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]]>I’M A SUCKER for a good wallopping view. And who isn’t? A view stirs the soul. It hits those hard-to-reach visceral notes in the way a simulation — a painting, say — can’t.
I’ve seen some spectacular ones: Machu Picchu on a clear day; Hong Kong from Victoria Peak; an unforgettable rainforest panorama from a canopy walk in Brunei; the fantastical mountains of Torres del Paine in Chile; and so on.
Sometimes, though, you want something easy, and that’s where hotel rooms come in. Here, the magic is presented to you, no effort required, to be savored from the comfort of your bed or balcony. It’s thrill and chill at the same time, both exciting and relaxing. I’ll take a three-star room with a view over a five-star room without one, any day.
I spend over a quarter of my life in hotels, at work or on vacation, so I’ve had my share. They tend to be cityscapes, mostly. My favorite of which, thus far, was a nighttime vista of Dubai from floor 60-something of the J.W. Marriott.
But urban panoramas get redundant after a while. It’s the greener settings I prefer. Mountains, oceans, forests. For instance, watching the sun come up over the Serengeti, from a tent at the Ole Serai safari lodge in Tanzania.
And I remember a place in Ecuador, overlooking a valley. It was a hacienda-style hotel perched at the top of a mountain. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out over the town, more than a thousand feet below. And it wasn’t a gradual or tapered descent; this was straight down, a sheer vertical drop. Was it Otavalo, maybe? Or Baños? It was twenty-five years ago and memory fails me. A dig through an old Lonely Planet guide is no help either.
Which is too bad, because the room was incredible. You could sit and watch the clouds sweeping past, below you. Standing outside, the atmosphere made a hissing noise. It was, best I could tell, the sound of the clouds condensing. I have no idea of this is even possible, but I swear those clouds made a noise as they billowed by.
Nothing would ever beat that view, I thought.
And nothing did, until just a few weeks ago, when I stayed at the Ladera Resort on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I’d broken the bank for a winter vacation, and while I expected the view to be special, judging from the online pics, I didn’t expect it to be this special. Stepping into the room, I actually laughed out loud.
It was one of those open-plan rooms with only three sides. The fourth side was a huge, unscreened balcony facing directly toward St. Lucia’s famous Pitons — a pair of party hat peaks, nearly three-thousand feet tall, that are part of an ancient caldera. The private pool was special enough, but it was the view — a sort of West Indies Machu Picchu — that stole the show.
That’s a custom of mine, by the way: immortalizing this or that gorgeous view with my ridiculous feet in the shot. Visit my Instagram stream and you’ll see others. Here’s a more pure version, sans toes.
Imagine feasting your eyes on that, dawn to dusk. I didn’t feel much like leaving the room.
So that’s the new number one. It was also the most expensive hotel room I’ve ever paid for, and to help assuage the guilt of having blown so much money, I think of it as compensation — a reward for all of the shitty and underwhelming views I’ve been stuck with over the years: all those times I’ve pulled back the curtain to behold a parking lot, an HVAC unit, an expanses of urban decay or, as Jonathan Richman put it, suburban bleakness. Heck, in Amsterdam one time I had a hotel room with no windows.
Meditating on the Pitons helps make up for what happened to me last summer at the Pullman hotel in Dakar, Senegal. I’d stayed in the Pullman many times, and my favorite thing about it was the view from the upper floors of the harbor and, in the distance, the famous (or infamous) Goree Island.
It had been several years since my last visit, and I was excited. But when I got to my room, a surprise was waiting. The top photo shows the view from my room in 2009. The lower photo shows almost the identical view in 2023. Speaks for itself. Progress or something.
The curved building with the triangular top is an old property that I once nicknamed “the Graham Greene Hotel,” because it reminds me of the sort of place where the famous novelist would have stayed, making journal entries in a sitting room with potted palms and a ceiling fan.
I was pleased to see it’s still there, and looks like it’s been renovated. The sight of that monolith, however, was devastating.
That’s nothing, though, compared to some other places. Allow me revisit a few…
I’ll add to this list as the misfortune presents itself.
(I need to confess, however, that the last photo isn’t mine. It was submitted by another pilot with whom I was commiserating on this topic.)
And don’t put too much stock in which particular hotels these are. Views can vary significantly room to room. A 40-th floor view from one side of a building might be a lot prettier than a third-floor view from another.
Maybe it’s ironic, meanwhile, to hear an airline pilot going on about views from the ground rather than those from aloft. So it goes, though. As regular flyers know, airplane scenery tends to be muted and indistinct. Altitude sucks away much of the grandeur. I’ve seen some amazing things — the glaciers of Greenland, the Sahara at dusk — but it’s mainly terra firma where the beauty is.
ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR, except for “Newark Afternoon,” courtesy of Dave English.
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]]>The post MH 370, Ten Years On appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
]]>TEN YEARS AGO this month, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The wreckage was never found.
There’s a solid chance the wreckage will never be found. That’s unfortunate, but there are clues to work with. And those clues have, over time, led me to believe that the plane was intentionally brought down by one of the pilots, most likely the captain, in an act of murder-suicide. It was ditched somewhere in the Indian Ocean — landed, if you will, on the surface of the sea — where it sank to to the bottom and rests today, undetected but mostly intact.
Early on, I was open to a number of theories popular at the time: fire, depressurization, and so on. Accidents. I’ve come around since then. My opinion is based on the evidence, both as it exists and, just as importantly, doesn’t exist.
If we assume an accident, we must also assume the plane crashed into the ocean. We know from electronic satellite “pings” that the jet continued on for some time after its last appearance on radar. Having suffered some catastrophic malfunction that rendered the crew dead or unconscious, the thinking goes, the plane continued on autopilot until running out of fuel, at which point the engines failed. Without pilots to control the glide, it plunged into the sea.
The problem with this idea is the absence of pieces. There is no way for a jetliner to crash “gently” into the ocean. A Boeing 777 in an out-of-control impact would have effectively disintegrated, producing tens of thousands of fragments: aircraft parts, body parts, luggage, and so on. Much of this debris would have sunk, but much would not have. Eventually, borne by currents, it would’ve washed up.
So why didn’t it?
A small number of pieces did come ashore, but that’s the thing: of the few parts recovered, almost all of them are consistent not with an out-of-control crash, but with a controlled and deliberate ditching. (Even the most textbook ditching at sea is going to cause serious damage and the likely shedding of parts.) The flaperon discovered in 2015 on Reunion Island, for example, and the trailing edge flap that washed up on Mauritius, both from the same wing.
The parts themselves are evidence enough; a thorough post-mortem on them reveals even more. The forensics are complicated, but they’re solid. Use your Google and check out the analysis by former Canadian crash investigator Larry Vance. These pieces tell a story.
For these particular parts to have been found, together with a complete absence of the myriad flotsam a full-on crash would have produced, is to me a smoking gun.
And thus, the biggest reason the submerged wreckage hasn’t been found is because the location of the search area has been based almost entirely on the fuel exhaustion theory. The search-zone calculations, extrapolating from the satellite pings, are based on when and where, approximately, the 777’s tanks would’ve run dry.
Except maybe the tanks didn’t run dry, and the plane went — was taken — somewhere else. What if that was the intent all along — to vanish?
Those pings are still important, and give us hints. Chances are the actual location of the wreckage isn’t far away. But it’s far enough away to have missed it.
I’ve been saying from the start that we should prepare for the possibility of the plane not being found. It happens this way sometimes. If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents. What makes this one different, maybe, is how we’ve come to expect easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything these days, with a fetishized belief that “technology,” whatever that means anymore, can answer any question and fix any problem.
Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. But all of that is fallible, one way or another.
Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean versus the comparative speck of a 777. It’s out there somewhere, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. We’ll probably never find it.
Related Story:
THE RIDDLE MAY NOT BE DEEP
Photos courtesy of Unsplash.
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]]>So Why Am I Nervous?
The post Future Tense appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
]]>HERE’S THE perfect segue from last week’s post. If you missed it, we were talking about the hype and hyperbole that seem to follow every minor incident these days, a phenomenon that I blame, in part, on the dearth of legitimately serious accidents. It often feels as if flying is getting more dangerous, when statistically we’re safer than ever.
To wit, according to the annual report just released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) 2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history. Not a single fatal accident was recorded involving a commercial jet. Not one.
Combining jet and turboprop operations, IATA says there were 37 million commercial flights last year. Among those, the only deadly crash was that of an ATR turboprop in Nepal last January. If I’m counting right, this puts last year as the second-safest on record, bested only by 2017.
This is nothing if not astonishing. And to glean a sense of how astonishing, you need to flip through the history books. You need to look at the accident archives of the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, when multiple disasters were the norm, year after year after year.
For example, in 1985, twenty-seven major accidents killed almost 2,500 people. That included the JAL crash outside Tokyo with 520 fatalities; the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed 240 American servicemen, and the Air-India bombing over the North Atlantic with 329 dead.
In 1974 there were ten disasters, including the Turkish Airlines catastrophe outside Paris that killed 346 people. Among the other nine were two Pan Am 707s, two TWA jets (one of which was bombed), and an Eastern DC-9. That’s five U.S. legacy crashes in the same year. Eastern and TWA had crashes within three days of each other.
And so on. Those were particularly bad years, but you get the picture.
I’ve mentioned all of this before. Apologies to those who are sick of me talking about it. But it always bears repeating, because so few people really understand how safe flying has become.
How we got here is also something I’ve discussed in the past. It’s been a combination of things: better technologies, better training, and, believe it or not, better regulation and oversight. For more, see the links below.
And yes, luck has played a role as well. We closed out 2023 with a near-perfect record, but not without a few close calls. Which is what makes posts like this so frustrating. Because sooner or later our luck will run out; there will be another major crash, right here on U.S. soil. As good as we are, we’ll never be perfect. And when it happens, nobody is going to care how long it’s been since the last one. History won’t matter, perspective won’t matter, stats won’t matter. The result will be hysteria and a media firestorm like no other.
It’s precisely because of how rare crashes have become that we’re guaranteed to overreact to the next one. Which is both fair and unfair, I suppose.
Related Stories:
LUCKY AND GOOD
TWENTY YEARS AND COUNTING
Upper photo by Pedro Pinheiro
Center photo by Michael Saporito
Lower photo by the author
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]]>Plus: How Today's Media Breeds Alarm.
The post When a Wing Comes Apart. appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
]]>SO, LAST WEEK, a passenger videoed a damaged wing slat on a United Airlines flight headed from Denver to Boston. Learning of the problem, the crew conferred with its dispatch and maintenance team, and a decision was made to divert the Boeing 757 into Denver.
Copyright issues prevent me from re-posting videos or images, but you can easily Google it. The upper part of the slat, along the front of the wing, inboard of the right engine, appears shredded and chewed. it’s a composite material, and somehow it delaminated and fragmented. How, exactly, is unknown.
Well, no surprise, the pictures are all over media and social media — so much as those things are different nowadays — accompanied by a barrage of terrifying headlines: “Passenger Sees Wing Coming Apart.” “Passenger Horror as Wing Comes Apart.” And so on.
The wing, in fact, did not come part. What “came apart,” if we can call it that, is a portion of a slat. There are several slats per wing, sectioned along the leading edge. Like the trailing-edge flaps along the back of the wing, these devices are deployed in stages to increase lift at low speeds. You’ll see them extended during takeoff and landing, then retracted during cruise.
It’s a terrible look for sure, but the danger here was minimal. One small hazard might’ve been broken material striking the rear stabilizers. Worst case would’ve been the slat breaking apart further, or detaching completely, unlikely as that might be, but even this wouldn’t crash the plane, so long as the stabilizers or tail weren’t struck and badly damaged.
There may have been a discussion about whether or not to deploy the slats for landing. There’s no way to isolate a specific slat, so keeping the broken one retracted would’ve meant a “no flap landing,” where all of the high-lift devices, both flaps and slats, remain stowed. A jetliner can land just fine this way — it just needs to do so at a higher speed, requiring more runway.
A few months ago, due to a malfunction, a 757 I was piloting made a no-flap landing in Colombia. We came in fast, as our checklists dictated (I can’t recall the exact speed), and used about two-thirds of the runway, as our calculations told us to expect. But otherwise the landing was routine. In most ways, what happened to me was more serious than what the United pilots had to deal with, just not as photogenic and so it got no attention.
As it happened, the United pilots deployed the slats and flaps as they normally would, and the plane landed safely. To nobody’s surprise. Certainly not mine.
I suspect the choice to divert was a practical one as much as anything. Denver is one of United’s biggest hubs, and the plane would need lengthy repairs; grounding it in Boston was going to trigger a cascade of logistical complications affecting hundreds of passengers. In Denver, an airplane swap could be handled expeditiously, with all the needed maintenance resources on site.
Nothing to fret about, all in all. But if the viewer comments on various media sites are any indication, the public is alarmed. “What’s going on in the skies these days?” Asks one reader, his sentiments echoing those of others. “Yet another close call.”
Not really. What’s actually happening is a matter of exposure. These sorts of minor incidents have always been with us. What’s different is the media environment in which they’re occurring. In the old days you never heard about them. Today, everything is photographed and everything is shared. The smallest mishap is on Instagram and other platforms within minutes, visible to millions. A landing gear problem; a compressor stall; a pressurization malfunction. The sky is falling.
Except it’s not. As I’ve talked about in prior articles, major airline disasters are far, far more uncommon today than they used to be. A dearth of them has led to us putting undue focus on relatively harmless incidents instead.
I’m unsure which is more to blame, social media or actual news sources. They seem to feed off one another, so maybe it’s a moot point.
The fact that the 757 is a Boeing model has only made things worse. Thanks to the controversies surrounding the 737 MAX, anything involving a Boeing jet now gets extra scrutiny, deserved or not. No matter that the 757 is a 42 year-old design with an excellent safety record. The B-word is what counts.
Let’s face it, everyone is looking for attention, for views and hits, be it FOX News or the Times or a 16 year-old Instagrammer. Few things, meanwhile, garner more attention or stoke more fear than plane crashes. The mere suggestion of one, realistic or not, is an automatic go-to for eyeballs. And so, here we are.
For more about slats, flaps, and the other doodads than help a plane fly, see chapter one of Cockpit Confidential.
Related Stories:
LUCKY AND GOOD
TWENTY YEARS AND COUNTING
Photos by Asato Hisada, courtesy of Unsplash.
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]]>Call Me Disappointed, and Here's Why.
The post Dignified and Old appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
]]>So, earlier this week the U.S. Senate’s Commerce Committee shot down the move to increase the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 67. The measure lost by a single vote. Lawmakers succumbed to pressure from the Air Line Pilots Association, which spent months lobbying against the change.
The matter now goes to committee and there’s still a shot it could pass. But I wouldn’t count on it.
ALPA opposed the measure, but many of its constituents, including myself, did not. The union spun the whole thing as a safety issue, and warned of air travel becoming more “complicated” if it went through. The simpler truth is that ALPA has grown beholden to its younger members, who now comprise most of its membership, and who see raising the retirement age as an impediment to their career progression.
Which technically it would be, resulting in slower attrition, fewer upgrades and all that. But it’d be a small one. And these pilots too would have the opportunity to work an extra couple of years at the finale of their tenures, if they so choose.
For older hands like me, there’s resentment. Resentment because the luck and good fortune enjoyed by the newest generation of pilots cannot be overstated.
Entry-level salaries are the highest they’ve ever been. Even at the regional carriers, young pilots can bring in six figure salaries without much effort. Meanwhile at the majors, pilots are zooming up the seniority lists, with some getting captain slots before their 30th birthday. These pilots will be millionaires before age 40.
These same junior pilots skated through the COVID-19 fiasco without a hiccup. Thanks to taxpayer bailouts, they avoided furloughs and in some cases were paid nearly a full salary to simply stay at home for a year. Many took second jobs and collected two salaries.
For those of us of baby-boomer and Generation X vintage, such fortune is difficult to fathom.
In my day, regional pilots were making fifteen grand a year and paying for their own training. Most pilots didn’t make it to the majors until well into their 30s, if they made it at all. After slogging it out at the regionals and a cargo carrier for nine years, I was hired by a major carrier in the spring of 2000 at age 35. Starting pay at the time was around $30,000 a year.
Then came the industry crash in 2001, and thousands of us found ourselves laid off. Those who kept their jobs were hit with massive pay and benefit cuts and elimination of pensions as the airlines went through a cycle of chapter 11 bankruptcies.
My furlough lasted five years. When I finally went back to work in 2007, I was 40 years-old and my salary was about $65,000. That was sixth-year pay. And it was the most I’d ever made in my life.
While all that was going on, the retirement age was bumped from 60 to 65. You think two years is a drag chute on your career progression, try five. But we dealt with it, and now we too can work until that age.
Long and short, we have some catching up to do. Those two extra years would be a huge help. The money, the health benefits.
New-hires in 2024 are earning in their first one or two years what it took us a decade’s worth of seniority to make. Projected over a thirty or forty-year career, the earning potential for a pilot hired today is absurd. Adjust for inflation all you want; the differential over any length of time is huge.
Wars, recessions, and any of a dozen other calamities could set the industry reeling yet again, it’s true. But that doesn’t offset the tremendously good fortune the newest pilots are currently basking in. My peers and I faced those same risks, but without the front-end benefits of today’s generation. Things might go sour at some point, but if nothing else they’re making fantastic money in the meantime. For us that wasn’t the case.
The younger gang is having its cake and eating it too, frosting and all. Maybe it’s human nature; call it selfishenss or self-interest. If I were in their shoes, what would my vote be? Still it feels greedy, even petty, as one generation of pilots prevents its predecessors from making up lost ground.
Original Story:
DIGNIFIED AND OLD
Related Story:
THE REGIONAL RECKONING.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
Numbers graphic by the author.
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]]>POOR ALASKA Airlines. There they were, leisurely mulling the finer points of their merger with Hawaiian, wondering which visage to paint on the tail, when the 737 MAX-9 stole the show.
Pop went a fuselage plug on flight 1282, decompressing the jet and scaring the daylights out of everyone on board. The plane landed safely, but now a number of MAXes are grounded as regulators focus on attachment bolts.
The MAX can’t catch a break, either. This is the plane that spent two years on hiatus after the crashes of Lion Air flight 510 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, until its twice deadly stall-avoidance system was redesigned.
It looks bad, I know. Particularly for Boeing. But this is likely a lot more minor than the media spin suggests. I expect the plug attachments will get some sort of do-over and the planes will quickly be up and flying again.
A jetliner is pressurized so that its occupants can breathe without the need for supplemental oxygen. If the fuselage is breached, that squeezed-together air rushes out. The pilots will don oxygen masks and take the plane to a lower altitude in what we call, plainly enough, an “emergency descent.” The sensations of this drop might be alarming, but it’s an easy and straightforward maneuver.
Rarely are decompressions deadly. When they are, it’s usually because it happens explosively, such as when a bomb goes off, causing massive structural damage. In the Alaska incident, the big danger would’ve been the door plug colliding with the tail structure. But this didn’t happen, leaving the rest of it pretty routine.
I don’t mean to sound blithe, but it’s amusing how much attention this mishap is getting. One of the biggest news stories of the week is about a decompression in which nobody was killed or injured. The track record of the MAX, I figure, is part of the reason. A negligible malfunction, or a design flaw suggesting negligence? Let’s hope it’s not the latter, but either way, back in the Golden Age of Air Disasters, something like this would barely have made the papers.
Ironically, the amount of coverage we’re seeing serves to remind us of just how safe flying has become. In decades past, multiple airline crashes were the norm every year, with hundreds dead at a time. We’ve grown so accustomed to near-perfect safety that a minor event, without a single injury, wins as much attention in 2024 as a crash that killed two-hundred people would’ve gotten in the 1980s.
On the other hand, it’s better to be reading about a decompression than about a catastrophe. And it hardly needs saying that this could easily have been more serious. Had a passenger been sitting adjacent to that plug and not wearing a seatbelt, he or she would’ve been ejected. A hole opening up in the side of a plane, regardless of the reason, earns more than a shrug. Even more so if the problem is traced to a design defect or a quality control screw-up. People are skeptical, and let’s be honest, both Boeing and the 737 MAX deserve whatever scrutiny they’re getting.
I guess that’s the real, if obvious issue: It’s less about what happened than what could have happened. And will it happen again?
Incidents like this, and our focus on them, keep us on our toes. I get that. It’s a way of being proactive and careful, so that we maintain the levels of safety we’ve achieved.
UPDATES:
Some of you have wondered why section of the Alaska 737 that blew out was shaped like a door. The number of required doors depends on seating configuration. Alaska’s layout doesn’t mandate a door in this spot, so there’s a plug there instead, attached with bolts.
Meanwhile, a news outlet today asked me why, following the decompression, no announcement was made by the captain. It’s hard to know, but I imagine the cockpit crew was quite busy. There was an emergency descent to perform, as well as the necessary checklists, coordination with air traffic control, etc. Also the pilots would’ve been wearing oxygen masks, which makes communications more difficult.
It’s possible one of the pilots did make a PA but it wasn’t heard in the noise. Or, being as busy as I imagine they were, they may have relayed information to the flight attendants and left it up to them.
As a pilot I’ve experienced a handful of depressurizations over the years. One afternoon I was working a flight from South America to the United States when, high over the Caribbean, came a sudden whooshing sound that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere at once. I could feel my ears popping, and sure enough, a glance at the instruments showed we were quickly losing pressurization. The captain and I put our masks on, took out the book and began troubleshooting.
Part of that troubleshooting involved one of those steep descents. To the passengers I’m sure it
felt like a roller coaster, but everything was carefully coordinated. The autopilot was engaged the whole time, and no limits were exceeded.
Should a pressure loss occur over mountains or other high terrain, pilots will follow predetermined routes, sometimes called “escape routes,” that allow for a more gradual descent, in stages. Even if crossing the Andes or the Himalayas, there’s always the opportunity to reach a safe altitude before supplemental oxygen runs out.
Related Stories:
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THE MAX IS BACK
THE AIRPLANE THAT ISN’T
Photos courtesy of Michael Saporito and Unsplash.
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]]>December 21, 2023
THE OTHER DAY I came in from overseas. At immigration I used the Global Entry line, as I normally do. The process was easy: a quick facial recognition scan and I was through.
Later I started wondering about that scan. Where did immigration authorities (CBP) get the biometric information used to identify me? I don’t recall signing over a scan of my face. Do you?
Not to sound paranoid, and I’m not saying we should object, necessarily. But the question is important: how do they know what we look like, and who gave them this data?
Maybe we did. It could happen when applying for a passport, and maybe a driver’s license too. It might be there in the fine print. (Those photos are awfully small, however. How much can be gleaned from them?)
Airlines, too, are beginning to use this technology to expedite boarding. Where did they get the data? If it came from those same passport or license pics, that would mean the government is sharing this information with airlines. Which is logical from a security perspective, but where is the line drawn? Does the government have the right to sell or share biometrics only with airlines, or with commercial entities in general? If so, which ones, and who gets to decide?
I don’t want this to topple into a worried rant over privacy and invasive technologies. There are enough of those out there already. Besides, it’s too late; the surveillance genie left the bottle a long time ago, and like it or not we’re stuck with the repercussions. But I’d like to know the answers.
Graphics courtesy of Unsplash and Getty Images
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]]>OVER THE WEEKEND, Alaska Airlines announced it will purchase Hawaiian Airlines for a reported $1.9 billion. If approved, the merger will form the nation’s fifth-largest carrier.
I find this interesting for a number of reasons — though probably not the ones most people are talking about. You can pop over to the other news and travel sites to learn about how this union does or doesn’t make sense, strategy-wise. You can read about loyalty programs, stock prices, and the alleged woes of yet more industry consolidation. My take is more fun:
Alaska and Hawaii. Our most geographically extreme states, numbers 49 and 50. One mammoth and frigid, the other small and tropical. They share a lot of traits: remoteness, mountains, indigenous people, whales.
Then we have the tails. Alaska and Hawaiian are the only carriers I know of whose liveries feature faces. One is a woman, the other a man. They stare longingly at one another across the vastness of the Pacific.
It’s romantic, no? They’ve been courting this merger all along, haven’t they? Thus we have a more literal marriage than are most mergers.
Both faces, by the way, are borrowed from real people.
The visage at Hawaiian is that of a woman named Leinaala Teruya Drummond. The former Miss Hawaii, she’s been up there since 1973. Ms. Drummon passed away in September at age 77.
Mr. Alaska’s history is a little less clear. What we know for sure is that he’s not Old Man Winter, Johnny Cash, an age-enhanced Che Guevara, or the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. He is an Eskimo. An Inuit. Though even the airline isn’t sure which one. They narrow him down to one of two native Alaskans: a reindeer herder from Kotzebue named Chester Seveck, or a man named Oliver Amouak, who appeared in an airline-sponsored “traveling stage show” in the 1950s.
Whichever is correct, he’s an iconic mascot and deserves to remain up there, in monochrome and smiling warmly in his parka.
For all of these reasons, I’m happy to hear that the plan is to keep both brands intact. Financially the carriers will be as one, but will operate independently under their own names. I suppose this makes sense. It’d be a little weird to have an entity called Alaska Airlines with a hub in Honolulu. Hawaii-Japan is one of Hawaiian’s busiest markets, and I imagine Japanese passengers in particular would find it baffling.
Of course, things like this have a way of changing. I wouldn’t be shocked if a year from now one of the two brands is subsumed or the carrier changes its name entirely. Pacific Airways, anyone?
Photo credits: Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines.
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]]>I SHOULD PROBABLY say something about the off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot who made headlines after attempting to shut down the engines of a Horizon Air regional jet en route to San Francisco. Joseph Emerson, 44, who was riding in the cockpit jumpseat, faces multiple counts of attempted murder.
Emerson says he believed he was in a dream-state at the time after dosing on psychedelic mushrooms two days earlier. He’d been traumatized by the death of a close friend, and, it has been reported, had been battling depression for years.
Where the drug use and mental health problems intersect is problematic. It’s tempting to see this as a clear-cut case of dangerously reckless behavior, backstory be damned. A heavy-enough intake of magic mushrooms can cause anybody, regardless of their normal mental state, to lose track of reality. So-called microdosing has become common as a do-it-yourself depression treatment; perhaps Emerson upped a dose without realizing how intense the effects can be. And as medical professionals will attest, depression by itself does not typically inspire sufferers to commit acts of violence. It took the mushrooms to push Captain Emerson over the edge.
(Twice in the last week I’ve been treated to snarky, “Hey man, I hope you aren’t trippin’!” comments from passengers. I know that flying brings out the worst and rudest in people, but try to restrain yourself.)
However you look at it, the incident has touched off a difficult conversation about how pilots do, or don’t, deal with ailments like depression and anxiety, the diagnosis of which can cost a pilot his or her livelihood. And we’re reminded, sadly, of Germanwings first officer Andreas Lubitz, who in 2015 locked the captain out of the cockpit and flew his Airbus A320 into the Alps, killing everybody on board. Not to mention first officer Gameel Al-Batouti, who in 1999 flew EgyptAir flight 990 into the Atlantic Ocean, murdering 217 people.
The New York Times ran an excellent story on the subject, here. There isn’t a whole lot I can add, other than to cut and paste from an earlier post…
First, be wary of extrapolation. The total number of pilot suicide crashes over the decades is a tiny one. These incidents are what they are: outliers. You can argue that the certification process for pilots needs fixing, but that’s not reason enough to suggest there’s a crisis at hand, with hundreds of looming Emerson’s or Lubitzes or Al-Batoutis waiting to snap, with nothing to prevent them from doing so.
And in only the rarest cases does mental illness turn people violent. The idea that a depressed individual is likely to be a dangerous individual is an ignorant and unfair presumption about the nature of mental illness. As one Ask the Pilot reader put it after the Germanwings catastrophe, “Andreas Lubitz didn’t kill those people because he was depressed; he killed them because he was evil.” You can say the same for Al-Batouti. In all but the rarest cases, a pilot with a mental health issue is not an unsafe pilot, never mind a suicidal killer.
Pilots are human beings, and no profession is bulletproof against every human weakness. Whether the result of stress or something more systemic, pilots sometimes need help — just as professionals in any industry do, including those entrusted with the lives of others. Unfortunately for us, the association carries a heavy stigma, and anything involving commercial aviation is subject to media amplification and hysteria.
The FAA now permits pilots to take certain anti-depressant medications. Although the process can be onerous, the agency says it will convene a committee to explore and update mental health protocols, aiming to speed up the approval process for those under treatment.
Airlines, meanwhile, have become more supportive and proactive than you might expect, while ALPA and other pilot unions have medical and mental health staff that pilots can contact any time. A proactive, employee-friendly approach keeps the problem from being driven underground; if a pilot has an issue, he or she can pick up the phone, usually with little worry of long-term career implications.
In the U.S., airline pilots undergo medical evaluations either yearly or twice-yearly, depending. A medical certificate must be issued by an FAA-certified physician. The checkup is not a psychological checkup per se, but the doctor evaluates a pilot on numerous criteria, up to and including his or her mental health. In addition, new-hire pilots at some airlines undergo psychological examinations prior to being hired. On top of that we all are subject to random testing for narcotics and alcohol.
We can further debate the merits of additional psychological testing, but at a certain point I’m not sure what more we should want or expect.
In the end, we’re forced to rely on a set of presumptions — it comes down to trust, if you will. As a pilot I do not come to work wondering if one of my colleagues is going to kill me. Passengers shouldn’t either. On the contrary. I don’t want this to sound like an airline commercial or an FAA press release, but you can confidently presume that the people flying your plane are exactly what you expect them to be: well-trained professionals for whom safety is their foremost priority.
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Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
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]]>AN OLD-TIMEY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SESSION.
Eons ago, in 2002, a column called Ask the Pilot, hosted by yours truly, started running in the online magazine Salon, in which I fielded reader-submitted questions about air travel. It’s a good idea, I think, to touch back now and then on the format that got this venerable enterprise started. It’s Ask the Pilot classic, if you will.
Q: I appreciated your rant about excessive public address announcements at airports and during flight. However, announcements from the cockpit can’t escape attention. Seriously, can some of your fellow pilots please stay quiet? We get what we need from the cabin crew; we don’t need the pilots piling on.
I’m okay with pilot PAs so long as they are professional-sounding, informational, jargon-free and brief.
I make one prior to departure. I say our names, then I give the flight time (I always round the minutes to zero or five), the approximate arrival time, and maybe a short description of the arrival weather. The whole thing takes fifteen seconds.
The names part is just to remind people that actual human beings are driving their plane. There’s such a disconnect between the cabin and cockpit; most passengers never even lay eyes on the individuals taking them across the country or across the ocean.
I do not start in with, “It’s a great day for flyin,’ and we’ve got eight of our best flight attendants back there for your safety and comfort,” blah blah blah. That style of folky-hokey chatter is embarrassing.
Q: When I fly, I always love the ka-thunk sound of landing gear coming down, as it signals we’re almost to our destination. Sometimes I notice it comes down much closer to touchdown than other times. Why?
Planes normally drop their landing gear at around 2,000 feet above the ground, or when passing what we call the “final approach fix.” That’s maybe three minutes from touchdown, give or take. But it varies, depending on airspeed, spacing with other traffic, and so on. Lowering the gear has a significant aerodynamic impact, mainly in the adding of wind resistance (that is, drag). Sometimes we drop it early to help slow down.
I remember going into JFK early one morning. The controllers initially kept us high and fast, then suddenly gave us a “slam dunk” clearance straight to the runway. We put the gear out at like 5,000 feet to slow down and increase our descent to the maximum possible rate. No pilot likes doing this, as it’s noisy and maybe a little disconcerting for passengers. But under the circumstances, it worked great.
At most carriers the policy is to have the gear down and the plane fully configured for landing no later than a thousand feet above the ground. The idea is to minimize power and pitch adjustments and maintain what pilots call a “stabilized approach.”
Q: And please cure this stupid irrational fear once and for all: could pilots ever forget to deploy the landing gear? What are the safeguards to ensure this doesn’t happen?
Verifying that the gear is down and locked is one of the checklist items prior to landing. There are also configuration warnings that will sound if the plane passes a certain altitude without the gear (or wing flaps) in the correct position.
On top of all that, if you still somehow managed to forget, the whole picture would look and feel wrong. The plane’s attitude would be off, the power settings would be strange, the sounds would be different.
Pilots of small private planes are known to land with their gear up from time to time, but I can’t imagine this happening in a commercial jet.
Q: I recently flew on a 737-900, in row 13. I was surprised to find that there was no window in this row, although there was ample space for one. Why?
You see this on a lot of planes. Usually it’s because there’s some sort of internal component — ducting, framing, or some other structural assembly — that doesn’t allow space for a window. Some turboprops are missing a window directly adjacent to the propeller blades, and you’ll find a strip of reinforced plating there instead. This is to prevent damage if, during icing conditions, the blades shed chunks of ice.
Q: I often listen in to air traffic control on the internet. On the approach control frequencies, pilots will call in and identify themselves “with” a character from the phonetic alphabet. For example, “Approach this is United 515 at ten thousand with Alpha or “Approach United 827, five thousand feet with Uniform.” What does this mean?
Every airport puts out a broadcast that gives the current weather, approaches and runways in use, and assorted other info particular to the airport at that moment (some of it, to be honest, unnecessary). This broadcast, called ATIS (automatic terminal information service), is identified phonetically between A and Z.
On initial contact with approach control (or with ground or clearance control when departing), pilots are asked to report in with the most current letter, verifying they’ve listened to the broadcast and have an idea of what’s going on. Each time something is updated, the broadcast advances to the next letter. I will call in “with Sierra,” and the annoyed controller will snap back, “Information Tango is now up.”
I use the words “broadcast,” and “listened to,” because traditionally crews would tune to a radio frequency for ATIS, and transcribe its highlights onto a slip of paper. Nowadays, at most larger airports, it’s delivered through a cockpit datalink printout or is pulled up on our iPads.
For no useful reason, much of the typical ATIS report is abbreviated and coded using all kinds of nonstandard shorthand, and takes some deciphering. Aviation is frustratingly averse to the use of actual words, preferring instead a soup of acronyms and gibberish. I mean, it’s not the 1950s anymore and we aren’t using teletype machines to communicate.
Q: Tell us something weird?
What’s weird is that I haven’t been to a rock concert in thirteen years.
That’s super weird, really, considering how deeply into music I once was, and how many hundreds of concerts I attended. I can’t explain why, exactly, but I developed a later-in-life disdain for live performances. They suddenly felt goofy and weird to me: Am I watching or listening? Where do I stand? And none of the songs sound right.
You’ll tell me I’m just getting old Whatever the reason, I stopped going, even when the musicians are ones I love.
My last time at a show was in 2010, when I went to see Grant Hart in Cambridge. Prior to that we go all the way back to 2004, when I saw the Mountain Goats, also in Cambridge. Both times I was on the guest list, which made the idea of a night out more appealing. I’m not sure I would’ve gone otherwise. (Somewhere in there was Curtis Eller the banjo guy, and some symphonies, but those don’t count.)
That said, I’m told by a reader that the Bob Mould show in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago was great, and at least half of the songs he played were classics from the Hüsker Dü canon. I wanna say that I wished I’d gone (the last time I watched Mould play live was in 1995). I was in Tanzania on vacation, so my excuse is solid, but even if I’d been home I may not have done it.
Concerts are one thing, but worst of the worst is any kind of live music in a bar or restaurant. There’s almost nothing I hate more. At least at a concert you’re there because, presumably, you enjoy the music of the artist you’re seeing. The music in a bar may or may not be anything you like. It’s intrusive, and conversation becomes difficult.
Here I’ll make this airline-related: On layovers in Accra, Ghana, I used to love hanging out at the poolside bar at the Novotel. It was such a chill place, with the most relaxing vibe. Then they brought in a piano player. Now the racket made talking almost impossible. He’d sing, too, and the beer mugs would crack when he hit the high notes. I had to find a new place.
EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO patricksmith@askthepilot.com
Related Stories:
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 1
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 2
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 3
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 4
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 5
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 6
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, COVID EDITION
Portions of this post appeared previously in the magazine Salon.
PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
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