December 8, 2025

That’s a passage found in chapter two of my book.

It’s that second toy, the one with the transparent fuselage, that I bring to your attention. As it happens, I discovered a photograph, buried in an old family album, in which you can see it. While I’ve always remembered the toy, I had no idea that a picture of it existed.

That’s me holding the plane, of course, with my sister and my mother in front. It’s Christmas morning, 1972.

Look closely and you can see the rows of seats, sectioned into different colors. The first class seats look red. On the left wing it says “Pan Am.” You can’t see the spiral stairs, but they’re in there, in the middle of that blue part. It appears the entire fuselage was look-through, not just half of it, as I’d written.

One wonders what sorts of shitty toys are available these days for first-grade airplane buffs.

That plastic plane is long gone, sadly. I’m not saying you should save all of your childhood toys, but be careful. This one, surely, deserved to be set aside. Even so young, I already has aspirations of becoming a pilot. It would’ve made a meaningful keepsake.

The picture, at least, remains.

Last Thursday, by the way, marked the 34th anniversary of the demise of Pan American World Airways. The company ceased operations on December 4th, 1991. I remember watching it on the news, in a hotel room in Burlington, Vermont.

I was fortunate enough to fly twice on an actual Pan Am 747. From Rio de Janeiro to New York, in 1982, and from Frankfurt to New York in the fall of 1991, shortly before the end.

 

(Note: A number of readers have pointed me to 747 toys for sale on eBay similar to the one I’ve described. These are not the same; they’re flimsier and cheaper than the one I had. The colors are different too.)

 

November 22, 2025

You’re in a hotel room in London. There’s a coaster on the desk in the design of a Union Jack (or half of one, at any rate).

Very British, very typical. But you see something else. You cover part of the flag with your hand, revealing a different design.

Then you cover it a slightly different way, revealing yet a third design. Like this…

What you’ve created are the 1970s-era logos of British European Airways (BEA) and British Airways.

BEA was a mainstay U.K. carrier that flew throughout Europe. Its “speedjack” logo was a segmented Union Jack. In 1974 BEA merged with B.O.A.C to form British Airways. The first tail livery worn by British Airways also was a segmented Union Jack, a version of which is still used today. They looked like this…

The fact you noticed this with hardly a glance makes you both pleased and uneasy.

On the one hand, you take pride in a level of knowledge that some might call encyclopedic. On the other hand, you suspect there are better things for your mind to concern itself with. Your talents of perception, you worry, are badly off-balance, hijacked by frivolous aviation esoterica. Take it easy, man. Sometimes a Union Jack is just a Union Jack.

So it goes when you’re an air travel nerd. You can’t help yourself. The world is always more interesting when something, anything, relates back to airlines or planes. And it happens a lot. Maybe it’s a tangible item, like a coaster. Maybe it’s something you saw in the news; something cultural, political, or a current event. Almost always there’s a connection.

This is a testament to your passion. It’s also a testament to the significance, and ubiquity, of commercial air travel. The world would be very, very different without it. Probably less fun, too.

 

Related Story:

RISE AND WHINE. MEDITATIONS ON A MILK CARTON.

November 11, 2025

Today’s topic is supposed to be the U.S. government shutdown. I’m supposed to offer “hacks” (a gruesomely overused term these days) that’ll help you deal with the delays and long lines, and assure you that the skies remain safe.

I can’t think of anything more boring, however, so instead I’m going to talk about this vintage American Airlines luggage tag that I found in the attic at my father’s house.

The tag — what’s left of it — was affixed to a suitcase that belonged to my mother in the 1960s, when she worked briefly as a flight attendant for American. An address on the suitcase is hers from before she was married.

I’m pretty certain the tag is from 1964. This jibes with both the address and her dates of employment. There’s also a “64” as part of the coding, visible in red.

You also can see where the flight number, 12, has been inked in by hand.

Flight 12 was, for decades, American’s Los Angeles-Boston nonstop. The reciprocal, flight 11, left Boston for Los Angeles each morning.

In the late 60s, flights 11 and 12 would’ve been run with a Boeing 707. Later it was a DC-10, and a 767 after that. I remember flying to LAX on flight 11 in 1980, when I was a freshman in high school.

The pairing no longer exists. These flight numbers were retired as of September 12th, 2001, the day after flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center.

There’s a science of sorts to flight numbers that you probably didn’t know about:

Ordinarily, flights going eastbound are assigned even numbers; those headed westbound get odd numbers. Another habit is giving lower, one- or two-digit numbers to more prestigious or long-distance routes. If there’s a flight 1 in an airline’s timetable, it’s the stuff of London–New York.

Numbers might also be grouped geographically. At United, transpacific flights use three-digit numbers beginning with 8, which is considered a lucky number in some Asian cultures. Four-digit sequences starting with a 3 or higher are, most of the time, indications of a code-share flight.

Technically, a flight number is a combination of numbers and letters, prefaced with the carrier’s two-letter IATA code. Every airline has one of these codes. For Delta, American, and United, it’s DL, AA, and UA, respectively. Lufthansa uses LH; Emirates uses EK. Often they’re intuitive, other times they’re mysterious. British Airways is BA, while jetBlue uses the alphanumeric B6.

If you didn’t know about this practice, you no doubt got familiar with it after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which from the start was referred to as “MH370.”

All this inspired by some fragments of a sixty year-old luggage tag.

Air travel forensics, you could call it. I’m good at it.

And I imagine you can find thousands of these sorts of curiosities — numbers and codes that tell a story — sitting in attics and basements all over the world.

 

Related Stories:
THE DAY OF THE COCKROACH
THE WEIRD WORLD OF AIRLINE COLLECTIBLES

 

Photo by the author.

UPDATE: November 16, 2025

Investigators are looking into the possibility that a structural failure — a fracture in the pylon that connects the engine to the wing — may have caused the engine separation that struck UPS fight 2976 on November 4th.

Shortly after the accident, the FAA grounded all MD-11 jetliners. This weekend they extended that emergency order to all remaining DC-10 jets. The MD-11 is a derivative of the DC-10 and shares many structural components.

Very few DC-10s remain active. Fewer than ten survive, used as freighters or as specialty firefighting planes.

In 1979 the FAA grounded all U.S.-registered DC-10s, and banned the plane from U.S. airspace, following the horrific crash of American Airlines flight 191 in Chicago (see below). Then, as now, the culprit was engine pylons. Airline maintenance procedures were blamed for causing cracks, but investigators criticized the pylon design as well. Did this issue rear its head again, all these decades later, in Louisville?

The poor DC-10 was beset by a slew of design shortfalls that contributed to several accidents. Cargo doors, floors, hydraulics, pylons. The Chicago disaster killed 273 people. Five years earlier, a faulty cargo door led to the crash of a Turkish Airlines flight outside Paris, in which 346 were killed.

So far as I know, the DC-10 becomes the only commercial jet to be grounded twice. A jinxed machine that can’t escape its fate. Here it is, with only the tiniest number still in service, yet its bad luck continues.

 

November 6, 2025

You’ve all seen the footage by now. Late on Tuesday afternoon, a UPS MD-11 freighter crashed off the runway in Louisville, Kentucky, erupting into a wall of fire. All three pilots perished, as did several people on the ground.

For reasons unclear, the left-side engine of the three-engine widebody jet separated from the wing before liftoff. Beyond that, there’s not a lot we know.

A commercial jet is, by regulation, able to safely take off and climb with a failed or detached engine. That doesn’t guarantee success, however. Everything must be done right, procedurally. It’s something pilots train for all the time, but when you’ve got a widebody jet at max takeoff weight, there’s nothing easy about it.

And there was more going on. From the video, it appears that the left wing was on fire. It’s possible the wing, or its critical control surfaces (flaps and slats), were damaged.

We can’t help thinking of American Airlines flight 191, a DC-10 that lost its left engine on liftoff at Chicago in 1979. The engine rolled over the top of the wing and tore out hydraulic lines, causing the flaps and slats on that side to retract. These devices are crucial for maintaining lift at low speeds. Without them, the wing stalled; the plane rolled over and crashed into a fireball killing 273 people. Indeed, the sequence that befell AA 191 isn’t at all unlike the one in Louisville.

It’s also possible that the MD-11’s center engine, located at the base of the tail, may have ingested debris or hot gasses from the wing fire, causing that engine to suffer a power loss, or fail completely, as well. A jet can take off with a lost engine. It cannot take off with two lost engines.

This brings to mind the Concorde disaster at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2000. With one engine already failed, a wing fire fed by leaking fuel caused the adjacent engine to quit as well.

A derivative of the star-crossed DC-10, the MD-11 was developed by McDonnell Douglas in the late 1980s. It didn’t sell particularly well. Long since retired from passenger service, a few remain in service as freighters, mostly with UPS and FedEx. The plane has a reputation for being difficult to handle in certain situations, such as when landing in gusty winds. MD-11s were involved in at least three landing rollovers. Whether or how its characteristics played a role in Tuesday’s disaster is unknown. It’s not likely.

At least four different videos of the MD-11 crash have been making the media rounds, each of them pretty gruesome. In the old days it was rare for crashes to be caught on film, be it photographs or video. Someone had to have a camera handy at exactly the right second. The few that were captured became iconic images, such as the photo of the PSA 727 in San Diego in 1978, its wing afire after colliding with a Cessna, and the aforementioned DC-10 at Chicago, rolled onto its side and out of control.

Nowadays, with cameras everywhere and a public starving for sensational images, a plane goes down and the footage is bouncing around social media within minutes.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

 

Photo by Lukas Souza, courtesy of Unsplash.

October 28, 2025

There’s that expression, “pissing into the wind.”

Since I began writing about commercial aviation, over twenty years ago, my foundational motive has been an evangelical one: encouraging people to rediscover the greatness of air travel. I’m well acquainted with the hassles and indignities of flying, and these too I’ve discussed at length. But what underlies my work is a seldom heard plea to reevaluate, and maybe even savor, the idea of getting on a plane. A newspaper once described me as “an air-travel romantic.” I can’t deny it.

“As a writer-pilot,” I said to an interviewer in 2004, “I hope to restore an appreciation for the airplane as part of the greater experience of travel.” Perhaps that’s too tall an order, but can’t we at least acknowledge the impressiveness of it? We live in an age when people can travel halfway around the world in a matter of hours, in almost absolute safety, at a cost of pennies per mile. Spend a little more to sit up front, and you relax in stupendous comfort. How is this not remarkable?

Well, remarkable as it might be, I worry it’s not enough. I’m afraid the bad simply outweighs the good, never giving people the chance to consider another perspective. They just don’t have the patience. My mission is a failed one, I suspect.

And I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve worked pretty damn hard to make flying as tedious and infuriating as possible.

Our propensity to sabotage what could be, and should be, an enjoyable experience, seems to worsen every year. And the saddest part is, it doesn’t need to be this way. The lines don’t have to be so long. The delays don’t have to be so frequent. The security rules don’t have to be so stupid, or the noise levels so aggravating. But we make them so. Flying doesn’t have to suck, yet we insist on it.

What’s the most dreadful part? That’s subjective, I suppose, but I can offer you an opinion on what, to me, are the three worst things to happen to commercial air travel since the dawn of the Jet Age:

REGIONAL JETS

Number three on my list is the advent of the regional jet. Starting in the 1990s, advances in engine efficiency meant that smaller jets with a few as 50 seats could now be operated profitably. This changed the way airlines did business, farming out huge swaths of domestic capacity to contract carriers (the various “Express” and “Connection” outfits) flying what came to be called “RJs.” These planes have always been reliable, safe, and technologically sophisticated, but they’re a sub-par product compared to mainline jets, with tight cabins, limited luggage space and minimal onboard service.

In the old days, turboprop “commuter” planes, as we called them, fed passengers into the big hubs from outlying satellite cities. Suddenly, with the longer range and higher speeds of RJs at their disposal, carriers began deploying them even on mainline routes. Why use a Boeing or an Airbus when you could throw a couple of RJs on a route, flown by a contractor that paid its workers next to nothing?

Their proliferation dragged down wages for tens of thousands of employees. RJ pilots often earned less than $20,000 annually, and working conditions at many regional carriers were dire. Things have improved significantly over the last few years, but an entire generation of workers suffered.

And while those commuter turboprops could fly at low altitudes and use shorter runways, more or less staying out of the way, RJs share the sky with the big jets. Thus they’ve been a huge contributor to delays and congestion — maybe the biggest. At the height of RJ mania in the early 2000s, these mini-jets came to account for close to 50 percent of all commercial flights in the United States. That’s half of the flights carrying maybe twenty percent of the passengers — a terribly inefficient use of airspace and runways. Thankfully these numbers are more reasonable today, but hundreds of RJs are still out there.

TERMINAL RACKET

Next we have airport noise levels. This is the intangible one, but a big one nonetheless. It’s chiefly, but not exclusively, a U.S. phenomenon, and it’s gotten worse in recent years.

Beyond cellphone chatter and the occasional screeching kid, the typical airport terminal should be a relatively quiet place — no noisier than, say, a shopping mall. But we’ve managed to make it hellishly loud thanks to an infatuation with public address announcements, very few of which serve a useful purpose. It didn’t used to be this way.

The din starts in the concourse, where travelers are bombarded with music, promotional announcements, and pointless security advisories. Then, at the gate, at least a dozen mostly redundant PAs accompany the boarding process. There’s little relief on the plane, with cabin crew yapping orders as passengers stow their bags and settle in. Then comes the interminable safety demo, and yet another flurry of announcements. Your first thirty or so minutes onboard is spent being lectured to and barked at.

If even half of this clamor were helpful or informative, it could be excused. But it’s not. It’s nothing but noise, making an already stressful experience that much worse.

Corrosive as it is to travelers’ nerves, the effects can be subtle. You might not realize how loud the average U.S. airport is until you experience one of the more peaceful European or Asian ones. Something feels different… and then it dawns on you: it’s quiet. Some European terminals ban public address announcements completely, and most non-U.S. carriers, too, take it a lot easier with PAs on the plane.

Congrats to the few U.S. airports who’ve restricted the use of PAs. San Francisco, for one. Hopefully more will join.

SECURITY THEATER

But probably the single worst thing to happen to flying is post-9/11 airport security, and all of its foibles and foolishness. In the United States our punching bag is the TSA, but really this is global.

I’m in full agreement that some type of passenger screening is necessary. The monster we created, however, is not the answer. A system that treats every last passenger as a potential terrorist, and everything they carry as a potential weapon, is a ludicrous one, but that’s what we’ve got; an approach we’ve barely budged from in all the years since the attacks of 2001. The exasperating irony being that none of the checkpoint protocols in place today would have prevented the 9/11 hijackers from doing what they did.

I’ve written volumes on all the things wrong and wasteful about airport security. Most of it is obvious, and we’ve gotten so used to it that it hardly warrants repeating. But every now and then, the audacity of it hits you. The other day, watching a TSA guard confiscate someone’s toothpaste, I got to thinking: Have you ever considered the thousands of tons of supplies that are trucked into airports every single day? Food, beverages, alcohol, and endless amounts of retail inventory: all the crap for sale on the concourse. It’s verboten for a passenger to carry through a tube of toothpaste, yet mountains of goods aren’t given more than a cursory inspection.  

Which is to be expected, because it’d be impossible to screen even half a percent of it with the same level of scrutiny we devote to passengers. Dare I suggest that a team of terrorists, with someone on the inside, working at a duty free shop or in a restaurant, could easily smuggle in something deadly, then pass it along to someone getting on a plane?

This is only one example of the holes in our security logic. The scenarios are endless. Meanwhile, TSA is micro-inspecting your toiletries. The whole thing is completely insane.

As I’ve always maintained, the true nuts and bolts of keeping terrorists away from planes takes place backstage, as it were, far from the airport. It’s the job of law enforcement and intelligence and international collaboration. It’s not the job of guards on the concourse. What the perfect checkpoint might look like is hard to say, but surely it’s not what we have.
 
Imagine a journey free of these three scourges. How different it all would feel.

 

Related Stories:
THE REGIONAL RECKONING
TERMINAL RACKET
WHAT IS AIRPORT SECURITY?

Photos by Daneil Shapiro, Aaskash Dhage, and Scott Fillmer, courtesy of Unsplash.

Quaint seem the days when Pan Am executives sat in their Park Avenue skyscraper, scratching their heads over ways to make a 747 reach Tokyo without refueling. Only a few decades later, the advent of ultra long-haul aircraft has made almost any two cities on the map connectable without a stop. Variants of planes like the A350 and 787 can stay aloft for twenty hours. Once upon a time, “long haul” meant New York to London. Today it’s London to Perth.

I say almost. Qantas, for example, still hasn’t closed the gap on the so-called “grail route” between Sydney and London. “Project Sunrise,” as they’ve named it, is the airline’s plan to run flights from Sydney to London, Paris, and New York. The project kicked off in 2017, but certification and technical issues keep pushing things off, and the launch is now delayed until 2027.

Looking at the route maps, however, we see another unconquered frontier that seldom gets a mention: Asia to South America. No airline has ever flown a nonstop route between these two continents. (The closest we have is All Nippon Airways’ flight between Tokyo and Mexico City, which, because of the altitude of MEX, operates nonstop only on the eastbound leg.)

The reasons for this are both economic and technical: There isn’t enough passenger demand to warrant the expenses of operating such a flight, and the distances would challenge the capabilities of even the longest-range jet. The mileage between Tokyo and Lima — the most likely city-pair — is just about equal to the mileage between New York and Singapore, currently the longest flight in the world.

Tokyo-Bogota is a little shorter, but as with Mexico, Bogota’s 8000-foot elevation would pose restrictions. Anything else (Hong Kong to Rio, Tokyo to Santiago, etc.) is probably beyond the range of any existing aircraft.

China Eastern has announced a Shanghai-Buenos Aires flight, but the plane will make a two-hour stopover in Auckland for fuel.

I know what you’re thinking: who the heck wants to be in a plane for that long anyway? That’s a fair question, and the real challenges of long-haul flying are perhaps no longer technological so much as human. That is, how do you keep passengers comfortable, or even sane, on a journey stretching ten-thousand miles? We’re basically at the limits of what people can endure.

In first and business class, things have never been swankier or more luxurious, and there’s virtually no limit to how long passengers in these cabins can tolerate being aloft. But economy class is another story. No matter how many video channels or complimentary cocktails you give people, A nine-abreast row with 32-inch pitch simply isn’t bearable for nineteen hours.

Because of this, some carriers equip their longest flights with enhanced economy cabins. Singapore’s New York flights have no standard economy seats at all, going with a comfier Premium Economy instead. Air New Zealand sells a “Skycouch,” where a row of economy seats convert into a bed.

My personal distance record is a comparatively modest 6,830 miles, covered in sixteen hours and six minutes, on a Delta Air Lines 777-200LR from Detroit to Hong Kong several years ago (Delta no longer flies this route). That, enjoyably, was in business class.

On the other hand, there’s also the 6,925 miles, covered in fourteen hours and forty-six minutes, that I spent in economy aboard South African Airways flight SA202 from JFK to Johannesburg. (Notice how the second flight was a longer distance, but flown in less time.) I know it was exactly fourteen hours and forty-six minutes because there was a digital timer bolted to the bulkhead in front of me, feeding us a minute-by-minute update. Watching the hours tick by seemed a torturous proposition, until a certain passenger was bold enough to tape a piece of paper over the clock.

As to the longest flight I’ve ever piloted, that would be New York to Cairo — a proverbial puddle-jump by today’s metrics.

 

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

Dubai boarding bridges
Dubai departure board
ANA arriving at Mexico City
On the apron in Doha

I’m just back from Paris today, and apropos of nothing else, here’s a shout-out to Air France. That is, a round of applause for the longevity of the airline’s paint scheme, which I was admiring through the windows at Charles de Gaulle.

It’s downright impressive how long Air France has worn its current livery. As well it should; it’s one of the best.

Back in the late 1970s, Air France was one of the first major carriers to ditch the horizontal “cheat line” striping and move to what aviation nerds call the “Eurowhite” look. And for more than four decades it’s served them well.

There have been revisions. The tail stripes have been softened, and, more recently, the typeface was enlarged and now spells the compound AIRFRANCE. But the template overall has stayed the same. I can think of no other airline whose colors have been so consistent for so long. Singapore, maybe?

The livery incorporates Air France’s distinctive circular logo — one of the industry’s most enduring trademarks and a classic of airline iconography. It’s known as the Hippocampe Ailé, and it dates to 1933, featuring a Pegasus head with the tail of a mythical sea dragon. (The design reminds us of the Homa of Iran Air, around since the ’60s.)

We’re glad they didn’t ditch this emblem, deeming it too anachronistic or some such. On the contrary, they’ve made it bigger, in a prominent spot just aft of the cockpit windows.

 

Related Story:
THE PECULIAR LOGO OF IRAN AIR

Photos by the author.

Comments (14)

September 24, 2025 · Filed under 2