Men in jumpsuits pull levers sending massive pallets of emergency food supplies trundling out and down to the desperate masses below.

The plane pulls up and away and the job is done. Aid has been delivered to the needy.

This is the TV aid fantasy that has hooked some politicians in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis and the refusal of the Government of Myanmar (Burma) to allow enough humanitarian workers in to deal with the disaster.

Dropping pallets of aid from the sky seems a straight-forward, elegant and technological solution to a difficult political problem.

However, this is far from the reality.

To begin with, reaching the people who desperately need the aid requires excellent intelligence.

Yet no-one knows exactly where the worst affected areas are, or how many people are suffering in each place.

We don't know if people are on the move, or what diseases are starting to appear, or exactly what state their homes and infrastructure are in.

Without good intelligence it's very hard to run an effective humanitarian operation – especially an airborne one.

It would be only too easy to drop the food miles from the nearest village, or even in water or a swamp, or into the hands of local criminals or strongmen who would sell it for a profit.

You can't drop a well or a sanitation system from the sky without specialists to set it up.

Communities could find themselves with aid completely inappropriate to their situation.

The final stage of a food aid distribution is often the most difficult in the whole operation.

Aid workers don't turn up at a starving, desperate village with a truck full of food without having organised the trip with village elders or officials first.

Things can easily go wrong when giving food to hungry people, and there has to be staff on the ground to organise the process.

Arriving unannounced could lead to a riot, with the strongest getting the food and the weakest leaving with nothing. Crowd control is vital.

Without precautions the aid would be very unlikely to go to the people who need it most.

Then there is the astronomical cost.

Just keeping an aircraft on the runway, ready to go, costs at least $25,000 a day.

The most commonly used plane, the IL 76, can carry 20 tonnes of food – enough to feed 40,000 people the most minimal rations for a day.

That could mean nearly 40 air drops a day to feed the 1.5million people most seriously affected – a massive expenditure for such a scattergun, uncoordinated approach.

In the right circumstances air drops have worked.

In the 1990s the UN used them to get aid into parts of southern Sudan that were temporarily cut off, either by fighting or heavy rains.

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