March 24, 2025

APROPOS OF nothing, aside from the nagging frustrations of getting older, it dawns on me that, at one point or another during the course of my beleaguered career, I’ve worked at three of commercial aviation’s most historically significant airline terminals.

And I don’t mean just passing through. I was based in these buildings.

In the early and mid-2000s I worked New York’s JFK Airport out of what, at the time, was known ignominiously as “terminal 3.” In its heydays, though, this was the Worldport, the home hub of Pan American World Airways.

The Worldport was never beautiful, architecturally, but it was one the most distinctive airport buildings ever constructed — a Jet Age fantasy topped with a dramatic elliptical rooftop that loomed over JFK like a giant flying saucer. Kings and queens, sheiks and ambassadors, statesmen and spies all had walked its corridors. And me, of course, headed off to Paris or Sao Paulo or Dakar.

Even before I worked at the Worldport, I more or less knew my way around it, having flown Pan Am several times as a kid. My first-ever visit had been in the spring of 1979, when I was in seventh grade. Me and a friend embarked on a secret trip to JFK — a sort of junior pilot’s planespotting pilgrimage, in which we’d spent the entire Saturday afternoon up on roof, watching and photographing the jets. We’d used our birthday money to buy round-trip tickets from Boston. We brought packed lunches, binoculars, and an old Kodak 110 camera. Our parents had no idea.

By the 2000s, long after Pan Am’s glory days, it was dilapidated and falling to pieces — a grimy warren of dimly lit passageways and peeling paint. Strategically placed buckets and sheets of canvas collected the rainwater that poured through ceiling cracks. The great flying saucer was still there, but its crumbling masonry evoked little beyond a crying need to be torn down.

Which, in 2013, it was…

Also in the early 2000s, prior to my time in terminal 3, I operated some flights from the Marine Air Terminal over at La Guardia.

The M.A.T. is William Delano’s Art Deco jewel in La Guardia’s southwest corner, right on the water. Opened in 1940, it was originally the embarkation point for Pan Am’s flying boats. Inside the rotunda is the famous “Flight” painting by James Brooks.

Unlike terminal 3, it remains standing, kept from destruction by the good sense of Gotham preservationists. The building’s newer extension is used today by Spirit Airlines, which is maybe an example of the worst kind of irony. Most passengers pass through the newer section without ever seeing the original atrium or the Brooks mural, but you can detour through if you want.

Commissioned in 1952, the mural traces the history of aviation from mythical to (then) modern, Icarus to Pan Am Clipper. The style is a less-than-shy nod at Socialist realism, and at the height of ’50s McCarthyism, in a controversy not unlike the one surrounding Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center, it was obliterated with gray paint. Not until 1977 was it restored.

There’s even a cozy garden and picnic spot just outside, to the right of the gleaming Art Deco doors as you face them, where you can relax beneath the blue and gold frieze of flying fish.

And, swinging back to JFK, in 1996 I flew out of Eero Saarinen’s landmark TWA terminal.

This is the most famous of the three terminals, and probably the only one that deserves to be called iconic (fewer words are more overused these days, but here’s one time it belongs).

“All one thing,” is how Saarinen, a Finn whose other projects included the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the terminal at Washington-Dulles, once said of it. It’s a fluid, unified sculpture of a space, at once futuristic and organic; a carved-out atrium reminiscent of the caves of Turkish Cappadocia, overhung by three cantilevered ceilings that rise from a central spine like huge wings.

In 1996, though, when I was working there as a captain for TWA Express, it had long since fallen into disrepair. Clutches of sparrows lived in the rafters, I remember, bouncing across the floors in a hunt for crumbs. The walls were discolored and the carpeting gave off an ammonia stink. It was a wretched place in swift need of a wrecking ball.

What happened, instead, was a miraculous reinvention. After sitting empty for several years, it was turned it into a hotel. Or, more accurately, it was renovated and a hotel was added on.

The TWA terminal is now the TWA Hotel, with the original section serving as a check-in lobby and, though it’s not described as such, a museum. It’s been kitch-ified a touch, but overall the preservation efforts were beautifully executed. If you can afford the rates, come stay the night. If you can’t, stop in and wander around for an hour.

So there it is. My New York City “terminal triangle.”

I have six more years before the government makes me hang up my wings. These are things I think about.

I think, too, about how our airports have changed — devolved, maybe, is the better word — in the decades since Eero Saarinen or the Marine Air Terminal. With only scattered exceptions, they’ve become unspeakably generic, lacking of any real architectural vision or grandeur.

Right next to the TWA terminal at JFK used to stand the National Airlines “Sundrome,” a glass-and-steel beauty designed by I.M. Pei. Think about it: Saarinen and Pei, at the same airport, a few hundred feet from each other. The Sundrome was demolished about ten years ago, and on that hallowed ground today sits the hulking nothingness of jetBlue’s “terminal 5.”

Functionality and efficiency are now the only measure. Like so much of the air travel experience, it ain’t what it used to be.

 

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

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March 14, 2025

TWO THINGS jumped to mind as I watched the footage last week of the American Airlines jet in Denver, its engine on fire, passengers evacuating onto the wing.

The first thing was the recklessness of the people who brought their carry-ons with them as they evacuated. Fewer things are more stupid, or more dangerous, particularly when there’s a fire. We’ve seen this before, and I’m sure we’ll see it again. Airlines and regulators need to come up with something.

Second thing was a wave of consternation. Here we go again, I thought. Jeju Air, Azerbaijan, Washington D.C., Toronto. Now this. Another incident, another round of media hype, another feeding frenzy on social media. Here come the emails asking, “What’s going on?”

Whatever it is, it’s bad enough that, according to airline execs, the demand for air travel is softening. How much of this is economics-related rather than fear-related is hard to quantify, but the CEOs believe the latter is part of it.

This is frustrating, because on the whole flying remains remarkably safe. Much, much safer than it was in decades past.

I don’t mean to downplay recent mishaps too much; the Potomac crash, especially, was tragic, and there’s no denying that aspects of our system need funding and shoring up. But what are we actually dealing with? Are these incidents symptomatic of something dangerously broken? Are they warning signs of catastrophes to come?

I’m not sensing that. At worst, we can see it as a correction. Perhaps what’s surprising isn’t the spate of accidents, but rather how long we’d gone without such a spate. Perhaps we were too lucky for too long. Around two million people travel by air every day of the week, aboard tens of thousands of flights. The idea of perfect safety is foolish.

What the traveling public needs more than anything is a sense of perspective. For that, I recommend a trip through the history books, a dig through the crash chronicles of a generation ago, and the generation before that. Many Americans, younger ones especially, have no knowledge, or no memory, of how bad things used to be. From the dawn of the jet age in the 1950s, through the early 2000s, deadly air disasters were soberingly common, year after year after year.

And I don’t mean engine fires where people lined up on the wing. I’m talking about major accidents with, in many cases, fatalities in the hundreds.

Just how common? In 1985, the worst year on record, there were 27 crashes — an average of one every two weeks. This included two of the deadliest air disasters in history (JAL flight 123 and Air India 182), which occurred within sixty days of each other and killed over eight hundred people. And that’s not counting the incredible hijacking saga of TWA flight 847, which also happened in ’85.

The year 1974 saw nine disasters, including a TWA bombing and an Eastern Airlines crash three days apart. In 1973, when a Delta jet crashed in Boston killing 89 people, the accident was recorded on page two of the New York Times, below the fold. Ten crashes occurred between the fall of 1988 and the fall of 1989, three of them terrorist bombings.

As recently as the year 2000, we saw eleven crashes in which a dozen or more people perished, including the Air France Concorde disaster and Alaska Airlines flight 261, plus a cargo jet crash in California in which a former colleague of mine died.

This doesn’t happen anymore. Primarily through advances in training and technology, we’ve engineered away what used to be the most common causes of accidents. The number of planes in the sky has tripled since the 1980s, while the accident rate has plummeted. The events of the last several weeks, however unfortunate, hardly nudge the big picture data. Neither would another crash — even a big one, knock on wood.

It’s not that we’re spoiled, exactly. But we’ve grown accustomed to the rarity of disaster. And the result is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we’re a lot safer. On the other hand, we’re primed to overreact when something goes wrong.

This is human nature, I suppose. When an engine catches fire, it grabs our attention. Fair enough. What it shouldn’t do, however, is cause you to call off your business trip or cancel your vacation.

 
Photo courtesy of Unsplash

AS MY REGULARS know, critiquing airline liveries is my favorite thing in the world. Especially the ugly ones, which nowadays is pretty much all of them.

From now on, rather than grading them individually in separate articles, we’ll compile them here, one at a time. This post will act as a sort of rolling report card, updated with every new reveal.

 

UP THE YIN YANG

Korean Air has been making some buzz, unveiling its first brand refresh in three decades. And in doing so they win the “If It Ain’t Broke…” award for terrible decision-making.

The new look fails for two big reasons. First, it’s ugly. Or spiritless, maybe, is the better word. Second, there was no need for it; the scheme it replaces was among the industry’s best, a pleasant reprieve from the plague of all-white fuselages and lookalike swooshes.

I don’t which part irks me more: the boring typeface, the blank bottom, or the tail emblem, which is a neutered version of the one it replaces. The blue is pretty, but all in all it’s a livery without much character. It looks like it was cooked up on a computer in about twelve seconds.

Photos courtesy of Sam Chui.

GRADE: D-plus

 

GOOFY GOLD

Air India was taken over not long about by the Tata Group. The new owners are expanding and hoping to establish the long-beleaguered carrier as a world-class brand. These sorts of reinventions are often accompanied, dangerously, by livery changes. To wit…

There’s a press release explaining all the meanings and symbolism here. It’s a brilliant self-parody. Someone asked ChatGPT to come up with a bullshit announcement full of pseudo-inspirational blather, and it happily obliged. “Purposeful and confident.” “Premium cues.” “Personality and storytelling.” It goes on like this.

Let’s keep it simpler. First of all, the lettering is too big. Billboard lettering is common these days, and Air India, like many others, crosses the line between assertive and overblown.  

Then we have the tail. Where do we start? The airline describes this weird-looking thing as a “hero signature window frame.”  Do we have any idea what this means? Heroes? Windows? What? I’m told the design is an evolution of the Rajasthani-style window decals that have heretofore been part of Air India’s livery for decades (do we dare call them iconic?). Possibly, but what most people will see is just a random, strangely angled pattern. The colors are pretty but the message is unintelligible. Neither does it work from a branding standpoint: it’s a pattern, not a logo, without any context or clarity. 

The element that really wrecks it all, though, is the gold accenting at the bottom. Specifically, the way it detaches from the red and goes off on its own, fore and aft. The red field, with the Air India name across the lower fuselage, is an obvious jab at Emirates, whose planes are marked similarly, and whose domination of routes into India the Tatas are hoping to unseat. All well and good, but those gold brackets… it’s like they put the wrong numbers into the paint-sprayer. This alone knocks my grade from a potential C to a D-minus. “The gold frame detail adds storytelling and and premium cues,” according to Air India. No, it doesn’t. What it adds is a rather bizarre coup de grace.

A shame how Air India’s look has degraded over time, from the masterpiece red swoosh livery of the 1970s, with its beautiful Sagittarius logo, to this. 

GRADE: D-minus 

 

MINTY FRESH

JetBlue’s livery features a grab bag of different tail patterns. According to the airline, these designs are “fun,” “distinct,” and — here comes that word — “iconic.” The latest one is named “Mint Leaves,” and it celebrates jetBlue’s premium class, branded as Mint. All planes outfitted with Mint suites will feature this look, which uses a scattering of the round-cornered “leaves” that serve as the Mint logo.

This is a nice idea, but it’s bound to be confusing to the average traveler, who has no idea what those little boxes represent. The Mint logo simply isn’t well-known enough. What most people will see is just a bunch of squares. And there are too many of them, top and bottom.

Up front, the oversized lettering is meant to balance out the heaviness of the tail, but it’s needlessly big and looks squeezed-in between the doors. The Southwest-style blue is too syrupy.

GRADE: C-minus

 

REALLY?

“Yesterday, our future was uncertain. Our economy in turmoil,” rumbles the home page. “Today, the dark clouds have passed. And we can take back to the skies. We were not ready for the turbulence that came before. Never again!” And with that we expect a grand crescendo, a sky-clearing crash of cymbals. Let the opening credits roll!

Welcome to Really Cool Airlines, a start-up out of Thailand that hopes to open routes around Asia using Airbus A350s. It should go without saying that any airline whose name requires an immediate set of parentheses to remind you that no, this isn’t a joke (this isn’t a joke), ought to maybe rethink its branding. But let’s save the name for another time. We shall defer, also, any exploration of the company’s business model, which has something to do with crypto and blockchains. (The carrier’s mastermind is Patee Sarasin, the same fellow who started Nok Air, a successful Thai LCC, so conceivably this could pan out.) To the livery…

The plane appears to be wearing headphones. So, there’s that.

I’m getting an LCC vibe here. Not a cheap LCC vibe, like you feel with Spirit or Southwest, but a more sleek and sophisticated one. The colors are part of this. I don’t know about really cool, but they’re cool. What drags this one down is the back of the fuselage: the design is tail-heavy. There’s way too much going on back there. Go easier with all those blue and green squares (ditto for jetBlue, above) and let’s talk again.

GRADE: C

 

DUBAI DO-OVER

If one airline didn’t need a re-fresh, it was Emirates. Can’t leave well enough alone, I guess. The kids have to put their art school degrees and fancy graphic design apps to use. So they took one of the boldest, cleanest, most distinctive liveries in the world and had to get all showy with it. Lo and behold, yet another overdone design fixated on motion and texture.

I don’t hate it. Truth be told, I like it, and if you insist it’s an improvement, I won’t argue. The basic blueprint — the Emirati flag — is still there, and it remains unmistakable. Just a little less so, because now it’s all wavy and scaly and even a little blurry. Identities are becoming less distinctive, not more, and sometimes it feels as if airline branding has been taken over by millennials trying to out-cool each other.

The red winglets are a great addition. The rest was unnecessary.

GRADE: B-plus

 

THE CONDOR BEACH TOWEL

Condor is a Frankfurt-based charter airline. The airline was set up in 1955 by Lufthansa, and for years its markings were handsomely reminiscent of that carrier’s: blue stripe, yellow tail, Lufthansa-esque condor logo. Later the Thomas Cook Group took control, and Condor adopted the group’s mostly inoffensive yellow and gray.

Today the airline is controlled by a European investment company, and in April, 2022, a bold new rebranding was unveiled, timed to coincide with delivery of Condor’s new Airbus A330-900s, which will replace a fleet of antique Boeing 767s. Each jet will feature a nose-to tail pattern of vertical candy stripes, in one of five colors. This, we are told, is to keep things more in synch with the leisure charter vibe: fun, friendly, easy, inexpensive and all that.

The main problem is, vertical stripes really don’t belong on a plane. The very shape of an airplane, in all its horizontal-ness, suggests motion, speed, and the traversing of distances. Vertical stripes suggest the opposite of that. The visual effect is one of negative motion, almost as if the plane is being held back and asked to stop.

Officially, according to the people who were paid to concoct this nonsense, the color representations go like this: blue for ocean; green for island; beige for beach, gold for sunshine, and red for “passion” — whatever that might mean. At least, for a change, there’s nothing here about the northern lights. I’m not seeing sunshine or passion. I’m seeing a picket fence, or maybe a couch cushion.

“Unmistakable,” is how Condor CEO Ralf Teckentrup describes it. And it certainly is — for the wrong reasons.

GRADE: F

 

CARIBBEAN CALAMITY

A hummingbird has long been the tail mascot for Trinidad-based Caribbean Airlines. For years the carrier used a photographic-style decal similar to the tails worn by Frontier. It was fetching. Here’s a picture I took one day at the airport in Georgetown, Guyana…

For reasons that can’t possibly be explained, this design has been made over into the abomination you see below. The updated magenta typeface (visible in the other links) is, in fact, an improvement. Nothing, however, can justify the psychedelic madness of the tail.

Caribbean is the successor to BWIA (British West Indies Airways), whose elegant livery and steel pan logo once graced the L-1011 TriStar. Talk about a devolution.

GRADE: F-minus

 

PRETTY IN PURPLE

Let’s ignore for a minute the question of whether we need another low-cost airline. Let’s also ignore the wisdom of operating 737s from the stubby runways at New Haven, Connecticut, one of Avelo Airlines’ hubs (the other is Burbank, where the runway isn’t much longer). Instead, let’s focus on their paintjob, which is rather pleasant.

The use of purple is unusual for an airline, and here it’s quite attractive. As is the typeface, which together with the engine nacelles and tail swoop, combine just right in a handsome, three-point balance.

This is one of those rare designs that works well even with a mostly bare fuselage. And unlike the looks of many LCCs, it’s not trying to be whimsical or amusing; it’s dignified.

I’m not sure the three-color, lightbulb filament tail was executed quite right. Maybe two colors instead of three, with thicker lines? It’s solid as a brand-mark, though, and it works.

GRADE: A-minus

 

UBERBLUE

This one, on the other hand. Were they having a hangar sale on blue paint? David Neelman is the founder of Breeze, which is opening a slew of routes from coast to coast, focusing mainly on secondary cities. Previously of jetBlue and Azul, blue has always been his thing. But come on, Dave, do you have to drown us in it, a light blue and a darker one?

The checkmark motif is an effective one for an LCC — and affirmation of sorts, suggestive of ease and simplicity — but the rest of it is dead weight. Here’s a case where the fuselage isn’t painted white for a change, but probably should be.

GRADE: D

 

NORTHERN NONSENSE

Northern Pacific is a low-cost upstart out of Anchorage with plans to open routes within the western United States and to Asia. Behold their livery here.

Black is their go-to color. That’s not a bad thing, by itself, and we dig the raccoon-style shading around the cockpit. It’s a trendy flourish these days, but it’s cool. Can we stop there and award them a top grade? Alas, our survey of the wreckage must continue.

Let’s focus on that strange “N” logo. Except we can’t focus on it, because it’s vibrating uncontrollably. That’s not a shadow or a camera blur; that’s actually how it’s painted. Though maybe it’s better this way, seeing how, in its non-vibrating state, it resembles the logo for an amateur sports team.

On the engine nacelles, meanwhile, they’ve applied a completely different logo — a pair of offset thingies that remind us, painfully, of the American Airlines box-cutter. Then, up on the tail, we have yet another design. Isn’t that a black hole, or a special effect from “The Matrix”? The airline says its livery is meant to “evoke the natural beauty of Alaskan wilderness.” What I see here is a bending of time and space.

And sure, why not, go ahead and throw another “N” up in the corner, but this time make it turquoise. While you’re at it, paint the wingtips in turquoise too, because the northern lights or something.

What a garble of elements and patterns — a good example of a livery trying to out-clever itself at every turn.

GRADE: F-minus

 

SPANISH FLY FLOP

My plan is to start a Spanish charter carrier. Step one is to think up the stupidest name possible. I like “Iberojet,” as it sounds like it came from a third-grader. On the tail I want three bands. Mute the colors, and have that same third-grader do the painting so that the bands are warped and pinched, diverging/converging in bizarre random directions. If there’s any paint left over, add a navy blue arc to the underside of the aft fuselage. Do the same thing, more or less, on the engine nacelles, and then write “Iberojet” on the side. Use lowercase letters, because why not.

GRADE: F-minus

 

BOREAL BOREDOM

So, Icelandair has a new look, featuring, guess what, a Eurowhite body with blue titles. How novel.

The tail, though, is the exciting part, because each will boast one of five highlight colors apparently inspired by the people who make Sharpies. Wait, don’t tell me, the colors are meant to suggest… the northern lights! Which every smart tourist knows are best viewed in Finland or Norway, not Iceland.

Officially, according to a company press release, each of the accents “represents a different phenomena in Icelandic nature.” If true, they should include a gray, a black, and maybe a fiery volcanic red. What we get instead is lemon yellow, a magenta, a cyan blue. You could hunt around Iceland for a month and not see those colors. (Two additional colors are yet to debut. Surely they’ll be lovely.)

If they’d chosen only one accent color it’d be worse; the grab-bag keeps it lively, if nothing else. And when you really look at it, the problem is less the tail than the lettering. Sure, billboard-style lettering is meant to be big, but in this case it’s too big.

At least they’ve hung on to their logo, which for decades has been one of the most distinctive in the industry.

GRADE: D-plus

 

UNITED BLUES

After its merger with Continental Airlines in 2010, United came up with an amalgamation blending the United typeface with the Continental globe. Bland and ultra-corporate, it looked like something you’d see in a PowerPoint slide. A refresher was maybe inevitable. Unfortunately, they’ve gone way too far in the other direction. They’ve stayed with the 2010 template; except, now, they’ve sucked away whatever dignity it had.

We start with the “United” title, which has gone big. Big for big’s sake, unbalanced and oddly spaced, as if it were painted over some other name. The gold accenting is gone from the tail now, and the blue has been amped up, turning the old Continental globe into a fluorescent spider web. Is this the airline’s excuse for a logo? Do they even have a logo? It’s a tail that manages to be gaudy and boring at the same time.

And, needless to say, you can’t have a livery these days without some annoying “in-motion” theme. United obliges with a mandatory curvy thing along the lower fuselage. Is it a worm? A garden hose? Worst of all it’s black.

Granted this isn’t as terrible as what American Airlines did a few years ago. It’s bold, I’ll give you that, and you can marvel in the simplicity of it. Or, you can call it what it is: an immature scheme that evokes the downmarket cast of a budget airline — hardly the look that a preeminent global carrier should hope to project.

GRADE: F

 
 

PHOTO CREDITS:

Rocco Smet (Caribbean Airlines)
Daniel Shapiro/Unsplash (Breeze)
Jan Rosolino/Unsplash (Iberojet)
Patrick Smith (United Airlines)

MANY OF US associate the time of year with music from our pasts. Midsummer, maybe, reminds you of a song or an album. We all have our memory triggers, and often they correlate with a change in the weather, the turn of a season.

Here it’s the month of March, and for me that takes me back to 1986, when a strange band out of Scotland called the Jesus and Mary Chain was making a splash in the indie music scene. Their debut album, Psychocandy, had come out the previous fall, landing in my collection months later, after I’d developed a liking for the song “Never Understand,” which had gotten some radio play.

Once I started listening, I couldn’t stop. Over and over and over. The needle of my old JVC turntable must’ve gone incandescent from the friction.

I remember a lot of rain that month, and the grayness was a nice accompaniment to the album’s mood. Not maudlin, exactly, but heavy, and maybe a little creepy. Which is interesting, because, at heart, when you push past all the feedback and fuzz, this is the poppiest damn album in the world.

Stripped down, we hear a collection of kindergarten melodies that on their own would be tough to take seriously. The album’s conceit, it’s trick, is to crank the volume and soak them in waves of distortion. Cast the whole thing in a dressed-in-black, art school gloominess, and now the whole enterprise becomes cool — a masterpiece, even, of pop-Gothic-psychedelia.

This was an underground album, back when there were such things, but it had some mainstream bleed-over. Maybe you caught the kickoff track, ”Just Like Honey,” playing along with the closing credits of Sofia Coppola’s film, “Lost in Translation.” A great song, but better is the exuberant spookiness of “The Hardest Walk.” Or the creepy melancholia of “Cut Dead.”

Or, without a doubt the most astonishing song on the album, “You Trip Me Up,” a sort of haunted love poem sneaking out beneath a shrieking squall of feedback.

You may have heard the comparisons. “The Beach Boys on acid” or “The Velvet Underground meets Metallica.” And so on. Such descriptions are facile and one-dimensional. They’re also spot on, and only fair: this is a facile and one-dimensional album. In the greatest possible way.

There’s nothing complex here, and in a lot of ways Psychocandy plays like one long song. It’s pretentious and gimmicky, sure. And supremely addictive. This is the ultimate guilty pleasure album, and I’ve probably listened to it more times than any other record in my collection.

Just enjoy it for what it is.

 

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APROPOS OF the death of filmmaker David Lynch, I dug up this photo from a few years ago.

There I was, watching Lynch’s proverbial cult classic “Eraserhead” in an Emirates first class suite. It had been ages since I’d seen the movie and was surprised to discover it in the airline’s catalog.

I can’t think of a stranger venue in which to have watched this movie. If you know “Eraserhead” you’ll know what I mean. The contrast was ridiculous: the luxury of the cabin and the industrial bleakness of the film.

It was great to see it again, and the experience was extra-enjoyable thanks to the Bowers & Wilkins noise-cancelling headsets that Emirates provides in first class. Sound was always such an important element in Lynch’s movies, especially in “Eraserhead,” and the ambient whooshing racket of Mach .84 at 35,000 feet might otherwise have drowned out that critical aesthetic.

That said, I was never a huge fan of Lynch’s work, save for this one and “Blue Velvet,” which I probably watched 62 times and at one point had most of the dialogue memorized.

Meanwhile I can thank various inflight entertainment systems for having introduced me to many of my favorite movies and TV series.

I discovered “Arrested Development” on a business class seatback screen several years after it went off the air. The same with “Flight of the Conchords,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Louie,” and, more recently, an excellent drama from England called “Happy Valley.”

I’m old enough to remember when airlines used to project movies onto a blurry bulkhead screen. If you didn’t fancy the carrier’s choice of the day, well, you were out of luck and had to read a book or peruse the inflight magazine. If you were lucky, on a longer flight, they might show two movies.

For the audio, they’d pass out plastic, stethoscope-style headsets that would plug into the armrests. The actors sounded as if they were yelling at each other under water.

 

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February 1, 2025

“Perhaps a boring 2025 is what we should hope for,” I wrote back on January 21. A week later, a Blackhawk military helicopter collided with a PSA Airlines regional jet maneuvering to land at Reagan National Airport. Both aircraft plunged into the Potomac River, killing 67 people.

Not a good way to begin the year.

As I understand it, the crew of the helicopter told air traffic control it had the regional jet in sight, and was asked to “maintain visual separation,” as we say. When this happens, the onus of avoiding a traffic conflict falls to the pilot, rather than ATC. Maybe that sounds a bit old school, and I suppose it is. But it’s a common procedure when operating close to an airport, and almost always a safe one.

So the big question is: why did the helicopter not do as instructed? It’s possible the pilots misidentified their traffic, confusing the lights of a different plane with those of the PSA jet. Or, They had the correct aircraft in sight, but misjudged their trajectories. Were they paying close enough attention? Were they reckless, negligent, or something in between?

Another question is why the regional jet’s collision avoidance system, called TCAS, didn’t save the day. For one, although all commercial aircraft are equipped with TCAS, military helicopters are not. For the system to work optimally, both aircraft need to be wired in, so to speak, with their transponders exchanging speed and altitude data.

Regardless, the most critical TCAS function, called a “resolution advisory,” or RA, which gives aural commands to climb or descend, is normally inhibited at very low altitudes. The collision happened at less than 400 feet above the ground, maybe 25 seconds from touchdown. The RJ pilots might have received a basic TCAS alert — a synthesized voice announcing “Traffic! Traffic!” — but they would not have received maneuver instructions, and were likely preoccupied with aligning themselves with the runway. That close to the runway, a pilot is focused on landing, not on scanning for traffic.

DCA is a busy and challenging airport. There are twisty approach and departure patterns, and military copters are often transiting the airspace. It’s hard to know at this point what the takeaways of this crash might be, but the whole “maintain visual separation” thing may need to be reevaluated, especially for operations at night.

This was the deadliest U.S. aviation accident since 2009, when 49 people died in the crash of Colgan Air (Continental Connection) flight 3407 outside Buffalo.

PSA is an Ohio-based regional affiliate of American Airlines. Although wholly owned, it operates independently, with its own employees and facilities. Its pilots are neither employed nor trained by American Airlines.

Unfortunate as this accident was, it didn’t involve a major carrier or a mainline jet. And so, if nothing else, our 23-year crashless streak, which I discuss often in these pages, remains intact. And we hadn’t had a serious crash of any kind in fifteen years, which itself is remarkable. Making these points is, I hope, not in poor taste; the deaths of 67 people is still a significant tragedy.

PSA Airlines is not to be confused with the original PSA, a.k.a. Pacific Southwest Airlines, which operated from 1949 until 1988, when it was taken over by USAir.

As it happens, the old PSA was involved in an infamous midair collision over San Diego in 1978, in which 144 people were killed. In that disaster, which remains the deadliest midair collision in U.S. history, the pilots of the PSA Boeing 727 lost sight of a private plane that ATC had instructed it to follow, eventually colliding with it. There’s an irony in there.

Hans Wendt’s photograph of the stricken PSA 727, flames pouring from its right wing, is one of the most haunting airplane photos ever taken. Google it.

Neither was last week’s crash the first involving the Potomac River. Some of us are old enough to remember the spectacle of Air Florida flight 90, in 1982. The pilots of flight 90 failed to run their engine anti-ice system during a Janauary snowstorm at DCA. The plane took off, stalled, slammed into the 14th Street Bridge, then disappeared below the frozen river.

I was a sophomore in high school at the time. I remember our teacher wheeling a television into the room so we could all watch the rescue efforts. The heroics of Arland Williams and Lenny Skutnik.

No heroics this time.

And nope, not the first time a military aircraft collided with a civilian one. I can think of at least three others, including the 1971 collision over California between a Hughes Airwest DC-9 and a U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom.

OUT WITH the old. As it happened, 2024 closed on a sour note, with two major crashes in the span of a week, capping what was, statistically, one of the deadliest years in some time.

Maybe so, but how deadly, exactly? Compare last year to many of the years of the 1970’s and 1980’s, when multiple major crashes were the norm. Suddenly 2024 doesn’t look so bad. Fact is, year over year, we have nowhere near the number of serious accidents we used to.

Just the same, it’s tempting to view 2024 as a correction, rather than an aberration. Perhaps what was surprising wasn’t the spate of accidents, but rather how long we’d gone without such a spate. Maybe we were too lucky for too long.

There’s no telling what might happen in 2025. If nothing else, let’s hope the U.S. majors maintain their remarkable streak of disaster-free years, currently standing at 23.

In the meantime, who’s next in line for a computer crash? The “airline meltdown” has become a recurrent event — a revolving series of tech-related fiascos. Every few months, it seems, things at one of the big carriers go haywire for a few days. Last summer, Delta had its fifteen minutes of infamy. More recently it was American. Is it United’s turn? Southwest? JetBlue?

Other predictions are easier. The unrelenting tedium of TSA, for instance. No changes there. You’ve been standing in line for the past two decades, mostly for no good reason. And you’ll be standing again.

Things have gotten a little better with delays and cancellations, as airlines have reduced their dependence on regional jets and rationalized their schedules. Somewhat. But the skies remain overcrowded, and ATC remains understaffed and underfunded. So I don’t foresee much improvement.

What else? Bankrupcties? Mergers? Will Spirit Airlines hang in there, or will they disappear under Chapter 7 or a last-minute acquisition? How about a new black swan event, akin to the COVID surprise of 2020?

Who knows. I don’t really see any markers. Nothing feels likely. And maybe that’s good. Perhaps a boring 2025 is what we should hope for.

Feel free to leave your own prognostications in the comments section.

 

Photo courtesy of Unsplash

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July 8, 2022 · Filed under 1