The Velvet Underground in Gerard Malanga’s famous photograph:
Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, Lou Reed and John Cale

October 27, 2013

LOU REED, founding member of the Velvet Underground and one of rock’s most influential musicians, died Sunday on Long Island at age 71. Reed had been ill for some time, and had undergone a liver transplant earlier this year.

This is the saddest news in music since the death of the great Joe Strummer in 2002.

Lou Reed’s career spanned close to five decades. Debating what was or wasn’t his most important work is of course a subjective and perhaps pointless exercise, but in my opinion Reed was responsible for three of the best rock songs of all time. Those would be “Sweet Jane,” “Rock & Roll,” and the seven-minute ode, “Oh! Sweet Nuthin!”

Remarkably, all three of these songs appear on the same album, 1970’s Loaded. The first two, in fact, are back-to-back as the record’s second and third tracks. I dare anybody to come up with a stronger one-two punch.

The greatness of those songs can be appreciated long-form, or parsed into seconds. Check out the drop, the gear-shift, at time 2:28 in the song “Rock & Roll.”

Understandably, “Sweet Jane” would become one of the most covered songs ever (my favorite version being the playful Jazz Butcher’s cover from the Gift of Music album in 1985).

Not to diminish the Velvets’ earlier, more avant-garde efforts (still waiting for one of the obits to mention “Sister Ray”), but it’s Loaded, whether because or in spite of its mainstream accessibility, that puts Lou Reed in the pantheon.

Meanwhile, as we know, celebrity deaths, like tropical storms (and plane crashes), seem to happen in threes — or at least in twos. Marcia Wallace, voice of Edna Krabapple on Fox TV’s “The Simpsons,” died this weekend at age 70.

Wallace joins Phil Hartman as the second “Simpsons” star to die during the show’s run. Hartman, the voice of actor/pitchman Troy McClure and the inept attorney Lionel Hutz, was murdered by his wife in 1998.

Maybe this is in bad taste, but perhaps the death of Ms. Wallace will persuade the execs at Fox to finally the pull the plug on America’s favorite family?

At its peak, between 1992 and 1996, “The Simpsons” was untouchable. “A spectacular five-year run,” said the writer Charles Bock in a recent issue of Harper’s “in which the show was as consistently funny and refreshing and innovative as anything in the history of broadcast television.”

Very true. And a very long time ago. In the years since, the show has gone from untouchable to unwatchable.

Creative decline is to some degree unavoidable and happens to everybody. How tragic it has been, though, for something once so brilliant as “The Simpsons” to have become so crass and embarrassing. The show once excelled with its masterfully hewn characters, rapid-fire comic timing and a welcome lack of the sort of self-congratulatory comic vanity the networks normally give us. The scripts were wry and irreverent, but never obnoxious. “The Simpsons” was art.

And then something — I don’t know what, precisely — began to go terribly wrong. There is no single moment — a switch of writers or producers, for instance — that commenced the demise, but within a season or two the scripts began falling apart. By 1998 the show was terrible, and has remained that way: tediously self-conscious, bloated with slapstick and annoying plots hitched cheaply to various events, celebrities, and products drawn from popular culture.

In its prime, only rarely would “The Simpsons” venture into pop culture or current events. Its plots and archetypes were fixed and timeless, which is much of what made the show so good for so long. Abandoning this approach is much of what ruined it.

Am I the only one who feels this way? In October, 1990, the openly gay actor Harvey Fierstein appeared in a fondly remembered episode playing Homer’s personal assistant, Karl. Watching this episode today, you see how deftly the writing and directing was able to incorporate the theme of implicit homosexuality. Not once is the word “gay” uttered; there are no political overtones or kitschy ironic references to Karl’s sexuality. By comparison, one needs only to endure the 1997 guest appearance of filmmaker John Waters to see how weak and witless the scripts would become. When Fierstein was asked to appear in a sequel to his 1990 appearance, he found the script so void of subtlety and overflowing with kitsch that he refused not only the initial offer, but a rewrite as well.

Whatever made the show sick, it so unraveled its DNA that today, watching re-runs, the eras are plainly distinct: a veteran fan can usually differentiate Simpsons “old” from Simpsons “new” within about the first ten seconds.

Sadly, the longer “The Simpsons” plays on, the weaker and more diluted it becomes in our cultural memory. Somebody pull the plug, please.

Okay, go ahead, start posting those insults in the comments boxes below. And be sure to include a snarky reminder that I’m a pilot, not a music or media critic, and that I should stick to aviation.

It’s difficult to broach the subject of creative decline, prevalent as it is, without drawing the usual criticisms: You’re stuck in the past, you’re a Luddite, you’re an old fart who hates change, etc.

I once wrote a column for Salon in which I tracked the fall of several well-known bands. All artforms are prone to this sort of arc, but it’s especially common in music. (Though maybe not inevitable: Loaded, that Velvet Underground album with three of the best-ever songs, was the band’s last.) For example I described The Replacements’ 1981 debut, Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out The Trash, as “the greatest garage rock album of all time,” while also submitting that the band’s later-career material, for which it is much better known, is by comparison a huge disappointment. Man, that got the letters coming in.

But I believe that I’m right. There’s a tendency, I think, for once-marginalized musicians to grow overconfident after achieving a certain measure of success. And when they do, their albums become overextended; self-conscious and self-indulgent. Tim, an album released in ’85, was the last memorable effort from the Replacements. Next came the gutless Pleased to Meet Me, marking the unfortunate point where the ‘Mats jumped the shark.

(If you need additional proof, Wikipedia reports that Green Day vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong said of seeing The Replacements perform live after the release of Pleased to Meet Me: “It changed my whole life.”)

This was around the same time that Husker Du, that other indie sensation from the Twin Cities, also jumped the shark. They signed with Warner Brothers and promptly treated us to an album named Candy Apple Grey. There are two outstanding cuts on that record: the bookends “Crystal” and “All This I’ve Done for You,” both written by Bob Mould. But they are poor compensation for the horror of Mould’s “Too Far Down” or the piano-laced abomination that is Grant Hart’s “No Promise Have I Made,” one of the most pretentious rock songs in history. Every copy of Candy Apple ought to be tracked down, baled up, and scuttled at sea.

(More proof? Armstrong and Green Day again, with a whole catalog of fantastic Husker songs to pick from, opted to cover “Don’t Want to Know if You Are Lonely,” a so-so cut from Candy Apple Grey.)

These sorts of collapses can happen surprisingly early in a band’s career. Consider REM, whose first two full-length albums, Murmur and Reckoning, are masterworks. But the latter was released in 1984, almost thirty years and dozens of watery, throw-away albums ago.

I think REM lost it around the time Michael Stipe decided to sing in actual lyrics rather than in tongues. If you’ve got a copy of Murmur around, throw on the song “Shaking Through.” It’s beautiful. And it’s also hilarious, because although Stipe sings in a slow and meticulous voice, with every syllable perfectly audible, you still can’t understand a single word he’s saying!

As a sign on a bin in a Boston record shop once put it: “REM: the only band that mutters!”

November 13, 2022

MAYBE YOU CAUGHT the footage. On Saturday afternoon at the Wings Over Dallas airshow in Texas, six people were killed in the midair collision of two vintage warplanes, including one of the few surviving examples of the B-17 bomber. Two of the six dead were retired American Airlines pilots. Another was an active Boeing 777 captain for United.

There are a few different videos of the accident, shot by spectators from different angles. You see the smaller plane, something called a P-63 Kingcobra, racing in from behind, nailing the B-17 in the midsection, almost as if it were aiming for it. The bomber instantly splits in half, spewing fragments, then plummets into the ground. As one of those pilots with a morbid fascination with air disasters, I confess to hitting the replay button multiple times.

If you do this, YouTube’s algorithms will send you on a greatest hits tour of previous airshow crashes. Of which there is no shortage. There’s the infamous B-52 crash in 1994, for instance. Or the ghastly footage from 1988 in Rammstein, Germany, when three planes from an Italian aerobatic team collided during a maneuver, sending a fireball into the crowd and killing 70 people. In 2002, 77 people died when a Russian-made Sukhoi fighter cartwheeled into the crowd at a show in Lviv, Ukraine.

Over on Wikipedia, meanwhile, a list of airshow fatalities runs for pages. Among the dozens of listings is a 2018 accident in Virginia that killed a pilot named Jon Thocker, a former colleague of mine who I flew with on numerous occasions.

All of which makes us ask: Has the time come, maybe, to put airshows to pasture? Is it really worth the risk? And is there not something anachronistic about these events? Are that many people still enthralled by the spectacle of planes doing loops and rolls?

Allow me to quote Sideshow Bob, from season seven of “The Simpsons”: “Air show? Buzz-cut Alabamians spewing colored smoke in their wizz-jets, to the strains of “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” What kind of country-fried rube is still impressed by that?”

Fair question.

Still from “The Simpsons,” 1995.

Not me, certainly. I’ve been to a few airshows over the years, but my interest in them is at best halfhearted. On a list of things I’d choose to do on a weekend afternoon, hanging out at an airshow is right up there with cleaning the bathroom. Oh, I might enjoy clambering around the aircraft on static display, but few things bore me more thoroughly than watching aerobatics, be it the Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, Red Arrows, or anyone else. I don’t know if you could pay me enough to attend Oshkosh, the big annual “fly-in” event up in Wisconsin that, for reasons not understood by me, draws hundreds of thousands.

Admitting this makes me feel a bit traitorous. I’m a professional pilot, after all; what’s wrong with me? Is there some visceral thrill I’m somehow immune to? But aviation is a broad field. Different aspects of it appeal to different people. Military aircraft, stunt flying, and so on, has never held my attention. My passion has always been the commercial realm: jetliners. As a kid I put together hundreds of plastic Revell kits of bombers and fighters, it’s true, but it was always the 747s and DC-10s that excited me more.

For that reason, if I were to attend an airshow, make it the one held every two years in Paris. At Le Bourget Airport, the focus is commercial planes. Though even here things can turn deadly. In Paris in 1973, a Tupolev Tu-144 — the Russian Concorde — crashed during a display flight killing the entire crew. This, too, you can watch on YouTube.

Maybe just stick with the static displays. Let kids get their pictures taken next to a B-2 bomber or a KC-10, or in the cockpit of an Airbus. But nix the daredevil fly-by stuff. Instead of risking life and limb, retired pilots can play golf or go fishing.

Related Story:

THE NOISY, SWEATY HELL OF SMALL PLANES
THE ARC OF CREATIVE DECLINE

October 24, 2022

LOTS GOING ON in the aviation world, beginning with the fact that I’ve retired my yellow highlighter. That’s right, I no longer carry a yellow highlighter as part of my pocket-flap ensemble of necessary cockpit gear.

Some months ago, you might recall, I talked about how, in the pocket of my (wrinkled) polyester pilot shirt, you’ll always find three things: a ballpoint pen, a highlighter, and a red Sharpie. The highlighter I’d use for marking up the flight plan. I’d go through it page by page, striking the important parts in yellow: the flight time, the alternates, the dispatcher’s desk number, the airport elevations, deferred maintenance items, ETP coordinates, etc.

Well, now that our flight plans have gone digital, there’s not much call for this. We still carry a hard copy version of the flight plan, it’s true, but at this point it’s just a backup, rolled and stuffed into a cubby hole near the center pedestal. And you can’t use a highlighter, really, on an iPad.

What I’m not letting go of, on the other hand, is my beloved red Sharpie.

The Sharpie is my tool for what we’ll call high-emphasis tasks, the most critical of which is putting my initials on the cap of my water bottle, to keep other pilots from drinking from it (there are sometimes four of us up there). I also use it for my scratch-pad notes. When I’m in the first officer’s seat on the 767, there’s a clipboard along the bottom ledge of the window, just to my right. I keep a folded piece of paper there on which I jot down various quick-reference info — a distillation of bullet points from the flight plan.

I prepare the sheet prior to departure, while still at the gate, as part of my preflight prep. The photo below is an example of a sheet used on a flight from Europe to the U.S. Here’s what it all means…

A. This is the flight number.

B. Planned flying time, wheels up to wheels down.

C. Arrival and departure times. Scheduled times are in red, in both local and UTC (Greenwich time). In this case, we’re scheduled to depart at 1110 local, and arrive at 1430 local. Or 1210 and 2030 respectively, in UTC. The addendum in pen, added after departure, is our arrival time based on when we actually took off. Today we’ll be 25 minutes early.

D. Fuel figures, in thousands of pounds. Block (B), minimum (M), and landing (L). Block fuel is our amount at pushback, which today will be 105,700 pounds. Minimum fuel is the lowest amount with which we’re permitted to commence the takeoff roll, in accordance with a slew of rules that we’ll save for another time. Landing fuel is our anticipated total at touchdown.

E. “300” is our initial expected flight level (altitude). That is, 30,000 feet, or “flight level three-hundred.” Below it I’ve written the name of the entry fix of our anticipated oceanic track, as well as our intended crossing altitude and speed. “LIMRI” is the fix name, and we hope to cross the Atlantic at 35,000 feet and Mach .79. This info will be added into the template of our oceanic clearance request.

F. We have 211 souls on board. That’s everyone: passengers, crew, and all the whiny kids riding in laps. The number below is the “assumed temperature” engine de-rate value used for takeoff (another topic for later). I’ll enter this into a datalink template later on; maintenance uses it to track engine performance.

G. This is the title of our assigned departure procedure (a series of initial routings, speeds and altitudes). We are cleared to depart via the “BELKO 6A.” I write it down because European departure controllers, on check-in after takeoff, often ask you to verbally verify which procedure you’re flying. Although you’ve got it loaded and have verified all the fixes and restrictions, the names can be confusing and easy to forget.

H. “T/A 50” means a transition altitude of 5,000 feet. This is the point at which our altimeters must be set to the standard pressure value of 29.92. This altitude varies country to country. “NADP” is a reminder that this airport requires us to fly a special noise-abatement departure procedure, with slightly different parameters for flap retraction and the setting of climb thrust.

I. Phonetic letter code (Foxtrot) for the most recent departure ATIS (Google it if you must), which I’ll pass along to ATC when necessary.

J. This empty section is where the arrival notes will go, later on. Items here might be the transition level for the destination airport, our gate number, and any anything else I might need to remember in a pinch. You might see radio frequencies here. For example, when flying into Los Angeles, controllers will often shift you from the north complex to the south complex, or vice-versa, on short notice, causing a flurry of arrival, approach, and taxi revisions. To stay a step ahead, I’ll write down all of the communications frequencies for tower, ground control and apron, in sequence, for both north and south sides. This info is on our charts, obviously, but it’s easier to have it on my cheat-sheet, ready to go, and not have to hunt around on my tablet while ATC is yelling at us.

Full disclosure: none of this is typical. Most pilots don’t bother writing much down aside from the flight number and maybe the departure fuel. But I’m a touch OCD, and, I don’t know, I’m just more comfortable this way. And it saves me from having to scroll through my iPad.

I suppose a regular pen would work just as well, but I like it all in red.

Related Story:

THINGS I BRING

Greg Norton, Grant Hart, and Bob Mould in 1984.

September 14, 2022

TODAY MARKS the fifth anniversary of the death of Grant Hart, drummer and co-vocalist of the Minneapolis trio Hüsker Dü. He passed away on September 14th, 2017, from liver cancer. He was 56.

I’ve been known, in my obsessive, not-at-all objective fan-boy opinion, to describe Grant as the greatest songwriter of the 1980s. While such statements are presumed to contain a measure of hyperbole, how much so is the question. The pantheon of 1980s songwriters is a formidable one. There’s Pat Fish and Billy Bragg. There’s the long-forgotten Roddy Frame. And Strummer and Jones, of course (most of whose brilliance had petered away by 1982 or so). Thinking as unbiasedly as I’m able to, I suppose I’d put Grant in third place, just behind Pat Fish (a.k.a the Jazz Butcher, another of my heroes who died recently) and Bragg.

Grant’s old band-mate, Bob Mould, is somewhere on that list as well. Although Mould ended up more famous, and continues making music to this day, it’s hard to argue that Grant wasn’t the more talented songwriter, if not the more prolific one. Perhaps ironically, among Grant’s finest moments are his backing vocals at the end of one of Mould’s best songs, “Divide and Conquer,” from the Flip Your Wig album in 1985. He almost steals it away.

Grant Hart’s greatest hits…

“Terms of Psychic Warfare”
“Pink Turns to Blue”
“It’s Not Funny Anymore”
“Books About UFOs”
“Keep Hanging On”
“Diane”
“The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill”
“Standing by the Sea”
“Turn on the News”
“She’s a Woman (And Now He is a Man)”

Subject to change, depending on my mood. If you’re unfamiliar and curious, you can do the YouTube thing and have a listen.

That final one on the list, I’ve always felt, rests as Grant’s most under-appreciated song. It’s also the last song I ever saw Hüsker Dü perform live, at a club called Toad’s, in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1987. He later sang a delicate acoustic version (a recording of which is one of my most treasured possessions), the last time I saw him play, in Boston around twelve years ago.

I was fortunate to meet Grant on several occasions, the first time in 1983, and I corresponded with him occasionally over the last couple of years of his life. Always gregarious, kind and accommodating, he even lent quotes to a few of my posts. I was a co-executive producer of “Every Everything,” the Gorman Bechard documentary about Grant’s life and work.

I could go on. I’ll finish with a small memory from a night in 1984. I was with some friends at a nightclub called The Living Room, in Providence, Rhode Island, standing in the parking lot just outside. Grant was there, feeding pieces of cheese to a stray dog. He’d hold out the pieces, one by one, raising his arm a little bit each time. And the dog would keep jumping, higher and higher, as everyone watched and laughed.

Related Stories:

THE GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME
THE (SECOND) GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME

Hüsker Dü photo by Daniel Corrigan.
Grant Hart thumbnail photo by Naomi Petersen.

September 13, 2022

WHAT BOEING NEEDS to build isn’t a fancy new long-range widebody. What it needs to build is a replacement for the 757.

When it debuted in the early 1980s, the twin-engined 757 was ahead of its time, and it went on to sell quite well until the production line closed fifteen years ago. By now the plane is — or should be — obsolete. Indeed it’s rare to spot a 757 outside of the United States. But here at home it remains popular, a mainstay of the fleets at United, Delta, FedEx and UPS, who together operate over two-hundred of them. They’ve kept the plane on their rosters so long for good reason: its capabilities are unmatched, and there’s nothing that can replace it.

The 757 is maybe the most versatile jetliner Boeing has ever built — a medium-capacity, high-performing plane that is able to turn a profit on both short and longer-haul routes — domestic or international; across the Mississippi or across the North Atlantic. The 757 makes money flying between New York and Europe, and also between Atlanta and Jacksonville. United and Delta have flown 757s from their East Coast gateways on eight-hour services to Ireland, Scandinavia, and even Africa. You’ll also see it on 60-minute segments into Kansas City, Cleveland, and Tampa.

Along the way, it meets every operational challenge. Short runway? Stiff headwinds? Full payload? No problem. With 180 passengers, the plane can safely depart from a short runway, climb directly to cruise altitude, and fly clear across the country — or the ocean. Nothing else can do that.

And it’s a great-looking machine to boot, sleek and muscular on its tall, twin-tandem landing gear.

I know this in part because I’ve been piloting the 757 for the past dozen years, along with its somewhat bigger sibling, the 767. The 787 is an excellent replacement for the latter, but what’s going to supersede the 757?

Boeing has been pitching its latest 737 variants as the right plane for the job. Airbus touts the A321. Am I the only one rolling my eyes? Sure these planes are sophisticated and efficient, but neither has the range, power, or capacity to match the 757.

With the 737, Boeing took what essentially was a regional jet — the original 737-100 first flew in 1967, and was intended to carry a hundred or so passengers on flights of around 400 miles — and has pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and pushed the thing to the edge of its envelope, over and over, through a long series of derivatives, from the -200 through the -900 and now onward to the 737 MAX. In other words, it has been continuously squeezed into missions it was never really intended for.

The 737’s range allows cross-country pairings, but transoceanic markets are mostly out of the question. It carries fewer passengers and less cargo than a 757, and at heavy weights it is often altitude-restricted. For a jet of its size, it uses huge amounts of runway and has startlingly high takeoff and landing speeds. The cockpit, architecturally unchanged from the 707, is incredibly cramped and noisy. The “Frankenplane,” I call it. I don’t care how many changes and updates the plane has undergone; at heart, it’s still a blasted 737 — a 55 year-old design trying to pass itself off as a modern jetliner.

I was jammed into the cockpit jumpseat — more of a jump-bench, actually — on an American Airlines 737-800 not long ago, flying from Los Angeles to Boston. Man, if we didn’t need every foot of LAX’s runway 25R, at last getting off the ground at a nearly supersonic 165 knots, then slowly step-climbing our way to cruise altitude. What would it have been like in the opposite direction, I wondered — a longer flight, from a shorter runway, in the face of winter headwinds?

By contrast, I recently piloted a 757 on a flight from Boston to San Francisco. At flaps 20, and even with a de-rated thirst setting, we lifted off at a docile 130 knots from Logan’s stubby, 7000-foot runway 9, with nearly half the runway still remaining! With every seat full and seven hours’ worth of fuel, we climbed directly to 36,000 feet and flew all the way to California. That’s performance.

Airbus, for its part, says that its A321, a stretched-out version of the A320, is the more adequate replacement than the 737. Perhaps it is, but this plane, too, fails to match the 757’s range or payload capabilities. The newest variant, the longer-range A321LR might prove more suitable, time will tell. If so, and if Airbus begins to rack up orders, then shame on Boeing.

What Boeing has long needed to do is design us a new airframe — the 797 — that can equal the 757’s remarkable combination of performance and economy. The 797 would be a clean-sheet 190-ish seater with a high-tech wing, fuel-efficient engines and a modernized flight deck. This is well within the technical expertise, if not the imagination, of the world’s largest plane-maker.

You can argue this plane already exists, at least as a template. I’m talking about the 767. Specifically, the older 767-200. The 767-200, which debuted in 1982, was quickly superseded by the larger -300, many of which remain in service. It’s an obsolete model seen today only in a scattering of freighters. But in terms of size, range, and capacity, it’d be just about perfect as a 757 replacement; a mini-widebody with outstanding performance and versatility.

In my opinion, the 797 ought to have been announced the very day the 757 was taken out of production, but for years the company has balked at such an endeavor, insisting that the market for such a plane, estimated at anywhere from 300 to a thousand examples, is too limited. This strikes me as disingenuous; an excuse to flood the market with yet more 737s. And early interest in Airbus’s extended-range A321s bears me out. Indeed, failure to build the 797 has all the makings of another Boeing boondoggle.

We’ll see what happens. For now, the 757 flies on.

Related Stories:

ODE TO THE 767.
FAREWELL DOUGLAS. TWO CLASSIC JETLINERS ARE PUT TO PASTURE.

Delta photo courtesy of Alberto Riva.
Nose-on photo by the author.
757 silhouette courtesy of Unsplash.

January 6th, 2014

IN MARCH, 2013, American Airlines unveiled its first major identity change in forty-plus years. The news broke as the carrier prepared to emerge from bankruptcy and prepared for its merger with US Airways.

American had bucked more than three decades of design fads. It’s distinctive silver skin, tricolor stripe and gothic “AA” logo dated back to the days of the its 707 “Astrojets.” Heck, my first ever airplane ride, in 1974, was on an American 727 decked out in the very same paintjob that, until last year, was American’s signature.

It was never anything beautiful, but what distinguished it was the logo — the famous “AA,” its red and blue letters bisected by the proud, cross-winged eagle. This was one of the last true icons of airline branding left in the world. Created by Massimo Vignelli in 1967, it was everything a logo should be: elegantly simple, dignified, and instantly recognizable.

The redesign features a U.S. flag motif tail, a faux-silver fuselage, and an entirely new logo that is so unspeakably ugly that it nearly brings tears to my eyes.

The logo — the trademark, the company emblem, to be reproduced on everything from stationery to boarding passes — is the heart of an airline’s graphic identity, around which everything else revolves. It has been said that the true test of a logo is this: can it be remembered and sketched, freehand and with reasonable accuracy, by a young child? The Pan Am globe, the Lufthansa crane, the Delta tricorn, Air New Zealand’s “Koru” and many others meet this criterion beautifully.

As did the AA emblem. Maybe they need a tweaking or two over time, but the template of such logos — the really good ones — remains essentially timeless. American Airlines had one of the really good ones. And if you’ve got something like that, you dispense with it at your peril.

I was at Kennedy Airport recently and had the opportunity to view several American Airlines jets — some in the old paintjob, others in the new one. I’m sorry, but there was nothing old or anachronistic looking about the AA emblem. It did not need to be “refreshed,” or “modernized,” as some have suggested. Particularly if you’re replacing it with something so utterly vapid.

What exactly is that new, Greyhound Bus-esque logo? It looks like a linoleum knife poking through a shower curtain. If it’s not the worst corporate trademark the airline business has ever seen, I don’t know what is. I can’t imagine a kid with crayons trying to sketch it. Why would anybody want to? It evokes nothing, it says nothing, it means nothing. It gives American Airlines all the look and feel of a bank or a credit card company. I cannot believe how awful a mark this is, and how anybody signed off on it I’ll never understand.

Its uglier, even, than the hideous Horus head of the new EgyptAir. It’s uglier, even, than the “rising splotch” that Japan Airlines came up with a few years back to replace its beautiful tsurumaru — the circular, red and white crane/Rising Sun it had used since 1960 (and which, by the way, JAL has wisely resurrected).

I’m hardly the only person put off by the new branding. It was controversial from the start, and among those who hated it most were thousands of American’s own employees. Finally, last month, CEO Doug Parker put things to a vote, allowing the carrier’s employees to choose between the new look, or a quasi-retro design that incorporated both the old and new schemes.

By a margin of about 2,000 votes, of some 60,000 cast, workers chose to stay with the new look.

Parker says he is happy about the result. But if he got what he wanted, that’s probably because the vote was effectively rigged. Parker won by making the airplane’s tail the focus of the vote. This misses the point, because like it or hate it, the piano key tail isn’t really the problem. It’s the logo that’s the problem. Neither of the choices dealt with the linoleum knife. In fact, Parker’s retro design would have kept both logos in use — a ridiculous, half-baked appeasement that would have left the plane looking manic and jumbled. A company can’t have two logos.

The smarter compromise would have been, and should have been, to keep the new tail, but dispense immediately with the linoleum knife and put the “AA” on the fuselage, as shown below courtesy of yours truly and Photoshop. Had this option been put to a vote, I suspect it would have won by a healthy margin:

To be clear, I’m not arguing that American didn’t need a spruce-up. The striping and typeface were overdue for a revision, and livery changes are all but mandatory, it seems, when airlines exit bankruptcy. But I can live with the tail and with the faux-silver body paint. Doing away with the AA symbol, however, was a tragic and unspeakably bad call.

Each time one of American’s newly painted planes taxis past me, I wince.

RELATED STORIES:

The Yin and Yang of Airline Identity, part 1.
The Yin and Yang of Airline Identity, part 2.