An American Airlines route map from 1954.

April 8, 2020

The COVID panic has reduced air travel to almost nothing. U.S. carriers have grounded up to 90 percent of their flights. Survival comes down to perseverance, bailout money, and innovation.

As to the latter, Alaska Airlines has a strategy to help it remain in markets where ridership has plummeted. Instead of relying on nonstop “spoke” flights from its Seattle hub, the airline will run consolidated, connect-the-dots style flights that take in multiple cities in a single run. For example, rather than operating one flight from Seattle to Pittsburgh, and another from Seattle to Baltimore, there’s now a single aircraft going Seattle-Pittsburgh-Baltimore. Seattle-Dallas-Houston and Seattle-Minneapolis-Columbus are two others.

It’s a useful way of adapting to the current environment. What it’s not, however, is new. Back in the proverbial day, this is what most cross-country flying looked like. Flights going coast-to-coast would often make two, three, possibly four stops along the way. I have a collection of timetables from the 60s and 70s; even then, well into the jet age, multiple-stop itineraries were common. A Boston to Miami flight with Eastern, for instance, might have stopped in Philadelphia and Atlanta. In PHL or ATL, passengers destined for those cities would disembark while additional Miami-bound passengers came aboard. “Through” passengers, as they were called, remained in their seats. The same thing was common in long-haul markets overseas. A flight from London to Singapore might have gone via Rome, Istanbul, Karachi and Bombay. How about: London-Rome-Khartoum-Nairobi-Johannesburng? In the 1940s, Qantas’ so-called “Kangaroo Route” made six stopovers between London and Sydney. When I traveled to Montana with my family in 1980, our Northwest flight went Boston-Detroit-Milwaukee-Minneapolis-Billings-Bozeman. The only change of planes was in in Minneapolis.

These were known as “direct” flights. Today the terms “direct” and “nonstop” are used interchangeably, but in the old days a “direct” flight merely meant there’d be no change of aircraft or flight number.

A lot of this was necessity. The range and payload constraints of older generation aircraft made nonstops unfeasible beyond a certain distance. But part of it, too, was efficiency. Carriers needed fewer planes and fewer crews.

Modern examples still exist. Southwest operates a number of multiple stop directs. Traveling to Bhutan in 2017, I boarded a direct flight from Bangkok to Paro. Along the way we spent 35 minutes on the ground in Gauhati, India, a city I had never heard of before. “Through” passengers like me stayed on board. On a recent flight from Phnom Penh to Doha on Qatar Airways, same thing, this time with a short stopover in Ho Chi Minh City. Ditto for an Emirates flight that went Phnom Penh-Yangon-Dubai. Plenty of examples are out there, but the remain-on-board option is increasingly rare.

BOAC’s eastbound routes in 1958.

The maps above (and below) are lifted from “Airline Maps, A Century of Art and Design,” a new book by Mark Ovenden and Maxwell Roberts.

I’ve been infatuated by airline route maps my whole life. They are what turned my passion for commercial aviation into a love of travel as well: a way of graphically understanding the airplane as something bigger than a means to an end. There’s something oddly meditative and Zen about them. As a kid, whenever I got hold of an airline timetable (back when such things existed) the first thing I’d do is open to the route map. The best were the center fold-outs, with the extra third page. I could spend hours studying those those arcs and lines. “Next time you’re wedged in economy, flip to the map section in the back of the inflight magazine,” I write in the introduction to my book. “Those three-panel foldouts and their crazy nests of city pairs were, for me, a kind of junior pilot porno.”

Now there’s 140 pages of them, spanning nine decades.

As you’d maybe expect, the authors spend most of their time in the decades between 1930 and 1970, when airline iconography and graphic design became an artform all its own. The selections from this period range from cartoonish to elegant, many of them nothing short of cartographic marvels. Almost all of them are colorful, whimsical, and historically evocative. Now departing for Leopoldville, Leningrad and Calcutta: it’s the history of air travel, design, geography and geopolitics all at once.

Most carriers still produce route maps, viewable online or in their magazines. They’ve become a lot simpler, and the presentation can be confusing. Some have done away with lines and rely only color-coded dots for destination cities, giving you only half the story. Worse are the ones that include the flights of code share and joint-venture partners, leaving the maps so cluttered you can’t make sense of them.

Delta Air Lines in 1960.

BOAC’s eastbound system shortly after World War 2.

Air France’s intercontinental routes, 1959.

Related Story:

HOMAGE TO THE BOARDING PASS WALLET

Boeing bet the future on a 50 year-old design. Did it lose?

December 16, 2019

I’M DEPRESSED. I’m depressed because the word on the street has it that Boeing will not be moving forward with its so-called “new midsize airplane,” or NMA, also known as the 797. That’s the rumor, at any rate.

If built, the 797 would bridge the range and capacity gap between the narrow-body 737 family and the much larger 787 and 777 families — a slot occupied by the now-geriatric 757 and 767. The concept was formally unveiled at the Paris Air Show two years ago, and the planemaker has been mulling it over ever since. The uncertainty around the project has become a simmering backstory to the ongoing 737 MAX saga.

The two are not unrelated.

Back about fifteen years ago, Boeing had a decision to make. It’s popular 757 was getting long in the tooth. Orders were drying up and the company would need to develop a replacement. This wouldn’t be easy, because the 757 was, and still is, a very special machine. You might call it the most versatile jetliner Boeing has ever built: a medium-capacity, high-performing plane able to turn a profit on both short and longer-haul routes — domestic or international; across the Mississippi or across the North Atlantic.

And along the way it meets every operational challenge. Short runway? Stiff headwinds? Full payload? No problem. With 180 passengers, the plane can safely depart from a short runway, climb directly to cruise altitude, and fly clear across the country — or the ocean. Nothing else can do that. And it’s a great-looking plane to boot.

Essentially three options were on the table. The first was to come up with a plane from scratch — a brand-new jetliner of roughly the 757’s size and capabilities. A second, less expensive option would be to equip the existing airframe with new engines, modern avionics and other upgrades — a 757-X, if you will. Option three would be to abandon the 757 template altogether and, instead, turn to the company’s favorite cash-cow, the 737, and somehow push it, squeeze it, force it, into the role of the 757.

Although Boeing hasn’t — at least not yet — officially abandoned the idea of new airplane, it is option three, if only by default, that seems to have won. Production of the 757 ceased for good in 2004, and the 737 remains Boeing’s only non-widebdoy replacement option. Need a 180-ish seater? If you’re buying from Boeing, it’s a 737 or nothing: the -800, the -900, or the beleaguered MAX.

None of these, however, can do what the 757 does. The 737’s range allows U.S. coast-to-coast and limited transatlantic pairings, but anything further is out of the question. And what it can do, it doesn’t do particularly well. On longer routes it’s often payload and/or altitude restricted, and for a jet of its size it uses huge amounts of runway with startlingly high takeoff and landing speeds.

I was jammed into the cockpit jumpseat — more of a jump-bench, actually — on an American Airlines 737-800 not long ago, flying from Los Angeles to Boston. Man, if we didn’t need every foot of LAX’s runway 25R, at last getting off the ground at a nearly supersonic 165 knots. What would it be like on the westbound leg, I wondered — a longer flight, from a shorter runway, in the face of winter headwinds?

By contrast, I recently piloted a 757 from Boston to San Francisco. At flaps 20, we lifted off at a docile 130 knots from Logan’s stubby, 7000-foot runway 09, with nearly half the runway still remaining! With every seat full and seven hours’ worth of fuel, we climbed directly to 36,000 feet and flew all the way to California. That’s performance. A 737 cannot come close to that.

In the 737, Boeing took what essentially was a regional jet — the original 737-100 first flew in 1967, and was intended to carry a hundred or so passengers on flights of around 400 miles — and has pushed, pushed, and pushed the plane into roles it was never intended for. Bigger and bigger engines, fancier avionics, MCAS. Five decades and ten variants later, the MAX is a monsterized hybrid of a thing — a plane that wants, and needs to be something that it’s not: all muscle and power and advanced technology, jammed into the framework of a fifty year-old design.

From the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Airbus line features a similar gap. The A310 died away a long time ago, and size-wise there’s nothing between the A320 family and the long-haul A330.

Or is there? The biggest Airbus narrow-body is the A321 — a stretched-out version of the basic A320. Two upcoming variants, the A321LR (long range), and the A321XLR (extra long-range), are about to hit the market. With two-class seating for around 200 passengers and a range of almost 5,000 nautical miles, these aircraft have enormous potential. JetBlue is among airlines planning to use the LR on routes across the pond, serving Western Europe from New York and Boston.

Whether you’re an airline CEO, a pilot, or a passenger, there’s a lot to like about the A320 family generally, certainly when matched against the 737. It requires less runway, for one, and uses tamer takeoff and landing speeds. On the inside it’s quieter and more spacious, A few weeks ago I rode aboard a 737 for the first time in a while. I normally find myself on an A320 or A321, and I was startled at how uncomfortable the 737 was. I had a window seat about a third of the way down, and the narrower cross-section meant my shoulder was pressed into the sidewall the entire time.

And the noise. The 737 is a loud airplane. On a two, three, or four-hour trip such comfort levels are acceptable. But six? How about a seven-hour nonstop from Gatwick or Shannon?

And if you think it’s noisy in the cabin, you should hear the cockpit, where the sound of the onrushing air must push a hundred decibels. Loud and tight, with barely enough room for the crew’s hand luggage. It’s interesting how both the A320 and the 737 families have roughly the same exterior dimensions, yet somehow the A320’s cockpit is three times roomier and five times quieter. How can that be? Well, look closely at the nose section of the 737. Do you recognize that? The old-fashioned flight deck windows, the shapes of the radome and fuselage? It’s the 707. Unchanged in over sixty years.

Take a MAX and put it next to an old 737-100 from the late sixties. It’s at once the same and yet completely different. You can virtually see the airplane straining, stretching, reaching — trying so hard to become something else. And therein is the problem. Boeing desires the commonality, the simpler training footprint and all the good things that the 737 family offers. But it also wants a plane that can take 200 people across the ocean. What it’s finding out is that perhaps, after all, they cannot be the same thing. You can only reinvent so many times.

Indeed the A321LR will be the closest thing out there to a 757. Comfort-wise it’ll be equal, if not superior, with almost the range, almost the capacity, and almost the muscle. Sure, those are a lot of important almosts. Eventually, however, the last 757 will be put to pasture, and when that happens, the lack of a 797 all but assures the A321’s domination of the mid-market niche.

Until that day, U.S. carriers continue holding on to their 757s. Hundreds remain in service on trunk routes and transcons. United and Delta have flown 757s from their East Coast gateways on eight-hour services to Western Europe, Scandinavia, even Africa. Of course, you’ll also see it on 60-minute segments into Kansas City, Cleveland, Tucson and Tampa. Nothing can match it across such a wide swath of markets, with little or no concerns as to weather, payload or runway length.

As to its relunctance in committing to the 797, Boeing says that the sales potential for such a plane, estimated at anywhere from three-hundred to a thousand examples, is possibly too limited. As a point of comparison, the company claims that it won’t break even on its 787 program until at least 1,500 aircraft have been delivered. If true, that’s a sad testament to how expensive it has become to develop new aircraft. If a thousand airplanes can’t justify a new line, what can?

Still, it seems that filling such a niche should be well within the technical expertise, and certainly the imagination, of the world’s largest and most prolific plane-maker. Wouldn’t the 797 borrow much of the 787’s architecture, and thus be cheaper to produce? And isn’t this the same company that, fifty years ago, created the 747, an airplane more than double the size of any existing plane, taking it from a napkin drawing to an actual, in-the-air prototype in less than two years! Forgive me for looking at this romantically, but what happened to that sprit and vision?

And if Boeing does press ahead with the 797, will they build the right plane? Preliminary renderings of the NMA from 2017 show us a jetliner seating between 220 and 270 passengers, with a composite fuselage and wings, and a range of around 5,000 nautical miles. Is it just me, or is this much too big? I like the twin-aisle idea; two aisles make for faster boarding and deplaning, and give the cabin a roomier feel overall. But, otherwise, how is this not just a 787 with a shorter range? A 757 replacement should be a plane that tops out at around 220 passengers, not one that starts there.

“It strikes me that the airplane Boeing ought to be putting out there is one that already exists, at least as a template,” I wrote on my website about a year ago. I was talking about the 767, Boeing’s venerable quasi-widebody that dates to the early 1980s. Although a passenger version hasn’t been ordered in years, the jet remains in production as a freighter and as a military midair refueler. Why not upgrade it, I asked in my article, with new engines, a new cockpit, and overhauled internal systems? Is that not a better option — especially considering the limited market that Boeing sees — than spending billions on an all-new airframe? “Call it the 767-X,” I wrote.

Well, in October of 2019 Boeing released a proposal for a 767 derivative called, guess what, the 767-X.

However, the 767 I had in mind as a baseline was the original -200. The -200, which debuted in 1982, is a long-since obsolete aircraft that, by today’s standards, would be laughably uneconomical. In terms of size, range, and capacity, however, it’d be just about perfect. Imagine a modernized, re-engined version delivering twin-aisle comfort for 180-200 people, containerized luggage and cargo, and all the range and unbeatable brawn of the 757. What’s not to like?

Boeing, though, says the -X would build not on the platform of the -200, but on that of the -400, and would be aimed at the cargo market. The -400, which sold very poorly, has seats for around 250 people. Again this is too big. In any case, Boeing eyes the 767-X chiefly as a freighter, not a passenger carrier.

Which leaves us… where?

While Boeing makes up its mind, the 737 MAX drama continues at center stage. And here’s the part we hate to ask but need to: why did the MAX need to exist in the first place?

What if, back in 2004, Boeing had gone ahead with the 797 in lieu of yet bigger and heavier 737s? And were the MAX tragedies, on some deep-down level, an inevitable result of Boeing’s decades-long obsession with its 737 — its determination to keep the production line going, variant after variant, seemingly forever? Where in the blame pie does poor corporate strategy and stubborness fall?

There’s a place for the 737 and always will be. I just don’t know if that place is as far and wide as Boeing would like it to be. And although you won’t see it any reports, but what happened in Africa and Indonesia is, maybe, fate’s way of telling Boeing that the time has come to move on.

This article appeared originally on The Points Guy website and is being used with permission.

Photos courtesy of Alberta Riva, Justin Hu, Daniel Shapiro, Nicholas Susilo, Joao Zymot, Bing Hui Yau and Unsplash.

February 19, 2020

THE TIMELINE of an aviation career, for some of us, is punctuated with dark occurrences. Furloughs, rejection letters, bankruptcies. And now, sigh, I’ve lost my beloved calculator.

I bought the thing 23 years ago, if I remember right, at the old Osco store on Highland Avenue near Davis Square. It was your basic flip-top model, dual solar and battery, with fat buttons and an oversized screen for better low-light viewing. I paid about four dollars for it.

When you own anything for 23 years, you grow fond of it. The same chemicals and synaptic energies that attach us to pets, or even people, I suspect, are the ones that, albeit on a lesser level, attach us to inanimate objects. These objects mark the passage of time. They carry with them the memories of past jobs, past relationships, former eras of our lives. I hope that isn’t being too oddly sentimental, or insulting the very nature of what it is to be human. Regardless, I miss my calculator.

Two weeks ago I was working a flight to Edinburgh, Scotland. I was the relief pilot on this leg, sitting in one of the cockpit jumpseats with the calculator on my knee. It was shortly after takeoff and I’d just finished running through the waypoint times and working out the breaks schedule. I was about to put it back into my briefcase bag when something distracted me. I placed it on top of my roll-aboard bag, which was stowed standing up, an arm’s reach away to my left — and promptly forgot about it.

That’s the last time I saw it. At some point it must have gotten jostled to the floor, where I presume it still is, kicked into a corner and set upon each flight by heavy luggage. Perhaps another pilot picked it up and tucked it into one of the cockpit cubby holes. (Sure we have a lost-and-found boxes in our crew bases, but who’s going to return a cheap plastic calculator?) Or maybe he threw it away. The truth is, most pilots don’t bring or use calculators. It would’ve been a peculiar artifact to find.

You can see the calculator in the picture below, taken in 1998. No, that’s not a U-boat circa 1944; it’s the flight engineer’s station of a Douglas DC-8. This was my office for about four years, shuttling cargo to and from Europe and across the U.S. The calculator is on the ledge, lower left. Notice it has an orange sticker on its case. I added the sticker for the same reason that I use a bright red bumper on my iPhone: to keep me from leaving it behind. So much for bright ideas, literally.

The calculator was a necessary instrument on the ancient Douglas. The weight, balance, and fuel calculations were all done by hand. It was simple arithmetic, but these were big, six-digit numbers. Not so much on the 767. It’s the dispatchers, loaders and planners who do all the serious number-crunching. They upload the results to us and we plug them in. About the only things we calculate manually are the waypoint crossing times and maybe the start/end times of our crew rest breaks. This is hardly anything technical; they’re just figures of convenience jotted down in the margins of the flight plan, requiring nothing more than adding or subtracting a few simple numbers.

But there are fewer things that I am worse at than adding or subtracting simple numbers. I am, in fact, so bad at even basic math that I can barely make change for a dollar. Solving a problem like “14 plus 28” is, to my mind, like contemplating quantum physics. And running the times, forget it: If you cross one waypoint at 14:26, and the next one is 47 minutes later, what time will that be? Are you kidding? Where the hell is my calculator?

I guess I’ll start using my phone. On the bright side this means one fewer thing to carry around.

And what do pilots carry around?

Once upon a time — meaning not very long ago — we lugged with us heavy black briefcases stuffed with maps, charts, and manuals. Pretty much all of this technical arcana now lives electronically in an iPad or other tablet device. Of all the advances seen in commercial aviation over the past two decades, this is probably the one most welcome by pilots. Because not only did those books weigh a ton, they required almost constant revising. Every two weeks a thick packet of pages would show up in your mailbox. The tiniest addendum to any approach or departure procedure, and bang, eighteen different pages needed to be swapped out. A particularly hefty set of revisions could take an hour or more to complete. Page in, page out, page in, page out. Side effects included dizziness, blindness, repetitive motion injuries and suicide.

Now all we do is tap a button that says UPDATE. United Airlines says that its switch to iPads saves twenty million sheets of paper annually. I can believe it. It also has saved time, fuel, and visits to the chiropractor.

We still carry flight bags, but they’ve gotten a lot smaller and contain mainly personal items and sundries. Some pilots use a soft-sided briefcase; others use gym-stye bags or even backpacks. My preference, at the moment, is an offensively overpriced Tumi briefcase that I bought about six years ago and quickly learned to hate, with a series of undersized exterior pockets that are exactly too small for anything I try to fit in them.

Inside this Tumi is a repurposed toiletries bag. This is where I keep my flight essentials. The most substantial object in here is a headset. The headsets supplied in our cockpits are old David Clark models — those Space Age green things that NFL coaches used to wear on the sidelines. They’re heavy, bulky, antiquated. So, like many pilots, I bring my own. I’ve been thinking about splurging on a noises-canceling set, but for now I use a cheap, reliable Telex. I also have a 26 year-old Sony that I sometimes bring. This was a present that I bought for myself in 1993 when I checked out as a Dash-8 captain.

You’ll also find pens, earplugs, a solar-powered flashlight, a calculator (RIP), sunscreen, masking tape, and a big packet of wet-naps used to wipe away the dust, crumbs, and grime from the radio panels and other cockpit surfaces, which are routinely, astonishingly filthy. And three or four clothes pins. The cockpit sun visors are flimsy things that don’t do much in the way of blocking the sun. To keep from going blind, I augment the visors by clothes-pinning up sheets of paper, a map, or maybe a folded garbage bag.

In the shirt pockets of my uniform you’ll always see three things: a ballpoint pen, a highlighter, and a red Sharpie.

The pen is used for all the things people use pens for. The highlighter I use mainly for marking up the flight plan. I’ll go through it page by page, striking the important parts in yellow: the flight time, the alternates, the dispatcher’s desk number, the airport elevations, deferred maintenance items, ETP coordinates, etc. Every pilot does this in his or her own style. Many don’t do it at all. I have a bad habit of coloring the flight plan even when it’s not my leg to fly, irritating the pilot whose turn it actually is.

The red Sharpie is my tool for what we’ll call high-emphasis tasks, the most critical of which is putting my initials on the cap of my water bottle, to keep anyone else from drinking from it. If there’s a redispatch point along our route, I’ll mark it on the flight plan with a red “RDP.” I also use it for my scratch-pad notes. When I’m in the first officer’s seat there’s a clipboard along the bottom ledge of the window, just to my right. I keep a folded piece of paper there on which I jot down various quick-reference figures: the flight number, en route time, block fuel, minimum takeoff fuel, transition levels, planned oceanic crossing altitudes and speeds, radio frequencies. All in red.

That’s aviation for you. Where the smallest and most mundane things — I mean physically, tangibly, the smallest accoutrements — are often the marks of experience. I’ve been flying commercially for thirty years now. My advice to the aspiring aviator is this: bring a Sharpie.

August 15, 2019

ON AUGUST 3rd, two United Airlines pilots were arrested at the airport in Glasgow, Scotland, after allegedly failing a breathalyzer test prior to operating a flight to Newark, New Jersey.

Curiously, this is not the first time a United crew arrested in Glasgow for the same alleged offense. In August, 2016, at the very same airport, a pair of United pilots were taken into custody under almost identical circumstances.

This is a tough one for me — maybe the most difficult of any subject to tackle. Incidents like these are a shameful black eye for the profession. The sound you heard was that of thousands of pilots everywhere groaning with embarrassment, if not anger. And they have kept alive a lingering stereotype of the airline pilot: the hard-drinking, renegade divorcee, with crows’ feet flanking his eyes and a whiskey-tempered drawl, a flask tucked into his flight case. And it’s easy to jump to conclusions. For every pilot nabbed, there must be ten others over the legal limit, right?

No, frankly. I have to acknowledge that yes, pilots have, on several occasions now, been found guilty of flying, or attempting to fly, under the influence. At the same time, it needs to be made clear how unusual this is. Tens of thousands of commercial flights depart daily around the world. Of all the things might endanger even one of these aircraft, intoxicated pilots is about as statistically insignificant a threat as might exist. I understand and expect that passengers will worry about all sorts of things, rational and otherwise. But as a rule, whether or not your pilots are drunk should not be one of them. These rare and isolated incidents deserve the attention they receive, and they need to be taken seriously. But they are not a symptom of some dangerous and unseen crisis. My personal observations are hardly a scientific sample, but I’ve been flying commercially since 1990 and I have never once been in a cockpit with a pilot who I suspected was intoxicated.

This is not something pilots play fast and loose with. Why would they, with their careers, to say nothing of the lives of their passengers, hanging in the balance? Violators are subject to immediate, emergency revocation of their pilot certificates.

The FAA blood alcohol limit for airline pilots in the United States is .04 percent, and we are banned from consuming alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. Pilots must also comply with their employer’s in-house policies, which tend to be tougher. (In the wake of the most recent Glasgow incident, United as moved to a minimum twelve-hour rule.) Above and beyond that, we’re subject to random, unannounced testing for drugs and alcohol. Overseas, the regulations are even tighter. In Britain, the legal limit is set at twenty milligrams of alcohol per one hundred milliliters of blood. That’s four times lower than the British limit for drunk driving and equates to about .02 percent blood alcohol level.

Not for nothing, though: Scottish regulations are more strict that those of the FAA. The legal limit is about .02 percent blood alcohol level. It’s not impossible for a pilot to be in full compliance with the time restrictions and not feel any of the typical signs of intoxication, yet still be in violation. The same can sometimes be said for our own .04. That’s not an excuse; I have no problem with a requirement that pilots abide by a higher, more conservative standard than others. If we need to be extremely careful, so be it, that’s part of our job. But it’s something to think about, and passengers should realize that “flying drunk” isn’t as clear-cut as it might seem.

It’s also true that more than one airline pilot has been pulled aside after a passenger, TSA guards, or other airport worker wrongly suspected the pilot was intoxicated. Typically in such cases, the papers and TV news hastily report the initial suspicion, but not the vindication.

Having said all that, it should go without saying that alcoholism exists in aviation. Just as it exists in every other profession, including many with public safety To their credit, air carriers and pilot unions like ALPA have been very successful with proactive programs that encourage pilots to seek treatment. This has helped keep the problem from being driven underground, where it’s more likely to be a public safety issue.

Not long ago I flew with a colleague who participated in the highly successful HIMS program — an intervention and treatment system put together several years ago by ALPA and the FAA. HIMS has treated more than 4,000 pilots and records a success rate of near 90 percent, with only 10-12 percent of participants suffering relapse. I asked that colleague if, prior to going into HIMS, he’d ever knowingly flown under the influence. His answer was a firm and very believable no.

Some of you may be familiar with the tale of former Northwest Airlines captain Lyle Prouse. Prouse, together with the other two pilots in his crew, was arrested one morning in Minnesota in 1990. All three had spent the previous evening’s layover at a bar in Fargo, North Dakota, downing as many as nineteen rum and Cokes. Tests showed their blood-alcohol levels far beyond the legal limit.

Prouse was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison. An alcoholic whose parents had died of the disease, he later became a poster pilot for punishment and redemption. AFter a remarkable and improbable sequence of events, he was able to return to the cockpit on his 60th birthday and retire as a 747 captain.

Once out of jail, Prouse was forced to requalify for every one of his FAA licenses and ratings. Broke, he relied on a friend to lend him stick time in a single-engine trainer. Northwest’s then-CEO, John Dasburg, who himself had grown up in an alcoholic family, took a personal interest in Prouse’s struggle and lobbied publicly for his return.

You’ll see Prouse in interviews from time to time, and inevitably you’ll be struck by how forthrightly he takes responsibility, without resorting to the sobby self-flagellation of most public apologies. Always one is left, unexpectedly, to conclude that this convicted felon deserved his second chance. In 2001 he was granted a Presidential pardon from Bill Clinton.

Related Stories:

DENZEL WASHINGTON AND THE MOVIE ‘FLIGHT’
PILOTS AND MENTAL HEALTH

February 25, 2022

THE SITUATION in Ukraine brings me back to my visits to the capital city, Kiev, some years ago, when my airline was still flying there.

Kiev really surprised me. It was green, hilly, with parks and museums and onion-dome churches. Nothing of the bleak, Soviet-looking city I expected. Our layover hotel was the Premier Palace, an expensive place done up in chandeliers and marble. It was the kind of hotel in which you always felt underdressed. But it had an edge to it — that unmistakable vibe of post-Soviet decadence. There was a strip club on the sixth floor.

Of the various day trips available in and around Kiev, none was more extraordinary than the chance to tour Chernobyl, only two hours away by car.

In April of 1986, reactor four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, sending plumes of radiation across Europe in what is still, by far, history’s worst nuclear accident. Prevailing winds saved Kiev from disaster, carrying the fallout in the opposite direction, north into Belarus. From there it diffused across northern Europe.

To this day, a 30-kilometer “Exclusion Zone” surrounds the site, accessible only to researchers, temporary workers, and a small number of villagers — most of them senior citizens — that the Ukrainian government allows to live there. And, believe it or not, to tourists.

I took one of those tours in October of 2007. At the time of my visit, a full-day Chernobyl excursion cost about $250. It included transportation to and from the site, plus all the admission formalities — and a radiation scan on your way out. The photographs below are from that day.

A guide accompanied us the entire time, but we were more or less free to wander as we pleased. We had the site almost entirely to ourselves, walking through apartment blocks, kindergarten classrooms, a high school, a hotel.

I have not captioned the pictures. They more or less speak for themselves. Most of them were taken in Pripyat, the abandoned city inside the Exclusion Zone that was once home to 50,000 people. The entire population of Pripyat was forced to flee, leaving everything behind. It exists as a sort of Soviet time capsule, a bustling city left in suspended animation, complete with hammers, sickles, and no shortage of radioactive detritus that was once the stuff of regular, everyday lives: kids’ toys, a ferris wheel, a classroom chalkboard. It’s these everyday items that leave the most lasting impression — a perversion of normalcy that drives home the magnitude of the tragedy.

When the reactor blew, Soviet helicopters dumped sand and clay over the exposed core, and later the building was encased in thousands of tons of concrete — a structure that become known as “the sarcophagus.” In the photo above, our guide aims his dosimeter at the sarcophagus. The reading you see on the machine is about sixty times normal background radiation. We were allowed to remain here only for about ten minutes.

I should note that reactor four no longer looks like this. In 2016, authorities completed the installation of a mammoth protective dome, concealing the remains within a 25,000-ton shell, made of steel, that looks like a cross between a football stadium and an airship hangar. What you see today is a much more sterile, less jarring aesthetic.

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK SMITH

The items below are souvenirs, I guess you’d have to call them, scavenged from Pripyat. Among them are a 1984 copy of Pravda, the Soviet state newspaper; some vintage postage stamps, and what appears to be a school report card, found inside the Pripyat high school. Perhaps some Ukrainian speakers out there can help translate some of this. I’d love to know more about the report card — names, dates, anything.

The bottom shot is from a roll of exposed film, found on the floor near the high school gymnasium.

Hopefully these items haven’t turned my apartment radioactive.

Two decades before my trip to Chernobyl, I’d been to the Soviet Union, visiting both Moscow and Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was known at the time). This was March of 1986, about a month before the reactor accident. Among the highlights of that trip were my flights aboard Aeroflot. I got to ride a Tupolev Tu-154 from Moscow to Leningrad, and then a Tu-134 from Leningrad to Helsinki.

Apple juice. I remember the Aeroflot flight attendants serving plastic cups of apple juice.

It dawns on me, too, that my travel habits are at times decidedly macabre. In addition to my trip to Chernobyl, I’ve been to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Poland, and to the various Killing Fields sites around Phnom Penh, in Cambodia. Some people make a hobby of such trips. They call it “disaster tourism,” or some such. Everyone has their own motives, but I like to believe there can be a deeper purpose to these visits than morbid thrill-seeking.