The title of this edition of my Great Thoughts (irritating enough for you, Lil’Elves?) can be read in two ways: flight is negative and flight is numbered.

OK, enough of the silly puns.

For some reason known only to those versed in the Dark Arts, in the aftermath of the nation-wide power cut a couple of weeks ago, the country ended up talking not about Konrad Mizzi’s incompetence or his complete lack of appreciation of the cost of a week’s shopping (€25 for Heaven’s sake, where does his wife shop, some provincial town in China or something? No, wait…) but about the fact that a few flights were diverted because the airport lost power.

We even had no less an exalted personage than the President of the Pilots' Union of Malta (not to be confused with the Pilots’ Union of, say, Milan) getting on his high horse and decreeing that the airport company should compensate airlines that lost money because of the delays. Well, I’m not sure if it was for the delays that compensation was claimed, it might have been because of the landing fees that had to be paid by the airline, now that I think of it. Piffling little things like delays don’t usually cost airlines money, they don’t have to compensate passengers or anything mundane like that, generally speaking.

It has now been reported, however, that in fact and in truth, the airport had a perfectly well functioning landing-ready runway all through the black-out, namely the other one, the shorter one that is used when the wind is wrong or maintenance is being carried out on the long one.

So why the diversions, you may ask?

Well, it seems that the air-traffic control people decided to order closure of the airfield, so questions should be directed to them and, according to the story in Saturday’s Times, questions did wing their way that way.

True to his upbringing as a former officer and a current gentleman, the head man in that area took responsibility for the call, even though not being a technical man, he obviously could have used what is becoming known as the “Evarist Bartolo plea" and blame his underlings. Apparently, the lights flickered on the secondary runway (which was clearly the result of the blips caused by Konrad Mizzi’s Enemalta deciding to take a nap) so Malta Air Traffic Services Limited decided to pull the plug, having already had a report from one of President-Captain Dominic Azzopardi’s members that the main runway was doing a disco impression.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d be able to weave some fantastic story together for you at this point.

It would go something like this.

Some quick thinking public affairs minion (minion “a”) within Konrad Mizzi’s Ministry, knowing full well that his Minister would not like to take the limelight on this one (it’s not as if the price of petrol was going to be reduced by one point five €uro cents after all) got on the blower to another minion in air-traffic (minion “b”) and suggested that the airport be shut-down - at the same time letting it be known that it was one of the Gods of the Cockpit, the ones that can never (and quite rightly so) be contradicted who had reported the main runway’s flashing lights episode. To the objection that we, erm, actually have two runways, minion “a” would have replied to minion “b” that its lights would be flashing too, because the power’s cutting in and out.

The whole thing would depend on assorted people shutting up or making noises about compensation and such-like, but minion “a” would be quite confident that some loud-mouth could be found for that, too.

Obviously, that is not what happened: there is no “minion “a”, there is no “minion “b”, there is no loud-mouth and there was no cunning plan: it was just a happy set of circumstances, serendipity, if you like, that diverted the country for a few days. Fingers were pointed, inquiries demanded, Ministers took breaks from having themselves filmed, in full HD and at no little cost, having cooling buckets of water poured over them in August (and failing to make it clear a) that they were paying for the professional filming themselves, b) that they were donating money to the good cause anyway and c) how much they were donating) and all we remembered about the power-cut was that some flights got diverted.

Pity one inquiry actually reported back, wasn’t it?