January 8, 2024

POOR ALASKA Airlines. There they were, leisurely mulling the finer points of their merger with Hawaiian, wondering which visage to paint on the tail, when the 737 MAX-9 stole the show.

Pop went a fuselage plug on flight 1282, decompressing the jet and scaring the daylights out of everyone on board. The plane landed safely, but now a number of MAXes are grounded as regulators focus on attachment bolts.

The MAX can’t catch a break, either. This is the plane that spent two years on hiatus after the crashes of Lion Air flight 510 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, until its twice deadly stall-avoidance system was redesigned.

It looks bad, I know. Particularly for Boeing. But this is likely a lot more minor than the media spin suggests. I expect the plug attachments will get some sort of do-over and the planes will quickly be up and flying again.

A jetliner is pressurized so that its occupants can breathe without the need for supplemental oxygen. If the fuselage is breached, that squeezed-together air rushes out. The pilots will don oxygen masks and take the plane to a lower altitude in what we call, plainly enough, an “emergency descent.” The sensations of this drop might be alarming, but it’s an easy and straightforward maneuver.

Rarely are decompressions deadly. When they are, it’s usually because it happens explosively, such as when a bomb goes off, causing massive structural damage. In the Alaska incident, the big danger would’ve been the door plug colliding with the tail structure. But this didn’t happen, leaving the rest of it pretty routine.

I don’t mean to sound blithe, but it’s amusing how much attention this mishap is getting. One of the biggest news stories of the week is about a decompression in which nobody was killed or injured. The track record of the MAX, I figure, is part of the reason. A negligible malfunction, or a design flaw suggesting negligence? Let’s hope it’s not the latter, but either way, back in the Golden Age of Air Disasters, something like this would barely have made the papers.

Ironically, the amount of coverage we’re seeing serves to remind us of just how safe flying has become. In decades past, multiple airline crashes were the norm every year, with hundreds dead at a time. We’ve grown so accustomed to near-perfect safety that a minor event, without a single injury, wins as much attention in 2024 as a crash that killed two-hundred people would’ve gotten in the 1980s.

On the other hand, it’s better to be reading about a decompression than about a catastrophe. And it hardly needs saying that this could easily have been more serious. Had a passenger been sitting adjacent to that plug and not wearing a seatbelt, he or she would’ve been ejected. A hole opening up in the side of a plane, regardless of the reason, earns more than a shrug. Even more so if the problem is traced to a design defect or a quality control screw-up. People are skeptical, and let’s be honest, both Boeing and the 737 MAX deserve whatever scrutiny they’re getting.

I guess that’s the real, if obvious issue: It’s less about what happened than what could have happened. And will it happen again?

Incidents like this, and our focus on them, keep us on our toes. I get that. It’s a way of being proactive and careful, so that we maintain the levels of safety we’ve achieved.

UPDATES:

Some of you have wondered why section of the Alaska 737 that blew out was shaped like a door. The number of required doors depends on seating configuration. Alaska’s layout doesn’t mandate a door in this spot, so there’s a plug there instead, attached with bolts.

Meanwhile, a news outlet today asked me why, following the decompression, no announcement was made by the captain. It’s hard to know, but I imagine the cockpit crew was quite busy. There was an emergency descent to perform, as well as the necessary checklists, coordination with air traffic control, etc. Also the pilots would’ve been wearing oxygen masks, which makes communications more difficult.

It’s possible one of the pilots did make a PA but it wasn’t heard in the noise. Or, being as busy as I imagine they were, they may have relayed information to the flight attendants and left it up to them.

As a pilot I’ve experienced a handful of depressurizations over the years. One afternoon I was working a flight from South America to the United States when, high over the Caribbean, came a sudden whooshing sound that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere at once. I could feel my ears popping, and sure enough, a glance at the instruments showed we were quickly losing pressurization. The captain and I put our masks on, took out the book and began troubleshooting.

Part of that troubleshooting involved one of those steep descents. To the passengers I’m sure it
felt like a roller coaster, but everything was carefully coordinated. The autopilot was engaged the whole time, and no limits were exceeded.

Should a pressure loss occur over mountains or other high terrain, pilots will follow predetermined routes, sometimes called “escape routes,” that allow for a more gradual descent, in stages. Even if crossing the Andes or the Himalayas, there’s always the opportunity to reach a safe altitude before supplemental oxygen runs out.

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THE AIRPLANE THAT ISN’T

Photos courtesy of Michael Saporito and Unsplash.

December 4, 2023

OVER THE WEEKEND, Alaska Airlines announced it will purchase Hawaiian Airlines for a reported $1.9 billion. If approved, the merger will form the nation’s fifth-largest carrier.

I find this interesting for a number of reasons — though probably not the ones most people are talking about. You can pop over to the other news and travel sites to learn about how this union does or doesn’t make sense, strategy-wise. You can read about loyalty programs, stock prices, and the alleged woes of yet more industry consolidation. My take is more fun:

Alaska and Hawaii. Our most geographically extreme states, numbers 49 and 50. One mammoth and frigid, the other small and tropical. They share a lot of traits: remoteness, mountains, indigenous people, whales.

Then we have the tails. Alaska and Hawaiian are the only carriers I know of whose liveries feature faces. One is a woman, the other a man. They stare longingly at one another across the vastness of the Pacific.

It’s romantic, no? They’ve been courting this merger all along, haven’t they? Thus we have a more literal marriage than are most mergers.

Both faces, by the way, are borrowed from real people.

The visage at Hawaiian is that of a woman named Leinaala Teruya Drummond. The former Miss Hawaii, she’s been up there since 1973. Ms. Drummon passed away in September at age 77.

Mr. Alaska’s history is a little less clear. What we know for sure is that he’s not Old Man Winter, Johnny Cash, an age-enhanced Che Guevara, or the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. He is an Eskimo. An Inuit. Though even the airline isn’t sure which one. They narrow him down to one of two native Alaskans: a reindeer herder from Kotzebue named Chester Seveck, or a man named Oliver Amouak, who appeared in an airline-sponsored “traveling stage show” in the 1950s.

Whichever is correct, he’s an iconic mascot and deserves to remain up there, in monochrome and smiling warmly in his parka.

For all of these reasons, I’m happy to hear that the plan is to keep both brands intact. Financially the carriers will be as one, but will operate independently under their own names. I suppose this makes sense. It’d be a little weird to have an entity called Alaska Airlines with a hub in Honolulu. Hawaii-Japan is one of Hawaiian’s busiest markets, and I imagine Japanese passengers in particular would find it baffling.

Of course, things like this have a way of changing. I wouldn’t be shocked if a year from now one of the two brands is subsumed or the carrier changes its name entirely. Pacific Airways, anyone?

Photo credits: Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines.

An American Airlines route map from 1954.

April 8, 2020

The COVID panic has reduced air travel to almost nothing. U.S. carriers have grounded up to 90 percent of their flights. Survival comes down to perseverance, bailout money, and innovation.

As to the latter, Alaska Airlines has a strategy to help it remain in markets where ridership has plummeted. Instead of relying on nonstop “spoke” flights from its Seattle hub, the airline will run consolidated, connect-the-dots style flights that take in multiple cities in a single run. For example, rather than operating one flight from Seattle to Pittsburgh, and another from Seattle to Baltimore, there’s now a single aircraft going Seattle-Pittsburgh-Baltimore. Seattle-Dallas-Houston and Seattle-Minneapolis-Columbus are two others.

It’s a useful way of adapting to the current environment. What it’s not, however, is new. Back in the proverbial day, this is what most cross-country flying looked like. Flights going coast-to-coast would often make two, three, possibly four stops along the way. I have a collection of timetables from the 60s and 70s; even then, well into the jet age, multiple-stop itineraries were common. A Boston to Miami flight with Eastern, for instance, might have stopped in Philadelphia and Atlanta. In PHL or ATL, passengers destined for those cities would disembark while additional Miami-bound passengers came aboard. “Through” passengers, as they were called, remained in their seats. The same thing was common in long-haul markets overseas. A flight from London to Singapore might have gone via Rome, Istanbul, Karachi and Bombay. How about: London-Rome-Khartoum-Nairobi-Johannesburng? In the 1940s, Qantas’ so-called “Kangaroo Route” made six stopovers between London and Sydney. When I traveled to Montana with my family in 1980, our Northwest flight went Boston-Detroit-Milwaukee-Minneapolis-Billings-Bozeman. The only change of planes was in in Minneapolis.

These were known as “direct” flights. Today the terms “direct” and “nonstop” are used interchangeably, but in the old days a “direct” flight merely meant there’d be no change of aircraft or flight number.

A lot of this was necessity. The range and payload constraints of older generation aircraft made nonstops unfeasible beyond a certain distance. But part of it, too, was efficiency. Carriers needed fewer planes and fewer crews.

Modern examples still exist. Southwest operates a number of multiple stop directs. Traveling to Bhutan in 2017, I boarded a direct flight from Bangkok to Paro. Along the way we spent 35 minutes on the ground in Gauhati, India, a city I had never heard of before. “Through” passengers like me stayed on board. On a recent flight from Phnom Penh to Doha on Qatar Airways, same thing, this time with a short stopover in Ho Chi Minh City. Ditto for an Emirates flight that went Phnom Penh-Yangon-Dubai. Plenty of examples are out there, but the remain-on-board option is increasingly rare.

BOAC’s eastbound routes in 1958.

The maps above (and below) are lifted from “Airline Maps, A Century of Art and Design,” a new book by Mark Ovenden and Maxwell Roberts.

I’ve been infatuated by airline route maps my whole life. They are what turned my passion for commercial aviation into a love of travel as well: a way of graphically understanding the airplane as something bigger than a means to an end. There’s something oddly meditative and Zen about them. As a kid, whenever I got hold of an airline timetable (back when such things existed) the first thing I’d do is open to the route map. The best were the center fold-outs, with the extra third page. I could spend hours studying those those arcs and lines. “Next time you’re wedged in economy, flip to the map section in the back of the inflight magazine,” I write in the introduction to my book. “Those three-panel foldouts and their crazy nests of city pairs were, for me, a kind of junior pilot porno.”

Now there’s 140 pages of them, spanning nine decades.

As you’d maybe expect, the authors spend most of their time in the decades between 1930 and 1970, when airline iconography and graphic design became an artform all its own. The selections from this period range from cartoonish to elegant, many of them nothing short of cartographic marvels. Almost all of them are colorful, whimsical, and historically evocative. Now departing for Leopoldville, Leningrad and Calcutta: it’s the history of air travel, design, geography and geopolitics all at once.

Most carriers still produce route maps, viewable online or in their magazines. They’ve become a lot simpler, and the presentation can be confusing. Some have done away with lines and rely only color-coded dots for destination cities, giving you only half the story. Worse are the ones that include the flights of code share and joint-venture partners, leaving the maps so cluttered you can’t make sense of them.

Delta Air Lines in 1960.

BOAC’s eastbound system shortly after World War 2.

Air France’s intercontinental routes, 1959.

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