Our airports are terrible, and our airlines are finding it harder to compete. We’ve done it to ourselves through flyer-unfriendly policies.

January 24, 2018

FORGIVE ME for repeating myself. In earlier posts, as well as in my book, I’ve emphasized the myriad ways in which U.S. airports pale in comparison to those overseas. I hate driving a topic into the ground, but my experiences over the past few days force me to revisit this:

The other day, traveling on vacation, I flew from Singapore to Amsterdam, with a connection in Hong Kong. The connection process in HKG went like this: I stepped off the first plane into a quiet, spacious, immaculately clean concourse. After a quick and polite security screening that took all of sixty seconds, I proceeded to my departure gate a few minutes away.

That’s it.

Compare this, if you dare, to the process of making an international connection in the United States of America. Imagine you’re a foreign traveler arriving in the U.S. from Europe or Asia, with an onward connection either domestically or to a third country:

You step off the plane and make your way to the immigration hall, which as always is packed to capacity. After standing in line for upwards of an hour, you’re photographed and fingerprinted before finally being released into baggage claim and the customs hall. Or maybe it takes even longer: after docking at the gate, airline station personnel inform you that due to extremely long lines at immigration, all passengers are asked to remain aboard for the time being.

Not to mention, if you’re coming from a country that’s not on the U.S. visa waiver list, you’ll need to have obtained a visa in advance just to begin this process, even you’re only passing through.

Your next task is to stand at the baggage carousel for twenty minutes and wait for your suitcase. American airports do not recognize the “in transit” concept, meaning that all passengers arriving from overseas, even those in-transit to a third country, are forced to claim and re-check their luggage. Once you’ve got your bag, another line awaits at the customs checkpoint, followed by yet another line at the luggage re-check counter.

Finally you’re released into the terminal. Of course, this building is used for “international arrivals only” — another of those peculiarly American airport concepts — and your connecting flight is leaving from a totally different terminal on the other side of the airport. To get there, you walk outside and spend fifteen minutes in the rain waiting for a bus.

And we haven’t gotten to the worst part yet: once you’ve reached the correct terminal, it’s time for security screening. The line at TSA is a good forty minutes long, the guards barking at people amidst the clatter of bins and luggage.

At long last you’re in the departure concourse, which is undersized, overcrowded, and, in the distinct fashion of too many American airports, louder than a football stadium. Babies are crying, CNN news monitors are blaring, and waves of public address announcements — most of them pointless and half of them unintelligible — wash over one another.

How long did all of that take? A solid two hours on some days. Welcome to the American airport.

Even if you’re not making a connection, the arrival process alone often takes over an hour. Back at Hong Kong, a passenger can be off the plane, through immigration and onto the train to Kowloon in fifteen minutes. I remember my last trip to Bangkok, and how I, an arriving foreigner, made it from the airplane to the taxi stand in less than ten minutes. BKK is one of the biggest and busiest international airports in the world, yet the waiting times at immigration can often be measured in seconds, never mind minutes.

Two years ago in a CNN poll of 1,200 overseas business travelers who’ve visited the United States, twenty percent said they would not visit the country again due to onerous entry procedures at airports, including long processing lines. Forty-three percent said they would discourage others from visiting. Separately, in a copy of Air Line Pilot magazine, U.S. Chamber of Commerce counsel Carol Hallett stated that “the United States risks falling behind Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as the global aviation leader.”

I’d say that battle was lost a long time ago.

To be fair, the scenario above is a worst-case to best-case comparison. Most overseas airports require a secondary security check for third-country connections, and there can be a secondary immigration checkpoint as well. Terminal transfers aren’t unheard of, and even some European airports go out of their way to make the travel experience tedious and confusing (CDG we’re talking to you). However, if we’re going to compare the typical connection experience in the U.S. versus the typical connection experience in Europe or Asia, the latter wins almost every time.

The crossroads of global air commerce today are places like Dubai, Istanbul, Seoul and Singapore. These are the places — not New York or Chicago or Los Angeles — that are setting the standards. They’ve got the best airports, the fastest-growing airlines, and the most convenience for travelers.

Some of their success is owed to simple geography. Dubai, for instance, is perfectly placed between the planet’s biggest population centers. It’s the ideal transfer hub for the millions of people moving between Asia and Europe; Asia and Africa; North America and the Near East.  The government of the U.A.E. saw this opportunity years ago, and began to invest accordingly. Today, Dubai airport is one of the busiest, and its airline, Emirates, is now the largest in the world if you exclude the U.S. domestic market.

Not far from Dubai, Istanbul’s new airport is poised to become a similar mega-hub. Its hometown carrier, Turkish Airlines, flies to more countries than any other airline.

There’s not much we can do about geography. At the same time, there’s no excuse for the American aviation sector to have fallen so far. We’ve done it to ourselves, of course, through shortsightedness, underfunding, and flyer-unfriendly policies. The Federal government seems to treat air travel as a nuisance, something to be dissuaded, rather than a vital contributor of tens of billions of dollars to the annual economy. As a result our airports are substandard across a number of fronts, both procedurally and infrastructurally; our terminals are dirty and overcrowded; our air traffic control system is underfunded; Customs and Border Protection facilities are understaffed; passengers are groped and hassled to the point where, if that CNN poll is to be believed, millions of them will refuse to visit the country.

And although our physical location may not be ideal as a transfer point, there are still plenty of travelers moving between continents who can and should be connecting at U.S. airports aboard U.S. carriers — if only we weren’t driving them away.

Traveling between Australia and Europe, for example, or between Asia and South America, the U.S. makes — or should make — a logical transfer point. Hell, we don’t even try, beginning with the fact that our airports don’t allow for transit passengers.

Flying from Australia to Europe, to pick another example, a traveler has two options. He or she can fly westbound, via Asia (through Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Hong Kong) or the Middle East (Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, etc.), or eastbound via the U.S. West Coast (Los Angeles or San Francisco). Even though the flying times are about the same, almost everybody will opt for the westbound option. Changing planes at LAX on the other hand, passengers have to stand in at least three different lines, be photographed and fingerprinted, collect and re-check their bags, and endure the full TSA rigmarole before slogging through a noisy terminal to the departure gate.

It’s a similar story traveling between Asia and South America. Europe to Latin America, ditto. Few passengers on these routes will choose to connect in the United States because we’ve made it so damn inconvenient. We can only guess at how many millions of passengers our carriers lose out on each year.

Insult to injury, airline tickets in America are taxed to the hilt. Overall, flying is a lot more affordable than it has been in decades past, but if it feels expensive, one of the reasons is the multitude of government-imposed taxes and fees. There’s an excise tax, the 9/11 Security Fee, the Federal Segment Fee, the Passenger Facility Charges, International Arrival and Departure Taxes, Immigration and Customs user fees, an Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service charge, and so on — a whopping 17 total fees! Airline tickets are taxed at a higher federal rate than alcohol and tobacco.

Finally, you should know that the government-run Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank of the United States provides billions of dollars in below-market financing each year to carriers overseas, helping deliver hundreds of American-built aircraft at rates not available to our own airlines. This is one of the reasons Persian Gulf carriers such as Emirates and Qatar Airways have been able to expand so rapidly. U.S. taxpayers are in fact subsidizing the growth of carriers that compete directly with our own. Ex-Im’s assistance is helpful to Boeing, but it gives foreign carriers a competitive advantage.

 

Related story: WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH AIRPORTS?

IF YOU’RE GONNA ask me about the debacle at Southwest Airlines, there isn’t much I can tell you that you don’t already know. The normal media has covered the crisis ad nauseam, and has done a fairly good job of it.

In short, it began as an employee shortage during a storm in Denver. Hundreds of apron workers walked off the job after the airline reacted threateningly to a high number of sick calls. This gridlocked the operation in Denver, in turn cascading into a massive number of cancellations systemwide. An outdated IT infrastructure then handicapped attempts to get things restarted. Thousands of crewmmembaers needed to be re-routed, departures re-sequenced, and so on. Southwest’s logistics software couldn’t handle it.

And so on.

The “airline meltdown” has become a recurrent event — a revolving series of on-again off-again fiascos. Every few months, it seems, things at one of the big carriers go haywire for a few days. It happened to American, it happened to Sprit. In fact, isn’t the first time it happened to Southwest. In October of 2021 the airline canceled 2,000 flights over a four-day span after bad weather swept through Florida.

What happened over Christmas was the worst of the disruptions so far (the tab for Southwest is estimated at nearly a billion dollars), but it’s unlikely to be the last. The industry’s new normal, at least for now, is to operate right on the edge of crisis, with little margin for error. Flights are full and the skies are jam-packed with planes, while carriers — together with air traffic control, TSA, and pretty much every other moving part in the air travel machine — remain understaffed and inflexible, still playing post-pandemic catch-up.

Which brings us to something that’s been nagging me for quite some time:

Labor, or lack thereof, appears to be the biggest underlying culprit. People resigned or were let go en masse during the pandemic, and haven’t returned. And so the solution should be no more complicated than re-hiring enough workers to replace them. Indeed, companies are trying, only to be met with a lack of interest and position after position going unfilled. This is the case not only within the myriad businesses supporting air travel, but economy-wide, from convenience stores to restaurants to Uber drivers.

What nobody will explain is where all these workers disappeared to, and why they’re staying there. Are they sitting home playing video games and smoking weed? Did they find better jobs? Service workers and other comparatively unskilled employees have always been an integral part of the workforce, if not the very bedrock of it. Where has this sector been displaced to?

It’s possible I’m misreading things, and clearly this is a bigger and more complex situation than I’m equipped to explore on my own. If someone with expertise in the matter cares to explain, be my guest…

In the meantime, if you’ll permit me a diversion…

As Southwest takes a minute to catch its breath, it should consider a refresh of its ghastly paint job. I recommend something that doesn’t make every Southwest jet look like an amusement park ride.

The livery should better incorporate the carrier’s heart emblem. The heart, along with Southwest’s “LUV” stock ticker, harken to its origins at Love Field, in Dallas. It’s a fairly iconic logo, but one the airline inexplicably works to hide. It appears only as a small decal on the underside of the fuselage. This is a friendly and effective motif that absolutely belongs on the tail, in place of those awful red and yellow stripes.

 

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December 23, 2022

This album — it’s an “EP” actually, from an era when such things existed — was released forty years ago this month.

This was the first Husker Dü record I owned. I first heard it on a cassette. Remember those? The tape was given to me by a high school friend from Marblehead named Mike Gitter. He, as much as anyone, was responsible for stoking my interest in underground music, and, in handing me that tape one day in a hallway at St. John’s Prep, was my introduction to Husker Dü.

As much as I’m sentimentally fond of this album, I would never recommend it to a novice. It’s primarily a thrash-punk record, and hardly a good representation of why I became so enamored of the band over time. That said, it has a few “Hey wait a minute” moments.

Grant Hart’s non-ironic cover of the 1960s hit “Sunshine Superman” marks a turning point in American punk rock, while Bob Mould’s “Gravity,” at the end of side two, is an uncelebrated masterpiece. Greg Norton’s bass work on this song is quietly sublime, and Mould’s guitar work over the last minute or so amazes me to this day — a cascading, climatic series of leads that I once called “the greatest 55 seconds of the 1980s.”

 

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December 22, 2022

LOTS OF MEMORABLE THINGS happened in Decembers past. The final flight of Pan Am, for instance, took place in December of 1991. Three years before that, just a few days before Christmas, was the Lockerbie bombing.

But let’s talk instead about the Clash — yes, the British punk rock band led by guitarists and co-vocalists Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. A number of anniversaries mark December as “Clash month.”

We’ll start with December 14th, which was the 43rd anniversary of the release of London Calling, the band’s most famous album and arguably — argues me — one of the greatest rock records of all time.

This was a double LP (back when there were such things) clocking in with 19 songs, almost all of them outstanding. If there’s a singular highlight, it’s probably “Death or Glory,” which to me is the finest song in the entire Clash canon. But on the whole its best songs are the more freewheeling and divergent: “Jimmy Jazz,” “Rudie Can’t Fail,” “Wrong Em Boyo,” and the ska-powered “Revolution Rock…”

Careful how you move, Mac, you dig me in me back,
And I’m so pilled up that I rattle.
I have got the sharpest knife, so I cut the biggest slice
But I have no time to do battle.
Hey!

What’s all that about? Who knows, who cares. It’s just fun, dammit.

And, at the other extreme, a few songs prior, here’s Mick Jones getting all historical on “The Card Cheat”…

From the Hundred Years War to the Crimea,
With a lance and a musket and a Roman spear,
To all of the men who have stood with no fear,
In the service of the King.

I mean, wow. What rock band would dream of writing a song like that today? Do they even have rock bands anymore?

Only two days earlier, December 12th, was the 42nd anniversary of the release of Sandinista!  Not to be outdone, this was a triple album (three pizzas, count ‘em, in the box) loaded with 36 songs.

Trying to describe Sandinista! is like trying to describe New York City — where a portion of it was recorded, along with London and Jamaica. Where do you start? It’s a staggering — and, for its time, quite brave — melange of punk, reggae, calypso, gospel, funk, dub. And lest we forget, the record’s opener, “The Magnificent Seven,” was punk rock’s first-ever foray into rap.

The title’s reference to the ’80s-era conflict in Central America will clue in the novice to the Clash’s idealistic underpinnings, and Joe Strummer spent his career singing and speaking on behalf of social justice, the politics of Nic-a-rag-you-ah, certainly, among them.

I’d had Sandinista! hanging around for years, but had never really given it a listen beyond the obvious, like “Charlie Don’t Surf” (taken from a line in the movie Apocalypse Now) or the sweet chimes of “Washington Bullets.” All that wax, all those songs; it seemed so daunting. How does one even approach a triple album? But for no special reason I threw it onto the turntable in the winter of 1991 — already it was more than a decade old — and started paying attention.

The first things to hook you might be the steel drums of “Let’s Go Crazy,” or the oddly beautiful “Silicone on Sapphire,” which is the skeleton of “Washington Bullets” set to a host of electronic effects, xylophone, and mysteriously alternating, left channel/right channel voices. Or take a loud listen to “The Sound of the Sinners,” with Strummer as a valiumed preacher singing in desperate euphoria to his congregation. My favorite cut, though, is probably “Living in Fame,” sung the by reggae star Mikey Dread.

Three discs, 36 songs, and a lot of stylistic zig-zagging. But it never feels pretentious or over-extended. On the contrary, Sandinista! is an elegant work of art.

Where were we? Oh yes, Clash bassist Paul Simonon also celebrated his 67th birthday this month.

But most poignant of all, December 22nd marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Joe Strummer. Joe died from a heart attack in 2002. He was only fifty.

Several of my music heroes have left us over the last several years: Grant Hart, Pat Fish, Lou Reed. The deaths of Hart and Fish hit me on a particularly sentimental, even personal level. But from a less subjective, purely artistic point of view, I suppose the loss of Joe Strummer has been the most tragic of all.

While it’s from neither of the aforementioned albums, here’s something to clear your head. This was, you might notice, before Strummer got his teeth fixed. And behold the mullet on Mick Jones.

 

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November 29, 2022

IS IT JUST ME, or is the entire air travel experience broken right now?

Security lines are endless, terminals are noisier and more crowded than ever, airport lounges have become overcrowded feeding troughs, onboard service isn’t half of what it was pre-pandemic, delays and cancellations are rampant. And so on; it’s across the board.

Initially, as the COVID-19 fiasco wound down, most of the trouble could be blamed on a lack of staffing. Passengers came back faster than expected, and the industry wasn’t ready. The resulting chaos was unpleasant, but was expected to be temporary. Yet here we are on the cusp of 2023, and although things aren’t as dysfunctional as they were six or eight months ago, they still feel badly off-kilter.

What troubles me most is that we seem to be resigning ourselves to it. I fear that we’re plateauing at a sort of “new normal.” Much as I hate that expression, it’s worryingly apropos in this case. The traveling public seems to be shrugging its shoulders and adapting.

It reminds me of what happened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Initially there were howls of outrage over the establishment of the TSA and the excesses of its policies: the agonizing lines, the illogical rules and hostile enforcement. It simply wasn’t sustainable, people declared. Things would mellow out in time, they said. They would have to.

Except that’s not what happened, really. Instead, we got accustomed to it all. Two decades later, security theater, with all of its extravagant waste, and despite the millions of hours it steals from us each year, is simply taken for granted. We endure it.

Is the same sort of thing happening again? Most people have always hated flying. Now they’ll just hate it a little more?

Where and how things are wrong is easy to see. But let me cherry-pick one example: onboard service. Food, wine, amenities. If you ask me, service hit its nadir somewhere around 2004, in the thick of the post-9/11 industry downturn. The airlines were going bankrupt, one after the other, and inflight offerings were scarce. But then it got better. It was a long, slow climb, but by 2019, in the premium cabins of the US legacy carriers, the levels of luxury and pampering at long last rivaled the better Asian and European carriers.

In fact, air travel by that point had entered a whole new golden age. Service, safety and convenience had reached unprecedented levels, and tickets were as affordable as they’d ever been — an achievement I celebrated in this New York Times article in 2017.

Then came COVID-19, and now the whole bar seems to have been re-set. Today, even on long-haul flights, a first class meal is often slung at you hurriedly on a tray, and they’re giving out champagne in plastic cups. At fares that aren’t any cheaper.

Will it get better this time, as the industry regains its footing? I’m not so sure. I’m sensing this is more of a paradigm shift — a change of expectations — than a simple correlation between profitability and service levels. Customers are more or less happy with things they are, I’m told. At least it’s not 2020, the thinking goes, when they got nothing at all.

Thus the benchmark, it seems, is the pandemic-panic realm of two years ago, rather than the golden age of 2019. By this logic, even the crappiest experience is a win. The bar has been re-set because expectations have been re-set.

We can look at this situation more broadly, too. It’s a decline, I think, that extends beyond flying.

This is a nitpicky example, but why do so many hotels, even five-star places, still not stock their rooms with cups or drinking glasses? Apparently guests are supposed to stick their faces under the faucet when brushing their teeth? I was in a Hyatt recently. No glasses, anywhere. So I call the front desk. “Would you like us to bring you some glasses?”

Hell, why not skip the pillows and sheets as well. If guests want them, they can always call.

I’d also like my Uber drivers to stop canceling at the last minute, and otherwise charging me double the normal fare. And don’t get me started with the hellishness of QR menus in restaurants.

And we should probably stop there. This is trending in a rather whiny direction.

These are, I realize, first-world complaints of a selfish, perhaps even gluttonous order. The world is spinning into ecological collapse, the specter of war looms large, and so on. I understand that. But everything has its context. And it’s possible that my gripes are symptoms, warning signs, of something more consequential gone rotten.

Welcome to post-pandemic America, 2022. The land where everything seems to be settling into a half-assed, slightly shittier, and more expensive version of what we had before.

Or, I’m just impatient. I’m known to be, and you’re free to judge my dooming and glooming as unfair.

Hopefully it is, and, at the risk of sounding manic, I’ll close with something more positive, and maybe more rational:

Flying remains, if nothing else, affordable and astonishingly safe. The business just went through the most traumatic two years of its existence, racking up tens of billions in debt. Recovery, which was never a sure thing in the first place, remains a long-term work in progress.

I, indeed all of us, should probably be thrilled with things as they are. It could’ve turned out a lot, lot worse.

And so, give it time.

 

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Airline cabin photo: Hanson Lu/Unsplash.
Hotel room photo by the author.

UPDATE: January 17, 2017

THEY MADE ME do it. Everybody from the journalist Peter Greenberg to my sister’s boyfriend implored me to finally go and watch “Sully,” the Clint Eastwood-directed movie starring Tom Hanks as U.S. Airways captain Chesley Sullenberger, guardian angel of flight 1549, the engineless Airbus that splashed into the Hudson River eight years ago. When the movie was first released, back in September, I refused to see it (see the original post, below). I’d watched too many big-screen butcher jobs — the chokingly awful “Flight,” for example, with Denzel Washington — and didn’t need the aggravation. But then the testimonials started coming in, boasting of the film’s surprising levels of accuracy and authenticity. This, I was told again and again, is the rare Hollywood movie that gets the pilot stuff right.

Why do I listen to these people?

The screening took place at my friend Todd’s home theater in Deerfield, Illinois. Todd, like me, is an airline pilot who flies 767s. Todd was a good viewing partner because, like me, he was skeptical from the start, but also because he’s less of a crank and was bound to keep me in check when my complaints got too whiny or pedantic. Except, in the end, neither of us much liked the movie. Cue 96 minutes of commiserative eye-rolling and sporadic laughter.

If there’s a saving grace, it’s that the cockpit scenes are brief. So far as that “pilot stuff” goes, there’s just not enough of it, really, to get wrong. The silliest scene, to me, is the reenactment of the takeoff sequence, where we see Sully and his first officer, Jeff Skiles (played by Aaron Eckhart, whose bushy ‘stache, I have to say, is groovily pilot-like), gazing out the window as their jet climbs away. The cockpit is eerily silent, as if the engines have somehow already quit, and the two men chat lazily about the beauty of the Gotham skyline in winter. Realism grade: F-minus. The first few minutes after takeoff are about the busiest portion of any flight. There’s a lot going on, from the flap retraction sequence to various turns and climb segments. And there’s a ton of radio chatter. It’s a very noisy, task-intensive several minutes, especially out of an airport like LaGuardia.

Then come the geese. And there go the engines. Skiles, who was at the controls, gives the jet over to Sully, who gets the heroics going. Skiles then consults the QRH and begins an oddly stilted reading of the emergency checklist (a little too emotionless and flat, though apparently true to the CVR, wordage-wise). And, a couple of minutes later, we get the splashdown into the icy river, digitally rendered in a manner that strikes me as probably more violent and forceful than it was in real life.

Later — indeed for most of the movie — the bad-guy investigators are on Sully’s ass about his decision to ditch in the water rather than attempt a return to LGA. As part of their complaint, they make the point, several times, that one of the plane’s engines hadn’t totally failed, but had remained at idle thrust. The implication here is that an idling engine would’ve helped get them back to the airport. This made no sense either to me or to Todd, as idle thrust is just that: idle. It produces little or no push, and wouldn’t have been useful. What were they saying here, that the pilots could have pushed up the throttle and found more power? It’s not clear. (In any case, it wasn’t true. As Sully contested, the engine had been wrecked, though investigators, and in turn viewers, don’t learn this until the very end.)

The whole return-to-La Guardia question has irked me from the start. Simulator experiments show that flight 1549 could have made it back to the airport. But this assumed ideal conditions and instantaneous decision-making, including a well-rehearsed crew that knew exactly what was about to happen. The real-world scenario was a lot messier, as these things always are. Sullenberger weighed the options. Sure, they might have made it back. But if he was wrong — even a small wind shift could throw off the glide — the result would be an Airbus A320 crashing headlong into one of the most populated areas of New York City. Landing in the water was hardly ideal, but it was the best and safest choice.

I was also introduced a magical new term that in all my years of flying I’d never heard before: “sub-idle.” The engine was at “sub-idle.” Presumably this is something even less useful than idle? So why are we hearing about it?

“What the heck is ‘sub-idle’?” I said to Todd.

“Is Tom Hanks’ hair really that gray,” answered Todd. “Or did they just color it that way?”

“Why is there so much trouble in this world?” I said, quoting my favorite line from “Blue Velvet.”

We were getting punchy. It was all a little much.

Of course, “Sully” isn’t a movie about flying. The cockpit sequences are almost incidental. It’s about Sullenberger the man, and his weathering of the investigation that followed. On this count, however, the movie fails harder. Eastwood gives us Sully as a kind of everyman American hero, in battle with obstructive bureaucrats trying to railroad him. But according to those who were there, that’s simply not how things played out.

“The portrayal of the NTSB investigators in the new ‘Sully’ movie as prosecutors is not only wildly inaccurate but grossly unfair,” said Mark Dombroff, an aviation lawyer who represented U.S. Airways during the investigation.

Folks at the NTSB, which is about the most highly respected government agency that exists, have been no less critical. I received an email from Robert Benzon, Investigator-In-Charge of the board’s inquiry into the flight 1549 accident. “This movie will hinder the success of future NTSB investigations,” wrote Benzon, “because of its incredibly inaccurate depiction of how such investigations are conducted. The NTSB needs the cooperation of all investigation participants: aircraft and engine manufactures, airline operators, the FAA, employee unions, and very importantly flight crewmembers. ‘Sully’ was a step backward.”

Ouch. Watching the movie, this resentment is easy to understand. The investigators are shown as caricatured villains, hostile to a point that simply isn’t believable. And the ridiculous, time-compressed version of the review board’s final hearing, in the film’s closing minutes, during which Sully is vindicated and everybody goes home happy, is nothing if not goofy — a contrived, Disneyfied portrayal that mocks the actual investigators’ hard work and dedication.

When Todd flicked off the screen, we turned and smirked at each other. We were, suffice it to say, underwhelmed.

ORIGINAL POST: September 7, 2016

I REALLY LIKED Tom Hanks in the Paul Greengrass movie, “Captain Phillips.”

There, that’s my review of the new film “Sully,” which opens this week, featuring Hanks as captain Chesley Sullenberger. He of “Miracle on the Hudson” fame, whose 2009 crash-landing into the icy river is widely hailed, for reasons not entirely clear, as the single most awesome, important, and unforgettable event in the history of heavier-than-air flight.

In other words, I’m not reviewing the movie. I can’t review it, because, in the interest of self-preservation, I’m afraid to see it.

It was all I could do to muster up the courage to take in the trailer. Which, in all honestly, had me wanting to see more. Once you get past the histrionics at the beginning — “No one warned us. No one said, you are going to lose both engines at a lower altitude than any jet in history.” — it’s a compelling little tease.

But thirty carefully culled seconds can be deceptive. I’ve been burned this way before. All I could do was shake my head. “Not bad,” I said to myself. “But do I have the stomach, or enough medication, to get through two full hours of this?“

Call me a coward, and maybe — hopefully? — I’ve got it all wrong. Remember, though, I have decades of precedent on my side. When Hollywood does airplanes, the results are always a mess, ranging from borderline realistic to off-the-wall preposterous. There have been almost no exceptions to this — save, perhaps, for the efforts of the aforementioned Paul Greengrass, whose “United 93” was a damn good movie that got most of the pilot stuff correct. Problem is, Greengrass isn’t directing “Sully,” Clint Eastwood is, and I have a bad feeling about this one.

A few years back, I had a similar reaction after the movie “Flight” came out. That’s the one where Denzel Washington pours himself drinks at the galley, then crash-lands his jet into a field after an inexplicable malfunction causes him to fly a series of inexplicable aerobatics. I had no intention of seeing it. Readers (and a magazine editor or two) kept badgering me, though, and in time I gave in. A mistake, that was. Then, a couple of years later, in one of the most unforgivably misguided moments of my life, I actually gave the film a second try. I watched it again, and it was even more infuriating the second time around.

And did they have to call it “Sully?” Couldn’t they have picked a better title? For that matter, couldn’t they have picked a better story? The very premise of the movie is based on a myth: the idea that only the most skillful and fearless ace was able to save flight 1549 from all but certain doom. “Miracle on the Hudson” and all that. What Would Sully Do? And for this allow me to cannibalize a segment from my book:

When the ill-fated jet took off from New York’s La Guardia airport, first officer Jeffrey Skiles had been at the controls. When the engines quit, at a little more than 2,000 feet above the ground after a collision with Canada geese, captain Sullenberger took over. There’s no reason a copilot can’t continue flying in an emergency, but in this case most of the primary instruments on Skiles’ side of the cockpit would have failed from loss of power. Sullenberger took the controls because, really, he had to.

Determining a place to land was urgent to say the least. A turn-back to La Guardia was deemed either too risky or downright impossible, as was continuing westward toward Teterboro airport in New Jersey. The choice, then, was either a crash landing in the middle of one of the most built-up cities in the world, or a ditching in the ice-cold Hudson River. The latter was hardly ideal, but it was clearly the better option and would have to do.

From there, Sullenberger would adjust the plane’s pitch to maintain an optimal glide speed. The trickiest part of the whole thing would be calculating the correct speed and altitude to begin the flare — when to pitch the nose up and break the descent. Flare too early and the plane could stall or drop hard into the water. Keeping the wings level would also be critical, lest the plane flip, roll inverted, or otherwise break up, with certain loss of life.

Well done.

Just the same, I’m uneasy at calling anyone a hero. Nothing they did was easy, and a successful outcome was by no means guaranteed. But they did what they had to do, what they were trained to do, and what, presumably, any other crew would have done in that same situation.

And seldom has the role of luck been adequately acknowledged. Flight 1549 was stricken in daylight, and in reasonably good weather that allowed the crew to visually choose a landing spot. Had the engines quit on a day with low visibility, or over a crowded part of the city beyond gliding distance to the river, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe. No amount of skill would matter. They needed to be good, but they needed to be lucky, too. They were both.

Sullenberger, to his credit, has been duly humble, acknowledging the points I make above. People pooh-pooh this as false modesty or self-effacing charm, when really he’s just being honest. He also has highlighted the unsung role played by his first officer. There were two pilots on board, and both needed to rise to the occasion. And let’s not forget the flight attendants, whose actions were no less commendable.

There’s little harm in celebrating the survival of 155 people, but terms like “hero” and “miracle” shouldn’t be thrown around lightly.

A miracle describes an outcome that cannot be rationally explained. Everything that happened on January 15th, 2009, can be rationally explained. Passengers owe their survival not to the supernatural, but to four very earthly factors. They were, in descending order (pardon the pun): luck, professionalism, skill, and technology.

And look at the movie poster for a minute. There’s almost a religious sheen to it: the airplane looking bird-like, angel-like, with its outstretched escape slides, backdropped by a romanticized gray Gotham. It’s just a little much. (The plane is also facing the wrong direction. If that’s lower Manhattan on the right — including a mysteriously completed One World Trade Center tower, which in real life wasn’t finished until long after 2009 — we should be looking at the tail, not the nose.)

A hero, meanwhile, describes a person who accepts a great personal sacrifice, up to and including injury or death, for the benefit of somebody else. I’d never suggest that Sullenberger and Skiles were merely “doing their jobs.” It was far beyond that. But I didn’t see heroics; I saw an outstanding execution of difficult tasks in the throes of a serious emergency.

And there’s a longstanding unfairness to the whole pilots-as-heroes thing that gets under my skin. Over the years, there have been countless aviators who, confronted by sudden and unusual danger, performed admirably, with just as much or skill and resolve as can ever be hoped for. But they weren’t as lucky. By virtue of this and nothing more, they and many of their passengers perished.

(Soundtrack for this post: “Nobody’s Heroes,” one of the brashest records of the 1980s, from the long forgotten Belfast rockers Stiff Little Fingers.)

As the trailer tells it, “Sully” goes beyond the flight 1549 accident itself. This is the proverbial “untold story” of everything that happened afterward, and how Sullenberger, the man, endured it. It explores some of the skepticism and second-guessing that dogged the investigation. Did Sullenberger and Skiles do the right thing by aiming for the Hudson? Is it true they could have, or should have, made a U-turn and glided back to La Guardia? Is it true that one of the plane’s engines was still functioning?

Sure, all of that is interesting stuff. To a point. Forgive me, but of all the harrowing things that have happened to planes, pilots, and their passengers over the years, this is the best the movie-makers could come up with? Why don’t we have a John Testrake movie? Why don’t we have a Bernard Dhellemme movie? Who, you ask? John Testrake was the captain of TWA flight 847. In 1985, he and his passengers were hijacked by Hezbollah militants, forced to fly back and forth between Algeria and Beirut, then held captive for two weeks. Captain Dhellemme, like John Testrake before him, was also the central character of one of the most riveting hijackings of all time.

And others too. Chances are you’ve never heard of them — maybe because their planes didn’t come splashing down alongside the world’s media capital.

I can’t help thinking about Al Haynes, the United Airlines captain who, ably assisted by three other pilots, deftly guided his crippled DC-10 to a crash landing in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989. A disintegrated engine fan had bled out all three of the plane’s hydraulics systems, resulting in a total loss of flight controls. Using differential engine power to perform turns, all the while battling uncontrollable pitch oscillations, that Haynes and his crew were able to pull off even a semi-survivable landing (112 people were killed; 184 survived) is about as close to a miracle as you can get.

How about Donald Cameron and Claude Ouimet, the pilots of Air Canada flight 797, who managed — barely — to get their burning DC-9 onto the runway in Cincinnati in 1983? It took so much effort to fly the plane that they passed out from exhaustion after touchdown.

Or consider the predicament facing American Eagle captain Barry Gottshall and first officer Wesley Greene three months earlier. Moments after takeoff from Bangor, Maine, their Embraer regional jet suffered a freak system failure resulting in full and irreversible deflection of the plane’s rudder. Struggling to maintain control, they returned to Bangor under deteriorating weather. Visibility had fallen to a mile, and as the 37-seater approached the threshold, Gottshall had to maintain full aileron deflection — that is, the control wheel turned to the stops and held there — to keep from crashing into the woods. Theirs was pure seat-of-the-pants improv. A fully deflected rudder? There are no checklists, and no procedures, for that one.

Me, I’ll take a daylight ditching in the Hudson over any of those three.

 

For the record, U.S. Airways 1549 was one of a handful of intentional “water landings” involving a commercial airliner in the modern era…

— In 1956, Pan Am flight 943, a Boeing Stratocruiser, ditched in the Pacific northeast of Hawaii, with only minor injuries.

— In 1963, an Aeroflot jet splash-landed in the Neva River outside Leningrad. Everybody on board survived.

— In 1970, an Overseas National Airways (ONA) DC-9 bound from New York to St. Croix ditched in the Caribbean after running out of fuel. Twenty-three people were killed and 40 were rescued.

— In 1996, an Ethiopian Airlines 767 went down off the Comoros Islands after running out of fuel during a hijacking. Video taken by tourists at a nearby beach shows plane slamming into the water and cartwheeling into pieces. At the moment of impact, the pilots and hijackers had been wrestling for control.

— In 2002, a Garuda Indonesia 737 ditched in a river near Yogyakarta, Indonesia, after both engines quit during a severe rainstorm. A flight attendant was killed.

— In 2006, a Tunisian ATR-72 turboprop crashed into the Mediterranean off the coast of Sicily. Twenty-three people survived.

— In 1977, a hijacked Boeing 747 owned by the Stevens Corporation plunged into the Bermuda Triangle and quickly sank. Miraculously, the cabin remained intact, leaving the occupants trapped alive at the bottom of the ocean. They were later rescued through the ingenious use of giant flotation balloons.

Oh, wait, that last one was the movie “Airport ’77.”

And this one.

 

Note: portions of this story appeared previously in the online magazine Salon.

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January 5, 2014

FEW THINGS mix more poorly than commercial flying and the mainstream media. Seldom is an aviation article free from some measure of distortion, exaggeration, or at times outright nonsense. If you caught my post on the AirAsia crash, you’re already aware of the pair of recent New York Times op-eds that couldn’t get it right. But that’s just for starters.

There are hardworking reporters out there who take the extra step to ensure their work is accurate, but they’re the exception. I’m not saying it’s an easy beat — aviation is a field brimming with jargon, stubborn mythology and recalcitrant sources (i.e. airline spokespeople), but sometimes it’s as if they’re not even trying. Especially when it comes to pictures. If only I had a dollar for every time an article or news segment was accompanied by incorrect or inappropriate photography. For instance a TV spot about a particular airplane type, or a particular airline, is accompanied by footage showing a totally different plane or a totally different carrier. Or newspaper article about Airbus shows a picture of a Boeing; an article about Boeing shows an Airbus. And so on.

Here’s one blooper that gets both the aircraft and the airline wrong. The story, carried last month by the Agence France-Presse (AFP), was about a US Airways Airbus A330 that diverted into Rome after several passengers became ill. Notice the caption. The problem is, that’s not an Airbus A330 and it’s not US Airways. It’s a much larger A380 in the colors of Qatar Airways. Not even close on either count.

Have you ever noticed, too, how any and every time a flight diverts somewhere or returns to its airport of origin, be it for a mechanical problem, medical issue, or anything else, the event is described as “an emergency landing”?

In fact the vast majority of what are described as emergency landings are precautionary diversions or returns. Actual emergency landings are rare, and pilots do not employ the term nearly as loosely. The captain must specifically declare an emergency to air traffic control. Situations vary, but generally it pertains to a situation in which expedited air traffic control handling is requested, and/or aircraft status is uncertain. Even then, most emergencies aren’t anything close to the life-or-death scenarios many passengers (or reporters) are prone to imagining.

Another bad habit of reporters is describing virtually any portion of airport tarmac as a “runway.” Taxiways, terminal ramps, etc., are commonly called “runways,” when in fact they are not. I should hardly have to point this out, but a runway is a very specific thing with a very specific purpose: it’s that long and clearly defined strip of pavement that a plane takes off from and lands on.

And while I hate to pile on, allow me to pile on…

I also have a problem with the media’s reliance on aviation academics. It’s customary for reporters to cite aviation professors, aerospace researchers, etc., in their stories. I understand the temptation here, and with certain topics these individuals offer valuable insights. But what reporters don’t realize is that professors and researchers can be highly unfamiliar with the day-to-day operational aspects of commercial flying. This is not their expertise. If the topic is aerodynamics, meteorology, or something statistical, that’s one thing. But for anything that touches the nitty-gritty of airline operations and the SOPs of flying jetliners, academics are often terrible sources.

And we haven’t even gotten to Hollywood yet. Movies are the worst. Never mind the more complicated plots involving pilots; half the time filmmakers can’t even get the basics right. I love it when they show a regional jet when they mean to show a long-haul widebody plane. Or when two different models are pictured at different times, intended to be the same plane. For example a 737 is shown taking off. Minutes later we see footage of the same flight landing… except now it’s a 747. It’s just airplanes, nobody will notice, right? Except many of us do. It’s baffling the way Hollywood will go to such extreme efforts and cost to get certain period details correct — automobiles, consumer products, clothing and haircuts — but it all goes out the window as soon as they get to the airport.

Movies we can forgive. The press, though, we hold to a higher standard.

Strange as it might sound, one of the better Hollywood takes was the old film “Airport ’75.” A 747 is struck near the flight deck in midair by a small propeller plane, and all three pilots are taken out (older 747s carried a third hand, the flight engineer). I almost hate to say it, but dangling Charlton Heston from a helicopter and dropping him through the hole in the fuselage wasn’t as far-fetched a solution as it might sound. It was about the only way that jumbo jet was getting onto the ground in fewer than a billion pieces. The scene where Karen Black, playing a flight attendant, coaxes the crippled jumbo over a mountain range was, if not entirely accurate from a technical standpoint, very realistic in demonstrating the difficulty any civilian would have pulling off even a simple maneuver.

I’ve always thought the best and most evocative Hollywood moments are those in which airplanes appear incidentally — as background characters, so to speak, rather than central to the story. In my book I cite the example of the Polish Tupolevs idling on the apron in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog IV.” Best, though, is the old Convair jet that appears with Al Pacino in 1975’s “Dog Day Afternoon.” One of my all-time favorite movies, its final scene unfolds at Kennedy Airport, where bankrobber Pacino is captured and handcuffed against a cop car, his accomplice shot through the head. In the background is a noisily idling jetliner, which Pacino thought would be his getaway plane. The plane is a Convair CV-990, a now-extinct, four-engine jet that was an uncommon sight even in the mid-70s. This peculiar rara avis is shown in the colors of Modern Air, a real life charter carrier at the time. (What a great name that was: Modern Air.)

Dog Day Afternoon was one of few major motion pictures to feature no music whatsoever. There’s no soundtrack, no backing score. Yet that closing scene is all about sound. Airplane sound. The earsplitting whine of the Convair’s early-generation engines, and the roar of unseen planes taking off.

 

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IT’S SUCH A VISUAL THING, air travel.

Take a look some time at the famous photograph of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903. The image, captured by bystander John T. Daniels and since reproduced millions of times, is about the most beautiful photograph in all of 20th century iconography. Daniels had been put in charge of a cloth-draped 5 X 7 glass plate camera stuck into Outer Banks sand by Orville Wright. He was instructed to squeeze the shutter bulb if “anything interesting” happened. The camera was aimed at the space of sky — if a dozen feet of altitude can be called such — where, if things went right, the Wright’s plane, the Flyer, would emerge in its first moments aloft.

Things did go right. The contraption rose into view and Daniels squeezed the bulb. We see Orville, visible as a black slab, more at the mercy of the plane than controlling it. Beneath him Wilbur keeps pace, as if to capture or tame the strange machine should it decide to flail or aim for the ground. You cannot see their faces; much of the photo’s beauty is not needing to. It is, at once, the most richly promising and bottomlessly lonely image. All the potential of flight is encapsulated in that shutter snap; yet we see, at heart, two eager brothers in a seemingly empty world, one flying, the other watching. We see centuries of imagination — the ageless desire to fly — in a desolate, almost completely anonymous fruition.

I own a lot of airplane books. Aviation publishing is, let’s just say, on a lower aesthetic par than what you’ll find elsewhere among the arts and sciences shelves. The books are loaded with glam shots: sexily angled pics of landing gear, wings and tails. You see this with cars and motorcycles and guns too — the sexualization of mechanical objects. It’s cheap and it’s easy and it misses the point. And unfortunately, for now, respect for aircraft has been unable to make it past this kind of adolescent fetishizing.

What aviation needs, I think, is some crossover cred. The 747, with its erudite melding of left and right brain sensibilities, has taken it close. The nature and travel writer Barry Lopez once authored an essay in which, standing inside the fuselage of an empty 747 freighter, he compares the aircraft to the quintessential symbol of another era — the Gothic cathedral of twelfth-century Europe. “Standing on the main deck,” Lopez writes, “where ‘nave’ meets ‘transept,’ and looking up toward the pilots’ ‘chancel.’ The machine was magnificent, beautiful, complex as an insoluble murmur of quadratic equations.”

Still, you won’t find framed lithographs of airplanes in the lofts of SoHo or the brownstones of Boston, hanging alongside romanticized images of the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. I won’t feel vindicated, maybe, until commercial aviation gets its own ten-part, sepia-toned Ken Burns documentary.

Until then, when it comes to popular culture, movies are the place we look first. One might parallel the 1950’s dawn of the Jet Age with the realized potential of Hollywood — the turbine and Cinemascope as archetypal tools of promise. Decades later there’s till a cordial symbiosis at work: a lot of movies are shown on airplanes, and airplanes are shown in a lot of movies. The crash plot is the easy and obvious device, and more than 30 years later we’re still laughing at Leslie Nielsen’s lines from the movie Airplane. But I’ve never been fond of movies about airplanes. For most of us, airplanes are a means to an end, and often enough the vessels of whatever exciting, ruinous, or otherwise life-changing journeys we embark on. And it’s the furtive, incidental glimpses that best capture this — far more evocatively than any blockbuster disaster script: the propeller plane dropping the spy in some godforsaken battle zone, or taking the ambassador and his family away from one; the beauty of the B-52’s tail snared along the riverbank in Apocalypse Now; the Air Afrique ticket booklet in the hands of a young Jack Nicholson in The Passenger; the Polish Tupolevs roaring in the background of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalog, part IV.

Switching to music, I think of a United Airlines TV ad that ran briefly in the mid 1990s — a plug for their new Latin American destinations. The commercial starred a parrot, who proceeded to peck out several seconds of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on a piano. “Rhapsody” has remained United’s advertising music, and makes a stirring accompaniment to the shot of a 777 set against the sky.

We shouldn’t forget the late Joe Strummer’s reference to the Douglas DC-10 in the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs,” but it’s the Boeing family that’s the more musically inclined. I can think of at least four songs mentioning 747s — Nick Lowe’s “So it Goes” being my favorite:

“…He’s the one with the tired eyes.
Seven-forty-seven put him in that condition…
Flyin’ back from a peace-keepin’ mission.”

Somehow the Airbus brand doesn’t lend itself lyrically, though Kinito Mendez, a merengue songwriter, paid a sadly foreboding tribute to the Airbus A300 with “El Avion,” in 1996. “How joyful it could be to go on flight 587,” sings Mendez, immortalizing American Airlines’ popular morning nonstop between New York and Santo Domingo. In November, 2001, the flight crashed after takeoff from Kennedy airport killing 265 people.

My formative years, musically speaking, hail from the underground rock scene covering a span from about 1981 through 1986. This might not seem a particularly rich genre from which to mine out links to flight, but the task proves easier than you’d expect. “Airplanes are fallin’ out of the sky…” sings Grant Hart on a song from Hüsker Dü’s 1984 masterpiece, Zen Arcade, and three albums later his colleague Bob Mould shouts of a man “sucked out of the first class window!” Then we’ve got cover art. The back side of Hüsker Dü’s Land Speed Record shows a Douglas DC-8. The front cover of the English Beat’s 1982 album, Special Beat Service, shows bandmembers walking beneath the wing of British Airways VC-10 (that’s the Vickers VC-10, a ’60s-era jet conspicuous for having four aft-mounted engines, similar to the Russian IL-62), while the Beastie Boys’ 1986 album Licensed to Ill depicts an airbrushed American Airlines 727.

The well-known Congolese painter Cheri Cherin is one of very few artists to commemorate a plane crash on canvas. His “Catastrophe de Ndolo,” seen below, depicts a 1996 incident in Zaire, as it was known at the time, in which an overloaded Antonov freighter careened off the runway at Kinshasa’s Ndolo airport and slammed into a market killing an estimated 300 people — only two of whom were on the airplane (a precise fatality count was never determined).

I asked Sister Wendy Beckett what she thought of Cherin’s non-masterpiece. You probably remember Sister Wendy — art historian, critic, and Catholic nun — from the PBS series a few years ago. “A splendidly gory recreation,” she tells us. “We see a bloody, devastated marketplace marked with the hulk of a burning fuselage. Yet the true fury of the event is captured not in the fire and gore, but in the cries and gestures of the people. It’s the apocalyptic landscape of a Bosch painting seen through the anguished psyche of modern African folk art.”

In reality who knows what Sister Wendy might say. I made that up.

Cheri Cherin has nothing on a certain young artist whose pièce de résistance appears below. This work commemorates the horrific, completely fictional three-way collision between Swissair, American Airlines and TWA. I would date this to 1975 or so, when I was nine years-old.

Last but not least, the Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry registers no fewer than 20 entries under “Airplanes,” 14 more for “Air Travel,” and at least another five under “Airports.” including poems by Frost and Sandburg. John Updike’s Americana and Other Poems was reviewed by Kirkus as, “a rambling paean for airports and big American beauty.” (And while I can’t seem to find it, I specifically recall an Allen Ginsberg poem in which he writes of the blue taxiway lights at an airport somewhere.) Subjecting readers to my own aeropoems is probably a bad idea, though I confess to have written a few. You’re free to Google them at your peril. Maybe it was the cockpit checklists that inspired me, free-verse masterpieces that they are:

Stabilizer trim override, normal
APU generator switch, off
Isolation valve, closed
Autobrakes…maximum!

 

Closing note:

Looking at that Boeing 727 tail section on the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill album, there are several things that give it away as an American Airlines plane. First is the angled-off tricolor cheatline — red, white, and blue — visible just forward of the engine. Those obviously are AA markings. Then you’ve got the all-silver base — another tradition of that carrier — as well as the whitish, off-color section of cowling over and around the center engine intake. This section of cowling was made of a different material, so they couldn’t use the bare silver here, going with a grayish-white paint instead. This gave the tails of AA’s 727s a mismatched look. Oh, and lastly, notice the black lettering to the lower right of the flag. This is the precise spot where the registration decals went. It would say, for example, “N483AA” Except, in this case it says “3MTA3 DJ.” The DJ part is for Def Jam records. The “3MTA3” means nothing…. until you hold it in front of a mirror.

October 29, 2014

THE OTHER NIGHT I went and re-watched the Denzel Washington movie,”Flight,” thinking that maybe it wouldn’t bother me as much as it did the first time I saw it.

A nice idea, but it was even more aggravating the second time around. I’m not sure who gets the bigger screw-job here: viewers, who are being lied to, but who may or may not care; airline pilots, whose profession is unrealistically portrayed; or nervous flyers, whose fears this movie will only compound.

First things first: this isn’t a movie review. I’ll leave that to the professional critics. I’m not Anthony Lane, and any attempts I make at dissecting “Flight” on its deeper cinematic merits, if there are any, are bound to fall short. I’m more than happy, however, to judge the film on its technical aspects: its cockpit scenes and its portrayal of airline pilots. And what I saw gets a firm thumbs-down.

I went into the theater with an open mind. Really, I did. I long ago accepted that when it comes to planes and pilots, Hollywood never gets it right, and I was not expecting anything different this time. There’s a point, however, where you just can’t let things go. There is nothing funny about “Flight”, but should you hear howls of laughter coming from the back of the theater, chances are there’s a pilot in the audience. Laughter, if not tears, is the only fair response to much of what the movie shows.

Above all else there’s the matter of Denzel Washington’s character, “Whip” Whitaker. Whip is a hotshot, sauced-up captain whose substance-abuse habit crash-lands him, quite literally, into a whole heap of trouble. Our anti-Sully is a guy who flies on the heels of a coke binge and pours his own cocktails in the galley. Whip is a cartoon, but the problem is that too many people watching this movie will take him seriously. The idea that such a reckless pilot might actually exist out there is hardwired into the imagination of the traveling public and unfortunately reinforced by rare but high-profile reports of commercial pilots who’ve been caught while under the influence.

Any number of pilots have indeed battled substance-abuse problems — as have professionals in every line of work — and over the years a much smaller number have been arrested after failing a Breathalyzer or blood-alcohol test. Incidents like these have nurtured a certain apocryphal stereotype: the pilot as hard-drinking renegade, with crow’s-feet flanking his eyes and a whisky-tempered drawl, a flask tucked into his luggage. When the image is so quick to form, it’s tempting to jump to conclusions: for every pilot who’s caught, there must be a dozen others out there getting away with it. Right?

Well, quite frankly, no. Intoxication isn’t something pilots play fast and loose with. Why would we, with our careers on the line? Violators are subject to immediate revocation of their pilot certificates, not to mention potential prison time. I will remind you that pilots are subject to random drug and alcohol testing, and I should also note that simply because a pilot is battling a substance-abuse problem, that does not mean he is flying while drunk or high. And he certainly isn’t mixing drinks in the galley. That is a huge and critical distinction. Passengers worry about all sorts of things, rational and otherwise, but trust me on this one: there’s no Whip Whitaker in the cockpit.

Why not? The rest of us wouldn’t tolerate such a dangerous colleague in our midst, for one thing. Neither would any pilot take the skies with somebody he or she knew to be under the influence. At one point, Whitaker’s copilot admits from his post-crash hospital bed to having known that his captain was drunk and high even before they’d taken off. Where’s a bucket of tomatoes when you need one?

In other words, a real-life Whitaker wouldn’t survive two minutes at an airline, and all commercial pilots — including, if not especially, those who’ve dealt with drug or alcohol addiction — should feel slandered by his ugly caricature.

The Federal Aviation Administration blood-alcohol limit for airline pilots is 0.04 percent, and we are banned from consuming alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. We must also comply with our employers’ in-house policies, which are usually stricter. Drug and alcohol tests are unannounced and common. Air carriers and unions like the Air Line Pilots Association have been very successful with proactive counseling programs that encourage pilots to seek treatment.

Not long ago, I flew with a colleague who participated in the HIMS program, an intervention and treatment system put together several years ago by ALPA and the FAA. HIMS has treated more than 4,000 pilots, with only 10 percent to 12 percent of participants suffering relapse. It has kept alcohol out of the cockpit and has helped prevent the issue from being driven underground, where it’s more likely to be a safety problem. I asked that colleague if, prior to going into HIMS, he’d ever knowingly flown under the influence. His answer was a firm and very believable no.

But back to the movie…

The workplace dynamic between Whip Whitaker and his copilot, Ken Evans (Brian Geraghty), is another problem. In the cockpit, Whitaker is flip, arrogant, and condescending; Evans is meek and at times frightened and clueless. This is not how actual pilots behave and interact. Further, such a botched depiction only reinforces one of flying’s most irritating myths: the idea of the copilot as a sort of apprentice pilot who is on hand merely to help out and assist the captain.

Copilots are not trainees. I ought to know: I am one. We perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do, and we are fully certified to operate the aircraft in all phases of flight. In fact, due to the peculiarities of the seniority bidding that determines almost everything in a pilot’s professional life, it’s not terribly uncommon for the copilot to be older and more experienced than the captain sitting next to him.

The cockpit scenes otherwise range from borderline realistic to preposterous. The checklists, the procedural callouts, the chatter with air-traffic control, etc., are occasionally rendered correctly, if a bit over the top. But mostly they’re peculiar, and at times they are outright silly.

The early-on segment where Whitaker and Evans are battling through a storm is particularly egregious. I cannot begin to describe how wrong it is, from the absurd idea that you would actually increase to maximum flying speed to race between storm cells to Whitaker’s impetuous descent, which for some inexplicable reason he believes will help lead them safely through the weather — all without permission from air-traffic control. Are you kidding?

Minutes later we see the jet, its pitch controls jammed, nosediving unstoppably toward the ground. Whip saves the day by turning the plane upside down, then rolling it right side up again in time for a semi-successful crash landing in a field. The aerobatic magic here is something that escapes me, but what do I know? I’m just an airline pilot. The sequence is based loosely on the crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261 in January, 2000, when a jammed stabilizer jackscrew forced the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 into an unrecoverable dive. (Whitaker’s jet is a fictionalized version of the same plane, with some digitalized winglets attached.) The crew of Alaska 261 briefly attempted to regain control by flying inverted. Whatever aerobatic and aerodynamic possibilities exist here aren’t anything I can vouch for. If they do exist, surely “Flight” has overextended them.

I can let that one go, but I loved it when Whitaker, seconds away from impact, actually radios air-traffic control with the news: “We are in a dive!”

Thanks, Whip. I can only imagine a perplexed controller staring haplessly into a radar screen, not really sure what to say or do, wondering if perhaps he ought to have called in sick that day. In the real world, pilots in the throes of such an emergency wouldn’t be all that worried about what ATC has to say, and such a radio call would be about the last thing on their minds. For most of the film I was too mortified to actually laugh out loud, but that one got a cackle from me.

Presumably, the filmmakers worked with one or more consultants, who must have at least attempted to encourage accuracy. Wikipedia tells us that the late Lyle Shelton, a former stunt pilot, worked as a technical adviser. Perhaps Shelton could have told us more about that upside-down business, but he wasn’t an airline pilot, and it’s the cockpit details — the dramatization of airline SOP — where things fall short. I almost hate to say it, but even Airport ’75 — one of the quintessential air-disaster movies, in which Charlton Heston is helicoptered through a hole in a crippled 747 — did it better.

I’ll be told, perhaps, that I need to relax, and that the movie ought be judged beyond its technical shortcomings. Normally I would agree, and for the average lay viewer it will hardly matter at all. I’m happy to allow a little artistic license. We should expect it, and some light fudging of the facts can be necessary, to a degree, for a film like this to work. Honestly, I’m not that much of a fussbudget. The trouble with “Flight” is that the filmmakers seem to have hardly tried.

And why not? Would it really have been that difficult? Would it really have diminished the picture’s storyline or its gravity? I think not.

As for real-life substance-abuse problems, I prefer the tale of the former Northwest Airlines captain Lyle Prouse.

Prouse, together with the other two pilots in his crew, was arrested one morning in Minnesota in 1990. All three had spent the previous evening’s layover at a bar in Fargo, North Dakota, downing as many as nineteen rum and Cokes. Tests showed their blood-alcohol levels far beyond the legal limit.

An alcoholic whose parents had died of the disease, Prouse became a poster pilot for punishment and redemption. He was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison. Then, in a remarkable and improbable sequence of events, he was able to return to the cockpit on his 60th birthday and retire as a 747 captain.

Once out of jail, Prouse was forced to requalify for every one of his FAA licenses and ratings. Broke, he relied on a friend to lend him stick time in a single-engine trainer. Northwest’s then-CEO, John Dasburg, who himself had grown up in an alcoholic family, took a personal interest in Prouse’s struggle and lobbied publicly for his return.

You’ll see Prouse in interviews from time to time, and inevitably you’ll be struck by how forthrightly he takes responsibility, without resorting to the sobby self-flagellation of most public apologies. Always one is left, unexpectedly, to conclude that this convicted felon deserved his second chance.

 

This article ran originally in The Daily Beast.

 

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TOM HANKS IS “SULLY.” WHAT SAYS THE PILOT?

What is it with Hollywood and Airplanes? A Complaint from Ask the Pilot’s Office of Pedantics and Minutiae.

March 1, 2013

SO I WATCHED ARGO, the Ben Affleck movie about the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran.

Those of us of a certain age remember the hostage crisis quite well. Until September 11th, nothing in post-World War Two American history garnered more media attention and public discussion, save perhaps for the Vietnam War.

I thought the movie started strong but ended weakly. The closing sequence, especially, was contrived and overwrought — not to mention historically inaccurate.

But it’s the airplane scenes that we’re here to talk about:

The Boeing 747 is one of the movie’s stars. The iconic jet makes numerous appearances in the period colors of British Airways, Iran Air, and Swissair. Now, I don’t know if the British Airways jet that brought CIA agent Tony Mendez into Tehran really was a 747. And the Swissair plane that carried the six Americans to freedom was, in fact, a Douglas DC-8. But that’s not the artistic license that irks me. (The 747 is no longer the biggest or the flashiest plane, but it’s still the grandest and most historically significant. And any movie set in the 1970s, particularly one focused on what was such a huge international story… if there’s gonna be an airplane, it has to be a 747.)

I’m reminded of the line from that old Nick Lowe song…

“Seven forty seven put him in that condition,
Flyin’ back from a peace keeping mission.”

What irks me, instead, is that these airplane scenes are quite clearly digitalized fakes. Even a child can see this. The shot of the BA flight descending into Mehrabad airport looks like something an eighth grader put together on his iPad — so goofily phony that it’s hard not to laugh out loud.

The Swissair scenes, in the film’s closing minutes, are no better. What a waste. There’s the 747, front and center of one of the coolest moments of the past 40 years. Except that it’s rendered in a sort of CGI-lite. There’s one shot, of the plane’s left wing, where they didn’t even pretend to make it real. The intake of the number one engine is just a two-dimensional black circle. As the kids say, WTF?

As the movie comes to a close, we see the superimposed jet accelerating down the runway, chased along by a phalanx of Iranian military vehicles and police cars. These cars and trucks miraculously keep pace until the nose gear begins to lift. I’m unaware of any jeeps or police sedans able to drive 170 miles-per-hour, but who knows what secret weapons the Iranians had in 1979.

And, by the way, what you see in Argo is a -300 series 747, with the extended upper deck and traditional (no winglets) wing. Swissair did operate the 747-300 for a time. The trouble is, it didn’t take delivery of the first one until 1983, four years after the events portrayed in the film.

That’s cheating a bit, I know. It’s really not fair that I can give them a pass for using a 747 in the first place, yet be offended by which variant was depicted. Here I am complaining because they used the wrong kind of the wrong plane.

Still though, if you’re going to show a plane at all, at least show one that actually existed at the time. Not bothering to do so is laziness. The choice of going with a 747 instead of a DC-8 can at least be argued on dramatic grounds. Going with a model that hadn’t been invented yet is simply incoherent.

You mean to tell me that with the millions of dollars lavished on the production of a major film, that Affleck and company couldn’t have gotten hold of an actual, chronologically correct 747 (it would have been the -200 variant) for a couple of simple runway scenes? At least a few 747-200s are still flying, and I’m sure the owners (cargo companies mostly) would have been happy to lease one out for a few days. Dozens more are mothballed in the deserts of California and Arizona, within driving distance of Hollywood, any one of which could have been painted up in the appropriate colors.

Speaking of which…

Earlier on, I was impressed that they got the period livery for British Airways exactly right, including the typeface used in airport signage. There’s also a very quick shot of the tail section of an Iran Air 747. Here too, though you don’t see it for more than a second, the livery is correct.

But then, with Swissair, they blow it. The colors shown, with the black and brown striping and the full red tail, weren’t used until 1980. They’ve got the wrong plane and the wrong paint job.

I don’t understand why flubs like these are so annoyingly common in movies. When it comes to cars, consumer products, hairstyles and clothes, Hollywood goes through considerable pain and expense to get their period details right — even ones that the average viewer wouldn’t necessarily notice or care about. But with airplanes and airlines, these standards don’t apply, even when the aircraft is center stage. We expect better, especially from a film as critically acclaimed as Argo, and certainly from any movie that’s intended to be read, however loosely, as a historical narrative.

 

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