November 1, 2024

Forgive me for being morbid, but did you know that no fewer than six major airline crashes occurred on Halloween?

That’s right, six.

Ranked chronologically, they go like this…

1. On Halloween morning, 1979, Western Airlines Flight 2605 crashed in Mexico City killing 73 people. The crew attempted to land on a closed runway in the fog. The DC-10 hit a truck, then careened into a building.

2. On the night of October 31, 1994, American Eagle Flight 4184 went down near Roselawn, Indiana killing all 68 passengers and crew. Investigators found that a design flaw allowed ice accretion to cause an uncommanded aileron reversal, which threw the ATR-72 into an unrecoverable dive. The plane’s de-icing system was redesigned.

3. Two years later the day, TAM flight 402 crashed after takeoff from São Paulo, Brazil, after a thrust reverser deployed during climb. All 99 people aboard the Fokker 100 jetliner were killed.

4. Exactly three years later, EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic near Nantucket, killing 217. Investigators determined that the first officer intentionally crashed the Boeing 767.

5. On Halloween night, 2000, the crew of Singapore Airlines Flight 006 attempted takeoff on a closed runway in Taipei, Taiwan. The Boeing 747 collided with construction equipment and burst into flames. Eighty-three of the plane’s 179 occupants died.

6. On October 31, 2015, Metrojet flight 9268, a Russian charter flight heading from Sharm El Sheihk, Egypt, to St. Petersburng, was destroyed by a bomb after takeoff. All 224 passengers and crew on the Airbus A321 were killed. It is believed the bomb was planted by operatives of the Islamic State group.

 

There you have it. There can’t possibly be a calendar day with a record worse than October 31.

There’s nothing going on here other than chance, of course. Bad luck is bad luck. Still it’s peculiar. I’m not normally superstitious, but can you find any patterns?

I had this to mull over on Halloween night, flying a 767 to Europe.

 

Border Crossing Conundrums for Travelers

October 23, 2024

 

Port au Prince, Haiti, 1999

“Sorry, it’s too dangerous,” says the driver.

To the best of my knowledge and experience, Port-au-Prince is the only place in the world this side of eastern Ukraine where a cabbie will refuse a twenty-dollar bill to take an American into town for a quick drive-through tour.

With nothing else to do I wander the apron. Behind our dormant jet a row of scarred, treeless hills bakes in the noon heat, raped of their wood and foliage by a million hungry Haitians. The island of Hispaniola is shared in an east-west split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the border between these countries is one of the few national demarcations clearly visible from 35,000 feet — the Dominican’s green tropical carpet abutting a Haitian deathscape of denuded hillsides the color of sawdust.

In front of the terminal, men ride by on donkeys and women balance baskets atop their heads. Somebody has started a cooking fire on the sidewalk. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and there’s more squalor along the airport perimeter than you’d see in the most run-down parts of Africa.

I notice a pair of large white drums being unloaded from our airplane. I ask a loader if he knows what the barrels contain, wondering what sort of nasty hazmat we’d just brought in. A forklift carries them to a corner of a ramshackle warehouse, and three skinny helpers pry off the heavy plastic lids. What’s revealed is a tangled white mass of what appears to be string cheese floating in water. A vague, quiveringly rotten smell rises from the liquid.

The forklift driver sticks in his hand and gives the ugly congealment a churn. “For sausage,” he answers. What we’re looking at, it turns out, is a barrel full of intestines — casings bound for some horrible Haitian factory to be stuffed with meat. Why the casings need to be imported while the meat itself is apparently on hand, I can’t say, but somebody found it necessary to pay the shipping costs and customs duties to fly a hundred gallons of intestines from Miami to Port-au-Prince.

 

THE SEGMENT ABOVE is from a book I’ve been pretending to write. It describes an afternoon several years ago, when I was a cargo pilot for DHL. The setting is the Port au Prince airport in Haiti — a country I’ve never been to.

Oh sure, I’ve flown into to the Port au Prince airport once or twice. But just the same, so far as I’m concerned, seeing that I never set foot outside the terminal, I have not been to Haiti.

The issue here is what, exactly, constitutes a visit to another country. Making that determination can be tricky, and those who travel a lot will sometimes wrestle with this quandary. When your plane stops for refueling or you spend the evening at an airport hotel… does that count?

Where to draw the line is ultimately up to the traveler; it’s more about “feel” than any technical definition of a border crossing. But there should be a certain, if ineffable standard — something along the lines of that you-know-it-when-you-see-it definition of pornography.

According to my own criteria, a passport stamp alone doesn’t cut it. At the very least, a person must spend a token amount of time — though not necessarily an overnight — beyond the airport and its environs. On the pin-studded map that hangs in the dining room of my apartment, there is no pin for Haiti.

Other cases, though, are more subjective. For instance, traveling once between Germany and Hungary, I spent several hours riding a train through Austria. We pulled into Vienna in the middle of the night and sat for six hours. At sunrise we headed out again, trundling across the Austrian countryside toward Budapest. Certain people might consider that enough, but as with Haiti there’s no Austria pin on my map. I saw towns, cars, people… but all through the window of a train, never touching soil. Doesn’t count.

On the other hand, I have been to Liberia. I used to fly a regular route there from Accra, Ghana, and our flights would lay over for a few hours at Liberia’s international airport, known as Roberts Field. One time I hired a driver to take us out for a mini-tour of the nearby area. We never spent the night, but I walked through villages, saw people, took pictures. Liberia gets a pin.

As does Qatar, though I spent a mere three hours in Doha, driving around at night, between flights, on a tour provided by Qatar Airways.

Sometimes the country itself is what muddles things up. Consider the world’s various territories, protectorates, self-governing autonomous regions, occupied lands and quasi-independent nations. Yeah, I know, Vatican City is a sovereign state, politically speaking. But in practical terms, is it really? When I tally up the countries I’ve visited, I can’t bring myself to include it.

And let’s not begin to assess the countless atolls, archipelagos, and assorted tiny islands scattered throughout the oceans. If a citizen of Japan visits Guam, has he been to the United States? In one sense, sure. In another, perhaps more accurate sense, he’s simply been to Guam — neither genuine U.S. turf nor a country unto itself. You can make a similar argument with Bermuda, Tahiti, and elsewhere. And let’s not get started with Tibet, or Palestine. Sometimes, maybe, there is no country.

Together these things can make it impossible to provide a wholly accurate answer when asked how many countries you’ve traveled to. It depends. For me the number is ninety-eight. Or thereabouts.

Of course, that’s only important if you’re the sort who keeps track of such things. Travelers are known to hold “passport parties” upon reaching certain milestones – a 50th, 75th, or 100th country. In the eyes of some, country-counting cheapens the act of travel by emphasizing quantity over quality, but maybe that’s sour grapes.

 

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

A version of this post originally appeared in the magazine Salon.

June 20, 2016

I’M OLD ENOUGH to remember when people dressed up to fly. I remember my dad putting on a tie before we left for the airport. And that was on a trip to Florida, of all places, as recently as the early 1980s.

One of the reasons that people once took flying so seriously is that so few of them had the means to partake in it. Not all that long ago, only a fraction of the population could afford to fly on a regular basis. When I was in junior high, in the late ’70s, maybe a third of my classmates had ever been in an airplane. Even into high school I frequently met other kids who’d never flown. Flying today is far cheaper than it used to be. As a result, almost everybody does it.

And as the demographics have changed, so have the levels of behavior. This we’d expect. With nearly four million people flying every day of the week, across every strata of culture and class, standards of decorum were bound to fall. That’s fine, and I don’t mean to sound snobbish. Maintaining simple dignity doesn’t require anything too formal. I have no problem, for example, with people wearing shorts and sandals onto a plane.

But there comes a point, and what I do have a problem with is when otherwise reasonable protocols of civility, manners and courtesy cease to apply. What is it? Is it the stress? Is it the contempt people harbor for the airlines? Whatever the causes, flying has a way of bringing out the worst in people.

I’ve never been privy to a full-blown “air rage” incident, but I’ve witnessed countless instances of shameful behavior: passengers cursing at airline staff; stealing from the liquor carts; leaving diapers in seat pockets; etc. It tends to be small-scale stuff — rudeness and a lack of elementary courtesy — rather than anything violent or overtly hostile, but that doesn’t excuse it. Why, for example, do so many airline passengers find it acceptable to throw garbage and food all over the cabin floor, then mash it into the carpeting with their feet? You don’t do this in a restaurant. Why is it okay on an airplane?

Here’s some of what I’ve seen just in the last few months…

I am at the airport in Dubai one early morning, waiting to catch an Emirates flight to Boston. I’m sitting in the boarding lounge when I hear a strange noise coming from behind me. Snip, snip snip, click, click, click.

I turn around, and what do I see? The guy directly behind me — a young guy in his twenties — is sitting cross-legged in his chair. Both of this feet are naked, and he is clipping his toenails. With every snip and click he splits away another crescent of nail, which he drops into a growing pile next to his left knee.

Would you take off your socks and start clipping your toenails in a movie theater? In the waiting room at your dentist? Most people would feel uneasy doing it in the woods, never mind at an airport boarding lounge in front of three-hundred people. And while I don’t want to watch, I feel that I have to. Because I need to know what he’s going to do with that big, disgusting pile of trimmings once our flight begins to board. Is he going to collect them up and carry them to the trash? Or will he brush them to the floor?

What do you think he does?

On another occasion I am at Kennedy Airport, in terminal four. A woman and her young daughter are sitting on a bench-seat along the edge of the corridor. The daughter is four, maybe five years old, and she’s holding a tall plastic cup brimming with round, colored candies. They’re marble-shaped candies, possibly peanut M&Ms. All at once, with no warning, the girl flings the cup onto the floor. It’s an impressive spectacle, I have to say, as hundreds of tiny orbs go clattering across the carpet, coming to rest in a great fan of color. People turn and stare.

And what does the woman do? She stands up, takes the girl by the hand, and the two of them walk silently away, leaving the entire mess — even the plastic cup — sitting there for some unfortunate janitorial worker to sweep up.

Meanwhile, people are kicked off planes all the time for acting, and even dressing, obnoxiously. In Boston recently, jetBlue denied boarding to a young woman because they felt her shorts were too revealing. Apparently, though, a t-shirt emblazoned with the words FUCK LOVE in huge block letters is within the boundaries of decency?

I’m not a prude. Nonetheless I’m dying to understand when and how this sort of thing become acceptable. And I’m imagining this same attire in a different context: In the bleachers at a baseball game, for instance. Would that be okay? Would the guy be asked to leave? Wouldn’t he be harassed by parents who’d brought their kids along? There are plenty of little kids at airports, so why is it different? And which is more troubling, the fact that he’s being accommodated, or the fact that somebody rude enough to put on a shirt like that exists in the first place?

Next we have Ms. Stinkytoes, luxuriating in her Emirates first class suite. She shows us that boorishness these days isn’t merely for the louts in steerage. Are these the same people who buy elephant ivory and rhinoceros horns? And the privacy of her suite is no excuse (couldn’t she at least have closed the doors?). Maybe I’m overreacting to this one, but how is this any more appropriate that resting one’s bare and splayed toes on a restaurant table? This is still, for all intents and purposes, a public place, and somebody else is going to be occupying that cubicle a few hours from now. And for crying out loud, they give you socks and slippers!

 
Photos by the author.

Presidents, Planes, and Pilot Black Magic. Is This How Donald Trump Won?

Update: November 5, 2024

It would’ve been fun to know that New Day Rising, or Sorry, Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, might be blasting through the halls of power in Washington. But oh well. It’s a wrap. And my streak goes on.

Eight candidates. It’s a little creepy, no?

I need to harness these powers for profit.

 

November 5, 2024

I’VE MET THREE PRESIDENTS. None of them American presidents, but presidents nevertheless.

The first of them was John Atta Mills, the semi-beloved leader of Ghana. Mills died in 2012, but during his tenure, he and his entourage had ridden aboard my airplane at least twice, traveling to or from Accra, the Ghanaian capital.

If you think that’s vaguely impressive, I also had the honor of meeting and flying the President of Guyana, Bharat Jagdeo, two or three times. (Contrary to what my father and others seem to think, Ghana and Guyana are in fact different countries, on different continents, with different presidents.)

Third on the list is Ellen Johnson Sirlief, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the President of Liberia. I met her four times, including once at a reception at Roberts Field near Monrovia. On one of those occasions I asked if she’d be kind enough to sign a copy of our flight plan. She obliged, adding her name in green ink at the bottom of the dot-matrix printout.

Things have worked out pretty well for me, I think. Years ago, when I was puttering around over Plum Island sweating to death in some noisy old Cessna, the idea that one day I’d be be carrying presidents in the back of my plane would have struck me as ludicrous.

There is, however, a dark side to my brushes with politicians. And if you’re planning to run for office, you might do well to keep your distance.

What am I talking about? Here are six vignettes, true stories all. Try to figure it out:

One day in 1980 I’m at Boston’s Logan airport, plane-spotting with a pair of my junior high pals. Who disembarks from a TWA plane only a few feet in front of us but Jerry Brown, then-governor (and, yes, governor again!) of California. In addition to his gubernatorial prowess, Mr. Brown, a.k.a. “Governor Moonbeam,” is known for his dabbling in Buddhism, his long liaison with Linda Ronstadt, and his appearance in one of the most famous punk rock songs — the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles.”

Four years later, the late senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts speaks at my high school graduation (St. John’s Prep in Danvers, Massachusetts).

Six years after that, on a Sunday morning in 1990, I’m standing at Teterboro Airport, a busy general aviation field in New Jersey, close to New York City. A private jet pulls up. The stairs come down, and out steps Jesse Jackson and a phalanx of burly bodyguards. Jackson walks into the terminal, passing me by inches.

The following summer I’m back at Logan, using a payphone in Terminal E. Suddenly Ted Kennedy is standing at the phone next to me, placing a call. (Quaint, I know, in this age of wireless, but there’s the famous Senator, slipping dimes into the slot.) I’m talking to a friend, and I surreptitiously hold up the receiver. “Listen,” I say, “whose voice is this?”

“Sounds like Ted Kennedy,” she reckons. And it is.

Next, it’s 1994, at Logan again, and I’m in the captain’s seat of a Northwest Airlink 19-seater, preparing for departure to Baltimore. Up the front stairs comes Michael Dukakis. He stops briefly behind the cockpit and says hello.

Later, in the late spring of that same year, Vice President Al Gore is making the commencement speech at Harvard University, close to my Cambridge apartment. I’m passing through Harvard Yard, and there’s the V.P., his wife Tipper, and his two blonde daughters shaking hands with a line of admirers. I join the line.

So, my question is: what is it that makes those six encounters collectively significant? Think about it. Each has something in common. Or, more correctly, two things. What are they?

While you’re mulling it over, I’ll give you the longer versions of my run-ins with Dukakis and Gore:

After we land in Baltimore, Dukakis thanks us for the ride and remarks, “Not a lot of room in here.” Even at 5’8″ he’s right about that. The Metroliner’s skinny, tubular fuselage earned it the nickname “lawn dart.”

“Yeah,” I answer, “It’s not exactly Air Force One.”

Meanwhile, intentionally or otherwise, the Duke has left a huge sheaf of important-looking papers in his seat pocket — probably because he’s run to a phone to cuss out his secretary for booking him on that stupid little plane with the annoying pilot. I carry the papers inside to the agent. “Here,” I say. “These belong to Mike Dukakis.” She looks at me like I’m crazy.

The day that I met Al Gore was sunny and humid. It was one of those days when I’d ride my mountain bike aimlessly around my neighborhood, hoping to meet a girl or maybe find a bag of money on the sidewalk. I never had much luck on those counts, but then I’d never run into a Vice President either.

I come down Broadway, then up Kirkland Street to the corner of Harvard Yard. The graduation ceremonies have just ended, and Gore — his family and a handful of Secret Service men in tow — have come through a gate and are walking toward the concrete plaza in front of the Science Center. I lock up my bike and follow them.

A crowd of about 50 people quickly gathers. Those of us in front form a straight row, and Gore comes down the line to shake our hands. He’s a Harvard graduate, and most of those around me are Harvard alum, or the parents and families of graduating seniors. People are introducing themselves with lines like, “Charles Tipton-Dune, sir, class of ’68. It’s an honor to meet you.” And Al says, “It’s a pleasure.”

As he approaches me, it’s my plan to say, “Patrick Smith, sir, class of ’88” (a total fabrication, but I’m feeling left out). Instead, I get nervous and do something a lot more idiotic. So idiotic, in fact, that to this day it makes my skin burn with embarrassment when I remember it.

My turn comes, and I look up at Al Gore, the Vice President of the United States of America. I stick out my hand and I say: “How ya doin’?”

Bear in mind, too, that I’m wearing shorts and a ratty old Husker Du t-shirt, surrounded by people in suits and gowns. I’m sweaty from bicycling. Gore shakes my hand and looks at me, a bit crookedly, no doubt wondering if I’m not some protégé of John Hinckley or Squeaky Frome.

“Great,” he answers. “How you doin’?”

After that I break from the crowd and go over to the black limousine parked on the plaza. This is Gore’s car, an ’80s-model Cadillac that looks like the cars of my Sicilian neighbors when I was a kid growing up in Revere. The tinting is peeling from several of the windows. It surprises me that such an important person is asked to ride around in such a shitty car. The Secret Service men inside eye me lazily. They wear sunglasses and have coiled wires sticking from their ears. They don’t seem particularly concerned with my loitering, and I nod to the guy in the driver’s seat. How ya doin’?

Right, okay, so back to my riddle. What do Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas, Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Mike Dukakis and Al Gore all have in common, in addition to crossing paths with yours truly?

The answer, of course, is that all six were Democrats who ran for President. And all six, whether it was the party nomination or general election, lost.

That’s pretty uncanny if you think about it. Six – six! – Democrats who ran and failed. Six losers and me.

Or is it seven? If we consider degrees of separation, I can maybe take responsibility for the election of Donald Trump in 2016 as well. That’s because, in 2012, I shared a shuttle flight from New York to Boston with Chelsea Clinton. She and her husband were sitting just a few rows ahead of me. At one point I was taking something down from the overhead locker when she passed me in the aisle. I was in her way and had to move aside. “Sorry,” I said. “Excuse me,”

“Thanks,” said Chelsea Clinton. And four years later, her mother would run for President and fall short. I don’t know if my curse is contagious among family members, but it felt like a weird coincidence.

And what’s my reason for dredging all of this up? Well, the U.S. Presidential election is happening as we speak, and know this:

A few years ago I was on a layover in San Francisco. It was the day of the annual Pride Parade, which I found myself watching from a street corner at the foot of my hotel. Floats and cars burbled past, their occupants calling and waving: corporate contingents, local pols, VIPs. One of those cars was a festively adorned convertible. And in the back seat, waving to the crowd, sat, you guessed it, Kamala Harris.

Have I struck again? Number eight?

If you’re rooting for Harris to prevail, I’m sorry, but I can’t un-see what I saw. If there’s a means of reversing these dark powers of serendipity, I don’t know what it is.

What’s more is that about six months ago I saw Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, at Washington-Reagan Airport. He stepped off a plane and walked past me, maybe fifteen feet away, accompanied by three or four Secret Service agents.

And no, I have never seen or met a Republican candidate (or their spouses or offspring) for President. Whatever dreary karma I’m lugging around, it’s viciously partisan. If the Republicans were smart, they’d hire me and shuttle me around to their opponents’ rallies.

I should also mention that I once saw James Carville, the famous political consultant and “Democrat strategist,” going through TSA security at La Guardia. That was about fifteen years ago. It can’t explain my earlier encounters, but maybe Carville caught whiff of my bad juju and passed it along to the candidates I saw later.

As I type this it’s 6 p.m. on election night. We’ll find out very soon if the streak continues.

 

Related Story:

DONALD TRUMP WANTS TO REPAINT AIR FORCE ONE.

An older version of this story appeared in the online magazine Salon.

September 23, 2024

I FOUND THIS LIST, over at The Atlantic, published back in 2015: What Was the Most Significant Airplane Flight in History? A roll call of aviation luminaries, myself not included, was invited to weigh in.

The Enola Gay, bound for Hiroshima, that’s a heavy one. And from my fellow blogger Christine Negroni: “In 1914, Abram Pheil became the very first passenger on the very first passenger flight, a 23-minute trip from St. Petersburg, Florida to Tampa. Like the 12-second flight of the Wright Brothers eleven years earlier, his brief time in the air has had an enormous impact on the world.”

It’s hard to argue with her. But some of the other entries, I don’t know. D.B. Cooper, come on. Lindbergh’s solo crossing? Nah. Of course, there’s no right or wrong answer. The idea of lists like these is to draw from different perspectives.

Had I been asked, my entry for history’s most significant flight would be Pan Am’s inaugural of the Boeing 747 in 1970.

Pan Am’s Clipper Victor kicked things off between New York and London on January 21st, about six months after the success of Apollo 11. Why this flight? Well, if we broaden this conversation to planes generally, rather than specific flights, we have to rank the Boeing 747 as the most influential aircraft of all time. The industry’s first-ever widebody, it ushered in the concept of affordable long-haul flying, changing global travel as we knew it — and know it still — perhaps more than any other invention.

Plus, it was a gorgeous design. In a production run lasting more than fifty years, Boeing would sell more than a thousand of them.

(Ironically the Victor was the very same 747 destroyed at Tenerife in 1977, in history’s worst aviation disaster. Remarkably, this single aircraft was involved in two of the most historic flights of all time, one celebratory and the other catastrophic.)

Runner up, for influence if not aesthetics, would be the Douglas DC-3.

Rolled out in 1935, the DC-3 wasn’t really the first of anything, but it perfected the evolution of the all-metal passenger transport to become the first truly profitable and mass-produced airliner. So many thousands of DC-3s were built, in civilian and military versions, both in the U.S. and under license abroad, that nobody knows for sure the actual count.

As late as the 1960s more than a thousand DC-3s were still in airline service. Today every passenger plane, from a ten-seater to the 787, bears a debt to this antique piston twin.

Much the same way, Boeing’s four-engined 707 revolutionized air travel forever.

The 707 was third in jetliner chronology — the star-crossed de Havilland Comet and the Soviet Union’s Tu-104 copycat came before it — but it was faster, with greater range and more seats, taking the Comet’s ill fortune and turning it into gold, safely crossing oceans and continents at twice the speed of mainstay propliners.

When, in 1958, Pan Am launched the 707 between New York and Paris (just like Lindbergh), the jet age truly was born. A year later American Airlines inaugurated transcon 707 nonstops between New York and Los Angeles. The poet Carl Sandburg was aboard.

Yes, well, sorry to some of you who’d lobby for something flashier. The Concorde, I know, makes a prettier icon than the 707 or a DC-3. But while sexy and famous, it proved little beyond the non-viability of the SST concept. Perhaps when hydrogen replaces kerosene this category will be reborn.

 

Photo Credits:

Lufthansa 747 by the author.
Pan Am 747 courtesy of Pan Am Historical Foundation.
DC-3 courtesy of Unsplash.
707 by Boeing, public domain.
707 thumbnail from the author’s postcard collection.

August 5, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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TALKING TURBULENCE
THE DEICE MAN COMETH

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

July 15, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TURBULENCE.
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April 23, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 27, 2024

IT WAS THE FRIDAY of Memorial Day weekend, 1979. I was in seventh grade, and a diehard airplane buff. It was a warm and sunny afternoon, and I was sitting in the dining room of the house I grew up in when the phone rang. It was a friend from school. He told me to turn on the television.

It had been a sunny day in Chicago, too, when just after 3 p.m. American Airlines flight 191, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with 271 people on board, roared down runway 32R at O’Hare International Airport, headed for Los Angeles. Just as the plane lifted off, its left engine broke loose. The entire engine, which weighed about eight thousand pounds, together with its connecting pylon and about three feet of the wing’s leading edge, flipped up over the wing and slammed back onto the runway.

As the engine ripped away, it severed hydraulic lines, releasing the hydraulic pressure that held the wing’s leading edge slats, deployed to provide critical lift during takeoff, in place. The slats then retracted, causing the left wing to stall. The plane rolled sharply to the left and plunged to the ground, disintegrating in a trailer park just beyond the airport perimeter.

Everybody aboard was killed, along with two people on the ground. With 273 fatalities, the crash of flight 191 was, and remains, the deadliest air disaster in U.S. history.

Descriptions of the accident are jarring enough. But we can see the horror, too, quite literally. Because a man named Michael Laughlin captured what might be the most haunting aviation photographs ever taken: a sequence of pictures showing the stricken jet literally sideways in the sky, in the throes of that ghastly twist to the left. And then the explosion. I don’t have permission to republish the photos here, but Google will oblige your queries.

When pylon cracks were found in several other DC-10s, the entire U.S. fleet was grounded for five weeks by the FAA. American, United, Northwest, Western and Continental were forced to pull all of their DC-10s from service. Foreign carriers were banned from flying DC-10s into the country.

NTSB investigators would eventually lay most of the blame on faulty maintenance practices and FAA oversight thereof. American — and other airlines, too — had been using a workaround procedure that caused unseen cracks to form in the engine pylon. But design flaws played a role as well. Unlike other planes, the DC-10’s wing slats were held in the extended position by hydraulic pressure, not by a mechanical lock. When the detached engine sheared the hydraulic lines, the slats retracted and the left wing essentially ceased flying.

The stall warning system also lacked a critical redundancy. It was powered only from the left-side electrical system, which had failed when the engine broke away. Thus, the pilots never realized their jet was stalling. Had captain Walter Lux and his crew understood, aerodynamically, what was happening, it’s very possible — likely, even — the catastrophe would’ve been averted.

I’d flown with my family on an American DC-10 on a vacation to Bermuda only two months before O’Hare. In the photo below you can see my mother (in pink), my sister (yellow), and my grandmother (gray), climbing the airstairs on the Bermuda tarmac. It’s possible — who knows — this was the same jet that would plummet to earth on May 25th.

The DC-10 had a checkered past even before O’Hare. In 1974, the horrific crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 outside Paris was caused by a defectively designed cargo door and a poorly reinforced cabin floor. McDonnell Douglas, in a race wtih rival Lockheed to produce a three-engined widebody jet, had hurriedly built a plane with a door that it knew was unsound; then, in the aftermath, they tried covering the whole thing up. It was reckless, maybe criminal.

The plane’s reputation was such that some people refused to ride on one. This included one passenger booked on AA 191 who, learning that he’d be boarding a DC-10, switched his travel plans at the last minute, effectively saving his life.

After the 191 crash, American began swapping out the “DC-10 Luxury Liner” decals from the plane’s nose, replacing them with a more generic “American Airlines Luxury Liner.”

So where am I going with this? I’m not sure, to be honest. But here on the 45th anniversary of flight 191, on Memorial Day no less, the story feels important.

And it hardly needs saying that what happened to the DC-10 reminds us in no small way of the ongoing drama of Boeing’s 737 MAX. The similarities are uncanny: multiple crashes, a grounding, a manufacturer accused of negligence and shoddy design.

In the case of the DC-10, fines were paid, lawsuits were settled, technical fixes were put in place. (Among the lawsuits was one against McDonnell Douglas filed by the family of Captain Lux.) The plane soldiered on and Douglas regained the public’s trust (mostly; the 1989 United crash at Sioux City was another black eye). Time works wonders that way. The Clash would even shout out to the DC-10 on “Spanish Bombs,” from the London Calling album.

How things will pan out for the MAX, and for Boeing, remains to be seen.

For a thirteen year-old airplane nut in Boston, the most exciting thing about the FAA grounding in ’79 was a temporary influx of exotic airplanes into Logan. For a month carriers would substitute other types. United’s DC-10 to Chicago became a 747 — the only 747 I’d ever seen in that carrier’s livery. Swissair brought in DC-8s, Lufthansa sent 707s. And so on. New planes, new colors. I couldn’t get to the airport fast enough.

You can always count on a kid, I guess, to find a silver lining in something so awful as a plane crash.

The DC-10 wasn’t the prettiest plane of its day, lacking the grace of its main competitor, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. Both were three-engine widebody jetliners with room for around 250 people, and both were built with a center engine mounted in the tail. But the TriStar was the sleeker by far, with that center engine integrated into the rear fuselage through a sexy, S-shaped intake duct. Douglas just jammed the engine through the base of the fin, like they didn’t know what else to do with it. For the same reason, there was no mistaking it. Few planes had a more distinctive profile.

 
DC-10 PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR

May 28, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Related Stories:
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TURBULENCE.
SAFETY IN PERSPECTIVE

Photos by the author.