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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just enjoy it for what it is.

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Emirates first class suite.   Author’s photo.

January 9, 2018

FOR TWO DECADES NOW, seat-back video has been the standard for inflight entertainment. Passengers the world over have grown accustomed to watching movies and shows on the screen in front of them. As well they should; it’s a fantastic amenity. I’ll go so far as to say that it’s the single greatest advent in onboard service in the past fifty years. Onboard comfort is all about the art of distraction, and nothing is a better distraction than being able to binge-watch your favorite TV series or catch a few films.

We’ve come a long way. Flyers of a certain age will remember “the inflight movie,” projected onto a scratched-up bulkhead screen. For the sound, you’d plug a bulky, stethoscope-style headset into the armrest. The picture was always blurry and the audio sounded like it was being transmitted from a submarine. Which usually was fine, because they rarely showed anything you wanted to watch in the first place. Today, passengers can choose between dozens or even hundreds of on-demand options. You can start, stop, pause, rewind…. In first or business class, with oversized screens and noise-reduction headsets, you essentially have your own personal theater. Indeed, one of my favorite guilty pleasures in life is sitting in an airline seat with a meal and a glass of wine, watching something fun on my screen.

Yet the days of the seat-back screen might be numbered. One of the big airline stories making the rounds of late describes how carriers are planning to do away with them. The future of inflight entertainment, we are told, is turning instead to wi-fi streaming, whereby passengers can stream shows and movies directly onto their own laptops, tablets or mobile phones.

And, we keep hearing, this isn’t just something the airlines want. Supposedly it’s what their customers want as well. People find the seat-back screens old-fashioned, or uncool — or something. They want streaming video instead.

Korean Air seat-back video.   Author’s photo.

I’m not buying it. Carriers might wish this were the case, but count me among those who don’t believe it. I suspect the media is simply repeating unchecked what airlines are telling them.

I don’t believe it because it doesn’t make sense: With a seat-back screen, you plug in your earphones and go. There are no power issues, no extra cords or wires, and the space in front of you is kept clear for eating, drinking, or whatever. Watching with your own device is cumbersome. For starters there are the sign-on and streaming settings to configure. Then, once you’re watching, you’ve got battery drain to deal with, and/or you’ll need to hook a power cord into an AC outlet, provided your seat has one. Tablet and smartphone screens are often smaller than the seat-back kind, and, if you’re in economy class, you’ll be using up pretty much all of the available tray-table space, making it impossible to enjoy a meal while you’re watching.

Not to mention the recline hazard: Any time you’ve got your laptop propped on your tray, you run the risk of it being crushed when the person in front of you comes hauling back without warning, jamming the screen between the tray and the seat-back (see photo below).

And some carriers won’t be offering a streaming service at all, leaving it up to the passenger to pre-download whatever he or she wants to watch. Fail to do this and, well, I hope there’s something good in the inflight magazine. Imagine a nine, ten, or twelve-hour long-haul and having absolutely nothing to watch. And what about those passengers who don’t carry a laptop or tablet?

Sure, in-seat systems are heavy and expensive — upwards of $10,000 per seat. But all airplane components are expensive, and the typical screen, over the course of its lifespan, will have entertained thousands of passengers. They’re reliable, convenient, and just so downright useful.

Hazardous viewing on China Airlines.   Author’s photo.

Now, I have to confess, I sometimes switch off my screen and watch something pre-downloaded on my Macbook instead. I don’t like doing this, for the reasons I just listed, but once in a while there just isn’t anything in the carrier’s library that I want to see. Thus the big caveat in my argument is that an airline needs a decent IFE system to begin with — one that’s easy to navigate, has a wide-enough variety to pick from, and has the hardware (i.e. a big enough screen) to go with it. To that last point, the tiny four or five-inch screens that some airlines have stuck with simply don’t do the trick.

There’s a lot of variation here. My sampling is by no means comprehensive, but I’ve flown a good number of carriers and I have my favorites:

For sheer volume, from blockbusters to Bollywood to documentaries to pop music, nothing comes close to Emirates’ “ICE” system (the letters stand for information, communications, and entertainment). Rest assured you’ll find something to watch or listen to, and the screens in all cabins are huge. The trouble with the Emirates system, however, is that it’s maybe too big for its own good. The ICE guide — a booklet in your seat pocket — is thicker than a novel and confusingly organized; sifting through it all — there are thousands of channels, including many Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and Urdu movies that seem a bit superfluous — can be taxing.

Other airlines have lots to pick from but a clunky user interface. Qatar Airways’ IFE, for example, for an airline of such renown, is appallingly tedious to navigate. Still others have decent usability but limited choices.

My vote for the best all-around system? Delta Air Lines. Theirs is a Panasonic-based platform that is both user-friendly and packed with movies and shows. The layout and navigation functions are the cleanest and most intuitive I’ve seen, and there’s a more than ample, eclectic selection of films and shows. (The one catch is that when clicking into either the TV or movie sections, the default screen shows only the newest additions. Look for the drop-down menu that allows you to access the entire “A-to-Z” archive.) Over the past few years I’ve flown with Emirates, Qatar, Singapore, Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, Thai, and a dozen or so others. Delta’s system beats all of them.

I should note that Delta also has an onboard streaming option called “Delta Studio,” offering much of the same content, at no cost. If that’s your thing, have at it. I’ll keep watching it seat-back style.

Whichever airline we’re talking about, the idea of fumbling around with a computer or an iPad, with wires all over the place and all my personal space taken up, is not a welcome change.

And why should the onus be on the passenger to worry about battery charging, lugging around wireless headphones, and so on, when for two decades the airlines have been supplying the hardware? And what of the millions of people who don’t have tablets or laptops, and/or who resent having to carry them onto a plane in order to enjoy something that heretofore was already there and hard-wired in? I’m still not getting this. Why would a passenger choose to voluntarily make the inflight entertainment experience more cumbersome and more of a pain in the ass?

Moving map on Delta’s outstanding IFE.   Author’s photo.

UPDATE: November 1, 2018

Last month, on a Philippine Airlines Airbus A330, I had my first ride in a long-haul cabin with no seat-back entertainment screens. In business class the cabin crew passed out iPads through which you could stream a selection of films and shows. For those in economy it was strictly BYOM (bring your own movies).

The experience was just as I feared it would be: cumbersome and uncomfortable, with a tangle of wires and insufficient space. I’m trying to watch season four of “Better Call Saul” on my MacBook Air. I’ve got a power cord over here, ear pod wires over there, and my screen is in constant danger of being crushed every time the dude in front of me reclines his chair. Worst of all, it’s impossible to enjoy a meal and a show at the same time. There’s simply no room for both a meal tray and a laptop (or even a drink and a laptop). You can eat, or you can watch. But not both.

It wasn’t much different in the business cabin. There were charging issues with the iPads, and even with bigger tables there wasn’t enough room for both tablet and food.

Here’s hoping this is not the future of onboard entertainment.

February 1, 2025

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

Not a good way to begin the year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No heroics this time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Unsplash

December 30, 2024

NOT A GOOD ending to the year. Two serious accidents in less than a week.

First came the shooting down of Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 on Christmas day, killing 38 people. Five days later, Jeju Air flight 2216 crashed in a fireball at Muan International Airport in Korea, killing all but two of the 181 passengers and crew on board.

The Azerbaijan incident appears pretty straightforward. The Brazilian-built Embraer E190 crashed after being hit by an anti-aircraft missile — the latest in a surprisingly long list of commercial jets downed by military fire. It could have been worse: twenty-nine people managed to survive, owing to the fact that, unlike the tragedy of MH17, for example, the plane did not break up in midair, instead hitting the ground in a semi-controlled state.

The Jeju Air disaster is, for now, more mysterious.

Some witnesses describe a flock of birds being ingested by the 737’s right engine, with flames coming from the engine thereafter. This is unconfirmed, and in any case does not explain what happened next: the plane touching down with its landing gear retracted, skidding off the runway into a berm and exploding in a fireball.

A gear-up landing, by itself, should be perfectly survivable. Never is a landing gear problem — any landing gear problem — a dire emergency. Just as a bird strike doesn’t explain the gear being up, the gear being up doesn’t explain the crash.

Which brings us to the flaps. Watching the accident footage, it appears to me (and others corroborate this) that the 737 landed without its wing flaps or leading edge slats extended. This is important because he 737 has unusually high approach and landing speeds to begin with. (In normal operations, flaps and slats are deployed incrementally during approach, allowing the plane to maintain lift while slowing to a safe landing speed.) These speeds would be even higher — much higher — if attempting to land without flaps or slats.

Under those circumstances you’d want the longest runway possible. The runway at Muan is 9200 feet long, but was shortened by a thousand feet due to construction. That left the pilots with 8200 feet. That’s not short, but it’s not long, either. How much runway would a 737-800 require if touching down with no flaps or slats, and no landing gear? I don’t know.

Which takes us to the issue of why the crew didn’t spend more time troubleshooting and better preparing for an emergency landing — preparations that might have included diverting to an airport with a longer runway. It appears the landing was quite rushed.

Landing inadvertently without gear and flaps is all but impossible. It was obviously done intentionally, and hurriedly. What we don’t know is why.

About two years ago, a flight I was piloting had a somewhat serious flap malfunction going into Bogota, Colombia. We spent a good half-hour in a holding pattern, going through checklists, coordinating with our company and with ATC, reviewing runway distance data, and so on. We landed without incident. It appears the Jeju pilots did nothing of the sort, short of issuing a brief distress call. They broke off one approach, circled around, and about five minutes later made the second, fatal landing.

It’s hard to imagine a professional airline crew needlessly hurrying and choosing a too-short runway. Something, I would think, was driving their urgency. A malfunction involving both the landing gear and flaps hints at a serious hydraulics problem. It also — especially combined with the rush factor — hints at the possibility that both of the plane’s engines had failed or were shut down. Did a bird damage one engine, and the crew then accidentally shut down the other one, leaving them with no power at all? Wrong-engine shutdowns have happened before (Google “British Midland crash”).

Others have speculated that complications from the bird strike may have caused the cabin to begin filling with smoke. Did the pilots then panic? Ultimately, we could be looking at a human factors failure as much as any mechanical one. In years past, Korean aviation was heavily scrutinized for its cockpit authority culture and a lack of what today is known as “crew resource management.” It’s worth noting that both pilots were, at least by U.S. standards, fairly inexperienced. The captain had about 6,000 flight hours, and the first officer fewer than a third as many. As a point of comparison, I have about 20,000 hours and currently fly as a first officer.

We’d also like to know the reason for that barrier wall and concrete antenna support at the end of the runway, rather than the type of clearway found at most airports.

One thing for sure is that putting the plane down in the ocean, as was suggested by a supposed aviation expert in a Wall Street Journal online article yesterday, would not have been wise. Any landing, including one without flaps or landing gear, would be far more dangerous on water than on pavement, provided the right precautions are taken. I emailed the reporters at the Journal, recommending they remove those lines, but got no reply.

Jeju Air is a Korean low-cost carrier named after the popular holiday island off the country’s south coast. The Seoul-Jeju route is one of the busiest air routes in the world.

The Azerbaijan Airlines flight, meanwhile, is at least the third commercial jet to have been shot down by Russian or Russia-backed military forces. In 2014, 298 people died when Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was hit by a Buk missile over Ukraine. And in 1983, 267 people died when Korean Air Lines flight 007 was downed near Sakhalin Island by a Soviet fighter after drifting off course. MH17 and KAL 007 stand as the 7th and 11th deadliest crashes of all time.

Welcome to the 2024 installment of “An Ask the Pilot Christmas.”

I traditionally start off with gift suggestions, but this year I really don’t have any, save a shameless plug for my book. I mean, it does make a kickass stocking stuffer.

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

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

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

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

Festi-fying my hotel room.   Accra, Ghana, 2013.

Eventually the process reaches a point when there are no more rostered trips to give out. Those pilots left over — the bottom ten or fifteen percent — are assigned to what we call “reserve.” A reserve pilot has designated days off, and receives a flat minimum salary for the month, but his or her workdays are a blank slate. The reserve pilot is on call, and needs to be within a stipulated number of hours from the airport — anywhere from two to twelve, usually, and it can change day to day. When somebody gets sick, or is trapped in Chicago because of a snowstorm, the reserve pilot goes to work. The phone might ring at 2 a.m., and you’re on way to Sweden or Brazil — or to Omaha or Sacramento.

Looking back, holiday flying has provided me a number of those sentimental vignettes guaranteed to make a person maudlin once they’re retired and looking back…

One of my favorite memories dates back to Thanksgiving, 1993. I was captain of a Dash-8 turboprop flying from Boston to New Brunswick, Canada, and my first officer was the always cheerful and gregarious Kathy Martin. (Kathy, who also appears in my “Right Seat” essay, was one of three pilots I’ve known who’d been flight attendants at an earlier point in their careers.) There were no meal services on our Dash-8s, but Kathy brought a cooler from home, packed with food: huge turkey sandwiches, a whole blueberry pie and tubs of mashed potatoes. We assembled the plates and containers across the folded-down jumpseat. The pie we passed to the flight attendant, and she handed out slices to passengers.

Quite a contrast to Thanksgiving Day in 1999, when I was working a cargo flight to Brussels. It was custom on Thanksgiving to stock the galley with a special meal, and the three of us were hungry and looking forward to it. Trouble was, the caterers forgot to bring the food. By the time we noticed, we were only minutes from departure and they had split for the day. I thought I was going to cry when I opened the door to our little fridge and saw only a can of Diet Sprite and a matchbook-size packet of Tillamook cheese. The best we could do was get one of the guys upstairs to drive out to McDonald’s. He came back with three big bags of burgers and fries, tossing them up to us just as they were pulling the stairs away. Who eats fast food on Thanksgiving? Pilots in a pinch.

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

Notre Dame, 2017.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kwame just smiles. “So lovely, yes.”

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Photos by the author.

December 21, 2024

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21st, is the winter solstice and either the shortest or longest day of the year, depending on your hemisphere. It also marks the 36th anniversary of one of history’s most notorious terrorist bombings, the 1988 downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Flight 103, a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of Seas, was bound from London to New York when it blew up in the evening sky about a half-hour after takeoff. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, along with eleven people in the town of Lockerbie, where an entire neighborhood was virtually demolished. Debris was scattered over 800 square miles. Until 2001, this was the deadliest-ever terror attack against American civilians. A photograph of the decapitated cockpit and first class section of the 747, lying crushed on its side in a field, became an icon of the disaster, and is perhaps the saddest air crash photo of all time.

The investigation into the bombing — the U.S. prosecutorial team was led by a hard-nosed assistant attorney general named Robert Mueller (yes, that Robert Mueller) was one of the most fascinating and intensive investigations in law enforcement history. Much of the footwork took place on the Mediterranean island of Malta, where the explosive device, hidden inside a Toshiba radio and packed into a suitcase, was assembled and sent on its way. The deadly suitcase traveled first from Malta to Frankfurt, and from there onward to London-Heathrow, where it was loaded into flight 103’s baggage hold.

Among the security enhancements put in place after the bombing is the now familiar requirement that passengers and their checked luggage travel together on the same flight. (“Bag pulls,” as we call them, are a regular occurrence on overseas flights when passengers — but not their bags — miss their connections, often resulting in delays.)

Two Libyans, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, were eventually tried in the Netherlands for the bombing. Both had ties to Libyan intelligence and were believed to have carried out the attack under orders of Libyan leader Mohammar Khaddafy. Fhimah was acquitted (a verdict that generated plenty of controversy), but in 2001, eleven years after the incident, al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life.

Al-Megrahi and Fhimah also had been employees of Libyan Arab Airlines. Al-Megrahi was in charge of security, and Fhimah was the carrier’s station manager at the Malta airport. During my vacation to the island a few years ago, it was eerie when I found myself walking past the Libyan Airlines ticket office, which is still there, just inside the gate to the old city of Valletta.

In 2009, in a move that has startled the world, Scottish authorities struck a deal with the Libyan government, and al-Megrahi, terminally ill at the time, was allowed to return home, to be with his family in his final days. He was welcomed back as a hero by many.

Then, only two years ago, a third alleged Libyan conspirator, Abu Agila Masud, was apprehended by U.S. authorities and awaits trial on charges that he built the explosive device that destroyed flight 103. The investigation remains open, and it’s possible, if unlikely, that other individuals could someday be held accountable.

There’s lots to read online about flight 103, including many ghastly day-after pictures from Lockerbie. But instead of focusing on the gorier aspects, check out the amazing story of Ken Dornstein, whose brother perished at Lockerbie, and his dogged pursuit of what happened. (Dornstein, like me, is a resident of Somerville, Massachusetts.)

The government of Mohammar Khaddafy was also held responsible for the 1989 destruction of UTA flight 772, a DC-10 bound from Congo to Paris. Few Americans remember this incident, but it has never been forgotten in France (UTA, a globe-spanning carrier based in Paris, was later absorbed by Air France).

A hundred and seventy people were killed when an explosive device went off in the DC-10’s forward luggage hold. The wreckage fell into the Tenere region of the Sahara, in northern Niger, one of the planet’s most remote areas. (Years later, a remarkable memorial, incorporating a section of the plane’s wing, was constructed in the desert where the wreckage landed.)

In exchange for the lifting of sanctions, Khaddafy eventually agreed to blood money settlements for Libya’s hand in both attacks. The UTA agreement doled out a million dollars to each of the families of the 170 victims. More than $2.7 billion was allotted to the Lockerbie next of kin.

Upper photo courtesy of Pan Am Museum.
Second photo by the author.

December 16, 2024

DRONES HAVE BEEN all over the news of late. While I can’t speak to what enemies or other state actors might be behind the ongoing rash of sightings, it gives us a good opportunity to revisit the dangers drones can pose to commercial aircraft.

The issue has moved from an “emerging threat,” as I described it not long ago, to an established one. The number of close encounters between airplanes and drones continues to grow. Here in the United States, the FAA says it receives over a hundred new reports every month — and it’s perhaps just a matter of time before we see a collision. (Just this past weekend, two men were arrested after flying a drone through prohibited airspace near Logan Airport here in Boston.)

The FAA, with its unquenchable enthusiasm for mind-paralyzing acronyms and abbreviations, now refers to all remotely piloted flying machines as UAS or “unmanned aerial systems.” Whatever you call them, they’re potentially lethal.

The amount of damage a collision might cause depends on two things: the speed of the plane and the size — which is to say the weight — of the drone. The heavier the drone, the greater the potential damage. A jetliner traveling at 250 miles per hour (in the U.S., that’s the maximum speed when below 10,000 feet), hitting a 25-pound UAS creates about 40,000 pounds of impact force.

Most hobby drones weigh less than ten pounds and don’t fly very high, but bigger, heavier machines are out there, and we’ll be seeing more of them: paramilitary border patrol drones; police department surveillance drones; Bezos and his fleet dropping iPhones and toasters from the sky.

It’s these larger drones that are of greatest concern. If an operator should lose control of one of these things, or it otherwise wanders into airspace it shouldn’t be in, the results could be catastrophic — particularly if the collision were to damage the plane’s control surfaces or cockpit.

Even a collision with a lightweight drone could result in serious, and expensive, damage. A small drone impacting an engine would be unlikely to cause a crash, but it could easily cause the failure of that engine and millions of dollars of repair bills. Windscreens and other components are vulnerable as well. Small drones are invisible to air traffic control and onboard radar.

Rules have been on the books from the start, though in typical FAA fashion they’re a confusing spaghetti-knot of dos and don’ts. And in 2015, regulators enacted a mandatory registration process for all UASs weighing more than half a pound.

Have all hobbyists been complying with this program? Of course not, but I suppose its purpose is less about tracking users than it is about creating awareness. Ultimately, it’s up to users policing themselves.

The problem all along has been mostly one of ignorance: most drone flyers aren’t trying to be reckless or cause mayhem; they simply don’t realize how hazardous a collision between and plane and a drone could be. This mindset needs changing. More than coming up with technical fixes or enforcing complex airspace rules, we need to encourage awareness and common sense.

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Upper and lower photos courtesy of Unsplash.
Center photo by the author.

November 18, 2024

ON NOVEMBER 12, 2001, two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, American Airlines flight 587 went down after takeoff from Kennedy Airport in New York. The Airbus A300-600 slammed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, killing all 260 people on board, plus five others on the ground. This was, and remains, the second-deadliest airline accident ever to happen on U.S. soil, after the American flight 191 disaster, in Chicago, in 1979.

It also was 23 years ago. More than two full decades have passed since the last major air disaster involving a U.S. carrier — the longest such streak by far.

I was impressed when we made it to five years; amazed when we made it to ten; shocked when we hit 15, then absolutely astonished when we got to twenty.

And still the streak goes on. We’ve grown accustomed to it. Even I have. This year, the November 12th anniversary slipped right past me. I’m publishing this post almost a week later, after an emailer reminded me of the date.

Tens of millions of Americans were born, raised, and reached adulthood in this 23-years span. Tens of millions more were children at the time of the 587 crash. My point being: a huge portion of citizens have no real memory of commercial aviation prior to the early 2000s. Fewer and fewer people realize just how common large-scale accidents once were, year after year after year, both globally and in the United States. More than twenty air disasters occurred in 1985 alone. In 1974, the U.S. major carriers recorded five crashes, including two within three days of each other.

Training, technology, and regulation have all had big roles in what changed. So has luck, and it hardly needs saying that our streak at some point will end. Maybe in five months, maybe in five years, maybe tomorrow.

I have no idea what might cause the next big crash — who or what will be to blame. What I do know is that the ensuing media frenzy will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen. This is both because and in spite of how rare crashes have become. The smallest aviation mishap these days generates a remarkable amount of buzz, to the point where aviation is perceived to be a lot more unsafe than it actually is. I can’t imagine what the reaction would be — and will be — with a death toll in the dozens or hundreds.

Fifty years ago, in 1973, a Delta DC-9 crashed into the seawall at Boston’s Logan International Airport, killing 89 people. The incident barely made the front page of the New York Times, running below the fold, under an article about transit bonds.

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November 3, 2024

THE OTHER DAY I flew an overtime trip. It was four days long. I spent the morning of day one at home, departing in the afternoon. I was on the road for the next two days, then home again by 6 p.m. on day four.

Over that span, I earned more money than I earned in an entire year at my first airline job.

You read correctly: I made in four days what I made in twelve months flying for Northwest Airlink in 1990. That’s not an exaggeration.

Neither is it a boast, or a humblebrag, or a means of suggesting pilots at the major carriers are overpaid. What it underscores, instead, is just how awful it was to work at the regional airlines in the 1990s. Starting salaries were typically under $15,000 a year, and many regionals required pilots to pay for their own training.

The early ’90s were a long time ago, sure. But not that long ago. You can adjust for inflation all you want; the pay was ridiculous, with hostile working conditions to boot.

Luckily that’s not true anymore. The changes were a long time coming, but they came. The prospect of slogging it out for poverty-level wages at shitty companies drove thousands out of the business and scared away an entire generation of would-be aviators. A pilot shortage (surprise!) eventually left the regionals with no choice but to vastly improve pay and benefits.

And so, today, even entry level flyers can make six-figure incomes.

The justification for the lousy pay was always one of thin margins. The regionals made so little, we were told, they simply couldn’t afford to pay their workers beyond a bare minimum. Except now they somehow can, even as airfares have come down. Makes you think.

Salaries at the majors are much improved also, at least compared to the doldrums of the early 2000s. When I came back from furlough in 2007, after five years on the street, sixth-year pay on a Boeing 767 was just over $80 per flight hour (figure 75 or 80 pay-hours in a month). Nowadays you can earn that much flying copilot on a regional jet.

Those of you who remember my column on the website Salon, which ran from 2002 until 2012, will recall my frequent griping about how little pilots were paid. Things are different now.

These changes are fantastic for those starting out. I, on the other hand, was born about thirty years too early. It’s not that I make a bad living by any stretch. It just took a long, long time.

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Paper airplane photo by the author.