DINNER PARTY INTEL: New flight safety

1. Honeymoon on hold

Cricket’s T20 World Cup, which ended on Sunday with Australia emerging as champions, led to a honeymoon being postponed.

Malala Yousafzai, a Nobel peace prize winner and activist for women’s education, married Asser Malik in Birmingham last week. The couple delayed their honeymoon to watch their home team, Pakistan, play Australia in a semifinal. Their priority was no surprise. Malala is a big cricket fan and her husband manages Pakistan cricket’s high-performance centre in Lahore. In the end, Pakistan lost and the honeymoon won.

2. Spaceman’s fatal flight

He went into space with Captain Kirk of Star Trek (William Shatner), but died a month later in a more prosaic flight. Glen de Vries, 49, travelled into space and back with Shatner and two others on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket. Last week De Vries and another man died when their single-engine plane crashed in a wooded area of New Jersey. De Vries, who founded a clinical research company, was a part-time pilot and a climate activist who put his money where his mouth was, donating $1m shortly before his trip into space.

3. New flight safety

United Airlines, which is due to resume flights to SA on December 1, is spending millions on paid leave for unvaccinated pilots because their colleagues "refuse to risk their safety" by flying with them.

The leave is costing the airline about $1.4m every two weeks — money it’s unlikely to recover even if it wins a lawsuit to fight a legal challenge to the employee vaccine mandate it announced in August.

United says 97% of its employees are vaccinated. Soon, it will be 100%, after the airline fires the 232 employees who refuse to get the jab.