At long last the new book is out. Patrick Smith and Sourcebooks are proud to announce publication of Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel. Questions, Answers, and Reflections.

“A book to be savored and passed to friends.”  – William Langeweische, Vanity Fair


A wry, thoughtful, and at times provocative look into the confounding world of commercial air travel, this is the ideal take-along for frequent flyers, nervous passengers, world travelers, and anybody yearning for an enlightened, behind-the-scenes look at the strange and misunderstood business of commercial aviation.

Cockpit Confidential is everything the original Ask the Pilot (2004) should have been, but was not. Virtually all of the content has been updated, expanded and revised in some way. Approximately 65 percent of the material is all-new, including new essays, sidebars, a glossary, and substantially expanded questions-and-answers sections. The book’s frank, occasionally hilarious discussions cover not merely the nuts and bolts of flying, but the grand theater of air travel in whole, from airport architecture to terrorism to the colors and cultures of the world’s airlines.

“Patrick Smith is extraordinarily knowledgeable and communicates beautifully in English, not in pilot-ese. The ideal seatmate, companion, writer and explainer.”  – Alex Beam, Boston Globe

• How planes fly, and a revealing look at the men and women who fly them
• Straight talk on turbulence, pilot training, and safety
• The real story on congestion, delays, and the dysfunction of the modern airport
• The myths and misconceptions of cabin air and cockpit automation
• Terrorism in perspective, and a provocative look at security
• Airfares, seating woes, and the pitfalls of airline customer service
• The colors and cultures of the airlines we love to hate

Available now at booksellers everywhere, including Amazon.com, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

CLICK HERE TO ORDER AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY FROM THE AUTHOR

CRANKY NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

If you’ve already read and enjoyed the book, please don’t be shy about leaving a brief review on Amazon.

I say this because first review posted gave me only one star (the lowest possible score), left by some nitwit who said the book “scared” him. Obviously this person wasn’t reading very closely, because nobody should come away feeling frightened. In any case, fear-of-flying concerns make up only one part of the book.

If that’s the only aspect this person could judge it on, taking the whole thing down with it, he had no business submitting a review. I put a tremendous amount of work into this book — into the writing. The introduction alone went through about seven drafts. And I am exceptionally happy with it.

(It’s also a far, far better book than the first one — by orders of magnitude. It’s bigger, smarter, and the quality of the writing isn’t close. There’s simply no contest. I’m waiting for somebody to leave a comment claiming that the first one was better, at which point I shall weep.)

Now, okay, about the title:

I know, it’s cheap and derivative. But it wasn’t my idea.

Okay, fine, it was my idea. Or, actually, it was a collaborative decision between me, my agent, and the publisher. It’s a touch misleading, as the book isn’t the least bit scandalous, but I like the sound of it — the alliterative quality. As one person put it: “There isn’t a better or a worse title for your book.” If it had been up to me alone, the book would have been called Half the Fun: Questions, Answers, and Reflections on Air Travel. That’s what I had in mind for the previous book as well. I’ve always loved that title, but once again it was booed off stage by the publisher.

I can feel better knowing that I have Anthony Bourdain’s blessings, sort of. He was a passenger on one of my flights a year or so ago. I introduced myself and told him about the title. He laughed.

Now, if I could just get Travolta to narrate the audiobook.

 
(Photos by the author)
 

May 13, 2013

In a CNN poll of 1,200 overseas business travelers who have visited the United States, a full twenty percent of them said they would not visit the United States again due to onerous entry procedures at airports, including long processing lines. Forty-three percent said they would discourage others from visiting the United States.

Separately, in the latest copy of Air Line Pilot magazine, US Chamber of Commerce counsel Carol Hallett stated that “the United States risks falling behind Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as the global aviation leader.”

I’d say that battle was lost a long time ago.

The United States of America may have pioneered commercial aviation, but today the crossroads of global air commerce are places like Dubai, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Seoul and Bangkok. These are the places — not New York or Chicago or Los Angeles — that are setting the standards.  They’ve got the best airports, the fastest-growing airlines, and offer the most convenience for travelers.

Some of their success is owed to simple geography. Dubai, for instance, is perfectly placed between the planet’s biggest population centers. It’s the ideal transfer hub for the millions of people moving between Asia and Europe; Asia and Africa; North America and the Near East, and so forth.  The government of the UAE saw this opportunity years ago, and began to invest accordingly. Today, Dubai airport is one of the world’s busiest, and its airline, Emirates, is now the world’s third-largest in terms of capacity. The book value of the planes Emirates has on order — to say nothing of the 200 widebody jets it already operates — exceeds the value of the entire US airline industry!

Not far from Dubai, Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport is poised to become a similar mega-hub. Its hometown carrier, Turkish Airline, in addition to winning numerous service awards, now flies to more countries (94) than any other airline in the world.

There’s not much we can do about geography.  At the same time, there’s no excuse for the US aviation sector to have fallen so far. We’ve done it to ourselves through shortsightedness, underfunding, and flyer-unfriendly policies.  Compare for a minute our air travel infrastructure to that of, say, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea or Germany.  It’s not even close.  Our airports are substandard across a number of fronts; our air traffic control system is underfunded; Customs and Border Protection facilities are understaffed; airline passengers are groped, taxed, and hassled, to the point where, if that CNN poll is to be believed, millions of them will refuse to visit the country. The government seems to treat air travel as a nuisance, something to be dissuaded, rather than a vital contributor of tens of billions of dollars to the annual economy.

And although our physical location may not be ideal as a transfer point, there are still plenty of travelers moving between continents who can and should be patronizing US airports and US carriers — if only we weren’t driving them away. Traveling between Australia and Europe, for example, or between Asia and South America, the US makes — or should make — a logical transfer point. Why can’t LAX, JFK or MIA work the way Dubai, Hong Kong or Amsterdam do?

Hell, we don’t even try. American airports simply do not recognize the “in transit” concept. All passengers arriving from overseas, even if they’re merely transiting to a third country, are forced to clear customs and immigration, re-check their luggage, pass through TSA screening, etc. It’s an enormous hassle that you don’t find in most places overseas, where transit passengers walk from one gate to the next with a minimum of fuss.

Flying from Australia to Europe, for example, a traveler has two options. He or she can fly westbound, via Asia (through Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Hong Kong) or the Middle East (Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, etc.), or eastbound via the US West Coast (via Los Angeles or San Francisco). Even though the distance and flying times are about the same, almost everybody will opt for the westbound option. The airports are spotless and packed with amenities; the connections painless and efficient. Changing planes at LAX or SFO on the other hand, a passenger to stand in at least three different lines, be photographed and fingerprinted, collect and re-check his bags, and endure the full TSA rigmarole before slogging through a noisy, dirty, claustrophobic terminal to the correct departure gate.

Traveling between Asia and South America, it’s a similar story. Europe to Latin America, same thing. Few passengers on these routes will choose to connect in the United States, because we’ve made it so damn inconvenient. Heaven help the poor slob who tries connecting at JFK, which is broken up into eight completely separate terminals. In addition to each of the hassles just mentioned, switching between airlines requires you to leave the building completely and catch a train.

We can only guess at how many millions of passengers our carriers lose out on each year because of all this.

Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok.    Photo by the Author.

Insult to injury, airline tickets in America are taxed to the hilt. Overall flying is a lot more affordable than it has been in decades past, but if it feels expensive, one of the reasons is the multitude of government-imposed taxes and fees. There’s an excise tax, the 9/11 Security Fee, the Federal Segment Fee, the Passenger Facility Charges, International Arrival and Departure Taxes, Immigration and Customs user fees, an Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service charge, and so on — a whopping 17 total fees! Airline tickets are taxed at a higher federal rate than alcohol and tobacco. And now there’s a proposal to double the security taxes.

Finally, you should know that the government-run Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank of the United States provides billions of dollars in below-market financing each year to carriers overseas, helping deliver hundreds of US-built aircraft at rates not available to our own airlines. For 2012 the total was $11 billion in funding for the export of 154 aircraft to 21 countries. This is one of the reasons Persian Gulf carriers such as Emirates and Etihad Airways have been able to expand so rapidly. US taxpayers are in fact subsidizing the growth of carriers that compete directly with our own. Ex-Im’s assistance is helpful to Boeing, perhaps, but it gives foreign carriers a strong competitive advantage and undermines the health of the US airline industry.

Patrick Smith is an airline pilot and author of the new book,COCKPIT CONFIDENTIAL: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AIR TRAVEL

Related story:

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH AIRPORTS?

May 5, 2013

Back in March, the Transportation Security Administration announced it would rescind its longstanding prohibition against the carriage of small knives in airplane cabins. Effective in mid-April, passengers would be allowed carry implements with blades of up to 2.36 inches * onto planes.

Well, we’re already into May, and it’s not happening. The announcement triggered strong backlash from flight attendant groups, pilots and airlines, and in response TSA has postponed the changes until further notice.

The concern is that relaxation of the ban could lead to more violence in the cabin. Flying can be stressful; planes are crowded and tempers occasionally flare—or worse. There have been numerous cases of so-called air rage in which passengers have assaulted flight attendants. The presence of knives, many believe, makes such attacks more likely, and more lethal.

Before exploring the TSA’s side of things, let me say up front that I am not endorsing their earlier decision to loosen the rules. Unfortunately this topic is so radioactive that it’s difficult for anybody (including me) even to discuss it without being harangued and ridiculed. You don’t need to remind me about the benefits of working behind a locked and armored door, and I’m perfectly aware of the threat posed by unstable or intoxicated passengers. Obviously I’m not in favor of a policy that would make it easier for somebody to physically injure a colleague. I’m just telling you what I believe the agency’s thinking is.

Basically it follows two lines of reasoning:

The first is knowledge that a deadly sharp object can be easily improvised and fashioned from virtually anything, including all kinds of materials regularly found on airplanes. There are thousands of ways to contrive a weapon that’s at least as dangerous a two-inch hobby knife. Apparently the TSA feels there is no longer any point in rummaging through bags to confiscate small knives and scissors when an equally lethal implement can be made from a broken first-class dinner plate, a wine glass, a snapped off shard of plastic, or one of the thousands of pieces of metal cutlery used on planes every day. Easing the rules could free up time and resources, allowing guards to concentrate on more potent threats, including bombs and improvised explosives.

The second line of thinking is more emotionally charged. It requires us to move this entire conversation out from under the framework, and the emotional weight, of September 11.

How so? Conventional wisdom holds that the 9/11 attacks succeeded because 19 hijackers took advantage of a weakness in airport security by smuggling box cutters onto jetliners. But it has been argued that what the men really took advantage of was a weakness in our thinking, and our presumptions of what a hijacking was, and how one would be expected to unfold, based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years prior, of course, a hijacking meant a diversion, perhaps to Havana or Beirut, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” The presence of box cutters on 9/11 was incidental. Any sharp objects would have sufficed, particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. Their plan relied on the element of surprise, not on weapons. So long as the hijackers didn’t chicken out, they were all but guaranteed to succeed.

They didn’t chicken out, and it worked. But could it work again? Indeed, flight attendants were the first people murdered on 9/11, with small blades. But it’s also true that the hijack paradigm was changed forever even before the morning of September 11 had ended, when the passengers on United Flight 93 realized what was happening and fought back. Because of the awareness of passengers and crew, together with armed pilots and barricaded cockpits, the chances that a jetliner could again be commandeered using knives is at best remote. This was not the case in 2001, but it is true today.

Those opposed to the changes can counter all of this with a simple and logical premise: there’s simply no need to make it easier for a passenger to injure somebody while flying. I agree.

Ultimately, if this issue is to be discussed rationally, it needs to be removed from the 9/11 context and put to a simple question: is there reason to think that allowing small knives on a plane could lead to an increase in violence or stabbings? If the answer to that question is yes, the restrictions should remain in place. If the answer is no, relaxing them is acceptable, for the common good of rationalizing and streamlining airport security.

* If you’re wondering where 2.36 inches comes from, that’s six centimeters. TSA’s liquids and gels restrictions are also based on metric measurements. The maximum container size is not 3 ounces, as is commonly believed. It’s 3.4 ounces, also known as 100 milliliters. Those travel-friendly containers you buy at CVS are cheating you out of nearly a
half ounce!

This story was originally published in The Daily Beast.

April 8th, 2013

It’s interesting sometimes, the stories that get media traction.

This time it’s the one about the tiny Samoan airline that has decided to charge fares based on a passenger’s weight. The move has touched off discussions about whether such an idea makes sense for mainline carriers as well. After all, Americans are quite a bit larger than they used to be, and doesn’t that extra weight affect an airplane’s performance? Is it just a matter of time before passengers on United, Delta or American are asked to stand on a scale, like their suitcases, when checking in?

Well, no. It makes sense if, like Samoa Air, you’re a company operating light, ten-seat aircraft in a region with extremely high rates of obesity, but not if you’re a major carrier with a fleet of Boeings or Airbuses. There are some touchy social and civil liberty aspects that probably make the idea controversial, if not untenable, but let’s take a look at the practical side:

To begin with, passengers account for surprisingly small percentage of a plane’s overall weight. As a general rule, the larger the plane, the less of a factor it is. That sounds counterintuitive, but consider the example of a Boeing 747″>Boeing 747. A 747 typically seats around 420 people, and its maximum allowable takeoff weight is 875,000 pounds. Four hundred and twenty people * and * their carry-on luggage weigh in at just under 80,000 pounds. That’s less than ten percent — ten percent! — of the plane’s maximum heft. Most of what it weighs comes from the mass of the jet itself, plus the fuel load, which runs into the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Airlines use standard approximations for people and luggage. The values — currently 190 pounds per person, including carry-ons, and 30 pounds per checked bag — are adjusted slightly higher during winter to account for heavier clothing. (Please don’t ask me about trans-climate routes, i.e. London to Cape Town or New York to Rio; I honestly don’t know if the origin or destination season is used.)

After the crash of a 19-seater in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2003, ten pounds were added to the standard passenger weights, and five to the luggage. What happened in Charlotte was not the consequence of an overweight or out-of-balance condition, but it nonetheless drew attention to the topic, and the FAA responded by acknowledging our expanding waistlines. It’s possible the numbers could be upped again in the not too distant future, particularly with passengers lugging aboard larger and heavier carry-ons than ever before.

Crews are schooled in the finer points of weight and balance calculations, but in practice it’s the planners, loaders and dispatchers who crunch the numbers. The boarding tallies are added to something called the BOW — basic operating weight — which is a book value of the ship itself, replete with all furnishings, supplies, and crew. (This BOW is adjusted time to time, such when components are removed or added.) Compounded with fuel and cargo, the result is the total gross “ramp” weight. Fuel used for taxiing is subtracted to reveal the takeoff weight.

Around the time of push-back or shortly thereafter, a detailed manifest is sent to the cockpit printer. It shows the passenger total, fuel and cargo totals, center of gravity information, and gives us all of the required takeoff speeds (V1, VR, V2) and flight control settings (how many degrees of flaps, the stabilizer trim setting, etc.), for each possible departure runway.

And yes, for many planes, especially bigger ones, the maximum takeoff weight is substantially higher than the limit for landing. Thus if a return or diversion is required, a certain amount of fuel will need to be burned away first. Or, on larger jets that are so equipped, it can be jettisoned overboard. An overweight landing will be made if need be, but unless things are urgent we’ll usually take the time to get within limits. Even on planes with a fuel dump system, this can take 30 minutes or more. (No, the fuel does not come splashing down on people. Unless in an urgent emergency, dumping takes place at relatively high altitude and the fuel dissipates long before reaching the ground.)

For a better sense of how much of a plane’s poundage passengers account for, here are some comparisons of different aircraft models. Most takeoffs aren’t made at maximum allowable weight, it’s true, and neither are most planes fully occupied; passenger load factors average around 80 percent. For simplicity, however, these examples assume max takeoff weight and every seat taken. Weight limitations can vary plane to plane, as can seating configurations; these are typical totals:

Boeing 747-400: Max takeoff weight: 875,000 pounds.
420 passenger and carry-ons: 79,800 pounds (9.1 percent of total)

Boing 777-200: Max takeoff weight: 647,000 pounds.
275 passenger and carry-ons: 52,250 pounds (8.0 percent of total)

Airbus A330-300: Max takeoff weight: 513,000 pounds.
240 passenger and carry-ons: 45,600 pounds (8.8 percent of total)

Boeing 757-200: Max takeoff weight: 255,000 pounds.
170 passengers and carry-ons: 32,300 pounds (12.6 percent of total)

Boeing 737-800: Max takeoff weight: 170,000 pounds.
155 passengers and carry-ons: 29,450 pounds (17.3 percent of total)

Airbus A320: Max takeoff weight: 166,000 pounds.
150 passengers and carry-ons: 28,500 pounds (17.2 percent of total)

Bombardier CRJ-700: Max takeoff weight: 74,800 pounds.
70 passengers and carry-ons: 13,300 pounds (17.7 percent of total)

Embraer ERJ-145: Max takeoff weight: 48,400 pounds.
50 passengers and carry-ons: 9,500 pounds (19.6 percent of total)

Dash-8 100 turboprop: Max takeoff weight: 34,500 pounds.
37 passengers and carry-ons: 7,030 pounds (20.4 percent of total)

Beechcraft 1900 turboprop: Max takeoff weight: 17,000 pounds.
19 passengers and carry-ons: 3,610 pounds (21.2 percent of total)

Little Samoa Air, who got all of this started, uses a twin-engine propeller plane called a BN-2 Islander (like the one I took to Kaieteur Falls, in Guyana). The Islander maxes out at around 6,600 pounds and has room for nine passengers accounting for up to 26 percent of the plane’s total. In the case of a Cessna Caravan, a popular singe-engine utility transport used all around the world, a full passenger load is 30 percent. For the small commuter and air taxi outfits who operate such planes, the girth of its customers matters a lot more than it does to an airline flying 747s. Should you fly with one of these companies, that 190-pound standard no longer applies. Embarrassed or not, you’ll be asked to divulge your exact weight, and your bags too will be weighed. This is nothing new. What’s different about Samoa Air is that it’s the first airline to actually charge higher fares to fatter passengers.

No, we’re not going to see this in the United States, though it does stir up some provocative questions…

Even if heavyset passengers can’t much affect a jetliner’s performance, there are definitely some implications when it comes to cabin safety and comfort. Maybe you’ve seen those seat belt extensions used on occasion? People are bigger than they used to be, but airline seats are not. Should passengers of a certain size be required to purchase two seats? Should they be prohibited from sitting in an exit row? Should airlines increase seat dimensions and legroom with larger customers in mind?

That last one is basically a nonstarter with profit margins as thin as they are (no pun intended). As for the rest, I really don’t know what the best course of action might be. I certainly don’t want to offend anybody, so perhaps these are topics (here comes more stupid wordplay) that I’d best not weigh in on.

 
A VERSION OF THIS STORY ALSO APPEARS ON BOSTON.COM

April 26, 2013

Late in the day on April 25th, the US Senate unanimously passed legislation that would end the FAA controller furloughs and restore the nation’s air traffic control system to normal, or close to normal operation. The measure permits the shifting of over $200 million from elsewhere in the Federal budget to cover the required funding. The “Dependable Air Service Act” now moves to the US House of Representatives, where it is expected to be taken up as soon as Friday.

This should put a quick end to the delays and cancellations that have been plaguing the country’s airports since last weekend. According to the FAA, roughly a thousand commercial flights each day were in some way affected by the sequester-induced furloughs, with many delays lasting several hours.

I saw it first hand:

When I landed in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, the terminal had the look and feel you’d expect during a snowstorm or hurricane: long, sullen faces, unusually heavy crowds, agents rushing around in an obvious state of fluster. The departure screens were blotched with red: CANCELED, CANCELED, CANCELED.

The following afternoon, my outbound departure was delayed for more than an hour. When I approached the podium for a look at the preflight paperwork, the agent handed me a printout: GROUND DELAY DUE TO FAA STAFFING SHORTAGE.

That Congress is finally acting to end the crisis is certainly welcome news. But the whole thing was unacceptable to begin with. The traveling public was caught up in a political squabble. Passengers had become pawns, basically, in a game of stalemate.

The airlines, too, were caught in the middle. Industry leaders were livid, and who can blame them: the trickle-down effects of a single canceled flight can wind up costing a carrier hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What a peculiarly American episode of incompetence and irresponsibility: I can’t imagine such a thing happening in Europe or Asia, where governments are quick to recognize how vital commercial air travel is to their economies. Our leaders don’t seem to understand, or don’t seem to care, how much the country stands to lose through long delays and cancellations: the tens of millions of daily dollars in lost productivity and wasted time.

Or else they knew exactly how much. Some have suggested the furloughs were a deliberate and cynical attempt to inflict as much pain as possible on the traveling public in order to guarantee FAA funding. Let’s leave that, and the subject of whether or not the FAA’s budget and ATC payroll are bloated and inefficient, for another time.

Regardless, this was just another depressing example of America’s long slide into infrastructural obsolescence, brought on by a government so mired in absurd partisan gridlock that the country’s best interests are no longer important. Our roads, bridges, railways and public buildings are falling apart. And compare for a moment the airports in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles with those of Seoul, Hong Kong, Munich or Singapore.

You mean to tell me that the government couldn’t reallocate a tiny fraction of the mandated cuts — less than two percent by some estimates — to keep something as critical as our air transport system running at a normal pace?

Earlier this year, Congress intervened to prevent the furlough of USDA meat inspectors, allocating $55 million from elsewhere in the budget. Last week, Airlines for America (A4A), the Regional Airlines Association (RAA), and the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) jointly filed for an Emergency Motion against the Department of Transportation and FAA, asking that the U.S. Court of Appeals issue an emergency stay to prevent implementation of the cuts pending a full review.

The motion was denied on April 19th, and millions of passengers paid the price.

And how this all came to be is something that I, and many others, don’t quite understand. The FAA is funded directly by user — i.e. passenger — fees. Airline tickets are more heavily taxed than almost any other product in the US economy, and it’s those taxes and fees, not the general treasury, that keep the air traffic control system up and running. Apparently that money was available all along, but the way the sequester was worded, it couldn’t be used as intended.

Furloughed controllers will be back to work shortly. Delays will likely linger, however, at least for a few days. Check with your airline before heading to the airport. There’s also information on the FAA’s website.

And bear in mind that the causes of a particular delay will be hard to pinpoint; they may or may not have anything to do with the controller cuts. The FAA says around 40 percent of delays in the past week were attributable to the furloughs, but I suspect that’s a soft number. “Normal” weather and traffic delays haven’t gone away, of course, and in many cases have been compounded by the staffing crisis. Flying out of LAX on Monday, the message we got from air traffic control referenced the personnel shortage specifically, but in many cases it was a mix of factors: the sequester, the weather, or perhaps both — or neither.

For instance, at La Guardia on Tuesday afternoon, dozens of flights were canceled (mostly regional jet departures), and delays were up to two hours long. But the weather, also, was terrible, with low ceilings and reduced visibility. To what extent the trouble could be blamed on staffing was impossible to determine.

It’ll be over soon, but what a shame all around. Airline on-time performance had been improving, too, with 84 percent of flights landing within 15 minutes of scheduled arrival time.

A VERSION OF THIS STORY ALSO APPEARS ON THE DAILY BEAST

 
Photo composite by the author.

I live just outside Boston, only a few miles from where the Boston Marathon bombing took place last Monday afternoon. When I learned what happened, my thoughts and feelings couldn’t have been any different from those of most people. I was shocked and appalled.

Also shocking and appalling, however, has been the media’s endless and outrageously sentimental coverage of the attack, and a public reaction with little sense of perspective.

It’s not that the incident wasn’t horrific, or that we shouldn’t be outraged, or that we shouldn’t be anguished by the loss of life and, all too literally, limb. I understand the concepts of grief and closure and the value of a collective public mourning. Boston is a small town in many ways. I’ve lived here my entire life, and the spectacle of a fatal bombing amidst one of the city’s most cherished annual event is jarring to say the least.

But there’s a point where public reaction to a tragedy becomes so ponderously emotional that we begin fetishizing our own victimhood. This is not productive. It does nothing to solve the crime or to prevent future attacks. It does nothing to alleviate the suffering of those directly affected, and it does nothing for the common good.

For most of Friday, the day of the manhunt for the wayward Boston Marathon bomber, was tough enough to take: the breathless, full-saturation news coverage together with the over-the-top response of city officials; All businesses, schools and universities closed; the public transportation system shut down all the way to Rhode Island; Governor Deval Patrick asking that the entire cities of Boston, Cambridge and Watertown be “locked down” (if I hear that expression one more time I’m going to scream); the postponing of the Red Sox and Bruins games.

The most troubling part, though, was yet to come, after 19 year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested in Watertown on Friday evening shortly before 9 p.m. His apprehension ignited a celebration across the city. People lined the streets, whooping and singing and waving American flags. Today at Fenway Park, the atmosphere is like that of a World Series game.

It’s the cheering and flag-waving that should bother us most. There’s something frightening and maniacal about it. Because, for one thing, it makes no sense. There is nothing good in this story; nothing to be celebrated. The capture of Tsarnaev is not going to un-kill the three victims of the Patriots Day bombing, reattach the limbs of the gravely injured or resurrect Sean Collier, the MIT police officer gunned down on Thursday night during the chase.

Everybody is still dead and maimed, yet look at how happy we are. How is that not grotesque?

The media, meanwhile, continues its wall-to-wall coverage. “Lockdown” and “manhunt” are out. Now the operative terms are about “healing” and “courage” and “moving forward.” On and on it goes; the vigils, the singing, the mawkish commentary, on every channel and in every headline.

There’s something peculiarly, distressingly American about this style of commemorating. We seem to have a surfeit of compassion for “ourselves,” yet a striking lack of it for others. We, as Americans (or however we define our personal in-groups) have tendency to fixate on and endlessly memorialize anything bad that happens to us, regardless of scale. We expend so much compassion on ourselves that we have none left for anybody else. Maybe we’d get over our traumas sooner if we acknowledged that we are not the only people in the world these things happen to, and incidents like this are hardly unique.

Bombings and mass killings are a near-daily event in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places. We see the stories, but the violence hardly registers. We barely notice, much less devote nonstop coverage or erect plaques and shrines. Multiple homicides with injuries of bystanders are also a regular occurrence throughout the United States. When was the last time we shut down an entire metro region to catch a murder suspect?

One can further argue that it’s precisely this country’s ongoing preoccupation with terrorism, and our almost guaranteed overreaction should an attack occur, that can inspire certain people to violence. If we didn’t spend so much time obsessing and talking about it, perhaps certain deranged people wouldn’t be inspired to bomb, murder, and maim.

And almost more than anything else, what the terrorist wants is attention. The true aim of terrorism, after all, isn’t to kill so much as to inspire fear, panic, and a self-defeating response. How many millions of dollars in law enforcement overtime and lost productivity did Friday’s “lockdown” cost, together with the tens of billions poured into the bulging coffers of the Security-Industrial Complex since 9/11. Why do we play into the perpetrators’ hands by reacting precisely as they hope we will?

I put this question to Bruce Schneier, one of the country’s best-known security experts, and his response was a tantalizing one: “Because that’s the way our brains are wired.”

I’m not sure that I believe that entirely. If it were true, why are we so out of synch with the rest of the world? I feel that our immature behavior is nurtured and encouraged by poor leadership, and sanctified by an irresponsible media.

The pundits this past week have talking a lot about “complacency,” and how we’ve “let our guard down” since the attacks of 2001. Good grief, are they implying we ought to be more twitchy and obsessed with terrorism? What a healthy society does is deal with things with a sense of historical perspective, and move on. My goodness, the cities of Europe were bombed into smithereens during World War Two, killing millions of people.

Others say it better than I can. Here’s Michael Cohen, writing in the Observer on April 20th:

“Londoners, who endured IRA terror for years, might be forgiven for thinking that America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston. They’re right – and then some. What we saw was a collective freak-out like few that we’ve seen previously in the United States. It was yet another depressing reminder that more than 11 years after 9/11 Americans still allow themselves to be easily and willingly cowed by the threat of terrorism.

After all, it’s not as if this is the first time that homicidal killers have been on the loose in a major American city. In 2002, Washington DC was terrorized by two roving snipers, who randomly shot and killed 10 people. In February, a disgruntled police officer, Christopher Dorner, murdered four people over several days in Los Angeles. In neither case was LA or DC put on lockdown mode, perhaps because neither of these sprees was branded with that magically evocative and seemingly terrifying word for Americans, terrorism.”

That’s a good point about how easily and willingly Americans are cowed. All this rhetoric about not allowing terrorism to “change our way of life” is just that, rhetoric. The mere threat of it has changed our thinking, our actions, and our responses to crisis. Terrorism doesn’t directly subvert our freedoms; we do it ourselves.

And where, after Boston, is the debate, the conversation, about all of this? There should be a robust and ongoing self-examination, led by the media. We hear it from people like Michael Cohen, writing from the United Kingdom, but here in the US there hasn’t been a whisper of criticism — nothing. Instead there is only constant cheerleading and the uniform approval that anything and everything is justified in the name of security. Any voice to the contrary is marginalized, so much that it exists at all. To suggest that our approach to terrorism is self-defeating, or that our reaction to the Boston bombing was anything but rational and necessary, is downright politically incorrect.

We behave this way at our own peril: this is too important a subject to be smothered by political correctness or the emotions of an easily frightened populace.

And last Monday was not, by the way, the first time the city Boston was hit by a terrorist bombing. Below are some local newspaper clippings from 1976.

This was only a few days prior to the city’s huge Bicentennial celebration. Four bombs were detonated in a 24-hour span. The plane in the pictures is an Eastern Airlines Lockheed Electra, blown up at Logan Airport.

I know all the reasons why the ’76 bombing was different from the one on Patriots Day. The lack of casualties, for one. But we should also recognize how the two bombings are similar.

Those of you who live around Boston are looking at these headlines and thinking, “Why didn’t I know about that?” Or “Why don’t I remember that?” That you probably don’t remember is both a good and bad thing. Once upon a time we were able to deal with such things in a way that was stronger, more measured. We were better for it, as both a city and as a country.

This is my preemptive plea, an open letter to the media, to rein in another silly airplane story before it garners too much traction.

Too late, I know.

I’m referring to the story, which began making rounds on Thursday, about the possibility of using Android devices or similar gadgets to “hijack” or “take over” commercial airplanes by inputting rogue data to the plane’s ACARS or FMS units.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, good. Chances are you do, however. If so, try not to take it too seriously.

On the one hand, Hugo Teso, the person behind this lecture/experiment, has a solid understanding of how planes fly, and is presumably familiar with the way pilots and their technology interact. Unfortunately, he’s extrapolating wildly — or certain commentators and reporters are extrapolating wildly — and giving people the entirely wrong impression. What could be an interesting conversation is instead being dumbed down into alarmist nonsense.

ACARS is an air-to-ground communications system that allows messages to be sent back and forth over VHF radio frequencies or satellite link. The FMS, or flight management system, is the proverbial “computer” that you sometimes hear pilots mention. It presents an electronic, integrated blueprint of a flight — the various courses, altitudes and speeds that we’ll be flying at between city A and city B — which the plane’s autoflight system — or the pilots, when flying manually — then follow. This blueprint is based on a slew of manually and/or electronically inputted data. Much of this is data is loaded prior to departure, but a flight is very organic; our headings, altitudes, speeds, arrival and departure patterns, etc., are never forecast with certainty from the start. FMS data is subject to constant updating and revising over the course of a flight. Most of the changes are entered manually by the crew. Occasionally they are sent automatically from air traffic control or company dispatchers. Either way, we are clearly aware of them.

Teso wants you to believe your smartphone can send these instructions as well, causing a dangerous disruption.

The problem is, the FMS — and certainly not ACARS — does not directly control an airplane the way people think it does, and the way, with respect to this story, media reports are implying. Neither the FMS nor the autopilot flies the plane. The crew flies the plane through these components. We tell it what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Whatever data finds its way into the FMS, and regardless of where it’s coming from, it still needs to make sense to the crew. If it doesn’t, we’re not going to allow the plane, or ourselves, to follow it.

The sorts of disruptions that might arise aren’t anything a crew couldn’t notice and easily override. The FMS cannot say to the plane, “descend toward the ground now!” or “Slow to stall speed now!” or “Turn left and fly into that building!” It doesn’t work that way. What you might see would be something like an en route waypoint that would, if followed, carry you astray of course, or an altitude that’s out of whack with what ATC or the charts tells you it ought to be. That sort of thing. Anything weird or unsafe — an incorrect course or altitude — would be corrected very quickly by the pilots.

Several websites that have picked up the story seem to contradict this by claiming that many modern planes “lack analog instruments” or have autopilot systems that cannot be switched off, etc., etc. — basically claiming that pilots would be unable to recognize or react in time to pirate uplinks. For instance, in this report, it states: “A pilot could thwart an attack by taking the plane out of autopilot although he pointed out that several newer systems no longer include manual controls.”

This is extremely misleading. While not all aircraft have direct manual reversion of flight controls, there is always a way for the pilots to disconnect the automation and, as we call it, hand-fly. Heck, more than 99 percent of landings a full 100 percent of takeoff are hand-flown every day.

To be clear, none of this is to suggest that beaming uninvited data into the electronic architecture of the cockpit is an acceptable idea. Of course it is not. There are aspect of this, such as how outside interference might interplay with fly-by-wire flight controls, and the emerging technology known as ADS-B, that warrant a closer look. That such things might be possible is, to be sure, a potential cause for alarm.

But, even so, this is not by any stretch the sort of imminent threat people are being led to think it is. In fairness to Mr. Teso, I’m less annoyed by his demonstration than by the the way some in the media have been spinning it. A hacker with an Android is not going to fly your 757 into the Empire State Building. Scary words like “hijack” and “takeover” have no place in this conversation.

RELATED STORY: MORE MEDIA CLAPTRAP ABOUT COCKPIT AUTOMATION

 
A VERSION OF THIS STORY ALSO APPEARS ON BOSTON.COM

IF, LIKE ME, YOU ARE OLD ENOUGH to lived through the nascent days of MTV and VH1, in the early 1980s, you remember just how awful a rock video can be.

The thing was, though, that in those early times the songs themselves were usually pretty awful too. I mean, Thomspson Twins? Kajagoogoo? Kim Wilde? Spandau Ballet? It’s only fitting that cheesy be accompanied by an equally cheesy video.

The bigger shame is to take a really terrific song and ruin it with silly visuals.

With that in mind, I present my vote for the worst rock video of all time.  This one!

This album came out in the autumn of 1985. The learning curve for videos had been fairly steep, and by that point even indie label bands were putting out spots with decent production values. What was the problem? I realize that SST Records didn’t have a whole lot of money hanging around for promotional efforts, but still. What a weird, incoherent mish-mash. There’s that phrase: What were they thinking?

There are several laugh out loud moments.  There’s Greg Norton nodding and dancing like a girl, and I love the part (see time 1:03) where you can see Bob eying the camera, the look on his face as if to ask an unseen director, “Am I doing this right?”

And wait a minute, are those home movies, spliced together into that bizarre pastiche? I don’t mean footage intended to look like home movies, in some useful and artful way, I mean actual, goofball home movies.

And near the end, the woman with the drink in her hand. is that… Grant’s mom?  Seriously, is that Grant’s mom?  And whoever it is, why is she there?  

Everything is so absurdly out of synch with what is otherwise a pretty powerful song. It’s actually embarrassing to watch.

And for the simple sake of pride, please, please, do not allow your browser continue to play beyond time 2:25, when the video segues into the old SST promo for “Love is All Around,” the theme to the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show.”  No, it’s not meant to be taken seriously as a video, but that doesn’t make it any less painful to behold.

I know, you went and watched it anyway.  Yeah, the hats and the penguins and all that — a true hand-to-the-mouth moment.

You really need to clear head out after that one.

And the best way of doing that, I think, is to watch this.

Now that’s much, much better. “It’s Not Funny Anymore” is one of the greatest indie rock songs of all time – certainly of the 1980s – and the footage is vintage and kickass.

Hang in there Grant!

That was filmed on December 16th, 1983, in Philadelphia.  It was two days later, on the 18th, in Boston, when I saw HD play live for the very first time, at The Channel down near South Station.  Bob was wearing that same shirt. Opening act was the Minutemen. (Both bands were promoting their soon-to-be-released double LPs — “Double Nickels on the Dime” for the Minutemen, and Husker Du’s masterpiece, “Zen Arcade”).

I almost became paralyzed at that show. People were slam-dancing and jumping from the stage. I fell of somebody’s shoulders and, unable to move my body in time, landed square on the back of my neck. Somebody pulled me up, and I remember it was several seconds before I could move or feel my arms again. For several days afterwards I had trouble walking.

Husker Du were never the tightest band live. In fact they were routinely awful. Grant’s songs were usually a little tighter than Bob’s, but neither sounded right. Everything was sloppy and sped-up, sometimes to the point of incoherence.

A Husker Du live album was released posthumously some years ago. It’s called “The Living End.” It’s a strange album, and perhaps for the better it’s a terrible representation of how the band actually sounded on stage.

Bob would always do this cool thing, though, between the main set and the encore:

He’d lean his Ibanez flying-V against his amplifier as he walked off stage, the volume still cranked. The result was a deafening, pulsing storm of feedback that washed over the crowd until the band came back out. This wasn’t your typical feedback whine. It was a condensed, high-energy version of a very specific and peculiar noise that only Bob’s guitar could make — a sort of 180-decibel squeal-hum, very fuzzy at the edges. I used to call this the “Husker Buzz.”

You can hear the same noise in many of the band’s songs. The “New Day Rising” album is basically one long version of it. But I love it best here, in this little snippet from “First of the Last Calls,” the fourth song from the old “Metal Circus” album. It’s the final eight seconds or so that you’re listening for — that harmonic, vaguely orchestral hum and whine. And right at the very end, that nuclear honk. That is the sound of Husker Du. That’s the tell-tale “Husker Buzz” of Bob Mould’s Ibanez. Play loud…

First of the Last Calls

March 27, 2013

Commercial air travel has long been a breeding ground for myths, conspiracy theories, urban legends, and plain old misunderstandings. Most of what people think they know about flying is wrong. Here are my picks for the five most stubborn myths, fallacies, and quasi-truths.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BOSTON.COM

The post is intended for my new audience at Boston.com. Mostly these are people unfamiliar with my work. If you’re a longtime reader, you’ve seen most of this material before, and if you don’t want to hear me ranting again about autopilots and cabin air, you can probably skip it — though I get paid based on page views, so I’d certainly appreciate a click or two. The entries are condensed selections from my new book. Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel, will be published by Sourcebooks on May 1st. Pre-publication orders are can be placed now on Amazon.

Today, by the way, is the 36th anniversary of history’s worst-ever airline disaster, the 1977 collision between two 747s on the Spanish island of Tenerife. Six years ago, on the 30th anniversary, I wrote a commemorative piece about the crash, analyzing the accident and describing my meeting with Bob Bragg, the copilot who survived. You can read it here. A version of this story also appears in the upcoming book.

Updated on March 14, 2013

LAST MONTH, American Airlines unveiled its first major identity change in forty-plus years. The news broke as the carrier prepares to emerge from bankruptcy and contemplates a merger with US Airways.

American had bucked more than three decades of design fads. It’s distinctive silver skin, tricolor stripe and gothic “AA” logo date back to the days of the its 707 “Astrojets.” Heck, my first ever airplane ride, in 1974, was on an American 727 decked out in the very same paintjob that, until now, was American’s signature. It was never anything beautiful, but it was distinguished.

And the “AA” symbol, with its proud, cross-winged eagle, was one of the last true icons of airline branding left in the world. Created by Massimo Vignelli in 1967, it was everything a logo should be: elegantly simple, dignified, and instantly recognizable.

And now it’s gone, all of it, replaced by some gimmicky claptrap.

Simply put, I cannot believe how awful a makeover this is. It’s so disappointing that it pains me even to write about it, and how anybody signed off on this I’ll never understand.

The body and tail manage to be boring and garish at the same time, with a cheap, downmarket lilt to the whole thing. The typeface is the strongest aspect of the whole mess, and that’s not saying much.

Those are (almost) forgivable aspects. Doing away with the AA symbol, however, was a tragic and unspeakably bad call.

It has been said that the true test of a logo is this: can it be remembered and sketched, freehand and with reasonable accuracy, by a young child? The Pan Am globe, the Lufthansa crane, the Delta tricorn, Air New Zealand’s “Koru” and many others meet this criterion beautifully. As did the AA emblem. Maybe they need a tweaking or two over time, but the template of such logos — the really good ones — remains essentially timeless. American Airlines had one of the really good ones. And if you’ve got something like that, you dispense with it at your peril.

Particularly if you’re replacing it with something so utterly vapid. What exactly is that new, Greyhound Bus-esque logo? It looks like an eagle’s beak poking through a shower curtain. (Or, as one person described it, a linoleum knife cutting through a red and blue tile.) No other word will do: it’s horrible. If it’s not the worst corporate trademark I have ever seen, I don’t know what is. I can’t imagine a kid with crayons trying to sketch it. Why would he or she want to? It evokes nothing, it says nothing, it means nothing. It gives American Airlines all the look and feel of a bank, or a credit card company.

It’s not just bland, it’s ugly. Its uglier, even, than the hideous Horus head of the new EgyptAir. It’s uglier, even, than the “rising splotch” that Japan Airlines came up with a few years back to replace its beautiful tsurumaru — the circular, red and white crane/Rising Sun it had used since 1960.

JAL eventually did the smart thing and brought the tsurumaru back. If American has any sense, it’ll do the same with its AA.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that American didn’t need a spruce-up. The striping and typeface were overdue for a revision, and livery changes are all but mandatory, it seems, when airlines exit bankruptcy. While I’m not terribly fond of the new tail or fuselage, I can live with them. My complaint is mostly about the abandonment of the iconic “AA” logo.

I was at Kennedy Airport the other afternoon, and had the opportunity to view several American Airlines jets. I’m sorry, but there is nothing old or anachronistic about the AA emblem. It does not need to be “refreshed,” or “modernized,” as some have suggested. Replacing it with that awful linoleum knife is inexcusable.

If you’re as offended as I am, please sign this petition on Change.org

As a word of caution, however: The petition seems to be aimed at trying to keep the old livery intact in its entirety. I’m not sure this is a good idea. We can’t expect the company to completely reverse direction. Instead, the focus needs to be on the most important aspect of the design — i.e. retaining the “AA”. The logo — the trademark, the company emblem, to be reproduced on everything from stationery to boarding passes — is the heart of an airline’s graphic identity. Everything else revolves around this.

You can’t be serious

The brilliant, timeless mark of American Airlines. Gone but not forgotten.

By the way, the AA wasn’t the only iconic logo to bite the dust recently. Spain’s Iberia Airlines just unveiled a new look as well, and has parted ways with its well-known “IB” symbol.

There has been an “IB” of one form or another atop the tails of Iberia’s jets since at least the ’60s. My favorite version, once seen on the carrier’s DC-8′s and earliest 747s, had the letters set inside a crosshatched globe, with the “IBERIA” name spelled out below. It was a handsome design, understated but unmistakable.

There’s no denying Iberia needed a revision. It’s latest colors and stripes were cluttered and overwrought. But their replacement is bland and generic, and the IB is gone entirely. Like American, they’ve turned to some banal abstraction instead.

And like too many other liveries of the last fifteen years, the new Iberia centers on a supposed “in motion” theme, featuring yet another, as it has been called, Generic Meaningless Swoosh Thing.

Somewhere is a vending machine. Airline executives drop in a million dollars worth of consulting coins, and out pops the latest, curvy-swervy variant of the GMST. These arcs and curves are meant to be “sophisticated.” They suggest “movement” and energy and who the hell knows what else. But all they really do is make your airline indistinguishable from everybody else’s. With very few exceptions (Aeromexico is one), these designs are so dismally uninspired that it’s hard to look at them without yawning.

MORE ON AIR CARRIER LIVERIES AND BRANDING IN THIS ESSAY.