More Than Meets The Eye in Kenya Plane Spotter Arrests

Men from Manchester held by Kenya photo courtesy of The Star

There's something very strange about the news out of Nairobi in which four British men were arrested after taking photos of airplanes at the city's in-town airport.

According to a BBC report, the self-described plane spotters said they had permission to take photos of airplanes at Wilson Airport, but the sight of them with their cameras caused concern among some folk who noticed them, “from the airport bar,” and I’m quoting directly from the BBC report. 

After the men were picked up at Wilson Airport they were taken to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on the far side of the city and incarcerated there for nine days. Stephen Gibson, 59, Ian Glover, 46, Edwin Swift, 47 and Paul William, 47, will have to cough up $2,000 to get out of jail and out of the country according to the Kenya Star newspaper.

During my visit to Nairobi I roamed Wilson Airport on four occasions, once after having a lovely lunch at the colonial-era-styled East African Aero Club complete with photos of famous aviatrix Beryl Markham on the walls and aviation-themed movies playing on the lobby television. I wandered around the property including the guest houses snapping away.

Florence Wilson

It is worth noting these days while we are doing so much talking about women in aviation, that Wilson Airport, was named after Florence Wilson, a British widow and heiress who invested in an airline in the twenties with her lover, the pilot Thomas Campbell Black. 

While Campbell didn’t treat Wilson like a lady, (he left her, the story goes for Beryl Markham), even after he was gone, the business thrived. In 1939, however, the British government absorbed Ms. Wilson’s fleet along with the flying school into its Kenya Auxiliary Air Unit. In 1962, shortly before becoming the independent nation of Kenya, the airfield was renamed to honor Florence Wilson.

In February I transited through Wilson airport several times as I changed planes en route to Keyna’s famed wildlife parks; Amboseli and Maasa Mara. I took photos from inside the airport and out and from inside my airplane and out and I was far from the only one with a camera.

I recorded 5Y-IHO the DeHavilland Dash-8 and ET-AMV, the Cessna Caravan, both of which are being used by the United Nations World Food Program. 5Y-FDK the Phoenix Aviation’s King Air used by the Flying Doctor Service and the arrival of a fancy business jet from which emerged several men acting important and tailed by an entourage of what seemed to be journalists. Helicopter touch-and-gos, pilot pre flights, security screenings, I shot it all without seeing a raised eyebrow.

Kenya is justifiably cautious as it faces a terrorism threat with Somali violence on its eastern border. I don’t know what about this particular band of Brits made them more threatening to the authorities than other camera-wielding travelers. But my photos show there’s more to this story than what meets the eye.

Beautiful hangar at Wilson Airport

Quest For More From CNN From MH-370

Full disclosure: The Crash Detectives, my own book on the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370, will be published by Penguin in September. This may have colored my perception of Richard Quest's new book, The Vanishing of Flight 370. Then again, maybe it really is a rehash of CNN's original undisciplined coverage.

Quest, CNN's business correspondent, is well known for his out-sized personality and his "say anything" interview style. But in the book he has produced for Penguin Berkley and timed to the second anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia 370, all his insouciant charm is gone. Without that, Quest's demonstrated ego wears thin long before the reader gets to the book's vanity snapshots section.

Passion but Few Tears in Amsterdam for Airliners That Fly into the Past

Too often air travel is an antiseptic experience for the passenger as we sit in tile-floored, waiting rooms, our heads down and our minds in cyberspace. It is so rare and so thrilling to actually smell the jet fuel and hear the whine of the engines at the few airports that still encourage a love of the journey. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is one of them and it's the perfect place to reflect on commercial aviation's first century since KLM Royal Dutch is, at 96 years old, the oldest airline still in operation under its original name. (And what a nice name it is.)  

The Eye Opening Experience of Passing out at 25K

Instructor Ron Diedrichs with EVA cadets

You got to hand it to the folks at Taiwan’s EVA Airlines they’re taking the hypoxia threat seriously. Each of its pilot cadets learning to fly airliners at the University of North Dakota’s Mesa, Arizona flight training center will take a ride in a hypobaric chamber before leaving the USA to go back to Taipei and fly the airline’s big jets. 

Nearly a decade ago, air safety officials in Greece suggested that that all airline pilots undergo hypoxia training, following the loss of a Boeing 737 on a flight from Cyprus to Athens that killed 121 people on August 14, 2005.

Delta 747 Replacement Not Ready for Prime Time

N671US in Shannon days ago. Photo courtesy Kevin Corry

This just in: The Delta Air Lines Boeing 747 N664US which was heavily damaged by hail on a flight to Seoul Korea last month will return to the United States late this week but it appears her flying days are over. This Queen of the Sky, I am told, is headed for Marana Aerospace Solutions, a enormous boneyard for retired airliners north of Tucson, Arizona. For more on this story, read on.


This post has been updated with more information about the process of taking an airliner out of desert storage.

First its Arizona retirement was interrupted when it was called back to work to replace a hail-damaged sister ship during the busy summer travel season. Then the Boeing 747 N671US had to make an emergency landing in Shannon, Ireland. 
Today I learned through a passenger scheduled to fly on this same jumbo, that his flight from Detroit to Narita was delayed due to problems with pressurization and air conditioning. The plane, you guessed it, N671US.  Two hours late, travelers did finally depart for Narita, but not on N671US, it was swapped out for another aircraft, presumably one in better shape.

Growth, Profitability and Timing Lifts Airline Industry

Tyler addresses the executives Photo by IATA

Writing from Miami - It seems strange to me that under the guidance of the soft spoken and urbane Tony Tyler, the airline industry should be experiencing its strongest growth and profitability but there you have it. Just four years after the former chief of the International Air Transport Association, Giovanni Bisignani nominated himself the best director general of the association ever in the pages of his book, Shaking the Skies, in waltzes his polar opposite and actually sees much of  Bisignani's big wish list getting accomplished.

Yes, it’s a happy group of global airline bosses here in Miami and why not?

Lost and Confounded Until Hiker Finds Missing Plane

What forces of fate allow thousands of people to cross the same terrain without seeing the crashed airplane that John Weisheit discovered on May 20th? And what does his find tell us about the still-missing Boeing 777 that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014?  Stay with me because I believe these two stories are related.

River guide and Colorado River advocate John Weisheit was hiking in the Grand Canyon National Park with several others last week when the group came across the wreckage of a plane wedged between two boulders. The aircraft was "smashed, so compressed that it was really hard to find an actual skeleton," Weisheit told the Associated Press, because seeing something like that really does beg the question, “Is anybody inside?” The answer was yes.

Ocean Search for MH 370 Lets Malaysia Overlook Clues on the Ground

9M-MRO in Los Angeles photo by Jay Davis

The adage that if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it, can be appropriately applied to the search for answers to the disappearance of Malaysia 370, now approaching its first anniversary. 

Oh no, I'm not talking about the theories that the plane was flown to Diego Garcia. I'm talking about the breast-beating accompanying the reports that the deep sea search for the missing airplane may come to an end and with it dies all possibility of knowing what really happened and why.

That's not true. While having the airplane would be nice, not all investigations are tied with a bow and presented to crash detectives. Public pressure should be put on the Malaysians who have used a lack of progress in finding 9M-MRO to absolve themselves of any responsibility to conduct a probe right there in Malaysia, where many clues inevitably reside. 

Lower Fuel Costs Good/News Bad News for Hawaiian

Hawaiian Airlines at New York

For every up there's a down, and no industry knows that better than the airlines. No, I'm not talking about takeoffs and landings, but the good news/bad news of declining fuel prices. 

As an airline, Hawaiian may have spent an unduly long time on the ground. It formed in 1929 but when commercial aviation reached its mid-century heyday it was the Pan Ams and the Uniteds and not Hawaiian that was lifting travelers by the plane full.  

Global Girl & Girlfriend of Sex Offender Epstein Same Person Flight School Says

The Facebook page of Global Girl

See previous post on this subject here.

The owner of the flight school where popular online aviatrix Nadia Marcinko received her private and commercial pilots licenses says Marcinko also used the name Nada Marcinkova while attending the school in Palm Beach, Florida, linking the Gulfstream Girl / turned-Global Girl to the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal.

Agonizing and Awe-Inspiring; Another Year in Aviation Flies By

Bookending the aviation news for the year 2014 is the Dreamliner battery; the sizzling lithium ion-flavored power source that I suggested in January was already being reviewed by the eggheads and pocket protector-wearing engineers at Boeing. The end of the year arrives and the Japan Transport Safety Board is asking for the same thing. 

I'm not bragging about being prescient here because any reasonable person can see that the risks outweigh the benefits of using this high-density battery chemistry. It's the recipe used more than a decade ago for laptops and handheld devices that started to spontaneously combust prompting the world's largest industrial recall. 

Timing is Right to Remember Wright Brothers as Symbols of Perseverance

Now. While we are celebrating the Wright Brothers historic flight 111 years ago, let me tell you the story of two other brothers; pilots and tinkerers who, in their own small way are commemorating the achievement and contributing to the Wright Brothers legacy.

Nick and Giles English are founders of the Bremont Watch Company, based in Henley-on-Thames in England, who struck a deal with the Wright Family Foundation to embed in a limited edition watch, a scrap of fabric from the wing of the original Wright Flier. Even while the popularity and necessity of conventional watches is on the wane there is a small and well-heeled minority who collect fancy watches and no surprise here, aviators are well represented among them.

Dreamliner Battery Still Not Safe Enough, NTSB Report Says

Firefighters at Logan Airport NTSB photo

How many ways did the company producing the lithium ion batteries on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner fail to meet safe standards? I'm still wading through the 100 page report and the exhibits in the thick docket accompanying it, but so far, the list is lengthy.

Dreamliner Fuels the Boom in International Flying

A UA 787-9 photo courtesy United

Passengers on United Flight 98 from Los Angeles to Melbourne, Australia on October 26, participated in small slice of aviation history; flying on the world's longest Boeing 787 route. They not only flew the longest route, but on the first American airline to fly the new stretched version of the Dreamliner, the dash-9.

Readin' Researchin' Writin' and the Tools to Make it Happen

Nils Haupt hosts salon on MH 370 mystery

Last month at the invitation of Nils Haupt, Lufthansa's former head of North American PR, I spoke to a small group of aviation and business writers about the book I have been contracted to write about the disappearance of MH 370 and other aviation mysteries. It was thrilling to be questioned about my theories and my experiences covering the story for ABC News from Malaysia, by people who had given the subject a lot of thought. 

With me that night, was Emily Baker, the acquisitions editor at Penguin who purchased the book and who, to my delight, is a big aviation geek. Don't ask her about Amelia Earhart unless you have a lot of time on your hands. 

Australian Adventurer Illustrates Flying's Glorious Contradictions

I spend so much time writing about the safety and economics of aviation every now and then its good to go back and remember that flying was pioneered by risk takers who were motivated by many things, convention and common sense not among them.

The role of adventurers in aviation was very much on my mind while reading Dick Smith's thrill-a-page book, The Earth Beneath Me, the story of his solo helicopter flight from Fort Worth, Texas to Sydney, Australia in 1982.

MH 370 Lawyer Behavior Criticized Yet Again

A disciplinary commission in Chicago has upheld a censure decision against a lawyer who just last week came under its scrutiny for her behavior  related to Malaysia Flight 370.

Monica Ribbeck Kelly, who made worldwide headlines when she filed the first case against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines following the mysterious disappearance of the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March, has been battling the ethics board of the Illinois Supreme Court since 2011 when she mishandled her representation of the victim of another crash.

Delta's 747s to Fly Into the Sunset

In a startling change of plans, Delta Air Lines today confirmed that it will retire four of its Boeing 747s beginning in September. Employees were notified in a memo penned by Glen Hauenstein the airline's chief revenue officer.  Hauenstein described the decision as way to "reduce Delta's footprint at Tokyo Narita" and to do less intra-Asia flying.

Sixteen 747s came to Delta through its 2009 merger with Northwest. This spring, when I interviewed vice president of fleet strategy Nat Pieper for an article on the plane for Air & Space magazine, he told me executives spent a lot of time trying to decide whether to keep the planes which ranged in age from 7 to 20 years. Ultimately they decided to upgrade the interiors and fly them. The benefit of ownership was worth the extra operating expense, he told me.

The Accident That Didn't Happen and What it Says About Safety

Airplane crashes make headlines. Missing airliners get the all-news channels into round-the-clock regurgitation of speculation. Missile-downed airliners throw global diplomacy and the entire air travel industry into turmoil. All this I get. What continues to baffle is the lack of interest in the news that is far better indicator of how particular airlines handle their duty to protect customers.

Two stories this week make my point. In his excellent article for Forbes, former NTSB member John Goglia reports on the unfortunate case of a mother traveling on Delta Air Lines who was prohibited from using the FAA approved child-seat she brought with her on the airplane.  Flight attendants were unaware of the rules and the airline hadn't taught them how to discern which seats can be used and which cannot.

Airlines and Governments Oblivious to Warnings of MH 17 Disaster

It is missing the point to "blame" Malaysia Airlines for its decision to continue to fly over the conflict zone in the Ukraine despite the disastrous outcome of that choice. At the same time, Malaysia and the dozens of others who opted to continue using the route should be asking, what exactly are they paying their security advisors for?