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.