When Culture and Air Travel Intersect

Crossovers. That’s my name for those moments when history, culture, art or politics intersect unexpectedly with commercial aviation. They underscore the many ways, not always recognized, that air travel touches our lives.

This will be an ongoing series. I’ll add to it as opportunities come up.

— NEW: AEROPOLITICS

This one speaks for itself. A 767 of El Al, the Israeli carrier, buddy-buddy with an Iran Air 747 at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport. I took this photo a decade ago, but the theme couldn’t be more timely.

Was this by accident, do you think, or were the authorities at BKK pushing for a sort of tarmac detente?

It’s hard to imagine, but in the days before the revolution in Iran, El Al flew scheduled service between Tel Aviv and Tehran. Iran Air had routes from New York to Tehran via London and Paris. Somewhere in a box is a picture of an Iran Air 747 that I took at Kennedy Airport in 1979, using an old Kodak Instamatic, from the rooftop parking lot of terminal 3.

Photo by the author

— HISTORY IN BLUE

This mural is in Portugal, near the city of Aveiro. Put up in the 1960s, during the glory days of Pan Am, it remains mostly intact. What makes it special is that it’s constructed using azulejos — the traditional, blue and white glazed tiles seen all over Portugal.

A similar Pan Am billboard can be found on a hillside above the Portuguese town of Leiria. Whether they’re actual azulejos or just painted to look that way I’m not sure. Either way it’s impressive, and Pan Am’s signature colors lend themselves nicely to the azulejo style. To think that so much effort and style was once put into an airline advertisement.

If you’re ever in Lisbon, be sure to visit the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, also known by its boring English name, the Tile Museum. It’s one of the city’s lesser known attractions, but home to one of the world’s largest ceramics collections, full of beautiful murals and mosaics.

Photo by Rui Vaz, courtesy of the Pan Am Historical Foundation.

— TAIL TALE

If you’ve followed the MH370 saga, you’ve no doubt grown familiar with the Malaysia Airlines logo. It’s seen all the time in news posts and articles. What you might assume is a meaningless abstract branding tool is in fact a cultural emblem: the logo uses the shape of an indigenous Malaysian kite known as the wau bulan, or moon kite.

True story: In 1993 I was in the city of Kota Bahru, a conservative Islamic town in northern Malaysia close to the Thai border, when we saw a group of little kids flying wau kites. At the time I didn’t realize where the airline’s logo had come from, but I recognized the pattern immediately. It was one of those crossover moments we aerophiles really savor.

Malaysia Airlines was formed in the early 1970s after its predecessor, Malaysia-Singapore Airlines (MSA), split to become Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines. Both carriers are renowned for their service, and cabin crews of both airlines wear the iconic, floral-pattern Sarong Kabaya batik — an adaptation of the traditional Malay kebaya blouse.

April 11, 2024

THE PHOTO ABOVE was taken in Boston, a week or so ago in the newly expanded section of terminal E.

The plane is an Airbus A340. But what’s important is that yellow box. See it, along the right edge of the main boarding door? Any guesses what it’s for?

Turns out it’s a sort of dry-erase board — an empty placard onto which crewmembers can write greetings to the passengers. “Welcome aboard,” and that kind of thing. Maybe everyone signs their names, or someone draws a whimsical sketch of mountains or a palm tree, depending where you’re off to. On the interwebs you can see reels and photos of flight crews getting creative.

Things like this restore my faith in commercial aviation. It’s one of those personal, friendly little touches that customers remember. And it costs virtually nothing. (It’s bloggable too, and good for publicity.) Airlines need to think like this more often.

So good on Lufthansa.

And good on me. Because I thought of it first.

I once concocted my own version, from a template I’d made on my computer. I’d print out a sheet of paper, with my airline’s logo and the standard “Welcome Aboard” at the top. I’d write in the pilots’ names, the flight number, and the expected flight time. Then at the bottom I’d sketch a small pictorial of the arrival weather: a sun, for instance, or a raincloud, and next to it the temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit (these were usually international flights). Using masking tape, I’d affix the piece of paper to the same spot where Lufthansa’s yellow rectangle is.

It was a pleasant way of saying hello, I thought, and gave customers something to look at while bottlenecked at the end of the jetway.

Not everyone agreed, however, which is why I gave the practice up. More than once I was chewed out by flight attendants, who claimed that people were pausing to read the sign, which meant it took longer to board. Other times, pilots I was flying with took issue with their names being shared.

Whether or not these objections were justified, I stopped doing it. Which made me feel nostalgic, and a bit resentful, when I learned about Lufthansa.

But, I don’t know, maybe it’s best that I stopped. The geek factor was, I admit, a little heavy. Walking past that Lufthansa jet, I pointed out the yellow block to one of my colleagues, and told him how I’d once improvised the same idea using paper and tape. He shot me a puzzled look. “You did what?”

Try to forgive me. I was back from a five-year furlough and excited to be flying again.

Litter. Litter would have been a valid gripe. I didn’t always remember to take down the sheets before the door was closed. And, no, they were never still attached when we landed. More than a few of my homemade greetings have long ago disintegrated into Jamaica Bay, no doubt, or found their way into airport storm drains.

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

March 28, 2024

I’M A SUCKER for a good wallopping view. And who isn’t? A view stirs the soul. It hits those hard-to-reach visceral notes in the way a simulation — a painting, say — can’t.

I’ve seen some spectacular ones: Machu Picchu on a clear day; Hong Kong from Victoria Peak; an unforgettable rainforest panorama from a canopy walk in Brunei; the fantastical mountains of Torres del Paine in Chile; and so on.

Sometimes, though, you want something easy, and that’s where hotel rooms come in. Here, the magic is presented to you, no effort required, to be savored from the comfort of your bed or balcony. It’s thrill and chill at the same time, both exciting and relaxing. I’ll take a three-star room with a view over a five-star room without one, any day.

I spend over a quarter of my life in hotels, at work or on vacation, so I’ve had my share. They tend to be cityscapes, mostly. My favorite of which, thus far, was a nighttime vista of Dubai from floor 60-something of the J.W. Marriott.

But urban panoramas get redundant after a while. It’s the greener settings I prefer. Mountains, oceans, forests. For instance, watching the sun come up over the Serengeti, from a tent at the Ole Serai safari lodge in Tanzania.

And I remember a place in Ecuador, overlooking a valley. It was a hacienda-style hotel perched at the top of a mountain. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out over the town, more than a thousand feet below. And it wasn’t a gradual or tapered descent; this was straight down, a sheer vertical drop. Was it Otavalo, maybe? Or Baños? It was twenty-five years ago and memory fails me. A dig through an old Lonely Planet guide is no help either.

Which is too bad, because the room was incredible. You could sit and watch the clouds sweeping past, below you. Standing outside, the atmosphere made a hissing noise. It was, best I could tell, the sound of the clouds condensing. I have no idea of this is even possible, but I swear those clouds made a noise as they billowed by.

Nothing would ever beat that view, I thought.

And nothing did, until just a few weeks ago, when I stayed at the Ladera Resort on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I’d broken the bank for a winter vacation, and while I expected the view to be special, judging from the online pics, I didn’t expect it to be this special. Stepping into the room, I actually laughed out loud.

It was one of those open-plan rooms with only three sides. The fourth side was a huge, unscreened balcony facing directly toward St. Lucia’s famous Pitons — a pair of party hat peaks, nearly three-thousand feet tall, that are part of an ancient caldera. The private pool was special enough, but it was the view — a sort of West Indies Machu Picchu — that stole the show.

That’s a custom of mine, by the way: immortalizing this or that gorgeous view with my ridiculous feet in the shot. Visit my Instagram stream and you’ll see others. Here’s a more pure version, sans toes.

Imagine feasting your eyes on that, dawn to dusk. I didn’t feel much like leaving the room.

So that’s the new number one. It was also the most expensive hotel room I’ve ever paid for, and to help assuage the guilt of having blown so much money, I think of it as compensation — a reward for all of the shitty and underwhelming views I’ve been stuck with over the years: all those times I’ve pulled back the curtain to behold a parking lot, an HVAC unit, an expanses of urban decay or, as Jonathan Richman put it, suburban bleakness. Heck, in Amsterdam one time I had a hotel room with no windows.

Meditating on the Pitons helps make up for what happened to me last summer at the Pullman hotel in Dakar, Senegal. I’d stayed in the Pullman many times, and my favorite thing about it was the view from the upper floors of the harbor and, in the distance, the famous (or infamous) Goree Island.

It had been several years since my last visit, and I was excited. But when I got to my room, a surprise was waiting. The top photo shows the view from my room in 2009. The lower photo shows almost the identical view in 2023. Speaks for itself. Progress or something.

The curved building with the triangular top is an old property that I once nicknamed “the Graham Greene Hotel,” because it reminds me of the sort of place where the famous novelist would have stayed, making journal entries in a sitting room with potted palms and a ceiling fan.

I was pleased to see it’s still there, and looks like it’s been renovated. The sight of that monolith, however, was devastating.

That’s nothing, though, compared to some other places. Allow me revisit a few…

I’ll add to this list as the misfortune presents itself.

(I need to confess, however, that the last photo isn’t mine. It was submitted by another pilot with whom I was commiserating on this topic.)

And don’t put too much stock in which particular hotels these are. Views can vary significantly room to room. A 40-th floor view from one side of a building might be a lot prettier than a third-floor view from another.

Maybe it’s ironic, meanwhile, to hear an airline pilot going on about views from the ground rather than those from aloft. So it goes, though. As regular flyers know, airplane scenery tends to be muted and indistinct. Altitude sucks away much of the grandeur. I’ve seen some amazing things — the glaciers of Greenland, the Sahara at dusk — but it’s mainly terra firma where the beauty is.

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR, except for “Newark Afternoon,” courtesy of Dave English.

March 19, 2024

TEN YEARS AGO this month, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The wreckage was never found.

There’s a solid chance the wreckage will never be found. That’s unfortunate, but there are clues to work with. And those clues have, over time, led me to believe that the plane was intentionally brought down by one of the pilots, most likely the captain, in an act of murder-suicide. It was ditched somewhere in the Indian Ocean — landed, if you will, on the surface of the sea — where it sank to to the bottom and rests today, undetected but mostly intact.

Early on, I was open to a number of theories popular at the time: fire, depressurization, and so on. Accidents. I’ve come around since then. My opinion is based on the evidence, both as it exists and, just as importantly, doesn’t exist.

If we assume an accident, we must also assume the plane crashed into the ocean. We know from electronic satellite “pings” that the jet continued on for some time after its last appearance on radar. Having suffered some catastrophic malfunction that rendered the crew dead or unconscious, the thinking goes, the plane continued on autopilot until running out of fuel, at which point the engines failed. Without pilots to control the glide, it plunged into the sea.

The problem with this idea is the absence of pieces. There is no way for a jetliner to crash “gently” into the ocean. A Boeing 777 in an out-of-control impact would have effectively disintegrated, producing tens of thousands of fragments: aircraft parts, human remains, luggage, and so on. Much of this debris would have sunk, but much would not have. Eventually, borne by currents, it would’ve washed up.

So why didn’t it?

A small number of pieces did come ashore, but that’s the thing: of the few parts recovered, almost all of them are consistent not with an out-of-control crash, but with a controlled and deliberate ditching. (Even the most textbook ditching at sea is going to cause serious damage and the likely shedding of parts.) The flaperon discovered in 2015 on Reunion Island, for example, and the trailing edge flap that washed up on Mauritius, both from the same wing.

The parts themselves are evidence enough; a thorough post-mortem on them reveals even more. The forensics are complicated, but they’re solid. Use your Google and check out the analysis by former Canadian crash investigator Larry Vance. These pieces tell a story.

For these particular parts to have been found, together with a complete absence of the myriad flotsam a full-on crash would have produced, is to me a smoking gun.

And thus, the biggest reason the submerged wreckage hasn’t been found is because the location of the search area has been based almost entirely on the fuel exhaustion theory. The search-zone calculations, extrapolating from the satellite pings, are based on when and where, approximately, the 777’s tanks would’ve run dry.

Except maybe the tanks didn’t run dry, and the plane went — was taken — somewhere else. What if that was the intent all along — to vanish?

Those pings are still important, and give us hints. Chances are the actual location of the wreckage isn’t far away. But it’s far enough away to have missed it.

I’ve been saying from the start that we should prepare for the possibility of the plane not being found. It happens this way sometimes. If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents. What makes this one different, maybe, is how we’ve come to expect easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything these days, with a fetishized belief that “technology,” whatever that means anymore, can answer any question and fix any problem.

Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. But all of that is fallible, one way or another.

Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean versus the comparative speck of a 777. It’s out there somewhere, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. We’ll probably never find it.

Related Story:
THE RIDDLE MAY NOT BE DEEP

Photos courtesy of Unsplash.

March 4, 2024

HERE’S THE perfect segue from last week’s post. If you missed it, we were talking about the hype and hyperbole that seem to follow every minor incident these days, a phenomenon that I blame, in part, on the dearth of legitimately serious accidents. It often feels as if flying is getting more dangerous, when statistically we’re safer than ever.

To wit, according to the annual report just released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) 2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history. Not a single fatal accident was recorded involving a commercial jet. Not one.

Combining jet and turboprop operations, IATA says there were 37 million commercial flights last year. Among those, the only deadly crash was that of an ATR turboprop in Nepal last January. If I’m counting right, this puts last year as the second-safest on record, bested only by 2017.

This is nothing if not astonishing. And to glean a sense of how astonishing, you need to flip through the history books. You need to look at the accident archives of the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, when multiple disasters were the norm, year after year after year.

For example, in 1985, twenty-seven major accidents killed almost 2,500 people. That included the JAL crash outside Tokyo with 520 fatalities; the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed 240 American servicemen, and the Air-India bombing over the North Atlantic with 329 dead.

In 1974 there were ten disasters, including the Turkish Airlines catastrophe outside Paris that killed 346 people. Among the other nine were two Pan Am 707s, two TWA jets (one of which was bombed), and an Eastern DC-9. That’s five U.S. legacy crashes in the same year. Eastern and TWA had crashes within three days of each other.

And so on. Those were particularly bad years, but you get the picture.

I’ve mentioned all of this before. Apologies to those who are sick of me talking about it. But it always bears repeating, because so few people really understand how safe flying has become.

How we got here is also something I’ve discussed in the past. It’s been a combination of things: better technologies, better training, and, believe it or not, better regulation and oversight. For more, see the links below.

And yes, luck has played a role as well. We closed out 2023 with a near-perfect record, but not without a few close calls. Which is what makes posts like this so frustrating. Because sooner or later our luck will run out; there will be another major crash, right here on U.S. soil. As good as we are, we’ll never be perfect. And when it happens, nobody is going to care how long it’s been since the last one. History won’t matter, perspective won’t matter, stats won’t matter. The result will be hysteria and a media firestorm like no other.

It’s precisely because of how rare crashes have become that we’re guaranteed to overreact to the next one. Which is both fair and unfair, I suppose.

Related Stories:

LUCKY AND GOOD
TWENTY YEARS AND COUNTING

Upper photo by Pedro Pinheiro
Center photo by Michael Saporito
Lower photo by the author

February 26, 2024

SO, LAST WEEK, a passenger videoed a damaged wing slat on a United Airlines flight headed from Denver to Boston. Learning of the problem, the crew conferred with its dispatch and maintenance team, and a decision was made to divert the Boeing 757 into Denver.

Copyright issues prevent me from re-posting videos or images, but you can easily Google it. The upper part of the slat, along the front of the wing, inboard of the right engine, appears shredded and chewed. it’s a composite material, and somehow it delaminated and fragmented. How, exactly, is unknown.

Well, no surprise, the pictures are all over media and social media — so much as those things are different nowadays — accompanied by a barrage of terrifying headlines: “Passenger Sees Wing Coming Apart.” “Passenger Horror as Wing Comes Apart.” And so on.

The wing, in fact, did not come part. What “came apart,” if we can call it that, is a portion of a slat. There are several slats per wing, sectioned along the leading edge. Like the trailing-edge flaps along the back of the wing, these devices are deployed in stages to increase lift at low speeds. You’ll see them extended during takeoff and landing, then retracted during cruise.

It’s a terrible look for sure, but the danger here was minimal. One small hazard might’ve been broken material striking the rear stabilizers. Worst case would’ve been the slat breaking apart further, or detaching completely, unlikely as that might be, but even this wouldn’t crash the plane, so long as the stabilizers or tail weren’t struck and badly damaged.

There may have been a discussion about whether or not to deploy the slats for landing. There’s no way to isolate a specific slat, so keeping the broken one retracted would’ve meant a “no flap landing,” where all of the high-lift devices, both flaps and slats, remain stowed. A jetliner can land just fine this way — it just needs to do so at a higher speed, requiring more runway.

A few months ago, due to a malfunction, a 757 I was piloting made a no-flap landing in Colombia. We came in fast, as our checklists dictated (I can’t recall the exact speed), and used about two-thirds of the runway, as our calculations told us to expect. But otherwise the landing was routine. In most ways, what happened to me was more serious than what the United pilots had to deal with, just not as photogenic and so it got no attention.

As it happened, the United pilots deployed the slats and flaps as they normally would, and the plane landed safely. To nobody’s surprise. Certainly not mine.

Segmented slats line the leading edge of a wing, shown here fully retracted. They are operated hydraulically.

I suspect the choice to divert was a practical one as much as anything. Denver is one of United’s biggest hubs, and the plane would need lengthy repairs; grounding it in Boston was going to trigger a cascade of logistical complications affecting hundreds of passengers. In Denver, an airplane swap could be handled expeditiously, with all the needed maintenance resources on site.

Nothing to fret about, all in all. But if the viewer comments on various media sites are any indication, the public is alarmed. “What’s going on in the skies these days?” Asks one reader, his sentiments echoing those of others. “Yet another close call.”

Not really. What’s actually happening is a matter of exposure. These sorts of minor incidents have always been with us. What’s different is the media environment in which they’re occurring. In the old days you never heard about them. Today, everything is photographed and everything is shared. The smallest mishap is on Instagram and other platforms within minutes, visible to millions. A landing gear problem; a compressor stall; a pressurization malfunction. The sky is falling.

Except it’s not. As I’ve talked about in prior articles, major airline disasters are far, far more uncommon today than they used to be. A dearth of them has led to us putting undue focus on relatively harmless incidents instead.

I’m unsure which is more to blame, social media or actual news sources. They seem to feed off one another, so maybe it’s a moot point.

The fact that the 757 is a Boeing model has only made things worse. Thanks to the controversies surrounding the 737 MAX, anything involving a Boeing jet now gets extra scrutiny, deserved or not. No matter that the 757 is a 42 year-old design with an excellent safety record. The B-word is what counts.

Let’s face it, everyone is looking for attention, for views and hits, be it FOX News or the Times or a 16 year-old Instagrammer. Few things, meanwhile, garner more attention or stoke more fear than plane crashes. The mere suggestion of one, realistic or not, is an automatic go-to for eyeballs. And so, here we are.

For more about slats, flaps, and the other doodads than help a plane fly, see chapter one of Cockpit Confidential.

Related Stories:

LUCKY AND GOOD
TWENTY YEARS AND COUNTING

Photos by Asato Hisada, courtesy of Unsplash.

February 9, 2024

So, earlier this week the U.S. Senate’s Commerce Committee shot down the move to increase the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 67. The measure lost by a single vote. Lawmakers succumbed to pressure from the Air Line Pilots Association, which spent months lobbying against the change.

The matter now goes to committee and there’s still a shot it could pass. But I wouldn’t count on it.

ALPA opposed the measure, but many of its constituents, including myself, did not. The union spun the whole thing as a safety issue, and warned of air travel becoming more “complicated” if it went through. The simpler truth is that ALPA has grown beholden to its younger members, who now comprise most of its membership, and who see raising the retirement age as an impediment to their career progression.

Which technically it would be, resulting in slower attrition, fewer upgrades and all that. But it’d be a small one. And these pilots too would have the opportunity to work an extra couple of years at the finale of their tenures, if they so choose.

For older hands like me, there’s resentment. Resentment because the luck and good fortune enjoyed by the newest generation of pilots cannot be overstated.

Entry-level salaries are the highest they’ve ever been. Even at the regional carriers, young pilots can bring in six figure salaries without much effort. Meanwhile at the majors, pilots are zooming up the seniority lists, with some getting captain slots before their 30th birthday. These pilots will be millionaires before age 40.

These same junior pilots skated through the COVID-19 fiasco without a hiccup. Thanks to taxpayer bailouts, they avoided furloughs and in some cases were paid nearly a full salary to simply stay at home for a year. Many took second jobs and collected two salaries.

For those of us of baby-boomer and Generation X vintage, such fortune is difficult to fathom.

In my day, regional pilots were making fifteen grand a year and paying for their own training. Most pilots didn’t make it to the majors until well into their 30s, if they made it at all. After slogging it out at the regionals and a cargo carrier for nine years, I was hired by a major carrier in the spring of 2000 at age 35. Starting pay at the time was around $30,000 a year.

Then came the industry crash in 2001, and thousands of us found ourselves laid off. Those who kept their jobs were hit with massive pay and benefit cuts and elimination of pensions as the airlines went through a cycle of chapter 11 bankruptcies.

My furlough lasted five years. When I finally went back to work in 2007, I was 40 years-old and my salary was about $65,000. That was sixth-year pay. And it was the most I’d ever made in my life.

While all that was going on, the retirement age was bumped from 60 to 65. You think two years is a drag chute on your career progression, try five. But we dealt with it, and now we too can work until that age.

Long and short, we have some catching up to do. Those two extra years would be a huge help. The money, the health benefits.

New-hires in 2024 are earning in their first one or two years what it took us a decade’s worth of seniority to make. Projected over a thirty or forty-year career, the earning potential for a pilot hired today is absurd. Adjust for inflation all you want; the differential over any length of time is huge.

Wars, recessions, and any of a dozen other calamities could set the industry reeling yet again, it’s true. But that doesn’t offset the tremendously good fortune the newest pilots are currently basking in. My peers and I faced those same risks, but without the front-end benefits of today’s generation. Things might go sour at some point, but if nothing else they’re making fantastic money in the meantime. For us that wasn’t the case.

The younger gang is having its cake and eating it too, frosting and all. Maybe it’s human nature; call it selfishenss or self-interest. If I were in their shoes, what would my vote be? Still it feels greedy, even petty, as one generation of pilots prevents its predecessors from making up lost ground.

Original Story:
DIGNIFIED AND OLD

Related Story:
THE REGIONAL RECKONING.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
Numbers graphic by the author.

January 8, 2024

POOR ALASKA Airlines. There they were, leisurely mulling the finer points of their merger with Hawaiian, wondering which visage to paint on the tail, when the 737 MAX-9 stole the show.

Pop went a fuselage plug on flight 1282, decompressing the jet and scaring the daylights out of everyone on board. The plane landed safely, but now a number of MAXes are grounded as regulators focus on attachment bolts.

The MAX can’t catch a break, either. This is the plane that spent two years on hiatus after the crashes of Lion Air flight 510 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, until its twice deadly stall-avoidance system was redesigned.

It looks bad, I know. Particularly for Boeing. But this is likely a lot more minor than the media spin suggests. I expect the plug attachments will get some sort of do-over and the planes will quickly be up and flying again.

A jetliner is pressurized so that its occupants can breathe without the need for supplemental oxygen. If the fuselage is breached, that squeezed-together air rushes out. The pilots will don oxygen masks and take the plane to a lower altitude in what we call, plainly enough, an “emergency descent.” The sensations of this drop might be alarming, but it’s an easy and straightforward maneuver.

Rarely are decompressions deadly. When they are, it’s usually because it happens explosively, such as when a bomb goes off, causing massive structural damage. In the Alaska incident, the big danger would’ve been the door plug colliding with the tail structure. But this didn’t happen, leaving the rest of it pretty routine.

I don’t mean to sound blithe, but it’s amusing how much attention this mishap is getting. One of the biggest news stories of the week is about a decompression in which nobody was killed or injured. The track record of the MAX, I figure, is part of the reason. A negligible malfunction, or a design flaw suggesting negligence? Let’s hope it’s not the latter, but either way, back in the Golden Age of Air Disasters, something like this would barely have made the papers.

Ironically, the amount of coverage we’re seeing serves to remind us of just how safe flying has become. In decades past, multiple airline crashes were the norm every year, with hundreds dead at a time. We’ve grown so accustomed to near-perfect safety that a minor event, without a single injury, wins as much attention in 2024 as a crash that killed two-hundred people would’ve gotten in the 1980s.

On the other hand, it’s better to be reading about a decompression than about a catastrophe. And it hardly needs saying that this could easily have been more serious. Had a passenger been sitting adjacent to that plug and not wearing a seatbelt, he or she would’ve been ejected. A hole opening up in the side of a plane, regardless of the reason, earns more than a shrug. Even more so if the problem is traced to a design defect or a quality control screw-up. People are skeptical, and let’s be honest, both Boeing and the 737 MAX deserve whatever scrutiny they’re getting.

I guess that’s the real, if obvious issue: It’s less about what happened than what could have happened. And will it happen again?

Incidents like this, and our focus on them, keep us on our toes. I get that. It’s a way of being proactive and careful, so that we maintain the levels of safety we’ve achieved.

UPDATES:

Some of you have wondered why section of the Alaska 737 that blew out was shaped like a door. The number of required doors depends on seating configuration. Alaska’s layout doesn’t mandate a door in this spot, so there’s a plug there instead, attached with bolts.

Meanwhile, a news outlet today asked me why, following the decompression, no announcement was made by the captain. It’s hard to know, but I imagine the cockpit crew was quite busy. There was an emergency descent to perform, as well as the necessary checklists, coordination with air traffic control, etc. Also the pilots would’ve been wearing oxygen masks, which makes communications more difficult.

It’s possible one of the pilots did make a PA but it wasn’t heard in the noise. Or, being as busy as I imagine they were, they may have relayed information to the flight attendants and left it up to them.

As a pilot I’ve experienced a handful of depressurizations over the years. One afternoon I was working a flight from South America to the United States when, high over the Caribbean, came a sudden whooshing sound that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere at once. I could feel my ears popping, and sure enough, a glance at the instruments showed we were quickly losing pressurization. The captain and I put our masks on, took out the book and began troubleshooting.

Part of that troubleshooting involved one of those steep descents. To the passengers I’m sure it
felt like a roller coaster, but everything was carefully coordinated. The autopilot was engaged the whole time, and no limits were exceeded.

Should a pressure loss occur over mountains or other high terrain, pilots will follow predetermined routes, sometimes called “escape routes,” that allow for a more gradual descent, in stages. Even if crossing the Andes or the Himalayas, there’s always the opportunity to reach a safe altitude before supplemental oxygen runs out.

Related Stories:

MARRIAGE MINDED: THE ALASKA-HAWAIIAN MERGER.
THE MAX IS BACK
THE AIRPLANE THAT ISN’T

Photos courtesy of Michael Saporito and Unsplash.

December 21, 2023

THE OTHER DAY I came in from overseas. At immigration I used the Global Entry line, as I normally do. The process was easy: a quick facial recognition scan and I was through.

Later I started wondering about that scan. Where did immigration authorities (CBP) get the biometric information used to identify me? I don’t recall signing over a scan of my face. Do you?

Not to sound paranoid, and I’m not saying we should object, necessarily. But the question is important: how do they know what we look like, and who gave them this data?

Maybe we did. It could happen when applying for a passport, and maybe a driver’s license too. It might be there in the fine print. (Those photos are awfully small, however. How much can be gleaned from them?)

Airlines, too, are beginning to use this technology to expedite boarding. Where did they get the data? If it came from those same passport or license pics, that would mean the government is sharing this information with airlines. Which is logical from a security perspective, but where is the line drawn? Does the government have the right to sell or share biometrics only with airlines, or with commercial entities in general? If so, which ones, and who gets to decide?

I don’t want this to topple into a worried rant over privacy and invasive technologies. There are enough of those out there already. Besides, it’s too late; the surveillance genie left the bottle a long time ago, and like it or not we’re stuck with the repercussions. But I’d like to know the answers.

Graphics courtesy of Unsplash and Getty Images

December 4, 2023

OVER THE WEEKEND, Alaska Airlines announced it will purchase Hawaiian Airlines for a reported $1.9 billion. If approved, the merger will form the nation’s fifth-largest carrier.

I find this interesting for a number of reasons — though probably not the ones most people are talking about. You can pop over to the other news and travel sites to learn about how this union does or doesn’t make sense, strategy-wise. You can read about loyalty programs, stock prices, and the alleged woes of yet more industry consolidation. My take is more fun:

Alaska and Hawaii. Our most geographically extreme states, numbers 49 and 50. One mammoth and frigid, the other small and tropical. They share a lot of traits: remoteness, mountains, indigenous people, whales.

Then we have the tails. Alaska and Hawaiian are the only carriers I know of whose liveries feature faces. One is a woman, the other a man. They stare longingly at one another across the vastness of the Pacific.

It’s romantic, no? They’ve been courting this merger all along, haven’t they? Thus we have a more literal marriage than are most mergers.

Both faces, by the way, are borrowed from real people.

The visage at Hawaiian is that of a woman named Leinaala Teruya Drummond. The former Miss Hawaii, she’s been up there since 1973. Ms. Drummon passed away in September at age 77.

Mr. Alaska’s history is a little less clear. What we know for sure is that he’s not Old Man Winter, Johnny Cash, an age-enhanced Che Guevara, or the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. He is an Eskimo. An Inuit. Though even the airline isn’t sure which one. They narrow him down to one of two native Alaskans: a reindeer herder from Kotzebue named Chester Seveck, or a man named Oliver Amouak, who appeared in an airline-sponsored “traveling stage show” in the 1950s.

Whichever is correct, he’s an iconic mascot and deserves to remain up there, in monochrome and smiling warmly in his parka.

For all of these reasons, I’m happy to hear that the plan is to keep both brands intact. Financially the carriers will be as one, but will operate independently under their own names. I suppose this makes sense. It’d be a little weird to have an entity called Alaska Airlines with a hub in Honolulu. Hawaii-Japan is one of Hawaiian’s busiest markets, and I imagine Japanese passengers in particular would find it baffling.

Of course, things like this have a way of changing. I wouldn’t be shocked if a year from now one of the two brands is subsumed or the carrier changes its name entirely. Pacific Airways, anyone?

Photo credits: Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines.