Crossovers

When Culture and Air Travel Intersect

Crossovers. That’s my name for those moments when history, culture, art or politics intersect unexpectedly with commercial aviation. They underscore the many ways, not always recognized, that air travel touches our lives.

This will be an ongoing series. I’ll add to it as opportunities come up.

 

— NEW: AEROPOLITICS

This one speaks for itself. A 767 of El Al, the Israeli carrier, buddy-buddy with an Iran Air 747 at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport. I took this photo a decade ago, but the theme couldn’t be more timely.

Was this by accident, do you think, or were the authorities at BKK pushing for a sort of tarmac detente?

It’s hard to imagine, but in the days before the revolution in Iran, El Al flew scheduled service between Tel Aviv and Tehran. Iran Air had routes from New York to Tehran via London and Paris. Somewhere in a box is a picture of an Iran Air 747 that I took at Kennedy Airport in 1979, using an old Kodak Instamatic, from the rooftop parking lot of terminal 3.

Photo by the author

 

— HISTORY IN BLUE

This mural is in Portugal, near the city of Aveiro. Put up in the 1960s, during the glory days of Pan Am, it remains mostly intact. What makes it special is that it’s constructed using azulejos — the traditional, blue and white glazed tiles seen all over Portugal.

A similar Pan Am billboard can be found on a hillside above the Portuguese town of Leiria. Whether they’re actual azulejos or just painted to look that way I’m not sure. Either way it’s impressive, and Pan Am’s signature colors lend themselves nicely to the azulejo style. To think that so much effort and style was once put into an airline advertisement.

If you’re ever in Lisbon, be sure to visit the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, also known by its boring English name, the Tile Museum. It’s one of the city’s lesser known attractions, but home to one of the world’s largest ceramics collections, full of beautiful murals and mosaics.

Photo by Rui Vaz, courtesy of the Pan Am Historical Foundation.

 

— TAIL TALE

If you’ve followed the MH370 saga, you’ve no doubt grown familiar with the Malaysia Airlines logo. It’s seen all the time in news posts and articles. What you might assume is a meaningless abstract branding tool is in fact a cultural emblem: the logo uses the shape of an indigenous Malaysian kite known as the wau bulan, or moon kite.

True story: In 1993 I was in the city of Kota Bahru, a conservative Islamic town in northern Malaysia close to the Thai border, when we saw a group of little kids flying wau kites. At the time I didn’t realize where the airline’s logo had come from, but I recognized the pattern immediately. It was one of those crossover moments we aerophiles really savor.

Malaysia Airlines was formed in the early 1970s after its predecessor, Malaysia-Singapore Airlines (MSA), split to become Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines. Both carriers are renowned for their service, and cabin crews of both airlines wear the iconic, floral-pattern Sarong Kabaya batik — an adaptation of the traditional Malay kebaya blouse.

 

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April 23, 2024 · Filed under 2

“Argo” and the 747

What is it with Hollywood and Airplanes? A Complaint from Ask the Pilot’s Office of Pedantics and Minutiae.

March 1, 2013

SO I WATCHED ARGO, the Ben Affleck movie about the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran.

Those of us of a certain age remember the hostage crisis quite well. Until September 11th, nothing in post-World War Two American history garnered more media attention and public discussion, save perhaps for the Vietnam War.

I thought the movie started strong but ended weakly. The closing sequence, especially, was contrived and overwrought — not to mention historically inaccurate.

But it’s the airplane scenes that we’re here to talk about:

The Boeing 747 is one of the movie’s stars. The iconic jet makes numerous appearances in the period colors of British Airways, Iran Air, and Swissair. Now, I don’t know if the British Airways jet that brought CIA agent Tony Mendez into Tehran really was a 747. And the Swissair plane that carried the six Americans to freedom was, in fact, a Douglas DC-8. But that’s not the artistic license that irks me. (The 747 is no longer the biggest or the flashiest plane, but it’s still the grandest and most historically significant. And any movie set in the 1970s, particularly one focused on what was such a huge international story… if there’s gonna be an airplane, it has to be a 747.)

I’m reminded of the line from that old Nick Lowe song…

“Seven forty seven put him in that condition,
Flyin’ back from a peace keeping mission.”

What irks me, instead, is that these airplane scenes are quite clearly digitalized fakes. Even a child can see this. The shot of the BA flight descending into Mehrabad airport looks like something an eighth grader put together on his iPad — so goofily phony that it’s hard not to laugh out loud.

The Swissair scenes, in the film’s closing minutes, are no better. What a waste. There’s the 747, front and center of one of the coolest moments of the past 40 years. Except that it’s rendered in a sort of CGI-lite. There’s one shot, of the plane’s left wing, where they didn’t even pretend to make it real. The intake of the number one engine is just a two-dimensional black circle. As the kids say, WTF?

As the movie comes to a close, we see the superimposed jet accelerating down the runway, chased along by a phalanx of Iranian military vehicles and police cars. These cars and trucks miraculously keep pace until the nose gear begins to lift. I’m unaware of any jeeps or police sedans able to drive 170 miles-per-hour, but who knows what secret weapons the Iranians had in 1979.

And, by the way, what you see in Argo is a -300 series 747, with the extended upper deck and traditional (no winglets) wing. Swissair did operate the 747-300 for a time. The trouble is, it didn’t take delivery of the first one until 1983, four years after the events portrayed in the film.

That’s cheating a bit, I know. It’s really not fair that I can give them a pass for using a 747 in the first place, yet be offended by which variant was depicted. Here I am complaining because they used the wrong kind of the wrong plane.

Still though, if you’re going to show a plane at all, at least show one that actually existed at the time. Not bothering to do so is laziness. The choice of going with a 747 instead of a DC-8 can at least be argued on dramatic grounds. Going with a model that hadn’t been invented yet is simply incoherent.

You mean to tell me that with the millions of dollars lavished on the production of a major film, that Affleck and company couldn’t have gotten hold of an actual, chronologically correct 747 (it would have been the -200 variant) for a couple of simple runway scenes? At least a few 747-200s are still flying, and I’m sure the owners (cargo companies mostly) would have been happy to lease one out for a few days. Dozens more are mothballed in the deserts of California and Arizona, within driving distance of Hollywood, any one of which could have been painted up in the appropriate colors.

Speaking of which…

Earlier on, I was impressed that they got the period livery for British Airways exactly right, including the typeface used in airport signage. There’s also a very quick shot of the tail section of an Iran Air 747. Here too, though you don’t see it for more than a second, the livery is correct.

But then, with Swissair, they blow it. The colors shown, with the black and brown striping and the full red tail, weren’t used until 1980. They’ve got the wrong plane and the wrong paint job.

I don’t understand why flubs like these are so annoyingly common in movies. When it comes to cars, consumer products, hairstyles and clothes, Hollywood goes through considerable pain and expense to get their period details right — even ones that the average viewer wouldn’t necessarily notice or care about. But with airplanes and airlines, these standards don’t apply, even when the aircraft is center stage. We expect better, especially from a film as critically acclaimed as Argo, and certainly from any movie that’s intended to be read, however loosely, as a historical narrative.

 

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November 19, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized

Tragedy Over Tehran


UPDATE: January 11, 2019

AFTER THREE days of denials, Iran has admitted that its military was accidentally responsible for last Wednesday’s downing of a Ukrainian 737 outside of Tehran. Now the politics will kick in, with calls for formal apology, restitution, and so on. As these things tend to go, expect a lot of drawn-out diplomatic haggling while the story fades from the headlines.

So there you have it. Ukraine International flight 752 becomes history’s fourth-deadliest military shoot-down of a civilian jetliner:

1. in 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17, a Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, is blown from the sky over Ukraine by a rocket fired by pro-Russia separatists. All 298 passengers and crew are killed.

2. In 1988, the crew of the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes accidentally shoots down Iran Air flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard.

3. In 1983, 269 are killed when Korean Air Lines flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet fighter jet after straying off course — and into Soviet airspace.

4. In 2020, an Iranian military battery mistakes Ukraine International flight 752 for a cruise missile and destroys it, killing 176 passengers and crew.

5. In 1973, Israeli Air Force jets fire on a Libyan Arab Airlines 727 over the Sinai. The plane crash-lands in the desert near the Suez Canal killing 108 of the 113 people on board.

It’s ironic, if that’s the right word, to see both Iran and Ukraine as unwitting partners in this latest tragedy. Ukraine was the setting for the Malaysia Airlines catastrophe, while Iran was host to the Vincennes debacle.

And this is the second such incident in just five years. I wouldn’t call this a trend, exactly, but we’re liable to see it again. All around the world one finds increasingly dangerous hotspots, where twitchy triggermen are armed with extremely lethal weaponry. You also have more airplanes flying than ever before.

Several nations have announced they will, for the time being, no longer permit their carriers to operate in Iranian airspace. Lufthansa has canceled its Tehran flights altogether.

Commercial flights between the U.S. and destinations in the Middle East and India have, until now, routinely passed through Iranian airspace. I have several pretty out-the-window photos of the snow-dusted Iranian mountains, as well as the cities of Isfahan and Qom, taken during flights out of Dubai and Doha. Emirates and Qatar Airways are now re-routing their U.S.-bound flights over Iraq instead.

I remember piloting a flight to Mumbai a few years ago and passing just north of Tehran. It was striking how well the Iranian controllers spoke English. More clearly than most European controllers.

 

UPDATE: January 9, 2019

U.S. OFFICIALS now say that Ukraine International flight 752 was shot down by a pair of surface-to-air missiles presumably fired in error by the Iranian military. This was a suspicion from the start, and although nothing is definitive, things are trending strongly in this direction.

Authorities in Iran, for their part, aren’t being especially forthcoming, which is hardly unexpected.

Ordinarily in incidents where a 737 airliner is involved, Boeing and the NTSB would participate in the investigation. Tensions being what they are the moment, that’s not going to happen. However, the Iranians say they will share necessary information with Canada, Sweden, Ukraine, and possibly other nations whose citizens were aboard the doomed flight. whether this information will include the plane’s data and voice recorders isn’t clear.

 

UPDATER: January 8, 2020

EARLIER TODAY, a Ukraine International Airlines flight carrying 176 people slammed into the ground shortly after takeoff from Imam Khomeini International Airport outside Tehran. There were no survivors. The plane was a Boeing 737-800 — the most popular of the many 737 variants.

It is safe to say there is no connection between this crash and the 737 MAX disasters. The -800 is an older model and has no MCAS system. Otherwise, however, there’s little to go on.

News reports keep bringing up “engine failure.” This can mean different things, but a 737, like any commercial jetliner, is fully capable of flying with one engine, so a simple failure, strictly speaking, is very unlikely to be the cause. If an engine somehow was the culprit, it would need to have been an uncontained failure, whereby the engine’s internal components, which rotate at thousands of RPM, punctured the wing or fuselage, touching off a fire or loss of control.

It hardly needs saying, meanwhile, with the crash coming only hours after Iran launched a missile attack on a U.S. compound in Iraq, that something more sinister could be at hand. An errant shoot-down, an intentional shoot-down, a Russian sabotage — pick your poison. Iranian authorities are, for now, refusing to hand over the voice or data recorders, which means either nothing or everything.

On July 3, 1988, the crew of the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, distracted during a skirmish with Iranian gunboats in the Straits of Hormuz, accidentally shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300 en route to Dubai, killing 290 civilians. The U.S. later awarded over $60 million to the families of the passengers. Most Americans don’t remember this, but it has never been forgotten in Iran, where some hardliners claim the shoot-down was intentional (no evidence suggests this, though the Vincennes crew clearly was negligent).

Could Wednesday’s crash in Tehran be some kind of revenge? It’s doubtful, as there were no Americans on board. Unless that too is part of the deadly geopolitical chess match we seem to be playing now. Still, there’s no denying the crash — the timing, the location, the seizing of the recorders — is suspicious.

Ukraine International operates 36 aircraft, most of them Boeings, including roughly two dozen 737s.

 

Related Stories:

“ARGO” AND THE 747
THE IRANIAN GRIFFIN

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November 19, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized