April 5, 2016

THE EBOLA CATASTROPHE in West Africa is over. The World Health Organization declared an official end to the crisis back on March 31st.

I visited the region several times during the height of the crisis. I was there in August, 2014, as the last known supply of ZMapp, an experimental Ebola drug, was brought into Roberts Field in Liberia. Below are some photographs from that day, as well as some earlier shots taken in some small villages near the airport.

Formally known as Roberts International Airport (ROB), the field was built by the United States government during World War Two. Later it was managed by Pan Am, which operated something of a mini-hub there, with flights from New York continuing on to Accra, Lagos, Johannesburg and Nairobi, among other places. Pan Am crews would layover at a hotel directly across the street from the terminal. Pan Am left Africa in 1991, and both the hotel and the terminal were destroyed during Liberia’s brutal civil war, which ended only recently. The Chinese are building a new hotel in the same spot, though construction was halted when Ebola hit.

There’s limited scheduled traffic at ROB. Brussels Airlines, British Airways, Kenya Airways and Nigeria’s Arik Air have been the most prominent carriers there. The airport is cluttered with United Nations helicopters, and a Russian-crewed 737 shuttles regularly between ROB and Accra, Ghana, carrying soldiers, staff and Liberian citizens returning home. At the moment most of the U.N. personnel stationed at ROB are from Ukraine and Algeria.

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK SMITH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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YAK HUNTING IN LIBERIA. THE STRANGE ALLURE OF A DERELICT PLANE.

 

UPDATE: July 13, 2017

I continue to be flummoxed by the volume of dental flossers, rubber bands, and plastic bags of dog shit that litter the streets and sidewalk of my neighborhood (see original post below), but now I’ve discovered a new plague: elastic hair bands. The kind that girls use to hold up their pony tails. It’s possible I just never noticed them before, but suddenly, it seems, they are popping up on every sidewalk and in every curbside gutter. Maybe one of my female readers can explain? Do these bands just spontaneously pop from the your head while you’re out walking? This photograph shows a harvest from just a handful of afternoon strolls around Somerville and Cambridge …

 

June 16, 2016

TIME OUT for a culture rant.

IS THERE such a thing as an “undeveloping country”? We all know about the developing kind, but what about a formerly great country now in the throes of devolving? If there are such places, the United States has to be leading the pack. We live in a nation where nobody wants to pay for, or take responsibility for, anything, and the results are starting to show. We see this in the bigger, macro sense. For instance, we are by some measures the wealthiest nation on earth, yet our infrastructure is rated 29th and is steadily falling to pieces.

But I see it in the small things, too. Take, for example, litter. I see litter and trash as a sort of bellwether for bigger problems. Our airports, to pick one spot (and to keep this conversation at least nominally within the sphere of air travel), are getting dirtier and dirtier. I see discarded cups and cans in the jet bridges, overspilling barrels, filthy curbsides, and apron and ramp areas that are just aswarm with trash. It didn’t used to be this way, and it’s not this way anywhere else in the world. I was at LAX not long ago on a windy afternoon, and the wind currents, whipping between two concourses, had created a sort of garbage cyclone — a great, rotating, three-story cloud of paper and plastic and styrofoam and dust. It was awesome.

There’s the litter itself, and also the human indifference to it. I’m not sure those are different things, but it drives me crazy when I see an airport employee step over a crushed coffee cup or a wadded up newspaper sitting on the floor of the jetway. Hey, it’s not my job! When I do the preflight, walk-around inspection of my aircraft, I’ll often scoop up an entire arm-full of refuse along the way — cups, bags, fasteners, locks, miscellaneous plastic luggage shards, wheels, and so on — because heaven forbid the apron workers bother to pick any of it up. Would this happen in Munich or Dubai or Osaka?

Then there’s my neighborhood. I’ll let a picture do the explaining. This snapshot was taken recently in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is a it extreme, but it’s not unusual, and even the tidier neighborhoods around here are strewn with litter in a way that simply wasn’t the case in years past. Some of the traffic islands around Boston look like a dumpster exploded. When did it become acceptable for drivers at red lights to simply heave their trash out the window? Because, apparently, everybody is doing it.

We also need to talk about dog shit.

Pet owners in my neighborhood are for the most part diligent when it comes to cleaning up after their dogs, tidily stuffing the droppings into small plastic bags. So far, so good, right? Except, the new custom is to simply leave the plastic bag sitting on the ground, thus turning one problem (dog waste) into two problems (dog waste and plastic). You’ve doubled the amount of litter, and you’ve made it permanent. Dog crap by itself is at least natural and biodegrade.

I can’t fathom the thought process of a person who would do this. As the kids would say, WTF? But obviously I’m missing something, because lots of people find it defensible. Every day I encounter more and more of these bags. Cambridge and Somerville are absolutely littered with them. It’s not merely a local thing, though. I’ve been seeing these bags in parks and on walking trails across the country, and even in other countries (including one in the pretty grass courtyard behind Chartres cathedral, in France!).

This one, though, is my favorite. Here you can actually see four separate bags. This is just around the corner from my house, and I watched as the bags were added, one at a time, over a period of several days, presumably by the same dog-walker:

Or this multi-bag collection, photographed near the Davis Square subway station.

And when I say it’s the small things, sometimes it’s the really small things.

Somebody needs to explain where the profusion of plastic dental flossers has come from. These blasted little things are everywhere. I never, ever, see pedestrians or drivers actually flossing, yet somehow these discarded flossers are popping up on every sidewalk and curb. Do they self propagate? Is there an army of secret night-flossers who roam around in the dark, keeping their gums healthy while sprinkling the ground with these things? (And yes, I know about the flossers in Infinite Jest.) I’m all for dental hygiene, but take your disgusting mouth picks home with you and dispose of them properly.

It’s funny, because according to some studies, flossing your teeth is mostly a waste of time. This has been long an open secret, apparently, but dental professionals have been loath to go public on the matter, perhaps fearing backlash from the influential flossing lobby (“Big Floss” has deep pockets). I learned about this in The Guardian. The Guardian is a U.K. publication. The Brits gave up on flossing years ago, and have since been laughing at the American obsession with the practice. It’s ironic, I know, that the Brits would be lecturing to anybody about dental health, but they may have this one right. The big question is whether or not this might result in a reduction of the number of plastic flossers littering American cities.

These beautiful collages (I actually spent a fair bit of time tinkering with the placement and textures of each image) were compiled over just two or three brief walks through my neighborhood:

Here, though, is clearly the best of the bunch. This picture was taken below the fuselage of a Boeing 767 at Kennedy Airport, while I was doing the preflight walk-around check!

People don’t seem to care much for public property. Neither, if the streets of my neighborhood are any indication, do they care about the their own. Consider the two front yards in the photos below. The top picture shows the house directly next to mine. Mind you I don’t live in an Appalachian trailer park, but in a trendy big-city neighborhood where property values have skyrocketed — a phenomenon untarnished by the fact that certain landlords can’t be bothered with even minimal maintenance. The bottom house is several streets away, on the border with Cambridge and West Somerville — an equally expensive area, where renovated two-family homes, with no backyard and neighbors only inches away on either side, can sell for upwards of a million dollars:

And our final culprit is the United States Postal Service.

Letter carriers around here carry bundles of mail tied with rubber bands. Lots of bundles, and lots of rubber bands. And when they unwrap the bands, what do you think they do with them? Thats right, and so the sidewalks where I live are littered with thousands of little brown noodles. What you see in the photo is about a month’s worth of bands picked up from around my neighborhood. Would it really be that difficult for USPS workers to shove these things into a pocket? And in case you didn’t realize it, they’re reusable!

And with that, for now, I am finished. Curmudgeon meter pegged.

 

PROMOTION

Update: October 20, 2017

A WORD OF ADVICE for aspiring aviators:

As discussed below, U.S. regional carriers, faced with a crippling shortage of pilots, have been bending over backwards to attract new hires — and to hang on to the pilots they already have. Salaries have been soaring and airlines are offering retention bonuses north of $30,000. It’s hard to see a negative in this, at least on paper, but if you talk to pilots at some of these companies you’ll learn that many of them are very unhappy. Why?

Although pilots are earning more, overall quality of life at many regionals is still suffering. And that’s because things are in panic mode. The industry is being reactive when it should have been proactive. The improvements we’re seeing should have been put in place years ago. Because they weren’t, numerous airlines now face chronic understaffing issues. This results in pilots being forced to work high-stress schedules with minimal time off. One pilot I spoke to, employed by a United Express carrier, says the company is so understaffed that even senior captains are being “junior manned,” as it’s called, and conscripted into duty on almost all of their scheduled days off, typically with little or no notice. Pilots are quitting in droves, he says, retention bonuses be damned.

As a group, pilots have never had as much leverage or opportunity as they have right now, and with thousands of retirements coming up in the next five to ten years at the majors, it should only get better. However, there are systemic problems in the regional sector, and just throwing money around isn’t going to fix them. It will take a while for things to stabilize. In the meantime, it behooves applicants to do their homework and realize what they’re getting into. Things can change quickly in this business, but some regionals are, at least for now, better-staffed and all-around more pleasant places to work than others. Know which are which.

August 5, 2017

THE PILOT SHORTAGE is here. It’s real, it’s global, and it’s been making headlines. However, we need to be clear which sectors of the aviation industry we’re talking about, and in which parts of the world.

Let’s start with North America, where the first step is to draw a sharp divide between the major carriers and their regional affiliates. The majors, also referred to as “legacy” carriers, are the ones people are most familiar with — American, United, Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, et al. There is no pilot shortage at these companies, and unless something changes drastically they will continue to have a surplus of highly qualified candidates to choose from. They are able to cull from the top ranks of the regionals, as well as from the military and corporate aviation pools. Even amidst an ongoing wave of retirements, a steady supply of experienced crews is unlikely to be depleted.

At the regionals, however, it’s a very different story. And by “regional” we’re referring to the numerous subcontractors who operate smaller jets (regional jets, or “RJs”) and turboprops on the majors’ behalf: those myriad “Connection” and “Express” companies, whose actual identities are concealed beneath the liveries of whichever major they are aligned with. United Express, Delta Connection, American Eagle, and so on. These carriers have been slashing flights, grounding planes, and otherwise scrambling to keep their cockpits staffed. In June, Horizon Air, the Seattle-based affiliate of Alaska Airlines and one of the country’s biggest regional carriers, announced it would be forced to reduce its busy summer schedule due to a dearth of pilots. Earlier this year, Republic Airways, a large U.S. regional carrier that flies on behalf of United, American and Delta, filed for bankruptcy protection. It blamed the filing, in part, on a lack of qualified pilots.

How this came to happen is both a long and short story. The short story is that employment at a regional carrier sucks. It’s not an easy lifestyle, and the pay has been the kind of thing that causes people to skip their school reunions. Salaries have traditionally started out as low as $20,000 a year (in some cases even lower), and have topped out at under six figures. Schedules are demanding and benefits paltry; the relationship between management and the workers is often hostile; and top of all that, the regional sector is highly unstable. Companies always seem to be coming or going, shrinking or shedding planes, changing their names and realigning with different majors. This has driven thousands of pilots out of the industry, and/or has discouraged countless others from pursuing an aviation career in the first place.

Yet pay and working conditions at these airlines have always been substandard, and filling jobs was seldom a problem. So what gives? Well, what’s different is that the regional sector has grown so large, now accounting for half of all domestic departures in the United States! As recently as twenty-five years ago it was around 15 percent. In those days, pilots saw a job with a regional as a temporary inconvenience — paying one’s dues. It was a stepping-stone toward a more lucrative position with a major. Pilots are now realizing that a job at a regional could easily mean an entire career at a regional. Thus, a diminishing number have been willing to commit the time and money to their education and training when the return on investment is somewhere between unpredictable and financially ruinous.

Pilots in the United States are responsible for securing their own FAA credentials, and for logging hundreds or even thousands of hours of flight time before applying at an airline. For those who come up through the civilian channels it’s a slow and very expensive process. An aspiring aviator has to ask, is it worth sinking $100,000 or more into one’s primary training, plus the time it will take to build the necessary number of flight hours, plus the cost of a college education, only to spend years toiling at poverty-level wages, with at best a marginal shot at moving on to a major? For many the answer has been a resounding (and logical) no.

In the meantime, the FAA has enacted tougher hiring standards for entry-level pilots. Over the past two decades, as the regional sector grew and grew, airlines sharply lowered their experience and flight time minimums to fill the thousands of new cockpit jobs this growth created. Suddenly, pilots were being taken on with as little as 350 hours of total time, assigned to the first officer’s seat of sophisticated RJs and turboprops. Then came a rash of accidents, including the Colgan Air (Continental Connection) disaster outside Buffalo in 2009. Regulators began taking a closer look at hiring practices, eventually passing legislation that mandated higher flight time totals and additional certification requirements for new hires.

Some airlines blame the shortage at least partly on these tougher rules. Technically they’re right, but arguing against an obvious safety enhancement is maybe not the smartest idea. Besides, all the new regulations really have done is return things to historical norms. When I applied for my first regional job in 1990, competitive applicants at the time had between 1,500 and 2,000 hours, and most of us had an Airline Transport Pilot certificate as well. That’s more or less what the FAA demands today. Flight time totals are just one indicator of a pilot’s skill or competence, but these requirements are not unreasonable.

The regionals have finally started upping their salaries and improving benefits, in some cases substantially. The cost structures of these carriers, whose existence is primarily to allow the majors to outsource flying on the cheap, limits how much they can lavish on their employees, but frankly they have little choice. New hires at companies like Endeavor Air (a Delta affiliate) and PSA (American), for example, can now make first-year salaries in the $70,000-plus range. That’s three times what these pilots would have made in years past. Other companies are offering signing bonuses of several thousand dollars, and work rules too are getting better. Air Wisconsin, a United partner and one of the nation’s oldest regionals, says that pilots can now earn up to $57,000 in sign-on bonuses. It promises earnings of between $260,000 and $317,000, including salary and bonuses over the first three years of employment. Figures like that are unprecedented.

So, for those considering a piloting career in the United States, the situation is looking better. The problem for the industry, though, is the lag time. Somebody just learning to fly is years away from meeting any airline’s hiring criteria. So while the mechanisms are falling into place to curtail a full-blown crisis, the shortage is going to be with us for a while.

Similar shortages exists elsewhere around the globe, but they are driven by slightly different forces. You don’t have the major/regional dichotomy like you do in North America, but the airline business overall has been expanding so rapidly, especially in Asia, that carriers can’t keep up. Many have success with what are called “ab-initio” programs, whereby young candidates are chosen from scratch, with no prior experience, and are trained and groomed from the ground-up, so to speak, in a tightly controlled regimen that puts them in the cockpit of a jetliner relatively quickly. These programs are ultra-competitive, drawing hundreds of applicants for each available slot. They produce quality pilots, but again there’s a lag time problem: industry growth is far outpacing the rate at which ab initio schemes can produce cockpit-ready pilots. This has forced airlines from Asia to go hunting for pilots in the U.S. and elsewhere, sometimes offering huge salaries and incentive packages.

The Gulf carriers, meanwhile, bring in expats from every corner of the world. Of Emirates roughly 4,000 pilots, the largest percentage is recruited from South Africa, where there are lots of young pilots and a rich aviation culture, but comparatively few jobs.

 

February 15, 2016

LASERS ARE BACK in the news again. This time, on Sunday, a Virgin Atlantic Airways jet bound for New York was forced to return to London after the first officer was injured in the cockpit by a laser strike.

We’ve been dealing with this phenomenon for over a decade now, but the number of incidents has been increasing. Not unlike the controversy surrounding drones, its mostly a matter of proliferation. Just as there are lot more drones around, there are a lot more laser pointers in the hands of a lot more people.

They’re small, inexpensive, and easy to obtain. And as with drones, users of these devices aren’t necessarily aware of their potential hazard. Many hobbyists see their lightweight drones as all but harmless, not realizing just how dangerous a high-speed impact with an aircraft could be. Similarly, it’s only human nature, I suppose, to direct your laser at something passing overhead. What’s the harm?

Well, laser pointers might be small, but they are able to cause temporary blindness and serious eye injury, even from a considerable distance, the ramifications of which are pretty obvious if the target is an airline crew during a critical phase of flight.

Hitting two pilots squarely in the face through the refractive, wraparound windshield of a cockpit would be difficult and entail a substantial amount of luck, and a temporarily or partially blinded crew would still have the means to stabilize a climbing or descending airplane. Still, it’s unsafe, and just a stupid thing to be doing.

The problem, by and large, isn’t one of nefarious intent. It’s one of not knowing better. And the solution isn’t going to be some elaborate technological fix or attempting to regulate users into compliance — though there’s certainly room for imposing stiffer penalties against abusers. It comes down to awareness and ordinary common sense.

In the immortal words of Gordon Gano: Don’t shoot, shoot, shoot that thing at me!

Regulators and airlines both have been taking the problem seriously. Here in the U.S., any laser strike must be immediately reported to air traffic control. The FAA’s website includes online forms through which pilots can submit the details of an incident.

As a pilot, I’m yet to have a laser encounter, knock on wood, but I remember something that occurred one night in the early 1990s, during an approach into Newark. It involved a high-intensity spotlight, not a laser, but the effect was similar. I was captain on an old Beech-99, a fifteen-seater, skirting the lower edge of Manhattan along the Hudson River. Suddenly a wayward (perhaps intentionally so) beam from a light show atop the World Trade Center caught and tracked our turboprop, filling the cockpit and cabin with a fiery incandescence.

 

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Photo courtesy of Unsplash.

Fine Dining In a Converted DC-10. Plus: Where in the World to Eat, and the Sad Confessions of a Non-Foodie.

January 20, 2016

I’M THE FARTHEST THING from a foodie. The very word foodie irritates me. It goes back to my childhood. I was raised in what was perhaps the must gastronomically unadventurous family in America. A “salad,” as I knew it when I was a kid, consisted of a bowl of iceberg lettuce doused with steakhouse dressing. We had our pizzas Margherita style, with sauce and cheese only. The idea of adding a topping was frighteningly exotic.

In sixth grade my little league coach took our team out for Chinese food. I cried and hid in my room because I didn’t know what Chinese food was or how to order it. Later, in the 1980s, friends of mine would often go for dim sum on Sunday afternoons. I always made excuses to stay home, because I had no idea what dim sum was, and would surely embarrass myself attempting to eat it. I was thirty before I could use chopsticks or knew what a burrito was.

Food, to me, was always a mundane, unexciting experience. I travel a lot, but to this day I consider dining out to be a chore. This is heresy to a lot of people, I know, but I’m perfectly happy with a burger from room service or some easy-to-grab street food.

Unless, that is, we’re talking about dinner inside a converted McDonnell Douglas DC-10. Now this is a restaurant to get excited about.

Welcome to La Tante DC-10 Restaurant, located just outside Kotoka International Airport in the friendly capital city of Accra, Ghana. For several years this venerable aircraft sat derelict next to a hangar, sans engines and wearing the sun-bleached colors of the defunct Ghana Airways.

The hulk was destined for the scrap pile when, in 2013, it was purchased by the Vindira Company. It was towed down an embankment to its current resting spot, and refurbished into a full-service restaurant with seating for 118 passengers — er, diners. It’s hard to miss, looming just behind the Marina Mall and painted a ghastly green (the color owes to a sponsorship from the locally brewed Club beer).

I love the repurposing of commercial aircraft. La Tante is one of several similar projects around the world, including a 747-turned-hotel outside the airport in Stockholm. There’s something about this idea, the recasting of the jet into a wholly unexpected role, that causes one to reflect on the astonishing capabilities of commercial aviation.

When you’re sitting on a plane at the airport, it’s easy to take for granted the fact that you’ll soon be soaring through the sky, en route to some exotic city halfway around the world, a feat that would have seemed unimaginable just a hundred years ago.

It’s different, though, when that plane becomes a restaurant, and you’re sitting inside and suddenly you think about how this place, this entire building — we think about it now as a building — once flew through the air at hundreds of miles per hour, calling port in London, New York, Johannesburg, and dozens of cities in between.

The main dining room is set in what used to be the economy class cabin. The outside seats are original, with tables installed in between. Conventional tables and chairs are used in place of the center rows. If you want, you can stow your extra belongings in the overhead bins.

 

The landing gear gardens are a cool if peculiar flourish.

 

The washrooms are all but unchanged, except for a conventional “land” commode in place of the blue-water toilets.

 

La Tante’s menu isn’t terribly sophisticated. It’s your basic Ghanaian food. But it’s wholesome and inexpensive (at the moment it’s about 4 Ghana cedi to the American dollar). Here I kept it simple and ordered the Jollof rice with chicken, a Ghanaian staple. It was good, if unexceptional. Just the right amount of spicy. My normal Ghanaian favorite is the “red-red,” a stew made with black-eyed peas cooked in palm oil, but La Tante offers it only with fish, not with chicken or beef, and I don’t enjoy the fish version. The waitresses (yes, they dress like flight attendants) are friendly and the food came promptly.

 

There’s a bar/lounge in the forward section, in the space once occupied by first class.

 

The Ghana Airways tail livery remains. Notice the kitchen annex built into the right side of the fuselage.

If there’s one thing La Tante is lacking, it’s a little history. I wish the owners would put up some framed photographs of the place from its flying days. In addition to its work for Ghana Airways, the jet flew for the U.S.-based World Airways, which sent it on charters all over the globe. Many restaurants have long and storied histories, but usually just in one place. Here’s a restaurant that has literally been everywhere.

 

UPDATE: June, 2018: A recent visit to Ghana confirms that yes, the La Tante restaurant has lost its Club beer sponsorship and is no longer doused in the sickening green paint seen in the photos above. The DC-10 is now mostly white.

 

As much as I enjoy La Tante, it’s not my favorite eating spot in Accra. That honor belongs to Tandoor, an Indian place in the Cantonments neighborhood. Tandoor might be my favorite restaurant anywhere. Established in 1993, it’s one of the oldest Indian restaurants in the city, with a gigantic menu concentrating on Mughlai specialties, plus all of the standard Indian entrees, and then some.

I order either the coconut-chicken kebab (not spicy) or the chicken Madras (where’s the fire extinguisher?). The menu includes approximately four thousand varieties of naan and roti. Seating is inside or outside, garden-style on heavy wooden benches and tables. The atmosphere is very laid-back, though you might hear Harry, the owner, berating his staff when the service gets too slow.

Dining out just isn’t my thing, but I do have my spots. La Tante and Tandoor are two of them.

Speaking of West Africa, if you’re in Senegal, I recommend a Lebanese place called Le Layal, near the Place L’independance and within walking distance of the Pullman hotel. It’s nothing fancy — which is partly why I like it — with good prices and good food. Once you get past the “Testicles With Garlic and Lemon,” and the “Homos with Chopped Meat,” the menu is both coherent and tasty. Le Layal’s mezze is the best I’ve had in Africa. (They’ve gotten around, those Lebanese. I dare you to name a big city anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a decent Lebanese restaurant or a Lebanese-run hotel.)

Down in Mexico City, meanwhile, you might find me at Fonda el Refugio, an historic restaurant on Calle Waterloo in the Zona Rosa that dates to 1954. “Historic” implies pricey, but the entrees here are well within the average traveler’s budget. The waitstaff is attentive to a fault, and the food arrives quickly. My regular dish is the carne asada a la tabasqueña. Get there early to avoid the crowd.

And let’s not forget Abou Tarek, in Cairo. Everybody in Cairo, if not in all of Egypt, is familiar with Abou Tarek, a four-story building on a grimy street full of tire and muffler shops, just off the eastern end of 6 October Bridge, a few blocks in from the Nile. It’s been there since 1950, founded and (still) owned by Youssef Zaki. Zaki is maybe Cairo’s closest thing to a celebrity chef, a sort of Colonel Sanders of Egyptian fast food, whose portrait stares down at you from the walls. On my last visit, Zaki himself was on the premises, shaking hands.

Walk in, take a seat, and within thirty seconds you’re dining on the restaurant’s sole entree, that most delectable of Egyptian treasures: a steaming bowl of koshary — a carbohydrate bomb of noodles, lentils, chickpeas and fried onions, topped with a spicy tomato sauce and however much chili you can handle. All for the equivalent of about $1.50. Abou Tarek is not fine or formal dining by any stretch, but it’s tons of calories and tons of fun.

The best meal I ever had, though, was an impromptu feast from a streetside take-out joint in the city of Van, in eastern Turkey. It was a kebab plate, with succulent hunks of meat and slabs of tomato and onion, all wrapped fish-and-chips style in newspaper. I was starving at the time, which is maybe why I remember it so fondly. I think I paid about two dollars. I have no idea what the name of the place was.

There, just like that I’m a food blogger.

 

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

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FAREWELL DOUGLAS.
YAK HUNTING IN LIBERIA.
LETTER FROM GHANA. WELCOME TO ROOM 420.

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK SMITH

Update: November 10, 2016

OKAY, HERE’S WHAT IT’S NOT: It’s not Singapore-Changi. It’s not Seoul-Incheon. It’s not sparkly or fancy or architecturally exciting. It’s got bottlenecked corridors, low ceilings, and seemingly endless walks between concourses. And recent construction projects have made the passageways even more congested.

It is, however, clean, efficient and amazingly flyer-friendly.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is the place I’m talking about.

Schiphol has always been one of the top-scoring airports in passenger surveys, something that never made sense to me until recently, when I had a couple of long layovers that gave me time to really explore the place. AMS is the world’s 15th busiest airport overall, and one of the top five for international transfers. Keeping long-haul passengers happy is all about time-killing, and to this end Schiphol’s range of amenities is amazing:

My favorite are the “quiet areas” — relaxation zones decked out with sofas and easy chairs. Some are decorated with faux fireplaces. Others have artistically-inspired chairs with built-in iPads. Every airport should have some version of this. Noise and crowds are among the biggest stressors that travelers face, and nothing is more welcome than some peaceful corner to relax in. There’s also an in-terminal hotel that rents day rooms.

Amsterdam’s famous Rijksmuseum has a branch at Schiphol, right there in the terminal, with no admission charge. Directly next door is a sit-down library.

For children, the “Kids’ Forest” play area is bigger, brighter, and I have to say, just more fun-looking than most municipal playgrounds. Or maybe your tyke would rather play pilot in the awesome (if vaguely psychedelic) airplane replica, complete with puffy clouds, pictured at the top of this post.

The retail options are pretty much endless, and there’s also a full-service grocery store. If your layover is long enough, there’s a tour desk that sells half-day guided excursions into Amsterdam, with a pick-up and drop-off point just outside the terminal. For those staying in-country, the railway link into Amsterdam — and to points beyond — couldn’t be simpler. Tickets are purchased from kiosks inside the terminal, and the platform is only a short walk away via tunnel and escalator.

Amsterdam’s hometown carrier, KLM, is the world’s oldest airline, and on the second level, near the meditation room, is a hallway of historical KLM travel posters showcasing the carrier’s destinations and aircraft over the decades. There’s also that rarest of rarities at airports nowadays, an open-air observation deck, called the Panoramaterras. An outdoor deck is maybe not ideal considering the Dutch weather, but it allowed them to install that old KLM Fokker 100 as part of the scenery. You don’t need to be an airplane geek to appreciate the view and a chance for some fresh air.

Down in the central lobby, meanwhile, is one of the coolest airport retails shops around — at least in the eyes of some of us. The Planes Plaza sells plastic and die-cast models, toy airports, airline pins, books, and so on. In the hallway out front there’s an entire forward section of a former KLM DC-9 (open to passers-by, of course), as well as a main landing gear section and engine cowling from a McDonnell Douglas MD-11.

And when the weather is good (an iffy proposition most months of the year), the fun continues outside. This being the Netherlands, the airport’s perimeter is ringed by bicycle paths, one of which leads to Schiphol’s spotterplaats, designated zones adjacent to the runways where airliner enthusiasts gather with their binoculars and cameras — an activity that is all but banned in the U.S. (Airplane spotting is so popular in Holland that Schiphol’s website includes a spotters’ subsection.)

As you can see from the sign below, cyclists can ride from the airport clear into Amsterdam itself. How many big-city airport’s are accessible by bike?

Schiphol is pronounced “Shkip-hole,” by the way. The second syllable is short and flattened; it’s “Shkipple.” It’s not “Shipple,” and it’s definitely not “Shy-pole.”

No, there’s not a butterfly garden or koi ponds like the ones in Singapore, or the soaring ceilings and waterfalls you’ll find elsewhere. But what Amsterdam lacks in flair, it makes up for with a workmanlike functionality and plenty of quirky charms. It’s got something even the biggest and flashiest airports often lack: character.

 

NORTH LATITUDE

LETTER FROM AMSTERDAM, 1991

LIMPING INTO Centraal Station, I whisper quietly. “Skip-hole,” I say. “Skipple. Skip-ill.” I’m rehearsing the correct pronunciation of Schiphol, the name of Amsterdam’s airport, from where in a few hours I’m due to catch a flight home.

It’s midsummer of and I’ve been up for two days — every hotel, motel, guesthouse and hostel sold-out from Antwerp to Hamburg. I’d taken a pass on a second floor chamber at the Kabul, a Red Light hovel across from a condom store, napping instead at McDonald’s and listening to a seven year-old cassette of Zen Arcade over and over and over. Now the lobby of Centraal Station hovers above me with its overcooked façade of gables and filigree, like some great medieval fun house.

I’m limping because of a late-night collision with one of Amsterdam’s countless sidewalk posts. The city’s streets are lined with tens of thousands of knee-high iron bollards, the point of which, I think, is to keep cars from parking on the sidewalks (a mission for which they are semi-successful, depending which part of the city you’re in). Because they are black, and because they are knee-high, these bollards are a sensational invitations for injury. How the Dutch and their swarms of bicycles avoid mass casualties I’ll never know, but distracted by a flaxen blonde pedaling past me on the Leidseplein, I ambled straight into one. It got me just below the right kneecap. I could feel the tendons twist and buckle.

I move slowly and achingly into the station, where, if it’s any consolation, the ticket man seems impressed by my pronunciation efforts. He takes my guilders and smiles.

A half hour later, watching from a second-level airport restaurant, the KLM employees are the easiest to spot in their blue uniforms. Everything about KLM is blue. Even their jets, inside and out, are done up in blue — a two-tone of powder and navy. There’s something soothingly, inexplicably Dutch about it — the pudding shades lifted straight from a Vermeer painting. I look at the ticket counters — at the logo and the aluminum marquee, the stacks of KLM timetables and frequent flyer brochures– and I realize there’s no red. Try to find an airline that doesn’t have at least one shade of red as part of its identity. None of that here, just cool Dutch blue.

“Shkip-ohl,” I mouth silently. Airport workers on bicycles glide across the polished floor.

A few seconds later I’m asleep, my head on the greasy table and my knee throbbing.

Finally I’m at the counter, and the KLM woman’s badge — the KLM-ers are handling check-in for my Northwest flight — says “Meike,” which I assume is a first name, not a last, but I can’t be sure. Her white hair and milky features seem to go nicely with her blue vest — a perfect picture of efficient Dutch neutrality.

I hand over my pilot credentials: company ID, licenses, medical certificate (“holder must wear corrective lenses”), letting her know I’m entitled to ride along gratis in one of the extra cockpit chairs.

Jetliner cockpits can have many as five seats. Behind the pilots you’ll find one, and often two auxiliary stations, known colloquially as observer seats or “jumpseats.” A jumpseat might unfold in sections or swing out from the wall; or it might be a fixed chair not much different from those of the working crew. They can be occupied by training personnel, FAA inspectors, off-duty pilots commuting to work, and freeloaders like me. It’s an uncomfortable place to sit, most of the time, though probably not as bad as the middle seat in coach. Certainly the scenery is more interesting, and although pilots are known to whine for extended periods of time, there are no colicky infants. And, it’s free.

Or not entirely, as Meike tells me that I need to pay a departure tax, which is bad news because my knee is all but seized and the payment kiosk is two-hundred meters away. The distance means nothing to her, the Dutch airport employees simply coast through the terminal on their bikes. As I stagger away, I’m nearly flattened by one.

Next hurdle is a gate-side podium where a gangly security man in a cranberry-colored suit is grilling me, making sure I’m not a terrorist. He looks like he belongs at the Avis counter. This is one of those post-Lockerbie things, where you stand at the desk to be peppered with questions about battery operated appliances, the contents of your suitcase, and why you came here in the first place.

If he’s looking at me a bit strangely, it’s easy to understand why: I am 25 years-old. I have not slept or showered in almost three days, and I can’t walk. And I’m trying to convince this officious fellow that I’m an airline pilot deserving of a free ride home in the cockpit.

“You are a pilot?”

“Yes sir.”

“For who?” The takes my ID badge and fingers it warily. This is still what might be called the old days, and my small-time regional carrier, Northeast Express, isn’t one to take things too seriously. Its employee badges look like something you’d make at home. In fact, they are hand-assembled in a company trailer at the airport in Bangor, Maine. There are no holographs or fancy stamps or bar codes. He looks at my crookedly cropped photo and picks at the cellophane tape I’ve placed over the peeled laminate.

“Northeast Express,” I explain. “Or Northwest Airlink, like it says on our planes. We’re a code-share affiliate of Northwest. They have a hub here.”

“Northeast?”

“No, Northwest.”

“You work for Northwest?”

“No, I work for Northeast.”

“But…”

“Northeast Express. We fly feeder routes for Northwest.”

“So is it Northeast or Northwest?”

“It’s both!” I say in a voice a little too chipper.

“Really,” says the guard. “What kind of plane do you fly?”

“The Beech 99.”

“The what?”

“It’s a fifteen-seater. A small turboprop.” Embarrassment mixes with exhaustion.

“Small, eh?”

“About the size of a milk truck.”

“Yes, well. And where did you stay in Amsterdam?”

“McDonald’s.”

And so on.

My luck, they are using a 747 today instead of the usual DC-10. It’s one of the old -200s with a three-man crew. I love the 747 and savor every chance to ride on one. This time, though, I learn that every last passenger seat is occupied, which means I’ll have to spend the entire eight-hour trip upstairs on cockpit. Usually the captain will toss you back to a vacant seat, hopefully in first or business, but this time there aren’t any.

The cockpit of the 747 sits at the forward tip of the upper deck, at such a forward extremity of the giant ship as to feel entirely removed from the rest of it. Possibly, from the crew’s point of view, that disconnect is the ideal arrangement. Pilots fully grasp the gravity of their responsibilities, trust me, but a constant awareness that you’re sitting atop hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal, fuel, freight and flesh can be — and how to say this exactly — distracting.  The cockpit is long, but surprisingly narrow and cramped for a plane so massive. Eight or more hours in the forward jumpseat, which does not recline, is the sort of thing that keeps chiropractors in business.

Worse, there’s another traveling pilot with us — he’s a United captain with a Dutch girlfriend, he tells us, who makes the crossing a couple of times monthly on his days off. This means there are five of us – the captain, first officer, flight engineer, and two jumpseaters, wedged into a room better suited for two.

But still, it’s a 747, that grandest of all jetliners. Despite my exhaustion and junkyard knee, I’m elated.

After strapping in, the other freeloader takes out his inflatable neck pillow and is sound asleep almost instantly. Propped in his seat, he looks like an unconscious accident victim in a neck brace.

We push exactly on time, and we’re in the air fifteen minutes later.

Out over the Atlantic it seems like the sun has hardly moved. And it hasn’t, so much, as we race westward, effectively slowing the passage of time. I can read the INS displays as they tick off the degrees of longitude and latitude.

At thirty degrees West the first officer is making a position report over the high-frequency radio. “Gander, Gander,” he calls, “Northwest zero three niner, position.” He’s got a clipboard full of dot-matrix printout on his left knee and a wedge of apple crumble on the right. A voice answers back, all reverb and crackly, a thousand miles away. Making a call over HF is a bit like offering up a prayer. You’re calling across some insane distance, hoping that somebody answers, and that they care.

The sunlight is white, oblique and directionless through the glass, like a spotlight from everywhere and nowhere. Outside temp shows minus 59. As the spectator, I’m both awed and heartbroken watching this crew of a 747 at work. An opportunity to sit here is irresistible. It’s like sitting in your favorite team’s dugout during a World Series game. But it carries with it a sort of voyeuristic shame. Forgive me, but it’s a bit like watching two strangers having their way with the girl of your dreams. You’re almost there, but the important parts are missing. You can watch but you can’t touch.

We are tracing a long, sub-polar arc toward eventual landfall at a gateway fix near Labrador. They’ve given us the northernmost track, one that will take us to nearly 60 degrees north latitude, practically scraping the glaciered tip of Greenland.

This far north, with clear weather and in the proper season (think April and Titanic), it’s not uncommon to see fields of icebergs drifting below, their wind-sculpted tops discernible from seven miles up.

Today there’s naught but gray ocean, the demarcations west of Greenwich passing invisibly, 60 cold miles at a time.

Which is fine since the view from the forward jumpseat of a 747 is terrible, unless you enjoy meditating on a wall of chipped zinc chromate, or else memorizing the lifejacket instructions embroidered onto the back of the captain’s chair. With all due love for the 747, the better jumpseat is on the old DC-10, where the aft left window extends from head-level to below the shins. You literally have a wall of glass to look through, and during steep approaches, or up over the Andes, the view is worthy of an Imax ticket.

My knee feels like it’s seizing, so I go for a walk.

I hobble downstairs and all the way rearward, past row 57 and up the other aisle. The plane is full and there’s crap all over the floor. People are asleep or watching the movie. I can’t tell what’s playing. A blurry bulkhead screen shows a distressed young woman crouching behind the fender of a pick-up truck.

I loiter near the rear galley and ask for a Diet Coke. A few feet away, waiting his turn for the lav, is a young guy in a purplish sweater. He strikes me as a straightlaced sort, maybe a law student or a kid who’d splurged for a bachelor party in Holland.

And he’s sweating, I realize. A nervous flyer? All flyers are nervous flyers, whether they admit it or not, but this is more serious. His J. Crew mock turtleneck (eggplant) is starting to blot at the armpits, and wet barbs of hair are sticking from his neck. Is this guy okay?

He’s the guy who in high school played on the hockey team and bullied me around. I’m thinking he’s got a Bulldog Café t-shirt somewhere in his luggage, which later he’ll give to his girlfriend who’ll wear it for the rest of the summer on Cape Cod.

I give him a half nod, then slide sideways towards the emergency exit. I turn and shift my weight so that I’m leaning against the door sill — my thigh held firmly against the boxy portion that contains the escape slide, and where it says DO NOT SIT.

And now the guy is eyeing me with a raised and quivering eyebrow, probably wondering which will pop open first — the lav, so he can relieve himself, or the cabin door, ejecting us both into the frozen tropopause. I should say to him: “Relax dude, I’m an undercover pilot, see?” Maybe flash him my trailer-made ID or a picture of myself in the cockpit of my ridiculous Beech 99, let him know it’s all gonna be okay.

But I don’t, and instead I put my hand on the big silver handle.

These door handles are designed for ease of use, I suppose, but they’ve always struck me as such retro-looking devices, clumsy and cartoonishly oversized. I’m thinking about this and tapping it with my thumb.

And now Eggplant J. Crew is on the verge of a full-bore conniption, his temples visibly throbbing. He fixes an angry gaze on me, his upper lip moist and trembling. Should I dare move that handle, he’s ready to spring, I can tell.

What Eggplant doesn’t know, and what, just for the fun of it, I choose not to tell him, is that neither of us could open the damn door if we spent all day trying. The doors on the 747, like the doors on most commercial planes, open in before they open out. At cruising altitude, with the cabin pressurized, there are probably 15,000 pounds of air pressure holding that door closed. If I jiggled the handle enough I might get a red light to come on and the pilot upstairs to drop his apple crumble, but the door is not opening.

After a minute he can’t take it any more. “Look,” he says, with a detectable tremor in his voice. “Could you please not touch that?”

“Sorry,” I say, pulling my hand back.

I take my Diet Coke and head towards the front again. As I hobble up the aisle, I shoot a quick glance at Eggplant, who seems to be calming down now that I’m leaving. “Take it easy.”

Little does he know this demented, limping person has a seat up front with the drivers.

 

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The Weird and Wonderful World of Airline Collectibles.

November 20, 2015

YOU KNOW WHAT I MISS? Airline ticket wallets. Once upon a time airline tickets were issued by hand, and were often several pages thick, while boarding passes came in the form of cardstock keepsakes. When you checked in at the airport, the agent would arrange this paperwork in a paper or cardboard wallet — sometimes they called it a “ticket jacket” — emblazoned with the carrier’s logo and colors, and hand it back to you. Have a nice flight, sir. It was a small but classy touch, and a helpful way of organizing your documents. Today’s electronically issued tickets are mere receipts that can be folded into a pocket, and the boarding pass has become a similarly flimsy scrap, rendering the jackets all but obsolete. I don’t imagine this saves much money, since they couldn’t cost more than a penny each to manufacture, though if nothing else I guess it saves a few trees.

When I was a kid I had a pretty good collection of ticket jackets from airlines around the world. I had a big timetable collection too, and those are another thing I miss. Timetables. Three or four times a year airlines would publish thick booklets containing their entire network schedule — arrival times, departure times, aircraft types, etc. — plus a wealth of other information. There were seating diagrams, addresses and contact info, and, my favorite, the fold-out route map. They were useful to frequent flyers and they made neat collectibles.

For the most part timetables have been relegated to virtual status on airline websites. Hard copy versions haven’t totally disappeared, but you need to look overseas to find the few that are still out there. I’m not sure who still prints them. The newest one I own is about ten years old. Curiously, looking at the various carriers’ current online versions is something of a sentimental journey, as the basic format has hardly changed. Several of the major carriers’ online timetables are laid out exactly like the printed versions 25 years ago, with the identical fonts and typefaces!

Airline collectibles. I wonder sometimes how much my old archive would be worth, if only it still existed. Inside a gray metal footlocker once resided a good fifty pounds of airline memorabilia that my friends and I had stockpiled during our weekend forays to Logan Airport in the mid and late 1970s. We’d rummage through kiosks and weasel our way onto parked jetliners. Virtually anything wearing an airline logo was snagged and hoarded: timetables, booklets, luggage stickers and tags, silverware, pins, inflight magazines, barf bags, playing cards.

We’d also write to airline offices the world over. “Dear South African Airways, could you please send us some timetables, pictures of your aircraft or other items for our collection.” Amazingly effective this was. A few weeks later a fat manila packet would arrive jammed with posters, pictures, promotional brochures, you name it.

All gone. Gone because, for reasons that I can’t today fathom, I threw it all away.

I was 18 or 19 when I did it. The locker, a gray aluminum chest the size of a large suitcase, still sits in the attic of my parents’ house in Revere, Massachusetts. It’s covered with luggage stickers from Braniff, Eastern, Piedmont and North Central. It goes BOOONG! when you bang on it. Because it’s empty. The bottomless echo of a teenager making another bad decision.

Among the few things I hung onto are a small handful of timetables, and a sizable library of airliner postcards, which I still actively curate. Their portability, if nothing else, inspired me to save them. Postcards, yes: years ago airlines would publish and distributed postcards showcasing photographs or drawings of their aircraft. Photo on the front; blank space for writing and postage stamp square on the back. I’ve got about 500 in all, from Aeroflot to Air Zimbabwe, some of which, according to eBay and the people who sell and trade such things, are worth $20 or $30 apiece.

Here are two examples, front and back. The LOT card, showing a Tupolev Tu-134, seems to be celebrating the airline’s 60th anniversary. It says “Blue Nile International Service” along the back of the Sudan Airways 707:

I’ve got an Avianca card of a 747 on its first trip to Medellin, Colombia, marked “Historica fotograica,” and a Laker Airways DC-10 that includes a little balloon picture Sir Freddie himself, his smile beaming skyward and his autograph reproduced across the bottom. And look at this one. It’s a watercolor painting of the Brussels Airport, put out by the old Belgian carrier Sabena. I’d date it to the mid-1970s judging from the planes:

Several of my cards are renderings like that one, done in watercolor, oil or acrylics. One of them is an Aeroflot Tu-114 done in charcoal and pencil, the AEROFLOT typeface straight out of 1957, the effect all Sputnik/Gary Powers/Oswald. Where did such wonderful things come from? Who designed them? Were they commissioned? Was somebody actually paid for this work?

Some airlines were astoundingly prolific with their postcards. Lufthansa produced hundreds of them. The U.S. majors did too. My favorites are the 1960s and 1970s-era cards: the 707s, DC-8s, Caravelles and 747SPs; the old Soviet Tupolevs and Ilyushins. I especially savor the tarmac shots where the jets are surrounded by activity: workers and tug-tractors and baggage vehicles all stirring about. I love the action and drama these scenes suggest, all of the logistical and human effort that goes into getting a plane off the ground. They’re vastly more interesting than the dime-a-dozen shots of a plane aloft, nose-to-tail against a sunset or a bank of clouds.

Artistically speaking, the Eastern Europeans seem to have put the most thinking into their cards. My collections spans dozens of airlines across six continents, but it’s those from the old Soviet Bloc that are the most nuanced and creatively designed. Maybe this was a minor form of Cold War propaganda, the Eastern carriers outdoing their Western rivals in one of the only ways they knew how. Check out these examples from Romanian carrier Tarom, and the former East German airline Interflug; the Tupolev’s underbelly in black-and-white, when it didn’t need to be:

You’ll find very few airline pilots who collect such things, or even know they exist. Most pilots aren’t into airlines per se and know relatively little about them. But to me these picture cards are poignant historical markers. Not just the airline industry’s history, but my own. They are like slices of my adolescence. They take me back to junior high school, to those critical formative years of my airline nerdity. If my apartment ever caught fire and I was allowed to save one thing, my box of postcards might be that thing.

A handful of airlines still do postcards. I was excited, last spring, taking a TAP (Air Portugal) flight from Heathrow to Lisbon, to discover a display of cards for the taking, in a plastic holster mounted on one of the cabin bulkheads, each with a picture of an Airbus A320. I grabbed one. Actually I grabbed two.

Here’s an online database of airline postcards both old and new, some of which I own.

Aside from the postcards I’ve been slowly rebuilding my memorabilia collection. I’ve got some menus, a few timetables that I bought online (including a few that I’d owned previously, before the great purge of 1985 or whenever it was), amenities kits and silverware and luggage tags. Most of it is newer material that for me lacks the meaning and sentimental associations of my earlier and collection, but this time I promise not to throw it out.

I also have this. It’s a wooden sake cup from the inaugural flight of the Boeing 747-400:

Northwest Airlines, some of you might recall, was the launch customer for the 747-400, back in 1989. That spring, they had been using the jet on domestic “proving runs” mainly between Minneapolis and Phoenix. Finally on June 1st, they inaugurated international service. The first departure was flight NW 47, from JFK to Narita. My friend Ben and I were passengers on that flight. It was the day after my 23rd birthday. I still have my commemorative sake cup. The 747-400 is no longer the preeminent or the most popular long-haul aircraft. That would be its slightly smaller brother, the 777-300. But there are still more than five-hundred -400s in service. And I had a seat on the very first one.

Which brings us to the strange object you see below. This was sent to me about five years ago by Peter Hughes, the bassist for the Mountain Goats and an Ask the Pilot aficionado, who’d found it at a flea market. It is what it appears to be: a small plastic doll, about three inches tall, encased in a transparent shell, like a miniature trophy case, adorned with ’60s-era airline logos, including those of BOAC, Pan Am, and the beautiful JAL crane (still in use, miracle of miracles). It says “Cragstan” across the bottom, which I take to be the name of the company that produced the thing. The doll is supposed to be a stewardess, possibly? I don’t know, but I dig owning it:

 

Help support the author’s postcard habit by ordering a copy of his book

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September 29, 2015

EVERYBODY has heard the word “checklist.” Most folks know that checklists are a staple in airline cockpits, and they get the gist of it. The term is self-descriptive; you can think of it as a grocery list of sorts — a line-by-line register of specific items, used to make sure that important tasks have been completed, and none skipped. Still, a lot of people don’t understand exactly what a cockpit checklist looks like and how the reading of one is carried out. Pardon the geekiness of what follows, but here’s how it works:

Pilots use checklists for both normal and non-normal operations: for routine situations, for malfunctions, and for emergencies. (You’ll notice I said “non-normal.” That’s a classic aviation-ism, devised in place of “abnormal” for reasons I can’t possibly fathom or explain. It’s a goofy word, but for the sake of realism we’ll stick with it.)

The non-normal checklists are bound together in an overstuffed book called the QRH, or Quick Reference Handbook. This volume contains step-by-step procedures for hundreds of potential situations or malfunctions, from minor component failures to how to prepare for an ocean ditching. The QRH is divided into chapters: electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, etc. There are at least two in the cockpit: identical copies for the captain and first officer, always within easy reach.

The normal checklists are usually printed on an a card — paper or cardboard — sometimes laminated and often folded vertically and/or lengthwise. A single card will be divided into as many as a dozen separate checklists, each of which will be read aloud depending on the phase of flight. Wording varies airline to airline, but the individual lists will be titled something like this:

PREFLIGHT
PUSHBACK and ENGINE START
AFTER ENGINE START
TAXI
BEFORE TAKEOFF
AFTER TAKEOFF
CLIMB

DESCENT
APPROACH
BEFORE LANDING
AFTER LANDING
SHUTDOWN

Most of these are only five or ten items long and take only a few seconds to perform. The PREFLIGHT checklist is normally the longest, and can have thirty or more steps, depending on the airline and aircraft type. On the newest jets, checklists are presented electronically on a screen — though there’s always a hard copy as well.

Boeing, Airbus, and the other manufacturers devise an initial, standard checklists for every airplane type, and carriers then tweak them. As a result, a 737 checklist at American Airlines will read differently than a 737 checklist at Delta. The basics are always the same, but airlines tailor them in accordance with their training and SOP.

Most of the normal checklists are read aloud in a challenge/response format. One pilot reads the item, and the other pilot calls out the verification. On the ground it’s usually the first officer who reads. In the air, it’s whichever pilot is not physically flying. For instance, using C and R for challenge and response, a LANDING checklist would go roughly as follows (this is a generic example):

C: “Landing gear?”
R: “Down, three green lights”

C: “Flaps and slats?”
R: “Thirty-Five, Thirty-five, Set”

C: “Spoilers?”
R: “Armed”

C: “Autobrakes?”
R: “Three”

The pilot who is reading then says, “Landing checklist is complete.”

Sometimes both pilots are required to call out verification of an especially important item. Challenge/Response becomes Challenge/Response/Response. Trying it again:

C: “Landing gear?”
R: “Down, three green”
R: “Down, three green”

C: “Flaps and slats?”
R: “Thirty-Five, Thirty-five, Set”
R: “Thirty-Five, Thirty-five, Set”

C: “Spoilers?”
R: “Armed”

C: “Autobrakes?”
R: “Three”

At other times, the pilot reading the checklist calls out both the item and the verification. It depends.

The verbal reply to a challenge/response might be a numerical value, an “on” or “off,” or a simple “checked” or “set.” Or, it might be something specific like “down, three green,” like you see above. In that case, the pilots are verifying that the landing gear lever has been selected down, and that the warning lights agree that the gear is down and locked for touchdown. When they say “thirty-five, thirty-five,” that’s a verification that the wing flap handle is set to 35 degrees, and that the associated gauge shows the flaps having in fact reached that position.

When one pilot verifies the task of the other pilot, that’s “crosschecked.”

We also say “roger” a lot. (Or “Rogah.” For fun, I am prone to reading the PREFLIGHT checklist in an exaggerated Boston accent: rogah, radah, transpondah, etc.)

To the outside listener, the smooth, uninterrupted reading of a checklist can be an interesting and curious ballet.

Occasionally, though, a checklist is performed silently, by one pilot. The AFTER LANDING checklist, for instance, is ordinarily silent, the only call being when the first officer says “After landing checklist is complete.” He’s meanwhile made sure the flaps, slats, and speedbrakes are retracted, the trim is reset, the radar is off, and so on.

There also are supplementary checklists, such as those used during oceanic crossings and other not-always-routine operations.

Checklist discipline is important. You always reach for the card, even if you’re 99.99 percent certain that everything is safe and complete. In the airline environment this discipline is taken for granted. In my entire major airline career, I have never once seen a checklist intentionally skipped.

Normal checklists are just that: check lists. You are verifying that tasks have already been accomplished. All the switches, buttons and levers should be in the correct position prior to reading. The pilots will already have run through their so-called “flow patterns,” a choreographed set of steps during which the physical button and switch-pushing is actually accomplished. For example, on the plane I fly, immediately after the engines are started, the first officer’s flow pattern includes, in a right-to-left sweep beginning at the overhead instrument panel, reconfiguring the plane’s pneumatics, turning on the engine anti-ice (if needed), turning on the center tank fuel pumps, shutting off the APU, checking the “recall” function of the main annunciator panel, and one or two other things. The AFTER START checklist then verifies that everything was done.

The non-normal QRH procedures, on the other hand, can more accurately be described as “do lists.” You don’t do anything until you’re instructed to.

That is, except for those times when so-called “memory items” come into play. These are a brief series of steps performed from memory in urgent circumstances, when time doesn’t permit the luxury of breaking out the QRH. Once the situation is stabilized, you refer to the book to make sure you did everything correctly. It will then guide you through whatever else needs to be done.

The QRH checklists can be complicated and go on for several pages. One or both pilots might be involved in the reading and verification, depending on circumstances. Regardless of which pilot’s turn it is to fly, it’s not unusual for the captain to delegate flying duties to the first officer while he or she breaks out the QRH and troubleshoots. During this process, the most crucial tasks — for instance, shutting down an engine — will require dual verification, and both pilots must become part of the conversation. Newer planes sometimes have electronic, on-screen checklists that pop into view when needed, used in lieu or in addition to those in the QRH.

All of this, meanwhile, is separate from the execution of what we call “profiles.” All normal or non-normal flight maneuvers are flown according to a profile: what speeds to fly, what angles of pitch to aim for, when to extend and retract the flaps or landing gear — each of these things, and more, happen at a prescribed place and time. It isn’t about switches, levers or dials. Rather, it’s how you fly the plane. Takeoffs, instrument approaches, go-arounds, and all of the maneuvers in between, follow a specific profile. Thus, at any given airline, all crews are trained to perform the same maneuvers the same way. This ensures commonality and, in turn, safety.

Pilots have been using checklists for decades, and it’s a little surprising that other industries haven’t adopted the concept more widely. Finally their use is beginning to spread into other realms, most notably medicine and nuclear power.

 

If you enjoyed this discussion, check out the author’s book.

 

Welcome to Room 420: Rubber Floors, Mysterious Odors and Inexplicable Artwork. Plus: Mojito Madness and the World’s Worst Billboard.

ACCRA, GHANA

THE FLOOR IN ROOM 420 is made of rubber — or something that looks like rubber. It’s a pebbly, industrial-style flooring. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were made from recycled tractor tires. That would be a good thing, and either way I like it. I admire its toughness, and it lends a handsome touch to the rest of the — what to call it? — African-modernist decor of sun-faded pastels and white pine. But tread barefoot at your peril: in the shower your feet will leave inky black stains around the drain.

Outside my window, a crippled man is propelling himself down the sidewalk in a hand-cranked wheelchair with a seat made of plywood. He is wearing an oily pair of jeans, and his legs — whatever might be wrong with them exactly, or if they’re there at all — look like deflated canvas tubes. Nearby, on the wall of a construction site, in angry spray-painted letters it says, DO NOT PISS HERE!

My room stinks of cigar smoke and cologne.

Now, at least as I understand it, the accepted literary style of describing smells is to always use some fantastical or over-the-top comparison and maybe a little metaphor. “His room stank of coalsmoke and defeat.” I’m not creative enough for that, and besides it doesn’t always describe the smell accurately. I assure you this room smells precisely like cigar smoke and cologne, and I am confident that both of those things were here, in abundance, shortly before my arrival yesterday afternoon. I picture an overweight German businessman in a towel dousing himself in some awful fragrance; a recalcitrant Nigerian hooker napping in this very bed. “Kommen ve must go now. It is check-out time!”

The smell hit me the second I walked in. I thought about changing rooms but I was too tired to go dragging my stuff back to the elevator.

Plus, this is room 420. I have had this room before, and Eau de Montecristo aside, it is my favorite for an excellent reason: because it is home to the most ridiculous piece of artwork ever to grace a hotel room. Hotel artwork is a pretty competitive field — in all the wrong categories — and if you travel a lot, doubtless you’ve marveled at the many tacky, trite, or simply hideous pieces tacked to the walls by clueless hoteliers. But the winner for oddest-ever in-room picture hangs proudly above the non-useful miniature sofa in room 420 of the Novotel City Centre here in Accra. I could try describing it, but here’s your proverbial Thousand Words instead:

I can’t make out who the artist was (initials DDR?), but this was a limited edition print, number 30 of 150, and it dates from 1997, embossed with an important-looking stamp decreeing its membership in the esteemed “Novotel Collection.” I call it, “Air and Sea,” or, “O Captain My Captain” (artist unknown; ink and whatnot on paper). Perhaps in a youth hostel or backpacker joint it wouldn’t seem so jarring, but the fact this is West Africa makes it even more of an insane non-sequitur than it would be anywhere else.

I thought about taking it with me — the theft of fine arts is a booming business, you know. And here in Somerville, Massachusetts, we have the should-be-famous Museum of Bad Art. MOBAs renowned curators could do worse, maybe, than ringing up Novotel and making an offer for DDR’s masterpiece. Alas the piece is surprisingly well-secured in its frame.

Or am I being unfair? It’s a fun picture, certainly, and far preferable to some schlocky painting of an African village or an acrylic stick figure of a woman grinding grain.

Meanwhile, for guests who don’t mind lingering odors, who aren’t serious art collectors, or who don’t enjoy bouncing around on rubber floors, the Novotel still has plenty to offer. It’s clean, in a convenient location, and the staff, like everybody in Ghana, is disarmingly friendly. The poolside pizzas are the best in West Africa and the Sangaw bar, just off the lobby, is a relaxed and cozy spot to enjoy a cold bottle of Star.

It’s also a great hotel to have your laundry done — a badly needed service after a long flight and the sweaty van ride from Kotoka airport. They are prompt and do an excellent job. It’s not too expensive, and everything comes back brightly washed and meticulously folded in accordance with some unfathomable mathematical folding principle. Even the socks come back folded, looking like little origami socks.

Not everybody at the washing station is paying attention though. I’m one of those eco-weirdos who takes those sad little “help us conserve water” placards seriously; I re-use the towels and I don’t let the housecleaners change the pillow cases. And on the laundry slip, I write, in big underlined letters, NO PLASTIC! Chipping in, doing my part. No matter, here’s how my clothes come back to me…

There’s some cultural disconnect going on here, possibly — the idea that a Western guest wouldn’t want his impossibly folded boxer-briefs and socks presented in cellophane splendor simply impossible to entertain. Or maybe they think this is funny?

Which brings us down to the aforementioned Sangaw Bar. What to make of this special cocktail promotion, advertised tabletop in clear plastic easels…

Apparently for some West Africans, your idea of “Latino” is a crazy old woman smoking a gigantic cigar.

I much enjoy traveling to Ghana, and Ghanaians are some of my favorite people in the world. Always smiling, always saying hello, always eager to sell you a handmade goatskin drum or some shea butter without ripping you off. This is an amiable and proud place — if not always for reasons everyone is eager to hear about. Once, a couple of years ago, I was getting out of a taxi across from the Novotel, and as I stepped to the curb I was confronted with the following, staring at me from a newspaper kiosk…

So we know there are people who keep track of these things. And naturally some of us wonder: who finished first and second?

Accra is also home to the world’s worst billboard. It’s just outside the airport, informing arriving passengers of the country’s desperate dearth of copywriters. KILL INSECTS! ENJOY NICE SMELL. Is that the smell of dead insects? At any rate, it looks like they applied a little too much: “Hey girls, come and help daddy spread some of this toxic insecticide around the house. Douse it good now, and breathe it in! Smell that wonderful smell. Breathe in deep! What’s that? Yes, daddy also has a headache and knife-like stomach pains. But just keep breathing and spraying. Wait, oh shit, I just killed my entire family…

I digress.

Every hotel has it quirks. Inexplicable artwork, rubber floors and bizarre cocktails, there are a lot of things to dislike about hotel rooms, even the fanciest and most expensive ones: temperamental air conditioning, toe-breaking doorjambs, ergonomically hellish “work spaces.”

And here’s another one: cardboard brochures. Nowadays, each and every hotel amenity, from room service to Wi-Fi, is hawked through one or more annoying advertisements displayed throughout the room. Cards, signs, menus, and assorted promotional materials—they’re everywhere: on the dresser, in the closet, on the pillows, in the bathroom. I wouldn’t mind if this laminated litter was placed unobtrusively, but it tends to be exactly in the way, and I resent having to spend five minutes after an exhausting red-eye, gathering up these diabolical doo-dads and heaving them into a corner where they belong. One’s first moments in a hotel room ought to feel welcoming, not confrontational.

Food and room service are another topic entirely. Speaking of West Africa, be careful never to dine too hungry at the Pullman Hotel in Dakar, Senegal, where the surly poolside waitress might, eventually, bring you the pizza you ordered ninety minutes ago, and where the in-room menu offers such delectables as:

Chief Salad
Roasted Beef Joint on Crusty Polenta
The Cash of The Day
Paving Stone of Thiof and Aromatic Virgin Sauce

That last one sounds like a chapter from a fantasy novel. Head instead to Le Layal, a great little Lebanese place up the street where, once you get past the “Testicles with Garlic” and the “Homos with Chopped Meat”, the menu is both coherent and tasty.

So the phones are open. If you’ve got comparable examples of hotel weirdness, feel free to share them in the comments section below.

 

UPDATE: November 15, 2014

Well, subsequent stays at the Novotel City Centre in Accra reveal that the “Novotel Collection” is more bountiful than we thought. We now have three contenders for the for strangest (worst?) hotel artwork of all time. Move over “O Captain,” you’ve got company. Down one floor, in room 302 we behold this remarkable creation. For now untitled, it appears to depict a severed robot head in the throes of a mind-meld with a giant strawberry…

And not to be outdone, also on the third floor, yet another demented masterpiece awaits us, perhaps the most impressive of the lot…

We notice a consistency here — an opposing-panels “faces” theme — though somehow this unifying principle doesn’t make the pictures less ridiculous. How to choose a favorite?

 

Anyway here’s an idea. Maybe you should visit Ghana. If you’re considering a first-time trip to West Africa, I can’t recommend it more highly. It’s friendly, safe, affordable, and there’s tons to do.

HIGHLIGHTS IN TEN DAYS…

Day 1: Arrival. Check in to your non-smoky room at the Novotel and enjoy the afternoon at leisure. Walk down to the Arts Center to try out your haggling skills, and maybe come away with one of those not-too-overpriced drums. Later have dinner at Tandoor, Africa’s best (and spiciest) Indian restaurant.

Day 2: Accra. Visit the Osu coffin makers, and finish the afternoon with a sundowner at Osekan, a seaside bar/restaurant not far from the hotel. Ghanaian food tonight at Buka, or at Asanka Local if you’re adventurous. If you’ve never had Ghanaian food, start easy and order the red-red, or the Jollof rice with chicken.

Day 3: Get an early start and head west to Elmina Castle, the famous slave castle about two-and-a-half hours west of Accra. (Skip Cape Coast Castle and head directly to Elmina, about 20 minutes further.) After a tour be sure to wander around the harborfront area. Get right down in there, onto the sand in into the little alleyways between the houses. After lunch continue west to the small town of Axim, near the border with Ivory Coast.

Days 4 and 5: Spend two nights at the Axim Beach Hotel, a rustic seaside place on a beautiful beach. Take some time to wander Axim town, with its ramshackle main street and nearby slave castle.

Day 6: Depart Axim early and head east to Cape Coast, stopping at Nzulezo floating village on the way. Once in Cape Coast grab a bus or tro-tro up to the frenetic city of Kumasi, about a five-hour drive away. Stay at the Four Villages Inn.

Days 7-8. From your base in Kumasi, take a tro-tro out each morning and visit the nearby Ashanti towns. Buy some Kente cloth and don’t forget your schnapps (this will make sense to you later).

Day 9. Fly back to Accra — no bus or tro-tro; you’ve had your fill of that — and spend your final night in room 420. Have a pizza and a crazy lady mojito.

 

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE AUTHOR’S PHOTO GALLERY FROM GHANA

 

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AN OLD-TIMEY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SESSION.

Eons ago, in 2002, a column called Ask the Pilot, hosted by yours truly, started running in the online magazine Salon, in which I fielded reader-submitted questions about air travel. It’s a good idea, I think, to touch back now and then on the format that got this venerable enterprise started. It’s Ask the Pilot classic, if you will.