August 10, 2017

For passengers made uneasy by inflight turbulence — and I know there are lots of you — the following article, reprinted this week in Business Insider magazine, can help put you at ease.

Click Below

This article is a re-write of an earlier piece I did on the topic. It will appear in the second edition of my book, Cockpit Confidential, due to be published in March, 2018. It also appears in the Questions and Answers section of this site. Nervous flyers may wish to bookmark the Q&A page, here.

 

UPDATE: November 13, 2021

AIRLINER ENTHUSIASTS are like birdwatchers in a lot of ways. We dress funny and we tend to own expensive binoculars. And, we’re into lists.

As I kid I was a planespotter. I’d spend entire weekends holed up in the 16th-floor observation deck at Logan Airport, logging the registration numbers of arriving and departing jets. There were books you could buy — annual global fleet directories with the registrations and specs of every commercial plane in the world, arranged alphabetically by country and airline. There were little boxes where you could check off each plane once it was “spotted,” or, you could just line through the listing with a highlighter. World Airline Fleets, I remember, was one of these books. It came from the U.K. and was edited by a fellow named Gunter Endres (who, the Interweb tells us, is still writing aviation books). An even bigger volume, published in Switzerland, was called J.P. Airline Fleets. The idea was to mark off as many planes as you could.

Up there on the 16th floor, things could get competitive. I’ll never forget the jealousy I felt toward a legendary Boston spotter named Barry Sobel, because he’d seen and recorded a Pakistan International 707 freighter that landed unexpectedly one weekday while I was in school.

At one point, way back when, I could have told you the model and airline of every commercial plane I’d ever seen. Birders have tallies like this, too. They call them “life lists.” Braniff DC-8, El Al 707, Aeroflot IL-62… check, check, check. There were hundreds. Somewhere along the way I stopped keeping track, and all these years later I couldn’t begin to reconstruct such a catalog.

What I can do, however, easily and accurately, is present a slightly different life list: a record of each airplane type, and each airline, that I have flown aboard. It appears below. I’ll also include which classes I’ve sat in, using the traditional industry codes:

F = First
C = Business
Y = Economy

The accompanying photo is from April, 1974. That’s my sister and me walking up the stairs to an American Airlines Boeing 727, on our way to Washington, D.C. This was the first airplane, large or small, that I ever set foot in. I’m fortunate to have the moment preserved like this.

Even then, at eight years-old, I knew it was a 727.

BOEING 727

American   F,Y
Northwest   F,Y
Eastern   Y
Delta   F,Y
Pan Am   Y
TWA   F,Y
USAir/US Airways  Y
Trump Shuttle   Y
Fawcett (Peru) Y
Aeroamericana (Peru)  Y
DHL (cargo)

 

BOEING 707

TWA Y

 

BOEING 737 CLASSIC

Piedmont  Y
USAir   Y
United  Y
Delta  Y
Aloha Y
Rutaca (Venezuela)  Y
Cayman Airways Y
Sky Airline (Chile)  Y
PLUNA (Uruguay) Y

&nbsp:

BOEING 737 (Next Generation)

American Y
United  Y
Delta   F,Y
Southwest   Y
KLM  Y
Malaysia Airlines  Y
SAS  Y
South African Airways  Y
Jet Airways (India) C
Turkish Airlines  Y

BOEING 747 (All series)

Pan Am Y
Northwest F,C,Y
El Al  Y
United  C
British Airways  C,Y
Air France  Y
Qantas  Y
Singapore Airlines  Y
Thai  C
Delta  C,Y
Korean Air  F,C,Y
Royal Air Maroc Y
South African Airways  Y

&nbsp:

BOEING 757

Northwest  Y
American  F,Y
United  F,Y
Delta  F,C,Y
British Airways  Y
Icelandair  Y

 

BOEING 767

United F,C,Y
Delta  F,C,Y
TWA C
All Nippon  Y
Kenya Airways  C

 

BOEING 777

United  Y
American C
Delta  C,Y
Emirates  F,C,Y
Malaysia Airlines  Y
Thai  C,Y
Eva Air  Y
Korean Air Y
Royal Brunei  Y
Cathay Pacific  C
Qatar Airways C
Singapore Airlines  C
Jet Airways (India) F
China Eastern C

BOEING 787

Japan Airlines  Y
Qatar Airways C
Virgin Atlantic C
Korean Air C

 

DOUGLAS DC-8

Air Canada  Y
DHL (cargo)

 

McDONNELL DOUGLAS DC-9 (Classic)

Northwest Y
USAir  Y
Delta  F,Y
Air Canada  Y
Finnair  Y
Aeropostal (Venezuela)  Y
ValuJet  Y

 

McDONNELL DOUGLAS MD-80 Series (DC-9 Super 80, MD-88/83/87, etc.)

TWA  F,Y
Delta  F,Y
American F,Y
New York Air  Y
Continental  F
Austral (Argentina)  Y

 

McDONNELL DOUGLAS MD-90 Series (MD-90, Boeing 717)

Delta  F,Y
Bangkok Airways  Y
Uni Air (Eva Air)  Y

 

McDONNELL DOUGLAS DC-10

American   F,Y
Northwest   F,C,Y
Aeromexico Y
Finnair  Y
British Airways   C
Continental   Y

 

McDONNELL DOUGLAS MD-11

Delta  C,Y

LOCKHEED L-1011

Eastern F,Y
Pan Am  Y
Delta  Y

 

FOKKER F-28

USAir  Y

 

AIRBUS A300

Eastern  Y
American  Y
Thai  Y
DHL (cargo)

 

AIRBUS A310

Lufthansa  Y

 

AIRBUS A320 Series (A319, A320, A321)

United F,Y
Delta  F,Y
America West F
US Airways Y
British Airways  Y
Air France  Y
Lufthansa Y
TAP Y
Royal Brunei Y
Air Malta   C
SAETA (Ecuador) Y
LanPeru  Y
AirAsia  Y
JetBlue  Y, C
China Eastern F
Drukair (Royal Bhutan Airlines) C
Avianca C
VietJet Y
Qatar Airways C
South African Airways Y

 

AIRBUS A330

Air France  Y
Sabena  Y
Delta  C,Y
Cathay Pacific  C,Y
Thai  Y
Asiana  C
Singapore Airlines  C
Turkish Airlines C
China Airlines  C
Philippine Airlines C
Qatar Airways C
South African Airways C

AIRBUS A340

Air France  C,Y
EgyptAir  Y
SriLankan  Y
Cathay Pacific Y
China Airlines Y
Qatar Airways C

 

AIRBUS A350

Qatar Airways  C
China Airlines   C
Cathay Pacific C
Delta C
Thai Airways C
Qatar Airways C

 

AIRBUS A380

Emirates  F,C
Qatar Airways   C
Asiana  C

 

AIRBUS A220 (Bombardier C-Series)

Delta   F,Y
airBaltic  Y

 

EMBRAER 190

JetBlue   Y
American   Y
US Airways   Y
Aerorepublica (Colombia)   Y

 

EMBRAER 190

JetBlue   Y
American   Y
US Airways   Y
Aerorepublica (Colombia)   Y

 

TUPOLEV Tu-134

Aeroflot  Y

 

TUPOLEV Tu-154

Aeroflot Y

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve left out regional jets and turboprops. Partly because they’re boring, and partly because, for that same reason, I can’t remember them all. Highlights would include a Pan Am Express Dash-7, an Air New England FH-227, an Aeroperlas (Panama) Shorts 360, and a cargo-carrying Twin Otter in which I sat on the floor during a hop from St. Croix to San Juan.

The winners, if we can call them that, are the 737 and A320, predictably enough. That’s not very exciting, which makes it pleasing to see the 747 coming in third place. Somehow I’ve managed to fly aboard 747s from 13 different carriers.

Northwest Airlines, some of you might recall, was the launch customer for the 747-400, back in 1989. That spring, they had been using the jet on domestic “proving runs” mainly between Minneapolis and Phoenix. Finally on June 1st, they inaugurated international service. The first departure was flight NW 47, from JFK to Narita. My friend Ben and I were passengers on that flight. It was the day after my 23rd birthday. I still have one of the commemorative sake cups that they handed out.

Of all the planes that ought to be on the list, but aren’t, the most painful example is the Concorde. Years ago, when I was a regional airline pilot, British Airways used to offer a special “interline” Concorde fare to London, available only to industry employees. It cost $400, and it was what we call “positive-space” — as opposed to standby. A remarkable bargain, looking back on it. But when you’re a young pilot making twenty grand a year, $400 is a lot of money, and so I kept putting it off, putting it off. I’ll do it later, I promised myself. Next year.

And then it was gone.

 

May 28, 2017

Is Air Travel Really As Bad As Everybody Claims? Here Are Some Reasons Why Not.

AN OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BY PATRICK SMITH

Click the Picture to Read

 

Some follow-up notes:

This is the sixth op-ed that I’ve had published in the Times, and I’m extremely grateful for their interest. I’m a little disappointed, though, at the headline they chose for this one. It’s misleading. The article isn’t about flying in the old days; it’s about flying today. I’m making a case that the golden age of air travel is in many ways happening right now, not in some mythologized past.

As expected, the angry and sarcastic letters have been pouring in. A lot of them are flip and fail to acknowledge the points I’m making. Here’s a typical example, sent anonymously…

We need to look at this objectively. Is flying cheaper than it used to be, yes or no? Is it safer, yes or no? Is it faster and, in a surprising number of ways, more comfortable and convenient? Either it is, or it isn’t. And the answer, in each case, is yes. That’s not me talking; it’s simply the facts. That doesn’t mean flying is a wonderful experience. And, if you’re at all familiar with my writing over the years, you’ll know that I have amply criticized the airlines when that criticism has been due. Poor communications, terrible customer service, lousy onboard products, our miserable airports — I’ve covered that stuff countless times without pulling my punches.

What I’m doing in the Times piece, though, is pointing out a few of the good things that are seldom acknowledged.

No matter, a number of readers already have insisted that not only am I wrong, and that flying is truly awful, but in fact it’s never been worse. To which I ask: really, are you sure? And if so, let’s try this: Imagine that you’re planning an economy class trip from, I don’t know, Seattle to Paris. You have two theoretical options. Option number one is that you can fly the route tomorrow, on the carrier of your choice, and experience flying exactly as it is. Or, option two, you can travel back in time and do it in 1965. What’s your pick? Just keep in mind that if you choose the latter, you’ll get a couple of extra inches of legroom, shorter lines at the airport, and maybe a chirpier flight attendant. Your journey also will take several hours longer, cost more than twice as much, and you will sit in a cabin with no personal entertainment system, filled with people smoking. And, just for good measure, your chances of being in an accident will be about eight times higher.

Are you still down for it?

For what it’s worth, a colleague and I were talking the other day, and we both agreed that so much of what people hate about flying isn’t really airline-related, per se, but rather infrastructural. The decrepit state of our airports, for example, and our outdated air traffic control system, contribute significantly to delays and congestion. Then you’ve got TSA. Our security checkpoints are badly overcrowded and poorly designed. Customs and immigration procedures, too, are flyer-unfriendly. These are bureaucratic and government-funding issues more than anything else. Fix them, and I estimate that 75 percent of passengers’ frustrations would disappear.

In the meantime, how trendy has it become to bash the airlines? The New York Post even has a “Hell of Flying” section…

January 24, 2017

DEAR PASSENGER: Look, I know it’s a long flight, and I realize that, at least in your aggrieved mind, commercial air carriers are the most malevolent entities the universe has ever known, fully deserving of your disrespect. But must you? Must you throw your garbage all over the floor? I realize that you’re seated for an extended period of time in cramped quarters, and it’s not like there’s a waste receptacle at every seat. But I’m afraid that’s not a good enough excuse for, say, leaving leaky Chinese food cartons or a half-eaten Chick-fil-A sandwich under your feet.

It’s a sobering spectacle, standing at the forward bulkhead and looking down the aisles once the passengers have disembarked. Arriving from Europe or the West Coast, the cabin of my 767 looks like a typhoon has blown through it. I’ve seen an entire can of Pringles mashed into the floor like sawdust. I’ve seen a mixture of chips and soda trampled and congealed into a kind of carpet-eating concrete. There are newspapers, cups, cans, plastic wrappers of every conceivable color and size, candy, gum, cookies, apple cores, and even sullied diapers, thrown under seats or crammed into pockets. By the time the cleaners have finished, they’ll have stuffed several oversized bags full of waste.

Thousands of long-haul flights operate every day, and each leaves hundreds of pounds of trash in its wake. (Much of this refuse is recyclable; unfortunately, regulations require all garbage be incinerated when a flight is coming from overseas). The amount of litter seems to be more or less proportional to the time spent aloft, but it can be astonishing even after a short flight. The sheer volume of it is depressing enough; the fact that some people are obnoxious enough to dump it on the floor makes it worse.

Airlines, for their part, could and should enact a few sensible, and cheap, countermeasures:

1. Put a lunch-sized, recyclable paper or plastic trash bag in each seat-back pocket. Or, if that itself is deemed too wasteful, supply a bag for each block of seats, to be shared. 

2. Have the cabin crew make more frequent trash collection runs, especially toward the end of flight, accompanied by a PA announcement. Some carriers already do this; alas, many flyers find it easier to simply dump their crap on the floor. Maybe that PA announcement needs to be a little more specific? “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be coming down the aisle to collect any items you wish to discard. Please do us a favor and not leave your trash under your seat.”

3. Cut down on the insane amount of plastic that accompanies the typical inflight meal (cellophane wrappers, cups, etc.).

(I was going to suggest, too, that carriers maybe get away from the types of snacks that are, by their nature, messy. Things like peanuts, chips and mini-pretzels are all but destined for the carpet and seat tracks. But then, what are the alternatives? Carrots?)

As a result of any or all of these ideas, interiors would be less soiled, while turnaround times would be quicker and require less labor. I’ve watched cleaning crews spend a better part of an hour picking up trash after a long flight. Am I wrong, or would a few pennies per plane save an airline millions in annual cleaning costs? Plus you’d have a more attractive product.

Until then, here’s a tip: In a pinch, an airsickness bag might be too small for cans, but it otherwise makes a semi-useful trash container. (Just remember, though, that you’re taking it away from the next person). Or, better, if you’re up in first or business class, your blanket or duvet frequently comes wrapped in a plastic sheathing that, if carefully removed, makes for a roomy receptacle.

 

Related Stories:

FIRST CLASS, NO CLASS. THE PASSENGER HALL OF SHAME

THE UNITED STATES OF DOG CRAP, RUBBER BANKDS AND DENTAL FLOSSERS

December 19, 2016

ACCORDING TO a newly published study by the Journal of Environmental Health, as many as 13 percent of airline pilots meet the threshold for clinical depression, and more than four percent — four percent! — admitted to having suicidal thoughts in the two weeks prior to taking the survey. Those are some frightening numbers, and not unsurprisingly the story is getting a lot of media pickup. “Think your job is depressing,” sang one headline. “Try being an airline pilot!”

Right, well, my personal opinion, speaking as just one of around 70,000 airline pilots in this country alone, is that I can hardly think of a less depressing job. Stressful at times, in its own peculiar ways, absolutely. But depressing?

Without wanting to discredit the hard work of researchers and mental health professionals out there, this study isn’t passing my smell test. At best, it feels sorely incomplete. My evidence to the contrary is anecdotal, for lack of a better term, but it’s meaningful just the same, I think, having been working in and around the business for over 25 years: I’ve known enough pilots to feel skeptical of the data. The idea that 12.4 percent of pilots might be clinically depressed is dubious enough; the idea that four percent are potentially suicidal is nothing if not outrageous.

We also need to look more closely at the metrics of the survey. For example, clinical depression, versus simply feeling depressed, or showing “signs of” depression, can be vastly different things.

Of course, without a medical or scientific background, and without fully understanding the nuances of the data — the depression questionnaire, to which around 1,500 pilots responded, is part of a screening protocol called PHQ-9 — it’s hard for a layperson like me to interpret what, exactly, the study reveals. As some have pointed out, the stats revealed by this study aren’t terribly different from those found in the general population. But because it involves pilots, it’s instantly a news story and ripe for embellishment. My disagreement is perhaps a response more to what the media is saying about the study, than what the study is actually saying about pilots. And the media has a well-established habit of taking what might be interesting and compelling scientific findings, and dumbing them down into sensationalist sound-bite nonsense. So, we’d be wise to withhold judgment.

The buzz here, of course, ties in with last year’s Germanwings pilot suicide crash, when a depressed (and quite possibly psychotic) first officer named Andreas Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and flew his Airbus A320 into the Alps, killing everybody on board.

And so, now, people are wondering, how many pilots out there are ready to crack? Is the mental health of pilots being evaluated properly by airlines and government regulators?

The answer is yes, mostly.

First things first, though, let’s be wary of extrapolation. No, Andreas Lubitz was the not the first pilot to kill himself and his passengers. But the total number of pilot suicides, over the decades and within the enormous statistical complex of global air travel, is a tiny one. These incidents are what they are: outliers. By all accounts Lubitz shouldn’t have been near a cockpit in the first place. The system seems to have failed. But that’s not reason enough to suggest there’s some crisis at hand — hundreds of looming Lubitzes waiting to snap, with nothing to prevent them from doing so.

And in only the rarest cases does mental illness turn people violent. The idea that a depressed individual is likely to be a dangerous individual is an ignorant and unfair presumption about the nature of mental illness. As one Ask the Pilot reader puts it, “Lubitz didn’t kill those people because he was depressed; he killed them because he was evil.” Whatever Lubitz was suffering from, it was more than depression.

In the U.S., airline pilots undergo medical evaluations either yearly or twice-yearly, depending. A medical certificate must be issued by an FAA-certified physician. The checkup is not a psychological checkup per se, but the doctor evaluates a pilot on numerous criteria, up to and including his or her mental health. Pilots can be grounded for any of hundreds of reasons, from heart trouble or diabetes to, yes, depression and anxiety. It can and does happen. In addition, new-hire pilots at some airlines must undergo psychological examinations prior to being hired. On top of that, we are subject to random testing for narcotics and alcohol.

Pilots have plenty of things to worry about: job security, the anxieties of training, commuting to work from distant cities, the chronic fatigue that results from long hours spent aloft, and so on. But is this really that much worse or different from what you’ll find in other lines of work? Meanwhile, there are just as many pros as cons, if not more: a good salary (at least at the major carrier level), flexible schedules, long stretches of time at home, and the personal satisfaction, the coolness, that comes from flying planes. It’s a challenging job, and one that doesn’t come easy: the career path is long and unpredictable. But I hardly see it as an environment conducive to depression — or worse.

That said, pilots are human beings, and no profession is bulletproof against every human weakness. Whether the result of stress or more serious mental illness, pilots sometimes need help — just as professionals in any industry do. And they can get it:

If a pilot is having an issue, airlines have become more supportive and proactive than you might expect, while ALPA and other pilot unions have medical and mental health staff that pilots can contact any time. There are protocols in place, and if a pilot has an issue, he or she can simply pick up the phone, usually with little worry of any long-term career implications. Sure, there’s still some stigma, and some pilots would be reluctant to self-report, but I reckon this is a lot less true today than it once was.

The FAA, meanwhile, now permits pilots to take certain anti-depressants (albeit after a waiting period and in accordance with strict guidelines).

In all but the rarest cases, a pilot with a mental health issue is not an unsafe pilot, never mind a suicidal killer. We can further debate the merits of additional psychological testing, but at a certain point I’m not sure what more we should want or expect.

In the end, we’re forced to rely on a set of presumptions — it comes down to trust, if you will. As a pilot I do not come to work wondering if one of my colleagues is going to kill me. And passengers shouldn’t either. On the contrary. I don’t want this to sound like an airline commercial or an FAA press release, but you can confidently presume that the people flying your plane are exactly what you expect them to be: well-trained professionals for whom safety is their foremost priority.

April 5, 2016

THE EBOLA CATASTROPHE in West Africa is over. The World Health Organization declared an official end to the crisis back on March 31st.

I visited the region several times during the height of the crisis. I was there in August, 2014, as the last known supply of ZMapp, an experimental Ebola drug, was brought into Roberts Field in Liberia. Below are some photographs from that day, as well as some earlier shots taken in some small villages near the airport.

Formally known as Roberts International Airport (ROB), the field was built by the United States government during World War Two. Later it was managed by Pan Am, which operated something of a mini-hub there, with flights from New York continuing on to Accra, Lagos, Johannesburg and Nairobi, among other places. Pan Am crews would layover at a hotel directly across the street from the terminal. Pan Am left Africa in 1991, and both the hotel and the terminal were destroyed during Liberia’s brutal civil war, which ended only recently. The Chinese are building a new hotel in the same spot, though construction was halted when Ebola hit.

There’s limited scheduled traffic at ROB. Brussels Airlines, British Airways, Kenya Airways and Nigeria’s Arik Air have been the most prominent carriers there. The airport is cluttered with United Nations helicopters, and a Russian-crewed 737 shuttles regularly between ROB and Accra, Ghana, carrying soldiers, staff and Liberian citizens returning home. At the moment most of the U.N. personnel stationed at ROB are from Ukraine and Algeria.

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK SMITH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related Story:

YAK HUNTING IN LIBERIA. THE STRANGE ALLURE OF A DERELICT PLANE.

 

UPDATE: July 13, 2017

I continue to be flummoxed by the volume of dental flossers, rubber bands, and plastic bags of dog shit that litter the streets and sidewalk of my neighborhood (see original post below), but now I’ve discovered a new plague: elastic hair bands. The kind that girls use to hold up their pony tails. It’s possible I just never noticed them before, but suddenly, it seems, they are popping up on every sidewalk and in every curbside gutter. Maybe one of my female readers can explain? Do these bands just spontaneously pop from the your head while you’re out walking? This photograph shows a harvest from just a handful of afternoon strolls around Somerville and Cambridge …

 

June 16, 2016

TIME OUT for a culture rant.

IS THERE such a thing as an “undeveloping country”? We all know about the developing kind, but what about a formerly great country now in the throes of devolving? If there are such places, the United States has to be leading the pack. We live in a nation where nobody wants to pay for, or take responsibility for, anything, and the results are starting to show. We see this in the bigger, macro sense. For instance, we are by some measures the wealthiest nation on earth, yet our infrastructure is rated 29th and is steadily falling to pieces.

But I see it in the small things, too. Take, for example, litter. I see litter and trash as a sort of bellwether for bigger problems. Our airports, to pick one spot (and to keep this conversation at least nominally within the sphere of air travel), are getting dirtier and dirtier. I see discarded cups and cans in the jet bridges, overspilling barrels, filthy curbsides, and apron and ramp areas that are just aswarm with trash. It didn’t used to be this way, and it’s not this way anywhere else in the world. I was at LAX not long ago on a windy afternoon, and the wind currents, whipping between two concourses, had created a sort of garbage cyclone — a great, rotating, three-story cloud of paper and plastic and styrofoam and dust. It was awesome.

There’s the litter itself, and also the human indifference to it. I’m not sure those are different things, but it drives me crazy when I see an airport employee step over a crushed coffee cup or a wadded up newspaper sitting on the floor of the jetway. Hey, it’s not my job! When I do the preflight, walk-around inspection of my aircraft, I’ll often scoop up an entire arm-full of refuse along the way — cups, bags, fasteners, locks, miscellaneous plastic luggage shards, wheels, and so on — because heaven forbid the apron workers bother to pick any of it up. Would this happen in Munich or Dubai or Osaka?

Then there’s my neighborhood. I’ll let a picture do the explaining. This snapshot was taken recently in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is a it extreme, but it’s not unusual, and even the tidier neighborhoods around here are strewn with litter in a way that simply wasn’t the case in years past. Some of the traffic islands around Boston look like a dumpster exploded. When did it become acceptable for drivers at red lights to simply heave their trash out the window? Because, apparently, everybody is doing it.

We also need to talk about dog shit.

Pet owners in my neighborhood are for the most part diligent when it comes to cleaning up after their dogs, tidily stuffing the droppings into small plastic bags. So far, so good, right? Except, the new custom is to simply leave the plastic bag sitting on the ground, thus turning one problem (dog waste) into two problems (dog waste and plastic). You’ve doubled the amount of litter, and you’ve made it permanent. Dog crap by itself is at least natural and biodegrade.

I can’t fathom the thought process of a person who would do this. As the kids would say, WTF? But obviously I’m missing something, because lots of people find it defensible. Every day I encounter more and more of these bags. Cambridge and Somerville are absolutely littered with them. It’s not merely a local thing, though. I’ve been seeing these bags in parks and on walking trails across the country, and even in other countries (including one in the pretty grass courtyard behind Chartres cathedral, in France!).

This one, though, is my favorite. Here you can actually see four separate bags. This is just around the corner from my house, and I watched as the bags were added, one at a time, over a period of several days, presumably by the same dog-walker:

Or this multi-bag collection, photographed near the Davis Square subway station.

And when I say it’s the small things, sometimes it’s the really small things.

Somebody needs to explain where the profusion of plastic dental flossers has come from. These blasted little things are everywhere. I never, ever, see pedestrians or drivers actually flossing, yet somehow these discarded flossers are popping up on every sidewalk and curb. Do they self propagate? Is there an army of secret night-flossers who roam around in the dark, keeping their gums healthy while sprinkling the ground with these things? (And yes, I know about the flossers in Infinite Jest.) I’m all for dental hygiene, but take your disgusting mouth picks home with you and dispose of them properly.

It’s funny, because according to some studies, flossing your teeth is mostly a waste of time. This has been long an open secret, apparently, but dental professionals have been loath to go public on the matter, perhaps fearing backlash from the influential flossing lobby (“Big Floss” has deep pockets). I learned about this in The Guardian. The Guardian is a U.K. publication. The Brits gave up on flossing years ago, and have since been laughing at the American obsession with the practice. It’s ironic, I know, that the Brits would be lecturing to anybody about dental health, but they may have this one right. The big question is whether or not this might result in a reduction of the number of plastic flossers littering American cities.

These beautiful collages (I actually spent a fair bit of time tinkering with the placement and textures of each image) were compiled over just two or three brief walks through my neighborhood:

Here, though, is clearly the best of the bunch. This picture was taken below the fuselage of a Boeing 767 at Kennedy Airport, while I was doing the preflight walk-around check!

People don’t seem to care much for public property. Neither, if the streets of my neighborhood are any indication, do they care about the their own. Consider the two front yards in the photos below. The top picture shows the house directly next to mine. Mind you I don’t live in an Appalachian trailer park, but in a trendy big-city neighborhood where property values have skyrocketed — a phenomenon untarnished by the fact that certain landlords can’t be bothered with even minimal maintenance. The bottom house is several streets away, on the border with Cambridge and West Somerville — an equally expensive area, where renovated two-family homes, with no backyard and neighbors only inches away on either side, can sell for upwards of a million dollars:

And our final culprit is the United States Postal Service.

Letter carriers around here carry bundles of mail tied with rubber bands. Lots of bundles, and lots of rubber bands. And when they unwrap the bands, what do you think they do with them? Thats right, and so the sidewalks where I live are littered with thousands of little brown noodles. What you see in the photo is about a month’s worth of bands picked up from around my neighborhood. Would it really be that difficult for USPS workers to shove these things into a pocket? And in case you didn’t realize it, they’re reusable!

And with that, for now, I am finished. Curmudgeon meter pegged.

 

PROMOTION

Update: October 20, 2017

A WORD OF ADVICE for aspiring aviators:

As discussed below, U.S. regional carriers, faced with a crippling shortage of pilots, have been bending over backwards to attract new hires — and to hang on to the pilots they already have. Salaries have been soaring and airlines are offering retention bonuses north of $30,000. It’s hard to see a negative in this, at least on paper, but if you talk to pilots at some of these companies you’ll learn that many of them are very unhappy. Why?

Although pilots are earning more, overall quality of life at many regionals is still suffering. And that’s because things are in panic mode. The industry is being reactive when it should have been proactive. The improvements we’re seeing should have been put in place years ago. Because they weren’t, numerous airlines now face chronic understaffing issues. This results in pilots being forced to work high-stress schedules with minimal time off. One pilot I spoke to, employed by a United Express carrier, says the company is so understaffed that even senior captains are being “junior manned,” as it’s called, and conscripted into duty on almost all of their scheduled days off, typically with little or no notice. Pilots are quitting in droves, he says, retention bonuses be damned.

As a group, pilots have never had as much leverage or opportunity as they have right now, and with thousands of retirements coming up in the next five to ten years at the majors, it should only get better. However, there are systemic problems in the regional sector, and just throwing money around isn’t going to fix them. It will take a while for things to stabilize. In the meantime, it behooves applicants to do their homework and realize what they’re getting into. Things can change quickly in this business, but some regionals are, at least for now, better-staffed and all-around more pleasant places to work than others. Know which are which.

August 5, 2017

THE PILOT SHORTAGE is here. It’s real, it’s global, and it’s been making headlines. However, we need to be clear which sectors of the aviation industry we’re talking about, and in which parts of the world.

Let’s start with North America, where the first step is to draw a sharp divide between the major carriers and their regional affiliates. The majors, also referred to as “legacy” carriers, are the ones people are most familiar with — American, United, Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, et al. There is no pilot shortage at these companies, and unless something changes drastically they will continue to have a surplus of highly qualified candidates to choose from. They are able to cull from the top ranks of the regionals, as well as from the military and corporate aviation pools. Even amidst an ongoing wave of retirements, a steady supply of experienced crews is unlikely to be depleted.

At the regionals, however, it’s a very different story. And by “regional” we’re referring to the numerous subcontractors who operate smaller jets (regional jets, or “RJs”) and turboprops on the majors’ behalf: those myriad “Connection” and “Express” companies, whose actual identities are concealed beneath the liveries of whichever major they are aligned with. United Express, Delta Connection, American Eagle, and so on. These carriers have been slashing flights, grounding planes, and otherwise scrambling to keep their cockpits staffed. In June, Horizon Air, the Seattle-based affiliate of Alaska Airlines and one of the country’s biggest regional carriers, announced it would be forced to reduce its busy summer schedule due to a dearth of pilots. Earlier this year, Republic Airways, a large U.S. regional carrier that flies on behalf of United, American and Delta, filed for bankruptcy protection. It blamed the filing, in part, on a lack of qualified pilots.

How this came to happen is both a long and short story. The short story is that employment at a regional carrier sucks. It’s not an easy lifestyle, and the pay has been the kind of thing that causes people to skip their school reunions. Salaries have traditionally started out as low as $20,000 a year (in some cases even lower), and have topped out at under six figures. Schedules are demanding and benefits paltry; the relationship between management and the workers is often hostile; and top of all that, the regional sector is highly unstable. Companies always seem to be coming or going, shrinking or shedding planes, changing their names and realigning with different majors. This has driven thousands of pilots out of the industry, and/or has discouraged countless others from pursuing an aviation career in the first place.

Yet pay and working conditions at these airlines have always been substandard, and filling jobs was seldom a problem. So what gives? Well, what’s different is that the regional sector has grown so large, now accounting for half of all domestic departures in the United States! As recently as twenty-five years ago it was around 15 percent. In those days, pilots saw a job with a regional as a temporary inconvenience — paying one’s dues. It was a stepping-stone toward a more lucrative position with a major. Pilots are now realizing that a job at a regional could easily mean an entire career at a regional. Thus, a diminishing number have been willing to commit the time and money to their education and training when the return on investment is somewhere between unpredictable and financially ruinous.

Pilots in the United States are responsible for securing their own FAA credentials, and for logging hundreds or even thousands of hours of flight time before applying at an airline. For those who come up through the civilian channels it’s a slow and very expensive process. An aspiring aviator has to ask, is it worth sinking $100,000 or more into one’s primary training, plus the time it will take to build the necessary number of flight hours, plus the cost of a college education, only to spend years toiling at poverty-level wages, with at best a marginal shot at moving on to a major? For many the answer has been a resounding (and logical) no.

In the meantime, the FAA has enacted tougher hiring standards for entry-level pilots. Over the past two decades, as the regional sector grew and grew, airlines sharply lowered their experience and flight time minimums to fill the thousands of new cockpit jobs this growth created. Suddenly, pilots were being taken on with as little as 350 hours of total time, assigned to the first officer’s seat of sophisticated RJs and turboprops. Then came a rash of accidents, including the Colgan Air (Continental Connection) disaster outside Buffalo in 2009. Regulators began taking a closer look at hiring practices, eventually passing legislation that mandated higher flight time totals and additional certification requirements for new hires.

Some airlines blame the shortage at least partly on these tougher rules. Technically they’re right, but arguing against an obvious safety enhancement is maybe not the smartest idea. Besides, all the new regulations really have done is return things to historical norms. When I applied for my first regional job in 1990, competitive applicants at the time had between 1,500 and 2,000 hours, and most of us had an Airline Transport Pilot certificate as well. That’s more or less what the FAA demands today. Flight time totals are just one indicator of a pilot’s skill or competence, but these requirements are not unreasonable.

The regionals have finally started upping their salaries and improving benefits, in some cases substantially. The cost structures of these carriers, whose existence is primarily to allow the majors to outsource flying on the cheap, limits how much they can lavish on their employees, but frankly they have little choice. New hires at companies like Endeavor Air (a Delta affiliate) and PSA (American), for example, can now make first-year salaries in the $70,000-plus range. That’s three times what these pilots would have made in years past. Other companies are offering signing bonuses of several thousand dollars, and work rules too are getting better. Air Wisconsin, a United partner and one of the nation’s oldest regionals, says that pilots can now earn up to $57,000 in sign-on bonuses. It promises earnings of between $260,000 and $317,000, including salary and bonuses over the first three years of employment. Figures like that are unprecedented.

So, for those considering a piloting career in the United States, the situation is looking better. The problem for the industry, though, is the lag time. Somebody just learning to fly is years away from meeting any airline’s hiring criteria. So while the mechanisms are falling into place to curtail a full-blown crisis, the shortage is going to be with us for a while.

Similar shortages exists elsewhere around the globe, but they are driven by slightly different forces. You don’t have the major/regional dichotomy like you do in North America, but the airline business overall has been expanding so rapidly, especially in Asia, that carriers can’t keep up. Many have success with what are called “ab-initio” programs, whereby young candidates are chosen from scratch, with no prior experience, and are trained and groomed from the ground-up, so to speak, in a tightly controlled regimen that puts them in the cockpit of a jetliner relatively quickly. These programs are ultra-competitive, drawing hundreds of applicants for each available slot. They produce quality pilots, but again there’s a lag time problem: industry growth is far outpacing the rate at which ab initio schemes can produce cockpit-ready pilots. This has forced airlines from Asia to go hunting for pilots in the U.S. and elsewhere, sometimes offering huge salaries and incentive packages.

The Gulf carriers, meanwhile, bring in expats from every corner of the world. Of Emirates roughly 4,000 pilots, the largest percentage is recruited from South Africa, where there are lots of young pilots and a rich aviation culture, but comparatively few jobs.

 

Fine Dining In a Converted DC-10. Plus: Where in the World to Eat, and the Sad Confessions of a Non-Foodie.

January 20, 2016

I’M THE FARTHEST THING from a foodie. The very word foodie irritates me. It goes back to my childhood. I was raised in what was perhaps the must gastronomically unadventurous family in America. A “salad,” as I knew it when I was a kid, consisted of a bowl of iceberg lettuce doused with steakhouse dressing. We had our pizzas Margherita style, with sauce and cheese only. The idea of adding a topping was frighteningly exotic.

In sixth grade my little league coach took our team out for Chinese food. I cried and hid in my room because I didn’t know what Chinese food was or how to order it. Later, in the 1980s, friends of mine would often go for dim sum on Sunday afternoons. I always made excuses to stay home, because I had no idea what dim sum was, and would surely embarrass myself attempting to eat it. I was thirty before I could use chopsticks or knew what a burrito was.

Food, to me, was always a mundane, unexciting experience. I travel a lot, but to this day I consider dining out to be a chore. This is heresy to a lot of people, I know, but I’m perfectly happy with a burger from room service or some easy-to-grab street food.

Unless, that is, we’re talking about dinner inside a converted McDonnell Douglas DC-10. Now this is a restaurant to get excited about.

Welcome to La Tante DC-10 Restaurant, located just outside Kotoka International Airport in the friendly capital city of Accra, Ghana. For several years this venerable aircraft sat derelict next to a hangar, sans engines and wearing the sun-bleached colors of the defunct Ghana Airways.

The hulk was destined for the scrap pile when, in 2013, it was purchased by the Vindira Company. It was towed down an embankment to its current resting spot, and refurbished into a full-service restaurant with seating for 118 passengers — er, diners. It’s hard to miss, looming just behind the Marina Mall and painted a ghastly green (the color owes to a sponsorship from the locally brewed Club beer).

I love the repurposing of commercial aircraft. La Tante is one of several similar projects around the world, including a 747-turned-hotel outside the airport in Stockholm. There’s something about this idea, the recasting of the jet into a wholly unexpected role, that causes one to reflect on the astonishing capabilities of commercial aviation.

When you’re sitting on a plane at the airport, it’s easy to take for granted the fact that you’ll soon be soaring through the sky, en route to some exotic city halfway around the world, a feat that would have seemed unimaginable just a hundred years ago.

It’s different, though, when that plane becomes a restaurant, and you’re sitting inside and suddenly you think about how this place, this entire building — we think about it now as a building — once flew through the air at hundreds of miles per hour, calling port in London, New York, Johannesburg, and dozens of cities in between.

The main dining room is set in what used to be the economy class cabin. The outside seats are original, with tables installed in between. Conventional tables and chairs are used in place of the center rows. If you want, you can stow your extra belongings in the overhead bins.

 

The landing gear gardens are a cool if peculiar flourish.

 

The washrooms are all but unchanged, except for a conventional “land” commode in place of the blue-water toilets.

 

La Tante’s menu isn’t terribly sophisticated. It’s your basic Ghanaian food. But it’s wholesome and inexpensive (at the moment it’s about 4 Ghana cedi to the American dollar). Here I kept it simple and ordered the Jollof rice with chicken, a Ghanaian staple. It was good, if unexceptional. Just the right amount of spicy. My normal Ghanaian favorite is the “red-red,” a stew made with black-eyed peas cooked in palm oil, but La Tante offers it only with fish, not with chicken or beef, and I don’t enjoy the fish version. The waitresses (yes, they dress like flight attendants) are friendly and the food came promptly.

 

There’s a bar/lounge in the forward section, in the space once occupied by first class.

 

The Ghana Airways tail livery remains. Notice the kitchen annex built into the right side of the fuselage.

If there’s one thing La Tante is lacking, it’s a little history. I wish the owners would put up some framed photographs of the place from its flying days. In addition to its work for Ghana Airways, the jet flew for the U.S.-based World Airways, which sent it on charters all over the globe. Many restaurants have long and storied histories, but usually just in one place. Here’s a restaurant that has literally been everywhere.

 

UPDATE: June, 2018: A recent visit to Ghana confirms that yes, the La Tante restaurant has lost its Club beer sponsorship and is no longer doused in the sickening green paint seen in the photos above. The DC-10 is now mostly white.

 

As much as I enjoy La Tante, it’s not my favorite eating spot in Accra. That honor belongs to Tandoor, an Indian place in the Cantonments neighborhood. Tandoor might be my favorite restaurant anywhere. Established in 1993, it’s one of the oldest Indian restaurants in the city, with a gigantic menu concentrating on Mughlai specialties, plus all of the standard Indian entrees, and then some.

I order either the coconut-chicken kebab (not spicy) or the chicken Madras (where’s the fire extinguisher?). The menu includes approximately four thousand varieties of naan and roti. Seating is inside or outside, garden-style on heavy wooden benches and tables. The atmosphere is very laid-back, though you might hear Harry, the owner, berating his staff when the service gets too slow.

Dining out just isn’t my thing, but I do have my spots. La Tante and Tandoor are two of them.

Speaking of West Africa, if you’re in Senegal, I recommend a Lebanese place called Le Layal, near the Place L’independance and within walking distance of the Pullman hotel. It’s nothing fancy — which is partly why I like it — with good prices and good food. Once you get past the “Testicles With Garlic and Lemon,” and the “Homos with Chopped Meat,” the menu is both coherent and tasty. Le Layal’s mezze is the best I’ve had in Africa. (They’ve gotten around, those Lebanese. I dare you to name a big city anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a decent Lebanese restaurant or a Lebanese-run hotel.)

Down in Mexico City, meanwhile, you might find me at Fonda el Refugio, an historic restaurant on Calle Waterloo in the Zona Rosa that dates to 1954. “Historic” implies pricey, but the entrees here are well within the average traveler’s budget. The waitstaff is attentive to a fault, and the food arrives quickly. My regular dish is the carne asada a la tabasqueña. Get there early to avoid the crowd.

And let’s not forget Abou Tarek, in Cairo. Everybody in Cairo, if not in all of Egypt, is familiar with Abou Tarek, a four-story building on a grimy street full of tire and muffler shops, just off the eastern end of 6 October Bridge, a few blocks in from the Nile. It’s been there since 1950, founded and (still) owned by Youssef Zaki. Zaki is maybe Cairo’s closest thing to a celebrity chef, a sort of Colonel Sanders of Egyptian fast food, whose portrait stares down at you from the walls. On my last visit, Zaki himself was on the premises, shaking hands.

Walk in, take a seat, and within thirty seconds you’re dining on the restaurant’s sole entree, that most delectable of Egyptian treasures: a steaming bowl of koshary — a carbohydrate bomb of noodles, lentils, chickpeas and fried onions, topped with a spicy tomato sauce and however much chili you can handle. All for the equivalent of about $1.50. Abou Tarek is not fine or formal dining by any stretch, but it’s tons of calories and tons of fun.

The best meal I ever had, though, was an impromptu feast from a streetside take-out joint in the city of Van, in eastern Turkey. It was a kebab plate, with succulent hunks of meat and slabs of tomato and onion, all wrapped fish-and-chips style in newspaper. I was starving at the time, which is maybe why I remember it so fondly. I think I paid about two dollars. I have no idea what the name of the place was.

There, just like that I’m a food blogger.

 

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

Related Stories:

FAREWELL DOUGLAS.
YAK HUNTING IN LIBERIA.
LETTER FROM GHANA. WELCOME TO ROOM 420.

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK SMITH

Update: November 10, 2016

OKAY, HERE’S WHAT IT’S NOT: It’s not Singapore-Changi. It’s not Seoul-Incheon. It’s not sparkly or fancy or architecturally exciting. It’s got bottlenecked corridors, low ceilings, and seemingly endless walks between concourses. And recent construction projects have made the passageways even more congested.

It is, however, clean, efficient and amazingly flyer-friendly.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is the place I’m talking about.

Schiphol has always been one of the top-scoring airports in passenger surveys, something that never made sense to me until recently, when I had a couple of long layovers that gave me time to really explore the place. AMS is the world’s 15th busiest airport overall, and one of the top five for international transfers. Keeping long-haul passengers happy is all about time-killing, and to this end Schiphol’s range of amenities is amazing:

My favorite are the “quiet areas” — relaxation zones decked out with sofas and easy chairs. Some are decorated with faux fireplaces. Others have artistically-inspired chairs with built-in iPads. Every airport should have some version of this. Noise and crowds are among the biggest stressors that travelers face, and nothing is more welcome than some peaceful corner to relax in. There’s also an in-terminal hotel that rents day rooms.

Amsterdam’s famous Rijksmuseum has a branch at Schiphol, right there in the terminal, with no admission charge. Directly next door is a sit-down library.

For children, the “Kids’ Forest” play area is bigger, brighter, and I have to say, just more fun-looking than most municipal playgrounds. Or maybe your tyke would rather play pilot in the awesome (if vaguely psychedelic) airplane replica, complete with puffy clouds, pictured at the top of this post.

The retail options are pretty much endless, and there’s also a full-service grocery store. If your layover is long enough, there’s a tour desk that sells half-day guided excursions into Amsterdam, with a pick-up and drop-off point just outside the terminal. For those staying in-country, the railway link into Amsterdam — and to points beyond — couldn’t be simpler. Tickets are purchased from kiosks inside the terminal, and the platform is only a short walk away via tunnel and escalator.

Amsterdam’s hometown carrier, KLM, is the world’s oldest airline, and on the second level, near the meditation room, is a hallway of historical KLM travel posters showcasing the carrier’s destinations and aircraft over the decades. There’s also that rarest of rarities at airports nowadays, an open-air observation deck, called the Panoramaterras. An outdoor deck is maybe not ideal considering the Dutch weather, but it allowed them to install that old KLM Fokker 100 as part of the scenery. You don’t need to be an airplane geek to appreciate the view and a chance for some fresh air.

Down in the central lobby, meanwhile, is one of the coolest airport retails shops around — at least in the eyes of some of us. The Planes Plaza sells plastic and die-cast models, toy airports, airline pins, books, and so on. In the hallway out front there’s an entire forward section of a former KLM DC-9 (open to passers-by, of course), as well as a main landing gear section and engine cowling from a McDonnell Douglas MD-11.

And when the weather is good (an iffy proposition most months of the year), the fun continues outside. This being the Netherlands, the airport’s perimeter is ringed by bicycle paths, one of which leads to Schiphol’s spotterplaats, designated zones adjacent to the runways where airliner enthusiasts gather with their binoculars and cameras — an activity that is all but banned in the U.S. (Airplane spotting is so popular in Holland that Schiphol’s website includes a spotters’ subsection.)

As you can see from the sign below, cyclists can ride from the airport clear into Amsterdam itself. How many big-city airport’s are accessible by bike?

Schiphol is pronounced “Shkip-hole,” by the way. The second syllable is short and flattened; it’s “Shkipple.” It’s not “Shipple,” and it’s definitely not “Shy-pole.”

No, there’s not a butterfly garden or koi ponds like the ones in Singapore, or the soaring ceilings and waterfalls you’ll find elsewhere. But what Amsterdam lacks in flair, it makes up for with a workmanlike functionality and plenty of quirky charms. It’s got something even the biggest and flashiest airports often lack: character.

 

NORTH LATITUDE

LETTER FROM AMSTERDAM, 1991

LIMPING INTO Centraal Station, I whisper quietly. “Skip-hole,” I say. “Skipple. Skip-ill.” I’m rehearsing the correct pronunciation of Schiphol, the name of Amsterdam’s airport, from where in a few hours I’m due to catch a flight home.

It’s midsummer of and I’ve been up for two days — every hotel, motel, guesthouse and hostel sold-out from Antwerp to Hamburg. I’d taken a pass on a second floor chamber at the Kabul, a Red Light hovel across from a condom store, napping instead at McDonald’s and listening to a seven year-old cassette of Zen Arcade over and over and over. Now the lobby of Centraal Station hovers above me with its overcooked façade of gables and filigree, like some great medieval fun house.

I’m limping because of a late-night collision with one of Amsterdam’s countless sidewalk posts. The city’s streets are lined with tens of thousands of knee-high iron bollards, the point of which, I think, is to keep cars from parking on the sidewalks (a mission for which they are semi-successful, depending which part of the city you’re in). Because they are black, and because they are knee-high, these bollards are a sensational invitations for injury. How the Dutch and their swarms of bicycles avoid mass casualties I’ll never know, but distracted by a flaxen blonde pedaling past me on the Leidseplein, I ambled straight into one. It got me just below the right kneecap. I could feel the tendons twist and buckle.

I move slowly and achingly into the station, where, if it’s any consolation, the ticket man seems impressed by my pronunciation efforts. He takes my guilders and smiles.

A half hour later, watching from a second-level airport restaurant, the KLM employees are the easiest to spot in their blue uniforms. Everything about KLM is blue. Even their jets, inside and out, are done up in blue — a two-tone of powder and navy. There’s something soothingly, inexplicably Dutch about it — the pudding shades lifted straight from a Vermeer painting. I look at the ticket counters — at the logo and the aluminum marquee, the stacks of KLM timetables and frequent flyer brochures– and I realize there’s no red. Try to find an airline that doesn’t have at least one shade of red as part of its identity. None of that here, just cool Dutch blue.

“Shkip-ohl,” I mouth silently. Airport workers on bicycles glide across the polished floor.

A few seconds later I’m asleep, my head on the greasy table and my knee throbbing.

Finally I’m at the counter, and the KLM woman’s badge — the KLM-ers are handling check-in for my Northwest flight — says “Meike,” which I assume is a first name, not a last, but I can’t be sure. Her white hair and milky features seem to go nicely with her blue vest — a perfect picture of efficient Dutch neutrality.

I hand over my pilot credentials: company ID, licenses, medical certificate (“holder must wear corrective lenses”), letting her know I’m entitled to ride along gratis in one of the extra cockpit chairs.

Jetliner cockpits can have many as five seats. Behind the pilots you’ll find one, and often two auxiliary stations, known colloquially as observer seats or “jumpseats.” A jumpseat might unfold in sections or swing out from the wall; or it might be a fixed chair not much different from those of the working crew. They can be occupied by training personnel, FAA inspectors, off-duty pilots commuting to work, and freeloaders like me. It’s an uncomfortable place to sit, most of the time, though probably not as bad as the middle seat in coach. Certainly the scenery is more interesting, and although pilots are known to whine for extended periods of time, there are no colicky infants. And, it’s free.

Or not entirely, as Meike tells me that I need to pay a departure tax, which is bad news because my knee is all but seized and the payment kiosk is two-hundred meters away. The distance means nothing to her, the Dutch airport employees simply coast through the terminal on their bikes. As I stagger away, I’m nearly flattened by one.

Next hurdle is a gate-side podium where a gangly security man in a cranberry-colored suit is grilling me, making sure I’m not a terrorist. He looks like he belongs at the Avis counter. This is one of those post-Lockerbie things, where you stand at the desk to be peppered with questions about battery operated appliances, the contents of your suitcase, and why you came here in the first place.

If he’s looking at me a bit strangely, it’s easy to understand why: I am 25 years-old. I have not slept or showered in almost three days, and I can’t walk. And I’m trying to convince this officious fellow that I’m an airline pilot deserving of a free ride home in the cockpit.

“You are a pilot?”

“Yes sir.”

“For who?” The takes my ID badge and fingers it warily. This is still what might be called the old days, and my small-time regional carrier, Northeast Express, isn’t one to take things too seriously. Its employee badges look like something you’d make at home. In fact, they are hand-assembled in a company trailer at the airport in Bangor, Maine. There are no holographs or fancy stamps or bar codes. He looks at my crookedly cropped photo and picks at the cellophane tape I’ve placed over the peeled laminate.

“Northeast Express,” I explain. “Or Northwest Airlink, like it says on our planes. We’re a code-share affiliate of Northwest. They have a hub here.”

“Northeast?”

“No, Northwest.”

“You work for Northwest?”

“No, I work for Northeast.”

“But…”

“Northeast Express. We fly feeder routes for Northwest.”

“So is it Northeast or Northwest?”

“It’s both!” I say in a voice a little too chipper.

“Really,” says the guard. “What kind of plane do you fly?”

“The Beech 99.”

“The what?”

“It’s a fifteen-seater. A small turboprop.” Embarrassment mixes with exhaustion.

“Small, eh?”

“About the size of a milk truck.”

“Yes, well. And where did you stay in Amsterdam?”

“McDonald’s.”

And so on.

My luck, they are using a 747 today instead of the usual DC-10. It’s one of the old -200s with a three-man crew. I love the 747 and savor every chance to ride on one. This time, though, I learn that every last passenger seat is occupied, which means I’ll have to spend the entire eight-hour trip upstairs on cockpit. Usually the captain will toss you back to a vacant seat, hopefully in first or business, but this time there aren’t any.

The cockpit of the 747 sits at the forward tip of the upper deck, at such a forward extremity of the giant ship as to feel entirely removed from the rest of it. Possibly, from the crew’s point of view, that disconnect is the ideal arrangement. Pilots fully grasp the gravity of their responsibilities, trust me, but a constant awareness that you’re sitting atop hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal, fuel, freight and flesh can be — and how to say this exactly — distracting.  The cockpit is long, but surprisingly narrow and cramped for a plane so massive. Eight or more hours in the forward jumpseat, which does not recline, is the sort of thing that keeps chiropractors in business.

Worse, there’s another traveling pilot with us — he’s a United captain with a Dutch girlfriend, he tells us, who makes the crossing a couple of times monthly on his days off. This means there are five of us – the captain, first officer, flight engineer, and two jumpseaters, wedged into a room better suited for two.

But still, it’s a 747, that grandest of all jetliners. Despite my exhaustion and junkyard knee, I’m elated.

After strapping in, the other freeloader takes out his inflatable neck pillow and is sound asleep almost instantly. Propped in his seat, he looks like an unconscious accident victim in a neck brace.

We push exactly on time, and we’re in the air fifteen minutes later.

Out over the Atlantic it seems like the sun has hardly moved. And it hasn’t, so much, as we race westward, effectively slowing the passage of time. I can read the INS displays as they tick off the degrees of longitude and latitude.

At thirty degrees West the first officer is making a position report over the high-frequency radio. “Gander, Gander,” he calls, “Northwest zero three niner, position.” He’s got a clipboard full of dot-matrix printout on his left knee and a wedge of apple crumble on the right. A voice answers back, all reverb and crackly, a thousand miles away. Making a call over HF is a bit like offering up a prayer. You’re calling across some insane distance, hoping that somebody answers, and that they care.

The sunlight is white, oblique and directionless through the glass, like a spotlight from everywhere and nowhere. Outside temp shows minus 59. As the spectator, I’m both awed and heartbroken watching this crew of a 747 at work. An opportunity to sit here is irresistible. It’s like sitting in your favorite team’s dugout during a World Series game. But it carries with it a sort of voyeuristic shame. Forgive me, but it’s a bit like watching two strangers having their way with the girl of your dreams. You’re almost there, but the important parts are missing. You can watch but you can’t touch.

We are tracing a long, sub-polar arc toward eventual landfall at a gateway fix near Labrador. They’ve given us the northernmost track, one that will take us to nearly 60 degrees north latitude, practically scraping the glaciered tip of Greenland.

This far north, with clear weather and in the proper season (think April and Titanic), it’s not uncommon to see fields of icebergs drifting below, their wind-sculpted tops discernible from seven miles up.

Today there’s naught but gray ocean, the demarcations west of Greenwich passing invisibly, 60 cold miles at a time.

Which is fine since the view from the forward jumpseat of a 747 is terrible, unless you enjoy meditating on a wall of chipped zinc chromate, or else memorizing the lifejacket instructions embroidered onto the back of the captain’s chair. With all due love for the 747, the better jumpseat is on the old DC-10, where the aft left window extends from head-level to below the shins. You literally have a wall of glass to look through, and during steep approaches, or up over the Andes, the view is worthy of an Imax ticket.

My knee feels like it’s seizing, so I go for a walk.

I hobble downstairs and all the way rearward, past row 57 and up the other aisle. The plane is full and there’s crap all over the floor. People are asleep or watching the movie. I can’t tell what’s playing. A blurry bulkhead screen shows a distressed young woman crouching behind the fender of a pick-up truck.

I loiter near the rear galley and ask for a Diet Coke. A few feet away, waiting his turn for the lav, is a young guy in a purplish sweater. He strikes me as a straightlaced sort, maybe a law student or a kid who’d splurged for a bachelor party in Holland.

And he’s sweating, I realize. A nervous flyer? All flyers are nervous flyers, whether they admit it or not, but this is more serious. His J. Crew mock turtleneck (eggplant) is starting to blot at the armpits, and wet barbs of hair are sticking from his neck. Is this guy okay?

He’s the guy who in high school played on the hockey team and bullied me around. I’m thinking he’s got a Bulldog Café t-shirt somewhere in his luggage, which later he’ll give to his girlfriend who’ll wear it for the rest of the summer on Cape Cod.

I give him a half nod, then slide sideways towards the emergency exit. I turn and shift my weight so that I’m leaning against the door sill — my thigh held firmly against the boxy portion that contains the escape slide, and where it says DO NOT SIT.

And now the guy is eyeing me with a raised and quivering eyebrow, probably wondering which will pop open first — the lav, so he can relieve himself, or the cabin door, ejecting us both into the frozen tropopause. I should say to him: “Relax dude, I’m an undercover pilot, see?” Maybe flash him my trailer-made ID or a picture of myself in the cockpit of my ridiculous Beech 99, let him know it’s all gonna be okay.

But I don’t, and instead I put my hand on the big silver handle.

These door handles are designed for ease of use, I suppose, but they’ve always struck me as such retro-looking devices, clumsy and cartoonishly oversized. I’m thinking about this and tapping it with my thumb.

And now Eggplant J. Crew is on the verge of a full-bore conniption, his temples visibly throbbing. He fixes an angry gaze on me, his upper lip moist and trembling. Should I dare move that handle, he’s ready to spring, I can tell.

What Eggplant doesn’t know, and what, just for the fun of it, I choose not to tell him, is that neither of us could open the damn door if we spent all day trying. The doors on the 747, like the doors on most commercial planes, open in before they open out. At cruising altitude, with the cabin pressurized, there are probably 15,000 pounds of air pressure holding that door closed. If I jiggled the handle enough I might get a red light to come on and the pilot upstairs to drop his apple crumble, but the door is not opening.

After a minute he can’t take it any more. “Look,” he says, with a detectable tremor in his voice. “Could you please not touch that?”

“Sorry,” I say, pulling my hand back.

I take my Diet Coke and head towards the front again. As I hobble up the aisle, I shoot a quick glance at Eggplant, who seems to be calming down now that I’m leaving. “Take it easy.”

Little does he know this demented, limping person has a seat up front with the drivers.

 

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