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“Argo” and the 747

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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November 19, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

Justice, of a Kind, For MH17

November 19, 2022

LAST WEEK, a court in Holland found three men responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 eight years ago.

Back in 2014, operating in eastern Ukraine, they were part of a separatist group under Russian control, responsible for firing the “Buk” rocket that struck the Boeing 777 at 33,000 feet during a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Cruising just above restricted commercial airspace, the plane had been misidentified as a military target. The men — Igor Firkin, Sergei Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko — were found guilty in absentia and sentenced to life. Currently free and living in Russia, it’s unlikely they ever will serve time.

MH17 was carrying 298 people from 17 countries, including 80 children. That ghastly total puts MH17 at number seven among the deadliest air disasters of all time. In the Netherlands, where 196 of the victims lived, the catastrophe was and remains front-page news. Strangely, the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about it. It never stayed in the headlines for especially long, and shortly thereafter it ceased to be much of a topic, even in aviation circles. It’s peculiar how many lesser disasters, even those that occurred decades ago, are fresher in our minds. Ask a pilot about MH17 and you’re liable to get a blank stare. “Which one was that?”

Is that a symptom of our diminished attention spans, or something else? Maybe it was the certain-ness of the accident, and the ugly brutality of it. Unlike many crashes, there was no mystery or mystique surrounding this one. From the very first day it was clear what had happened, and it was pretty grotesque.

It’s also true that Malaysia Airlines had already earned its fifteen minutes of infamy. It’s the carrier’s other major mishap, earlier that same year, that is more widely remembered and discussed. That’d be MH370, of course, the vanished 777, only a few parts of which have ever been found, washed up on beaches on Mauritius and Reunion islands. That one gets people talking, albeit nonsensically much of the time.

MH17 wasn’t the first commercial jet downed by the Russians. Many of you will remember the tragedy of Korean Air Lines flight 007 in 1983. The Boeing 747 was on a flight from New York to Seoul when it strayed off course and was blown up by a Soviet fighter jet. The worldwide outrage the followed was a lot more intense than anything stoked by MH17.

Ditto after the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iran Air jetliner in July, 1988, killing 290 people.

The Iran Air incident sits at number eight on that list of deadliest disasters. KAL 007 was, until 2014, the tenth worst, nudged to number eleven by MH17. This means that three of history’s eleven worst crashes were planes brought down by missiles. Add in Lockerbie (number 10), plus the 1985 Air India bombing (number 5), and five of the worst eleven — nearly half — were either missiles or bombs.

It’s not entirely fair, lumping those together. The bombings were deliberate; the shoot-downs were cases of mistaken identity. We will save for later the bigger and deeper conversation over what does or doesn’t constitute an “accident,” and the sticky applications of culpability. MH17, Iran Air, KAL 007; each of these involved a certain amount of recklessness. At what point, though, does an error become criminal?

And this isn’t the first time someone has been convicted in absentia for destroying a commercial plane. In 1999, a court in Paris found six Libyans guilty for the bombing of UTA flight 772 ten years earlier, including the brother-in-law of Moammar Khadafy. None of the six stood trial. The explosion, over a remote part of the Sahara, killed 170 people. A U.S. judge later ordered Libya to pay $6 billion in damages on behalf of seven Americans who’d been on board.

Malaysia Airlines logo

Some of my U.S. readers have asked why the Malaysia Airlines flights are always referred to alpha-numerically: MH17 and MH370. Most Americans don’t realize that flight numbers are prefixed by a two-character airline code. The code for Malaysia Airlines is MH. In the United States we normally drop these prefixes, but they are used routinely elsewhere. This is discussed in more detail in chapter seven of my book.

And the name of the airline is Malaysia Airlines. It’s not “Malaysian Airlines,” and certainly not “Malaysian Air.”

Malaysia Airlines was formed in the early 1970s after its predecessor, Malaysia-Singapore Airlines (MSA), split to become Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines. Both carriers are renowned for their outstanding service, and cabin crews of both airlines wear the iconic, floral-pattern “Sarong Kabaya” batik — an adaptation of the traditional Malay kebaya blouse.

Malaysia Airlines’ logo, pictured above, is an indigenous kite known as the Wau. True story: In 1993 I was in the city of Kota Bahru, a conservative Islamic town in northern Malaysia close to the Thai border, when we saw a group of little kids flying Wau kites. At the time I didn’t realize where the airline’s logo had come from, but I recognized the pattern immediately. It was one of those airline/culture crossover moments that we aerophiles really savor.

 

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November 19, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

The Riddle May Not be Deep

June 18, 2019

WILLIAM LANGWEISCHE, long one of the country’s preeminent journalists, has hit one out of the park with his story in the most recent Atlantic about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. It’s by far the best-written, best-researched, and all-around most compelling piece one can read on the topic. It also has brought me to terms as to what most likely happened on the night of March 8, 2014.

From the beginning I’ve been afraid of the rogue pilot theory — the idea that one of the pilots, presumably Captain Zaharie Shah, was responsible for the flight’s disappearance. I suppose this is partly out of pride. I don’t want it to have been Zaharie, because the idea of the captain hijacking his own aircraft and killing over two-hundred people shames the entire profession.

I’ve instead been noncommittal, usually taking the “two main possibilities” route. After acknowledging at least the chance of Zaharie being the culprit, I propose a second, more complicated scenario in which both pilots became incapacitated:

First, there’s a rapid or explosive cabin decompression. The decompression is caused by an explosion of the crew oxygen bottle, down in the avionics compartment. This not only knocks out the pilots’ oxygen supply, but causes many of the plane’s electronics to fail as well, thus explaining the loss of transponder contact, etc. Zaharie and first officer Hamid commence an initial turn-back toward the airport on the island of Penang (this is the hairpin turn seen on the plots), and enter an initial waypoint or two in the navigation system. They’ve donned their masks, but of course there’s no oxygen flowing, and within seconds they’re unconscious. Minutes later, as the drop-down masks are depleted, so is everyone in the cabin.

After passing Penang, the plane turns right, up the Strait of Malacca and past the northern end of Sumatra — again, in accordance with what’s seen on the satellite plots. It does this because… well, who knows what waypoints may have been in the FMS at that juncture. Maybe, in the throes of losing consciousness, the pilots had typed in nonsense. Heck, there could have been a whole sequence of irrelevant waypoints in the box. Or, is there an arrival procedure or an approach into Penang that might trace a similar outline? Later, the plane defaults to heading mode, and off it goes southwards on a long straight line to oblivion.

Of course, while such a theory explains some of the evidence, it doesn’t explain all of it. For example, it doesn’t account for the plane’s electrical systems later powering up again. Neither can it explain, my thoughts above notwithstanding, why certain course changes occurred precisely where and when they did. The flight path. Langeweische takes this to the limit:

“It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error,” he writes. “Computer glitch, control-system collapse, squall lines, ice, lightning strike, bird strike, meteorite, volcanic ash, mechanical failure, sensor failure, instrument failure, radio failure, electrical failure, fire, smoke, explosive decompression, cargo explosion, pilot confusion, medical emergency, bomb, war, or act of God — none of these can explain the flight path.”

The problem with my scenario is that it requires further and further layering to make sense. Not just this happened, but also that — and so on.

The only thing that easily and neatly accounts for all of it is Zaharie.

Occam’s Razor. And I think the author has changed my mind, particularly after revealing what other people said and knew about the captain and his personal life — things the Malaysian government has been all too keen on concealing.

Then there’s Zaharie’s home simulator. The idea of a 777 captain owning and spending time on a home simulator in the first place is rather strange. What they found inside it is stranger still. Explains Langeweische:

“Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight — in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead, he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone.”

While this mystery will never be conclusively solved, that’s about the closest thing to a smoking gun we’re liable to find. As Langeweische puts it, rather understatedly,”The simulator flight cannot easily be dismissed as random coincidence.”

Does locating the wreckage even matter anymore? The voice and data recorders are out there somewhere, nestled invisibly in some immense undersea fissure or canyon, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. The search vessels may have swept right over them. But from the start, they were never likely to tell us much. Malaysian investigators, meanwhile, bumbling and obfuscating from the outset, operating on behalf of a corrupt and secretive regime, want only for the entire story to, if you’ll pardon the irony, vanish forever.

“The important answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia,” Langeweische concludes. “That should be the focus moving forward. The riddle may not be deep. That is the frustration here. The answers may well lie close at hand, but they are more difficult to retrieve than any black box.”

 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

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November 19, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

Permanent Mystery

March 14, 2022

I WAS AT A WINERY outside Porto, Portugal, when the phone rang. I took the call and walked out front to the parking lot. It was a Sunday afternoon, March 9th, 2014. The sun was out.

It was a woman from the BBC. A Malaysia Airlines plane had gone missing, she explained. It had vanished the night before, somewhere over the ocean near Vietnam. That’s all anyone knew, really.

With almost nothing to go on, I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sure they’ll find it within a day or two,” I told her. Other accidents came to mind — planes that had fallen into the ocean. Just a few years earlier had been the Air France crash off Brazil, for instance. It took a little while, but they found it.

But then a day became two days, became three days, became a week. The possibility struck me that the jet might never be found.

Eight years later and MH370 is still missing. Only a few scattered pieces have ever been retrieved, washed ashore on the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion, presumably hundreds or even thousands of miles from the actual, unknown spot were the flight met its end.

If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents. What makes this one different, maybe, is that we live in an age that expects easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything, with a fetishized belief that “technology,” whatever that even means anymore, can answer any question and fix any problem — and therefore locate any plane.

But it can’t. Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean, both in breadth and depth, versus the comparative speck of a 777. Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. All of that is fallible, one way or the other. The wreckage is out there somewhere, nestled invisibly in some immense undersea fissure or canyon, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. The search vessels may have swept right over it.

Consider this: We’ve all watched airplanes high in the sky. A plane flying 12,000 feet above you (that’s the average depth of the Indian Ocean) appears as just the smallest gray speck, its profile visible but indistinct. Now, imagine you’re looking down at that same plane. Except, you’re looking down not through clear sky, but through 12,000 feet of murky seawater. Indeed, for most of that depth you’re staring into aphotic blackness. And the airplane you’re looking for is, in all likelihood, no longer in the shape of an airplane; it’s in thousands of fragments scattered across miles of rugged seabed.

As the saying goes, good luck with that, even with sophisticated imaging equipment. That’s an anecdotal analysis, ignorant of the science of whatever fancy scanners are used to search the ocean floor, but I have a sinking suspicion (pardon the wording), the jet is lost forever.

And if it were to be discovered, what then? What good is a voice or data recorder that’s spent the last eight years under water?

There are a number of theories, two of which are the most plausible: Did the plane wander off course after a mishandled cabin depressurization, its crew and passengers unconscious, until running out of fuel? Or did captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijack his own flight? While I lean towards the latter, my insights aren’t any better than anyone else’s.

And that’s about as far as we’re going to get. Solving this mystery has become, I’m afraid, all but impossible. We’ll have to make do with our hunches.

 

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November 19, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

Tragedy Over Tehran


UPDATE: January 11, 2019

AFTER THREE days of denials, Iran has admitted that its military was accidentally responsible for last Wednesday’s downing of a Ukrainian 737 outside of Tehran. Now the politics will kick in, with calls for formal apology, restitution, and so on. As these things tend to go, expect a lot of drawn-out diplomatic haggling while the story fades from the headlines.

So there you have it. Ukraine International flight 752 becomes history’s fourth-deadliest military shoot-down of a civilian jetliner:

1. in 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17, a Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, is blown from the sky over Ukraine by a rocket fired by pro-Russia separatists. All 298 passengers and crew are killed.

2. In 1988, the crew of the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes accidentally shoots down Iran Air flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard.

3. In 1983, 269 are killed when Korean Air Lines flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet fighter jet after straying off course — and into Soviet airspace.

4. In 2020, an Iranian military battery mistakes Ukraine International flight 752 for a cruise missile and destroys it, killing 176 passengers and crew.

5. In 1973, Israeli Air Force jets fire on a Libyan Arab Airlines 727 over the Sinai. The plane crash-lands in the desert near the Suez Canal killing 108 of the 113 people on board.

It’s ironic, if that’s the right word, to see both Iran and Ukraine as unwitting partners in this latest tragedy. Ukraine was the setting for the Malaysia Airlines catastrophe, while Iran was host to the Vincennes debacle.

And this is the second such incident in just five years. I wouldn’t call this a trend, exactly, but we’re liable to see it again. All around the world one finds increasingly dangerous hotspots, where twitchy triggermen are armed with extremely lethal weaponry. You also have more airplanes flying than ever before.

Several nations have announced they will, for the time being, no longer permit their carriers to operate in Iranian airspace. Lufthansa has canceled its Tehran flights altogether.

Commercial flights between the U.S. and destinations in the Middle East and India have, until now, routinely passed through Iranian airspace. I have several pretty out-the-window photos of the snow-dusted Iranian mountains, as well as the cities of Isfahan and Qom, taken during flights out of Dubai and Doha. Emirates and Qatar Airways are now re-routing their U.S.-bound flights over Iraq instead.

I remember piloting a flight to Mumbai a few years ago and passing just north of Tehran. It was striking how well the Iranian controllers spoke English. More clearly than most European controllers.

 

UPDATE: January 9, 2019

U.S. OFFICIALS now say that Ukraine International flight 752 was shot down by a pair of surface-to-air missiles presumably fired in error by the Iranian military. This was a suspicion from the start, and although nothing is definitive, things are trending strongly in this direction.

Authorities in Iran, for their part, aren’t being especially forthcoming, which is hardly unexpected.

Ordinarily in incidents where a 737 airliner is involved, Boeing and the NTSB would participate in the investigation. Tensions being what they are the moment, that’s not going to happen. However, the Iranians say they will share necessary information with Canada, Sweden, Ukraine, and possibly other nations whose citizens were aboard the doomed flight. whether this information will include the plane’s data and voice recorders isn’t clear.

 

UPDATER: January 8, 2020

EARLIER TODAY, a Ukraine International Airlines flight carrying 176 people slammed into the ground shortly after takeoff from Imam Khomeini International Airport outside Tehran. There were no survivors. The plane was a Boeing 737-800 — the most popular of the many 737 variants.

It is safe to say there is no connection between this crash and the 737 MAX disasters. The -800 is an older model and has no MCAS system. Otherwise, however, there’s little to go on.

News reports keep bringing up “engine failure.” This can mean different things, but a 737, like any commercial jetliner, is fully capable of flying with one engine, so a simple failure, strictly speaking, is very unlikely to be the cause. If an engine somehow was the culprit, it would need to have been an uncontained failure, whereby the engine’s internal components, which rotate at thousands of RPM, punctured the wing or fuselage, touching off a fire or loss of control.

It hardly needs saying, meanwhile, with the crash coming only hours after Iran launched a missile attack on a U.S. compound in Iraq, that something more sinister could be at hand. An errant shoot-down, an intentional shoot-down, a Russian sabotage — pick your poison. Iranian authorities are, for now, refusing to hand over the voice or data recorders, which means either nothing or everything.

On July 3, 1988, the crew of the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, distracted during a skirmish with Iranian gunboats in the Straits of Hormuz, accidentally shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300 en route to Dubai, killing 290 civilians. The U.S. later awarded over $60 million to the families of the passengers. Most Americans don’t remember this, but it has never been forgotten in Iran, where some hardliners claim the shoot-down was intentional (no evidence suggests this, though the Vincennes crew clearly was negligent).

Could Wednesday’s crash in Tehran be some kind of revenge? It’s doubtful, as there were no Americans on board. Unless that too is part of the deadly geopolitical chess match we seem to be playing now. Still, there’s no denying the crash — the timing, the location, the seizing of the recorders — is suspicious.

Ukraine International operates 36 aircraft, most of them Boeings, including roughly two dozen 737s.

 

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November 19, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

RIP Lou Reed

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!”

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November 13, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

Daredevil Debacles

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.

 

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November 13, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

Me and My Sharpie

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.

 

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October 24, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

The Death of Grant Hart, Five Years Later

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.

 

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

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September 14, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

Ode to the 757

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.

 

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

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September 13, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

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