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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LASERS, LASERS, EVERYWHERE

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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MY LIFE LIST

 

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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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AMERICA’S DEADLIEST AIR DISASTER, 40 YEARS LATER

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.

June 20, 2016

I’M OLD ENOUGH to remember when people dressed up to fly. I remember my dad putting on a tie before we left for the airport. And that was on a trip to Florida, of all places, as recently as the early 1980s.

One of the reasons that people once took flying so seriously is that so few of them had the means to partake in it. Not all that long ago, only a fraction of the population could afford to fly on a regular basis. When I was in junior high, in the late ’70s, maybe a third of my classmates had ever been in an airplane. Even into high school I frequently met other kids who’d never flown. Flying today is far cheaper than it used to be. As a result, almost everybody does it.

And as the demographics have changed, so have the levels of behavior. This we’d expect. With nearly four million people flying every day of the week, across every strata of culture and class, standards of decorum were bound to fall. That’s fine, and I don’t mean to sound snobbish. Maintaining simple dignity doesn’t require anything too formal. I have no problem, for example, with people wearing shorts and sandals onto a plane.

But there comes a point, and what I do have a problem with is when otherwise reasonable protocols of civility, manners and courtesy cease to apply. What is it? Is it the stress? Is it the contempt people harbor for the airlines? Whatever the causes, flying has a way of bringing out the worst in people.

I’ve never been privy to a full-blown “air rage” incident, but I’ve witnessed countless instances of shameful behavior: passengers cursing at airline staff; stealing from the liquor carts; leaving diapers in seat pockets; etc. It tends to be small-scale stuff — rudeness and a lack of elementary courtesy — rather than anything violent or overtly hostile, but that doesn’t excuse it. Why, for example, do so many airline passengers find it acceptable to throw garbage and food all over the cabin floor, then mash it into the carpeting with their feet? You don’t do this in a restaurant. Why is it okay on an airplane?

Here’s some of what I’ve seen just in the last few months…

I am at the airport in Dubai one early morning, waiting to catch an Emirates flight to Boston. I’m sitting in the boarding lounge when I hear a strange noise coming from behind me. Snip, snip snip, click, click, click.

I turn around, and what do I see? The guy directly behind me — a young guy in his twenties — is sitting cross-legged in his chair. Both of this feet are naked, and he is clipping his toenails. With every snip and click he splits away another crescent of nail, which he drops into a growing pile next to his left knee.

Would you take off your socks and start clipping your toenails in a movie theater? In the waiting room at your dentist? Most people would feel uneasy doing it in the woods, never mind at an airport boarding lounge in front of three-hundred people. And while I don’t want to watch, I feel that I have to. Because I need to know what he’s going to do with that big, disgusting pile of trimmings once our flight begins to board. Is he going to collect them up and carry them to the trash? Or will he brush them to the floor?

What do you think he does?

On another occasion I am at Kennedy Airport, in terminal four. A woman and her young daughter are sitting on a bench-seat along the edge of the corridor. The daughter is four, maybe five years old, and she’s holding a tall plastic cup brimming with round, colored candies. They’re marble-shaped candies, possibly peanut M&Ms. All at once, with no warning, the girl flings the cup onto the floor. It’s an impressive spectacle, I have to say, as hundreds of tiny orbs go clattering across the carpet, coming to rest in a great fan of color. People turn and stare.

And what does the woman do? She stands up, takes the girl by the hand, and the two of them walk silently away, leaving the entire mess — even the plastic cup — sitting there for some unfortunate janitorial worker to sweep up.

Meanwhile, people are kicked off planes all the time for acting, and even dressing, obnoxiously. In Boston recently, jetBlue denied boarding to a young woman because they felt her shorts were too revealing. Apparently, though, a t-shirt emblazoned with the words FUCK LOVE in huge block letters is within the boundaries of decency?

I’m not a prude. Nonetheless I’m dying to understand when and how this sort of thing become acceptable. And I’m imagining this same attire in a different context: In the bleachers at a baseball game, for instance. Would that be okay? Would the guy be asked to leave? Wouldn’t he be harassed by parents who’d brought their kids along? There are plenty of little kids at airports, so why is it different? And which is more troubling, the fact that he’s being accommodated, or the fact that somebody rude enough to put on a shirt like that exists in the first place?

Next we have Ms. Stinkytoes, luxuriating in her Emirates first class suite. She shows us that boorishness these days isn’t merely for the louts in steerage. Are these the same people who buy elephant ivory and rhinoceros horns? And the privacy of her suite is no excuse (couldn’t she at least have closed the doors?). Maybe I’m overreacting to this one, but how is this any more appropriate that resting one’s bare and splayed toes on a restaurant table? This is still, for all intents and purposes, a public place, and somebody else is going to be occupying that cubicle a few hours from now. And for crying out loud, they give you socks and slippers!

 
Photos by the author.

Presidents, Planes, and Pilot Black Magic. Is This How Donald Trump Won?

Update: November 5, 2024

It would’ve been fun to know that New Day Rising, or Sorry, Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, might be blasting through the halls of power in Washington. But oh well. It’s a wrap. And my streak goes on.

Eight candidates. It’s a little creepy, no?

I need to harness these powers for profit.

 

November 5, 2024

I’VE MET THREE PRESIDENTS. None of them American presidents, but presidents nevertheless.

The first of them was John Atta Mills, the semi-beloved leader of Ghana. Mills died in 2012, but during his tenure, he and his entourage had ridden aboard my airplane at least twice, traveling to or from Accra, the Ghanaian capital.

If you think that’s vaguely impressive, I also had the honor of meeting and flying the President of Guyana, Bharat Jagdeo, two or three times. (Contrary to what my father and others seem to think, Ghana and Guyana are in fact different countries, on different continents, with different presidents.)

Third on the list is Ellen Johnson Sirlief, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the President of Liberia. I met her four times, including once at a reception at Roberts Field near Monrovia. On one of those occasions I asked if she’d be kind enough to sign a copy of our flight plan. She obliged, adding her name in green ink at the bottom of the dot-matrix printout.

Things have worked out pretty well for me, I think. Years ago, when I was puttering around over Plum Island sweating to death in some noisy old Cessna, the idea that one day I’d be be carrying presidents in the back of my plane would have struck me as ludicrous.

There is, however, a dark side to my brushes with politicians. And if you’re planning to run for office, you might do well to keep your distance.

What am I talking about? Here are six vignettes, true stories all. Try to figure it out:

One day in 1980 I’m at Boston’s Logan airport, plane-spotting with a pair of my junior high pals. Who disembarks from a TWA plane only a few feet in front of us but Jerry Brown, then-governor (and, yes, governor again!) of California. In addition to his gubernatorial prowess, Mr. Brown, a.k.a. “Governor Moonbeam,” is known for his dabbling in Buddhism, his long liaison with Linda Ronstadt, and his appearance in one of the most famous punk rock songs — the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles.”

Four years later, the late senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts speaks at my high school graduation (St. John’s Prep in Danvers, Massachusetts).

Six years after that, on a Sunday morning in 1990, I’m standing at Teterboro Airport, a busy general aviation field in New Jersey, close to New York City. A private jet pulls up. The stairs come down, and out steps Jesse Jackson and a phalanx of burly bodyguards. Jackson walks into the terminal, passing me by inches.

The following summer I’m back at Logan, using a payphone in Terminal E. Suddenly Ted Kennedy is standing at the phone next to me, placing a call. (Quaint, I know, in this age of wireless, but there’s the famous Senator, slipping dimes into the slot.) I’m talking to a friend, and I surreptitiously hold up the receiver. “Listen,” I say, “whose voice is this?”

“Sounds like Ted Kennedy,” she reckons. And it is.

Next, it’s 1994, at Logan again, and I’m in the captain’s seat of a Northwest Airlink 19-seater, preparing for departure to Baltimore. Up the front stairs comes Michael Dukakis. He stops briefly behind the cockpit and says hello.

Later, in the late spring of that same year, Vice President Al Gore is making the commencement speech at Harvard University, close to my Cambridge apartment. I’m passing through Harvard Yard, and there’s the V.P., his wife Tipper, and his two blonde daughters shaking hands with a line of admirers. I join the line.

So, my question is: what is it that makes those six encounters collectively significant? Think about it. Each has something in common. Or, more correctly, two things. What are they?

While you’re mulling it over, I’ll give you the longer versions of my run-ins with Dukakis and Gore:

After we land in Baltimore, Dukakis thanks us for the ride and remarks, “Not a lot of room in here.” Even at 5’8″ he’s right about that. The Metroliner’s skinny, tubular fuselage earned it the nickname “lawn dart.”

“Yeah,” I answer, “It’s not exactly Air Force One.”

Meanwhile, intentionally or otherwise, the Duke has left a huge sheaf of important-looking papers in his seat pocket — probably because he’s run to a phone to cuss out his secretary for booking him on that stupid little plane with the annoying pilot. I carry the papers inside to the agent. “Here,” I say. “These belong to Mike Dukakis.” She looks at me like I’m crazy.

The day that I met Al Gore was sunny and humid. It was one of those days when I’d ride my mountain bike aimlessly around my neighborhood, hoping to meet a girl or maybe find a bag of money on the sidewalk. I never had much luck on those counts, but then I’d never run into a Vice President either.

I come down Broadway, then up Kirkland Street to the corner of Harvard Yard. The graduation ceremonies have just ended, and Gore — his family and a handful of Secret Service men in tow — have come through a gate and are walking toward the concrete plaza in front of the Science Center. I lock up my bike and follow them.

A crowd of about 50 people quickly gathers. Those of us in front form a straight row, and Gore comes down the line to shake our hands. He’s a Harvard graduate, and most of those around me are Harvard alum, or the parents and families of graduating seniors. People are introducing themselves with lines like, “Charles Tipton-Dune, sir, class of ’68. It’s an honor to meet you.” And Al says, “It’s a pleasure.”

As he approaches me, it’s my plan to say, “Patrick Smith, sir, class of ’88” (a total fabrication, but I’m feeling left out). Instead, I get nervous and do something a lot more idiotic. So idiotic, in fact, that to this day it makes my skin burn with embarrassment when I remember it.

My turn comes, and I look up at Al Gore, the Vice President of the United States of America. I stick out my hand and I say: “How ya doin’?”

Bear in mind, too, that I’m wearing shorts and a ratty old Husker Du t-shirt, surrounded by people in suits and gowns. I’m sweaty from bicycling. Gore shakes my hand and looks at me, a bit crookedly, no doubt wondering if I’m not some protégé of John Hinckley or Squeaky Frome.

“Great,” he answers. “How you doin’?”

After that I break from the crowd and go over to the black limousine parked on the plaza. This is Gore’s car, an ’80s-model Cadillac that looks like the cars of my Sicilian neighbors when I was a kid growing up in Revere. The tinting is peeling from several of the windows. It surprises me that such an important person is asked to ride around in such a shitty car. The Secret Service men inside eye me lazily. They wear sunglasses and have coiled wires sticking from their ears. They don’t seem particularly concerned with my loitering, and I nod to the guy in the driver’s seat. How ya doin’?

Right, okay, so back to my riddle. What do Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas, Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Mike Dukakis and Al Gore all have in common, in addition to crossing paths with yours truly?

The answer, of course, is that all six were Democrats who ran for President. And all six, whether it was the party nomination or general election, lost.

That’s pretty uncanny if you think about it. Six – six! – Democrats who ran and failed. Six losers and me.

Or is it seven? If we consider degrees of separation, I can maybe take responsibility for the election of Donald Trump in 2016 as well. That’s because, in 2012, I shared a shuttle flight from New York to Boston with Chelsea Clinton. She and her husband were sitting just a few rows ahead of me. At one point I was taking something down from the overhead locker when she passed me in the aisle. I was in her way and had to move aside. “Sorry,” I said. “Excuse me,”

“Thanks,” said Chelsea Clinton. And four years later, her mother would run for President and fall short. I don’t know if my curse is contagious among family members, but it felt like a weird coincidence.

And what’s my reason for dredging all of this up? Well, the U.S. Presidential election is happening as we speak, and know this:

A few years ago I was on a layover in San Francisco. It was the day of the annual Pride Parade, which I found myself watching from a street corner at the foot of my hotel. Floats and cars burbled past, their occupants calling and waving: corporate contingents, local pols, VIPs. One of those cars was a festively adorned convertible. And in the back seat, waving to the crowd, sat, you guessed it, Kamala Harris.

Have I struck again? Number eight?

If you’re rooting for Harris to prevail, I’m sorry, but I can’t un-see what I saw. If there’s a means of reversing these dark powers of serendipity, I don’t know what it is.

What’s more is that about six months ago I saw Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, at Washington-Reagan Airport. He stepped off a plane and walked past me, maybe fifteen feet away, accompanied by three or four Secret Service agents.

And no, I have never seen or met a Republican candidate (or their spouses or offspring) for President. Whatever dreary karma I’m lugging around, it’s viciously partisan. If the Republicans were smart, they’d hire me and shuttle me around to their opponents’ rallies.

I should also mention that I once saw James Carville, the famous political consultant and “Democrat strategist,” going through TSA security at La Guardia. That was about fifteen years ago. It can’t explain my earlier encounters, but maybe Carville caught whiff of my bad juju and passed it along to the candidates I saw later.

As I type this it’s 6 p.m. on election night. We’ll find out very soon if the streak continues.

 

Related Story:

DONALD TRUMP WANTS TO REPAINT AIR FORCE ONE.

An older version of this story appeared in the online magazine Salon.

September 23, 2024

I FOUND THIS LIST, over at The Atlantic, published back in 2015: What Was the Most Significant Airplane Flight in History? A roll call of aviation luminaries, myself not included, was invited to weigh in.

The Enola Gay, bound for Hiroshima, that’s a heavy one. And from my fellow blogger Christine Negroni: “In 1914, Abram Pheil became the very first passenger on the very first passenger flight, a 23-minute trip from St. Petersburg, Florida to Tampa. Like the 12-second flight of the Wright Brothers eleven years earlier, his brief time in the air has had an enormous impact on the world.”

It’s hard to argue with her. But some of the other entries, I don’t know. D.B. Cooper, come on. Lindbergh’s solo crossing? Nah. Of course, there’s no right or wrong answer. The idea of lists like these is to draw from different perspectives.

Had I been asked, my entry for history’s most significant flight would be Pan Am’s inaugural of the Boeing 747 in 1970.

Pan Am’s Clipper Victor kicked things off between New York and London on January 21st, about six months after the success of Apollo 11. Why this flight? Well, if we broaden this conversation to planes generally, rather than specific flights, we have to rank the Boeing 747 as the most influential aircraft of all time. The industry’s first-ever widebody, it ushered in the concept of affordable long-haul flying, changing global travel as we knew it — and know it still — perhaps more than any other invention.

Plus, it was a gorgeous design. In a production run lasting more than fifty years, Boeing would sell more than a thousand of them.

(Ironically the Victor was the very same 747 destroyed at Tenerife in 1977, in history’s worst aviation disaster. Remarkably, this single aircraft was involved in two of the most historic flights of all time, one celebratory and the other catastrophic.)

Runner up, for influence if not aesthetics, would be the Douglas DC-3.

Rolled out in 1935, the DC-3 wasn’t really the first of anything, but it perfected the evolution of the all-metal passenger transport to become the first truly profitable and mass-produced airliner. So many thousands of DC-3s were built, in civilian and military versions, both in the U.S. and under license abroad, that nobody knows for sure the actual count.

As late as the 1960s more than a thousand DC-3s were still in airline service. Today every passenger plane, from a ten-seater to the 787, bears a debt to this antique piston twin.

Much the same way, Boeing’s four-engined 707 revolutionized air travel forever.

The 707 was third in jetliner chronology — the star-crossed de Havilland Comet and the Soviet Union’s Tu-104 copycat came before it — but it was faster, with greater range and more seats, taking the Comet’s ill fortune and turning it into gold, safely crossing oceans and continents at twice the speed of mainstay propliners.

When, in 1958, Pan Am launched the 707 between New York and Paris (just like Lindbergh), the jet age truly was born. A year later American Airlines inaugurated transcon 707 nonstops between New York and Los Angeles. The poet Carl Sandburg was aboard.

Yes, well, sorry to some of you who’d lobby for something flashier. The Concorde, I know, makes a prettier icon than the 707 or a DC-3. But while sexy and famous, it proved little beyond the non-viability of the SST concept. Perhaps when hydrogen replaces kerosene this category will be reborn.

 

Photo Credits:

Lufthansa 747 by the author.
Pan Am 747 courtesy of Pan Am Historical Foundation.
DC-3 courtesy of Unsplash.
707 by Boeing, public domain.
707 thumbnail from the author’s postcard collection.