“I must apologise for the time it took for us to taxi across the runway,” announced the pilot once we had touched down in Khartoumâ€s airport – already, his voice was dripping with sarcasm. “There were only two planes on the runway and it seems that control got confused. So sorry about that folks.” link

Not sure if the video above is of the flight Blake mentions, but it is supposedly at Khartoum International Airport and suitably shaky.

Times newspaper reporter Deborah Haynes blogs about the rigmarole associated with getting flights in Iraq as she seeks out the ‘Freedom Express’ on a mission to Mosul only to get upgraded to cockpit class,

Travelling to northern Iraq for an embed is always a bit of a gamble because there are limited military flights and the weather has a habit of grounding them. Fellow journalists have shared horror stories about being stuck en route for hours, even days, at a remote base called Speicher, waiting for a connection. For me, the tidings for a trip up to Mosul last month were grim from the start. link

Deborah is up the award of Foreign correspondent of the year at the British Press Awards for next month

We were carrying supplies for a hospital on the other side of the rebel-held mountains. I knew that heavy rains had rendered some sections of the road almost impassable, that our cargo might tempt looters, and that war was looming. I did not expect the 50-mile journey to take 24 hours.

We negotiated the various checkpoints without difficulty, but well into the mountains, the deep mud defeated our driver. Time and again, we dug ourselves out, but the light was fading and we decided it would be safer to stop than to continue in the dark.

The man who claimed to know the area best said we were in no man’s land. Rebels controlled the area immediately to our north; the army had been advancing from the south. Neither side, he thought, was likely to risk descending to the road from their hilltop vantage points. Nobody seemed greatly cheered by this assessment.

Our colleagues hadn’t heard from us, so they called senior contacts on both sides to seek assurances that we would come to no harm. One commander soon confirmed our position, adding that we had grilled corn-on-the-cob around a little roadside fire before sleeping in the cab. We never noticed his scouts.

Leaving at dawn, we fell silent as we passed through a series of abandoned villages. Looters had left doors swinging open; furniture littered the street. The sense of desolation lifted as we neared our destination and saw signs of life again: children, cattle, wood smoke.

That night, a sound like distant thunder signalled the outbreak of heavy fighting along the road we had taken. Nobody would be going that way for a while.

(The setting is North Kivu, eastern Congo, at the end of last year. I submitted this to The Observer Magazine’s ‘Incredible Journeys’ section, which features a variety of very short travel anecdotes. They were too busy to write back, though, so what the hell, here it is.)

The crew [in the picture] escaped with only minor injuries and no one was killed, even though the blast ripped the engine from its armoured bay and hurled it over 100 yards…

EU Referendum has more pics and more detail on the alarming vehicular situation for British troops and more accounts of the Mastiff’s lifesaving qualities. The Mastiff was introduced a fraction too early to join the ranks of the World’s most expensive cars, but we fully expect to see it making an appearance on 2008’s list alongside a starring role on the boulevards of Beverley Hills if the humvee headcases are anything to go by.