September 11, 2024

MY MOST VIVID MEMORY of September 11th, 2001, is my memory of a cockroach.

It was one of the biggest roaches I’ve ever seen — copper-colored and bullet-shaped, the length of my little finger — and it came crawling across the platform of the Government Center subway station at 7:00 a.m., as I stood there waiting for the train that would take me to Logan Airport. It scampered, stopped, then zigged and zagged, in that deliberate yet utterly directionless way of insects, its footsteps so heavy I swear that I could hear them, click-click-click on the greasy concrete.

It portended everything, this giant subway cockroach. Or it portended nothing. And as it came closer I drew my foot back — my right foot, I remember with absolute clarity — and nudged it, gently, off the platform and down into the dark and filthy space alongside the tracks, where it disappeared more or less instantly into the shadows and detritus.

This is how we remember things.

Once on the train, I would chat briefly with a United Airlines flight attendant, whose name I never got, and who maybe, possibly — I’ll never know for certain — was headed to work aboard the doomed United flight 175.

I was on my way to Orlando, where I’d be picking up a work assignment later that afternoon. My airplane would lift off only seconds after American’s flight 11, the first of the two jets to hit the twin towers. I had watched the silver Boeing back away from gate 25 at Logan’s terminal B and begin to taxi. United 175 would launch a few minutes later. My plane was in-between.

In an old briefcase here in this room, I still have my boarding pass from that morning. It shows me assigned to seat 11D, on the aisle, but there were empty seats and I slid over the window.

Elevens were wild that day. On the 11th day of the month, flight 11 would collide with the World Trade Center, two buildings that shaped an enormous “11” in the Manhattan sky. I looked down from row 11.

But there was nothing to see, yet. I recall an almost uncannily clear view of Manhattan, taking note, as I always do, of that graceful little bend that the island makes — the way it turns eastbound just below Midtown. There was no smoke, no fire. I was just a few minutes — a matter of seconds, maybe — too soon.

A short time later, about halfway to Florida, we started descending. Because of a “security issue,” our captain told us, we, along with many other airplanes, would be diverting immediately. Pilots are polished pros when it comes to dishing out euphemisms, and this little gem would be the most laughable understatement I’ve ever heard a comrade utter.

Our new destination was Charleston, South Carolina.

A bomb threat had been called in. That was my hunch. My worry wasn’t of war and smoldering devastation. My worry was being late for work. It wasn’t until I joined a crowd of passengers in Charleston, clustered around a TV in a concourse restaurant, that I learned what was going on.

And there I am. I’m watching the video of the second airplane, shot from the ground in a kind of twenty-first century Zapruder film. The picture swings left and picks up the United 767 moving swiftly. This is flight 175. The plane rocks, lifts its nose, and, like a charging, very angry bull making a run at a fear-frozen matador, drives itself into the very center of the south tower. The airplane vanishes. For a fraction of a second there is no falling debris, no smoke, no fire, no movement. Then, from within, you see the white-hot explosion and spewing expulsion of fire and matter.

And then, a bit later, the collapse. And this is the important part. Because to me, had the airplanes crashed, blown up, and reduced the upper halves of those buildings to burned-out hulks, the whole event would nonetheless have clung to the realm of believability. Had the towers not actually fallen, I suspect our September 11 hangover, which rages to this day, might not have been so prolonged. It was the collapse — the groaning implosions and the pyroclastic tornadoes whipping through the canyons of lower Manhattan — that catapulted the event from ordinary disaster to historical infamy.

As I stand awestruck in this shithole airport restaurant in South Carolina, the television shows the towers of the World Trade Center. They are not just afire, not just shedding debris and pouring out oil-black smoke. They are falling down. The sight of those ugly, magnificent towers, collapsing onto themselves, is the most sublimely terrifying thing I have ever seen.

Then I would go to a motel and spend the night. The next morning I’d rent a car and drive all the way home to Boston.

This is how we remember things.

And pilots, like fire fighters, police officers, and everyone else whose professions had been implicated, had no choice but to take things, well, personally. Four on-duty airline crews were victims, including eight pilots. John Ogonowski comes to mind, the good-guy captain of American 11. Of the thousands of people victimized that day, Captain Ogonowski was figuratively, if not literally, the first of them. He lived in my home state; his funeral made the front pages, where he was eulogized for his philanthropic work with local Cambodian immigrants.

Maybe it’s melodramatic to say I felt a bond or kinship with these eight men, but it’s something like that. What they went through, these eight colleagues on the very front edge of the attacks, the very men whose airplanes would be stolen and weaponized, is something I can’t fathom yet, at the same time, I can imagine and visualize all too chillingly.

And yes, in the ten-second bursts it took the towers to fall, I knew something about the business of flying planes would be different forever. I just wasn’t sure what it would be.

Fast-forward. It’s hyperbole to speak of the world having been “changed forever” that day. I’m conservative and skeptical when it comes to these things. History is bigger than us. Try to take the long view, even if, all these years on, the dominos haven’t stopped falling. Heck, tens of millions of people died in World War Two — tens of thousands at a time, as the incendiaries rained down over Europe and Japan. A hundred thousand bodies one night in Tokyo alone.

Sure, things are different now. Albeit for reasons we don’t always own up to. I have to say, I’m discouraged — or should that be encouraged? — because more than any “clash of civilizations,” the real and lasting legacy of Mohamed Atta and his henchmen has been something more mundane: tedium.

Think about it. The long lines, the searches and pat-downs, the litany of rules and protocols we’re forced to follow — all this meaningless pomp in the name of security. Of modern life’s many rituals, few are marinated in boredom as much as air travel. “Flying” is what we call it. How misleading. We don’t fly so much as we sit and stand around for interminable amounts of time.

And most distressing of all, we seem to be okay with this. There’s the real legacy of September 11th. The terrorists have won, goes the refrain, and perhaps that’s true. It isn’t quite what they hoped to win, but they’ve won it nevertheless.

The irony that nobody talks about is that the hijackers’ ability to pull off the 2001 attacks so spectacularly had almost nothing to do with airport security in the first damn place. And none of the measures we see on the concourse today would have kept them from succeeding. I’ve made this point many times, but never have I seen or heard it acknowledged elsewhere.

As conventional wisdom has it, the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto the airplanes. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold: diversions to Beirut or Havana, with hostage negotiations and standoffs.

The presence of boxcutters was merely incidental — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The men could have used knives fashioned from plastic, broken bottles wrapped with tape, or any of a thousand other improvised tools. The only weapon that mattered was the intangible one: the element of surprise. And so long as they didn’t chicken out, they were all but guaranteed to succeed.

For a number of reasons, just the opposite is true today. The hijack paradigm was changed forever even before the first of the Twin Towers had dropped to the ground, when the passengers of United 93 realized what was happening and fought back. That element of surprise was no longer a useful device. Hijackers today would face not only an armored cockpit, but also a planeload of people convinced they’re about to die. It’s hard to imagine a terrorist, be it with a boxcutter or a bomb, making it two steps up the aisle without being pummeled. It’s equally hard to imagine that organized groups would be willing to expend valuable resources on a scheme with such a high likelihood of failure.

In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again. Guards paw through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors, screwdrivers. Meanwhile, even a child knows that a lethal implement can be crafted out of virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a shattered first class dinner plate.

And so on.

A September 11th post isn’t anything I’ve looked forward to, and I’m wary of the maudlin sentimentalizing and over-the-top coverage this anniversary brings each year. But something needs to be said, and so here it is. After all, nothing in my lifetime had a more profound effect on air travel than the events of that Tuesday morning twenty-three years ago.

At least until COVID-19 came along.

As the pandemic played out, it was interesting to notice the eerie parallels with September 11th and the ensuing “war on terror.”

Both crises were born of legitimately dangerous circumstances, but quickly became twisted by politics and hysteria. Curiously, this seems to have happened in opposite ways: After the 2001 attacks, it was mostly people on the right who bought into the hype and fear; who saw terrorists around every corner and were willing to sign off on things like the Patriot Act, TSA, the Iraq War, and so forth. Left-leaning people resisted. With COVID, it was left-leaning people who were more fearful and pessimistic, while those on the right advocate for a softer, more laissez-faire approach.

Why the difference? I suspect it’s because people who lean right are more naturally drawn to responses involving power and conflict; going after enemies, seeking revenge, etc. — all the things that came into play after September 11th. The pandemic, on the other hand, centered on concepts like compassion and “saving people.”

Both crises have mostly receded, thankfully. But one of the crucial takeaways, in both instances, was witnessing how, when people are afraid, they’ll quickly adapt to almost anything, including ways of life that are unproductive or harmful.

Just as the virus will stay with us, chronic and endemic, so will terrorism. There may have been, and may still be, a “war on terror,” but there will never be an end of terrorism.

How we live within this reality defines us for the long term. We can do so sensibly, or by waging a ruinously expensive, self-destructive battle with no conceivable end.

About the photos:

The picture at the top was taken by the author from the cockpit of a 19-seater in 1994.

The second picture is a watercolor rendition of the same, painted by Julianna Harhay, the daughter of Michael Harhay, a pilot for United Airlines. That is Michael’s arm in the first photo.

An earlier version of this essay appears in chapter six of COCKPIT CONFIDENTIAL.

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August 5, 2024

“Meltdown” is the buzzword used when computer glitches throw air travel into disarray, as happened a couple of weeks ago. But is there a more literal application? How do extreme temperatures impact air travel? The question is important, as heat waves pummel the globe and we keep breaking records for the hottest-ever temperatures.

On the most basic level, hot weather affects air travel the way it affects most things: it makes people uncomfortable and wears them down. Things happen more slowly. With all that nonreflective asphalt and open space, airports become “heat islands,” subjecting people and equipment to sometimes unbearable conditions. Imagine what it’s like slinging suitcases out on the tarmac when the mercury hits triple digits.

Workers are subject to overheating, and so is their equipment: tugs, tractors, cart and lifts — all the myriad moving parts of airport logistics. Airplanes themselves, meanwhile, have a lot of internal machinery, both electronic and mechanical, and much of it runs hot to begin with. Throw in soaring temps and things can break down.

Aerodynamically, warmer air is less dense than cooler air, meaning that in hot weather a wing produces less lift. Jet engines don’t like this low-density air either, producing less thrust. Engines also are subject to internal temperature limits — exhaust gas temps, etc. — beyond which operation isn’t permitted. Together, this dictates higher takeoff and landing speeds — which, in turn, increases the amount of required runway.

What all of that means for travelers is that your flight might be weight-restricted and unable to take a full load of people or cargo. How much so will vary with the temperature and runway length.

Outright grounding of flights is rare, but at a certain point that can happen too. Some aircraft have a hard temperature limit — usually around 50 degrees Celsius — beyond which taking off simply isn’t permitted. We also get a detailed paper printout before each departure that factors in weight, temperature, wind, runway length, and so forth, providing us with the speeds, thrust, and flap settings that we’ll use for takeoff. Sometimes, above certain temperatures, data doesn’t exist.

So, you could say there are hard and soft limits. The aerodynamic limits are soft. That is, you don’t know for sure if a flight can safely depart, or at what weight, until you juggle the numbers. The hard limits are the absolute temperature maximums, set by the manufacturer, that you’re not allowed to exceed.

If your flight is weight-restricted — or canceled — you’re liable to get a dumbed-down synopsis over the gateside loudspeaker or from your pilots. Something along the lines of, “We’re sorry but it’s too hot to fly today.” This makes it sound subjective, or up to the whims of the crew, but in reality it’s more scientific.

Extreme heat is no fun for airlines or their customers. Unfortunately, you can expect more of it as climate change causes more and more extreme weather events, including extreme heat waves.

It’ll be especially interesting to see the effects on those carriers whose hubs are located in what are already the hottest places on earth. The Gulf Carriers, for example (Qatar, Emirates, and Etihad) or Saudia, or Air India. Fortunately for them, many of their long-haul flights arrive and depart in the dead of night, when it’s cooler.

All well and good, but I’ve failed to address the one question you’re lining up to ask: Why are are planes so damn hot when parked at the gate?

Well, a plane’s air conditioning is supplied one of three ways:

1. Via the engines. Air for the “packs” as the AC units are called (it’s an acronym from the words “pneumatic air cycle kit”), is plumbed from the engine compressors. This is the most effective way of cooling or heating the cabin.

2. However, planes can’t run their engines at the gate. And so, during boarding and deplaning, air is supplied to the packs via the plane’s APU, or auxiliary power unit. This is a small jet engine usually located up under the tail. The APU can power the packs as necessary, but they won’t run as robustly as when the main engines are supplying the air.

3. Via an external air supply. You’ll sometimes see fat, caterpillar-like hoses connected to the belly of a plane. These provide hot or cold air as requested from an air conditioning unit attached to the jet bridge. The effectiveness of this method tends to vary plane to plane and gate to gate.

Variations in 2. and 3., above, are the reason the cabin is sometimes sweltering. Or, in winter, freezing cold.

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Landing photo by Victor Forgacs, courtesy of Unsplash.
Emirates photo by the author.

July 15, 2024

Everyone’s talking about turbulence. Each week now, it seems, we’re reading about this or that flight getting wracked around by unusually rough air. People are being injured, flights are diverting. In one case a passenger died after a Singapore Airlines flight hit severe turbulence over Southeast Asia.

Are dangerous turbulence encounters becoming more prevalent, or are they merely getting more attention?

I honestly don’t know. That’s a bummer of an answer, but I’m unaware of any stats indicating things one way or the other. For now it’s all pretty anecdotal.

That includes my own observations. For instance I seem to notice more and larger thunderstorms these days — over the U.S., over the Atlantic — than I did in years past, but that’s without any objective measuring; it’s just a hunch.

Either way, the media loves a scary-sounding airplane story. In an age when large-scale air disasters have become vanishingly rare, news sources — to say nothing of social media — have taken to hyping minor mishaps instead. That Singapore Airlines incident (the passenger actually died from a heart attack after the turbulence upset) got as much coverage as a crash that killed 200 people would have gotten in decades past.

Another factor is the number of planes in the air. There are more than twice as many commercial flights aloft at any given moment as there were a generation ago. More flights, more people; an uptick in incidents is inevitable.

It’s also possible that yes, turbulence is getting worse. It stands to reason that as climate change intensifies weather patterns and causes bigger, more powerful storms, flying will, to a small but perhaps measurable extent, be bumpier.

How much bumpier is impossible to know, but cases where passengers are hurt or aircraft are damaged will likely remain uncommon. (This is being studied as we speak, though you can expect any results pointing to climate change to set off further squabbling rather than, as it were, clearing the air.)

Also helping are the technological tools now at our disposal. The weather apps that we use in the cockpit are far more advanced than they were even five years ago, and are remarkably accurate when it comes to predicting the where, when, and how bad of turbulence — and how best to avoid it.

Even in worst-case turbulence encounters, meanwhile, the seat belt will probably keep you safe. The vast majority of turbulence-related injuries are suffered by crew members moving through the cabin, or passengers who weren’t belted in when they should’ve been. Flights might get bumpier, but the basics of staying unhurt remain the same.

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April 23, 2019

DID YOU HEAR the one about the flight that went to Edinburgh instead of Dusseldorf?

On March 25th, a British Airways regional jet took off from London City Airport (LCY) bound for Dusseldorf, Germany. An hour or so later, the passengers found themselves in Edinburgh, Scotland. Not until the jet touched down did they realize they were headed to the wrong city.

Reporting on this incident has been inconsistent at best. Obviously certain outlets find the whole “the pilots flew to the wrong airport!” angle irresistible. But that isn’t what happened. The pilots, the flight attendants, and their aircraft were dispatched, flight-planned, and fueled for a trip to Edinburgh. That’s where they were expected to fly, and that’s where they went.

The passengers, on the other hand, thought they were going to Dusseldorf. In other words, the plane didn’t fly to the wrong city. The passengers were put on the wrong plane.

The breakdown was apparently between the technical staff (pilots, dispatchers and flight attendants) and the airport personnel who processed and boarded the passengers. The former were Edinburgh-bound. The latter were handling a flight to Germany — or so they thought.

But, you’re thinking, wouldn’t the “welcome aboard” spiel by either the pilots or cabin crew have given things away? We always mention the destination, don’t we? And surely flight attendants would have noticed “Dusseldorf” on the customers’ boarding passes, right? The signs and announcements at the gate, too, would have referenced Edinburgh. Could all of this have somehow been missed?

I, for one, can see it happening. Those PAs are sometimes perfunctory, and how many people are listening to begin with? And I can easily — easily — imagine a scenario where the gate personnel and flight crew found themselves on separate pages, regardless of any boarding announcements or signs above the podium. The fact this was a contract company flying on British Airways’ behalf, rather than an actual BA aircraft operated and overseen by BA personnel, could also have been a factor.

Embarrassing, sure. But not the same thing as two pilots taking their plane to the wrong destination. Which, I’m the first to admit, has happened. More than once…

In 2013, a Southwest 737 destined for Branson, Missouri, instead ended up at a small general aviation field nearby, touching down on a runway less than four thousand feet long. Only a few months earlier, a 747 freighter operated by Atlas Air found itself at the wrong airport in Kansas. In June, 2004, a Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Rapid City mistakenly landed at Ellsworth Air Force Base. And, in 1995, a Northwest DC-10 touched down in Brussels instead of Frankfurt. And this is only a partial list.

The idea of highly trained aircrews with troves of technology at their behest landing astray sounds, I’ll agree, amusing, quaint, or even patently ridiculous. So how does it happen? Improperly keyed coordinates? A navigational computer gone crazy? Or is there a more visceral, seat-of-the-pants explanation, such as a tired crew mixing up a pair of similar-looking runways.

If there’s a common thread, it’s that often in these cases pilots were flying what we call a “visual approach.” Most of the time, jetliners land using what we call an ILS (instrument landing system) in which controllers guide us onto a pair of radio beams — one vertical, the other horizontal — that form a sort of crosshair that we track to the runway, either manually or by coupling the ILS to the plane’s autoflight system. There are also what we call “non-precision” instrument patterns, in which a GPS-guided course takes you to a few hundred feet or less above the pavement.

But a visual approach, as the name implies, is almost entirely pilot-guided. This is when high-tech goes low-tech. Essentially you eyeball the airport through the windshield, report “field in sight” to ATC, get your clearance and go ahead and land. When available we back-up a visual with whatever electronic landing aids might also be available (an ILS signal, usually), But sometimes our orientation is based entirely on what we see through the window.

Visual approaches are very common, very routine, even at the biggest and busiest airports. Airline pilots perform thousands of these approaches every day without incident. However, you need to be sure of what you’re looking at. This is particularly true at smaller airports, where cues on the ground (roads, coastlines, buildings etc.) aren’t as obvious, and where you might not be familiar with the surroundings. Certain combinations of circumstances make a mistake more likely: a nighttime visual with low-altitude maneuvering, for instance, at an airport you’re not used to, with perhaps a similarly laid-out airport nearby.

In the winter of 1990 I was copiloting a small turboprop when we were cleared for a nighttime visual approach to New Haven, Connecticut. As it happens, the lights and orientation of nearby Bridgeport, Connecticut, appear strikingly similar to those of New Haven. After a minute or two we realized the error and corrected course. All of this happened far from the runway, and, somewhat in our defense, we were flying a 15-seat Beech-99 — a vintage relic from the Age of Aquarius, with as many electronic accoutrements as my mountain bike.

In addition to whatever human errors catalyze such events, weather and air traffic control (ATC), to name two, can lend a hand in getting from point A to, as it were, point C. In the case of that DC-10 finding its way to Belgium instead of Germany, air traffic controllers had been given the wrong information, and began issuing a long and complicated series of vectors and course changes to the crew, sending it toward Brussels. Airspace in Europe is complex and congested, and roundabout routings aren’t uncommon. Thus it wasn’t necessarily obvious to the crew that they were being led astray. By the time the crew realized they were being vectored to Brussels, they decided to land there rather than have to recalculate fuel reserves and orchestrate a last-second re-routing. In the end, it was probably safer to land at the wrong airport than the right one.

The act of landing a plane is, on one level, inordinately simple. At the same time, it’s a maneuver beholden to technology. It can be one, or the other, or both, depending on circumstances: the aircraft type, the approach being flown, the weather, the airport. There are times when an old-school, seat-of-the-pants skill set is exactly what’s required. Other times it’s all but impossible to find a runway without help from the instruments and screens in front of us. Either way, though, it comes down to judgment and decision-making. Despite everything you hear about autopilot and the alleged sophistication of modern jetliners, it’s the fight crew — the pilots — who are very much flying the airplane. Sometimes it takes an embarrassing mistake to make this clear.

May 28, 2024

LAST WEEK, a passenger died and multiple more injured when a Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 encountered severe turbulence while en route from London to Singapore. The encounter happened over Myanmar and the flight diverted to Bangkok. Then, on May 26th, twelve people were hurt when a Qatar Airways jet hit severe turbulence during a flight to Dublin.

The media is off and running, no doubt triggering panic among the many flyers for whom turbulence is an acute fear.

If you’re one of those people, the first thing I can do is refer you to the turbulence essay found in the Q&A section of this website. You can read it here.

The second is to emphasize the rarity of incidents like this one. Any turbulence encounter powerful enough to hurt scores of people and tear away ceiling panels and overhead lockers, is a frightening prospect. And as climate change intensifies weather patterns and creates more powerful storms, we may see more of them. But they are, and should remain, exceptionally uncommon.

And maybe most important of all, it’s been reported that most, and possibly all, of the injured passengers were not wearing seatbelts. If you’re belted in, even the worst turbulence is unlikely to cause harm. Keep your belt on anytime you’re seated. Crews will often make a PA reminding you to keep your belt on on anytime you’re seated. This is a good example why.

We should also mention that the man who passed away on the Singapore flight died from a heart attack, not from any sort of impact trauma caused by the turbulence directly.

Prior to last week, if I’m counting right, the most recent turbulence-related fatality on a commercial jet occurred in 2009. Before that, a passenger was killed aboard a United Airlines flight in 1997. That’s two or three deaths in a roughly 25-year span, during which close to thirty billion — with a b — passengers traveled by air, aboard tens of millions of flights. Try to let those numbers sink in. This is the kind of thing even the most frequent flyer (or pilot) won’t experience in a lifetime.

What happened is unfortunate and scary, but it’s not a reason to freak out and cancel your flight because the turbulence app on your iPhone shows yellow.

The media focus, meanwhile, has been relentless. An accident in which one person died has received as much attention as a disaster that killed 200 people once would have. That’s not an exaggeration; I can remember when major crashes, in other parts of the world, would be buried on the second or third page of the newspaper. Most people didn’t even know they occurred.

This is one of those “for better or worse” things. It’s precisely because of how rare crashes have become that we hyper-focus on the smaller stories.

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