BEING in a business where bad news sells, it’s gratifying for once to have an uplifting story about a local hero on our front page.

Pilots need to have a nerve of steel just to qualify for the job, but how cool was BA pilot Chris Henkey from Padworth when fire broke out on his Boeing 777 as he was about to take off from Las Vegas to Gatwick?

Thanks to his quick thinking and calm demeanour, all 157 passengers and 13 crews were evacuated on inflatable slides and, apart from a few minor injuries, were unharmed.

Chris, 63, who once ran a pub in Burghfield, will be coming back to a fanfare next week when he is reunited with his wife Lenka and daughter Charley at his home just south of Reading.

And one of the proudest moments of dealing with this story is listening to his mayday call from the cockpit - which you can hear on the Reading Chronicle website - and picking up a very slight hint in his voice of a Berkshire burr.

l NOW back to the bad news. A group of elderly people living in a retirement complex in Tilehurst were hosts to a band of particularly rotten thieves last week. They broke in through the bin room and made off with a couple of mobility scooters and an electric wheelchair.

Now the residents, including one elderly lady who has only one leg and is partially sighted, can’t get out on their weekly trips to the shops or to church.

No doubt the thieves involved would come up with a plethora of reasons why they needed to steal someone else’s property: they can’t get a job, or they have an expensive drug habit to fund, perhaps.

Most of us find theft an inexcusable crime, no matter what the motive, but when it is perpetrated on vulnerable people such as these it becomes even more despicable. The only way to deal with such crimes is for the police to catch the perpetrators.

Let’s hope Anthony Stansfeld, Police and Crime Commissioner, lives up to the letter he sent us this week