December 30, 2024

NOT A GOOD ending to the year. Two serious accidents in less than a week.

First came the shooting down of Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 on Christmas day, killing 38 people. Five days later, Jeju Air flight 2216 crashed in a fireball at Muan International Airport in Korea, killing all but two of the 181 passengers and crew on board.

The Azerbaijan incident appears pretty straightforward. The Brazilian-built Embraer E190 crashed after being hit by an anti-aircraft missile — the latest in a surprisingly long list of commercial jets downed by military fire. It could have been worse: twenty-nine people managed to survive, owing to the fact that, unlike the tragedy of MH17, for example, the plane did not break up in midair, instead hitting the ground in a semi-controlled state.

The Jeju Air disaster is, for now, more mysterious.

Some witnesses describe a flock of birds being ingested by the 737’s right engine, with flames coming from the engine thereafter. This is unconfirmed, and in any case does not explain what happened next: the plane touching down with its landing gear retracted, skidding off the runway into a berm and exploding in a fireball.

A gear-up landing, by itself, should be perfectly survivable. Never is a landing gear problem — any landing gear problem — a dire emergency. Just as a bird strike doesn’t explain the gear being up, the gear being up doesn’t explain the crash.

Which brings us to the flaps. Watching the accident footage, it appears to me (and others corroborate this) that the 737 landed without its wing flaps or leading edge slats extended. This is important because he 737 has unusually high approach and landing speeds to begin with. (In normal operations, flaps and slats are deployed incrementally during approach, allowing the plane to maintain lift while slowing to a safe landing speed.) These speeds would be even higher — much higher — if attempting to land without flaps or slats.

Under those circumstances you’d want the longest runway possible. The runway at Muan is 9200 feet long, but was shortened by a thousand feet due to construction. That left the pilots with 8200 feet. That’s not short, but it’s not long, either. How much runway would a 737-800 require if touching down with no flaps or slats, and no landing gear? I don’t know.

Which takes us to the issue of why the crew didn’t spend more time troubleshooting and better preparing for an emergency landing — preparations that might have included diverting to an airport with a longer runway. It appears the landing was quite rushed.

Landing inadvertently without gear and flaps is all but impossible. It was obviously done intentionally, and hurriedly. What we don’t know is why.

About two years ago, a flight I was piloting had a somewhat serious flap malfunction going into Bogota, Colombia. We spent a good half-hour in a holding pattern, going through checklists, coordinating with our company and with ATC, reviewing runway distance data, and so on. We landed without incident. It appears the Jeju pilots did nothing of the sort, short of issuing a brief distress call. They broke off one approach, circled around, and about five minutes later made the second, fatal landing.

It’s hard to imagine a professional airline crew needlessly hurrying and choosing a too-short runway. Something, I would think, was driving their urgency. A malfunction involving both the landing gear and flaps hints at a serious hydraulics problem. It also — especially combined with the rush factor — hints at the possibility that both of the plane’s engines had failed or were shut down. Did a bird damage one engine, and the crew then accidentally shut down the other one, leaving them with no power at all? Wrong-engine shutdowns have happened before (Google “British Midland crash”).

Others have speculated that complications from the bird strike may have caused the cabin to begin filling with smoke. Did the pilots then panic? Ultimately, we could be looking at a human factors failure as much as any mechanical one. In years past, Korean aviation was heavily scrutinized for its cockpit authority culture and a lack of what today is known as “crew resource management.” It’s worth noting that both pilots were, at least by U.S. standards, fairly inexperienced. The captain had about 6,000 flight hours, and the first officer fewer than a third as many. As a point of comparison, I have about 20,000 hours and currently fly as a first officer.

We’d also like to know the reason for that barrier wall and concrete antenna support at the end of the runway, rather than the type of clearway found at most airports.

One thing for sure is that putting the plane down in the ocean, as was suggested by a supposed aviation expert in a Wall Street Journal online article yesterday, would not have been wise. Any landing, including one without flaps or landing gear, would be far more dangerous on water than on pavement, provided the right precautions are taken. I emailed the reporters at the Journal, recommending they remove those lines, but got no reply.

Jeju Air is a Korean low-cost carrier named after the popular holiday island off the country’s south coast. The Seoul-Jeju route is one of the busiest air routes in the world.

The Azerbaijan Airlines flight, meanwhile, is at least the third commercial jet to have been shot down by Russian or Russia-backed military forces. In 2014, 298 people died when Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was hit by a Buk missile over Ukraine. And in 1983, 267 people died when Korean Air Lines flight 007 was downed near Sakhalin Island by a Soviet fighter after drifting off course. MH17 and KAL 007 stand as the 7th and 11th deadliest crashes of all time.

 

Welcome to the 2024 installment of “An Ask the Pilot Christmas.”

I traditionally start off with gift suggestions, but this year I really don’t have any, save a shameless plug for my book. I mean, it does make a kickass stocking stuffer.

You can expect chaos at the airports, of course. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), roughly 62 billion people are expected to fly between now and New Year’s Eve, 96 percent of them connecting through Atlanta.

In fact I don’t know how many people are projected to fly. I haven’t been listening. In any case, it’s the same basic story every year: the trade groups put out their predictions, and much is made as to whether slightly more, or slightly fewer, people will fly than the previous year. Does the total really matter? All you need to know is that airports will be crowded and flights full. Any tips I might offer are simple common sense: leave early, and remember that TSA considers fruitcakes to be hazardous materials (no joke: the density of certain baked goods causes them to appear suspicious on the x-ray scanners).

For years I made a point of working over the holidays. When I was a bottom-feeder on my airline’s seniority list, it was an opportunity to score some of those higher-quality layovers that were normally out of reach. Other pilots wanted to be home with their kids or watching football, and so I was able to spend Christmas in Cairo, Edinburgh, Budapest and Paris.

That’s how it works at an airline: every month you put in your preferences: where you’d like to fly, which days you’d like to be off, which insufferable colleagues you hope to avoid, and so on. There are separate bids at each base, for each aircraft type and for each seat – i.e. captain and first officer. The award process then begins with the most senior pilot in the category and works its way down. The lowest-rung pilots have their pick of the scraps.

Eventually the process reaches a point when there are no more rostered trips to give out. Those pilots left over — the bottom ten or fifteen percent — are assigned to what we call “reserve.” A reserve pilot has designated days off, and receives a flat minimum salary for the month, but his or her workdays are a blank slate. The reserve pilot is on call, and needs to be within a stipulated number of hours from the airport — anywhere from two to twelve, usually, and it can change day to day. When somebody gets sick, or is trapped in Chicago because of a snowstorm, the reserve pilot goes to work. The phone might ring at 2 a.m., and you’re on way to Sweden or Brazil — or to Omaha or Sacramento.

Looking back, holiday flying has provided me a number of those sentimental vignettes guaranteed to make a person maudlin once they’re retired and looking back…

One of my favorite memories dates back to Thanksgiving, 1993. I was captain of a Dash-8 turboprop flying from Boston to New Brunswick, Canada, and my first officer was the always cheerful and gregarious Kathy Martin. (Kathy, who also appears in my “Right Seat” essay, was one of three pilots I’ve known who’d been flight attendants at an earlier point in their careers.) There were no meal services on our Dash-8s, but Kathy brought a cooler from home, packed with food: huge turkey sandwiches, a whole blueberry pie and tubs of mashed potatoes. We assembled the plates and containers across the folded-down jumpseat. The pie we passed to the flight attendant, and she handed out slices to passengers.

Quite a contrast to Thanksgiving Day in 1999, when I was working a cargo flight to Brussels. It was custom on Thanksgiving to stock the galley with a special meal, and the three of us were hungry and looking forward to it. Trouble was, the caterers forgot to bring the food. By the time we noticed, we were only minutes from departure and they had split for the day. I thought I was going to cry when I opened the door to our little fridge and saw only a can of Diet Sprite and a matchbook-size packet of Tillamook cheese. The best we could do was get one of the guys upstairs to drive out to McDonald’s. He came back with three big bags of burgers and fries, tossing them up to us just as they were pulling the stairs away. Who eats fast food on Thanksgiving? Pilots in a pinch.

On New Year’s Eve, 2010, I was flying over the city of Bamako, Mali, in West Africa. Fireworks explode only a few hundred feet from the ground, but when enough of them are going off at once, it’s quite the spectacle when seen from a jetliner. At the stroke of midnight, the city erupted in a storm of tiny explosions. The sky was lit by literally tens of thousands of small incendiaries — bluish-white flashes everywhere, like the pulsing sea of lights you see at concerts and sporting events. From high above, this huge celebration made Bamako look like a war zone.

I’ve also spent a number of holidays traveling on vacation. Thanksgiving in Armenia, for instance. Another Thanksgiving in Timbuktu.

And with that in mind, here’s some advice…

Do not, ever, make the mistake that I once made and attempt to enjoy Christmas at a place in Ghana called Hans Cottage, a small hotel situated on a lagoon just outside the city of Cape Coast.

They love their Christmas music at the Hans Cottage, you see, and the compound is rigged end-to-end with speakers that blare it around the clock. And although you can count me among those people able to tolerate Christmas music (in moderation, and so long as it isn’t Sufjan Stevens) there is one blood-curdling exception. That exception is the song, “Little Drummer Boy,” which is, to me, the most cruelly awful piece of music ever written. (It was that way before Joan Jett or David Bowie got hold of it.)

It’s a traumatic enough song in any rendition. And at the Hans Cottage Botel they have chosen to make it the only — only! — song on their Christmastime tape loop. Over and over it plays, ceaselessly, day and night. It’s there at breakfast. It’s there again at dinner. It’s there at three in the morning, seeping through the space under your door. And every moment between. I’m not sure who the artist is, but it’s an especially treacly version with lots of high notes to set one’s skull ringing.

“Ba-ruppa-pum-pum,ruppa-pum-pum…” as I hear it today and forever, that stammering chorus is like the thump-thump of chopper blades in the wounded mind of a Vietnam vet who Can’t Forget What He Saw. There I am, pinned down at the hotel bar, jittery and covered in sweat, my nails clattering against a bottle of Star lager while the infernal Drummer Boy warbles into the buggy air.

“Barkeep!” I grab Kwame by the wrist. “For the love of god, man, can’t somebody make it stop?”

Kwame just smiles. “So lovely, yes.”

 

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Photos by the author.

December 21, 2024

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21st, is the winter solstice and either the shortest or longest day of the year, depending on your hemisphere. It also marks the 36th anniversary of one of history’s most notorious terrorist bombings, the 1988 downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Flight 103, a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of Seas, was bound from London to New York when it blew up in the evening sky about a half-hour after takeoff. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, along with eleven people in the town of Lockerbie, where an entire neighborhood was virtually demolished. Debris was scattered over 800 square miles. Until 2001, this was the deadliest-ever terror attack against American civilians. A photograph of the decapitated cockpit and first class section of the 747, lying crushed on its side in a field, became an icon of the disaster, and is perhaps the saddest air crash photo of all time.

The investigation into the bombing — the U.S. prosecutorial team was led by a hard-nosed assistant attorney general named Robert Mueller (yes, that Robert Mueller) was one of the most fascinating and intensive investigations in law enforcement history. Much of the footwork took place on the Mediterranean island of Malta, where the explosive device, hidden inside a Toshiba radio and packed into a suitcase, was assembled and sent on its way. The deadly suitcase traveled first from Malta to Frankfurt, and from there onward to London-Heathrow, where it was loaded into flight 103’s baggage hold.

Among the security enhancements put in place after the bombing is the now familiar requirement that passengers and their checked luggage travel together on the same flight. (“Bag pulls,” as we call them, are a regular occurrence on overseas flights when passengers — but not their bags — miss their connections, often resulting in delays.)

Two Libyans, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, were eventually tried in the Netherlands for the bombing. Both had ties to Libyan intelligence and were believed to have carried out the attack under orders of Libyan leader Mohammar Khaddafy. Fhimah was acquitted (a verdict that generated plenty of controversy), but in 2001, eleven years after the incident, al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life.

Al-Megrahi and Fhimah also had been employees of Libyan Arab Airlines. Al-Megrahi was in charge of security, and Fhimah was the carrier’s station manager at the Malta airport. During my vacation to the island a few years ago, it was eerie when I found myself walking past the Libyan Airlines ticket office, which is still there, just inside the gate to the old city of Valletta.

In 2009, in a move that has startled the world, Scottish authorities struck a deal with the Libyan government, and al-Megrahi, terminally ill at the time, was allowed to return home, to be with his family in his final days. He was welcomed back as a hero by many.

Then, only two years ago, a third alleged Libyan conspirator, Abu Agila Masud, was apprehended by U.S. authorities and awaits trial on charges that he built the explosive device that destroyed flight 103. The investigation remains open, and it’s possible, if unlikely, that other individuals could someday be held accountable.

There’s lots to read online about flight 103, including many ghastly day-after pictures from Lockerbie. But instead of focusing on the gorier aspects, check out the amazing story of Ken Dornstein, whose brother perished at Lockerbie, and his dogged pursuit of what happened. (Dornstein, like me, is a resident of Somerville, Massachusetts.)

The government of Mohammar Khaddafy was also held responsible for the 1989 destruction of UTA flight 772, a DC-10 bound from Congo to Paris. Few Americans remember this incident, but it has never been forgotten in France (UTA, a globe-spanning carrier based in Paris, was later absorbed by Air France).

A hundred and seventy people were killed when an explosive device went off in the DC-10’s forward luggage hold. The wreckage fell into the Tenere region of the Sahara, in northern Niger, one of the planet’s most remote areas. (Years later, a remarkable memorial, incorporating a section of the plane’s wing, was constructed in the desert where the wreckage landed.)

In exchange for the lifting of sanctions, Khaddafy eventually agreed to blood money settlements for Libya’s hand in both attacks. The UTA agreement doled out a million dollars to each of the families of the 170 victims. More than $2.7 billion was allotted to the Lockerbie next of kin.

 

Upper photo courtesy of Pan Am Museum.
Second photo by the author.

December 16, 2024

DRONES HAVE BEEN all over the news of late. While I can’t speak to what enemies or other state actors might be behind the ongoing rash of sightings, it gives us a good opportunity to revisit the dangers drones can pose to commercial aircraft.

The issue has moved from an “emerging threat,” as I described it not long ago, to an established one. The number of close encounters between airplanes and drones continues to grow. Here in the United States, the FAA says it receives over a hundred new reports every month — and it’s perhaps just a matter of time before we see a collision. (Just this past weekend, two men were arrested after flying a drone through prohibited airspace near Logan Airport here in Boston.)

The FAA, with its unquenchable enthusiasm for mind-paralyzing acronyms and abbreviations, now refers to all remotely piloted flying machines as UAS or “unmanned aerial systems.” Whatever you call them, they’re potentially lethal.

The amount of damage a collision might cause depends on two things: the speed of the plane and the size — which is to say the weight — of the drone. The heavier the drone, the greater the potential damage. A jetliner traveling at 250 miles per hour (in the U.S., that’s the maximum speed when below 10,000 feet), hitting a 25-pound UAS creates about 40,000 pounds of impact force.

Most hobby drones weigh less than ten pounds and don’t fly very high, but bigger, heavier machines are out there, and we’ll be seeing more of them: paramilitary border patrol drones; police department surveillance drones; Bezos and his fleet dropping iPhones and toasters from the sky.

It’s these larger drones that are of greatest concern. If an operator should lose control of one of these things, or it otherwise wanders into airspace it shouldn’t be in, the results could be catastrophic — particularly if the collision were to damage the plane’s control surfaces or cockpit.

Even a collision with a lightweight drone could result in serious, and expensive, damage. A small drone impacting an engine would be unlikely to cause a crash, but it could easily cause the failure of that engine and millions of dollars of repair bills. Windscreens and other components are vulnerable as well. Small drones are invisible to air traffic control and onboard radar.

Rules have been on the books from the start, though in typical FAA fashion they’re a confusing spaghetti-knot of dos and don’ts. And in 2015, regulators enacted a mandatory registration process for all UASs weighing more than half a pound.

Have all hobbyists been complying with this program? Of course not, but I suppose its purpose is less about tracking users than it is about creating awareness. Ultimately, it’s up to users policing themselves.

The problem all along has been mostly one of ignorance: most drone flyers aren’t trying to be reckless or cause mayhem; they simply don’t realize how hazardous a collision between and plane and a drone could be. This mindset needs changing. More than coming up with technical fixes or enforcing complex airspace rules, we need to encourage awareness and common sense.

 

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Upper and lower photos courtesy of Unsplash.
Center photo by the author.

A Planespotting Memoir.

December 4, 2024

WHAT WERE YOU DOING on December 4th, 1980? Chances are you have no clue. Owing to my eccentric habits of memory, I can tell you exactly what I was doing. I was flying to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a four-day vacation with my parents and sister.

I was a freshman in high school, thirteen years old. Distant ago as it was, my recollections of that long weekend are, you’ll likely agree, startlingly specific. This is owed, maybe, to the impressionability of the adolescent mind, but also the degree to which I savored trips by airplane. Short as it would be, this was a vacation I’d spent weeks looking forward to, with most of that adrenaline focused on the flight.

The morning of the fourth was a Thursday. I’m so sure it was a Thursday that I’m not going to burden Google with the keystrokes to double check. It was also cold; the temperature had plummeted overnight, making the thought of a respite in sunny Puerto Rico all the more appealing. I can remember, our bags packed and waiting for our ride to Logan, standing by the door that led to our back porch, and marveling at how the glass had frosted over, all white and crystalline. A man on the kitchen radio said it might drop into the teens.

We flew economy class on an Eastern Airlines L-1011. It was my first time on a TriStar and only my second time on a widebody jet. The cabin was maybe half full. I moved around, and at one point had a center block of seats all to myself.

A movie played on the cabin bulkhead screen, blurry and distorted, but I didn’t watch it. Instead I listened to music, clamping on a pair of those awkward, stethoscope-style headphones some of use are old enough to remember, with the little caps on the end that scratched into your ears. The Pat Benetar song “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” was popular the time. I had no prior fondness for that song, but something about how it sounded, coming through that blue plastic tube, enthralled and energized me. I listened to it over and over. (You couldn’t rewind on the old audio systems, so I’d wait patiently while cycled through a dozen other songs.) The chorus would be stuck in my head for days.

We stayed at the El San Juan, a mediocre hotel just a short drive from the airport. I have a memory of beige or yellow stucco. The hotel was on the beach, with backside rooms overlooking the ocean. The room they gave us, however, was on the city side, five or six floor up, and when I pulled back the curtain I was astonished to realize we had a view of the airport. Specifically, we could see the entire approach end of SJU’s runway 8, plus a good portion of the adjacent taxiway. Planes touching down would soar right past our balcony, while those taxiing for takeoff would trundle by in plain view.

This would be a problem. For as much as I wanted to swim and enjoy the warmth of the Caribbean, I also wanted to sit on the balcony with my binoculars and watch jets. We hadn’t traveled much, and my planespotting had been limited mostly to Boston, with its predictable roll call: Eastern, Delta, Allegheny, TWA, plus a smattering of European traffic. San Juan, though, was like nowhere I’d been — an airport of Latin exoticness. Here would be planes and airlines I’d only seen pictures of.

I unlatched the glass door and stepped outside, taking in that tropical smell of heat, humidity and vegetation, with the whine of turbojets in the background. As my mom, dad, and sister put their swimsuits on, I became more and more reluctant to leave that balcony.

Two things solved my dilemma:

The first thing was the weather. Thursday afternoon had been sunny, and Susan and I spent a good two hours in the water battling the four foot breakers. By the morning of day two, however, it had turned damp and drizzly and cool. And the forecast said it would stay this way — overcast, with periods of light rain — right through our departure on Sunday.

The second thing was a hamburger. I’d consumed this burger in the hotel restaurant on Thursday evening. By midnight I found myself in the throes full-on food poisoning, vomiting and feverish. I camped out in the bathroom for I don’t know how long, sitting in the harsh fluorescent light, listening to a radio station from the Virgin Islands. I can clearly remember the garish red-and-white pattern of the tiling.

And so, after an abbreviated and fitful sleep, I awoke on Friday morning to gray skies, a low simmering fever, and a very troubled stomach. Swimming or sightseeing was out of the question. About the only thing I could do, and would do, is watch planes.

It’s not that I wasn’t disappointed. Enamored as I was with aviation, I wasn’t going to forsake the the warm-weather pleasures of San Juan for something as nerdy as planespotting. But now that weather had gone south. And, I was sick. I now had a viable backup plan, enjoyable and distracting enough to salvage my vacation.

I have no idea what my parents and sister did over the next 48 or so hours. I assume they went shopping, or maybe took a rainy-day tour of El Morro. But I know what I did: I sat in a metal chair with my Bushnell 10x42s and a notebook, hunkered down like a postmodern birdwatcher, logging the arrivals and departures at San Juan International Airport. Rain and illness were a bummer for sure, but on another level I was elated.

Back at home I had a book, the 1980 edition of “World Airline Fleets.” This was an annually published directory with the registrations and specs of every commercial plane in the world, arranged alphabetically by country and airline. Once a plane once was “spotted,” you could mark it with a check, or, as I did, line through the listing with a highlighter. Later, at our dining room table, I’d take out the notebook from San Juan and meticulously transpose each sighting.

Neither that notebook nor the fleets volume survive (the one in the photo was found online). Like most of my memorabilia from that era, it was carelessly and foolishly discarded. My memories, on the other hand, are intact, perhaps to a point of almost preternatural detail. How and why I’m able to recall such things is something I can’t fully explain; after all, there are significant tracts of my life that I remember little from. I’ve forgotten names, places, birthdays, phone numbers, the when and where of so many events. But I can tell you without hesitation which planes I saw coming and going at the San Juan airport in December, 1980.

There were, for starters, the multicolored Herons of Prinair, the Puerto Rican commuter carrier whose route network island-hopped the Caribbean. The Riley Heron was a peculiar bird, with 17 seats and four piston engines. That weekend was the only time I ever saw a Heron, but surely I logged the entire Prinair fleet three times over. Every minute, it seemed, a Heron was puttering by.

I remember the American Airlines “Inter-Island” Convair 440s. Those too were piston-powered, precursors to the American Eagle turboprops and regional jets that would later serve San Juan. I saw the old Jetstreams of Dorado Wings, an Air Haiti C-46 Commando, and any number of Douglas DC-3s, anonymous in dirty silver paint. I saw a DC-9 in the colors of BWIA, an Aviaco DC-8, an Iberia DC-10 coming in from Madrid, as well as my first Pan Am DC-10, a plane inherited during the merger with National Airlines earlier that year.

The highlight, though, had to be the Lockheed Constellation. It wore the red and white livery of Argo S.A., a Dominican freight outfit, with the registration HI-328. I watched it take off and land at least three times, so it must have been shuttling back and forth. This was the only operating Constellation I ever saw, or ever would see. You can find several photographs of HI-328 online, where you’ll also learn that it crashed into the ocean near St. Thomas about a year later.

And that was my holiday.

On Sunday afternoon the skies cleared, just in time for our trip home. We took off in darkening twilight at around 4 p.m. Once again we were aboard an Eastern L-1011. This time we were upgraded to first class, a 2-2-2 cabin done up in fudge-brown leather.

We all have our ways of recalling our lives, our chronological cues. For me, the demarcations are so often those of airplanes, trips, and places visited.

I’m frustrated, though, by the selectiveness of memory. I can remember the registration I.D. of a particular airplane, which is cool (I think), but what I can’t remember is what sort of path I expected my life to actually take. What was I thinking? I wanted to become a pilot, that I knew. But I was such a lazy little shit of a kid, with no real idea of how to make that — or anything else — happen; how the steps towards that goal were actually my responsibility. Something, somebody, would take care of it for me, I assumed. It would all just work itself out.

I think I became a pilot in spite of my love for aviation, not because of it. I got lucky.

On Monday, December 8th, I was back in class at St. John’s Prep School, where I was a moody misfit freshman with no friends. Nobody believed I’d been to Puerto Rico, because I didn’t have a tan.

 

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November 18, 2024

ON NOVEMBER 12, 2001, two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, American Airlines flight 587 went down after takeoff from Kennedy Airport in New York. The Airbus A300-600 slammed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, killing all 260 people on board, plus five others on the ground. This was, and remains, the second-deadliest airline accident ever to happen on U.S. soil, after the American flight 191 disaster, in Chicago, in 1979.

It also was 23 years ago. More than two full decades have passed since the last major air disaster involving a U.S. carrier — the longest such streak by far.

I was impressed when we made it to five years; amazed when we made it to ten; shocked when we hit 15, then absolutely astonished when we got to twenty.

And still the streak goes on. We’ve grown accustomed to it. Even I have. This year, the November 12th anniversary slipped right past me. I’m publishing this post almost a week later, after an emailer reminded me of the date.

Tens of millions of Americans were born, raised, and reached adulthood in this 23-years span. Tens of millions more were children at the time of the 587 crash. My point being: a huge portion of citizens have no real memory of commercial aviation prior to the early 2000s. Fewer and fewer people realize just how common large-scale accidents once were, year after year after year, both globally and in the United States. More than twenty air disasters occurred in 1985 alone. In 1974, the U.S. major carriers recorded five crashes, including two within three days of each other.

Training, technology, and regulation have all had big roles in what changed. So has luck, and it hardly needs saying that our streak at some point will end. Maybe in five months, maybe in five years, maybe tomorrow.

I have no idea what might cause the next big crash — who or what will be to blame. What I do know is that the ensuing media frenzy will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen. This is both because and in spite of how rare crashes have become. The smallest aviation mishap these days generates a remarkable amount of buzz, to the point where aviation is perceived to be a lot more unsafe than it actually is. I can’t imagine what the reaction would be — and will be — with a death toll in the dozens or hundreds.

Fifty years ago, in 1973, a Delta DC-9 crashed into the seawall at Boston’s Logan International Airport, killing 89 people. The incident barely made the front page of the New York Times, running below the fold, under an article about transit bonds.

 

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November 3, 2024

THE OTHER DAY I flew an overtime trip. It was four days long. I spent the morning of day one at home, departing in the afternoon. I was on the road for the next two days, then home again by 6 p.m. on day four.

Over that span, I earned more money than I earned in an entire year at my first airline job.

You read correctly: I made in four days what I made in twelve months flying for Northwest Airlink in 1990. That’s not an exaggeration.

Neither is it a boast, or a humblebrag, or a means of suggesting pilots at the major carriers are overpaid. What it underscores, instead, is just how awful it was to work at the regional airlines in the 1990s. Starting salaries were typically under $15,000 a year, and many regionals required pilots to pay for their own training.

The early ’90s were a long time ago, sure. But not that long ago. You can adjust for inflation all you want; the pay was ridiculous, with hostile working conditions to boot.

Luckily that’s not true anymore. The changes were a long time coming, but they came. The prospect of slogging it out for poverty-level wages at shitty companies drove thousands out of the business and scared away an entire generation of would-be aviators. A pilot shortage (surprise!) eventually left the regionals with no choice but to vastly improve pay and benefits.

And so, today, even entry level flyers can make six-figure incomes.

The justification for the lousy pay was always one of thin margins. The regionals made so little, we were told, they simply couldn’t afford to pay their workers beyond a bare minimum. Except now they somehow can, even as airfares have come down. Makes you think.

Salaries at the majors are much improved also, at least compared to the doldrums of the early 2000s. When I came back from furlough in 2007, after five years on the street, sixth-year pay on a Boeing 767 was just over $80 per flight hour (figure 75 or 80 pay-hours in a month). Nowadays you can earn that much flying copilot on a regional jet.

Those of you who remember my column on the website Salon, which ran from 2002 until 2012, will recall my frequent griping about how little pilots were paid. Things are different now.

These changes are fantastic for those starting out. I, on the other hand, was born about thirty years too early. It’s not that I make a bad living by any stretch. It just took a long, long time.

 

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THE RIGHT SEAT

Paper airplane photo by the author.

November 1, 2024

Forgive me for being morbid, but did you know that no fewer than six major airline crashes occurred on Halloween?

That’s right, six.

Ranked chronologically, they go like this…

1. On Halloween morning, 1979, Western Airlines Flight 2605 crashed in Mexico City killing 73 people. The crew attempted to land on a closed runway in the fog. The DC-10 hit a truck, then careened into a building.

2. On the night of October 31, 1994, American Eagle Flight 4184 went down near Roselawn, Indiana killing all 68 passengers and crew. Investigators found that a design flaw allowed ice accretion to cause an uncommanded aileron reversal, which threw the ATR-72 into an unrecoverable dive. The plane’s de-icing system was redesigned.

3. Two years later the day, TAM flight 402 crashed after takeoff from São Paulo, Brazil, after a thrust reverser deployed during climb. All 99 people aboard the Fokker 100 jetliner were killed.

4. Exactly three years later, EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic near Nantucket, killing 217. Investigators determined that the first officer intentionally crashed the Boeing 767.

5. On Halloween night, 2000, the crew of Singapore Airlines Flight 006 attempted takeoff on a closed runway in Taipei, Taiwan. The Boeing 747 collided with construction equipment and burst into flames. Eighty-three of the plane’s 179 occupants died.

6. On October 31, 2015, Metrojet flight 9268, a Russian charter flight heading from Sharm El Sheihk, Egypt, to St. Petersburng, was destroyed by a bomb after takeoff. All 224 passengers and crew on the Airbus A321 were killed. It is believed the bomb was planted by operatives of the Islamic State group.

 

There you have it. There can’t possibly be a calendar day with a record worse than October 31.

There’s nothing going on here other than chance, of course. Bad luck is bad luck. Still it’s peculiar. I’m not normally superstitious, but can you find any patterns?

I had this to mull over on Halloween night, flying a 767 to Europe.

 

Border Crossing Conundrums for Travelers

October 23, 2024

 

Port au Prince, Haiti, 1999

“Sorry, it’s too dangerous,” says the driver.

To the best of my knowledge and experience, Port-au-Prince is the only place in the world this side of eastern Ukraine where a cabbie will refuse a twenty-dollar bill to take an American into town for a quick drive-through tour.

With nothing else to do I wander the apron. Behind our dormant jet a row of scarred, treeless hills bakes in the noon heat, raped of their wood and foliage by a million hungry Haitians. The island of Hispaniola is shared in an east-west split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the border between these countries is one of the few national demarcations clearly visible from 35,000 feet — the Dominican’s green tropical carpet abutting a Haitian deathscape of denuded hillsides the color of sawdust.

In front of the terminal, men ride by on donkeys and women balance baskets atop their heads. Somebody has started a cooking fire on the sidewalk. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and there’s more squalor along the airport perimeter than you’d see in the most run-down parts of Africa.

I notice a pair of large white drums being unloaded from our airplane. I ask a loader if he knows what the barrels contain, wondering what sort of nasty hazmat we’d just brought in. A forklift carries them to a corner of a ramshackle warehouse, and three skinny helpers pry off the heavy plastic lids. What’s revealed is a tangled white mass of what appears to be string cheese floating in water. A vague, quiveringly rotten smell rises from the liquid.

The forklift driver sticks in his hand and gives the ugly congealment a churn. “For sausage,” he answers. What we’re looking at, it turns out, is a barrel full of intestines — casings bound for some horrible Haitian factory to be stuffed with meat. Why the casings need to be imported while the meat itself is apparently on hand, I can’t say, but somebody found it necessary to pay the shipping costs and customs duties to fly a hundred gallons of intestines from Miami to Port-au-Prince.

 

THE SEGMENT ABOVE is from a book I’ve been pretending to write. It describes an afternoon several years ago, when I was a cargo pilot for DHL. The setting is the Port au Prince airport in Haiti — a country I’ve never been to.

Oh sure, I’ve flown into to the Port au Prince airport once or twice. But just the same, so far as I’m concerned, seeing that I never set foot outside the terminal, I have not been to Haiti.

The issue here is what, exactly, constitutes a visit to another country. Making that determination can be tricky, and those who travel a lot will sometimes wrestle with this quandary. When your plane stops for refueling or you spend the evening at an airport hotel… does that count?

Where to draw the line is ultimately up to the traveler; it’s more about “feel” than any technical definition of a border crossing. But there should be a certain, if ineffable standard — something along the lines of that you-know-it-when-you-see-it definition of pornography.

According to my own criteria, a passport stamp alone doesn’t cut it. At the very least, a person must spend a token amount of time — though not necessarily an overnight — beyond the airport and its environs. On the pin-studded map that hangs in the dining room of my apartment, there is no pin for Haiti.

Other cases, though, are more subjective. For instance, traveling once between Germany and Hungary, I spent several hours riding a train through Austria. We pulled into Vienna in the middle of the night and sat for six hours. At sunrise we headed out again, trundling across the Austrian countryside toward Budapest. Certain people might consider that enough, but as with Haiti there’s no Austria pin on my map. I saw towns, cars, people… but all through the window of a train, never touching soil. Doesn’t count.

On the other hand, I have been to Liberia. I used to fly a regular route there from Accra, Ghana, and our flights would lay over for a few hours at Liberia’s international airport, known as Roberts Field. One time I hired a driver to take us out for a mini-tour of the nearby area. We never spent the night, but I walked through villages, saw people, took pictures. Liberia gets a pin.

As does Qatar, though I spent a mere three hours in Doha, driving around at night, between flights, on a tour provided by Qatar Airways.

Sometimes the country itself is what muddles things up. Consider the world’s various territories, protectorates, self-governing autonomous regions, occupied lands and quasi-independent nations. Yeah, I know, Vatican City is a sovereign state, politically speaking. But in practical terms, is it really? When I tally up the countries I’ve visited, I can’t bring myself to include it.

And let’s not begin to assess the countless atolls, archipelagos, and assorted tiny islands scattered throughout the oceans. If a citizen of Japan visits Guam, has he been to the United States? In one sense, sure. In another, perhaps more accurate sense, he’s simply been to Guam — neither genuine U.S. turf nor a country unto itself. You can make a similar argument with Bermuda, Tahiti, and elsewhere. And let’s not get started with Tibet, or Palestine. Sometimes, maybe, there is no country.

Together these things can make it impossible to provide a wholly accurate answer when asked how many countries you’ve traveled to. It depends. For me the number is ninety-eight. Or thereabouts.

Of course, that’s only important if you’re the sort who keeps track of such things. Travelers are known to hold “passport parties” upon reaching certain milestones – a 50th, 75th, or 100th country. In the eyes of some, country-counting cheapens the act of travel by emphasizing quantity over quality, but maybe that’s sour grapes.

 

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

A version of this post originally appeared in the magazine Salon.