The flight is popular with travellers from outside Britain, who fly into Heathrow and transfer at the airport. The Department of Transport is understood to have passed on intelligence from security sources to the airline that flight BA 223 could be the target of an attack.
Earlier yesterday, the same numbered flight, which left Heathrow at 3.05pm on New Year’s Eve, was held for three hours on arrival at Washington Dulles International Airport while the baggage of the 247 passengers underwent extra screening.Suspicions that the intelligence only related to the BA 223 afternoon route were further confirmed by the disclosure that two other direct British Airways flights to Washington, which leave in the morning and evening, were allowed to continue yesterday.The decision to cancel the afternoon flight to Washington from Heathrow was only made in the morning. A terrorism alert led to the the cancellation of a British Airways flight with 180 passengers from Heathrow to Washington yesterday. Though sympathetic, he admits that that their invented private languages don’t add up to a reconstituted public realm. He is acerbic about the blind alley of “world music”, pleasantly waspish about John Tavener and prophets of the New Naivety, and shows the futility of trying to “remake” tonality.

The power of classical tonality in its heyday derived from a perfect reciprocity between form and social function. The genie’s out of the bottle.What now? Hewett offers a brilliant tour d’horizon of music’s multifarious new directions – aided by sampling tricks, fuelled by PC notions – but concludes that if we want to “heal the rift”, we can’t delegate the job to composers We must all start making music again If we play and sing, we will once more listen actively too And that way lies musical health.. Herein lies the misery of the modernist composer: obliged to teach the audience a new language, but inevitably doomed to fail.Hewett writes so illuminatingly about Birtwistle, Boulez, Cage and Carter that one feels impelled to listen again. Sometimes the writing is too densely philosophical for the argument to be immediately grasped, but that only puts it on a level with its subject-matter.One of Hewett’s many sub-plots follows the rise of the programme note, starting with Berlioz’s instructions on how to listen to the Symphonie Fantastique, and culminating in the current situation where it’s unthinkable for a new work to be presented without copious verbal explication. Deploying the expertise which made him the ideal anchorman for Radio 3’s Music Matters, Hewett writes with easy authority.

He has interviewed widely, read deeply, listened at length: his nine short chapters ripple with provocative insights. As he makes clear, that crisis reflects a falling-apart in our entire culture. Putting it together again – if such a thing is possible – would benefit us all.His focus is on composers past and present. Until recent times, says Ivan Hewett, music was everywhere, and always an authentic expression of the social situation that called it forth. The idyll was shattered, in the developed West, by the notion that music could be transportable: a mass could be taken out of church and performed in a concert hall Then music began its long retreat from the public domain.