Last Sunday afternoon, nine people died when a Learjet rocketed into the ground of a suburban neighborhood of Palm Beach County, Florida.

And I mean rocketed. Chances are you’ve seen the dashcam footage. The most chilling part, to me, is the missile-like acoustics — the Doppler shriek of the engines as the plane flashes briefly into view before disintegrating into oblivion. Its speed when it hit the ground has been estimated at around six-hundred miles per hour.

A freeze-frame image shows both of the Learjet’s horizontal stabilizers missing. Those are the small wings in the back, the rear-hinged portions of which are called elevators, that provide a plane’s pitch control — its nose-up or nose down orientation. Without them, the plane is going in one direction only: down.

Reportedly, the stabilizers and other parts of the tail were found nearly four miles from the crash site. One question is whether they detached before or during that horrendous nosedive. Did their detachment cause the dive, or did the dive tear them away?

My money says the latter. I’m leaning towards a theory that the pilots found themselves within (or very close to) a thunderstorm, battling heavy turbulence and ice accretion. The plane ended up in an aerodynamic stall from which the crew failed to — or could not — recover. It then began to plummet at a speed and attitude beyond its design envelope. The stabilizers and other parts were subsequently ripped off, making the plummet even more extreme.

Inflight icing can, if unchecked, lead to a loss of lift and potentially a full-on stall. Smaller planes are more susceptible to this than commercial airliners. A Learjet is comparatively small, but like any sophisticated aircraft it has deicing equipment built into its wings, engine inlets, air data probes and so forth. It’s possible, however, that unusually severe icing, perhaps combined with strong turbulence, caught the pilots off guard. A failure or malfunction of the deicing system is also in play.

The stall recovery technique would be basic: lower the nose, level the wings, add power. And be careful to avoid a secondary stall by easing the nose up too soon. Easier said than done. A stall in a jet isn’t like a stall in a Cessna; it can take thousands of feet to recover, and Learjets are known to be particularly stall-unfriendly. Add ice to the mix and you’ve got a highly dangerous situation. Icing changes the contours of the wings and can make the characteristics of a stall more violent and unpredictable.

Which brings us to the next question: how did they get themselves into such weather in the first place? If there’s one thing pilots avoid at all costs, it’s thunderstorms. Were they trying to fly safely above the weather — a tactic fraught with risks? Were the radar returns deceptively docile-looking? Or did they simply underestimate, or misinterpret, what they were dealing with?

The less likely scenario has the stabilizers coming off before the high-speed plunge, effectively causing it. If so, similar questions arise. Did they detach from extreme turbulence? Did the pilots overreact to a turbulence encounter and cause a structural failure? Did icing contribute?

People also have been bringing up the possibility of a dangerous phenomenon known as “Mach tuck.” This is a sort of high-speed, high-altitude stall that results when the air flowing around the wings exceeds a critical velocity. Shock waves form on the wings and migrate backwards, shifting the wing’s center of lift to a point behind its normal position, causing the nose to pitch down abruptly. This would never happen in normal, stable flight, but in the throes of a storm, who knows. Learjets are, let’s just say, sensitive, and there’s not a lot of aerodynamic wiggle room at high altitudes. Worse yet, icing can exacerbate the effects of Mach tuck.

One way or the other, the plane probably shouldn’t have been where it was. How and why it got there is the biggest question of all.

The copilot was only twenty years-old — a very young age to be at the controls of a private jet. The captain was 55 and presumably more seasoned. Records show him obtaining his ATP license (the certificate required for his position) about five years ago. We don’t know if their backgrounds or experience levels were a factor, though surely it’ll be looked at.

Learjet thumbnail courtesy of Jeffry Surianto

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THIS IS about food. Or love. Or love and food. Love, mostly. Or food, mostly.

It’s about food because life, to me, was never about food.

The matter goes back to childhood, as so many things do. I was raised in perhaps the most gastronomically unadventurous family in America, a fact that would haunt me well into adulthood.

Growing up, a “salad,” as I knew it, consisted of a bowl of iceberg lettuce doused with big-brand dressing. We had our pizzas Margherita-style, with sauce and cheese only. The idea of a topping, even pepperoni, was frighteningly exotic.

I don’t necessarily blame my parents. They were known to serve up interesting meals from time to time. The problem was me. I wasn’t just shy of food, I was willfully ignorant and disdaining of it — afraid of it.

In fifth grade, when my little league team won its only game of the season, our coach took everyone for Chinese food. Everyone except me. 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, my friends would go to Chinatown on Sunday mornings for dim sum. I always made excuses, because I had no idea what dim sum was, and would surely embarrass myself attempting to eat it.

Dining in a group, my menu anxiety was so crippling that I was known to feign illness to avoid ordering, even if I was starving. “Oh I’m not feeling so well. Just some water for me.”

Middle Eastern food? Sushi? Mexican? No chance. I was thirty before I could use chopsticks or knew what a burrito was.

And so the act of dining out, seldom as it happened, was always a mundane, unexciting experience, limited to fast food or this or that suburban steakhouse. Easy menus, nothing to mispronounce.

Once I was into my twenties I began traveling. Yet restaurants were almost never in the experience. Although I’d been to fifty countries by my 35th birthday, the eating part had always been an afterthought. This is heresy to millions, I know, for whom travel and gastronomy are synonymous. I’m the guy who flew to Hong Kong and had dinner at McDonald’s.

There I am, on a layover in Copenhagen, Sao Paulo, Barcelona or Cape Town, walking back to my hotel with secret haul of fast food, the greasy bag hidden in a backpack in case any colleagues see me. And then there’s room service, the ultimate guilty pleasure for the food-phobic. Nobody cares what you order from room service. The dude comes to your door, the shame of your dinner concealed beneath silver domes.

My life is full of ironies, including the fact I once met Anthony Bourdain. I met him on an airplane. And it was on planes, perhaps predictably, that I was known to push my boundaries, if ever so slightly. I found it a form of decadent fun indulging in the gourmet offerings up in first or business class. Lamb kofta with smoked eggplant? Sure, why not. I remember really liking the Indian entree I had once on a flight out of Mumbai, yet I’d have panicked at the thought of going into an Indian restaurant at home.

But fancy as it was, it still was airplane food, and the passenger is a captive audience. You’ve got two or three entrees to choose from; you pick one and they shove it in front of you. It doesn’t take a lot of adventuring to enjoy the seared mahi-mahi with macadamia nut crust.

Food, as I learned it, equals boring, be it at home or abroad or in the air. It had always been that way.

Until it wasn’t.

The change came fairly suddenly, and it’s owed to Elizabeth.

It takes other people — a love interest, more often than not — to nudge you out of your comfort zone. And if your girlfriend is into food, well you’d better be into it as well. Particularly if said girl is, as they say, out of your league. If it’s restaurants she wants, it’s restaurants she’ll get.

Liz, barely five feet tall, makes up for a lack of stature with an outsized intellect and an equally outsized penchant for dining out. And a streak of bossiness that won’t take no for an answer. What was I in for?

For me, “foreign food” would be the biggest challenge. Any cuisine with an ethnicity attached: Korean, Vietnamese, Lebanese. Even Italian. Words like “paneer” or “paella” or “pho” made me scared — highfalutin concepts from some culinary outland. What the hell is focaccia bread?

My great-grandparents came from a town near Naples. I can remember my grandmother speaking Italian. But I couldn’t tell you jack about Italian cuisine. Liz is Indonesian. Her parents came to the U.S. in their 20s. In addition to being an aficionado of Boston’s best-ranked (and priciest) dining spots, she’s versed in the specialties of Indonesian cooking. This gives her an extra layer of exotic-ness and, as I saw it, intimidation. This would be quite a learning curve.

Not counting pizza, the first restaurant I brought us to was a Turkish place in Somerville, up near Teele Square. I knew nothing about Turkish food. I’d have to fake it.

Faking it. The faking game is important. My strategy was simple: whenever I was in another part of the world, I’d take the time to commit one or two food-related details to memory. I’d file these details away for use later on, back at home, should I find myself in a nice restaurant hoping to impress a girl.

Thus I’d memorized “Asada Tampiqueña” after eating out once in Mexico. “Koshary” in Egypt. “Moussaka” in Athens. And so on.

Now, sitting in that Turkish place, as Liz’s coffee-colored eyes smoldered at me suspiciously, no doubt discerning the fraud that I was, I was able to recall two small words from a trip to Turkey some years earlier: “Adana kebab.” I’d been in a restaurant in Cappadocia and ordered Adana kebab, most likely on a waiter’s recommendation — the old, “Oh, what would you suggest?” gimmick employed by know-nothings like me.

And there it was, praise Jesus, on the menu in Somerville. What a boost of confidence. “Oh, the Adana kebab!” I said. “Those are really good.” In truth I had no recollection of what one looked or tasted like. But it didn’t matter; the recognition gave me swagger.

Impressed with myself, I ordered my Adana, unaware at the time that an Adana kebab is about as basic a Turkish dish as exists. It’s like ordering Pad Thai.

It put me at ease, though.

And that was the beginning.

Our first trip abroad was to the Baltics. Strolling the cobblestones of Tallinn, the specter of mealtime loomed before me each afternoon. How could I get out of this? “My feet are tired, could we maybe just settle for a club sandwich from room service?” That wasn’t going to work. “Looks like rain out there.” Nope, that wouldn’t work either. Like it or not we’d be dining out. Nightly. I chose the sightseeing and Liz did the food hunting online. What choice did I have?

And suddenly there I was, in the choicest restaurants in Tallinn and Riga, eating local specialties.

That’s how these things happen: gradually, and then all at once. The Baltics were the jumping-off point. Later it would Slovenia, the Greek Islands, Palawan, New York City. And a hundred spots in between.

The biggest surprise was how rapidly my anxiety eased. I discovered could find my way around a menu just fine. Indeed, somewhere along the way it dawned on me: this isn’t rocket science. It’s food. It’s just food. I’d been living in a self-imposed exile, denying myself one of life’s great pleasures, for no reason.

At home, armed with a “Boston’s 50 Best” list, Liz took charge. I found myself eating Cuban food, tapas in Inman Square, dining with hipsters in the South End. Locally-sourced this, artisanal that. Chef-curated. Farm-to-table. Vegetble-forward. Fusion. The buzzwords were as annoying as ever, but I was getting comfortable.

Once I relaxed, it was easy. So easy that I actually started looking forward to our dinner dates (if not the AmEx bill that came later). I’d skip breakfast to be extra-hungry.

In fact there are millions of people like me — people who make later-in-life discoveries of commonplace delights. Often because someone they care about changed their thinking.

On my birthday one year Liz took me for Beef Wellington at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant in Boston. Prior to that night, I had an insane notion that Beef Wellington, of all things, was some esoteric entree. The reality of it startled me. It was so basic. And so delicious (and, bless her, Liz picked up the tab for that one).

In the town of Delphi, north of Athens, I learned what a Greek salad actually is (and isn’t), triggering a newfound love of feta cheese.

A Bosnian restaurant in Dubrovnik, with a Michelin recommendation to boot? I was making reservations.

I learned, too, that good food doesn’t need to be expensive or concocted from obscure ingredients full of French accent marks. This is hardly breaking news — foodies have long sung the praises of unpretentious neighborhood spots — but for me it was something of a relief. For instance that place in Revere with the incredible sub sandwiches. Or the fish and chips up in Rockport.

When I think of our trip to Utah, it’s the meals that I recall most vividly, none of them elaborate: the Red Iguana in Salt Lake, and that barbecue joint down near Zion. Simple food, but food that would’ve scared me away when I was fifteen (or forty).

Once upon a time, even a taco would’ve frightened me. Not any more. Now, on a layover in Mexico City, I can drag a colleague out to Taqueria Gabriel, strolling in like I own the place. (It was Liz who found Gabriel. She finds everything.)

Look at me. It took a shamefully long time, but I’m enjoying exciting dishes in exciting locations — with the added bonus of being seen in the company of the sexy Indonesian girl who made it happen.

Somewhere in there I even earned to like olives, which I’d despised — or thought I did — since I was a kid. Today I can’t get enough of them.

I’d been less squeamish on airplanes, but there too were lines I couldn’t cross. Flying in Emirates first class, for example, which I’ve been fortunate to do on several occasions, I was always afraid of sampling the airline’s signature caviar course. I mean, how the heck do I eat caviar? The answer: just like anyone else. And now I’m asking for a second course. (Liz, sitting next to me in row two, eschews the caviar and goes for the mini-burgers. Who’s the gourmet now?)

One of the biggest testaments to my conversion is seen in my photo stream, which has grown messy with food pics. I’ve become one of “those people,” with my phone out the minute the entree arrives, rearranging plates and flatware for the right aesthetic. I do this even (or especially) when Liz isn’t there, excited to send her a shot of that dish I had in Guatemala City or Milan.

And when she is there, sharing the table with me, the dinner becomes a sort of complete moment: the food in front of me and the girl across from me.

These occasions — a simple dinner together — have become crucial memories. A meal is no longer an inconvenience or a source of intimidation. It’s a time marker, a touchstone.

I’m still a rube, don’t get me wrong. When I scan through the pictures, I can’t tell you half the time what I’m looking at. A soup of some kind from a restaurant in St. Lucia. A pork dish in the Philippines that I forget the name of. A pasta thing in Croatia. Burrata? Is that burrata? What’s burrata, again?

Honestly, I can’t remember the difference between sushi and sashimi. But there I am in a high-end omakase running up a $500 bill on Valentine’s Day.

Onward and upward. Maybe I’ll open a restaurant when I retire. I’m reminded that Greg Norton, the guy from Hüsker Dü, became a chef!

What Liz brings to the table, so to speak, is beauty and elegance and, hopefully, a sense of pride in having turned me around. What I bring to the table, aside from a credit card, is less clear. But the key is I’m enjoying it. Maybe I’m not sure what I’m eating, but I know that I like it. And, most important, I’m no longer afraid of restaurants. Maybe I’m still faking it. But I’m faking it better.

What does it mean when someone “changes your life”? Usually those changes occur in small bites. Literally, in this case. And when a person accepts your weaknesses and foibles, it’s an expression of kindness. Returning that favor means welcoming change and adapting, even when it makes you uneasy. We can maybe view food — the act of dining together — as a shared love language all its own.

It’s been been said a million times, but food is more than a mere comestible needed to survive or satiate a craving. We use it to communicate.

A shame it took so long. All those years, all those countries, all those opportunities. If only I’d met her sooner.

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

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“Garage rock” is one of those tough-to-define genres — if we can call it a genre. Gritty, scrappy, unpolished, low-fi. Bands that play fast and don’t take themselves too seriously. It’s any or all of those things. A lot like punk, I guess, and the terms are sometimes interchangeable. Best to let the music do the describing…

And, so, allow me to present the greatest garage rock album of all time: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, by the Replacements.

Late to the party, I discovered this record in 1985. It was already four years old. (Which itself is remarkable. In 1981, fer Chrissakes, I was listening to REO Speedwagon.) Unfamiliar with the band, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Oh sure, I’d known of the Replacements — four bratty drunks out of Minneapolis led by a growly singer named Paul Westerberg — but had never really given them a listen. (They’d been tangential to the punk scene as I knew it, more for the over-21 crowd instead of the Sunday matinee hardcore crowd.)

This was their “early stuff,” as the saying goes. Brash and breathless. The band had since moved on — matured, most would say — into the era of “Please to Meet Me” and an appearance on Saturday Night Live. They’d nudged into the mainstream. The edges of it, anyway, much the way their fellow Minnesotans Hüsker Dü had done around the same time, both bands leaving their thrashier roots behind and gunning for wider appeal.

It’s tempting to say that Sorry Ma is to the Replacements what Land Speed Record is to Husker Dü. That formative first record (and the one that, years down the road, bands like to distance themselves from). But while both projects are fast and furious, Land Speed is, after a couple of listens, a one-dimensional bore. Sorry Ma, on the other hand, is a classic of freewheeling punk rock energy.

It’s like a fireworks show. Each of the 18 songs is a quick little incendiary — explosive but colorfully crafted. Now you see it, now you don’t… and here comes the next one. Most of them clock in at under two minutes; a hallmark of punk efficiency. They make their point and move on, Westerberg’s cheeky lyrics riding a barrage of shock-and-awe melodies both frantic and playful.

“I hate music! It’s got too many notes!”

There’s nothing poppy about them, but songs like “I Hate Music” or “Love You Til Friday” quickly stick in your head. They also make you laugh. Everything about the album is fun. Who can’t laugh out loud at Westerberg’s exasperation in the song “Shut Up”? There’s even a track called “Somethin’ to Dü,” a tongue-n-cheek dig at their Twin City compatriots.

What other bands do we associate with fun? The Ramones? The Ramones were fun in a packaged, constrained sort of way. The Replacements were fun in a sloppy, punchy, hung over sort of way. I know which one I like better.

Which brings us back to the “garage rock” thing. You know it when you hear it, I suppose. The album’s title, alone, is garage as it gets, but it’s Sorry Ma’s raw guitars and no-fuss mix that are quintessential. Indeed this has to be the least pretentious LP ever recorded. (The engineer was Steve Fjelstad, who later would engineer Husker Dü’s 1985 masterpiece New Day Rising. Though the two, as it happens, sound nothing alike.)

The album’s greatest moment, though, is on its last and best song, “Raised in the City,” which ought to have been an indie rock anthem. It’s the part near the end where Westerberg shouts, “Stinson! Stinson!” calling out to the Stinson brothers, Bob and Tommy, on lead guitar and bass respectively, as the album comes to a close. It’s one of those easy-to-miss improvisations that can make a song special. I can’t imagine Westerberg planned to yell those names out. He just did, and on-beat. It’s that kind of record and I’ve always loved it.

“File under power trash,” it says on the cover. Perfect.

When Bob Stinson died in 1995, Sorry Ma was played at his wake.

Meanwhile, bringing this back on theme, let’s jump ahead a few records. In ’85, around the time I was discovering Sorry Ma, the Replacements put out an album called, for whatever reason, Tim. This was the band’s major label debut. It’s a solid effort with several good songs, one of which is called “Waitress in the Sky.”

“Waitress” is a bit of a novelty, a catchy singalong with a rockabilly vibe that provides a breather between the album’s heavier tracks…

Sanitation expert and a maintenance engineer,
Garbage man, a janitor and you my dear,
A real union flight attendant, my oh my,
You ain’t nothin’ but a waitress in the sky.

Well, that doesn’t sound very nice. However, Paul Westerberg later explained the song was written from the point of view of a disrespectful passenger. “I was playing the character of the creep who demands to be treated like a king,” he says in “Trouble Boys,” a book about the Replacements by author Bob Mehr.

In fact, “Waitress” was inspired by Westerberg’s sister, Julie, who at the time was a flight attendant for Minneapolis-based Northwest Airlines. She retired from Delta in 2019 (Northwest had merged with Delta in 2009), after a forty-year career.

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October 5, 2026

On September 30th, the first officer on a FlyDubai 737 en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv attacked the captain with a cockpit crash axe. A panicked struggle followed as passengers and off-duty pilots rushed to the cockpit.

The first officer, Hamam al-Hammami, was subdued and the jet landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia — though not before it was pushed into a high-speed dive that tore away part of its tail. Nobody was killed. Injuries to the captain were serious but he’s expected to recover fully.

Al-Hammami’s exact intentions are uncertain. According to reports thus far, his most likely plan was to hijack the Boeing and fly it into a Tel Aviv skyscraper.

This was a close call. If the captain, 38 year-old Smith Machchhar, hadn’t managed to unlatch the cockpit door from inside, al-Hammami would have probably killed him and crashed the plane.

It later came to light that al-Hammami had been banned from commercial flying in his home country of Oman, apparently for espousing radical Islamist views. How FlyDubai, a large and successful carrier, managed to overlook this is a question that needs answering.

Goodness. It’s Germanwings all over again. Or EgyptAir flight 990. Or SilkAir 185. Air India 171. Malaysia 370. Sad but true, pilots have gone rogue and crashed airplanes before. That list is much too long. So long that, as shown recently in a Wall Street Journal article, suicidal pilots are becoming one of the biggest statistical threats to air safety. This is partly true because other causes of crashes have grown increasingly rare, but still it’s a bit frightening.

So how do we keep that list from growing?

Passing through aircrew security yesterday at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the screeners were a little more tightly wound than usual. It took our crew a good half hour to get through, with our luggage enjoying lots of extra scrutiny. This kind of nervousness isn’t surprising, but neither is it logical. The weapon employed by al-Hammami wasn’t something he smuggled aboard; it was a piece of standard cockpit equipment. And heck, you can fashion a deadly weapon out of any number of innocuous things.

It’s not about hardware. It’s about the element of surprise. The danger was Hammami himself, not anything he was carrying. This was true of the others on that list above (and of the 9/11 hijackers as well).

We can, in the meantime, debate the merits of additional psychological screening. We also can, for what it’s worth, separate those acts committed in the name of religious or political beliefs from those motivated by mental illness — so much as those things are different. For the victims it hardy matters — murder is murder — but methods of detection might need to be developed separately.

At a certain point, however, there’s not a lot we can do. We’re forced to rely on a set of presumptions. It comes down to trust. The threat can never be zero, but it’s always going to be low — very low. I don’t want this to sound like an airline press release, but you can confidently presume that the people flying your plane are exactly what you want them to be: well-trained professionals for whom safety is their priority. As an airline pilot I do not leave for work wondering if one of my colleagues is going to kill me. I shouldn’t be expected to. And neither should passengers.

For someone like me, the most frustrating takeaway from this near-disaster is knowing that people around the world are getting on planes today and wondering, if only idly, if their pilots are potential mass-murderers. For the profession it’s about the biggest embarrassment we could suffer.

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September 11, 2026

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, American Airlines flight 11, and United Airlines flight 175, took off from Boston’s Logan International Airport, only minutes apart. Both were bound for Los Angeles. Neither, of course, ever got there.

The idea of constructing a memorial to the 2001 terror attacks, at the airport from which two of the four hijacked planes departed, was perhaps to be expected. But it needed to be done just right. There’s a fine line sometimes between commemorative and jingoistic. What they came up with, I’m pleased to say, is superb, and ought to serve as a model for such memorials everywhere.

Reached along an ascending pathway that twists upward amidst grass and trees, the main structure is a sort of open-topped glass chapel, inside of which are two vertical slabs, one for each of the two aircraft that struck the World Trade Center — and mimicking the shapes, one can’t help noticing, of the twin towers themselves — engraved with the names of the passengers and crew. There’s one for flight 11, the 767 that struck the north tower, and the other for flight 175, which hit the south tower minutes later.

The glass and steelwork allow the entire space to be flooded with silvery light, creating an atmosphere that’s quiet and contemplative without feeling maudlin or sentimentalized.

There are no flags or any of the crudely patriotic touches one might expect (and dread). It’s everything it should be: beautifully constructed, understated, and respectful.

Officially it’s called the “Place of Remembrance,” and it was built by the Boston-based firm of Moskow Linn Architects, as part of a public competition. The final design was chosen by airline workers, airport representatives, and family members of the victims.

The engraved names are separated into columns of crew and passengers, and the names of off-duty United employees on the flight 175 plate include the small “tulip” logo of United Airlines. This might seem a strange touch, but this memorial was built primarily for the community of people who work at the airport. Among the passengers and crew killed on the two jets were more than a dozen Logan-based employees.

But anyone is welcome, of course, and I wish more people knew about it. Although it’s easily accessible from terminals A or E, it’s not well advertised. It sits on a knoll just to the southern side of the central parking garage, across from the Hilton hotel.

The easiest way to find it is to follow the signs to the ride-share pickup point for terminals A and E. There are two pickup points; go to the one closest to terminal A. Once you step out of the elevator it’s just a one-minute walk around the corner.

An event was held this year on the 25th anniversary of the attacks, during which a sculpted wreath and plaque were added.

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Photos by the author

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September 11, 2026

MY MOST VIVID MEMORY of September 11th, 2001, is my memory of a cockroach.

It was one of the biggest roaches I’ve ever seen — copper-colored and bullet-shaped, the length of my little finger — and it came crawling across the platform of the Government Center subway station at 7:00 a.m., as I stood there waiting for the train that would take me to Logan Airport. It scampered, stopped, then zigged and zagged, in that deliberate yet utterly directionless way of insects, its footsteps so heavy I swear that I could hear them, click-click-click on the greasy concrete.

It portended everything, this giant subway cockroach. Or it portended nothing. And as it came closer I drew my foot back — my right foot, I remember with absolute clarity — and nudged it, gently, off the platform and down into the dark and filthy space alongside the tracks, where it disappeared more or less instantly into the shadows and detritus.

This is how we remember things.

Once on the train, I would chat briefly with a United Airlines flight attendant, whose name I never got, and who maybe, possibly — I’ll never know for certain — was headed to work aboard the doomed United flight 175.

I was on my way to Orlando, where I’d be picking up a work assignment later that afternoon. My airplane would lift off only seconds after American’s flight 11, the first of the two jets to hit the twin towers. I had watched the silver Boeing back away from gate 25 at Logan’s terminal B and begin to taxi. United 175 would launch a few minutes later. My plane was in-between.

In an old briefcase here in this room, I still have my boarding pass from that morning. It shows me assigned to seat 11D, on the aisle, but there were empty seats and I slid over the window.

Elevens were wild that day. On the 11th day of the month, flight 11 would collide with the World Trade Center, two buildings that shaped an enormous “11” in the Manhattan sky. I looked down from row 11.

But there was nothing to see, yet. I recall an almost uncannily clear view of Manhattan, taking note, as I always do, of that graceful little bend that the island makes — the way it turns eastbound just below Midtown. There was no smoke, no fire. I was just a few minutes — a matter of seconds, maybe — too soon.

A short time later, about halfway to Florida, we started descending. Because of a “security issue,” our captain told us, we, along with many other airplanes, would be diverting immediately. Pilots are polished pros when it comes to dishing out euphemisms, and this little gem would be the most laughable understatement I’ve ever heard a comrade utter.

Our new destination was Charleston, South Carolina.

A bomb threat had been called in. That was my hunch. My worry wasn’t of war and smoldering devastation. My worry was being late for work. It wasn’t until I joined a crowd of passengers in Charleston, clustered around a TV in a concourse restaurant, that I learned what was going on.

And there I am. I’m watching the video of the second airplane, shot from the ground in a kind of twenty-first century Zapruder film. The picture swings left and picks up the United 767 moving swiftly. This is flight 175. The plane rocks, lifts its nose, and, like a charging, very angry bull making a run at a fear-frozen matador, drives itself into the very center of the south tower. The airplane vanishes. For a fraction of a second there is no falling debris, no smoke, no fire, no movement. Then, from within, you see the white-hot explosion and spewing expulsion of fire and matter.

And then, a bit later, the collapse. And this is the important part. Because to me, had the airplanes crashed, blown up, and reduced the upper halves of those buildings to burned-out hulks, the whole event would nonetheless have clung to the realm of believability. Had the towers not actually fallen, I suspect our September 11 hangover, which rages to this day, might not have been so prolonged. It was the collapse — the groaning implosions and the pyroclastic tornadoes whipping through the canyons of lower Manhattan — that catapulted the event from ordinary disaster to historical infamy.

As I stand awestruck in this shithole airport restaurant in South Carolina, the television shows the towers of the World Trade Center. They are not just afire, not just shedding debris and pouring out oil-black smoke. They are falling down. The sight of those ugly, magnificent towers, collapsing onto themselves, is the most sublimely terrifying thing I have ever seen.

Then I would go to a motel and spend the night. The next morning I’d rent a car and drive all the way home to Boston.

This is how we remember things.

And pilots, like fire fighters, police officers, and everyone else whose professions had been implicated, had no choice but to take things, well, personally. Four on-duty airline crews were victims, including eight pilots. John Ogonowski comes to mind, the good-guy captain of American 11. Of the thousands of people victimized that day, Captain Ogonowski was figuratively, if not literally, the first of them. He lived in my home state; his funeral made the front pages, where he was eulogized for his philanthropic work with local Cambodian immigrants.

Maybe it’s melodramatic to say I felt a bond or kinship with these eight men, but it’s something like that. What they went through, these eight colleagues on the very front edge of the attacks, the very men whose airplanes would be stolen and weaponized, is something I can’t fathom yet, at the same time, I can imagine and visualize all too chillingly.

And yes, in the ten-second bursts it took the towers to fall, I knew something about the business of flying planes would be different forever. I just wasn’t sure what it would be.

Fast-forward. It’s hyperbole to speak of the world having been “changed forever” that day. I’m conservative and skeptical when it comes to these things. History is bigger than us. Try to take the long view, even if, all these years on, the dominos haven’t stopped falling. Heck, tens of millions of people died in World War Two — tens of thousands at a time, as the incendiaries rained down over Europe and Japan. A hundred thousand bodies one night in Tokyo alone.

Sure, things are different now. Albeit for reasons we don’t always own up to. I have to say, I’m discouraged — or should that be encouraged? — because more than any “clash of civilizations,” the real and lasting legacy of Mohamed Atta and his henchmen has been something more mundane: tedium.

Think about it. The long lines, the searches and pat-downs, the litany of rules and protocols we’re forced to follow — all this meaningless pomp in the name of security. Of modern life’s many rituals, few are marinated in boredom as much as air travel. “Flying” is what we call it. How misleading. We don’t fly so much as we sit and stand around for interminable amounts of time.

And most distressing of all, we seem to be okay with this. There’s the real legacy of September 11th. The terrorists have won, goes the refrain, and perhaps that’s true. It isn’t quite what they hoped to win, but they’ve won it nevertheless.

The irony that nobody talks about is that the hijackers’ ability to pull off the 2001 attacks so spectacularly had almost nothing to do with airport security in the first damn place. And none of the measures we see on the concourse today would have kept them from succeeding. I’ve made this point many times, but never have I seen or heard it acknowledged elsewhere.

As conventional wisdom has it, the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto the airplanes. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold: diversions to Beirut or Havana, with hostage negotiations and standoffs.

The presence of boxcutters was merely incidental — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The men could have used knives fashioned from plastic, broken bottles wrapped with tape, or any of a thousand other improvised tools. The only weapon that mattered was the intangible one: the element of surprise. So long as they didn’t chicken out, they were all but guaranteed to succeed.

For a number of reasons, just the opposite is true today. The hijack paradigm was changed forever even before the first of the Twin Towers had dropped to the ground, when the passengers of United 93 realized what was happening and fought back. That element of surprise was no longer a useful device. Hijackers today would face not only an armored cockpit, but also a planeload of people convinced they’re about to die. It’s hard to imagine a terrorist, be it with a boxcutter or a bomb, making it two steps up the aisle without being pummeled. It’s equally hard to imagine that organized groups would be willing to expend valuable resources on a scheme with such a high likelihood of failure.

In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again. Guards paw through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors, screwdrivers. Meanwhile, even a child knows that a lethal implement can be crafted out of virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a shattered first class dinner plate.

And so on.

A September 11th post isn’t anything I’ve looked forward to, and I’m wary of the maudlin sentimentalizing and over-the-top coverage this anniversary brings each year. But something needs to be said, and so here it is. After all, nothing in my lifetime had a more profound effect on air travel than the events of that Tuesday morning twenty-five years ago.

At least until COVID-19 came along.

As the pandemic played out, it was interesting to notice the eerie parallels with September 11th and the ensuing “war on terror.”

Both crises were born of legitimately dangerous circumstances, but quickly became twisted by politics and hysteria. Curiously, this seems to have happened in opposite ways: After the 2001 attacks, it was mostly people on the right who bought into the hype and fear; who saw terrorists around every corner and were willing to sign off on things like the Patriot Act, TSA, the Iraq War, and so forth. Left-leaning people resisted. With COVID, it was left-leaning people who were more fearful and pessimistic, while those on the right advocate for a softer, more laissez-faire approach.

Why the difference? I suspect it’s because people who lean right are more naturally drawn to responses involving power and conflict; going after enemies, seeking revenge, etc. — all the things that came into play after September 11th. The pandemic, on the other hand, centered on concepts like compassion and “saving people.”

Both crises have mostly receded, thankfully. But one of the crucial takeaways, in both instances, was witnessing how, when people are afraid, they’ll quickly adapt to almost anything, including ways of life that are unproductive or harmful.

Just as the virus will stay with us, chronic and endemic, so will terrorism. There may have been, and may still be, a “war on terror,” but there will never be an end of terrorism.

How we live within this reality defines us for the long term. We can do so sensibly, or by waging a ruinously expensive, self-destructive battle with no conceivable end.

About the photos:

The picture at the top was taken by the author from the cockpit of a 19-seater in 1994.

The second picture is a watercolor rendition of the same, painted by Julianna Harhay, the daughter of Michael Harhay, a pilot for United Airlines. That is Michael’s arm in the first photo.

An earlier version of this essay appears in chapter six of COCKPIT CONFIDENTIAL.

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The post The Day of the Cockroach appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

September 10, 2026. UPDATED.

Five people were killed this past Sunday when a Boeing 767 freighter crashed off the end of a runway in Miami, colliding with several vehicles and catching fire.

As more info comes to light, the more and more egregious things look. My cardinal rule is to avoid early speculation and conjecture, but this is shaping up to be a colossal screw-up on the part of the crew.

The bullet points:

1. The plane touched down at an unusually high speed and roughly halfway down the runway. Pilots are expected to abandon any landing should the targeted speed be exceeded by any significant amount. (Landing speeds vary with weight, flap setting, and weather.)

2. The pilots were still in the process of configuring the jet as it passed over the threshold. The flaps were in the process of extending. This is somewhat shocking. Standard protocol is to have the jet fully configured and stable no lower than a thousand feet above the ground. If it’s not, you break off the landing and go around.

3. Neither the plane’s thrust reversers nor its ground spoilers (panels that lift from the wing to help the jet decelerate), were activated after touchdown. Reverse thrust is controlled by whichever pilot is at the controls, while the spoilers deploy automatically after sensing proper weight-on-wheels and tire spin-up — in other words, when the plane “knows” it’s on the ground. The reason they didn’t deploy is probably because the jet never sensed a proper touchdown. In the videos, the left main landing gear can be seen still aloft as the jet speeds past. It was so fast it wanted to keep flying. The pilots could have manually activated the spoilers, but a last-second decision was made to apply go-around thrust instead.

4. In something of a panic move, the throttles were pushed fully forward. Was there enough runway left to become airborne again? Maybe, but the pilots decided otherwise and, after only a few seconds, power was again cut to idle. At which point they were out of options: there was neither room enough to stop nor to fly again.

What it all looks like, in summary, is a highly unstable approach that, for whatever reasons, the pilots chose to continue rather than abandon.

Video footage shows ominous-looking clouds and rainstorms off the approach end of the runway. Gusts and possible windshear may have been a factor. Yet even if this is the case, it wouldn’t excuse the pilots for attempting to land.

Unless there’s more to it. We know certain facts, but we don’t know the why of them. None of this is conclusive.

Much of the media, meanwhile, is describing the plane as an “Amazon” or “Prime Air” jet. Which it was and wasn’t.

Amazon does not own an airline or fly its own planes. It uses contractors, some of whom paint their jets in an Amazon “Prime Air” livery. (It’s an arrangement not unlike those between the major passenger carriers and their regional jet “Express” and “Connection” partners.) The 767 that crashed in Miami was flown on Amazon’s behalf by a company called 21 Air, which I’d never heard of until today.

Another company that relies on contractors is DHL, the global shipping giant. You’ll see jetliners in DHL’s distinctive red and yellow colors at airports all over the globe. These belong to a multitude of contractors; none are flown by DHL itself.

FedEx and UPS, on the other hand, own and operate their own airlines.

Related Story:
ODE TO THE 767

Photo courtesy of Unsplash

The post Five Dead After 767 Crashes in Miami appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

Of late, U.S. airlines have embarked on a flurry of international expansion. United, in particular, has been throwing darts at the map, moving into markets (Split, Kaohsiung, Ulaanbataar) many Americans have never heard of.

Yet one destination continues to remain conspicuously absent: Poland.

No U.S. carrier flies to Poland. Nor has any American carrier served Poland since Delta flew to Warsaw in the early 1990s, after its takeover of Pan Am’s European network. The city was dropped shortly thereafter.

Why? This isn’t a trick question. I don’t know the answer. Surely it’s odd. Not only are there millions of Polish-Americans, but the largest community of them lives in and around Chicago, a major hub for both American Airlines and United. Polish carrier LOT, meanwhile, has flown to both O’Hare and JFK for decades. We compete with foreign carriers on hundreds of routes; why not this one?

Is it a political thing? Is there not enough premium fare traffic to warrant such a flight?

A LOT Boeing 787 at New York’s JFK Airport.

The latter would seem a likely reason, but many of the recently unveiled routes are to lower-yield leisure markets. Surely Warsaw, or a summer route to Krakow, could bring in as much revenue as Sardinia or Tenerife or Dubrovnik, one would think.

American Airlines did announce a Chicago-Warsaw flight just before COVID hit. The launch was put on hold, then the whole idea was scrapped.

The Israeli carrier El Al sometimes operates charters from JFK to the Polish city of Katowice. My guess is that these are remembrance tours of some kind, as the Auschwitz-Birkenau site is nearby to there.

While were at it, what other “missing routes” are you there? Can you name another city-pair that seemingly should have regular service, but for whatever reasons doesn’t?

The post Dlaczego nie Polska? appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

August 6, 2026

I’m working a trip to Paris. I’m early for my sign-in, so I stake out a quiet spot at the bottom of the stairs, down at the connector to terminal C. I’m scrolling on my phone, setting up some things on my iPad.

A man approaches from the escalator. He’s looking right at me, and I can sense he’s about to say something. Probably he wants trading cards, or has some nerdy question about planes. I don’t mind this at all. I’m only killing time, and it makes me happy when people take interest in my job.

“Hi,” he says. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? Whenever I see a pilot, there’s a question I like to ask them.”

“Hey,” I respond. “No, not at all.”

But something is off. What does he mean by “there’s a question”? The phrasing, plus the oddly smug look on his face, are caution flags. This is going somewhere strange, I can tell.

“Round or flat?” he asks, folding his arms.

Oh. This. I look back at him but don’t say anything. I know exactly what he’s asking, but I’m too annoyed, too disappointed, to speak.

“Are you a round earth pilot, or a flat earth pilot?” He’s half-smiling, looking down his nose at me, like he’s got me in a bind.

“Come on, dude,” I finally say. “Seriously?”

For a moment he seems startled. I’m probably less polite than most of the pilots he’s ambushed with this nonsense. He’s used to hearing the likes of, “Well, sir, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but I have to argue that the planet is round.”

And while that’s certainly true, I don’t have patience for it. “I’m not answering the question,” I say to him. “It’s too silly.”

He bristles, moves his head around.

And how unexpected this is. The man is so nondescript, so normal looking. Aren’t flat-earthers supposed to be dressed like medieval priests, with a crazy gleam in their eye? Here’s a professional-looking 35 year-old with a neatly trimmed beard and luggage from Tumi. Is this what the Internet has done to us?

“What if I told you,” he goes on, “That fifty percent of the pilots I talk to say the earth is flat?”

I make an exasperated noise. “I’d say either you’re lying, or they’re messing with you.” (And if it’s the latter, I’d like to add but keep to myself, I don’t blame them.)

I’m tempted to run with this. “Actually it’s both,” I could tell him. “It’s round on the top and flat on the bottom. Like a gumdrop. You’ve never heard of Gumdrop Theory? The trash countries are all at the bottom, like Burundi and Canada.”

Or I could turn it into a gentlemanly discussion, where I invite him to sit, take out my charts, and brief him on the realities of latitude and longitude, great circle routes and such.

From there, once I’d convinced him of his folly, we could segue into a chat about map projections. One thing that has always irked me is the Mercator projection, with its massive distortions as you approach the poles. Kids grow up thinking Greenland is bigger than Africa, or that Alaska is the size of Western Europe. Point being: things aren’t always what they seem, or what conventional wisdom says they are. Common ground.

But I know there’s no point. No matter what I say, he won’t believe me. It’s no different with the chemtrail people, or the September 11th people. It’s like arguing religion. So I don’t try. Besides, why indulge what essentially is willful ignorance?

And with that he gives up. “Okay, he says “If that’s how you feel.” And he walks away.

Yes, that’s how I feel.

Why me? Why couldn’t this guy have just sauntered by and gotten himself lunch at Walhburger’s, instead of approaching me so that I can feel hopeless about the future of humanity? And this business about, “Are you a round earth pilot, or a flat earth pilot?” As if there are two camps. As if this is the kind of thing we debate all night flying across the Atlantic. As if his question isn’t, in fact, stupid.

And apparently it’s worse than I thought. A friend of mine, a pilot, told me that a man came up to him at a party and did the same thing. Another colleague said it happened to him in an airport restaurant. Suddenly it’s a trendy line of thinking. Which both surprises me and doesn’t.

“The Dark Ages,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut. “They haven’t ended yet.”

Artwork by Jack Niles and Gael Gaborel, courtesy of Unsplash.

The post Round or Flat? appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

THERE’S A PICTURE I always take. There’s a theme, a theme, that I’m drawn to. Usually it’s a wall or a door or other flat surface, the weatherbeaten elements of which are similar: sun-cracked paint, peeling artwork, crumbling plaster or fissured stucco.

I call these my “texture” pictures, though it’s not that simple. It’s a combination of things: textures, patterns, geometry, colors — with a certain something that pulls it all together. In other words, there needs to be aesthetic merit to the shot. As to which make the cut and which don’t, there’s no formal criteria. In the words of Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it.

They’re travel photos by default, and I’ll go ahead and label the locations. But contextually they don’t say much. Most of them could be anywhere. Most focus on a single surface, but a few, as you’ll see, such as number 20, are more complicated.

Click any photo for a full-screen view.

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR.