Teenagers on work experience banned from air traffic control
Schoolchildren gaining practical experience of the workplace will no longer be permitted to manage the traffic at busy airports, following a number of recent safety concerns.
At the age of fourteen or fifteen, most Year 10 pupils are seconded to a local business or retail outlet to gain practical experience of office life before making further education or career choices. However a number of pupils who did their work experience at Heathrow Airport have been judged to be insufficiently attentive or mature to be left in charge of busy air traffic lanes.
Fifteen year old ‘Degsy’ O’Rourke from Hayes Technical College spent a week on the computers at Heathrow. ‘You had to get these little planes on the screen onto this like narrow strip? It’s not as good as Grand Theft Auto, cos you only get one life’ Another Hayes pupil was sent home after he made two planes on the screen bump into one another ‘to see what would happen’. ‘The acoustics on these computers is like, amazing,’ said Johnny Finch, 14. ‘I got them to crash on the screen but it sounded like the big explosion was right outside the window!’
‘They were only supposed to be making the coffee and doing a bit of photocopying’ said Bill Hendry the headteacher who organised the Heathrow work experience allocations. ‘Unfortunately a small minority of irresponsible pupils thought it would be amusing to get out of doing PE for the rest of term by crashing a jumbo jet into the school gymnasium.’
http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2012/01/12/teenagers-on-work-experience-banned-from-air-traffic-control-271/
= new reply since forum marked as read
"It's like Grand Theft Auto..," Ok that scares the crap out of me! 
here in the UK, is general misuse of some teenagers when they're out on a work experience program. Aside the the experience of actually going to work the intention is that they learn - not just be used for making the tea and sweeping etc.
You let some young kid get near a simulator like that, you can expect this to happen. They're young, for God's sake. Come on, it was a simulator, that spells "GAME" to kids. It's 99.9999% likely that they knew it wasn't even real. Chalk this up under a completely harmless example of youthful indiscretion. (Unless I'm misreading this story and real planes were actually crashed into real planes and/or buildings?) Immaturity, at worst. The worst punishment I'd prescribe for these kids is to make them look at photos of real crashes and maybe listen to the videos of dead victims' families talking.
The real idiots here, however, are the adults who put these young kids within reach of these things and didn't ever expect them to touch them and have some fun.
If the adults let these kids onto the simulators then they were utterly irresponsible. If the kids sneaked and got onto the simulators then we have a bit of incompetence involved here. Either way, the adults screwed up. The story should be about them.
BTW.... was this picture from the movie "Knowing"?
