Welcome to the 2025 installment of “An Ask the Pilot Christmas.”

In years past I would start off with gift suggestions, but this time I don’t have any, save a tedious plug for my book. It’s in dire need of updating, but I suppose it makes a good stocking-stuffer.

You can expect chaos at the airports, as always. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), roughly 62 billion people are projected to fly between now and New Year’s Eve, 96 percent of them connecting through Atlanta.

In fact I don’t know how many people might fly. I haven’t been listening. In any case, it’s the same basic story every year: the trade groups put out their predictions, and much is made as to whether slightly more, or slightly fewer, people will fly than the previous year. Does the total really matter? All you need to know is that lines will be long and flights full. Any tips I might offer are simple common sense: leave early, and remember that TSA considers fruitcakes to be hazardous materials (no joke: the density of certain baked goods causes them to appear suspicious on the x-ray scanners).

For years I made a point of working over the holidays. When I was a bottom-feeder on my airline’s seniority list, it was an opportunity to score some of those higher-quality layovers that were normally out of reach. Other pilots wanted to be home with their kids or watching football, and so I was able to spend Christmas in Cairo, Edinburgh, Budapest, Paris.

That’s how it works at an airline: every month you put in your preferences: where you’d like to fly, which days you’d like to be off, which insufferable colleagues you hope to avoid, and so on. There are separate bids at each base, for each aircraft type and for each seat – i.e. captain and first officer. The award process then begins with the most senior pilot in the category and works its way down. The lowest-rung pilots have their pick of the scraps.

One of my favorite holiday memories dates back to Thanksgiving, 1993. I was captain of a Dash-8 turboprop flying from Boston to New Brunswick, Canada, and my first officer was the always cheerful and gregarious Kathy Martin. (Kathy, who also appears in my “Right Seat” essay, was one of at least three pilots I’ve met who’d been flight attendants at an earlier point in their careers.)

There were no meal services on our Dash-8s, but Kathy brought a cooler from home, jammed with food: huge turkey sandwiches, a whole blueberry pie and tubs of mashed potatoes. We assembled the plates and containers across the folded-down jumpseat. The pie we passed to the flight attendant, and she handed out slices to passengers.

Quite a contrast to Thanksgiving Day in 1999, when I was working a cargo flight to Brussels. It was custom on Thanksgiving to stock the galley with a special meal, and the three of us were hungry and looking forward to it. Trouble was, the caterers forgot to bring the food. By the time we noticed, we were only minutes from departure and they’d split for the day. I thought I might cry when I opened our little fridge and saw only a can of Diet Sprite and a matchbook-size packet of Tillamook cheese.

The best we could do was get one of the guys upstairs to drive out to McDonald’s. He came back with three big bags of burgers and fries, tossing them up to us just as they pulled the stairs away. Who eats fast food on Thanksgiving? Pilots in a pinch.

Fireworks explode only a few hundred feet from the ground, but when enough of them are going off at once, it’s quite the spectacle when seen from a jetliner. On New Year’s Eve, 2010, I was en route to Dakar, passing over the city of Bamako, Mali, in West Africa. At the stroke of midnight, the capital erupted in a storm of tiny explosions. The sky was set aglow by literally tens of thousands of small incendiaries — bluish-white flashes everywhere, like the pulsing sea of lights you see at concerts and sporting events. From high above, this huge celebration made Bamako look like a war zone.

I’ve also spent a number of holidays traveling on vacation. Thanksgiving in Armenia, for instance. Another Thanksgiving in Timbuktu.

And with that in mind, here’s some advice…

Do not, ever, make the mistake that I once made and attempt to enjoy Christmas at a place in Ghana called Hans Cottage, a small hotel situated on a lagoon just outside the city of Cape Coast.

They love their Christmas music at the Hans Cottage, you see, and the compound is rigged end-to-end with speakers that blare it around the clock. And although you can count me among those people able to tolerate Christmas music (in moderation, and so long as it isn’t Sufjan Stevens) there is one blood-curdling exception. That exception is the song, “Little Drummer Boy,” which is, to me, the most cruelly awful piece of music ever written. (It was that way before Joan Jett or David Bowie got hold of it.)

It’s a traumatic enough song in any rendition. And at the Hans Cottage Botel they have chosen to make it the only — only! — song on their Christmastime tape loop. Over and over it plays, ceaselessly, day and night. It’s there at breakfast. It’s there again at dinner. It’s there at three in the morning, seeping through the space under your door. And every moment between. I’m not sure who the artist is, but it’s an especially treacly version with lots of high notes to set one’s skull ringing.

“Ba-ruppa-pum-pum,ruppa-pum-pum…” as I hear it today and forever, that stammering chorus is like the thump-thump of chopper blades in the wounded mind of a Vietnam vet who Can’t Forget What He Saw. There I am, pinned down at the hotel bar, jittery and covered in sweat, my nails clattering against a bottle of Star lager while the infernal Drummer Boy warbles into the buggy air.

“Barkeep!” I grab Kwame by the wrist. “For the love of god, man, can’t somebody make it stop?”

Kwame just smiles. “So lovely, yes.”

 

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Photos by the author.

 

February 19, 2020

Son of a bitch. Here we go again with “rollerboard,” that odious, etymologically crippled term for wheeled luggage.

Originally I blamed the novelist Gary Shteyngart for mainstreaming this dismal word, scattering it throughout the opening pages of his latest book, Lake Success. Now, in a truly distressing blow, I discover that Jonathan Franzen — Jonathan Franzen! — is perhaps equally responsible. The word appears multiple times in “Missing,” one of the essays in Franzen’s 2018 collection, The End of the End of the Earth.

The End is a heartbreaking enough book to start with. The author and I share a love of birds (the feathered kind if not the metal ones) and I was having a tough time getting through his sober chronicle of all the depraved things humans are doing to ensure their destruction. To then stumble across “rollerboard” made it all a bit much. I had the same reaction as I did reading Lake Success, which was to fling the book in a corner and go pout.

Both books were published in the fall of 2018, which clearly points to a conspiracy of some kind. And both of my favorite authors having helped to normalize this lazy bastardization is something I take personally. I feel betrayed!

Of course, it seems pretty likely that “rollerboard” was accepted usage before Franzen or Shteyngart ran with it. It’s tough to imagine two authors of such eminence getting a non-word past their editors and fact-checkers. When and how the term entered the lexicon I can’t say for sure. If I weren’t so exasperated and afraid of what I might find, I’d look it up.

The problem is that “rollerboard” (sometimes presented as “roller board”) is a misconstruction. It’s a mis-hearing of the term “roll-aboard.” This is wheeled luggage we’re talking about. You roll it aboard. “Roll-aboard” (or “rollaboard”) makes sense not only logically and grammatically, but has a pretty sound to it as well. “Rollerboard” is something unrelated, that in no way evokes or describes luggage. A board with wheels on it? I picture a plank, or a surfboard, with wheels like roller skates.

Yes I know, this is the evolution of language. Our conversations, you’ll point out, are jammed with words that have come into general use through laziness or distortion. “Rollerboard,” meanwhile, has just enough of the right sound and meaning to be plausible, sort of.

I sense defeat. And there are, I suppose, worse words to pick on.

 

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July 10, 2025

THERE’S NOSTALGIA, and then there’s time travel.

The latter is impossible, but every once in a while, in the right circumstances, you can nudge up against it.

For me it happened a few nights ago, at a small concert venue in Malden, Massachusetts. Up on stage was an outfit called Greg Norton & Büddies. The buddies, or Büddies, were guitarist Jon Snodgrass and drummer David Jarnstrom. And Greg Norton was Greg Norton, bassist from the legendery Minnesota threesome Hüsker Dü.

I hadn’t seen Greg since October of 1987, when Hüsker Dü performed at a club called Toad’s in New Haven, Connecticut. This was shortly before the band’s demise; the thirteenth, and last, time I would watch them play.

Even before the death of drummer/vocalist Grant Hart in 2017, the possibility of a reunion was never taken seriously. It wasn’t gonna happen, and we superfans knew it. We had our memories, our albums, our bootlegs. That would be it. The closest we could come was going to see Hart or Bob Mould on their solo tours, enjoying the newer stuff but always waiting impatiently for whatever Hüsker classics they might sprinkle in.

Then one day, all these years later, Greg Norton says fuck it. He teams up a pair of outstanding musicians and hits the road playing nothing but Hüsker songs. “Celebrating 40-plus years of Hüsker Dü!” boasts the promos. No ambiguity here; you don’t have to wait for an encore to hear “Books About UFOs” or “Celebrated Summer.”

I’d skipped out on the last several Bob Mould shows, but this was something different. Barring the outlandish possibility of Mould teaming up with Norton, this would be as close to seeing Hüsker Dü again as will ever be possible. I couldn’t not go.

Call it a cover band if you have to. But then, is it a cover band, exactly, when one of the guys is, well, one of the guys? How to even describe this? Imagine Beatlemania, except way cooler and starring an actual Beatle.

Which is probably an insulting way to put it, because there was nothing superficial or gimmicky about the hour-long set Norton and his mates blasted through. I knew ahead of time that a number of songs would be sung by audience members ambitious enough, and sentimentally motivated enough, to give it a try, and so I expected it to be fun. And it was. What I didn’t expect was how passionate it would be.

That’s probably due, in part, to the energy that longtime devotees like me brought with us into the room. This was, for us, more than a novelty act. (And yeah, it was a distinctly older, Gen X crowd.) But it’s also true that the band kicked ass.

One third of Hüsker Dü can never be Hüsker Dü, but damn if the songs weren’t nailed. Greg might hate me for saying this, but their set was tighter than some of the Hüsker sets I stood through back in the 80s. I missed the sight of Mould’s iconic Ibanez flying-V, but Jon Snodgrass knew the songs backwards and forwards. As did Jarnstrom on drums (who unlike Grant Hart wears shoes while he plays).

The set list was just about perfect, though I wish they’d done “Terms of Psychic Warfare.” I loved the choice of “It’s Not Funny Anymore” as the kickoff, and kudos too for bringing out Hart’s, “Back From Somewhere.” There aren’t a lot of memorable cuts on the Warehouse album, but that’s one of them them — one of Grant’s mini-masterpiece sleepers.

At one point Snodgrass took the mic and and talked for a moment about the song “Divide and Conquer,” comparing it to a Bob Dylan song. He wasn’t kidding around, and this leaped out at me. What it made clear is that these guys weren’t just doing an imitation of Hüsker Dü. They were doing their best to replicate, and to wholeheartedly respect, the band’s energy and spirit. They know and understand why people like me take their music so seriously. Led along, of course, by Greg, who was there for the real thing.

And who, by the way, at 67, can still get some air with those signature jumps.

Close your eyes for a second, and let that time machine kick in. This was as close to 1985 as you’ll ever get again. A tribute in the best possible way.

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Photo courtesy of Joshua Pickering.

July 9, 2025

THAT SOUND you heard was the sudden rejoicing of tens of millions of U.S. air travelers. They’re whooping it up because TSA just rescinded its longstanding requirement for passengers to remove their shoes prior to screening. The change was announced on July 7th. It came without warning and went into effect immediately.

The shoe rule was put in place in 2006, five years after British terrorist Richard Reid attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight with explosives hidden in his sneakers.

“Thanks to our cutting-edge technological advancements and multi-layered security approach,” said the agency in a press release, “We are confident we can implement this change while maintaining the highest security standards.”

Whatever that means, exactly, is unclear. The important part is, lines will move more quickly.

One of my biggest gripes with airport security has been how entrenched the rules and protocols have become. Aside from the PreCheck program, not much has changed since the early 2000s — other than the fact we’ve gotten used to it all. There’s been little outside pressure to overhaul or re-think our berserk approach to keeping the skies safe, and travelers have merely grown accustomed to the tedium. The time and resources we’ve wasted over the last two decades is staggering.

So consider me surprised. And encouraged.

Hopefully the rest of the world will follow suit. Most of Europe and Asia came to their senses a while back, but a number of countries still make flyers doff their Birckenstocks.

We hope, too, that the liquids and gels policy is next.

 

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Photos courtesy of Getty Images and Unsplash.

October 18, 2021

LATE LAST WEEK, Alitalia operated its final flight and officially ceased to exist. For seventy-four years, Linee Aeree Italiane S.p.A., as it was formally known, had carried Popes, kings, despots, movie stars, and tens of millions of tourists, across a network that once spanned six continents.

Its demise was both a complete surprise and not the least bit shocking. The airline spent its existence in a more or less permanent state of distress, yet it always managed to pull through, be it from a government bailout, cash from a foreign partner, or some combination. Not this time. Thus, one of the most recognized names in the industry has disappeared, joining the likes of Swissair, Sabena, Malev, and the other classic European carriers that have vanished.

A new, government-owned entity, Italia Trasport Aereo (ITA) is taking its place. With the whole thing being schemed out in advance, it’s more of a reincorporation — a reinvention — than a shut-down in the traditional sense, with ITA absorbing most of Alitalia’s assets and employees. Could they not have done this without totally dissolving such a well-known brand? Though, maybe, having left such a legacy of struggle, that was the point.

The transition has so far been messy. The ITA website and mobile app have been plagued with problems, and the new airline has struggled to receive U.S. government approval to operate here. While they sort things out, let’s do the fun thing and have a look at the identity they’ve come up with…

I can’t get my head around this one. It’s not ugly so much as confusing. Or maybe it’s confusing and ugly. The colors and styles are so mis-matched as to seem almost arbitrary — a big, weird, non-sequitur. The patterned tail motif reminds me of a doily, or the kind of tablecloth you’d find in certain Italian restaurants. To replace Alitalia’s iconic “A” emblem, worn since the ’70s, they needed to step up. They didn’t.

About the only positive thing is the ITA logo. The typeface is distinctive and elegant in an old-school sort of way. (In fact it’s almost too old-school, reminiscent of a made-up airline from a movie.) And, smartly, they’ve kept the red, white and green, which is a nod to Alitalia and the colors of the flag. On the airplane, however, the blue background requires the letters to be rendered only in white, so the whole effect is lost.

In an annoying last-minute decision, they went and added “Airways” into the carrier’s name. “ITA,” just by itself, was smoother, simpler, and perfectly adequate. But no, they had to jam “Airways” in there, because apparently passengers are stupid and might forget that it’s an airline. Loosely translated, the carrier is now called “Italian Air Transport Airways.”

With or without the extra word, it lacks the poetry of “Alitalia.” Still, it’s better than “Italian Air,” “Prego,” or any of several other garish possibilities. We may have dodged a bullet there.

Grade: D

 

Alitalia photo from author’s postcard collection.

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June 18, 2025

WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE, pilot and celebrated journalist, has passed away at age 70.

Langewiesche’s articles covered a lot of ground, from the 9/11 attacks to the Iraq War to nuclear proliferation. But it’s his air crash chronicles, which appeared in Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, that to me are the most unforgettable. His accounts of EgyptAir 990, the 2006 midair collision over the Amazon, and the disappearance of MH370, among others, are the best examples of aviation journalism I’ve ever read.

William was a National Magazine Awards finalist eight times, and held a degree in cultural anthropology from Stanford. Not your typical reporter or your typical aviation nerd. He was on another level. In an era of “content creation” and slapdash news coverage, his meticulously researched stories and vivid narrative style will be sorely missed. Nobody did it better.

I never met William, but we exchanged emails and phone calls many times, and he was kind enough to contribute a blurb to my book.

His father was Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of the seminal art-of-flying primer, “Stick and Rudder,” which has been in print since 1944.

 

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November 5, 2019

I’ve pretty much had it with the safety demo arms race: the noise, the gimmickry, the hoary attempts at humor.

The competition has been tight in this mad contest, with various carriers attempting to out-cute one another, setting their briefings to music, using animation, adding celebrity cameos, and so on. Some months ago, Virgin America brought us this unforgettable, five-minute fever-dream. We also had this, courtesy of Taiwan’s Eva Air. Could anything be worse?

Oh, yes. In what has to be the most excruciating of all the many efforts, comes the latest from Qatar Airways. Yes, we know, the world loves football. Which in no way excuses the skin-crawling awfulness of this production. It’s lifeless, aimless, and very, very long. We have a winner.

There’s no denying that airline safety briefings are dull. However, setting all of this ornamental gibberish to music or humor, while it might generate a little publicity and a bit of social media buzz, does not make it more compelling. It also undermines the purpose of the briefing in the first place. If safety is really the point, the briefing should be taken seriously. Here, you’re watching it for fun — wow, like, that’s so edgy and interesting and cool — rather than to learn something that could save your life. The informational aspects of it, many of which are important, are buried in the noise.

Here’s a better idea: shrink it. The reason people don’t pay attention to the safety demos is because they are too damn long — a kind of legal fine print come to life. They do contain some important and useful info, but it’s so layered in babble that people tune out and ignore the entire thing. With a pair of shears and some common sense, most of this ornamental gibberish could be trimmed away to create a lucid oration that passengers might actually listen to, and remember something that could save their lives.

Hit the bullet points and be done with it. No pre-flight demo, be it a video or the old-fashioned “live” version, should be more than about ninety seconds long.

And, of all the blather that is crammed into the typical briefing, one of the most potentially valuable pieces of instruction is frequently glossed over or is missing entirely: a warning that passengers leave their carry-on items behind during emergency evacuation. In the past few years, we’ve seen several runway evacuations during which passengers came down the escape slides with their roll-aboard bags and other heavy items. I cannot overemphasize how dangerous this is. This should be a bold-print, high-emphasis item in any briefing. Instead we get complicated, twenty-step directions on how to use a lifejacket — as if anybody might remember them. I could also mention that while neither is likely, a runway evacuation is a lot more likely than a water landing.

Flying is a noisy enough experience as it is, and airline passengers are already instructed, talked to, and yelled at enough, from the barrage of public address announcements in the terminals to the various on-board spiels. We don’t also need five minutes of singing and ridiculous performance art. I’m all for airlines thinking outside the box and getting creative. We need more of that, frankly. Just not like this.

 

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.

 

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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.

 

AURORA OVERLOAD

Beginning next year, Alaska Airlines will launch flights to Iceland and the U.K. — the Seattle-based carrier’s latest foray into the long-haul realm. As part of the celebration, it’s painting up some 787s in a flashy new scheme. “Our new 787 exterior embodies Alaska’s transition to a global airline with beauty, grace and a nod to our heritage,” says the company CEO Ben Minicucci.

Color me bored. It’s not the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, but the aurora theme is overdone (see Icelandair, below) and was all too predictable. As for the “heritage” invoked by Mr. Minicucci, the longstanding Alaska tail, starring the parka-wearing Inuk man, is a classic of American airline branding and should absolutely, no question, be up there for the 2026 route launches — an iconic emissary to the carrier’s newest outposts. Instead we get some neon nonsense. It looks like someone spilled anti-freeze across the back of the plane.

GRADE: D

 

ITA RECONSIDERED

A few years back, ITA Airways became the Italian flag carrier, replacing the chronically troubled Alitalia, which had been in and out of solvency for decades. I wasn’t a fan of ITA’s livery. “The colors and styles are so mis-matched as to seem almost arbitrary,” I wrote in an earlier post. “The patterned tail motif reminds me of a doily, or the kind of tablecloth you’ll find in certain Italian restaurants.”

That part about the tail is still true, but overall the look has grown on me. One thing you don’t notice in most photographs is the beautiful iridescence of the blue. And that mis-matching I decried isn’t so; there’s a sly synchronicity to the colors.

That blue, it turns out, is formally known as “Savoy Blue,” or “Italian Blue,” and has been associated with Italian royalty since the Middle Ages. It’s also the traditional color of the Italian national sports teams.

Indeed there’s an Italian-ness to it all, helped along, of course, by the Tricolore striping along the rudder. (The doily patterning is subtle enough not to steal the show.) It’s stylish, tasteful, and culturally apropos. Yet simple at the same time, as any good branding should be. My apologies for missing it the first time.

My gripe is no longer with the uniform, it’s with the name. Annoyingly, they went and added “Airways” to the carrier’s moniker. “ITA,” just by itself, was smoother, simpler, and perfectly adequate. But no, they had to jam “Airways” in there, because apparently everyone is stupid and might forget it’s an airline. They’ve even painted it on the fuselage, in a smaller typeface below the main titles, throwing off the livery’s balance (hence my B-plus grade instead of an A).

Loosely translated, the carrier is now called “Italian Air Transport Airways.” And with or without the extra word, it lacks the poetry of the old “Alitalia.”

ITA’s radio call-sign is “Itaro,” which is kinda sexy and wouldn’t be bad as a name on its own.

GRADE: B-plus

 

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 know 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 character. It looks like it was cooked up on a computer in about two minutes.

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-minus

 

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:

Alaska Airlines
Sam Chui (Korean Air)
Rocco Smet (Caribbean Airlines)
Daniel Shapiro/Unsplash (Breeze)
Jan Rosolino/Unsplash (Iberojet)
Patrick Smith (ITA)
Sam Chui (Korean Air)
Patrick Smith (United Airlines)