March 4, 2022

THE RUSSIAN invasion of Ukraine is impacting commercial aviation on multiple fronts — as wars tend to do. It remains to be seen how long the effects last, or how deeply they’ll be felt. Will NATO countries join the fight? Will tourists shy away from European destinations in general? Even in a best case scenario, this is the last thing the airline industry needs, just as the coronavirus pandemic appears to be winding down.

Oil is knocking at $130 a barrel as nations discuss ratcheting up sanctions, possibly banning the import of Russian petroleum. Although jet fuel prices have been higher in the past, the problem, right now, is that airlines lack the pricing power to stay in synch. Business travel is still down considerably, especially in transoceanic markets, and passing these costs to the customer is more difficult than it was in, say, 2008, when oil was last this expensive. The price could skyrocket further; it could stabilize or fall. Nobody knows.

Meanwhile, Russia has closed off its airspace to foreign carriers. The big issue here isn’t so much the cancellation of flights to and from Russian cities, but rather those routes overflying Russian territory, especially the country’s northern areas, including Siberia. Russia is a gigantic piece of land, and hundreds of long-haul flights overfly these regions weekly on routes connecting Europe and North America with Asia.

This might not make sense if you’re looking at a flat map or atlas; you need a globe to better visualize it. The shortest distance from the U.S. to India, for example, goes more or less due north, up over Siberia and down through the very heart of Russia. A flight from the U.K., France or Germany headed to Japan, China or Korea, similarly relies on Russian airspace.

United Airlines has suspended its flights to Delhi, but on the whole it’s the Asian and European airlines who are feeling the pain. Most flights between the U.S. and Pacific Rim cities can be re-routed without much trouble. This isn’t so for flights between Asia and Europe. Alternate routings are possible — down through the Gulf, across India and such — but they’re substantially longer, in some cases requiring a stopover. Not only does this increase fuel costs, it wreaks havoc with logistics, crew staffing and scheduling. Longer travel times mean that passengers can no longer make onward connections, and so on. It’s a very expensive problem, with disruptions rippling through an airline’s operation.

JAL and All Nippon have cancelled all of their flights to Europe. Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and British Airways have been canceling or re-routing dozens of departures. This simply isn’t sustainable.

To say nothing of the airspace over Ukraine, which has become a no-fly zone for pretty much anybody (though, as of a few days ago, Air India’s flights to and from Europe were still passing overhead). The skies above Ukraine are obviously dangerous, but this isn’t new. People have largely forgotten about it, but eight years ago, pro-Russian forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the country’s disputed Donbas region, killing 298 people. (In 1983, a Soviet fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007 after it strayed into restricted airspace over Sakhalin Island, killing all 246 on board. And in 1988, the Navy cruiser Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing 290.)

Reciprocally, many nations have banned Russian-registered planes from their own airspace. This includes the European Union, Canada, and the United States. The big loser here is Aeroflot, which had been flying to dozens of European capitals, as well as to New York and Los Angeles. Aeroflot’s routes to Caribbean holiday destinations are affected as well.

Even worse for Aeroflot, Boeing and Airbus have cut ties with the carrier (as well as with other Russian airlines), and will no longer offer support or supplies. Aircraft lessors have rescinded their leases, and Sabre, which acts as Aeroflot’s online booking agent, will no longer allow customers to book seats. This will severely cripple Russian’s commercial aviation sector, if not ground it completely.

One of the oldest airlines in the world, Aeroflot began flying 98 years ago. In its Cold War heydays, it was by far the largest airline in existence, roughly the size of all the U.S. carriers combined. Numerous smaller airlines splintered off following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Aeroflot itself carries on, still using its elegant, Soviet-era hammer and sickle logo.

Aeroflot has never had much of a reputation either for service or safety. Some of that is deserved, some not. Flipping through the crash records from the 1960s through the 2000s, the Aeroflot name does appear more than any other. But you have to consider its size at the time. Add up all of the crashes involving American carriers during the same span, and now the totals are a lot more equal. Since the Soviet breakup it has had only four fatal accidents, one of which involved a subsidiary.

One of my biggest thrills was riding aboard Aeroflot in 1986. We flew from Moscow to Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was still called at the time, on a Tupolev Tu-154 — the Russian version of the 727. A few days later, on the quick hop from from Leningrad to Helsinki, it was a Tu-134. The babushka cabin attendants served us a cup of tasteless, urine-colored apple juice and what appeared to be a hamburger bun stuffed with newspaper.

Next to me on the plane out of Moscow sat a Muscovite about my age –- a blond kid with a jawline like the villainous commie boxer from Rocky IV. This was 1986, remember, with the Cold War still on, and my seatmate was aghast at the novelty of encountering an actual American. He was thrilled to shake my hand and try out his English. He’d just gotten a new camera, and he took it from the overhead bin to show me proudly. At least I think it was a camera. Oversized and clunky, the device looked like a blender held sideways. He kept calling it “my apparatus.”

Our high-altitude détente continued all the way to Leningrad. “I can show you of America,” said my friend. And with that he took out a piece of paper. Beaming, he proceeded to draw me a picture of the World Trade Center, accurately placing the north tower’s cloud-popping rooftop antenna. Pointing to the buildings he said, “One hundred and ten stories!”

Ukraine, by the way, is the home of Antonov, which has been building commercial airplanes since 1946. Formerly known as the Antonov Design Bureau, the company is named for its founding designer, Oleg Antonov, and for decades was a supplier of passenger and cargo planes for the Soviet Union.

Last week, at Hostomel Airport outside Kiev, Russian forces destroyed the only example of the Antonov An-225, the six-engine behemoth originally built to carry the Soviet space shuttle, “Buran.” It was the largest airplane ever made.

I once saw the An-225 at Bradley Airport outside of Hartford, Connecticut, of all places. It had been chartered there to pick up medical equipment, we were told, for the treatment of victims of the Chernobyl disaster.

 

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February 8, 2022

THIS WEEK, Frontier airlines announced it would acquire Spirit Airlines, thus turning two of the nation’s biggest low-cost carriers (LCCs) into one.

What does this mean for consumers? Most importantly, fingers crossed, it means we won’t have to look at Spirit’s ugly yellow planes anymore. Beyond that, I really don’t know. Not a lot, probably. Maybe fares will go up in some markets. Maybe they won’t. Any time airlines combine forces, there’s a resulting media chorus about all the awful ways in which the merger will impact travel: higher prices, fewer flight options, and so on. The actual repercussions tend to be subtle.

Frontier’s main hub is in Denver. Spirit’s headquarters are in Florida, with a concentration on eastern cities, as well as numerous routes into Latin America and the Caribbean. In this respect the merger makes sense, with the two company’s route structures complementing one another. A “classic” merger, if you will. Once approved by regulators, the new carrier will be the fifth largest airline in the United States, just behind American, United, Delta, and Southwest.

Frontier was established in 1994, and operates about 110 aircraft. It’s not to be confused with the original Frontier airlines, which collapsed in 1986 after a boondoggled takeover by PeopleExpress. Spirit was founded in 1993, and currently flies 175 planes, all of them of the Airbus A320 series.

Mergers, acquisitions, takeovers. Consolidation is the story of commercial aviation in this country. Take a look at the lineages of American, Delta and United. Those three alone carry the DNA of at least twenty carriers absorbed over the years.

Today we have fewer airlines overall, but there’s plenty of robust competition. Fares remain historically cheap and there are flights going everywhere, all the time. Despite waves of consolidation, the fallout for travelers has been largely positive. The list below highlights the most significant mergers since Deregulation in 1979:

It’s unknown, for the moment, which name the new Frontier-Spirit enterprise will settle on. Will it be Frontier, Spirit, or something completely new? The Frontier name is nice enough, but it evokes a particular region — as it was designed to do. It makes you think of Colorado, the American West. The tails of Frontier’s planes feature a menagerie of great American wildlife: grizzlies, elk, salmon and the like. Spirit is more generic, and probably a better fit for a carrier whose routes reach into South America. Just please do something, anything, about that yellow paint job.

While mergers often appear uneventful on the outside, things can become quite contentious on the inside, among the employees. This especially true within the pilot ranks. Seniority controls everything for pilots, from which plane you fly to the quality of your monthly schedule, and when pilot groups are suddenly combined, the seniority list has to be rebuilt in a way that is more or less equitable to both sides. As the saying goes, good luck with that.

Sometimes, when one airline buys another, the airline doing the buying simply takes the entire roster of the airline being bought and moves it to the bottom. In other words, if airline A purchases airline B, forming airline C, all of the airline B pilots are now junior to all of the airline A pilots. Pilots call this “stapling.” This is what happened when American took over TWA, and is more of a concern when the groups are represented by different unions — or by no union at all.

The Delta-Northwest integration in 2008 was about as seamless and peaceful as the pilots (or their management) could have hoped for. In the cases of American-TWA, or Northwest-Republic, on the other hand, things didn’t go so smoothly. The “green book” pilots from Republic spent two decades clashing with the “red book” pilots of Northwest. To this day many former TWA pilots, some of whom spent years on furlough after their airline was bought by American, feel they were tossed under the bus.

 

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February 1, 2022

I FOUND THIS picture on the Interwebs. It’s an aerial shot of Boston-Logan, my hometown airport. Judging from the liveries and aircraft types, I’d put the date at 1986, give or take a year.

What a time capsule. We see USAir’s red tails; a United DC-8; a pair of Piedmont 727s; a Delta TriStar; a United DC-8. And most obvious, maybe, is the old terminal A, home to Eastern Airlines. Three of the carrier’s Airbus A300s, which it used on Shuttle routes to La Guardia, are visible. You can’t make it out through the shadows, but the latticed façade and five-story archways of this building bore a likeness to the lower curtain wall of the World Trade Center in Manhattan — and not by accident, for both were the work of architect Minoru Yamasaki. And, standing sentry, there’s Logan’s unmistakable control tower. The 16th floor observation deck would still have been open.

But something else really jumps out at me. And it’s not something we can see. It’s something we don’t see. I want you to study the picture and tell me what’s not there. Air travel in 2022 is quite different from air travel in the 1980s, and a big reason for this difference is the thing missing from this photograph. What is it?

The answer appears on the next line. See if you can figure it out before scrolling.

What I’m talking about is the complete absence of regional jets.

No Expresses, no Connections, no Eagles, and so forth. No Canadairs or Embraers. Every single jet in the picture is a mainline jet. This was before the introduction of RJs, at which point the big airlines began the widespread outsourcing of their routes to small-jet contractors.

Small jets did exist in the 1980s (the F-28 for instance), but they burned a lot of fuel and had very high seat-mile costs. It wasn’t until the advent of more efficient planes like the CRJ-200 and the early Embraers that domestic codesharing really took off. By the early 2000s, depending on the airport, forty percent or more of the planes in a photo like this would be regional jets. Love them or hate them, RJs are everywhere.

Many travelers don’t realize it, but the majority of regional airlines have a livery-only affixation with their legacy carrier partners. Some are wholly or partly owned by a major; others are completely independent, but either way they are separate entities, with their own employee groups, pay scales, management structures, and separate FAA operating certificates. (There’s more about this, if you’re interested, in chapter four of my book.)

The term “regional airline” has always been around, but in the old days it meant something different. A “regional” was a major airline whose network concentrated in a particular part of the country. Ozark Airlines, for instance. Or Southern Airways. What today we think of as a regional was called a “commuter.” Commuters fed the majors’ hubs from outlying cities, using turboprops almost exclusively. Look closely at the photo and you can see a couple of turboprop planes. One of them is a Command Airways ATR-42. An independent commuter at the time, Command later became an American Eagle franchise.

The first airline I worked for was a commuter. This was the very early 1990s; maybe we were calling them regionals by then? Our planes flew under the banner of Northwest Airlink, a feeder into Northwest’s Boston hub. We had 15-seaters, 19-seaters, and later a handful 37-seaters. All props. Our network spoked out to places like Burlington, Bangor, Albany, down to Virginia and up into the Canadian Maritimes.

The balance has begun to swing back of late, with the majors taking over a bigger and bigger percentage of routes and frequencies. Driven in part by the pilot shortage, which has forced regional airlines to offer better salaries and working conditions, the cost advantage of RJs has diminished somewhat. For the time being, however, they still comprise a healthy chunk of our flying.

 

Photo credit: Aerial Photography International.

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December 4, 2021

IT WAS thirty years ago, on December 4th, 1991, that Pan American World Airways ceased operations.

This is possibly, maybe, the most significant (and unfortunate) anniversary in airline history, marking the death of history’s most significant airline.

Pan Am’s firsts, bests, longests, mosts, and whatever other superlatives you might come up with, are untouched, and untouchable. Its achievements include conquest of the Pacific Ocean and launch of both the 707 and 747, the two most influential jetliners of all time. Founded and led by a visionary entrepreneur from New Jersey named Juan Trippe, the airline’s network would reach into every nook and corner of the planet, its blue globe logo among the world’s most widely recognized trademarks. It was the only airline to have its own Manhattan skyscraper — the Walter Gropius-designed Pan Am Building, soaring over Grand Central Terminal.

The carrier’s slow and ignominious decline, punctuated by the sales of its most valuable assets and — for a final coffin nail, the Lockerbie bombing — is a tale of hubris, poor management, the volatility of a deregulated airline industry, and plain old bad luck. Most agree that the final chapter began around the time of the disastrous merger with National Airlines in 1980. Six years later Pan Am would sell its Tokyo-Narita hub and Asian routes to United. Four years after that, its transatlantic network was handed over to Delta. The airline’s winnowed remains stumbled on for another year or so. It was just a shell of itself in the end, with dismal service and shabby old planes.

December 4th, 1991, was a Wednesday. I was laying over that night in a Sheraton in Burlington, Vermont. I almost never watch television in hotel rooms, but this time, for some reason, I had the news on. Suddenly the story broke. I remember some of the footage: panicky-looking employees rushing around a ticket counter, that sort of thing.

Pan Am’s final flight was a Boeing 727 from Barbados to Miami. Which was fitting, I guess. South Florida is where it all began, 64 years earlier, on a route from Key West to Havana.

For pilots, a job with Pan Am was once the most prestigious and glamorous job in aviation. By the end, though, they weren’t paying very much. I never had the chance to apply. On the day the carrier fell, I was a young Beech-99 captain still cutting his teeth. Working for a major carrier wouldn’t be a realistic option for several more years.

I was, however, lucky enough to have flown Pan Am a handful of times, including trips from Frankfurt to JFK on a 747, and from JFK to Rio de Janeiro on an L-1011. I also was a semi-regular customer on the Pan Am Shuttle between Boston and New York in the months before the shut-down. And, one of my most cherished memories is the day I spent plane-spotting on the roof of the Pan Am “Worldport” (later known as boring old Terminal 3) at Kennedy, as a seventh-grader in 1979.

Further reading…

There have been plenty — some would say too many — hardbound homages to the legacy of Pan Am. Most of these are pretty awful (crudely written flight attendant memoirs and such), but two are outstanding:

The first is Barnaby Conrad’s elegantly documented and superbly illustrated chronicle, Pan Am: An Aviation Legend. Not to detract from Conrad’s prose, but the photos and artwork are what make this volume special. The double-page spread of the flight attendants in the doorway of the “Clipper Freedom” is my favorite, along with the shot of the Beatles at Idlewild, coming down the stairs of the 707. This a fantastic book not merely for airline enthusiasts, but for any student of the history of 20th-century America.

The second is Matthias C. Hühne’s Pan Am: History, Design & Identity. So much of airline history has been told graphically — in the liveries, travel posters, promotional brochures and advertising copy of the world’s great airlines. It’s amazing, the level of attention and resources airlines once devoted to the finer points of their branding, and how spectacular so much of it was. This is particularly true with Pan Am.

 

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November 12, 2021

WE MADE IT. I had my doubts, but we pulled it off.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the crash of American Airlines flight 587 in New York City. We have now gone twenty full years since the last large-scale crash involving a major U.S. carrier. This is by far the longest such streak ever.

On the sunny morning of November 12th, 2001, American 587, an Airbus A300 bound for the Dominican Republic, lifted off from runway 31L at Kennedy Airport. Seconds into its climb, the flight encountered wake turbulence spun from a Japan Airlines 747 that had departed a few minutes earlier. The wake itself was nothing deadly, but the first officer, Sten Molin, who was at the controls, overreacted, rapidly and repeatedly moving the widebody jet’s rudder from side to side, to maximum deflection. The rudder is a large hinged surface attached to the tail, used to help maintain lateral stability, and Molin was swinging it back and forth in a manner it wasn’t designed for. Planes can take a surprising amount of punishment, but airworthiness standards are not based on applications of such extreme force. In addition, the A300’s rudder controls were designed to be unusually sensitive, meaning that pilot inputs, even at low speeds, could be more severe than intended. In other words, the pilot didn’t realize the levels of stress he was putting on the aircraft. The vigor of his inputs caused the entire tail to fracture and fall off.

Quickly out of control, the plane plunged into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, a skinny section of Rockaway only a few blocks wide, with ocean on both sides. All 260 passengers and crew were killed, as were five people on the ground. It remains the second-deadliest aviation accident ever on U.S. soil, behind only that of American flight 191 at Chicago, in 1979.

Flight 587 was well known among New York City’s Dominican community. In 1996, merengue star Kinito Mendez paid a sadly foreboding tribute with his song El Avion. “How joyful it could be to go on flight 587,” he sang, immortalizing the popular daily nonstop.

This was a catastrophe to be sure. It was also the last multiple-fatality crash involving a legacy American airline, and the last on U.S. soil with more than 50 fatalities.

To be clear, there have been a number of post-2001 tragedies involving regional carriers and freighters. The worst of these were the Comair (2006) and Colgan Air (2009) crashes, in which 50 and 49 people were killed, respectively. In 2005 a young boy in a car was killed when a Southwest Airlines 737 overran a runway in Chicago, and in 2018 a woman on a Southwest Airlines 737 was killed after being partially ejected through a blown-out cabin window.

What we haven’t seen, however, is the kind of mega-crash that was once brutally routine, year after year. Take a look through the accident archives from 1970s through the 1990s. Seldom would a year go by without recording one or more front-page mishaps, with 100, 200, sometimes 300 (or more) people killed at a time. In the eighteen years prior to November, 2001, and not counting the September 11th attacks, the American legacies, which at the time included names like Pan Am, TWA and Eastern, suffered ten major crashes. The idea that we could span two full decades without such a disaster was once unthinkable.

It’s especially remarkable when you consider there are nearly twice as many planes, carrying twice as many people, as there were in 2001. Since then, the mainline American carriers have safety transported more than twenty billion passengers. Today they operate over four thousand Airbuses and Boeings between them, completing tens of thousands of flights weekly. The streak also takes in those dark years of the early 2000s, when pretty much all of the big carriers were in and out of bankruptcy, fighting for survival. Not to mention the dire challenges of the last twenty months, brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Best of times, worst of times. All it would have taken is one screw-up, one tragic mistake. Yet here we are.

When we expand the context globally, the trend is even more astonishing. Between the 1980s and the mid-2000s there were dozens of air disasters worldwide — sometimes five or more in a year. In 1985 alone, twenty-seven major crashes — twenty seven! — killed almost 2,400 people.

How we got here is mainly the result of better training, better technology, and the collaborative efforts of airlines, pilot groups, and regulators. We’ve engineered away what used to be the most common causes of accidents. Yes, we’ve been lucky too, and the lack of a headline tragedy does not mean we should rest on our laurels. Complacency is about the worst response we could have. Air safety is all about being proactive — even a little cynical. Our air traffic control system needs upgrades, our airports need investment. Terrorism and sabotage remain threats, and regulatory loopholes need closing. The saga of the 737 MAX has been a cautionary window into just how fortunate we’ve been, and exposed some glaring weaknesses.

Duly noted, but a congratulatory moment is, for today, well earned. This isn’t a minor story.

Almost nobody in the media is paying attention, trust me. Crashes, not an absence of them, make the news. Call it the silent anniversary, but there’s no overstating it: we have just passed one of the most significant milestones in commercial aviation history.

 

U.S. Airline Accidents With 50 or More Fatalities, by Year

1970: 1
1971: 1
1972: 1
1973: 2
1974: 4
1975: 1
1976: 0
1977: 2
1978: 1
1979: 2
TOTAL 1970s : 15

1980: 0
1981: 0
1982: 2
1983: 0
1984: 0
1985: 3
1986: 0
1987: 1
1988: 1
1989: 2
TOTAL 1980s: 9

1990: 0
1991: 0
1992: 0
1993: 0
1994: 2
1995: 1
1996: 2
1997: 0
1998: 0
1999: 0
TOTAL 1990s: 6

2000: 1
2001: 5

Since 2001: 0

 

History’s Ten Worst Disasters Involving U.S. Carriers

1. 1977. Two Boeing 747s, operated by Pan Am and KLM, collide on a foggy runway at Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands killing 583 people, 335 of them on the Pan Am plane. The KLM jet departed without permission and struck the Pan Am jet as it taxied along the same runway. Confusion over instructions and a blockage of radio transmissions contributed to the crash.

2. 1979. As an American Airlines DC-10 lifts from the runway at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, an engine detaches and seriously damages the wing. Before its crew can make sense of the situation, the plane rolls 90 degrees and disintegrates in a fireball beyond the runway, killing 273. The engine pylon design and airline maintenance procedures are faulted by investigators, and all DC-10s are temporarily grounded.

3. 1988. Two Libyan agents are later held responsible for planting a bomb aboard Pan American flight 103, which blows up in the night sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, including 11 on the ground.

4. 2001. American Airlines 587 goes down outside JFK airport in New York killing 265.

5. 1985.  An Arrow Air DC-8 crashes after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killing 256 people, most of them U.S. military personnel returning from Egypt. The disaster is blamed on ice contamination of the jet’s wings.

6. 1996. Shortly after departure, a fuel tank explosion destroys TWA flight 800, a 747 carrying 230 passengers and crew from JFK to Paris. There are no survivors.

7. 1995. A navigational error causes American Airlines flight 965, bound from Miami, to Cali, Colombia, to wander off course during arrival. The 757 hits a mountain 25 miles from its destination. There are four survivors of the plane’s 163 occupants.

8. 1987. A Northwest Airlines MD-80 crashes on takeoff at Detroit. The pilots had neglected to properly set the flaps and slats, and for reasons unknown the jet’s warning system failed to alert them. A four year-old girl was the only survivor among the 155 passengers and crew.

9. 1982. A Pan Am 727 goes down seconds after departing from New Orleans, Louisiana. There are 153 fatalities, including eight people on the ground. The plane had taken off into a rare and deadly microburst — a localized, high-power windshear produced by a violent thunderstorm.

10. 1978. A Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) 727 collides over San Diego with a small private plane. A total of 143 people die including seven on the ground.

 

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