Flying Lessons

Taking a (Web) Page from Wikipedia's Book

2012-01-25T15:33:00.001-05:00

Spirit Airlines is nothing if not clever, as I reported in The New York Times back in 2011 when this airline was alone among U.S. carriers in deciding to turn the baggage fee concept on its head. It not only charged to check a bag, it also charged for carry-ons. See what I mean? Verrrry clever.

Now, taking a page from the campaign of Wikipedia, Google and other popular Internet sites regarding proposed regulations of the web, Spirit has plastered an advisory on its home page about new government regulations that apply to airlines and it is urging passengers to make their voices heard in Washington.

Beginning this week, the U.S. Department of Transportation says airlines must include federal taxes when quoting the price of an airline ticket. Spirit's website alert was half of a two pronged effort to enrage airline passengers about the rule. It also send an email to its customers. But if Spirit thinks air travelers feel about their service providers the way that users of the Internet feel about Wikipedia and Google, maybe it's not as smart as I thought.

Photo courtesy Spirit Airlines

The reaction I've seen to Spirit's campaign is befuddlement. And once the issue is explained, befuddlement quickly turns to boredom. Spirit has misread the modern traveler if it thinks passengers care one whit more than the bottom line; "What is it gonna cost me to get from A to B? Question mark. Period.

Impulse travel is an increasingly popular activity a global phenomenon conceived and incubated by airlines that made travelers believe they could fly somewhere for pocket change. (See the music video by three Irish ladies for a hilarious example.) Its a deal with the devil though - a bait and switch that has travelers holding their noises while buying their tickets and boarding their planes.

Like Ireland's Ryanair, and others, Spirit advertises fares so low, low, low, the only way it can make money is by tacking fees, fees, fees to the price, price, price. the new law doesn't change that, it only adds the federal taxes and puts them right up front so would-be travelers can see them right away.

Rest assured, seat selection, ticket confirmation, checked bags and all those other add-ons will still hike up the ticket price. So my advice to Spirit is, Find a business model that eliminates that frustrating practice before you ask air travelers to carry your water because until you do, you and your airline buddies are in this fight on your own.

Wing Cracks and Cars That Go Zoom in the Night

2012-01-20T17:44:00.003-05:00

Two items in the news caught my eye this week. And while both are getting relatively little attention while Americans focus on Newt Gingrich's "open marriage" scandal and the rest of the world wonders what really happened when that cruise ship ran aground in Italy, these other stories are significant.

In today's International Herald Tribune, Nicola Clark reports on the new European airworthiness directive aimed at getting to the bottom of wing cracks discovered on two of nine super jumbo Airbus A380s. Eee gads! Think Airbus customers at Singapore, Emirates and Air France/KLM are biting their nails? Uh, yeah, because those are the airlines who've been told wing installation techniques on the airplanes in their fleet could be susceptible to this problem.

Airbus dismissals that the fractures are harmless, seem not to be carrying much weight with the safety authorities in Cologne, who wrote in the directive, "This condition, if not detected and corrected, could potentially affect the structural integrity of the aeroplane."

Other operators of the A380, Lufthansa and Qantas may feel they've dodged a bullet, and that's a term I've used more than once in writing about this particular model airplane. Need I even say, uncontained engine failure? Near disaster over Indonesia? Nope, these airlines can't be too comfy right now, especially as the directive concludes with the caveat that these visual inspections of wing rib feet are "an interim action." The investigation, as they say, is ongoing, "further mandatory actions might be considered."

Would that the investigation was still ongoing into the cause of unintended acceleration on Toyota cars in 2008 and 2009. Unfortunately, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has turned off the ignition, locked the car and walked away from further study. But in a report by Bill Vlasic of The New York Times, we learn that the federal agency charged with insuring auto safety isn't up to the task of supervising or even understanding the risks associated with digitization. Hello?

In autos and in aviation, engineers are boldly going where we have not been before. And for years I've been fielding emails from electronics engineers convinced that electromagnetic interference, (yep, that would be Alec Baldwin's EMI) played a role in all those out-of-control Prius, RAV4s, Corollas that had drivers feeling like Keanu Reeves in a real-life version of the movie Speed.

Don't get off the exit ramp yet, I'm gonna bring this back to airplanes in a minute.

Toyota was under pressure to address concerns that all those cases of unintended acceleration might have EMI interference as a factor. So credible were the people raising the issue that Toyota felt the need to have its engineer, Kristin Tabar answer the charge in a video on the company website, and it hired the scientific consulting firm Exponent to do its own study.

What Vlasic's story points out, however, is that an independent review found the federal agency not competent to regulate automative electronics. Part of the problem could be the speed with which the auto industry is developing in terms of digitization. A number of recent events with flight software and cockpit systems interference leads me to believe these two industries are not too dissimilar when it comes to keeping up with and managing the risks of complicated fly-by or drive-by-wire technologies.

The argument often put forth by those who say EMI is a fantasy rather than a ghost, is that there is no evidence of problems with interference as the source. It its report, the National Academy of Sciences replies, "Some failures of software and other faults in electronics systems do not leave physical evidence of their occurrence, which can complicate assessment of the causes of unusual behaviors in the modern, electronics-intensive automobile."

Everyone who did not go on a wild ride in a Toyota may be sick to death of the subject just as many people are tired of the debate over whether portable electronic devices should be allowed on flights below ten-thousand feet. But Negroni predicts, this is not the last we are going to hear about wing cracks or crackling electrons. Nor should it be.

Safety is My Co-Priority

2012-01-11T15:41:00.012-05:00

If you are operating under the impression that air show megastar Sean Tucker confines his fancy maneuvers to his airplane, I'm here to tell you, he does not. Yesterday at the NTSB hearing in Washington, I watched him dazzle a panel of hardened air safety investigators looking into ways to improve air show and air race safety.

"It's not basket weaving 101", he said, all gosh, shucks and boyish charm and the five board members from Mark Rosekind on the left to Earl Weener on the right practically cooed.

But Tucker has a point. In a demonstration of courage and cojones, he was one of only a few of the air show/air race luminaries who testified at the hearing willing to admit that all ain't right in the world of performance aviation.

Well, as Chairman Deborah Hersman said early on, "Danger is part of the attraction." But when 11 people end up dead and dozens more are injured as happened on the final day of the Reno Air Races on September 16, 2011, the usual blandishment that "Safety is our number one priority" no longer seems sincere.

Let's be honest, safety is not the number one priority or all those souped-up planes and hot-shot pilots would be safely on the ground. Thrill seeking is the number one priority for the performers and for the spectators. The question is; can safety be the co-priority in sport aviation?

That's the delicate task for the safety board and the Federal Aviation Administration, recognizing that this kind of aviation is tremendously popular because it taps into our emotions. Air shows recall a pioneering past and demonstrate how innovation is sculpting the future. (And then there are those pilots!)

But the safety folks can't be carried aloft on the winds of good intentions. Real issues, as of yet unaddressed, have been brought to light by the Reno disaster.

Jimmy Leeward, the pilot whose nosediving P-51 turned the box seats at Reno Stead Airport into a scene of carnage, was 74-years old. To fly competitively and undergo the extraordinary physical stresses of air racing, he was required to have just a 3rd class medical certificate, the same sign-off as your basic general aviation pilot.

Then there is the airplane. Leeward's P-51 was as far removed from its original design as the family Ford is from a Formula One race car. And whether airworthiness has been compromised by all that performance-enhancing tinkering can be a difficult question for FAA inspectors to answer authoritatively.

"They can check that things are tightened down and make sure things are properly greased but they can't say that the thing is going to hold together, they don't have the expertise," said Mike Danko, an aviation lawyer from San Mateo, California. Mike spoke with me yesterday while I was working on a story about the hearing for The New York Times.

These omissions speak to the question of pilot hazards and one can argue that the men and women who fly in this environment know what they're getting into.

But it becomes a matter of public concern in the third area into which the NTSB board members tiptoed yesterday; are the setbacks for air show spectators appropriate?

In his testimony, Mike Houghton, chief executive of the Reno Air Race Association was unequivocal, even after Hersman pressed the point, reminding Houghton of a crash on the track at the 2007 Reno air race.

"We looked at debris disbursement and compared it with what had been established," Houghton said, of the set backs established years earlier and how they impacted the safety of race attendees in the 2007 accident. He continued, "and all the calculations were correct. We were 75 feet short of the spectator area. In spite of that we took steps to put Jersey barriers on the other side of the racecourse between taxi and runway to mitigate if something should ever happen again and if debris were to happen it would be stopped by the barriers."

Hersman wasn't the only one raising the figurative eyebrow about the notion that the course of an out-of-control airplane can be predicted. Danko says the premise is fallacious.

"They’ve used geometry and physics to say we’re going to design a course so the aircraft is never pointed at the crowd," he said. "But it's based on a false premise that if it fails in flight it will travel in a straight line. It may not travel in a straight line. It may go out of control. A control surface breaks off it may go in an unpredictable direction."

Predictably, a control surface did appear to come off Leeward's plane which then landed nose down within striking distance of a crowd of spectators.

Leeward, Tucker and all the other performance pilots are not alone. They share the risks with every thrill-seeker who buys a ticket to an air show. Any industry capable of pushing envelopes like this one does can surely balance mitigating the risks with maintaining the sport. But the first task on the check list is acknowledging the real priorities.

Flames, Air, Altitude Create Deadly Triangle in New Zealand

2012-01-06T21:53:00.006-05:00

August 2007 photo courtesy Transport Safety Board Canada

The news tonight from New Zealand's north island is terrible. Eleven people, 10 passengers and a pilot killed in a fiery hot air balloon crash.
Apparently the airship flew into a power line and caught fire. Early reports suggest the balloon was 160 feet above the town of Carterton, east of the capital city of Wellington. Even those able to get out of the burning basket could not survive the fall.

The news had a particular impact on me. Last autumn I spent two idyllic days at the Plano Balloon Festival in Texas. High winds made it impossible for me to actually get up in the air, nevertheless I was enchanted by the sight and sound of them.

But the news from New Zealand also reminded me of a tragedy in Canada on August 24, 2007. At a balloon festival in British Columbia that summer there were 12 passengers and the pilot in the basket waiting to lift off but the aircraft was still tied to the ground when fire broke out. All but two of those on board were able to get out of the basket on the pilot's order, but the fire severed the ground tether before the last two, a mother and her daughter, could flee. The balloon rose with the two women still inside and they were killed. It was the second serious balloon accident in a month in Canada and when the Transport Safety Board issued its final report, it included a call for a wide-ranging safety review of hot air balloon operations.

There is a triad of incompatible elements in hot air ballooning, fire and air being two of them, altitude being the third as the accident in New Zealand seems to show. Reports say this is the most deadly aviation accident in the country since a DC-10 crash that killed 257 in 1979.

But near-record breaking or not, I have every confidence the air safety investigators at the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand will do their conscientious best to find out what happened. They may discover, as I did while researching the Canada balloon accidents, that over the past two and a half decades there have been more than 500 hot air balloon accidents - about a tenth of them involving fatalities. These deaths come in ones and twos for the most part. Though there have been exceptions. Six people died in 1993 in Woody Creek, Colorado. Four were killed three years earlier in Ohio. Both accidents involved the balloon striking something.

Power line strikes are a factor in one out of three balloon accidents and more significantly, when a power line is involved the event is twice as likely to cause fatalities and serious injuries. That's because the current being carried on power lines can ignite the balloon. Even when electricity is not a problem, high tension lines can slice through a fast moving airship - instantly deflating the envelope and sending the basket plummeting.

Fire, air and altitude, are inherent in the sport of hot air ballooning but when you look at the accident statistics too often power lines are a disturbing constant as well.

What a Dying Airline Looks Like

2012-01-02T20:47:00.001-05:00

I could have paid for a night in a fancy hotel (and I saw a beautiful one) if I had a dollar for every time someone told me about the glory days of Air Zimbabwe while I was there last month. But airlines cannot fly on memories alone and the Air Zimbabwe of late has had little else to keep it in the sky. It has a decades-old habit of unreliable service and not paying its bills. By the end of 2011 some credit holders had enough.

It's not just the airline, as a country, Zimbabwe seems well on its way to hell in a hand basket, as my mom used to say, thanks to a president who won't leave even though voters sent a message THIS CLEAR they'd like him gone, like yesterday.

As I was flying out of the country on Ethiopian Airlines btw, I got to talking to the man sitting next to me who turned out to be a retired captain with Air Zimbabwe. "If that airline doesn't start paying its bills," I warned, "it won't be long before a creditor throws a lock on one of those Boeing 767s."

To my astonishment American General Supplies, Inc of Washington, DC, did exactly that four days later when Flight 722 arrived at Gatwick airport in London. The supplier of airplanes, engines and components claimed the airline owed it more than $1.5 million dollars. I'm not sure where it came from but somebody forked over the cash because the airplane finally departed London's Gatwick for Harare on Christmas Eve.

AGS isn't the only company that's got accounts receivable with Air Zim's name at the top. The airline reportedly owes half a million to Bid Air Services a South African ground operations company and lest Bid Air get the bright idea to do the same thing and nab itself a Boeing, Nicholas Goche, the Zimbabwe minister of transportation announced today that the airline will no longer fly to Johannesburg or London.

This leaves Air Zimbabwe flying a few domestic routes and three international ones including its flight to Beijing China. And here is where it gets interesting.

Chinese investment in Zimbabwe can be seen all over Harare. In my time there I passed two major projects; a military-like compound still under construction and a large mining enterprise also under construction and heavily guarded. So I was intrigued to read a Zimbabwean newspaper article suggesting that Hainan Airlines has rushed in to save the day by buying a controlling interest Air Zimbabwe.

True? I dunno. But in spite of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's intransigent president-for-life, China isn't alone in trying to keep an open door into the country. Dubai's Emirates, another airline known for keeping its finger to the wind begins five-times-a-week-service to Harare on February 1st.

To some folks, Air Zimbabwe appears to be dying as routes, customers, planes and prestige all shrivel. But there are those who see Air Zimbabwe's plight as potential gain and for them a dying airline can look like a golden opportunity.

Aviation - This Thing We Love

2011-12-30T14:16:00.003-05:00

CRAZY STUFF!
Despite scarey decompressions, a you-can-not-make-this-up event on a commuter flight to New York, the inexplicable but global trend of attacking pilots with lasers, an elevation of rhetoric in politics and in aviation and some truely appalling carrying-on by air travelers who really should know better (Gerard! Alec! Leisha! what got into you?) aviation was blessed this year with many, many happy landings.

SAFE FLIGHTS!

Let's start with the publication of the International Air Transport Association's new statistics that show commercial aviation around the world has never been safer.

Statistics being slippery, I don't normally tout this kind of thing, but Gunther Matschnigg IATA's safety guru makes the point that this is the continuation of an ongoing decline in air accidents and cites success in getting regulators and airlines to participate in standardized operational audits and sharing of safety information; learning from each other being a key factor in aviation safety.

NEW PLANES!

The Dreamliner in Addis Ababa in December

Two new airplanes took to the skies in 2011, the much redesigned and ever lovely B747 and the B787 Dreamliner, which may have seemed more like fantasy than dream after years of delay actually getting the airplane off the ground.

Capt. Desta Zeru flew the 787 into Addis Ababa

But what the hey? All seemed to be forgiven in Japan when All Nippon Airways' first 787 arrived in October (and was then promptly smashed into a boarding bridge). Equally enthusiastic crowds greeted the 787's arrival in Addis Ababa in December. Ethiopian Airlines didn't actually take posession of the airplane, but one of their pilots did make history by left-seating it into the continent on its 'round the world tour.

MERGER MANIA!

British Airways/Iberia, LAN Chile/TAM, Continental/United, Southwest/AirTran all tied the knot in 2011. And while setting up housekeeping together is working more easily for some than for others, take my mother-in-law's advice and remember, good marriages aren't built in a day. Here are some other kinda love stories that kept the drama up at airports around the globe.

And if that's not enough kissy-kissy for you, the short-lived TV show Pan Am offered sexy story lines and prompted former Pan Am employees to reminisce about the glory days to the delight of many of us.

SWEET DREAMS!
After years and years of mind-numbing talk about pilot flight duty times, the Federal Aviation Administration finally issued a proposed a rule that should provide some needed shut-eye for pilots. Airline pilots anyway. Cargo pilots seem to be left to fend for themselves with the sandman and flight attendants, mechanics and air traffic controllers aren't part of the rule either, so this issue is far from ready to be put to bed.

GOOD NEWS FROM BAD TIMES!
There were glimmers of good news emerging from the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March. Pilot Jim Karsh, who flies frequently into Japan generously kept FLYING LESSONS readers updated in the immediate aftermath. My friend and correspondent, Takeo Aizawa was gracious enough to provide small details of how aviation was faring in Japan in the weeks that followed. I chose to see these reports as glimmers of hope for a better tomorrow.

ALL THE BLESSINGS OF FLYING
When I thank God for the blessings of the year just past, I include these personal highlights:

opportunities to watch airplanes, from the great vantage points at airports or airport hotels in Orlando, Chicago, Copenhagen, Bangkok and Dubai.

Steve Guenard takes me flying in N7995

My experience flying above Manhattan with acrobatic pilot John Klatt, and touring Utah from a beautifully restored Stearman with Steve Guenard at the controls.

The magnificent sight of a "pilot's halo"viewed while flying above the clouds on a Lufthansa A340.

Most of all dear readers, I'm thankful to YOU for making FLYING LESSONS a part of your day and contributing your ideas, critiques and comments to make better this thing we love called flying. Happy New Year.

Why Blogging Ain't Reporting (That Means You BITS)

2011-12-26T21:13:00.003-05:00

Yep, I'm a blogger and I'm a reporter. And sometimes I'm an advocate. When I'm all objective and such, you'll find my byline in The New York Times and the Dallas Morning News, et cetera, et cetera. But when a blog is actually in The New York Times, that line between reporter and opinionator gets blurry pretty darn fast. And to the question, "Is a blog post in the Times subject to the same editorial review as print version?" the answer appears to be not so much. But if you ask me, it oughta' be.

My problem is with the series of posts written by Nick Bilton, lead technology reporter/writer for The New York Times Bits blog. These tweet-sized bits of so-called reporting are delivered to the reader with all the impact of the Gray Lady herself. Even though nothing he's written on the subject of the use of personal electronic devices on airplanes rises to what the discerning reader would consider a basic journalistic standard.

By way of background, and in truth, full disclosure, I'm a little prickly on the subject. In January 2011, after more than two months research and 30 interviews I reported for The New York Times that pilots, aeronautical and electrical engineers and air safety investigators were concerned about the increased use of hand held gadgets on airplanes and the potential for electromagnetic interference with flight deck instruments. We air travelers aren't the only ones who have gone digital. The formerly mechanical airplane has too and this has created a potential conflict. The navigation, communication and operational systems can be affected by extraneous signals from all the gizmos we bring on board.

The authorities looking into the issue found 10 reports filed by commercial airline pilots who suspected electronic devices had interfered with flights under their command.

Following the publication of that story, a confidential source provided me with a study from the International Air Transport Association showing that the problem was global in scope. I wrote a follow up here in my blog, and provided the study to ABC News which produced its own investigative report this summer.

Nevertheless, just in time for the holiday travel season, Bilton has dipped his toe into the water of aviation safety and with the imprimatur of the same New York Times suggests all those worries are for babies. There's no real safety risk in using personal electronic devices during critical phases of flight. Bilton bases his conclusion on the fact that, and I'm gonna quote him here,

"no crashes were attributed to people using technology on a plane."

Well, first of all, that's wrong, which he would have known if he'd even read the previous Times story on the subject. Electromagnetic interference could not be ruled out as a factor in the 2003 crash of an commuter crash in New Zealand. And it was a mid-air collision over New York City in 1960 that first got the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics looking into the issue.

Even so, anyone with more than a "I've heard the safety briefing" background in aviation, knows an absence of accidents is not evidence of safety, any more than arriving home alive after driving intoxicated is evidence that there's no risk in driving drunk.

By the time Bilton opines next on the subject, he's gobsmacked that the transition to electronic flight bags means pilots will soon be using iPads in the cockpit. More proof, he concludes that EMI presents no flight threat.

"pilots with iPads will be enclosed in the cockpit just a few inches from critical aviation equipment."

There are a number of significant differences between the use of a well-tested and controlled device in the cockpit by the people actually flying the airplane and the use in the back of hundreds of electronic devices in Lord-knows-what state. Just ask yourself, how long would it take a pilot to switch off a questionable piece of electronic machinery in the cockpit versus how long would it take a flight attendant to track down a surreptitiously-used device if the pilots even had the time and presence of mind to investigate that possibility during an anomalous event?

So, you can see why I'm frustrated when a guy writing under the masthead of prestigious newspaper says there is no "evidence to support the idea that someone reading an e-book or playing a video game during takeoff or landing is jeopardizing safety."

Well there is evidence, Bilton just zooms right by it. In the global study, seventy-five pilots reported episodes that concerned them, and folks familiar with the data suggested the 75 is probably about one quarter of the actual number of events, since about one quarter of the world's airlines contribute reports to the database.

For those who prefer their pilots not to be wetting their pants over suspected EMI flight control issues I'll point out that it is a basic tenet of aviation safety that events are more predictive than accidents. These pilots were reporting on the precursors to crashes.

But Bilton, having spoken to at last count about half a dozen people over the course of four posts tells Times readers its "time to change the rules."

He's wrong. Aviation's remarkable record is the result of eliminating anticipated risks and creating redundant systems for the risks and errors that are unpredictable. The use of portable electronic devices falls squarely in the former.

Bilton would know that if he felt the need to take his reporting even slightly off the path between his hunches and his biases. As a blogger he may not need to do that, but as someone who's opinions fall under the banner of The New York Times, he and his editors certainly ought to.

Pickin' Up a Guy Named Mike From a Trailer Park in Texas

2011-12-20T00:01:00.013-05:00

Owen Benjamin reads books on his Ideapad

They're both tall, they're both good lookin' and they're both frequent flyers. But there's a big difference between Alec Baldwin and Owen Benjamin. When a flight attendant tells Owen to turn off his portable electronic device, Owen right away says, "Yes."

That wasn't always the case. But since Owen accepted an offer from Southwest Airlines and Lenovo to sponsor his quest to set a record for most airports visited in a month, the stand-up comedian-turned road warrior has a new respect for flight attendants.

"The most important lesson I learned is to be nice to the flight attendant," Owen told me during a skype interview on Monday. "They work really hard."

For the last 30 days, Owen has been on an airplane all day, every day, flying to every city Southwest serves and a few it doesn't. Or at least that's what the funny man claims.

"Southwest will stop anywhere. I'm like, 'Why are we landing?' They go, 'We're picking up a guy named Mike.' It goes to every city in Texas. Every city. It stops in trailer parks, it goes anywhere."

Thirty days of traveling has given the comedian lots of new material that he's been trying out at the comedy clubs he's visiting as he criss-crosses the country at 38-thousand feet.

My Lenovo ThinkPad treated me well for more than five years.

He's also equipped with a Lenovo Ideapad Tablet, so he can read, watch videos or write down more jokes and he's tweeting too. Full disclosure: I am writing this post on a new X220 convertible laptop/tablet, after five years of productive traveling with a conventional Lenovo ThinkPad.

Whether it is the books he's downloaded to his tablet, or the famously cheeky airline - Owen claims he's having fun flying around the country. That's in contrast to the 39 percent of travelers who told the U.S. Travel Association that given the chance, they'd choose some form of transport other than air.

Maybe those two out of five travelers need to follow Owen's example and pack light, eat healthy and always carry something to read. "Time seems more joyous if you are looking forward to an hour delay so you can sit and read your book." he told me.

The Funny on the Fly campaign ends today with a ceremony in Raleigh, North Carolina. Then the 31-year old comedian will hop back on a Southwest airplane for Lake Placid, New York to spend the holidays with family.

Has the whole thing been one great big publicity stunt for Southwest, Lenovo and Owen? Sure it has. That's okay, all three of them are on the right track with a message that says, no matter why you're traveling or where you're going, the most important thing to bring with you is your sense of humor.

"It's all about positivity, it's how you view it," Owen told me. Seriously, I think he's got something there. Alec, you listening?

Flying the Modern Airliner Through Magical Skies

2011-12-17T21:17:00.003-05:00

Scene from Lufthansa Flight 400 today

All the great aviation writers, Antoine Saint Exupery, Ernest K. Gann, William Langewiesche, even the Boeing 747 designer Joseph Sutter (a surprisingly good writer for an engineer) know that flying is an exquisite balance of science and art. There’s poetry in the skies and plenty of it.

Nevertheless, the world of air travel we know today is reliant on the hard reality of complex and interconnected systems. I mention this having just returned from Ethiopia, where Ethiopian Airlines, joined the Star Alliance and became - in my opinion - the perfect illustration of the yin and yang of the skies.

Ethiopian Q400 at Lalibela Airport

To many people - even plane geeks - what airlines participate in what alliances, is of little interest. I got that. But it is worth pausing to appreciate how an airline can connect a traveler to twelve-hundred destinations in 189 countries while serving corners of the world so remote that the local airport is one of few places in the area with electricity.

Be astonished - because when I arrived on an Ethiopian Airlines flight at the tiny community of Lalibela last week, I was barely off the airport property before I saw farmers threshing grain in the fields using hand tools. The finished product would be hauled in sacks, uphill on a donkey if they’re lucky, on the back of a person if they are not.

Villagers walking home from Lalibela

That airline services can reach previously unreachable communities is a thrilling evolution and it only occurs because of the love it/hate it progress of communications technology.

These alliances; Star, One World and SkyTeam, it doesn’t really matter, all require their members to speak to each other, across many departments from ticket sales to baggage tracking to frequent flyer programs.
Yep, it’s the decidedly unglamorous, down-to-earth reality of modern aviation. But you can’t have that thrilling product, the ability to travel to and from formerly remote corners of our globe without it.

If you want to get a good debate going ask your friends, "What has had the largest effect on modern civilization; advances in communication or aviation?" Until a few years ago I would have said, "aviation". These days, though, aviation seems ever more reliant on following the innovations that have their origins in communication.

This was reinforced on Saturday when I boarded Lufthansa Flight 400 on my way home from Africa and discovered wifi was available during the eight-hour flight. While waiting for my computer to boot up, I looked out the window and saw an amazing sight, the sun was casting the shadow of our A340 on the cloud layer below. Surrounding it was a perfect circle of refracted light.

Meteorology may explain the phenomenon. Engineering got the plane up there in the first place. Never mind, we were flying through a magical halo and flying was poetry again.

And the fact that I could take a picture of it and upload it to my blog’s Facebook page within minutes, did not detract from the experience one teeny-tiny bit.

Airline Stars in Sandals and Sashes

2011-12-13T17:10:00.005-05:00

Don’t say that airline executives are stuffed shirts because today two dozen of them including United's Jeff Smisek, Air Canada's Calin Rovinsecu and Lufthansa's Christoph Franz gathered to welcome the newest member of the Star Alliance wearing flowing tunics, brightly colored sashes and sandals – no socks.

When Ethiopian Airlines boss Tewolde Gebremariam and Jaan Albrecht of Star Alliance signed the documents, Ethiopan became the 28th member of the airline network and Ethiopian threw among other things, its 40 African and 15 Middle East and Asia destinations into the pot.

“We were very keen to get Ethiopian,” Albrecht told me after the papers were signed, the photos taken and the cake and champagne served. With South African Airways handling the southern region of the continent and EgyptAir the north, Ethiopa fills a need in the center of Africa.

There’s more to this than just expanding Star’s already well-filled out global web of air routes. The newest member brings the number of Star Alliance destinations to nearly thirteen hundred and the number of countries served to 189. “We consciously decided we needed global reach. The more countries, the more destinations, the more appealing our product to customers in any part of the world,” Albrecht said.

Tewold Gebremariam and Boeing's Van Rex Gallard

From Gebremariam’s perspective, joining the alliance is another step towards the airline's meeting its 2020 plan in which the 45-year old company becomes the leading airline in Africa for passenger, cargo, training and maintenance and overhaul. This is more than just business, to hear Gebremariam tell the story, considering the relationship between aviation and economic development.

When executives tout a business and marketing arrangement as revolutionary social change, they need to bring more than cake to the party. Enter stage left, the airplane Boeing's Katherine Overby calls the "game changer."

Capt. Desta Zeru flew the 787 into Addis Ababa

Yep, in anticipation of the 2-day Ethiopian Airlines/Star Alliance extragavanza, the Dreamliner touched down for the first time on the African continent in Addis Ababa on Sunday. Also for the first time, an African pilot, Capt. Desta Zeru was at the controls.

Today the star alliance executives and some lucky Ethiopian employees went for a fly around. The visit is part of Boeing's six month world tour for the Dreamliner but it's also their way of saying "Thanks" to Ethiopian for its purchase of ten 787s. The first to arrive should start service here sometime in 2012.

New airplanes, new alliances, new travel and migration patterns giving rise to hopes for a new Africa, why, it’s enough to convince the airline bosses to lighten up and go native.

A Holiday Help-Me-Out from a Swiss Samaritan

2011-12-09T16:55:00.000-05:00

I travel often enough so that I do not ordinarily forget the essentials. In saying this, I am glossing over how my son Antonio had to race to the train station to bring me my passport two weeks ago when I left for the airport without it. Okay, I had a good excuse; I changed handbags the morning of my trip to Copenhagen and neglected to transfer my passport into my new purse. But other than that, really, I have a system and it does not often fail me.

That system consists of keeping my laptop case and my toiletry kit packed and ready to go at all times. What I did not count on was that on my return from Copenhagen, I would have such a head cold that I would go straight from the airport to my bed. With my laptop on my night stand, I finished writing an article and conducted an interview in my jammies.

And that is where my laptop power cord remained when I left the house for a flight to Geneva on Tuesday. The cries of “Christine you numb skull!” reverberated around my noggin when, already at the airport, I went searching for the cord with 40% battery power remaining and a 10 day trip ahead of me.

With my Lenovo ThinkPad,, my essential travel companion.

Acting on a road warrior survival tip my husband taught me, I asked the receptionist at the Swiss business class lounge if I could go through their box of abandoned power cords and she sweetly allowed me to paw through the three that were there long enough to discover they would not work on my much loved, Lenovo ThinkPad.

Then, across the room, like a vision in black, I spied the distinctive profile of another Lenovo ThinkPad. It was opened, in use and plugged into the wall. Hovering over the keyboard was a man with an approachable face. So, on the extremely unlikely chance that this fellow traveler might have an extra power cord he’d be willing to sell me, I slipped up to him and asked.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but I was desperate! After a 12-hour stop in Geneva, I was headed to Harare and Addis Ababa (on Ethiopian Airlines), where, I was pretty darned sure finding a computer cable for my 6-year old laptop might not be all that easy. Anyway, here’s what he said.

“I live in Zurich and I am flying home in an hour where I have another power cord. Why don’t you just take this one?”

You are re-reading those words undoubtedly because WHO DOES THIS? I did not need to have him repeat the offer because he delivered this statement with a lovely accent in perfect English with a demeanor that left no doubt he was absolutely sincere.

So here I sit at the absolutely charming Armandale Lodge in Harare. And the neighborhood has lost power 3 times, taking down the wifi as well. But this power cord, when it is energized, works like a champion.

My Good Samaritan of Zurich, you are a gentleman. Even more, you reaffirm my conviction that people will do generous and unselfish things if given the opportunity. I am so glad my absentmindedness resulted in my meeting you which reminded me of this truth.

Alec Baldwin: Don’t Go Actin’ All Stupid on Me

2011-12-08T11:16:00.002-05:00

Oh Alec, I know you don’t remember but back in the day when I was a correspondent for CNN and you, the movie star, were a guest on Larry King Live (I said it was back in the day!) you exited the studio, looked around the nearly-empty Saturday afternoon newsroom, our eyes met and you smiled at me. You smiled that sensational, toothy, dimple-punctuated smile, that I’m sexy-but-still–smart-smile and I, well, I let’s just say, I still remember.

You are my handsome fantasy and in respect for all the years that have passed since that day at CNN please don’t ruin it now by going all stupid on me.

I refer, to your behavior earlier this week on an American Airlines flight in which you decided that an electronic game, albeit a thought-provoking, brain-teaser of a game, was more important than the safety of your fellow airline passengers.

Okay, I know, I’m the geek and you’re the stud muffin, so you are forgiven if you don’t know that the reason those flight attendants ask you to turn off electronic devices is because they emit electromagnetic waves which can, indeed have, interfered with the systems on the flight deck.

This is not a good thing.

Yes, you have been confused by recent blog posts that suggest the ban on electronic devices is all a plot by the wicked airlines who want to further tick off passengers. But I assure you, oh-man-of-my-dreams, this is not the case.

You have heard that modern airplanes are equipped with system shielding that prevents any extraneous signals from penetrating the wires that are critical to the pilots’ navigation and operation of the aircraft or communication from the cockpit. In theory this is correct. But before you go about assuming that the rules are created by a bunch of worry wart-engineers (okay, they are created by worry-wart engineers) who, in an abundance of caution thrill to act as kill joys to the modern traveler, just let me ask a few questions.

How old was the airplane on which you parked your manly physique?
When was the last time the integrity of the sheathing that stands between critical wiring and an errant electronic signal from a passenger’s electronic device was examined?
How old is your handheld gadget?
When was the last time it was tested to be sure its emissions are within standards?
What about your fellow passengers? How much do you know about the devices they are using or the batteries providing the juice? Did they purchase said devices from the iPod or Android store, or did those devices fall off a truck and get purchased at the local flea market?

Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live

Alec, dear Alec, of course you don’t know the answers. But those are just some of the factors that could cause an otherwise benign electronic gadget to start causing havoc with airplane electronics without your ever knowing it. And that is why these rules exist. There are many variables and many unknowns. You're not a pilot, (though you played one on TV) so don’t dismiss the guidance that says during critical phases of flight, electronic devices should be turned off.

You’re not responsible for those good looks of yours or your great brain. God gave you those. But deciding to act stupid is entirely your choice.

DUIs, Bankruptcies, and Little Old Ladies Who Claim to be Strip Searched

2011-12-06T08:47:00.003-05:00

UPDATE: Babbitt resigns at 5:00pm EST

Excerpt from his statement

"I am unwilling to let anything cast a shadow on the outstanding work done 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by my colleagues at the FAA. They run the finest and safest aviation system in the world and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to work alongside them."
.
Assorted notes on the latest round of breaking news on the aviation beat. Where to start?

Okay, Randy Babbitt. What is there really to say besides bemoan the tragedy that his arrest in Virginia on Saturday for driving under the influence of alcohol will likely cost the FAA administrator his job.

I have a few correspondents who are delighted schadenfreude-style that the nation's most highly-visible former airline pilot (okay, second to you-know-who) is now on administrative leave which can only be to provide time to collect facts and figure out what statement will accompany his resignation.

On the other hand, I have correspondents who are as gob-smacked by the news as I was when it hit the wires on Monday. Granted, running the FAA with all that's going on these days is one ongoing reason to drink. But with just news accounts to go on, my initial reaction is that the administrator has made a terrible error in judgment. Had the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board not been in a tizzy for the entire length of Mr. Babbitt's time at the FAA over the very subject of judgment, there might be forgiveness for this lapse.

With the crashes of Colgan Air flight 3407 in 2010, Comair flight 5191 in 2006, overflying pilots and sleeping air traffic controllers all seeming to demonstrate a decline in standards of professionalism, there is just too much riding on the maintenance of impeccable behavior by the top dog at the FAA. And in that, he has certainly failed.

Sad. That was how I felt about this yesterday and that's how it feels today.

Incensed is how I was feeling on Sunday when I heard the report of the little old lady en route to Florida who claimed security agents at the JFK airport checkpoint strip searched her before allowing her on jetBlue flight. Incensed because there's nothing about this story that rings true. I am baffled by standards of professionalism in journalism in which the comments of one side in a dispute are reported without evidence or logic to support the validity of the claim.

Lenore Zimmerman, 84, requested a private pat-down screening at the airport and two female agents accompanied her into a room to conduct it, I am told by Greg Soule of the Transportation Security Administration. (You can read the TSA's version of the story here.)

The screening apparently involved the removal of Ms. Zimmerman's back brace or money belt. In an effort to understand the gap between two versions of the story, my mind makes the leap that from the removal of that device, Ms. Zimmerman has come to believe that her privacy was invaded. Perhaps it may even have seemed, upon reflection during a 2-hour flight that the agents looked in her pants and underpants during the process because that is what she told reporters. She wound up her story with a promise to sue.

But the information from the TSA doesn't support the passenger's claim about the length of the screening or that she was asked to remove her clothing during the search. She did not complain to anyone at the time, or appear disturbed upon exiting the screening room.

"Nothing unusual was depicted on the CCTV (closed circuit TV) as the passenger and two female officers entered and exited the room," the TSA blog reports. "The wheelchair attendant assisted the passenger in departing the checkpoint area for the gate."

Since Sunday the story has gone viral. And is that really a surprise? The news - veracity notwithstanding - has fed the appetites of travelers who cannot get enough of TSA bashing.

There was a time when the likely accuracy of what someone said was a factor in determining what and how an event would be reported. No longer. Certain claims on certain subjects require little more than that they be made. Transportation security and airline indignities are two such subjects.

I'm not starting off the week or leaving you dear readers on a downer. Rather, I'm going to recommend that you read the intriguing analysis of American Airline's bankruptcy filing by William Swelbar (some great name eh?) of MIT who writes on his Swelblog that the legacy carrier could emerge from its woes intact and unmerged. A little optimism for the beginning of the week, well that's a good thing.

Air Methods, You Just Don't DO That.

2011-12-02T10:17:00.002-05:00

The Arabic word "haraam" is such an expressive word because it means two things; that something is forbidden and an activity is shocking. Haraam is the word that comes to my mind with the latest development in the plan to operate a helipad atop Children's Memorial Hospital located on Chicago's Lake Michigan.

In the world of aviation, it is a article of faith that all employees must feel free to speak up about safety. So important is the concept that around the world, workers are encouraged to submit confidential or anonymous safety reports - even about their own mistakes - because with safety, you can't fix what you don't know is broken.

Here is where the behemoth air ambulance company, Air Methods apparently took the fork in the road that separates those that wanna be safe from those that don't, according to a news report on ABC Channel 7 in Chicago. In the story, Ravi Baichwal, reports that an unsigned "whistle-blower" letter was sent to the neighborhood group opposing the helipad claiming that pilots who fly into the present ground-based landing zone for Children's Hospital in nearby Lincoln Park, have complained about operating risks at the high rise. But their concerns have been ignored. Further, they were prohibited from "discussing the subject with anyone" the letter says.

I have little doubt that back in the day when the hospital first conceived of the plan to bring helicopters onto their rooftop, 411 feet in the air, in a canyon of high rise buildings commercial and residential, that it had no idea it would be fighting with the neighbors for years. But fight they have as nearly every claim the hospital made about the benefits was challenged by nearby residents concerned about the risks.

The case got quite complicated. Scientists, engineers and meteorologists were hired by both sides. (Full disclosure: in 2008, the neighborhood group paid for a data search on the Comprehensive Medical Aviation Safety Database in which I have an interest.)

In a battle pitching expert against expert on subjects as dense as atmospheric boundary layers, vorticity isosurfaces and approach path trajectories, it's hard for the general public to know who is right and who is wrong.

But when the very airmen who will be required to fly say the plan is bad, because there is "nowhere to safely land in an emergency" or that "their helicopter does not have the power to successfully fly away on one engine because of the nearness of surrounding buildings" that makes it pretty clear.

So you can see why these people might be under pressure to keep quiet though to their credit, they have not. Instead, the unsigned letter was sent to Streeterville Organization of Active Residents, the neighbors opposing the helipad, a modern-day David fighting two Goliaths; a prestigious hospital and Air Methods Corporation, the nation's largest provider of air medical transport. The letter arrived just as the slingshot-armed-upstart was nearing the bottom of the bag of rocks.

And now, the inspector general of the Department of Transportation has opened an investigation into whether either the Colorado-based and publicly traded Air Methods or the hospital tried to shush those who had something to say about safety.

Of all the things helicopter ambulance companies and their enablers have done in the past decade to turn ostensibly life-saving medical transport into the for-profit multi-billion dollar, over-used and under-regulated sham that it is today, the decision to fight so hard for this location in Chicago seems uniquely arrogant and reckless. But if the inspector general finds that workers were indeed told to shut up about safety that's even worse, that would be haraam.

Blowing a Circuit Over Everybody's Expertise

2011-11-28T22:54:00.004-05:00

I'll be the first to say that all those people who know about circuit boards and microprocessors are pretty darned clever. But don't let them wander too far from their field of expertise or they wind up making statements that make them sound, well...stupid.

I'm referring to an item that ran in the Bits blog of The New York Times online on Sunday headlined, Flyers Must Turn Off Devices, But its Not Clear Why, in which the author, Nick Bilton, disses the safety hazards associated with the use of personal electronic devices on airplanes and cites as the expert, the association representing wireless device manufacturers.

What fries me about the hew and cry that accompanies this issue each time it is brought up is that people smart enough to be downright boring at a dinner party explaining digital complexities can lift up their eyes from the screen of their iPad and see something like commercial aviation in such starkly simplistic terms.

Bilton's story boots up with the argument that people routinely do not turn off their devices on airplanes and no planes have crashed. Therefore, no problem exists. There are two problems with that. The first, is that it is wrong. The history of the study of the effect of EMI on airplanes begins with a spectacular mid-air collision - over New York no less - in 1960. At that time it was thought that radio interference caused the pilots of a United DC-8 to believe their VOR receiver was not working, resulting in the plane being off course and colliding with a TWA Super Constellation.

Since then there have been other accidents studied by the members of the RTCA committee which has been investigating the potential for gadgets to interfere with airplane systems. When I wrote about this for the Times in January of this year, one of the members mentioned several accidents (some of them quite well known) in which EMI was considered a likely contributing factor. Electromagnetic interference, unlike bent metal or broken parts, leaves no trace.

Still, there have been many reports of pilots experiencing problems in the cockpit that did not lead to disaster that were were tracked back to a passenger using an electronic device. You can read more about them here.

But the second and larger problem with the story is that it is another rallying cry for air travelers who don't get that aviation accidents aren't an A-follows-B sort of thing, like plugging a fork into a wall outlet and watching the fireworks begin. Absent a plane-spiraling-to-earth-event, everyone armed with a Google-equipped iPod (forgive me, Android) now feels that is perfectly appropriate to to make their own decision about whether to heed the flight attendant's plea to kindly power down anything with an ON/OFF switch. A lack of accidents is not evidence of air safety and its frightening that passengers feel equipped to make safety decisions on their own with this yardstick as measuring device.

Bilton brings his argument on home by quoting an executive of the International Association for Wireless Communications, a trade group representing the device manufacturers, hardly an unbiased source. The executive reassures Times readers that aircraft wiring is shielded. Well, yeah. We know that. He does not suggest the impact of 200-400 plus passengers, each with 2 to 3 devices all powered up and ready to go may be slightly beyond what any airplane designer may have had in mind a decade or more ago when the PED wasn't SOP for everyone over the age of 3. We're not even talking about the thousands of airplanes in service around the world that were designed prior to the 1990s.

Anyway, I'm not feeling so good about the integrity of all that communications gear or even the robustness of the shielding of airplane wiring, which will always be one or two digital generations behind the device manufacturers. (I say this having spent five years on an F.A.A. committee on aging aircraft wiring. See me later.)

So when I get on an airplane and I am mildly tempted to keep my Kindle on, or squeeze a few more photos on my digital camera, I resist that temptation. To steel my spine I need only remember the what Boeing had to say about the matter.

"Operators of commercial airplanes have reported numerous cases of portable electronic devices affecting airplane systems during flight. These devices, including laptop and palmtop computers, audio players/recorders, electronic games, cell phones, compact-disc players, electronic toys, and laser pointers, have been suspected of causing such anomalous events as autopilot disconnects, erratic flight deck indications, airplanes turning off course, and uncommanded turns. Boeing has recommended that devices suspected of causing these anomalies be turned off during critical stages of flight."

Digital blogger or Boeing guidance? For me, it's not a tough call.

Picking on the Airlines Always Politically Profitable

2011-11-22T15:11:00.000-05:00

Airlines are making billions from the baggage fees they started charging in 2005. In the last four years, they've raked in some $6 billion as I reported in The New York Times this spring. Now comes Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana with a plan that will mandate that airlines include one checked bag in the price of a ticket. The senator recognizes that there is a problem. Her solution, however is all wrong.

While airlines are raking in money by the suitcase-full, they are sloughing off on passengers and the Transportation Security Administration, the burdensome consequences of bag fees. The TSA estimates checkpoint workers are inspecting 59 million more bags as people bring their luggage with them on the airplane.

Once on board, passengers are fighting for overhead bin space. Flight attendants are left to mediate. Checked bag fees have had negative consequences for everyone except the airlines.

But let's think about the airlines for just a minute. For an industry heavily reliant on oil, the check bag fee can be the difference between red and black ink on the balance sheet. And really, considering that on an airplane, weight equals fuel, what's wrong with an airline charging to move our stuff?

Now, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday travel period, Sen. Landrieu is proposing an Airline Passenger Basics Act that would require airlines to accommodate one checked bag and one carry on bag in the ticket price. It would also require the airlines to provide unspecified "basic amenities".

When government starts telling private businesses what they can and cannot charge for, I think we are on a slippery slope. "The government deregulated aviation in 1978," said Steve Lott, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association. "Having the government dictate prices and services is a 30-year step backwards."

There's also something arbitrary about focusing on airlines. Last month I rented a car from Avis and before I drove off, I had to navigate through no less than seven ancillary-fee related services; from turning on the satellite car radio to activating the tollway pass. Why is it okay for the government to tell airlines what they can charge while leaving other businesses alone? I put this question to Jay Sorensen, a guru on airline revenue who runs IdeaWorks, an aviation revenue consulting firm.

"What's next, the 'French Fry Act' which would require McDonald's to include an order fries with every hamburger?" Jay asked, rhetorically. "Congress has no business legislating the price of services offered by a private company."

On this, I think he's right. But Landrieu has a valid point, too.

TSA screening costs have increased by $260 million a year, the senator's office said in a press release. "These additional costs are the direct result of airlines’ checked baggage fees and taxpayers are being forced to pick up the tab."

To the extent that airline baggage fees have impacted a government provided service, the airlines have some financial obligation. Sen. Landrieu should be trying to figure out a way to re-capture from the airlines what their baggage fee decision has cost the rest of us, without legislating the way airlines provide services. Its doable, but requires something a little more thoughtful than playing to the highly excitable American air traveler.

Pilots, the Devil and the Horns of a Dilemma

2011-11-18T03:31:00.002-05:00

You may have heard the joke about the airline pilot who goes to hell only to find on arrival that rather than an eternity suffering fire and brimstone, his hell will be spent doing endless walk-arounds in blizzard conditions. (That’s not the punch line, but this is a family blog, and I can’t print the rest of it. Ask Jim Hall or see me later.)

Another version of pilot hell might be something like what happened to the captain of a Chautauqua Airlines/Delta Connection flight earlier this week en route from Ashville, North Carolina to New York.

The poor pilot just wanted a quick “biological break” about 30 minutes before landing at LaGuardia. He might have been inspired by the air traffic controller telling the crew that they would take their place in a holding pattern. Or perhaps he was remembering the recent antics of the actor Gerard Depardieu on a CityJet flight in August.

Whatever, when the captain tried to return to the cockpit, he found the bathroom door would not open. A passenger seated nearby heard the man pounding and tried to help, but no dice. The door was shut tight.

Meanwhile back on the flight deck, the first officer was getting more and more nervous - wondering why his captain went AWOL. What could be taking so long? The Embraer 145 is 98 feet long even walking slowly he should have returned already. With him in the cockpit, it is reported, was the sole flight attendant, who was required to be in the cockpit in the absence of the second pilot.

So that when they heard a knock on the door, and a heavily accented voice tried to explain the situation, the first officer was unsure what to do. Sure, it could be the truth, then again, what if it was not? Who in the post-9/11 world wants to err on the trusting side? So here’s what he told the air traffic controller as transcribed from the website liveatc.net.

“We are 180 knots 10,000 uh, can we leave the frequency for a minute? We are going to try to, uh contact dispatch. The captain disappeared in the back, and, uh, I have someone with a thick foreign accent trying to access the cockpit.

Military jets were notified. The FBI was called and the first officer was advised to declare an emergency and get that airplane on the ground. It was at this point that the captain finally forced his way out of the bathroom and returned to the flight deck.

"The captain - myself - went back to the lavatory and the door latched," he can be heard explaining what happened to controllers, adding, "There is no issue, no threat."

In the highly complex world of aviation we have systems on top of systems plans, backup plans and back up to the backup plans. But who could have imagined this? Sometimes stuff just happens.

The world spins on in all its marvelous complexity and we think we are in control. Then we are treated to a tragicomedy that shows us we are just hangin’ on by the straps pretending there is no force greater than our own magnificent minds. But we.be.wrong.

Airline Gets a Bitch-Slap from the NTSB. Ouch!

2011-11-10T12:26:00.004-05:00

Deborah Hersman photo from NTSB

Its apparent that the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board is a beauty. I've heard people describe her as "angelic". Here's her photo. You be the judge.

But don't let that cutie-pie face deceive you. Deborah Hersman is no delicate flower when it comes to fools or manipulators. In a letter to Pinnacle Airlines today, Ms. Hersman (ordinarily I'd call her Deb but I'm still in shock and awe. Give me a minute to recover.) demands that the company, parent of regional carrier Colgan Air, do what it failed to do during a near year-long investigation; surrender all records having to do with the training and qualifications of the crew of Colgan Air flight 3407.

To recap: Flight 3407, under a contract with Continental Airlines, was on a trip from Newark to Buffalo, New York in February 2009, when it crashed on approach to the airport after the captain responded inappropriately to a stick shaker warning. Forty-nine people on the plane and one person on the ground were killed.

It wasn't much of a secret to investigators that the captain, 47-year old Marvin Renslow, was not a pilot in command of his game from the moment the cockpit voice recorder was played and his motor-mouth monologue could be heard. Sterile cockpit? Not for Renslow.

What was not clear until a New York lawyer made it public two weeks ago, is that at the highest levels of the airline, Renslow was tagged as not-ready-for-prime-time.

Hugh Russ, with Hodgson Russ, obtained the emails during discovery in the civil action against the airline on behalf of people who lost loved ones in the crash. You can read the emails here. In summary, the documents show that six months before the crash, Renslow's promotion to captain was a source of concern to managers at Colgan.

In an investigation that from the start was about piloting and training, this internal discussion should have been made known to the investigators. But it was not.

Now do you understand why Ms. Hersman is furious?

Her letter, which you can read here, shows a steely determination that, despite the fact that probable cause has already been determined, the fact-finding is not over.

What's with Colgan? Was it out of the country when Hersman removed American Airlines from an investigation of a runway excursion in December 2010? she took that action after American downloaded the flight data recorder prior to sending it on to the NTSB recorder lab.

And where was Colgan when she scotched the participation of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association for speaking on the specifics of a mid-air collision over the Hudson River in August 2009? Looking at the calendar, I'm guessing the safety board would have been in the thick of the flight 3407 investigation right about then.

Don't mess with Deb, that's all I'm saying, because she has little tolerance for folks who don't play by the rules. Government officials are often accused of being too cozy with the industries with which they work. A Congressional investigation and a review by the office of the inspector general of the Department of Transportation into the relationship between the FAA and Southwest Airlines, is just one example.

Deb Hersman is a lovely exception. As a taxpayer, I mean "lovely" figuratively, though really, the word applies however you want to use it.

Aviation Reporting 101 What Is and What Is NOT a Story

2011-11-04T14:09:00.005-04:00

Earlier today, (yes I'm blogging twice today, but I can't help myself!) I wrote about the excellent story by CBS4 Denver journalist Rick Sallinger questioning whether the emergency oxygen masks on a Frontier flight deployed as they should have last month, the kind of story that serves the public and the industry by casting fresh eyes on what might be an otherwise unexamined incident.

But before I'd even hit the "publish" key a loyal reader sent a link to what ABC seven-on-your-side reporter Michael Finney in San Francisco thinks is news, a 2 minute plus tear-jerker of a story about Terri Weissinger, who made a home for herself in the San Francisco Airport in April.

Now I don't know SFO that well, I'm sure its a lovely airport. Nevertheless, few folks in their right mind would want to camp out there for a week. And the key phrase here ladies and gentlemen is "in their right mind."

Ms. Weissinger, according to the news story, appears to be operating with her "left mind" as in - "I must have left my mind somewhere because it doesn't appear to be with me" - because she claims she didn't know about baggage fees when she arrived for her USAirways flight to Idaho. She may not have had her mind with her but she did have two suitcases and $30 in her pocket. Unable to ditch the bags or convince the gate agent to let her pay later, she channeled her inner Tom Hanks and made the airport her home for the next eight days.

There are several now-wait-a-cotton-pickin'-minute questions related to her account. But the biggest is, what adult alive today doesn't know about airline bag fees? Ms. Weissenger explained that she hadn't flown in five years and back then bags flew free. This is so far short of passing the smell test that a reporter who passes that along to viewers with a straight face must have a clothes pin on his nose.

I must also ask, why oh why is this USAirways problem? Mr. Seven-on-Her-Side-Finney had the nerve (reporters are very nervy, busted!) to call the airline for a response as if Ms. Weissinger's inability to pay for the services of an airline to take her and her stuff from A to B was worthy of a response and got a somewhat gracious, "We have apologized for her experience but cannot refund her ticket."

Stuck in the airport because of baggage fees, is the characterization of the reporter. She wasn't stuck in the airport because of baggage fees, she was stuck in the airport because while she certainly looks like an adult, she seems to be as ill-informed and helpless as a child. "They just told me they couldn't do anything, they couldn't help me." Ms. Weissenger told the television reporter.

If an ABC Channel 7 advertiser was not familiar with the cost to purchase a TV commercial, I doubt that the station would say, "Oh shucks, just pay what you thought was the price." That this is the expectation of Ms. Weissenger is one thing. That she was able to spin that expectation into something a reporter thought was a reasonable position is quite another.

God bless them, it was the Airport Church of Christ that finally came to Ms. Weissenger's aid with a cash contribution that got her on her way to her new home in Idaho. She was "elated" she said to be out of SFO. No doubt so was USAirways.

We are well into a pattern of demonizing the airlines. Sometimes they deserve it. This time they don't. If there's grumbling to be done in San Francisco it is over why TV viewers had to spend any time at all watching this silly excuse for a news story.

A Clear-Headed Response to Dizzying Flight

2011-11-04T11:47:00.002-04:00

Photo courtesy Andrew Vos and CBS-4 TV Denver

Passengers on Frontier Airlines Flight 787 were startled when the oxygen masks dropped as the airplane was cruising above the Rocky Mountains at 36,000 feet last month. But just how confused they were by an apparent shortage of oxygen masks is just becoming clear from a story reported by Rick Sallinger of the CBS television station in Denver.

As the pilots began a quick descent and a return to the airport in Denver that day, passenger Kevin McClung noticed that not everyone had oxygen masks. "All of the masks did not deploy,” he told Sallinger. “There are two rows that were ahead of me that did not have masks."

Photo courtesy CBS - 4 TV Denver

Further, McClung said while his wife’s mask was providing her with a stream of oxygen-dense air, his was not working at all and he thought others were having the same trouble.

Photos and a video show a man without a mask struggling with the air vent above his head. These images are being reviewed by the Federal Aviation Administration to determine if Frontier’s oxygen system was defective, Sallinger said.

Peter Kowalchuk, a spokesman for the airline told Sallinger there were no problems with the emergency oxygen system on the Airbus A319 saying, “If all the masks dropped, the only way that there could be unused masks or people without a mask is if there was a mask that was unused, because somebody used the wrong mask and we believe that is what happened.” Well if Frontier can follow that, good for them. As for me, say what Mr. Kowalchuk?

Several years ago I wrote a lengthy article about issues with hypoxia (If you’ve got an hour to spend, be my guest.) Here's the condensed version: You can quibble all you like about how long it takes to get really sick when an airplane loses pressurization but you can take it to the bank that there's an immediate diminution of cognitive skills; judgment and comprehension. Since we're all presumably breathing at ground level now, here's a quick quiz. How important is it that emergency oxygen masks be easy to find and ready to don? Answer: Pretty darn important.

Whether the McClungs were confused about the number and serviceability of the oxygen masks because they were already feeling the effects of oxygen deprivation, their story is valuable because it reveals potential problems. Is the deployment of the masks confusing? Are the overhead oxygen compartments likely to create disputes among passengers who cannot tell which masks go to which seats?

Don't think decompression events are mere customer service blips, requiring re-booking of passengers and a heartfelt apology for the inconvenience. Alarm bells should start ringing because the danger is real.

One hundred and twenty-one people died in the crash of Helios Flight 522 in 2005. In that accident, a Boeing 737 crashed near Athens after the pilots succumbed to hypoxia on ascent and the plane kept flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel. The passengers died hours earlier having run through the 12-15 minute oxygen supply at their seats.

Another hypoxia related event worth reviewing is the 1996 decompression aboard American Trans Air Flight 406 which you can find here.

The McClungs and everyone else aboard Flight 787 have put Frontier and the A319 through a real-time test run of the emergency oxygen system. How well did it fare? If safety professionals are clear-headed they'll follow Sallinger's example and investigate this event further.

AirTran's Lesson to a Certain Airline: It's the Communication Stupid

2011-11-01T01:22:00.001-04:00

AirTran in Phoenix

Last year at this time, while traveling on AirTran from Phoenix to New York, my connecting flight out of Atlanta was canceled due to a problem with the airplane. Since it was the last flight of the evening, AirTran officials had to find overnight accommodations and rebook seats for the following day for a planeload of tired and disappointed travelers.

This meant I would miss the annual Scottish Sunday at my church, but hey, these things happen. The AirTran workers were unfailingly polite, patient and apologetic. And if that was not enough, when I got home, I received not one but two written expressions of regret. The first in an email, and the second an entirely unexpected certificate for a free flight on AirTran.

With AirTran poised to become part of Southwest I hope the big personality that is Southwest, plans to incorporate the great personality that is AirTran. That's my particularly heart-felt wish after the latest headline making antics of the anti-Airtran - jetBlue.

Bradley International Airport on a better day

To recap: For seven hours on Saturday, jetBlue Flight 504 - an A320 enroute from Ft. Lauderdale to New York - sat on the runway at Bradley International Airport where it and twenty-two other flights had diverted due to the freak Halloween snowstorm. It is not clear yet why there was no overall plan to accommodate all these unexpected arrivals; Bradley is a frequently-used alternate for Boston and New York area airports.

Nevertheless, passengers sat on airliners and in the case of Flight 504 the pilot in command was so concerned about the growing anger of his passengers, he asked air traffic control to send police officers to quell the unrest. Capt. Thompson also said he was worried about two specific passengers, a paraplegic and a diabetic who might need care. The exchange between Capt. Thompson and controllers via ATC.net can be heard here.

A jetBlue pilot on his way to work

What's dis-heartening but totally in keeping with my experience with jetBlue is the poor captain's frustration with his employer. "We got more help from you guys than we got from our own people," he says at one point during the seven minute recording of his ground communication at Bradley.

A pilot with another large U.S. carrier wrote to tell me that in cases like this, "the crews are totally at the mercy of what they are told to do by their superiors who are 'managing' the situation, usually from afar."

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary communications and its pretty clear that jetBlue doesn't know how to handle ordinary times.

In August 2010, when jetBlue flight attendant Steve Slater blew his top during a flight and wound up opening the emergency exit so that he could bolt from the plane before it was even parked at the gate, I could almost relate. I've never had a timely response from jetBlue whether I've been in touch as a consumer or as a journalist, whether I've called, sent emails or written letters.

jetBlue wasn't the only airline with diversions and unhappy travelers but it is the one taking the heat over this weekend's big chill. Just maybe this is an airline that has not paid enough attention to communication among its own employees or with the public.

jetBlue, take a tip from AirTran, that scrappy upstart that will soon be flying Southwest. "Its the communication stupid." But of course they'd never say it that way. They're much too good at what they do.

Emails About Colgan Pilot Skim Over Larger Industry Woes

2011-10-27T11:55:00.004-04:00

Well, with a great sigh of relief and a "our work here is done" my 16-year old son Joseph got his learning drivers permit at the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday.

But it was dark by the time we turned onto the street where we live so that when Joseph asked if he could drive the rest of the way home, I had to weight the risk: reduced visibility, no sidewalks and pedestrians walking home from the train and his inexperience driving a manual transmission car. So I told him "no". Of course he was disappointed, but all my neighbors are still alive and so is he.

So why oh why, didn't the managers at Colgan Air do the same risk benefit analysis in deciding whether 47-year old Marvin Renslow was ready to be the pilot in command after a slew of performance evaluations showed less than stellar piloting skills? Oh wait. They did. Only in their case, as a series of internal company emails show, they cast those concerns aside.

Photo courtesy Hodgson Russ

The emails, were obtained by Hugh Russ, an attorney representing families of some of the 50 people who died in the crash in Buffalo, New York on Colgan Air Continental Connection flight 3407 on February 12, 2009. You can read the emails here.

A spokesman for Colgan says this is old news, that the airline informed the NTSB before the board came out with its finding of probable cause in February 2010. Whether it did or whether it didn't, it's important not to get bogged down with the shocking specifics of this particular revelation because it is just the latest of a series of alarm bells that have been going off concerning Colgan, its parent, Pinnacle and the regional airline industry as a whole.

Just last week, the Federal Aviation Administration fined Pinnacle $1 million for defying a government prohibition on allowing flight crew to perform maintenance work and flying a Canadair Regional Jet 40 hours past a mandatory engine inspection. What's 40 hours you might ask? Well, the inspection was to track the propagation of a crack, that did indeed grow while Pinnacle was heedlessly flying the airplane in passenger carrying service the last week of August 2010.

This is just a few months after the hearing into the Colgan crash where executives of Colgan insisted safety was their highest priority. The same airline who's safety director admitted during the hearing that he had never heard of James Reason, the grand-daddy of human factors and a legend among safety specialists.

Doing the rounds of the television networks after the emails went viral this week, attorney Russ told one interviewer, "Colgan sacrificed safety for profit." He's giving the airline credit by assuming it had safety practices to sacrifice.

But lest this rant be perceived as solely focused on Colgan/Pinnacle, throughout 2009 and 2010, I wrote just some of a blizzard of articles that included the excellent Frontline report Flying Cheap, and a lengthy story in the Wall Street Journal. All delved into the many factors making regional airline operations so unsafe. (see my list of accidents since 2000 below) But the focus has narrowed to efforts to require minimum hours for pilots. I've not seen any indication that regional airlines and their relationship to large airlines has fundamentally changed.

Mr. Russ told the interviewers, his goal "is to change airline safety and only by bringing these emails to the light of day can we meet that goal." Nice plan, but after this latest stunning news fades from view, he's got his work cut out for him keeping this story on the front burner.

List of regional airline accidents since 2000

Colgan Air 2.12.09 Fatalities 50 N200WQ (Continental Connection)
Pinnacle Airlines 11.13.08 Injuries no fatalities N8698A (Northwest Airlink)
Shuttle America 2.18.07 No fatalities N862RW (Delta Connection)
Comair 8.27.06 Fatalities 49 N431CA(Delta Connection)
Flying Boat Inc. 12.19.05 Fatalities 20 N2969 (Chalk's Ocean Airways)
Executive Airlines 5.9.04 No fatalities N438AT (American Eagle)
Corporate Airlines 10.19.2004 Fatalities 13 N875JX (American Connection)
Pinnacle Airlines 10.14.04 Fatalities 2 N8396A (Northwest Airlink)
Air Midwest Airlines 1.8.03 Fatalities 21 N233YV (USAirways Express)
Colgan Air 8.26.03 Fatalities 2 N240CJ (Ferry flight)
Peninsula Airways 10.10.01 Fatalities 9 N9530F

The Dreamliner that Nightmares Are Made Of

2011-10-20T12:56:00.007-04:00

How embarrassed is the All Nippon Airways ground crew in Japan after towing the brand spankin' new, close-to-$200 million Dreamliner into a passenger boarding bridge last Thursday? Oh, I'd say that kind of a ding requires something northward of a "my bad" and something southward of hari-kiri.

From what I read, the plane checked out good as new and will fly - as scheduled - and in the Japanese-style (that is fully packed) on Wednesday the 26th from Tokyo to Nagasaki.

Remarkably, no cameras captured this nightmare-inducing boo-boo but this is what it looked like on September 28th, when the nearly all-composite twin-engine airliner landed at Tokyo International Haneda Airport.

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After a 3 year delay in actually receiving the Dreamliner from Boeing, the first airline to take delivery of the airplane of the future should be flying sky high. Instead A-N-A is reassuring passengers that everything is A-OK for the second time in six weeks.

On September 6th it shook up a planeload of travelers when a pilot trying to open the cockpit door to readmit the captain after a potty break, accidentally turned the wrong knob flipping the B737 on its head.

This latest episode had the ground crew towing the plane thisclose to the passenger boarding gate, scraping the engine cowling. Does it get any worse? Well kinda, inside the cowing beats the heart of a Trent 1000 by Rolls Royce, another aviation company that can't seem to catch a break.

Welcome to my Dreamliner nightmare? Nah, ANA says the damage was slight and the plane is good-to-go on its charter flight next week. Just no more wasabi before bedtime between now and then okay?

And the (woomph, woomph, woomph) Beat Goes On

2011-10-18T19:27:00.002-04:00

Photo from Illinois DOT documents

Chicagoans, be prepared for the woomph, woomph, woomph of helicopter blades comin' in from over Lake Michigan once the Children's Memorial Hospital places a helipad on its roof, 411 feet above the street. At the end of last week, the Illinois Department of Transportation issued permission for the hospital to locate the high altitude helipad in a community of skyscrapers, community and concerned activists be damned.

It may be noisy, it may cause the values of million dollar properties on Chicago's Miracle Mile to decline but that's not the issue as far as I'm concerned. It's the safety stupid!

The helipad - one of only two this high in the country - will be located in an area dense with potential obstructions. The hospital's application listed 91 high-rise buildings in the vicinity, 12 shorter than and 79 taller than the hospital, with 31 more scheduled for construction in the future. Folks, this is a challenging environment in which to operate a helicopter without the additional factor which is Lake Michigan.

I lived in Chicago for 10 years but it took me 10 minutes to realize why its monikor The Windy City, is so apt. Forget long-winded politicians, this is a city on a lake with winds that blow through the downtown area with such strength, ropes are strung from building to building to give pedestrians something grab to keep from being blown down.

The debate over how to calculate the effect of Chicago winds took years. In granting permission to locate the helipad in this environment, state officials required a lower wind limit for operations than what the hospital requested.

Its way too little. What roasts me and others who haven't bought the myth that helicopter transport saves lives, is the hospital's continued insistence that this perilous location is good for its future patients. This despite an accident rate that makes helicopter ambulances the most dangerous form of aviation next to flying in combat. The National Transportation Safety Board has held four investigations into HEMS (that's the handy acronym for helicopter emergency medical services ), concluding that the "accident record is unacceptable".

What's really behind the push, push, push for more woomph, woomph, woomph, is the fact that helicopters make money for hospitals and for air ambulance companies like Air Methods, the for-profit corporation that is responsible for flying to the on-the-ground helipad at the present Children's Memorial Hospital in Lincoln Park. Air Methods, by the way, has about 22% of the $2.5 billion U.S. helicopter ambulance industry.

Helipad on hospital construction from IDOT document

The hospitals incautious request to perch a helipad in a valley of skyscrapers - residential, commercial and educational - should have fallen on ears deafened by the woomph, woomph, woomph of all the other ostensible life-saving helicopters in the past that were, in fact, life-taking.

That air ambulances can save lives is possible though various studies suggest otherwise. What's unambiguous is the fact that patients and medical workers have been killed in these helicopters by the score.

And here to help you visualize that is former air ambulance pilot, Randy Mains who spent this morning bringing the truth on home at the Air Medical Transport Conference in St. Louis. First he distributed to the audience hundreds of envelopes telling the medical aviators to just hang on, they could open them shortly.

Randy is on a mission making speeches and writing about how to make HEMS operations safer.

"I have watched in despair for over 32 years as the HEMS system in the U.S. has become more and more dangerous to where it is now officially the most dangerous job in America ."

Finally, the people in the audience with envelopes were asked to stand, 346 of them, about half of people in the room. Inside each envelope was the name of someone who died in a medical helicopter crash.

Randy's wife Kaye described what happened next. "All you could hear was the tearing of envelopes. People really were in the moment and looking around, absorbing it. It was about two minutes with people standing. There was an overwhelming feeling."

"It was very satisfying, " Randy said, describing the stunt - a bit of dramatics intended to energize the people who do not want to imagined their own names on such a slip of paper in the future.

"We must design our programs in the States like they do it in Europe and Canada where they have excellent safety records," he said ticking off the requirements outside of the United States; two pilots with current instrument-ratings and night vision goggles, in twin-engine aircraft. "Aviation safety doesn't care about egos, bottom lines or competition. It only works if it is done right."

Crystal clear to an audience in St. Louis perhaps, but in Chicago what it looks like is safety done wrong.

UPDATE on Passenger Removals and Hawaii Heroes

2011-10-14T15:01:00.003-04:00

One never knows when a good story will result in a tip that leads to another and this week I've had a double dose. After writing on my travel blog GO HOW about how arbitrary the decisionmaking can be when it comes to removing passengers from airplanes, I received accounts from three separate sources that just baffle me.

Saying that his recent removal from a Finnair flight was embarrassing (I have no doubt) business class passenger - let's call him Hannu - had to purchase another ticket and was not reimbursed for his original fare of €2800. I wasn't there and I don't know Hannu, but he claims the episode began when he complained to a flight attendant about a delay.

"Now you will think that I probably behaved like a drunk or a rebel, but that is not at all the case," he wrote to me. "I complained one time about the delay to a flight attendant, in a polite manner, not loud, not using any foul language or body gestures."

Hannu says this was his third time on this particular flight and the third time the flight was delayed. The previous delays had resulted in his luggage not being transferred to his onward connection, so he was naturally concerned.

I can't weight in here with an opinion about who was right in this situation and I'm still waiting to hear back from Finnair, but according to Hannu when he registered a complaint about being taken off the plane he was told that the airline has "the right to remove any passenger if he makes the staff or other customer feel uncomfortable."

Well, yeah, they do. But there must be some standard, even internal to the company to prevent such apparent injustices as Hannu's tale and the other one that came to me this week.

Two separate readers - strangers to each other but both on a United flight from Portland to Chicago tell a remarkably similar story about what happened to them on Tuesday, on the very day my article on the subject of passenger evictions appeared in The New York Times.

As these two men - one a lawyer the other a retiree - tell the story, as they waited for their flight to take off from Portland International Airport, the passenger I'll call Mike, complained to the flight attendant that the public address system was uncomfortably loud and asked that she lower the volume.

After walking to the front of the plane she "returned stating that nothing could be done and that if passengers were concerned about hearing damage that the plane could return to the gate and that those passengers could deplane," according to a man who was seated in front of Mike.

Where Mike clearly erred was in replying to this obviously harried flight attendant that he was "merely asking" if she could lower the volume because the plane did return to the gate and four United employees took Mike off.

Further, those passengers objecting to this treatment including my other correspondent, the retiree, were told that they could be ejected too. I am told a chorus of "Nos" greeted the flight attendants announcement that Mike was being removed -- a voice vote that many passengers objected to the action, but perhaps also attributable to fears of the delay that this action would inevitably cause. After all, the airplane was already taxiing when the pilot turned it around.

In conclusion, the retiree told me he felt intimidated by the flight attendant's threat and described the atmosphere on the plane saying, "It is difficult to describe the feeling of powerlessness that we felt in this situation."

I realize we are talking about 68 million people every day who board an airplane somewhere in the world. There are going to be a few crackpots in the lot. But let's talk turkey here.

As they move us from place to place, airlines are responsible for assuring security and providing a civil environment. Their role now, teetering as it does on giving single employees the power to be both judge and jury is dangerous territory.

Passengers, my message to you is this: YOU ARE responsible for behaving to a high standard and you have a right to expect the same of your fellow travelers. Airlines: YOU ARE responsible for hiring capable people and training them to use common sense and good judgment. When they fail to do so, YOU ARE responsible for removing those employees from the airplane. 'Nuff said.

After blogging here about the ditching of a Cessna 310 off the coast of Hawaii and the Coast Guard's amazing video tape of their rescue of pilot Charles Brian Mellor, a reader of Flying Lessons made me aware of the role played by Denne Hoover of the Federal Aviation Administration who was working at the NORAD Command Center last Friday afternoon when the ferry pilot's worried call first came in. Mellor reported that he might run out of fuel short of his destination.

My correspondent's account (below) has been confirmed by the FAA, so I share it with you, adding that of her participation in the event, Ms. Hoover modestly insisted she was simply part of a team effort.

"The actual credit for the save belongs with Ms. Denee (sic) Hoover. She is the FAA rep who works in the NORAD Command Center. The pilot realized far more than 500 miles out he wouldn't make it and didn't have the gas to turn around. Ms. Hoover alerted me, the Command Center Director, and we alerted the folks in Hawaii. That action on her part gave the Coast Guard team the time to react.

This is not to take away from what the Coasties did on their end, but that pilot would definitely have been in the water for some time if not for the 3 hours lead time Ms. Hoover gave the rescue team to get in place and make the intercept.

No one will likely ever know or care about what really happened behind the scenes, but those of us on duty that night know the truth, and the real hero here is Ms. Denee Hoover, FAA professional."

I'll argue that many people do want to know the back story and I thank my reader for sharing these details with all of us.

Heroics in Hawaii Might Save More Than One Life

2011-10-10T20:29:00.003-04:00

I recognize that as an aviation journalist I am part of the problem. And the problem as I see it is this. We generate so many words about safety but the attention is disproportionately paid to airlines. Don't get me wrong, as a frequent flyer, I'm all for safe airline operations. It's just that other forms of transportation - riskier forms of transportation without the sex appeal of the big airlines, sometimes seem to get a pass.

Just last week, for example, I wrote a story for The New York Times, reporting that a motor coach operator responsible for a horrific crash that killed 15 people earlier this year, had essentially evaded a Department of Transportation cease operation order by simply transfering buses from the sanctioned company to another bus company also under his control.

Photo courtesy NTSB

When the complex ownership of Platinum Jet Management came to light after a runway excursion in Teterboro Airport in 2004, the FAA and the NTSB were all over the issue like white on rice. Criminal charges were filed and rules dealing with operational control in business aviation were tightened.

I'm ruminating about all this today because I watched with a horrified fascination this video taken by the U.S. Coast Guard on October 7th. This was a ditching off the coast of Hawaii when the pilot of a twin engine Cessna 310 realized he did not have enough fuel to make it to the mainland.

Bless those Coasties from the 14th District in Honolulu, they not only saved the day, they had the presence of mind to video tape the plane's final seconds aloft and the pilot's miraculous emergence from the cockpit out onto the wing.

Charles Brian Mellor, 65, was ferrying the plane from Monterey, California to Hilo International Airport. And though he was flying with auxiliary fuel tanks, about 500 miles from his destination he realized he would run short of gas and radioed the Federal Aviation Administration.

Angela Henderson, a press officer with the Coast Guard says when the rescue center got the call at 12:30 on Friday they immediately dispatched a C-130 and a Coast Guard cutter along a track line looking to intercept the airplane.

U.S. Coast Guard photo by Ensign Richard Russell)

"There was a fifty-fifty chance that he could have made it", Angela told me in a phone call this afternoon. "We were there in case he didn't." Thirteen miles offshore Mellor ditched the plane. A rescue helicopter hoisted him from the sea and delivered him to the Hilo Medical Center emergency room.

There were 11 airplane accidents in the United States last Friday. Nine on Thursday and 10 the day before that. You get my drift here, right? More than two dozen airplane crashes in less than a week but the one bouncing 'round the world is this one, courtesy of Coast Guard heroics, the internet and the extremely rare situation in which a pilot has advance notice that he is going down. Which is why poor Angela has been fielding calls right and left.

Who knows as this point why Mellor ran shy of fuel on a trans-Pacific ferry flight? His narrow escape is a reminder that beyond airliners there are other safety issues that also deserve attention. If this video helps accomplish that, the Coast Guard can claim another success.

Don't Touch That Dial! No the Other Dial!

2011-10-06T10:57:00.007-04:00

Certainly the Japanese safety authorities know better than to tell pilots of All Nippon Airways to be more careful in the future and don't touch the knob that can turn a 737 upside down with a full load of passengers in the back. But I'm not so sure the boss does judging from his comments the other day.

Futoshi Osada, chief of the country's Civil Aviation Bureau was quoted as saying, "It is really deplorable that the incident occurred as it threatened to undermine public trust in the safety of the public transportation system." Osada then told the airline's president to "to take appropriate action and report back."

If that wraps up the investigation into what happened on the upside down flight from Okinawa to Tokyo last month, an opportunity to learn from this near-disaster will be lost.

A recap: the Boeing 737 was put into a turn so steep the plane rolled upside down. The co-pilot who was alone in the cockpit at the time inadvertently selected the wrong knob while trying to readmit the captain to the flight deck after a potty break.

When I heard this story, I immediately thought of the DC-8. Let me explain.

Back in the 1970s when many airlines were flying the McDonnell Douglas jet, pilots on at least two occasions accidentally deployed the ground spoilers when the airplane was still in the air. Because this destroys lift (spoils it, get it?) it is a monumental no-no. On July 5, 1970 the oopsie caused an Air Canada flight to crash after an attempted go-around at Toronto International Airport, killing all 109 people on board.

Three years later, a Loftleidir Icelandic Airlines DC-8 crashed on landing at Kennedy Airport in New York. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded the pilot deployed the ground spoilers while attempting to arm them.

Fortunately, no one was killed. Air travelers in general were fortunate too because the American safety officials spent some time trying to find out why the pilots erred. Their conclusion: telling pilots "don't do that" wasn't going to fly. Design changes in the cockpit were necessary.

Don't get me wrong, this insight wasn't immediate. After the Air Canada accident, the Federal Aviation Administration's first response was to install a placard on the DC-8 flight decks saying - and I am not making this up - DO NOT DEPLOY SPOILERS IN FLIGHT.

It is easy to be smug in the 21st century about the oversights in the 1970s when human factors in cockpit design was a relatively new field of study. I don't mean to be that girl. Thirty-five years ago the machine was considered rigid and the pilots considered malleable. Why not bend the human to the design of the cockpit?

Over the years we have learned why not. As the late flight surgeon Dr. Charles Billings wrote in his 1997 handbook of human factors "Technology should not expect humans to adapt in some fundamental way because cognitive and physical abilities of the human do not change."

So in Japan, and anywhere else in the world where 737s fly and that would be everywhere, I sure hope the air safety folks are doing an examination of their incident and accident databases to see if there are similar cases of pilots accidentally confusing critical flight control knobs with the door knob. If so, perhaps Boeing needs to take another look at the design of the flight deck and how it pairs up with the design of the people who work on it.

Following the Leader in Airline Emergencies

2011-09-29T11:34:00.000-04:00

Scott McCartney’s story in today’s Wall Street Journal makes some excellent points about the special challenges of saving lives in aviation catastrophes.

First of all, let’s set aside the myth that an aviation accident = everybody dead. It’s not the case though it leads some people adopt the fatalistic and passive view that if anything goes wrong there’s little they can do about it.

But at a hangar at London’s Heathrow Airport, British Airways is giving select passengers a dare-I-say crash course in accident survivability. It’s a one-day class offered for the frequent-flying employees of companies who are customers of BA. Scott writes that the airline is considering whether to offer the training to the public for a fee or in exchange for frequent flier miles.

I’ll admit on first reading I was perturbed by Andy Clubb, the flight attendant who runs the class, who told Scott, "We teach people to react faster than anyone else so they are in the aisle first and down the slide first," but Clubb goes on to explain that when a confident passenger demonstrates the correct way to respond, others will follow.

Passengers as exemplars is a fabulous idea, a safety spin on the lesson of United Airlines flight 93 that once the door to the plane is closed the folks inside are a self-contained and necessarily self-sufficient community. In a crisis, survival depends on how well the community works as a whole.

Evacuating a 777 is a little frightening

The last time I traveled by air, I sat at the over wing exit row and when the flight attendant asked me if I was willing to handle the door in an emergency, I answered confidently that I was. After all, I’d just spent a week in flight attendant training at Emirates reporting a story for The New York Times. Can I remove the door if required? Yes, indeed. (I could even sell duty free perfume if push came to shove.)

What’s a tad bit troubling is that British Airways is considering charging tuition of $220 for the school. If better safety on the plane becomes another source of ancillary revenue like better service at the airport well, that would be wrong.

A crazed rugby fan in Air New Zealand's safety briefing

Passengers deserve some of the blame for being blasé about safety, but with a few exceptions such as Air New Zealand, Southwest and Cebu Pacific (see their videos below) the airlines have done little to make the safety briefing relevant or interesting to passengers. For the most part, their flight attendants are up there droning on and on - boring us to death with information that could save our lives.

So my proposal is this; how about all the airlines join BA in this innovative new program and invite their most frequent travelers to take a safety course for free? Then, in return, and "in the unlikely event of an emergency" these trained passengers would follow instructions text-book style and show the rest of us how its done.

A Plot by Airlines to Make Us Behave Better

2011-09-27T22:53:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm just a few years late in hearing about the otherwise famous Kyla Ebbert and her equally famous little-white-skirt both of which had a Southwest flight attendant hyperventilating back in 2007. Seems the lovely Hooters waitress -turned Playboy model was considered inapproprately dressed for her flight from San Diego to Tuscon and she was asked to change outfits or get off the plane. Well that was then.

Oh wait, is it now?

Yeah, in a bit of deja vu all over again, actress Leisha Hailey is whining about being asked to step off a flight out of Baltimore for engaging in some kissy-kissy with her girlfriend that some other passengers apparently found too-too much. That in itself wouldn't have sent the ladies packing. Leisha apparently matched the airline's purple and orange livery by letting loose with some colorful words of her own when a flight attendant told the couple to cool their jets, or Flight 2274 would be one jet the BFFs wouldn't be traveling on.

Change the name, change the problem, airlines telling passengers they can't fly seems to be cropping up on a near-weekly basis. It happens often on Southwest, but Delta, US Airways and Air Canada Jazz have had their moments too. And I'm wondering if the airlines are involved in a diabolically clever plot to keep us passengers off-guard.

If we don't know exactly what behavior or dress will get us asked to deplane prior to departure, will we all just start acting and dressing better when traveling by air?

At the risk of bringing up Pan Am the television show one more time, let me just suggest that in the not-too distant past, people didn't board airplanes wearing tee-shirts with the F-word emblazoned on them. They didn't reveal their underpants beneath teeny tiny skirts, or from above low-slung pants. Nor for that matter did people wear pajamas when they traveled, unless of course the traveler was pint-sized and the PJ's had feet and a snap crotch.

No, these choices are a product of the modern-age. Airlines, struggling to manage the sensibilities of an eclectic assortment of cultures, religions and orientations have a tough job trying to make sure no one is offended and too often it seems, they fail.

But air travelers, beware: To the question, "do we have a right to fly?" the answer seems to be "no". In spite of the threats from the recently dis-boarded and their demands for apologies, airlines have a tightly constructed contract of carriage printed on every single airline ticket, which says, and I paraphrase here, behave yourself in a manner that will not disrupt your fellow passengers because on the airplane, the ultimate authority is the flight crew.

This week, Leisha Hailey is tweeting that her removal from the plane, along with her companion Camila Grey was "an outrage" and she's calling for a boycott of Southwest. Homosexuals may be the newest but they're certainly not the last special interest group to ride the wave of publicity triggered by an involuntary departure from an airplane prior to push back.

The interest group I'd like to see start to agitate is the one demanding that everybody traveling by air board the plane, settle down, button up and pretend that we are in granny's parlor for the duration of the flight.

When Airlines Were On Top of the World

2011-09-22T23:00:00.005-04:00

Sony Pictures Television / Patrick Harbron

Fellow aviation geeks, don't be too tempted to quibble over just how authentic the new television show, Pan Am is - already Mickey Maynard is tweeting that the blue of the stewardesses uniforms is the wrong shade. And I confess, when I saw the first episode, (I got to see it two weeks ago but you'll have to wait until Sunday - Thanks Sony!) I did wonder if the set designers couldn't do a better job on the B707 boarding bridge.

Still, if handsome Capt. Dean Lowrey looks too young to be in command of a plane full of 1960s-era travelers, think again. Think in fact, of Capt. Robert Evans.

Pan Am Capt. Robert Evans (L) and actor Mike Vogel who plays Capt. Dean Lowrey

Capt. Evans flew a S-42 like this one when he joined Pan Am

Through a family connection, I was privileged to spend a few days this summer reading the memoirs of Capt. Evans, who flew for Pan Am from 1940 to 1976 - a career that started when he was just twenty-four and took him from the Sikorsky S-42 to the left seat of the Boeing 747, then and now the queen of the sky.

Photo courtesy Pan Am Historical Association

It's no wonder Evans took time from traveling the world to jot down his stories. In a chapter of his book called Unusual Earthly Sights, he describes the sun rising in the west over Scandinavia, a view of Victoria Falls while diverting to avoid weather, experiencing the Aurora Borealis north of Labrador and encountering static electricity known as St. Elmo's fire, that made his airplane glow.

"The bright fiery glow enveloped props, wings and fuselage. A blue ball of static developed in the cabin - rolling down the aisle - and discharging off the tail. Flight service reported a lot of wide-eyed passengers." I'll bet!

So today, as I sat at the Brooklyn film studio where episodes of Pan Am are being shot, talking to the actor Mike Vogel who plays the Pan Am Sky God Dean Lowrey on the weekly program, I reminded myself that Capt. Evans probably looked a lot like him.

Vogel described a childhood growing up by Pennsylvania's Willow Grove Naval Air Station, spending so much time watching the airplanes take off and land that he learned to distinguish a P-3 from an A-4 by the sound of their engines. Aviation was a first love that never died, he told me, which explains why Vogel flies a 707 on TV while working on his PPL in real life.

Photo courtesy Pan Am Historical Association

While the perfectly coiffed Vogel and his co stars did their thing under the studio lights, off to the side Sherry Zahner, was fussing over the shrimp appetizers that the four women who play Pan Am stewardesses will use in the next scene. Sherry was a Pan Am flight attendant in that era and she's gonna make sure the service details are true-to-life.

In the sixties, heck, through the eighties, stewardesses on Pan Am didn't just serve pretty food, they cooked it too. Sherry says her years at the airline were the best time of her life.

Najeeb Halaby pins wings on Candice Adams Kimmel

Sure the work was hard. If it was easy everybody would be doing it. But Pan Am didn't hire just anybody. The airline wanted educated, multilingual flight attendants. The recruiters went to college campuses, which is how Candice Adams Kimmel, French-speaking with a degree in history ended up becoming a stewardess.

With two months experience she was flying to Rome, hanging out with other stewardesses who were "doing everything but saying 'sombody pinch me'" she recalled when I spoke with her earlier this month. They all thought they were dreaming. It just didn't get any better than this.

But it wasn't all carefree excitement for Candice. In 1971 she was on a flight that was hijacked to Cuba. That's her with co-workers talking about the four-day event on CBS News.

Scary? I think so. Especially in the post September 11th world. But consider this, between 1968 and 1972 there were more than seventy - that's 70 - airplane hijackings. So if there's an episode of Pam Am the TV show which includes that in the plot, don't be surprised, that's all I'm sayin'.

Sony Pictures Television / Patrick Harbron

Handsome men starting out with responsibility beyond their years, strong women circling the globe with all the attendant joy and danger. Dazzling airplanes flying faster and farther. Who doesn't want to watch all this on television? There's so much material and just plain old gratuitous shots of beautiful people, places and planes.

So don't quibble about the small stuff. We've got an opportunity to take a trip to a time when aviation was big. Very big - and on top of the world.

Photos courtesy Pan Am Historical Association

See my other post on this subject at GO HOW KNOW HOW

Air Show Race and Hollywood Special Effects

2011-09-17T02:07:00.003-04:00

When I heard Canadian Defense Force Major Adam Cybanski talking about his Hollywood approach to air crash investigations, by analyzing the videos of citizen documentarians, I knew he was on to something. What I did not know was that his Tuesday lecture to the International Society of Air Safety Investigators would be Friday's reality.

National Championship Air Race pilot Jimmy Leeward (R) crashed his World War Two P-51 Mustang into a seating area at the Reno race track Friday afternoon and within minutes, two separate videos were posted on You Tube.

Photo courtesy Leeward Air Ranch

There’s no crystal clear view of what happened, but glimpses suggest that Leeward, an experienced racer, pulled up out of the way of other racers before the plane nosed over and dived into the ground.

Leeward, 74, called in a mayday and "pulled up to clear the race path" according to Mike Draper, a spokesman for the race. Clearly Leeward was unable to control the plane after that. The video shows the P-51 smashing into the ground. Fifty four people were taken to the hospital and the initial fatalities including Leeward.

That this accident and the crash on Thursday of a private airplane across the street from a school in Salt Lake City came the very week that air safety specialists were meeting in Utah strikes me as a coincidence. Still, I hear the Twilight Zone soundtrack playing softly in the background.

Let's start with Major Cybanski and his interest in movie special effects. In 2010, he was asked to help investigators determine why an F-18 Hornet crashed during an air show rehearsal. Demonstrating how he used Hollywood special effects software to help determine what happened kept an audience of seasoned investigators mesmerized.

"We can analyze the video and see how the wings were moving," he told me, "how the control surfaces were moving and how the elevator was moving; all sorts of stuff we wouldn't have if we didn't have the cameras there."

Expect Major Cybanski’s expertise in movie analysis to get a workout over the next few months. But even he may not be able to explain why, with all the safety prerequisites at air shows and races, the Reno spectator section was placed below the circuit where airplanes perform at low altitude and at speeds in the 350-400 mile per hour range. It’s not as if this was Reno’s first accident. There have been more than 20 accidents in the show’s history, and in 2007 there were three fatal accidents all in one week.

When I start hearing the ain’t-this-odd soundtrack swelling in my head, it’s because all of this information converges as we are learning that commercial airline operations have never been safer. If Investigators were at risk of leaving Salt Lake City complacent that their work was done, they didn’t have to wait long for the wake-up call. When it comes to general and sport aviation, it’s a whole different story.