of an aeroplane so that when it lands at the 2^nd airport, we land back at the original.

WM 2 : We’ll probably get around to pot holing on the moon, or cave diving on Mars if there’s enough water.

WM 1 :  Not in our lifetimes though.