I AM of course delighted that the US is now air-dropping food into Gaza to alleviate some of the misery caused by the Israeli army’s slow genocide of its inhabitants. However, let’s not pretend that the drops are anything other than the tiniest of fig leaves, despite the efforts of the White House to big them up.

There’s understandable ignorance about the mechanics of dropping supplies from aircraft, illustrated by most of the media’s reporting. On Radio 4 an "expert", who had served in the RAF, likened the current operation to the one conducted in Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985. An operation that was authorised by Mrs Thatcher, so she wasn’t entirely bad.

I was an RAF pilot at that time, flying the C-130 Hercules; a fantastic aeroplane, still in service worldwide and about the only one capable of missions such as Operation Bushel, as the detachment to Ethiopia was called. I spent a month in Addis Ababa in December 1984 as Ops Officer and returned in October 1985 in a flying role, air-dropping food to the remote Ethiopian highlands.

The aid delivery flights were loaded with four pallets, each carrying 10,000lbs of grain in sacks. We flew low over the drop zone and members of the Army’s 47 Air Dispatch Squadron pushed the pallets out of the back of the aircraft, one pallet on each run through the zone. Official advice was to drop from 50ft above the ground, but we found that the pallets would rotate as they left the aircraft, resulting in many sacks splitting; so we dropped from 10-15ft. This was onto long, flat areas, with people kept clear till we’d finished - at which point hundreds would rush onto the drop zone to collect a meagre handful of grain from sacks that had split. The intact sacks were carried away for distribution; I suspect some were appropriated by the Ethiopian Army.

Dropping by parachute from altitude is a completely different kettle of fish. Your recent article (“115 Palestinians die in convoy incident”, March 3) uses the figure of 42,000lbs as the capability, but para drop reduces that markedly, I suspect to a quarter or less. So we have three US C-130s delivering a total of 30,000lbs of food per day to 2.4 million people. Do the math, as they say in the States: it’s welcome, but the tiniest fraction of what’s needed.

Doug Maughan, Dunblane.

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Glasgow deserves much better

MARK Smith ("The Glaswegians who'll pay the price for the 10pm rule", The Herald, March 4) sums up Glasgow City Council as "exasperating ... tone deaf". I must commend him for his avoidance of stronger, possibly unprintable language.

Who could fail to be angered by the latest anti-business idea from a council which has been complicit in turning a once-vibrant city centre into a litter-strewn landscape of closed and graffitied shutters? The hospitality industry, be it theatres, cinemas, galleries, night clubs, bars or some of the country's finest restaurants, will see the council's plan to extend parking restrictions to 10pm citywide as the final insult, the coup de grace in the war the SNP/Green alliance seems to be waging on city centre businesses. As for the council advice to "use sustainable transport" is that the expensive and unreliable buses, the often cancelled and always late trains, our subway that shuts up shop at 10.4 pm and at 6.30 on a Sunday evening or perhaps the dwindling number of black cabs?

Our city surely deserves better than this.

William Gold, Glasgow.

Automatics are hard to find

ONE small but perhaps not irrelevant point that is often missed in the discussion regarding learning to drive/passing one's test in an automatic car (“Glasgow’s leading the automatic revolution - at last”, The Herald, March 2 and Letters, March 5) is the fact that, with the obvious exception of the US and Canada, it is difficult and very expensive to source an automatic rental car when abroad. One company that I have used in the past at Faro airport has only two automatics out of a fleet of over 100 cars and it happily charges a 70% premium compared to the manual equivalent.

Andy Trombala, Stirling.

Oatmeal dissected

TRADITIONAL Scottish pinhead oatmeal and steel-cut oatmeal (Letters, March 5) are not the same.

At our mill we had three sets of millstones. The first was for shilling (shelling) the oats which had been dried and toasted on a flat floor kiln. The stones were set up so as to hit the grain on their ends thus removing the outer coating; they were adjusted as necessary. The second pair were set up to grind the resulting groats (kernels) into pinhead oatmeal. The third pair were set closer together to produce fine oatmeal.

The taste was determined by the skill of the miller in drying, turning and toasting the grain without burning it.

The smell of newly-made oatmeal lingers.

George McGavin, Fenwick.

VAR should be abolished

TODAY'S contributors (Letters, March 5) make valid points about the introduction of VAR to Scottish football.There is, however, no need to learn lessons from rugby; VAR should be abolished.

There is no VAR in the Scottish Championship, where games are fast, competitive, and more skilful than one might imagine. Mistakes are made, but that is traditional. Three times I have seen the much-maligned Willie Collum referee Queen's Park matches, and three times have I failed to see him make a mistake. Other referees are, admittedly, not as good.

Oh for the days of Peter Craigmyle and " Tiny" Wharton.

But I do tend to live in the past.

David Miller, Milngavie.

The Herald: Willie CollumWillie Collum (Image: SNS)

• I AGREE with the dismay expressed by readers as to the performance of VAR at recently screened football matches. Perhaps the game would be better served by referees stamping down on the continual wrestling sessions between players in and around the goal area. A tug is a tug. A push is a push. Both rarely result in action by the referee.

When the obvious is overlooked the whole flow of the game spirals into indiscipline.

Allan C Steele, Giffnock.

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Mangaling of the language

THERE have been a number of letters recently regarding mangled English and the glottal stop (Letters, March 1, 2 & 5).

There is another mispronunciation becoming commonplace that I find irksome. It is the addition of the letter “a” where it does not belong. Here are some examples heard by BBC news reporters: assembaly, gambaling, struggaling, resembalance. Then there is “should of” instead of should have.

David Clark, Tarbolton.