September 13, 2023

FRIDAY, September 15th, is Cloud Appreciation Day. There’s really such a thing, says the Cloud Appreciation Society. There’s such a thing as that, too.

Sure, why not? Who doesn’t like clouds?



Those three above are a spectacular example of cumulonimbus. Thunderstorms, in other words. These are the clouds aviators avoid. They’re picturesque, but as atmospherically unfriendly as clouds can be.

Any type of cumulus cloud — the white fluffy ones — generally indicates unstable air and turbulence of varying degrees. But while fair-weather cumulus are by and large harmless, cumulonimbus, with their tell-tale anvil tops pointing in the direction of travel, are a sort of supercharged cumulus. At their meanest they contain thunder, lightning, hail, and extreme turbulence. We stay clear of them.

Evidence thus far is mostly anecdotal, but it stands to reason that as global warming intensifies weather patterns, storms like these will likewise become stronger and more frequent.

Stratus clouds are the flatter, more uniform type associated with overcast skies. They tend to be smooth inside. But not always. Few things in aviation are always.

Cirrus are the wispy, higher-altitude clouds. They’re made of ice crystals and sometimes translucent.

Types can form in a combination. Cirrocumulus. Cirrostratus. Pretty words, pretty clouds. Or you might see the prefix “alto,” as in altostratus or altocumulus. These are middle-altitude clouds.

When the Latin “nimbus” is part of the name, it means precipitation is falling. Nimobstratus, for instance, is your typical rainy-day cloud.

It can be difficult or impossible to see clouds at night. That’s when our onboard radar pulls its weight, together with weather forecasts, turbulence plots and real-time imagery viewable on our tablets.

One reason I enjoy flying the Boeing 757, antiquated as it might be, is its outstanding climb performance, even at max weight. It’s easy for us to get above most or all of the weather. Jets like the 737 and A320 can’t match it and are often stuck down low.

Contrails are essentially a machine-made cloud. One of the byproducts of jet engine combustion is water vapor, which at higher altitudes will often condense visibly, nucleating on exhaust particles. Contrails can run behind an aircraft for many miles. Or, they might appear as short white plumes. It varies with altitude, temperature, humidity.

Chemtrails, anyone? Let’s not.

This is not the same thing as the trail of mist you sometimes see coming from a wingtip during takeoff or landing. This latter phenomenon happens in high-moisture conditions when the cores of wingtip vortices condense, shooting from the wings as strands of vapor.

Moist, high-velocity air will condense around other spots too, such as the engine attachment pylons. You might witness what appears to be white smoke pouring from the top of an engine during takeoff. This is vapor made visible by the currents around the pylon. Other times, the area just above the surface of the wing will suddenly flash into a gray puff of localized cloud.

 

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TURBULENCE. EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW.

August 30, 2023

EARLIER THIS MONTH month I was in Berlin, boarding a plane at the new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport. Walking through the lobbies and concourses, something felt different. I couldn’t quite place it. The airport, only three years-old is spacious, clean, and well laid out. But it was more than that. It was something else.

Then it hit me. It was quiet! From the time we walked through the front doors, until the moment we arrived at the gate, not a single public address announcement played. Not one. The speakers were silent.

Every airport in the world should follow this model. Indeed, some are quieter than others, to varying degrees. Copenhagen and Amsterdam, for example, keep announcements to a minimum. But on the whole, airports are some of the noisiest public spaces we have, and the loudspeaker is mainly to blame.

Sure, terminals are packed with wailing babies, chattering TVs, and airport architecture seemingly designed to amplify, rather than quash, the collective racket of hundreds of people. But it’s those public address announcements that are the most aggravating culprit. Ninety percent of them are useless in the first place, and they’re often delivered at a volume severe enough to shatter windows. And with all the various microphones and speakers targeting different sections of a terminal, it’s not uncommon to hear two or three announcements blaring at the same time.

The result of this, whether you sense it directly or not, is stress. And if there’s one thing the air travel experience needs less of, it’s stress.

The needlessness and redundancy of most announcements would be hilarious if it weren’t so annoying. And those few of any value are presented in such a tautological tangle as to be almost incomprehensible. Why say in ten words what you can say in a hundred?

At JFK, for instance, there’s an announcement that loops around every five minutes or so. It declares: “All areas of the terminal have been designated as smoke-free.” I’ll begin by asking if there’s anyone alive who’d be daft enough to assume they’re permitted to smoke in a terminal. But listen, also, to the language. JFK is the ultimate melting pot, and I have a healthy suspicion that, to someone with limited English skills, a phrase like “designated as smoke-free” has about as much meaning as a bird call.

Then we have the security announcements. Did you know that my hometown airport, Boston-Logan, is home to a program called “SAFE,” or “Security Awareness For Everyone”? I know this because I’m told about it over and over again while sitting at the gate. “If you see something, say something.” Important advice there.

We also have the one that goes, “If a stranger approaches you about carrying a foreign object…” A what? I picture a toaster with wires coming out of it. “Would you mind taking this to Frankfurt for me?”

Meanwhile, “TSA has limited the items that may be carried through the security checkpoint,” we’re told at Los Angeles International. “Passengers are advised to contact their air carrier.” The pointlessness of this counsel deserves no elaboration. Of the millions of travelers who’ve been subjected to this recording, I suspect the total number who’ve moved to action and “contacted their air carrier,” stands exactly at zero. To further fray our nerves and damage our hearing, it plays after you’ve gone through security.

As does the one that goes, “Los Angeles International Airport is closed the general public, and only employees, ticketed passengers, and those directly assisting passengers qre allowed on the airport property” (I’m paraphrasing slightly). There is no need for this one, period, but the fact that it’s broadcast after passengers have been screened and cleared by TSA is surreally idiotic.

Indeed, the overseers of LAX have created what might be the noisiest airport in America. Among the racket is an absurd series of PAs that play outside, on the sidewalks, where the concrete overpasses increase the decibel level exponentially. Anyone waiting for a hotel shuttle or the rental car bus is subject to a mind-melting cacophony of unintelligible blather.

And although Americans have a deep cultural affinity for infantilization and condescension — as if every citizen is too stupid to get on an airplane, or to even ride an escalator, without a loudly barked set of instructions — we aren’t the only offenders. If you’ve ever been to the domestic terminal in Medellin, Colombia, or to Mexico City’s terminal 2, you’ll know what I mean. Bring a good pair of headphones.

Ironically, the actual loudest things at an airport — airplanes themselves — are almost never heard, buffered behind walls of glass and concrete. And it’s not until stepping aboard your plane that you can finally savor some silence.

Or that’s the idea, anyway. Alas, the airplane cabin has contracted this same scourge. Nowadays, the entire boarding process, followed by the first several minutes after takeoff, consist of nothing but announcements: safety videos that never end, ignored directives on how to stow your luggage, and those manifesto-length promotional speeches. On a flight recently I counted thirteen separate PAs during the boarding process alone, from either the gate agent or a cabin attendant.

Here’s the thing: nobody is paying attention. All these PAs do is create noise and leave people frazzled.

On one airline, a pre-recorded briefing plays during descent, telling people to buckle up, stow their tables, shut their laptops and such. The recording ends, and a second later a flight attendant comes on and repeats the entire thing.

Bad enough, but winner of the redundancy award are those announcements letting us know that “Flight attendants will now be coming through the aisles to [insert task here].” Seriously, we don’t need a heads-up on what you’re about to do any more than we need to know what color underwear you’re wearing. Simply do it.

All of this sonic pollution does not make passengers more attentive, more satisfied, or keep them better informed. What it does is make an already nerve-wracking experience that much more uncomfortable.

Berlin we turn our weary ears to you.

 

Upper photo courtesy of Unsplash.

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July 26, 2023

A PROPOSAL is moving through the U.S. Congress right now that would increase the mandatory retirement age for pilots from 65 to 67. The proposal has momentum and bipartisan support, and many expect it to become law.

Count me among those hoping this happens.

Those pushing for the change cite the ongoing pilot shortage as one of the reasons. Fair enough, though for me it’s more personal. For one, I really enjoy my job. As things currently stand I have eight years left, and I’d love to stay at it for a couple more (assuming all the radiation exposure doesn’t kill me first). But perhaps more importantly, I have a substantial amount of lost income to make up for, having been laid off for half a decade in my mid-thirties — prime earning years.

Not everyone is on board, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Also among the opposers is the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), the world’s largest pilot union. This might seem a bit of a head-scratcher, and I suspect their resistance is owed to demographics: pilot rosters are skewing younger and younger these days, and many of the newest pilots see age 67 as a threat to their career progression. Older pilots like me will stay on the property slightly longer, the thinking goes, impeding their seniority advantages (aircraft bidding, seat bidding, and so forth).

Forgive me if I’m less than sympathetic.

In 2001, after slogging it out at the regionals and a cargo carrier for nine years, I was hired by a major carrier at age 35. Starting annual pay at the time was around $30,000, and I was promptly furloughed in the wake of the September 11th attacks. (My ensuing gig as an online columnist and author was fun, but by no means lucrative.)

While I was out of work, my airline, along with several others, declared bankruptcy. Industry-wide, wages were cut some 40 percent and retirement plans eliminated.

Then, in 2007, shortly after being recalled, the retirement age was extended not merely two years, but five, from age 60 to age 65. Not only did I miss out on several years of major airline salary, but the minute I got back, seniority movement slowed to a crawl.

You wanna whine about threats to your career progression? Try five years of furlough, a bankruptcy, and a massive seniority slowdown first.

If this sounds like a sob story, it’s not just mine. Thousands of other airline pilots went through all of the same things — or worse.

The industry has since changed dramatically, and pilots entering the ranks today have never had it better. It’s common now for the legacy carriers to bring on pilots in their mid-twenties, and under the latest contracts, new-hires are earning in their first one or two years what it used to take a decade or more to make. When I returned from furlough, my sixth-year first officer hourly rate was $65 per flight hour. Pilots are now making $100 or more per hour on day one.

These same pilots are upgrading to captain in record time (at some airlines, new-hires are getting widebody captain slots), and otherwise racing up the seniority lists. 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.

I should mention also that salaries at the regional carriers have vastly improved. Most airline pilots begin their careers at the regional level, and here too they are cashing in. In my day, starting pay at the regionals was under $20,000 a year, working conditions were abysmal, and in some cases you had to pay for your own training. Today an RJ pilot can easily bring in six figures. You can make a good living even before scoring that dream job with a major.

To say nothing of the fact that junior pilots skated through the COVID-19 fiasco without so much as a hiccup. Thanks to the taxpayer bailouts, they avoided furloughs and in some cases were paid nearly a full salary to simply stay at home for a year. Many of them took on second jobs and collected two salaries.

For those of us of baby-boomer and Generation X vintage, such fortune is difficult to fathom. Hence, when I hear some twentysomething hotshot whining about the “damage” the age 67 change might wreak, my reaction is a combination of exasperation and bemusement. You’ve got to be kidding.

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. I, along with thousands of my peers, 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.

All told, it has never been a better time to be a pilot.

If you’re worried about competency, training cycles and medical certification standards are there to ensure older pilots are up to the task. And, I should add, nobody is going to force you to work until 67. You’re free to retire at 65, or any other age at which you feel comfortable. And the extra two years aren’t just for the older workers; they’re for the new-hires as well, eventually.

The idea isn’t without its complications. Most foreign authorities remain committed to the age 65 limit, effectively blocking any U.S. airline pilot over that age from flying beyond American borders. Unless that changes, pilots between 65 and 67 would be restricted to domestic-only routes. This will cause some training headaches and require some finessing of airline seniority lists, but it’s certainly doable.

You’ll maybe detect a tone of resentment in this piece. That’s not quite how I mean it. Much as I might be jealous, I cannot begrudge anyone the advantages of youth and fortuitous timing. Good for them. Just please don’t take it for granted. They need to understand how lucky they are, and how different things used to be. While most new pilots realize this, there are those who don’t, and who seem to think they’re entitled to a hassle-free career and a bursting bank account before they’ve hit 30. If you’re in that camp, try to understand why and how, to some of your older coworkers, griping over a two-year age extension sounds greedy and petty.

 

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THE REGIONAL RECKONING.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
Numbers graphic by the author.

May 31, 2023

LAST WEEK, a distraught passenger opened an emergency door aboard an Asian Airlines flight as it prepared to land on the Korean holiday island of Jeju. A dozen people were injured in the ensuing melee.

Numerous readers have sent unfriendly emails taking me to task for statements I’ve made in the past about the ability to open a door in flight. Specifically, we turn to chapter five in my book, where one beholds the following:

You cannot — I repeat, cannot — open the doors or emergency hatches of an airplane in flight. You can’t open them for the simple reason that cabin pressure won’t allow it. Think of an aircraft door as a drain plug, fixed in place by the interior pressure. Almost all aircraft exits open inward. Some retract upward into the ceiling; others swing outward; but they open inward first, and not even the most musclebound human will overcome the force holding them shut. At a typical cruising altitude, up to eight pounds of pressure are pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage. That’s over 1,100 pounds against each square foot of door.

Well, yes and no, the over-confidence of that first sentence being the main offense. What I describe is basically correct, but as a plane descends, the pressure differential lessens, eventually dropping to zero at the point of touchdown. When very close to the ground, the “weight” holding the doors shut may in fact be negligible enough to permit a door to open. In the case of Asiana, the Airbus A321 was at only 700 feet; just a minute or so from the runway.

The book further states…

Even at low altitudes, where cabin pressure levels are much less, a meager 2 p.s.i. differential is still more than anyone can displace — even after six cups of coffee and the aggravation that comes with sitting behind a shrieking baby. On the ground, the situation changes—as one would hope, with the possibility of an evacuation . During taxi, you will get the door to open. You will also activate the door’s emergency escape slide.

While the part about being on the ground is true, there’s a difference between low altitudes and very low altitudes. I should’ve made this clear. If my publisher is kind enough to move forward with a third edition, I’ll revise this entire Q&A.

What I was trying to do, a bit too eagerly, is dispel the idea of opening a door during cruise, creating the sort of disaster movie situation that people envision when this topic arises: the one of complete chaos, with people getting sucked through the hole. That can’t happen. What can happen, though, is what happened aboard Asiana.

Fortunately, the very ability to get the door open also means that nothing catastrophic will occur. It’ll be noisy and scary, and unsecured objects could get whipped around; but without any serious pressure differential, nobody’s getting sucked out.

 

Photos courtesy of Unsplash.

May 23, 2023

NOT MUCH GOING ON, so I’ll bore with you some details about my vacation flights with airBaltic.

A young company that got its start 1995, Air Baltic lacks the recognition factor of the mainstay European airlines. But it’s maybe a bigger company than you’d expect, with a 40-strong fleet of Airbus A220s and a network touching every major city in Europe. New routes extend all the way to Dubai and Armenia. Its main hub is in Riga, Latvia, with smaller hubs out of Tampere, Finland, and the Estonian capital of Tallinn. We flew up to Tallinn, then down to Riga a few days later.

airBaltic follows a quasi low-cost carrier (LCC) model, with a la carte pricing and a streamlined onboard product. There’s a small, unfussy business class up front with complimentary hot meals. Economy class is no-frills, but with ample legroom and a reasonable selection of buy-on-board food and drink. Similar to jetBlue in the United States, airBaltic is more of a hybrid than a true LCC. Service-wise they’re leagues ahead of European budget giants Ryanair and easyJet. (They also borrow jetBlue’s and easyJet’s unusual branding affectation, using a lowercase “a” and the camel-cap “B.”)

I wasn’t hungry, so I can’t vouch for the quality of that buy-on-board food, but the guy next to me ordered a tasty looking wrap. He also got annoyingly chatty after two very large cans of Latvian beer.

The seats in airBaltic’s A220s feature an unusual design in which the tray table pivots from the bottom of the seat structure. If you’ve got food or a laptop on your tray, this avoids any pinching or crushing when the person in front of you reclines.

There’s no entertainment system or seat-back screens, but most of airBaltic’s flights are under three hours long.

The airline’s website is straightforward and user-friendly.

The airports in Riga and Tallinn are quiet and compact. Both have Priority Pass lounges that, surprise of surprises, were pleasantly uncrowded. My only gripe was the third-degree experience at the security checkpoints. The lines were short, yet it still took half an hour to get through because the guards pored through our bags, scrutinizing every last container of liquid, no matter how small.

Overall grade: B

Most people couldn’t care less which airline they fly with. Many can’t remember which carrier took them to their last vacation. I guess it’s different for airline geeks, with our weird notions of posterity. It always excites me flying on an airline for the first time, and this was no exception. A new one for my list.

 

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

For pictures from Estonia and Latvia, visit the author’s Instagram feed.

THE JET BRIDGE, that strange, too-often troublesome umbilicus connecting terminal to fuselage.

The other day I was stuck on a regional jet for twenty minutes because the gate agent couldn’t get the damn thing into the right position. If only I had a dollar for every time this has happened. And much of the problem, I think, is that these devices are so monstrously over-engineered. Take a look at the typical jet bridge. The things are enormous. They must weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds and cost millions of dollars.

(Note: I’ll be using the generic term rather than “Jetway,” which is a brand.)

That wayward bridge at JFK was twice the size of the plane. As the agent fumbled with the thing, it looked like she was trying to steer a battleship. Hydraulic arms flexed and groaned, machinery wailed, lights flashed and bells rang. Finally the tires began to turn — like the wheels of those huge mobile barges that NASA used to position the Saturn rockets. All of this so that fifty people could walk the negligible distance from the aircraft to the terminal.

I realize the bridges are multifunction. The air conditioning and power connections used by the plane during its downtime are part of the assembly. But do they need to be so big and heavy, with all of this Rube Goldberg machinery? It’s just a gangway for crying out loud. You see simpler, lightweight, often glass-sided jet bridges in Europe and elsewhere around the world (see the following photo), but here in the U.S. we rely on these ponderous, lumbering contraptions.

Of course, I’m opposed to jet bridges on principle. I prefer the classic, drive-up airstairs. Some of the international stations I fly to still employ those old-timey stairs, and I always get a thrill from them. There’s something dramatic about stepping onto a plane that way: the ground-level approach along the tarmac followed by the slow ascent. The effect is like the opening credits of a film — a brief, formal introduction to the journey. The jet bridge makes the airplane almost irrelevant; you’re merely in transit from one annoying interior space (terminal) to another (cabin).

Plus, it takes me back to my first-ever ride on an airplane. It was 1974 and I was eight years-old, and I vividly remember walking up the stairs to that American Airlines 727. A photo snapped by my mother immortalizes the moment…

I know, the bridges are important for passengers with limited mobility or who rely on wheelchairs, and for avoiding inclement weather. But the old-style stairs worked well for decades, and I see no reason they couldn’t still. Hydraulic lifts could be used for wheelchairs while the rest of us climb the stairs. I’m convinced this would be a faster and more efficient method. Ryanair is one carrier that agrees with me. The European budget giant relies on stairs, not bridges, at most of its stations.

But if we’re going to rely on jet bridges, we ought to have not only simpler ones, but more of them. Airports outside the U.S. routinely board and deplane a widebody jet through multiple doors using multiple bridges — at least two, and sometimes even three. This makes a massive difference in how long it takes to move hundreds of people, and their hundreds of carry-ons, between the terminal and the cabin. Here at home it takes 45 minutes to get a few dozen people onto a regional jet, and it’s chaos the entire time, while in Asia I’ve seen 500 passengers board an A380 in under thirty minutes. Dual-bridge boarding does exist in the United States, but it’s uncommon.

In Amsterdam, KLM boards some of its flights using forward bridges, plus a unique, over-the-wing bridge that connects to the rear fuselage. These overwing bridges are by no means lightweight, slung from a superstructure that looks like something you’d see in a shipyard where they build aircraft carriers, but they do make getting on and off the jet quicker and more pleasant.

Another reason that boarding is more efficient in other countries, Asia especially, is that carriers there tend to use bigger planes. In Asia, even a 45-minute hop is often aboard a 777 or A330. Widebody planes, with dual aisles and all-around greater spaciousness, are by their nature easier to get on and off. In the U.S., aircraft size has been steadily shrinking over the past three decades. More people are flying than ever before, it’s true, but we’re doing it on smaller planes: regional jets, A319s, 737s and the like. The reasons for this are a subject for another time, but the narrow aisles and limited bin space mean longer boarding and deplaning times.

A few years back, my friend Harriet Baskas penned this interesting story for USA Today on the history of the jet bridge.

In closing, just an observation…

Look around, and it seems that 90 percent of the world’s jet bridges are emblazoned with logo of HSBC.

I’m not sure this advertising strategy has been all that effective, however, because although millions of people see these four letters every day, relatively few of them know what they’re looking at. I did a little impromptu research, asking several colleagues if they knew what HSBC was. Not one of them could tell me.

HSBC is a British bank, originally founded in Shanghai and Hong Kong. The letters stand for “Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.” It’s one of the ten biggest banks measured by assets. The company pays tens of millions of dollars every years to airport authorities the world over — mostly at major international hubs — for the rights to put its name on boarding bridges.

In 2012, HSBC was hit with a $1.9 billion fine for laundering money on behalf of drug cartels and terrorist groups — carrying on a tradition of questionable practices that goes back generations, apparently, to the days of the opium trade.

 

April 18, 2023

SO MUCH OF a piloting career is leaving things behind. Change is a constant — new airlines, new planes, new routes — and you’re always saying goodbye. Goodbye to companies, goodbye to colleagues, goodbye to places you loved (or hated) to fly.

And goodbye to airplanes. Seems we’re always jumping from one model to another. Maybe your company finally retired those aging 757s. Maybe you upgraded to captain on a different type, or switched to something bigger and better.

And those airplane farewells aren’t always fond. So it was in 1992 when I completed my final flight in the Beech 99, a twin-engined fifteen-seater from the 60s that was my first assignment as an airline pilot. When I stepped off the stairs of that sad contraption for the last time, I couldn’t run away fast enough. To borrow from an earlier story…

Unpressurized and slow, the Beech 99 was a ridiculous anachronism kept in service by a bottom-feeder airline and its tightfisted owner. The rectangular cabin windows gave it a vintage look, like the windows in a 19th-Century railroad car.

Passengers at Logan would show up planeside in a red bus about twice the size of the plane. Expecting a modern Boeing or Airbus, they were dumped at the foot of a fifteen-passenger wagon built during the Age of Aquarius. I’d be stuffing paper towels into the cockpit window frames to keep out the rainwater while businessmen came up the stairs cursing their travel agents.

The noise, the cramped cockpit, the shame. Good riddance. My logbook lists my valedictory flight as a run from Augusta, Maine, to Boston, on August 13th, 1992. I don’t remember it, specifically, but my sentiments at the time remain indelible: I never wanted to set foot in a Beech 99 again. And because the plane was an obsolete antique that no respectable airline would operate, never in my dreams did I expect to.

Fast forward to 2023, and I’m sitting with my girlfriend at the airport in Nassau, Bahamas, about to catch a flight to the tiny island of Staniel Cay. We’re booked with something called Flamingo Air, which until three days ago I’d never heard of. Sitting in the departure lounge, I’m idly wondering what kind of plane will be making the half-hour hop to Staniel. A Twin Otter? A Caravan? A Cessna 402?

And then I see it. Or I hear it, actually — that vaguely familiar buzz-rumble of PT-6 engines. I turn and there it is, taxiing towards the building. The awkward, tail-low silhouette and the square windows. The long tapered nose. You can’t be serious. Well fuck me if it isn’t a Beech 99.

“You can’t be serious.”

“What?” says Liz.

“That’s our plane.”

“It’s so cute!”

Nostalgia, you’re thinking, would be the way to approach this. But the only sensation I can muster up is wary combination of disappointment and fear. The Beech 99 was already a tottering piece of junk 32 years ago. To discover one still airworthy is equally hilarious and startling.

And now I have to get in the thing. Being a superstitious sort who can’t help seeking out those nooks of fate where irony and tragedy intersect, I’m convinced I’m going to die.

An agent walks us across the apron towards the plane, which is mostly tombstone-colored. Coming around the wing, I notice the red tail-stand. The 99 is aft-heavy, and boarding has to be staggered to keep it from plopping onto its tail. At Northeast we’d hold the thing up with our shoulders until the forward rows were full. Then after landing we’d run back and do it again.

Going up stairs I catch a view of the tail, decked out in a colorful design of the famous swimming pigs of Big Major Cay. The charm of the image is a little hard to savor because the decal is webbed and cracked and peeling, giving the fin the look of a shattered window.

“All the way forward,” the agent tells me. I climb inside and go to the first row, just behind the pilots. I have to turn sideways because there isn’t enough legroom between my seat and the copilot’s. There’s no cockpit door, of course. At Northeast Express, some of our 99s had curtains. Not this one. The copilot’s shoulder is inches from my face.

It all comes back to me, the details suddenly familiar, even after three decades. The comically small seats and the dearth of headroom, the wing spar cutting across the middle of the cabin floor. The grime and the chipped paint and broken-off moulding. The sun-baked upholstery and the scratched-up plastic windows. The shambles of it all.

Elizabeth eyes me cheerfully, asks me to take her picture. To her this is all great fun. She has no idea of this rattletrap’s significance in my life, or the fact that I’m terrified of it.

I look at the instrument panel. More memories, none of them especially welcome. The toy-sized artificial horizon, the torque gauges, the radio panel straight from a 1970s Piper Cherokee. Theres a primitive GPS, at least, which is something we didn’t have in the early 90s. Several of the annunciatior panel lenses are cracked or missing. The whole thing has the look and feel of a military surplus plane reassembled in someone’s garage.

I recall my first-ever time at the controls of this thing. “It seems like yesterday,” I might say. But it doesn’t. It seems like when it was: October of 1990. On the glamorous route between Manchester, New Hampshire, and Boston — a flight even shorter than this one. I remember cutting my knuckles on the cabin door latch the first time I closed it, flying with bloody fingers.

Off we go. The copilot’s sun visor is broken in six places. It’s turned to the side, and as we accelerate for takeoff it slips from its mount and lands in my lap. I place it on the floor.

The plane is louder than I remembered, and with every seat taken our takeoff roll seems to go on forever. Once airborne, it shimmies and wobbles as it climbs, as if aggravated by its own lack of strength.

At last we reach 5,500 feet and the pilots level off. Takeoff is the most inherently dangerous part of any flight, and I feel better now with the ground a mile below. I relax a little — at least until I glance at the engine gauges and notice the RPM indicator for the left engine sitting at zero. The propeller is still happily turning, thank goodness, so clearly the instrument is kaput. I don’t think that would’ve been “deferrable,” as we put it, back at Northeast Express. Not a big deal, but the little things are adding up.

Elizabeth is looking out the window. The scenery as we near the Exumas chain is unworldly, a psychedelic swirl of blue and cream, sandbar and sea. At least someone is enjoying it.

I already know that I’m going to write about this. Assuming I survive, of course. The question is how. What will the angle be? Should I interview the pilots? The captain is an older guy who looks like a lifer, not some kid building experience with his eyes on a better job elsewhere. He’s not saying goodbye. He must have some stories, flying around the Bahamas all these years, dodging storms, landing on tiny runways. This is the kind of flying highly dependent on seat-of-the-pants skills and local knowledge.

Maybe that should be my article. I jot a few things in my notebook, my handwriting vibrating in time with the engines. But ultimately I decide that I don’t care. I don’t care about the nuances of flying in the Bahamas. I don’t care about local knowledge or the captain’s derring-do. I just want off this thing before the coast guard is fishing my half-eaten body out of some barracuda-infested reef.

And that — this — is my article.

There’s a warbling as we start down, the propellers out of synch as the power comes back. I see an island in the distance, a candy-bar landing airstrip at the center of it. A few minutes later the gear drops. If either pilot says so much as a word over the radio, I don’t notice it.

We whistle over the rocky edge of Staniel and settle onto the pavement. The touchdown is feather-smooth, but when the props go into reverse, it sounds like a table saw chewing through plywood.

The runway is three-thousand feet, the captain tells me after shutting down the engines. We chat for a couple of minutes. “I have eleven hundred hours in one of these,” I tell him. I do some quick and depressing math in my head, calculating how many days of my life that works out to.

He seems impressed, or something. And maybe he’s annoyed. There I was in the first row, watching so intently. Back-seat flying, as it were.

“What’s up with that RPM gauge?”

And though we’re safe and sound, for now, I can’t really savor the moment, because the scarier part is yet to come. Landing on a 3,000 foot runway is one thing, taking off is another. Something to worry about for the next five days.

None of this, if you can’t tell, is especially rational. It’s all me. Was that airplane actually unsafe? It was old and cosmetically beat-up, sure, but aside from a malfunctioning non-critical instrument, everything seemed normal. The ones I flew thirty years ago were no different. The pilots are experienced and know what they were doing. Is it safe to fly this airline to Staniel Cay? No doubt.

The danger exists entirely in my head. It’s not about the airplane; it’s about my past. I’ve been taken hostage, it feels, by the neurotic and the annoying games I play with memories and fate, self-conspiring to wreck my vacation. I can’t help myself.

At the airport we rent a golf cart. That’s how you get around on Staniel, switching from one silly mode of transportation to another. Liz steers us towards the villa while I ruminate. Is there a ferry back to Nassau, I wonder? A fishing boat? Anything but a Beech 99?

 

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For more pictures from Staniel Cay, see the author’s Instagram sets.

March 20, 2023

A FLURRY of recent close calls finds us nervous. There were near misses on runways in New York, Boston, and Austin. A United Airlines jet plunged to within 800 feet of the ocean after takeoff from Maui. And so on.

The billion-dollar question is, are these incidents symptoms of something gone rotten, or a spate of bad luck? Are they harbingers of disaster, or outliers?

Much discussed are staffing woes both at the airlines and air traffic control. The post-pandemic aviation world is operating at maximum capacity, but with lesser levels of experience and expertise. The job losses during COVID aren’t just measured in raw numbers; there was a brain-drain as well, as many senior employees took early-retirement packages. Now, thousands of new-hire employees are being taken on: pilots, cabin crew, controllers, dispatchers, schedulers, mechanics. They find themselves in a high-stress environment where learning curves are steep and mistakes can be unforgiving or worse.

Whatever the root causes, it’s been alarming enough to gather the FAA and airline officials in an aviation safety summit taking place this week in Washington.

And that’s a good thing. Surely it’s better to be digging into things now, rather than after there’s a catastrophe that kills 250 people. It’s all about being proactive; identifying weaknesses in the safety chain, and fixing them.

Our vantage point is a remarkable one. Twenty-one years have passed since the last major crash involving a legacy U.S. airline. That’s by far the longest such streak in commercial aviation history. Whether you look at it nationally or globally, never has commercial flying been as safe as it’s been over the last two decades.

For a sense of how true this is, all one needs to do is flip through the accident annals of the 1960s through the 1990s, when multiple deadly crashes were the norm year after year after year, killing 200, 300, even 500 people at a time. In some years we’d rack up ten or more mishaps worldwide. In 1985, perhaps the deadliest year on record, we saw a major crash on average of once every two weeks! Even with vastly more planes in the sky, accident rates are a small fraction of what they were.

It’s not easy, I know, for the average person to keep this in perspective. The media certainly doesn’t help. Precisely because there aren’t as many serious crashes to steal the headlines, there’s a tendency to hyper-focus on even the most insignificant events, inflating and sensationalizing them. This creates an atmosphere in which it can feel like flying is becoming riskier, when really the opposite is true.

Over at that safety summit, the focus is on preventing runway collisions. At least three of the most recent incidents involved so-called “incursions,” where planes were on active runways when they shouldn’t have been. Scary, sure, but when you look at the FAA data, the number of incursions so far in 2022 and 2023 match those from 2018 and 2019 almost exactly. The numbers aren’t going up, but the attention they receive is.

It’s a double-edged sword, to a degree. The safer we are, the more obligated we are to keep it that way. Near-misses like the ones we’ve seen draw so much talk both because and in spite of how reliable flying has become. And while it’s easy to see them as warning signs, they end up making us safer in the long run.

Sure, we’ve been lucky. There’s no denying we’re overdue, and accidents, including really bad ones, will continue to occur from time to time. But also we’ve been pretty damn good, having engineered away what used to be the most common causes of crashes. Better training, better technology, and better oversight have brought us to where we are.

And so, while maybe it sounds bizarre, or disingenuous, the way I see it, for the FAA to be holding an emergency summit underscores not how overdue we might be for a crash, but rather how safe it is to fly. We’re living in an age when major disasters, once commonplace, are virtually unheard of. What they’re trying to do is keep it that way.

 

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