March 19, 2024

TEN YEARS AGO this month, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The wreckage was never found.

There’s a solid chance the wreckage will never be found. That’s unfortunate, but there are clues to work with. And those clues have, over time, led me to believe that the plane was intentionally brought down by one of the pilots, most likely the captain, in an act of murder-suicide. It was ditched somewhere in the Indian Ocean — landed, if you will, on the surface of the sea — where it sank to to the bottom and rests today, undetected but mostly intact.

Early on, I was open to a number of theories popular at the time: fire, depressurization, and so on. Accidents. I’ve come around since then. My opinion is based on the evidence, both as it exists and, just as importantly, doesn’t exist.

If we assume an accident, we must also assume the plane crashed into the ocean. We know from electronic satellite “pings” that the jet continued on for some time after its last appearance on radar. Having suffered some catastrophic malfunction that rendered the crew dead or unconscious, the thinking goes, the plane continued on autopilot until running out of fuel, at which point the engines failed. Without pilots to control the glide, it plunged into the sea.

The problem with this idea is the absence of pieces. There is no way for a jetliner to crash “gently” into the ocean. A Boeing 777 in an out-of-control impact would have effectively disintegrated, producing tens of thousands of fragments: aircraft parts, human remains, luggage, and so on. Much of this debris would have sunk, but much would not have. Eventually, borne by currents, it would’ve washed up.

So why didn’t it?

A small number of pieces did come ashore, but that’s the thing: of the few parts recovered, almost all of them are consistent not with an out-of-control crash, but with a controlled and deliberate ditching. (Even the most textbook ditching at sea is going to cause serious damage and the likely shedding of parts.) The flaperon discovered in 2015 on Reunion Island, for example, and the trailing edge flap that washed up on Mauritius, both from the same wing.

The parts themselves are evidence enough; a thorough post-mortem on them reveals even more. The forensics are complicated, but they’re solid. Use your Google and check out the analysis by former Canadian crash investigator Larry Vance. These pieces tell a story.

For these particular parts to have been found, together with a complete absence of the myriad flotsam a full-on crash would have produced, is to me a smoking gun.

And thus, the biggest reason the submerged wreckage hasn’t been found is because the location of the search area has been based almost entirely on the fuel exhaustion theory. The search-zone calculations, extrapolating from the satellite pings, are based on when and where, approximately, the 777’s tanks would’ve run dry.

Except maybe the tanks didn’t run dry, and the plane went — was taken — somewhere else. What if that was the intent all along — to vanish?

Those pings are still important, and give us hints. Chances are the actual location of the wreckage isn’t far away. But it’s far enough away to have missed it.

I’ve been saying from the start that we should prepare for the possibility of the plane not being found. It happens this way sometimes. If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents. What makes this one different, maybe, is how we’ve come to expect easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything these days, with a fetishized belief that “technology,” whatever that means anymore, can answer any question and fix any problem.

Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. But all of that is fallible, one way or another.

Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean versus the comparative speck of a 777. It’s out there somewhere, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. We’ll probably never find it.

 

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Photos courtesy of Unsplash.

November 19, 2022

LAST WEEK, a court in Holland found three men responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 eight years ago.

Back in 2014, operating in eastern Ukraine, they were part of a separatist group under Russian control, responsible for firing the “Buk” rocket that struck the Boeing 777 at 33,000 feet during a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Cruising just above restricted commercial airspace, the plane had been misidentified as a military target. The men — Igor Firkin, Sergei Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko — were found guilty in absentia and sentenced to life. Currently free and living in Russia, it’s unlikely they ever will serve time.

MH17 was carrying 298 people from 17 countries, including 80 children. That ghastly total puts MH17 at number seven among the deadliest air disasters of all time. In the Netherlands, where 196 of the victims lived, the catastrophe was and remains front-page news. Strangely, the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about it. It never stayed in the headlines for especially long, and shortly thereafter it ceased to be much of a topic, even in aviation circles. It’s peculiar how many lesser disasters, even those that occurred decades ago, are fresher in our minds. Ask a pilot about MH17 and you’re liable to get a blank stare. “Which one was that?”

Is that a symptom of our diminished attention spans, or something else? Maybe it was the certain-ness of the accident, and the ugly brutality of it. Unlike many crashes, there was no mystery or mystique surrounding this one. From the very first day it was clear what had happened, and it was pretty grotesque.

It’s also true that Malaysia Airlines had already earned its fifteen minutes of infamy. It’s the carrier’s other major mishap, earlier that same year, that is more widely remembered and discussed. That’d be MH370, of course, the vanished 777, only a few parts of which have ever been found, washed up on beaches on Mauritius and Reunion islands. That one gets people talking, albeit nonsensically much of the time.

MH17 wasn’t the first commercial jet downed by the Russians. Many of you will remember the tragedy of Korean Air Lines flight 007 in 1983. The Boeing 747 was on a flight from New York to Seoul when it strayed off course and was blown up by a Soviet fighter jet. The worldwide outrage the followed was a lot more intense than anything stoked by MH17.

Ditto after the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iran Air jetliner in July, 1988, killing 290 people.

The Iran Air incident sits at number eight on that list of deadliest disasters. KAL 007 was, until 2014, the tenth worst, nudged to number eleven by MH17. This means that three of history’s eleven worst crashes were planes brought down by missiles. Add in Lockerbie (number 10), plus the 1985 Air India bombing (number 5), and five of the worst eleven — nearly half — were either missiles or bombs.

It’s not entirely fair, lumping those together. The bombings were deliberate; the shoot-downs were cases of mistaken identity. We will save for later the bigger and deeper conversation over what does or doesn’t constitute an “accident,” and the sticky applications of culpability. MH17, Iran Air, KAL 007; each of these involved a certain amount of recklessness. At what point, though, does an error become criminal?

And this isn’t the first time someone has been convicted in absentia for destroying a commercial plane. In 1999, a court in Paris found six Libyans guilty for the bombing of UTA flight 772 ten years earlier, including the brother-in-law of Moammar Khadafy. None of the six stood trial. The explosion, over a remote part of the Sahara, killed 170 people. A U.S. judge later ordered Libya to pay $6 billion in damages on behalf of seven Americans who’d been on board.

Some of my U.S. readers have asked why the Malaysia Airlines flights are always referred to alpha-numerically: MH17 and MH370. Most Americans don’t realize that flight numbers are prefixed by a two-character airline code. The code for Malaysia Airlines is MH. In the United States we normally drop these prefixes, but they are used routinely elsewhere. This is discussed in more detail in chapter seven of my book.

And the name of the airline is Malaysia Airlines. It’s not “Malaysian Airlines,” and certainly not “Malaysian Air.”

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 outstanding service, and cabin crews of both airlines wear the iconic, floral-pattern “Sarong Kabaya” batik — an adaptation of the traditional Malay kebaya blouse.

Malaysia Airlines’ logo, pictured above, is an indigenous kite known as the Wau. 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 airline/culture crossover moments that we aerophiles really savor.

 

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PERMANENT MYSTERY. MH370, EIGHT YEARS ON.

June 18, 2019

WILLIAM LANGWEISCHE, long one of the country’s preeminent journalists, has hit one out of the park with his story in the most recent Atlantic about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. It’s by far the best-written, best-researched, and all-around most compelling piece one can read on the topic. It also has brought me to terms as to what most likely happened on the night of March 8, 2014.

From the beginning I’ve been afraid of the rogue pilot theory — the idea that one of the pilots, presumably Captain Zaharie Shah, was responsible for the flight’s disappearance. I suppose this is partly out of pride. I don’t want it to have been Zaharie, because the idea of the captain hijacking his own aircraft and killing over two-hundred people shames the entire profession.

I’ve instead been noncommittal, usually taking the “two main possibilities” route. After acknowledging at least the chance of Zaharie being the culprit, I propose a second, more complicated scenario in which both pilots became incapacitated:

First, there’s a rapid or explosive cabin decompression. The decompression is caused by an explosion of the crew oxygen bottle, down in the avionics compartment. This not only knocks out the pilots’ oxygen supply, but causes many of the plane’s electronics to fail as well, thus explaining the loss of transponder contact, etc. Zaharie and first officer Hamid commence an initial turn-back toward the airport on the island of Penang (this is the hairpin turn seen on the plots), and enter an initial waypoint or two in the navigation system. They’ve donned their masks, but of course there’s no oxygen flowing, and within seconds they’re unconscious. Minutes later, as the drop-down masks are depleted, so is everyone in the cabin.

After passing Penang, the plane turns right, up the Strait of Malacca and past the northern end of Sumatra — again, in accordance with what’s seen on the satellite plots. It does this because… well, who knows what waypoints may have been in the FMS at that juncture. Maybe, in the throes of losing consciousness, the pilots had typed in nonsense. Heck, there could have been a whole sequence of irrelevant waypoints in the box. Or, is there an arrival procedure or an approach into Penang that might trace a similar outline? Later, the plane defaults to heading mode, and off it goes southwards on a long straight line to oblivion.

Of course, while such a theory explains some of the evidence, it doesn’t explain all of it. For example, it doesn’t account for the plane’s electrical systems later powering up again. Neither can it explain, my thoughts above notwithstanding, why certain course changes occurred precisely where and when they did. The flight path. Langeweische takes this to the limit:

“It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error,” he writes. “Computer glitch, control-system collapse, squall lines, ice, lightning strike, bird strike, meteorite, volcanic ash, mechanical failure, sensor failure, instrument failure, radio failure, electrical failure, fire, smoke, explosive decompression, cargo explosion, pilot confusion, medical emergency, bomb, war, or act of God — none of these can explain the flight path.”

The problem with my scenario is that it requires further and further layering to make sense. Not just this happened, but also that — and so on.

The only thing that easily and neatly accounts for all of it is Zaharie.

Occam’s Razor. And I think the author has changed my mind, particularly after revealing what other people said and knew about the captain and his personal life — things the Malaysian government has been all too keen on concealing.

Then there’s Zaharie’s home simulator. The idea of a 777 captain owning and spending time on a home simulator in the first place is rather strange. What they found inside it is stranger still. Explains Langeweische:

“Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight — in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead, he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone.”

While this mystery will never be conclusively solved, that’s about the closest thing to a smoking gun we’re liable to find. As Langeweische puts it, rather understatedly,”The simulator flight cannot easily be dismissed as random coincidence.”

Does locating the wreckage even matter anymore? The voice and data recorders are out there somewhere, nestled invisibly in some immense undersea fissure or canyon, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. The search vessels may have swept right over them. But from the start, they were never likely to tell us much. Malaysian investigators, meanwhile, bumbling and obfuscating from the outset, operating on behalf of a corrupt and secretive regime, want only for the entire story to, if you’ll pardon the irony, vanish forever.

“The important answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia,” Langeweische concludes. “That should be the focus moving forward. The riddle may not be deep. That is the frustration here. The answers may well lie close at hand, but they are more difficult to retrieve than any black box.”

 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

March 14, 2022

I WAS AT A WINERY outside Porto, Portugal, when the phone rang. I took the call and walked out front to the parking lot. It was a Sunday afternoon, March 9th, 2014. The sun was out.

It was a woman from the BBC. A Malaysia Airlines plane had gone missing, she explained. It had vanished the night before, somewhere over the ocean near Vietnam. That’s all anyone knew, really.

With almost nothing to go on, I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sure they’ll find it within a day or two,” I told her. Other accidents came to mind — planes that had fallen into the ocean. Just a few years earlier had been the Air France crash off Brazil, for instance. It took a little while, but they found it.

But then a day became two days, became three days, became a week. The possibility struck me that the jet might never be found.

Eight years later and MH370 is still missing. Only a few scattered pieces have ever been retrieved, washed ashore on the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion, presumably hundreds or even thousands of miles from the actual, unknown spot were the flight met its end.

If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents. What makes this one different, maybe, is that we live in an age that expects easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything, with a fetishized belief that “technology,” whatever that even means anymore, can answer any question and fix any problem — and therefore locate any plane.

But it can’t. Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean, both in breadth and depth, versus the comparative speck of a 777. Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. All of that is fallible, one way or the other. The wreckage is out there somewhere, nestled invisibly in some immense undersea fissure or canyon, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. The search vessels may have swept right over it.

Consider this: We’ve all watched airplanes high in the sky. A plane flying 12,000 feet above you (that’s the average depth of the Indian Ocean) appears as just the smallest gray speck, its profile visible but indistinct. Now, imagine you’re looking down at that same plane. Except, you’re looking down not through clear sky, but through 12,000 feet of murky seawater. Indeed, for most of that depth you’re staring into aphotic blackness. And the airplane you’re looking for is, in all likelihood, no longer in the shape of an airplane; it’s in thousands of fragments scattered across miles of rugged seabed.

As the saying goes, good luck with that, even with sophisticated imaging equipment. That’s an anecdotal analysis, ignorant of the science of whatever fancy scanners are used to search the ocean floor, but I have a sinking suspicion (pardon the wording), the jet is lost forever.

And if it were to be discovered, what then? What good is a voice or data recorder that’s spent the last eight years under water?

There are a number of theories, two of which are the most plausible: Did the plane wander off course after a mishandled cabin depressurization, its crew and passengers unconscious, until running out of fuel? Or did captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijack his own flight? While I lean towards the latter, my insights aren’t any better than anyone else’s.

And that’s about as far as we’re going to get. Solving this mystery has become, I’m afraid, all but impossible. We’ll have to make do with our hunches.

 

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March 4, 2022

THE RUSSIAN invasion of Ukraine is impacting commercial aviation on multiple fronts — as wars tend to do. It remains to be seen how long the effects last, or how deeply they’ll be felt. Will NATO countries join the fight? Will tourists shy away from European destinations in general? Even in a best case scenario, this is the last thing the airline industry needs, just as the coronavirus pandemic appears to be winding down.

Oil is knocking at $130 a barrel as nations discuss ratcheting up sanctions, possibly banning the import of Russian petroleum. Although jet fuel prices have been higher in the past, the problem, right now, is that airlines lack the pricing power to stay in synch. Business travel is still down considerably, especially in transoceanic markets, and passing these costs to the customer is more difficult than it was in, say, 2008, when oil was last this expensive. The price could skyrocket further; it could stabilize or fall. Nobody knows.

Meanwhile, Russia has closed off its airspace to foreign carriers. The big issue here isn’t so much the cancellation of flights to and from Russian cities, but rather those routes overflying Russian territory, especially the country’s northern areas, including Siberia. Russia is a gigantic piece of land, and hundreds of long-haul flights overfly these regions weekly on routes connecting Europe and North America with Asia.

This might not make sense if you’re looking at a flat map or atlas; you need a globe to better visualize it. The shortest distance from the U.S. to India, for example, goes more or less due north, up over Siberia and down through the very heart of Russia. A flight from the U.K., France or Germany headed to Japan, China or Korea, similarly relies on Russian airspace.

United Airlines has suspended its flights to Delhi, but on the whole it’s the Asian and European airlines who are feeling the pain. Most flights between the U.S. and Pacific Rim cities can be re-routed without much trouble. This isn’t so for flights between Asia and Europe. Alternate routings are possible — down through the Gulf, across India and such — but they’re substantially longer, in some cases requiring a stopover. Not only does this increase fuel costs, it wreaks havoc with logistics, crew staffing and scheduling. Longer travel times mean that passengers can no longer make onward connections, and so on. It’s a very expensive problem, with disruptions rippling through an airline’s operation.

JAL and All Nippon have cancelled all of their flights to Europe. Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and British Airways have been canceling or re-routing dozens of departures. This simply isn’t sustainable.

To say nothing of the airspace over Ukraine, which has become a no-fly zone for pretty much anybody (though, as of a few days ago, Air India’s flights to and from Europe were still passing overhead). The skies above Ukraine are obviously dangerous, but this isn’t new. People have largely forgotten about it, but eight years ago, pro-Russian forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the country’s disputed Donbas region, killing 298 people. (In 1983, a Soviet fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007 after it strayed into restricted airspace over Sakhalin Island, killing all 246 on board. And in 1988, the Navy cruiser Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing 290.)

Reciprocally, many nations have banned Russian-registered planes from their own airspace. This includes the European Union, Canada, and the United States. The big loser here is Aeroflot, which had been flying to dozens of European capitals, as well as to New York and Los Angeles. Aeroflot’s routes to Caribbean holiday destinations are affected as well.

Even worse for Aeroflot, Boeing and Airbus have cut ties with the carrier (as well as with other Russian airlines), and will no longer offer support or supplies. Aircraft lessors have rescinded their leases, and Sabre, which acts as Aeroflot’s online booking agent, will no longer allow customers to book seats. This will severely cripple Russian’s commercial aviation sector, if not ground it completely.

One of the oldest airlines in the world, Aeroflot began flying 98 years ago. In its Cold War heydays, it was by far the largest airline in existence, roughly the size of all the U.S. carriers combined. Numerous smaller airlines splintered off following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Aeroflot itself carries on, still using its elegant, Soviet-era hammer and sickle logo.

Aeroflot has never had much of a reputation either for service or safety. Some of that is deserved, some not. Flipping through the crash records from the 1960s through the 2000s, the Aeroflot name does appear more than any other. But you have to consider its size at the time. Add up all of the crashes involving American carriers during the same span, and now the totals are a lot more equal. Since the Soviet breakup it has had only four fatal accidents, one of which involved a subsidiary.

One of my biggest thrills was riding aboard Aeroflot in 1986. We flew from Moscow to Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was still called at the time, on a Tupolev Tu-154 — the Russian version of the 727. A few days later, on the quick hop from from Leningrad to Helsinki, it was a Tu-134. The babushka cabin attendants served us a cup of tasteless, urine-colored apple juice and what appeared to be a hamburger bun stuffed with newspaper.

Next to me on the plane out of Moscow sat a Muscovite about my age –- a blond kid with a jawline like the villainous commie boxer from Rocky IV. This was 1986, remember, with the Cold War still on, and my seatmate was aghast at the novelty of encountering an actual American. He was thrilled to shake my hand and try out his English. He’d just gotten a new camera, and he took it from the overhead bin to show me proudly. At least I think it was a camera. Oversized and clunky, the device looked like a blender held sideways. He kept calling it “my apparatus.”

Our high-altitude détente continued all the way to Leningrad. “I can show you of America,” said my friend. And with that he took out a piece of paper. Beaming, he proceeded to draw me a picture of the World Trade Center, accurately placing the north tower’s cloud-popping rooftop antenna. Pointing to the buildings he said, “One hundred and ten stories!”

Ukraine, by the way, is the home of Antonov, which has been building commercial airplanes since 1946. Formerly known as the Antonov Design Bureau, the company is named for its founding designer, Oleg Antonov, and for decades was a supplier of passenger and cargo planes for the Soviet Union.

Last week, at Hostomel Airport outside Kiev, Russian forces destroyed the only example of the Antonov An-225, the six-engine behemoth originally built to carry the Soviet space shuttle, “Buran.” It was the largest airplane ever made.

I once saw the An-225 at Bradley Airport outside of Hartford, Connecticut, of all places. It had been chartered there to pick up medical equipment, we were told, for the treatment of victims of the Chernobyl disaster.

 

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The Mangling of Airline Names is Nothing New. But What’s This, an Error in The New Yorker!

Warning: the post below, much like its author, is pedantic, petulant, overbearing and annoying. Reader discretion is advised.

 

August 20, 2014

EVERYBODY messes up airline names. They spell them wrong, say them wrong, add letters and breaks and apostrophes where none belong, and so on. In the aftermath of the MH370 and MH17 incidents, for instance, we’ve had one mangling after another of the Malaysia Airlines name. No, it’s not that important, and I’ve eased up on correcting people, but there are times when you just can’t let it go. I was startled the other day to come across a slip up in, of all places, The New Yorker. There are fewer if any more impeccably edited and fact-checked periodicals, but there it is, in an essay by George Packer on page 85 of the August 11th issue. Packer makes a reference to “Malaysian Air” flight 17.

George! Of all people!

The name of the company is Malaysia Airlines. It’s not “Malaysian Airlines,” “Malaysia Air,” or “Air Malaysia.” And it’s certainly not the doubly wrong “Malaysian Air.”

What is it, anyway, with the shortening of the words “Airlines” or “Airways” into “Air”? “British Air,” “Singapore Air,” “Virgin Air,” “Malaysia(n) Air.” Is it unfamiliarity with certain airlines from overseas? We don’t say “American Air” or “United Air.” I realize that it’s fewer syllables, but it’s ugly-sounding and wrong.

As maybe you’ve heard, Malaysia Airlines is considering a name change — not terribly surprising after two notorious tragedies in less than a year. This doesn’t shock me, but it does concern me for a couple of reasons. First, is it really necessary? People are squeamish, but the bulk of travelers aren’t irrational enough to avoid a particular airline because it happened to be tragically unlucky. If the carrier wants to prove itself proud and resilient, it needs to think long term and should keep its identity intact. Second, Malaysia Airlines is such a classy and dignified name. It should stay that way. If not, and if the current trend in airline branding is any indication, we’re liable to end up with something truly awful, like “Jet Fun Asia” or “Malay Sunshine Fly.”

Airline malapropisms aren’t limited to the media or to industry outsiders. People I work with, many of them long-time veterans of the airline business, will sometimes speak of “Air Italia,” and I’ve encountered just about every possible variant of the pronunciation and spelling of the name Lufthansa, from the crudely phonetic (“Liftunza”) to the inexplicable (“Lefthoonza.”)

I think we’re good on Malaysia Airlines, but they’re just one of many common victims. If you’re an editor or reporter, here are some simple guidelines that will keep you from receiving a letter of correction from yours truly:

• Let’s be clear on this “Air” thing. There are no such things as “British Air,” “Virgin Air,” “Alaska Air,” or “Singapore Air,” just to pick four. British Airways, Virgin Atlantic (or Virgin America), Alaska Airlines and Singapore Airlines are what you mean. As to that first one, you can earn extra credit by calling it “BA,” as savvy fliers like to say.

• There’s no “Malaysian Airlines,” and there’s no “Iberian Airlines” either. It’s Iberia.

• You cannot fly to Rome on “Air Italia” or “Alitalian.” It’s Alitalia.

• To camel cap or not to camel cap? The Egyptian national carrier is EgyptAir, not “Egyptair” or “Egypt Air.” On the other hand, it’s Icelandair and Finnair, not “IcelandAir” or “FinnAir.” (Alas now defunct, though still fondly remembered, it was neither “SwissAir” nor “Swiss Air.” It was Swissair.)

• Pardon my nitpicking, but there is no “Delta Airlines” based in Atlanta, Georgia. There is only Delta Air Lines. I wish more carriers used this old-timey three-word style.

• In the old days one flew to Seoul on KAL, as everyone called it. But did that stand for Korean Air Lines, or was it Korean Airlines? I’ve got photos of aircraft on which both are painted. No matter, in 2014 it’s a short and simple Korean Air.

• There is no such thing as “China Air.” There is, however, China Airlines, the national carrier of Taiwan, Republic of China (ROC). There also is Air China, based in Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Don’t mix them up: the PRC is the sworn enemy and claimant of Taiwanese sovereignty, and China Airlines and Air China crews are known to engage in airport brawls and run one another off taxiways.

• Beware of redundancies when tempted to tack on any kind of “Air,” or “Airways” suffix, as it might already be there. SAS, for example, needs nothing of the sort, lest it become “Scandinavian Airlines System Airlines.”

• I know of at least two carriers that rely on the singular “Airline.” Emirates Airline, and the lesser-known Sky Airline of Chile. Frankly they’d be better off with the “s.” (Why does there have to be an “air” suffix at all? “Emirates,” alone and unadorned, is such a great-sounding name. Similarly, the full and annoying name of JetBlue is JetBlue Airways. What’s wrong with just “JetBlue”?)

• Lufthansa is Lufthansa. Sort of. Officially it’s Deutsche Lufthansa, which means, basically, “German Air Company” (The name derives from Luft, the German word for “air,” and Hansa, a Latin term meaning “guild”). On the emblem of a Lufthansa pilot’s hat it says “DLH,” taken from the full German name.

• KLM? Why that’s Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij, or “Royal Airline Company.” But you knew that.

• There is no “u” in Qantas. It’s taken care of by the Queensland part of Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, as it was named more than 90 years ago.

• Everybody remembers the Concorde. More properly, everybody remembers Concorde. The plane’s makers always insisted the article extraneous. In a haughty Oxford accent you might have heard, “We’ll be arriving on Concorde at noon.” This is possibly the most pretentious bit of nonsense in the history of aviation; most of the time I go ahead and use the the.

• The The? Does anyone remember that song “Uncertain Smile” from c. 1983? I once had the extended version on a 12-inch 45.

Let’s go back to Lufthansa for a minute. Of all the endless manglings of this fine and handsome word, perhaps the most atrocious version is one heard dozens of times daily at Boston’s Logan International Airport. The offense takes place on Massport’s inter-terminal shuttle bus and aboard the MBTA’s Silver Line connection from downtown, both of which share a common audio loop that announces the occupants of each terminal. As the only airline pilot alive who doesn’t own an automobile, I take public transportation to and from the airport. And every time the bus nears terminal E, I clench my teeth and close my eyes as the tape goes through its alphabetical listing. It starts out fine. “This stop serves Air, France, Aer Lingus, Alitalia, British Airways” Then then, here it comes… “Loof-THUND-za.”

Say what?

“Loof-THUND-za,” the woman’s voice repeats. Not only does she screw it up, she makes a presentation out of it. Her voice drops an octave and appropriates the accent of a Teutonic demon.

Being touchy about these things, I’ve thought about protesting to Massport. But imagine how that might go:

PS: Yes, hello, I’m calling to complain.

MP: Oh, is this about the toilets in Terminal C? Sorry, we’re trying to…

PS: No, it’s about the bus. The shuttle bus.

MP: The bus? Did the driver swear at you? We have a special number for that, let me…

PS: No, it’s the recording, the tape recording that calls out the airlines at each terminal.

MP: I see. No problem. Is the volume too loud? Is there an airline missing?

PS: No, it’s not missing. It’s just all messed up.

MP: Oh. Which one?

PS: Lufthansa.

MP: “Lefthinza?”

PS: Yes. Or, well, no. Lufthansa.

MP: That’s what I said, Lifthoonsa.

PS: See, this is what I’m talking about. You’re not pronouncing it right, and neither is the tape. It’s very confusing. [Actually, it isn’t confusing at all, it’s just irritating.]

MP: All right, I will have our audio tape team look into this and call you back.

PS: Great, thank-you.

[Four days later Massport returns the call.]

MP: Yes, Patrick, our engineers have reviewed the recording. They could not find any problem. The voice clearly says “Lifthonser.”

PS: [exasperated] In fact that’s not what it says. It says “Loof-THUND-za.”

MP: [sternly] That’s what I just said, “Luftownza.”

PS: That isn’t what you said. And either way it’s wrong. Can’t you keep your diphthongs straight? Geez. What the hell is wrong with you people?

And so on.

That conversation never really happened, though I suppose it could have. And those of you who long ago decided that I’m a petulant crank are, once again, amply rewarded. But I am of the belief that every field, every specialty and sub-specialty, no matter how esoteric, needs its obsessives, and is richer for their efforts. To the layperson, such intense adherence to detail might seem undue, or comical. But without it, standards fall, and the transfer of information becomes corrupt.

From there it’s a slippery slope: the very building blocks of society begin to fissure and crumble. The terrorists have won!

In any event, we shouldn’t push it, lest Lufthansa be tempted to change its name. The only thing worse than a recorded voice announcing “Loof-THUND-za” would be one announcing “Air Germany.”

If you haven’t noticed, the global expansion of commercial aviation has brought with it some truly awful carrier names. In the past few years, more than 250 commercial operators have entered the market, the bulk of them with identities ranging from inexplicable to embarrassing. Many, apparently, were thought up by twelve year-old girls (Golden International Airlines, Butterfly Helicopters), or junior high kids strung out on energy drinks (Maximus Air Cargo, Mega Aircompany).

Of course, nobody will ever outdo the accidental hilarity of Taiwan’s now-defunct U-Land Airlines, but particularly noxious has been the fondness for ultra-quirky, dare I say “fun” monikers. Zoom, Jazz, Clickair, Go Fly, Wizz Air. Enough already. Sure, it freshens things up, but can you really buy a ticket on something called “BMIbaby” and still feel good about yourself in the morning?

The idea, I think, is to personify the ease and affordability of modern air travel. One result, however, has been to undercut whatever shred of dignity the experience retains. In fairness, this trend is emblematic of the way too many products, not just airline tickets, are pitched these days, with everything presented as quick, quirky, snappy and hip. But as a pilot, if not as a traveler, I’m troubled by the incongruity of a $50 million jetliner that says “Zoom” on the side in cartoon letters the size of a house.

Here are some suggestions: Zip-Air, Neato Plane, CrazyJet. Shoot, I was going to type “Superjet,” but guess what? Superjet International — you can’t make this up — a joint venture between planemakers Alenia Aereonautica of Italy and Russia’s Sukhoi, is developing a new family of regional jets. And you thought “Airbus” was bad.

If it’s any consolation, there are, for now, some beauties still out there. Avianca, the flag carrier of Colombia, is one of the oldest airlines in the world, and maybe the prettiest-named. What a sweet word that is, both the way it looks and sounds: Avianca. You could almost name your daughter that.

 

Portions of this post originally ran in the magazine Salon.