Two days ago I mentioned the delightful story about the TSA's plan to place "behavior detection officers," or BDOs, in airports and to disguise them in ... TSA uniforms. Herewith several relevant responses.
1) About the plan's underlying genius:
"There are so many security officers at the airport that one no longer notices them. It's like policemen at the US capitol building, or people wearing orange clothes at a Clemson football game. Clothing that would be conspicuous in normal situations becomes the best way to blend in at the airport."
2) About how it may be working in Seattle:
"I witnessed this in action at SeaTac airport on this past Sunday morning. But I have to say the quote: "They do not focus on nationality, race, ethnicity or gender, said TSA spokeswoman, Sari Koshetz, does not ring true.
"As I (a nicely dressed white middle aged woman) sat there a young woman of Asian heritage was approached and asked for her boarding pass. She complied and I didn't think anything of it but realized it was a newly established check point. Then a few minutes later another TSA agent approached the same woman and asked again. Hmmm, was she so nervous looking? Not to me, she looked like the rest of us bored and waiting to go folks. She did have a nice long conversation on her cell phone in a language I could not understand but there are thousands of people who do this. Another young white woman who was sitting to my right was shocked and said "but they just asked her". Yep. So they don't focus on nationality, race or ethnicity? I am not at all convinced and will be observing to see how this plays out." [JF note: Like all law enforcement work, this is tricky. Eg, in any sensible risk-based system people in their 20s would deserve more attention than people in their 70s or 80s. The trick of course is drawing the line between that sort of common-sense triage and blanket categorization. Let's hope TSA is working on it.]
3) An account from inside the system:
"I [have a relative] who is in fact one of the Behavior Detection Officers your item today mentions. She is a very nice, petite Asian woman, and she finds it pretty entertaining that she is now a BDO and gets to flag people for extra security, question them, etc.
"Some of her comments to us about her job raise some questions (for me at least, I don't think she thinks this critically about her job) about how these officers are regulated, and their approach to screening.
Seven years ago I wrote in the magazine about the genesis of the F-35 fighter plane, known back then as the Joint Strike Fighter or JSF. ("Uncle Sam Builds an Airplane," June, 2002.) At the time, the JSF was supposed to be the solution to one of the modern military's worst problems: relentless and "unexpected" cost growth. Year after year, ships, missiles, tanks, etc go up "surprisingly" much in unit cost, so year after year the numbers in the inventory go down. The JSF was explicitly designed to break the cycle. In three complementary models, it was supposed to suit the differing aviation needs of the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. Like a car or computer meant for a broad global market, it was intended from the start to fit the needs of a large number of allied militaries.
As part of the story said:
"The JSF matters because of both its scale and its conceptual
ambition. The planners at the Pentagon and at Lockheed Martin imagine
that as many as 6,000 of these airplanes may be bought, at a total cost
of as much as $200 billion, over the next twenty-five years. If all
goes according to plan, about 3,000 of the JSFs will go to the original
"investors" in the program--the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps,
plus the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy in Britain. All have shared the
cost of developing the plane. The other 3,000 are supposed to go to
customers in the rest of the world."
That was then.
In this new column at Military.com, Winslow Wheeler -- part of the group of defense thinkers I mentioned yesterday -- talks about what has happened to the JSF as it has evolved into the F-35. Main plot line: cost has gone up, reliability has gone down, capabilities have fallen short of promises -- all of these "unexpected" changes forcing the planned number of purchases down, which in turn has pushed unit cost up further still. Check out the full account at Wheeler's column. And consider this part of the original article in light of what has happened seven years into the project:
"The ambitious idea behind the JSF is to address several chronic
problems of U.S. military acquisition policy simultaneously. If it
succeeds, it will put military procurement on a more affordable, more
effective track. If it fails, it will underscore how deep those
problems are."
November 7, 2009
In defense of the TSA
On the "man bites dog" front, and in the spirit of fairness, here are two items on behalf of the TSA. Or at least in opposition to some lines of criticism (like this recent one from me).
First: I can't believe that I've learned only now that the TSA has its own chatty blog, which takes up various criticisms, especially from web sites, and gives the TSA's answer. For instance, if you want to know their response to this famed cartoon from XKCD.com, check here.
The wonderful headline on another item
at the blog: "Response to 'TSA Agents Took My Son.'" I won't say that I
am tremendously convinced by their rebuttals, but I do (seriously)
admire the effort, and the flair. (I learned about the blog via Bob Collins of Minnesota.)
Next, below and after the jump, a reader's message in response to the recent GAO critique of TSA, mentioned here.
"While agreeing with the spirt of your attack on TSA, I'm not sure the jab is well centered.
"The GAO report is about TSA funding new technology. Clearly that is a botched job -- the withdrawal of the "puffer" machines is a demonstration that TSA is not good at funding R&D. But it has nothing to do with TSA screening tactics -- which I agree are not "risk based". And on the larger level, I'm not sure a blanket risk analysis is an effective tool for deciding where to put R&D dollars.
A man in Florida sends what may be the ideal example of reader mail, combining as it does aerodynamic theory, politics, economics, and presidential rhetoric. If only there were a China- or beer-related angle... Seriously, his critique of how the Obama team has explained the continuing collapse of the U.S. employment base is insightful. Although it is obviously too late to adjust the rhetoric with which the Administration launched its economic recovery plans, arguments like this reader's could help shape the ongoing discussion.
"I'm really confused by how the Obama administration has handled the narrative and voter expectations for this recession. I clearly understand that they had to carefully balance early 2009 dire warnings against economic pessimism, while making a case for the stimulus package, etc. But once the stimulus was passed, I believe that they should have boldly stated how bad things really were, how their economic policies were the correct choices (even acknowledging Krugman's critiques of "too little"), and emphasizing that even the best possible management of the 2008 economic trainwreck would see significantly increasing unemployment as a lagging indicator.
"One analogy I've thought of often, aligned with your interests, is an economic analogy of an aerodynamic stall. When commerical credit froze and consumers reduced spending, the prevailing economic "lift" was gone. Stall! Conservative knee-jerk reactions for tax cuts were the equivalent of "pulling up" on the stick- intuitive but deadly. Obama's expert advice was to gain speed by spending (diving), even at the cost of altitude (deficit/debt). High unemployment was destined from the moment the stall occurred. Only when sufficient airspeed/angle of attack (spending) had been reached could the economy begin to pull up, and the unemployment would be analogous to the altitude lost even after the decision to finaly "pull up" had been made. Passenger relief (consumer confidence) would follow long after the immediate recovery (i.e., GDP), and no one would be "satisfied" until the plane came in for a (economic) "soft landing."
"There are probably numerous logical errors with this analogy [JF note: seems pretty good to me], but the simple point is this: If "Joe six-pack" clearly understands that Obama saved his economic life, while Conservatives would have driven the plane into the ground, he's more likely to appreciate and reward the unpalatable choices that Obama made. His appreciation would be enhanced if he understood all along that the pilot had no choice but to lose altitude, and the pilot explained that altitude (jobs) would take a long time to regain. This administration sorely needs a narrative that citizens can grasp and accept, otherwise the cynical partisan naysayers will continue to fill the void....
"I came across this, published online by Irwin M. Stelzer on 12/19/2008 in the Weekly Standard (hardly a liberal apologist):
'Bush knows that Obama is inheriting a very difficult economic situation indeed. So does the president-elect. Economists with whom I have spoken--and these are the people listened to at the highest levels in both parties and at Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve Board--believe that the unemployment rate, now at 6.7 percent, will hit double digits sometime in 2009, and stay there well into 2010. They expect house prices to drop another 15 percent and share prices at least another 10 percent before finding a bottom.Worse still, they are predicting an extraordinarily sluggish recovery. Since unemployment is what economists call a lagging indicator--job creation doesn't start until a recovery is well under way--the unemployment rate might remain high well into 2011.'
"None of this is news to you. But if the Weekly Standard could articulate this in late 2008, why hasn't the Obama administration made sure that average Americans understand the "pre-destination" involved with unemployment?"
As an answer to the final question, my guess is that a combined message of uplift and caution is among the most difficult for leaders to convey. Obama and his economic team had to keep sounding optimistic, since so much of a recovery is affected by "animal spirits." But they also needed to acknowledge that for a long time ahead more people would be losing than gaining jobs. The dual message is not impossible, but it's tricky, and as the reader suggests the proper balance has not yet come across.
November 6, 2009
Ongoing TSA / Security Theater watch
The monthly "Airport Policy News" reports by Robert Poole, of the Reason Foundation, are a steady source of nuggets about economic, technological, and political developments in the aviation world. I would send a link to the latest report I'm about to cite, except that what's online, here, is routinely a few weeks behind what's come out in the newsletters.
I am not a full adherent to the Reason Magazine/Ayn Rand view of the world (I loved her books when I was 14, though!), including some specifics about aviation. But we are as one in dismay about the combination of authoritarianism, empty symbolism, and undiscriminating clumsiness that makes up much of our current TSA policy. See my Atlantic colleague Jeff Goldberg on this point too.
Poole's latest nugget is a GAO report on how the TSA is doing. Links to the full 75-page report and summary highlights are here. The cover page gets across the essential point, which is that years and years into its existence, the TSA is still not basing its screening plans, its strategy, or its technology on assessment of relative risk. That is, if you wonder why the two-year old in a stroller is getting the full pat-down and why so many TSA procedures fail the basic-logic test, it turns out that the GAO wonders those things too.
From its summary:
"TSA completed a strategic plan to guide research, development, and deployment of passenger checkpoint screening technologies; however, the plan is not risk-based. [My emphasis.]...
"Since TSA's creation, 10 passenger screening technologies have been in various phases of research, development, test and evaluation, procurement, and deployment, but TSA has not deployed any of these technologies to airports nationwide.... In the case of the ETP [ a new scanner], although TSA tested earlier models, the models ultimately chosen were not operationally tested before they were deployed to ensure they demonstrated effective performance in an operational environment. Without operationally testing technologies prior to deployment, TSA does not have reasonable assurance that technologies will perform as intended."
Much more from the full GAO report, here in PDF form. I realize that there are bigger emergencies in America right now. But the ongoing impossibility of applying logic to this situation really is discouraging -- or, more positively, is an opportunity for someone in government to address.
November 4, 2009
The Prius of the sky
A contest for fuel-efficient small airplanes has a winner: a modified VariEze that gets 45 mpg at over 200 MPH with two people aboard, and nearly 100 mpg at a lower "maximum range" speed.
Details from Wired here, Tree Hugger here, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association last year here. Just as I've always said: to get America moving again, including on the fuel-efficiency front, we've got to get more people up in the air. (Thanks to Michael Ham.)
October 26, 2009
More on the Minneapolis "overflight"
According to numerous accounts in the last hour -- AP here, Reuters here, WSJ here -- the current story from the Northwest flight crew that forgot to land in Minneapolis is that they were so absorbed in using laptops in the cockpit that they neglected to talk with air traffic controllers for more than an hour and didn't get around to descending.
I hate to say this about people with enough other problems already, but: that's simply impossible to believe.
Flying an airplane is different from driving a car, in that it doesn't take constant second-by-second attention to the mechanics of where you're going and how you're handling the controls. If you type out a text message while you're driving a car, you really are putting yourself and others in danger. But if you take a minute in an airplane to check a detail of the routing, or a weather report, or anything else that comes up, in most phases of flight nothing bad is going to happen. The plane will cruise along with its autopilot, and most of the time no other planes are anywhere nearby. (Obviously this doesn't apply in takeoff and landing, in busy airspace, etc.)
That's why some of the stories tut-tutting the pilots for breaking company rules by opening laptops during flight are beside the point. That's a for-form's-sake only rule whose violation may be"wrong" but is not intrinsically dangerous.
The difficulty for the pilots is that the version of the story they're resisting -- that they simply fell asleep -- is less damning for them than any alternative version. If they fell asleep, that's bad, but they could argue some kind of force majeure. But if their "heated conversation" (previous story) or intense laptop use (current story) kept them from remembering their most elemental responsibility as pilots, that really is beyond the pale. The closest comparison would be, say, to an operating-room team that got so interested in watching a football game on TV that they sliced open a patient but forgot to take out his appendix. Forgetting where you are going is incredible enough on its own. And not having any back-of-mind nag saying, "Wait a minute, we haven't heard anything on the air-traffic control frequency for a while" also is outside any known experience of the professional flight-crew world.
I say this not to rub it in for people who have lots of trouble ahead -- and who, to their credit, did get their passengers down safely. I mention it to underscore how much an outlier the apparent failure in this case is -- and to emphasize the trouble they're creating for themselves with the "conversation" and "laptop" alibis. If they fell asleep, that's embarrassing. If they were awake, it is far, far worse.
October 24, 2009
From an Airbus captain, about recent flight errors
A reader writes:
"I just thought you might like to know that while the airplane overflying Minneapolis received major headlines, the Delta airplane which landed on a taxiwayin Atlanta earlier this week received minimal coverage. As you can imagine the taxiway landing is much more of a close call (that is a greater chance of casualties) than overflying an airport at altitude. As I've come to expect from the press there is no perspective on the relative danger of either incident. Somewhat similar to focusing on shark attacks while we kill approximately 40,000 every year on our roads.
"As an A-320 captain I don't mean to throw stones at either crew (there but for the grace of God...)... As to the Atlanta taxiway incident there were multiple factors including a long overnight flight, a sick check airman who was in the back, and a change of runway inside the marker [well into the plane's final descent, shortly before landing] to a runway without approach lighting... But it is interesting that one incident is totally ignored while the other gets major media play."
Google Earth view of approach to runway 27R at Atlanta. Where they should have landed is the runway at center of this view, with the chevron markers on black background pointing towards it. Where they actually landed was the taxiway just to its right. This happened in the dark. At night the taxiway would have blue lights and the runway white lights.
Why a taxiway landing is potentially much more dangerous: another airplane could theoretically be turning onto the taxiway just as the incoming plane was touching down, raising the prospect of a repeat of the deadliest accident in aviation history, the collision of two fully-loaded 747s on the runway at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, in 1977. Why the current "overflight" incident, despite its safe conclusion, has gotten attention: for what it may show about pilot-fatigue and work-rule questions (plus the melodrama factor of passengers sitting, reading, dozing innocently while things in the cockpit are not as they should be; plus the melodrama factor of controllers, hearing nothing from the plane, not knowing whether it was another hijacking/terrorist episode). Why news coverage does not follow statistical risk of danger: this is life.
More on missing an airport (updated, on pilot fatigue)
Not sure if this makes me feel better or worse. I mentioned yesterday that I had once inadvertently been steering a small airplane toward Ellsworth Air Force Base, in South Dakota, rather than the Rapid City airport a couple of miles to its side, where I really intended to land. (Pilot-world detail: Airports in the US are officially known by a four-letter identification scheme, starting with K, rather than the three letters familiar from airline tickets. Thus LAX is KLAX for purposes of filing a flight plan; O'Hare is KORD; Logan is KBOS; and so on. The airport in Rapid City is KRAP. For the record, Ellsworth is KRCA.) The two airports are close together; their runways are laid out the same way; and so on. Via SkyVector.com, here's the FAA chart of KRCA, nearer the top, and KRAP below it, with green circles on each. I was way off the lower right side of the chart when trying to find the airport.
Now I hear from several readers that five years ago a Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis-St Paul (KMSP) did what I avoided -- went all the way and landed at Ellsworth, on a flight that was supposed to end at Rapid City. In my case I think that, even if a controller had not alerted me from ten minutes out that I needed to turn slightly to the left, I would have figured it out before I actually landed at an Air Force base. For one thing, the numbers at the end of the runway, which you can see from far away, would have been a clue. (The relevant runway would say 32 in big numbers at Rapid City, and 31 at Ellsworth. You know the number of the runway you're planning to land on, and if you see something different, it would give you pause.) For whatever reason, this NWA flight made it all the way to a landing at Ellsworth.
Sorry for the passengers, who had to spend several hours on the ground before the five-minute flight to KRAP, and sorry for the pilots too.
UPDATE: This story in today's LA Times goes frontally at what I suspect will be the main question in the current "ooops, we missed Minneapolis" airline incident: whether, why, and how often airline pilots fall asleep in the cockpit. Obviously that was not the case with the five-year-old Ellsworth/KRAP incident discussed in this post. I expect this is just the beginning of broad discussion on pilot-fatigue issues coming out of the Minneapolis case. Thanks to reader D.L.
October 22, 2009
In case you were wondering.... (Updated)
... the Northwest Airlines flight that apparently "missed" the Minneapolis-St Paul airport today and overshot it by 150 miles did not make an ordinary mistake, like missing Exit 32A on a busy freeway and having to get off on Exit 32B.This is more like ... well, it's hard to think of a comparison, because it's pretty startling.
Once when I was flying westward toward the Rapid City airport in South Dakota, I found myself lining up 25 miles away instead with the much bigger runway of Ellsworth Air Force Base nearby. I must not have been the first one to do so, because the controller said in a routine way, "What you're probably heading for is Ellsworth. You want to turn your head ten degrees to the left and look for a little airport that's closer. That's where you want to go." This was embarrassing enough, and it was just my wife and me, not a bunch of paying passengers. (Below, Google Earth's view of what caused my problems. The runways have similar orientation, and Ellsworth is the first one you see from a distance. And this is from straight overhead! I was looking from a slant, into a setting sun, from a relatively low altitude, way off in the distance. It's a miracle I saw either of them!)
In contrast, from the air you really cannot miss a big, busy, international airport. It's unlike anything else you see -- especially when controllers are talking you every step of the way, as they are required to with airliners. Rather, I guess you can miss it, but it's a surprise.
Glad everyone is safe. Will be interesting to hear the pilots' account. I have my own hypotheses, but it's fairer to wait.
UPDATE: To avoid being coy about my "hypothesis," it's hard to imagine how this could have happened if the pilots were awake. There is too much going on in the last 45 minutes of a flight -- with procedures for arrival, approach, and landing, many checklists -- just to be "distracted." So most likely either they both fell asleep in the normal sense or, weirdly, were both disabled in a way they then recovered from. After a cockpit crew on Go! airlines fell asleep for fifteen minutes in Hawaii last year while their plane was headed out toward the open ocean, one of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin's readers offered this possible explanation:
"Aliens I say. They took the pilots to their spaceship, then put them
back in the plane. They were gone for 2 weeks, but only 15 minutes
Earth time."
Bonus analysis point: on top of the Colgan crash in Buffalo early this year, plus that previous Hawaiian sleeping-pilots problem, we are bound to see more serious political attention to the question of work rules, fatigue, pilot training, etc under the new operating realities of the airline industry. Thanks to M. Griffith for the Go! tip.
Bad news, good news on the air-traffic beat
Bad news: further evidence that the worldwide GPS system, which is run by the US government and on which everything from airline navigation to iPhone mapping apps relies, is at risk of "browning out." Earlier mention of the problem, back in May, here, based on this government report. Update this month, from Avionics magazine, here. Talk about your deteriorating critical infrastructure! Headline below gives you the gist.
"Fixing GPS
"Almost half of the current
constellation of GPS satellites are at or approaching 'single thread'
operation, where a critical system failure could render a satellite
inoperative. What are the options for replacing GPS satellites?"
Now, the better news. Assuming that the GPS network gets tuned up in time, Scott McCartney, of the WSJ, explains some of the potential for better, more efficient, and safer airline navigation -- including over the vast oceanic "big blue data void" into which Air France 447 disappeared. The "NextGen" navigation systems McCartney describes have their strong supporters and critics, when it comes to specific configurations and timetables for the program. But a shift to some version of the new system is as inevitable, and McCartney explains clearly what the benefits can be.
September 24, 2009
A few more random return-to-the-homeland notes
I will never do this systematically, so I'll keep jotting them down at random. As I repatriate, I notice:
- Not as many very fat large Americans as I was expecting. Am I looking in the wrong places? So propagandized into thinking that all of my countrymen are obese that expectations are off? Something gone wrong with my visual judgment? Something gone right with public health? I don't know. Just telling you what I have (not) seen.
- In a number of airports the past few days. I can't help noticing the moronic, utterly rote and meaningless announcements that begin, "The Department of Homeland Security has determined that the threat level is Orange. Please be alert..." The way you can tell that I'm still not fully acclimated is that I notice the announcements at all. For everyone else, they are 100% white noise. Is there a stupider aspect of national policy at the moment than these formulaic "threat level" announcements, which are always orange and which give no useful info whatsoever? Okay, I'm sure there's something stupider, but for rhetorical purposes I'll say that I can't think of one right now.
- When I am king: I will outlaw "wheelie"- style rollable bags for carry-on luggage. Wheels and a handle on a big, heavy suitcase meant to be checked? Perfectly reasonable. But if you're going to carry something onto the plane, the law should require you actually to carry the thing, all the way to your seat. Why do I care? The wheelie triples or quadruples the floor space occupied by any one person, and the people tugging them don't look behind. I get my revenge by kicking the bags as they're being dragged across my path and tripping me. Then I act like it was an "accident."
- But even before that I will outlaw: leafblowers. God in heaven, do I hate that noise. Unfortunately, the neighborhood abounds in households that love hiring crews for the all-out leafblower experience -- they stagger their days, so it happens pretty much nonstop. I realize that the Beijing approach (below) is probably not practical in the U.S. But, hey, I actually have used a rake in my time. Part of the new Clean Energy policy for America?
As is obvious, I'm auditioning for Andy Rooney's role as public crank.
September 6, 2009
Festival of updates #6: TSA vs. the toddler menace
No, this doesn't prove anything, but the picture is too interesting not to share. It's from a reader who describes his experience at BWI airport. It was back in 2005, before the BWI-specific improvements mentioned here, so maybe this would never happen again. But...
"Attached is a picture of my daughter (15 months old at the time) being frisked by a TSA security screener at BWI....
"I had been carrying her through security after putting the stroller through. Of course the metal detector detected something. You can see in the picture that I am holding my pants up with my hand rather than my belt and have no shoes on so who knows what it was. Maybe it was her shoes - they didn't make her take them off. I got the feeling when they called a woman over that they were going to frisk her so I called to my wife who had already gone through to get a picture. Sure enough they gave her the wand metal detector and pat down treatment."
If all of this were part of a shrewd, realistic, threat-based strategy of imposing inconvenience and occasional humiliation only when necessary, then -- great! But in reality....
September 4, 2009
Holiday festival of updates! #1 in a weekend-long series
Labor Day Weekend wouldn't be the cherished American ritual it is, without cookouts, beer, one last beach weekend frequent updates on past technical, political, and aviation matters. To kick off this special all-weekend series, an airline industry insider's account on why the Transportation Security Administration condones class-war in the airport security system: Shorter lines for high-mileage passengers (like me! until my China-travel miles time out), all the longer waits for everyone else. Here's the inside view:
"You might have already gotten this from other sources, but as a 25-year
airline industry veteran, the discriminatory TSA lines are easily
explained.
"They exist because the Legacy Airlines cut a deal
with senior-level political appointees in the early days of the TSA,
and no one has ever challenged them, and it is set up so no one can
challenge them. The airlines are, of course, not actually paying
anything for the privilege of deciding which taxpayers have
first-class/second-class access to federally mandated security
screening. The "justification" is that airline rents and fees "pay" the
costs of the airport, therefore they have the right to control how
"public" spaces in the terminal are used. Neither airports or the TSA
gets an incremental dollar for allowing this discrimination.
"The
floor space used to sort passengers into different queues is officially
controlled by the airlines, and is separate from the space (just behind
it) that is controlled by the TSA. Thus the situation is quite
different from discriminatory queues you might
have experienced in London and other overseas points, where the
airlines actually paid money to fund separate "business-class" airside
access
points. All that money you paid United to earn Platinum status pays for
the lounges and upgrades you get. But your preferential TSA access is a
gift from the government, and a "wealth" transfer from all of us in
steerage to all of your friends in business class.
Three updates: Hudson River, "false claims," origins of Iraq
Catching up on a variety of previous reports:
1) The FAA responds in a sensible, proportionate way to last month's tragic crash above the Hudson River. Following the lead of the NTSB, as mentioned here, it will soon propose clear, common-sense rules of the "road" to keep airplanes and helicopters safely separated in the busy Hudson River corridor. For instance, it will require -- rather than just expect -- that northbound traffic stay on the east side of the river, and southbound on the right; and that helicopters stay at a lower altitude than the airplanes; and all pilots stick to the same radio frequency; and other steps.
Why this matters: because it's a targeted, non-panicky response directed at the specific problem that has been revealed, rather than a sweeping exercise in TSA-style "security theater." It will no doubt create complications of its own, mainly through increased work for controllers. But overall, this is a victory for common sense.
2) Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, whose previous reporting about the health-care debate has been noted (in different ways) here and here, has a very strong story today about Elizabeth McCaughey and her role in these discussions.
Why this matters: the story straightforwardly does something that goes against the nature of mainstream coverage. It notes the influence that Ms. McCaughey's claims have had on public discussion, while also flatly saying that those claims are often false. It's worth recognizing what a step this is for the Times, prefigured in this story from three weeks ago. The natural reflex of mainstream publications is to finesse such disagreements with the "some critics claim..." approach. It seems more "objective," and it certainly is safer for the reporter and the news organization. And when we are talking about differences of opinion, judgment, or political creed, of course that's exactly the right approach to take. ("Is the Administration's approach to Iran likely to work? Some critics claim...") But there is a such a thing as plain misstatement of fact, and it is good when the press can point it out.
3) James Gibney of the Atlantic also has a very strong, short item about revisionism now being practiced by some of the architects and enthusiasts of the invasion of Iraq. In particular, the writer Max Boot and the former DOD official Paul Wolfowitz, the latter of whom I have written about here and here.
Why this matters: The edge to Gibney's argument will be evident to anyone who reads it. What most people would not realize is how particularly trenchant a judgment this is, coming from him. As a one-time Foreign Service officer (and former executive editor of Foreign Policy magazine), James Gibney is no one's idea of a hothead. He is more gentlemanly than most people who express views on this site (not to mention on the whole untrammeled web), and less known for harsh opinions. These words have weight.
September 1, 2009
Last aviation post of the day: the world's biggest fire truck
Quite amazing footage from Fox 11 in Los Angeles of a specially modified 747 serving as a fire-fighting tanker today. The plane is flying extremely low-and-slow to dump retardant in an attempt to contain the LA-area wildfires. From this site.
For the first two or three minutes of this video I found it hard to believe it was live footage of an actual airplane, rather than a computerized simulation. Better use of local-TV live cams than following cops in a standard highway chase! (Thanks to Joseph Musco.)
Rounding out our "love for the TSA" theme
Don't know how to explain it, but over the past week I've received a large amount of correspondence all with the same gripe about the Transportation Security Administration: its role as enforcer of class-inequality among the airborne traveling public. (Previously on the TSA here.) For instance, this sample note, from a military official with whom I've usually corresponded about Iraq policy and so forth:
"My big puzzle/complaint with TSA: how can they enforce and man discriminatory lines in the airport check in? If someone is paying United more for a first class seat they can enjoy better service and seating on United--but in going through gov't run, TSA-manned security, how can there be a first class line with faster security checks? It's a clearly wrong, illegal practice.
"I protested it once--going through first class line with my cheap seat ticket, and refusing to go back, pointing out that this is a government security service, not the airline, and its illegal for gov't to discriminate for a business. They called security police, I continued arguing for 10 minutes, got escorted through, then subjected to thorough bag searches despite having waved my military ID around. I had plenty of time to waste on this, and it did no good apparently (unless they've stopped this practice at Las Vegas airport). They may argue that its the airport folks who man the front part of line, but that's often not true, and it is always TSA folks at the security end of the line--they are illegally discriminating."
Thanks to my travel back and forth from China in recent years, I have a million-zillion miles on United and therefore am in favor of any class inequality that might favor high-mileage customers like me. But I recognize that having public officials doing the favoring is unseemly. This is the next-to-last straw in judging the TSA an experiment that desperately needs to be rethought. The last straw comes from Patrick Smith, of the always-excellent "Ask the Pilot" site on Salon, who asks pointedly whether the intrusive and expensive TSA checklines are doing any good at all. Read his whole column for details, but here is the gist [my emphasis added:
"The novelty of the Sept. 11 attacks notwithstanding, the primary threat to commercial planes is, was and shall remain the smuggling aboard of explosives, which is what happened on Pan Am 103 [the Lockerbie explosion twenty years ago whose instigator was recently set free]. The bomb came onboard in a suitcase. The hijack paradigm changed forever on 9/11, rendering the inflight takeover concept unworkable for a terrorist....
"Yet whether by virtue of incompetence or willful ignorance, TSA continues to waste untold time and untold millions of dollars on a tedious, zero-tolerance fixation with blades and sharps. This does nothing to make us safer, and in fact draws security resources away from worthy pursuits.
"Yes, TSA scans most bags for explosives. Mandates were put in place after 9/11 that have greatly increased the percentage of bags that are run through high-tech detectors, with a goal of screening all of them. But eight years later, screening is still not fully comprehensive. It does not yet include 100 percent of luggage and cargo, and procedures remain inadequate at many overseas airports from which thousands of U.S.-registered jetliners depart each week.
Neither is there widespread screening for explosive materials that somebody can carry on his or her person. Good luck getting a hobby knife through a concourse checkpoint, while a pocket full of Semtex is unlikely to be noticed....
"There is a level of inherent risk that we simply must learn to accept. But, if we are going to have an airport security apparatus, and if we are going to devote millions of tax dollars to the cause of thwarting attacks, can we please do it smartly and at least improve our odds?
Am I the only one who finds it maddening, and even a little scary, that we can't get this right? Is it not a national disgrace that TSA should spend its time confiscating butter knives from uniformed pilots rather than focusing on deadly threats with a long historical precedent?
"Where are the voices of protest? As I've said before, the airlines
ought to be speaking out and pressuring TSA to revise its policies. I
know it puts them in a tough spot, liability-wise -- carriers don't
want to be perceived as opposing security, even when that security
isn't helpful -- but much of what people despise about flying pertains
to the TSA rigmarole.
"And passengers, for their part, are
apparently content with, or at least resigned to, the idea of security
theater in lieu of the real thing. Indeed, rather than demand or expect
change, hundreds of thousands of Americans have paid good money for the
chance to simply circumvent the hassle of TSA."
Amen. Now, if there were only some way to channel the surplus emotion from anti-health-care-reform "town meetings" and direct it toward the excesses of "security theater."
Late last week the National Transportation Safety Board put out a "safety recommendation" letter about preventing accidents in the "VFR Flyway" above the Hudson River. For previous items on the August 8 airplane-helicopter collision that killed nine people, see here, here, here, and here. VFR = "Visual Flight Rules," in which pilots are responsible for their own navigation and for keeping out of other planes' way.
The full NTSB account of the accident will take many months to complete. This interim recommendation, available in PDF here, is interesting in several ways. First, in contrast to some excitable "it's the Wild West up there!" comments by politicians and media figures, it notes that there have been no previous collisions in 30 years of operating under current procedures over the Hudson, and just one reported "near miss" in the past ten years. Thus, "The procedures in use to promote separation between VFR flights appear to have been effective in preventing collisions." [Full quote from this section, with caveat, after the jump.]
Nonetheless, its recommendation for avoiding problems in the future includes something that makes obvious sense: keeping helicopters and airplanes at different altitudes, since helicopters can safely operate much closer to the ground than airplanes can. This recent collision happened at 1,100 feet -- the altitude at which airplanes typically fly through the corridor, since above that they get into controlled "Class B" airspace for New York's three major airports. The airplane was flying level at that altitude; the helicopter climbed to that altitude just before the crash. By the NTSB's recommendations, helicopters would not get that high.
There are other observations about air traffic control procedures to keep a closer eye on traffic. (For the reaction from air traffic controllers' union, see this Washington Post item. More on the merits of this part of the argument later.) Worth checking out. ___
More love for the TSA (plus actual good TSA-related news)
Four ways of looking at the TSA (drawn from reader mail, following this and this item): As possibility for political symbolism:
"Political experts will disagree, but the smartest thing that Gingrich and Co did back when they took over Congress was kill the federal speed limits. It told every American that they were serious about killing outdated government regulations and it gave some moral power to their deconstruction.
"In another era, Miranda rights, repeated endlessly on TV cop shows, gave every American the idea they had "rights".
"I remember an axiom, perhaps from Nixon, that every President needs to kill a government department on taking office. Killing TSA, and saving $5 for every airline ticket sold, would seem to be an enormously easy venture. Going back to your 1977 article, What Would Jimmy Carter Do?" [Deferring comment on this last point for now.]
As occasion for good news! A reader sent this positive account from a recent trip via BWI airport in Baltimore:
"The last time we traveled through BWI in July, we noticed that TSA seemed a lot friendlier. Someone near the area where you got screened was announcing a list of things that you had to take out of your bags to be screened separately. This list included some things that I considered fairly bizarre like an accordian. This made the TSA look a lot less humorless than they had been before.
"I do agree with you that the shoe thing needs to stop. There are some people trying to sneak through with their Vibrams or similar shoes. These are still rare enough that they puzzle some TSA personnel."
As it turns out, there is a reason why BWI seems less maddening/harassing than most other airports! A friend who works for IDEO, the famed design firm, pointed me toward a report showing what IDEO had done to reduce the going-crazy experience of passing through airport check lines. It's here, and it includes apercus like this:
"It was clear that trying to observe the subtleties of hostile intent
would be less effective in a chaotic environment filled with stressed
passengers. IDEO was engaged to design a solution that calmed the
environment of the checkpoint, thus making potential threats stand out."
1) Demonstrating the mathematical theorem that TSA+Google Ads = unintended comedy, reader Andrew Hall shows what happened when he clicked on the trailer for the Hilary Swank / Amelia Earhart film:
In case you can't read it, the pop-up ad says: "Homeland Security: Become a TSA Scanner by Earning Your Degree in Homeland Security." I hope it's a joke -- I mean, including the "Degree in Homeland Security." But I fear it is not. FWIW, my pop-up ads on the same trailer were all for the WaWa grocery store chain.
2) I said that the Grace McGuire story had a happy ending. After TSA security-theater threatened to close down her reconstruction of an Amelia Earhart-type plane, the pre-approved crew from a San Diego museum had taken over the task. A reader begs to differ:
"Happy ending..." you say, at the end of today's piece.
But probably not for the "....variety of craftsmen and suppliers who happened to come up with the right part for the plane...." not to mention the likely large number of simple voluntary workers on such a project.
Case in point: My 76 year old mother, who is the non-flying secretary of her local EAA [Experimental Aircraft Association] chapter, was a volunteer member of a group which recently completed the restoration of a Viet Namese era artillery spotter plane. She, and the other 60 and 70 something year-olds who restored that Piper took great pleasure and pride in what they did, and the results - in fact, they're planning to do another plane in the not-too distant future. What a shame it will be if their ability to make some contribution, and derive a sense of satisfaction and worth from the effort, is prevented by the TSA's bureaucratic nonsense.
3) Just because it's both China-related and aviation-themed, here's a YouTube video of China's first all-electric plane, the Yuneec. (Say it out loud. Hardee-har!) Kind of odd video, but looks like fun -- it's at a California airport I know well. And, to bring things back to a TSA theme, never once in my many, many trips through Chinese airports did I have to take off my shoes. I mean, except on flights back to the U.S. Let us learn from a 5,000-year-old culture to the east. (More here. Thanks to Ted Pearlman.)
As a conservative, I did not vote for President Obama. Nonetheless, it's my hope that some of the sillier things instituted by the Bush Administration would get thrown out.
Why hasn't the Obama Administration acted to clean up the public image of TSA? Specifically, why hasn't TSA stopped making people take off their shoes? It's the silly tip of the iceberg of silly security theatre.
I'd think that the President would win himself a lot of independent votes by getting rid of this rather ridiculous measure. Have any ideas as to why it hasn't happened?
August 25, 2009
Why we love the TSA, chap. #14,867 (Amelia Earhart dept)
The most interesting movie trailer I've seen since coming back to America -- OK, the only one -- is for Hilary Swank's upcoming biopic about Amelia Earhart. Opening shot below; link to full trailer at the bottom.
This is timely not just because the movie looks so gorgeous -- as does Swank, reinforcing the beautiful androgynous kinship in appearance between Earhart and the young Charles Lindbergh -- but also because the latest small chapter in the war of TSA-vs-common-sense involves Amelia.
Four years ago, as described in this NYT article and this one from Smithsonian Air and Space, a New Jersey pilot named Grace McGuire resolved to recreate Amelia Earhart's round-the-world journey, in a restored version of the same kind of Lockheed Electra airplane Earhart flew. All instruments, equipment, and detailing would be similar. The big difference, as McGuire pointed out in her standard punch line, is that she intended to get home safely rather than disappearing over the South Pacific.
McGuire encountered various obstacles along the way, most notably a struggle with Lyme Disease that for years left her too weak to advance her plans. But her most recent hassle has been with our friends at the TSA.
As described here in AVweb and recounted on many general-aviation sites, the TSA has been ramping up background-check requirements for anyone who does any work, of any kind, at any site where flying craft can land. Most of the nation's 4000-plus small airfields have historically been very casual, low-formality, open operations, policed mainly and effectively by their community of users. To people who have worked at and gathered around them, the airports' openness was much of their American-freedom-style, Earhart-and-Lindbergh-style appeal. To the TSA, it looks like a threat. An overheated pilot partisan argues here
that fortifying little airports is part of the Big Government vision of "Team Obama." Her heart's in the right place about the TSA, but of course these rules and the overall security-theater approach got started under the previous team.
McGuire had moved her Electra airplane to the tiny Santa Maria airport in California, a very nice little field very far from big cities. Restoring a 75-year old airplane meant a lot of ad hoc visits by a variety of craftsmen and suppliers who happened to come up with the right part for the plane. Putting every one of them through Federal security checks and certifying them for permanent airport ID cards, before they could drive up to the little airfield and repair an aileron, was bringing the project to a halt.
Help has arrived, in the form of the San Diego Air and Space Museum. Its staff has already passed TSA security checks, and it will take over restoration of the plane. Happy ending -- but you wonder, will there ever be a chance to say, Enough with the petty security theater, and let's think about the courage and common sense that keep free people free. (Anyone who wants more on this topic, see here and here.)
Back to Hilary/Amelia: film trailer below.
August 20, 2009
More reassuring news: new life for Eclipse?
This news has been brewing for weeks, but it appears to have reached a critical point. The assets of the ill-fated Eclipse Aviation company, whose rise is described here and here, and demise here and here, may be sold at auction today to a new group of investors doing business as Eclipse Aerospace. The head of the new company, Mason Holland of South Carolina, was a deposit-holder for an Eclipse jet when the company went under. (He also owned and flew a Cirrus propeller airplane, and I know him slightly through the Cirrus pilots' organization.)
The Eclipse jet was to be the backbone of a new small-jet air-taxi network. Operating on what is often known as the "second mouse gets the cheese" principle, Holland appears to be interested in retaining what was valuable about the airplane's design, after the wreck of the original company's finances. More background on the sale here, here, and here. Interviews with Mason Holland here and here. Good luck!
August 17, 2009
Omnibus news catch-up #1: Hudson River air crash UPDATED
Concerning Saturday's front-page story in the NYT about what the Teterboro air traffic controllers were doing just before the airplane-helicopter collision over the Hudson:
Obviously this doesn't look good for the controllers (that one of them was on a "non-business-related phone call" just before the crash), and the National Transportation Safety Board will eventually pronounce on how much, if anything, that had to do with the crash.* The NTSB's special update on what it has learned so far about the controllers' behavior and other factors is here.
There's one main reason to think that none of the controllers, including the one in the Teterboro airport tower who was on the phone, should principally be "blamed" for the crash. The reason is that by definition controllers are never principally responsible for "traffic separation" when planes are operating under "Visual Flight Rules," or VFR. The pilots themselves are responsible, like the drivers of cars.
When the weather is clear and pilots are operating under VFR, they are free (within limits) to choose their own course and altitude; but they -- not the controllers -- bear legal and practical responsibility for staying clear of terrain and not running into anything else in the sky. Everyone involved in the system understands this. The big divide in aircraft operations is between VFR and IFR, "Instrument Flight Rules." Under IFR, the pilots have to go where the controllers say -- but the controllers bear legal responsibility for keeping one plane away from others. Virtually all airline flights operate under IFR, so non-pilot public assumes that controllers are supervising flights of every kind. They're not.
Also, based just on the facts now released, there's something to be explained about the airplane pilot's actions. Soon after the plane had taken off, the Teterboro tower controller told the airplane pilot to switch to a Newark "departure" controller on another frequency. This is purely routine and is something you expect once airborne from an airport with a control tower. ("Airplane XXX, contact departure on [ XXX frequency]".)** Usually you know ahead of time what frequency you'll be switched to, and you have it pre-loaded into your radio. When instructed, you activate that new frequency by pushing one toggle switch.
In this case, the pilot acknowledged the "contact departure" request but then never spoke to the new controller. "Never" covers the 54 seconds between the request to switch frequency and the actual crash. That's a pretty long time not to "check in" with the next controller. Usually you enter the new frequency (a few seconds); listen a few more seconds for a chance to talk; and then announce yourself to the new controller. In extremely busy air-traffic areas, like New York most of the time, you may have to wait quite a while for a break in transmissions so you can check in. Was the pilot waiting all that time? The tapes will show whether he had a chance.
Now we come to the area of murk and "responsibility" in other than a strictly legal sense, which the NTSB will try to sort out. The NTSB announcement says that the second controller, in Newark, was eager to reach the pilot to warn him about the helicopter and suggest that he turn to avoid its path. Obviously that warning never get across. Was it just because the frequency was too busy? That would seem odd: when a controller really wants to reach a particular plane, he can tell other pilots to be quiet and put out a call to the plane he needs to reach. It's not unusual to hear such instructions. ("Piper XXX, if on frequency, acknowledge; all other traffic stand by....") Did the controller ever put out such a call? The NTSB doesn't mention it, but says that the Newark controller telephoned the one in Teterboro to mention the problem. Of course that Teterboro controller could no longer reach the pilot, whom he had instructed to switch away from his frequency.
The lore of aviation disasters, often discussed here, is that they very often involve an "accident chain" that could theoretically have been broken at any link. If the Teterboro controller had not been on the phone, maybe he would have seen the same impending problem that the Newark controller did -- but maybe not, because his radar scope may not have covered the same area. If the pilot had been able to check in quickly with the Newark controller, maybe he would have gotten the warning and turned. If the Newark controller had tried to reach the pilot, maybe that would have paid off. If the pilot and passengers had been looking in a different part of the sky, maybe they would have seen the helicopter in time. We'll know more about this eventually, although the whole tragedy may never be fully explained.
Main point for the moment: it would be natural for non-flying readers to hear about the controllers and conclude: Obvious negligence! They should have been at the scope keeping those planes apart! That's been the implication of some recent coverage of the crash. It is indeed possible, based on what's known now, that controllers might, through extra vigilance, have averted this disaster. The one in Newark apparently tried. But this is different from a situation in which, say, a controller neglects his duty to keep airliners safely separated and allows them to collide. Here what we know so far is that controllers may have missed a chance to go beyond normal duty and save the pilots from error. More when the NTSB speaks.
UPDATE: According to this AP story, as of Monday night the NTSB revised a previous claim that the Teterboro controller (the one with the phone call) could have seen the impending collision. The new info suggests that the helicopter did not show up on that controller's screen until immediately before the crash. Main reminder: it will take a while to sort out what really happened. __
*Side note: for all the care and thoroughness of the NTSB, its final
reports can be weirdly tautological. If a plane has crashed on takeoff,
the finding of probable cause may talk about the "pilot's failure to
maintain proper terrain clearance." When it eventually reports on this
Hudson crash, the conclusions will probably include both pilots'
"failure to maintain proper separation from other traffic." Still, it
does careful, exhaustive work, and its reports end up containing as many crucial
facts as can be found.
**Why is a pilot talking with controllers at all, if he is flying VFR? There's a very long answer, but the short version is: at airports with control towers and in certain categories of airspace, a pilot must be in radio contact with air traffic control and obey their instructions -- even if operating VFR. So even if this pilot was planning a VFR trip out of New York, which meant that he would choose his own course after he got away from the city and would be responsible for seeing and avoiding other planes, he needed to talk with controllers in these early stages of the flight.
August 13, 2009
Last word on helicopters v. airplanes (for now)
Two responses to my recent confession that while I loved flying airplanes, I was basically frightened of helicopters. Airplanes are meant to stay up in the air; helicopters are meant to fall out of it. First is from a reader who is a helicopter pilot in Alaska; then, from a reader who flies neither helicopters nor airplanes but is a professor of physics.
From the pilot:
Perhaps you've heard the expression, "Helicopters don't fly, they beat the air into submission."
From the professor -- Steven Lepp, of the physics department at UNLV.
"I am sure you will hear from all kinds of helicopter pilots, who will probably know more then I do. But as a Physics Professor (though Atomic and Molecular Astrophysics rather then Fluids is my specialty), I can say I don't think there is much difference between a helicopter and a fixed wing airplane in terms of how much it "likes to fly".
"Maple seeds are a good example of "Helicopters love to fly". As a kid I could play with these things for hours,...
I mentioned yesterday that a good NYT op-ed this week on the limits of GDP-as-Holy-Grail paralleled a similar argument in an also very good Atlantic cover story from 1995. To round out the trio of excellence, I should mention a NYT column last year by the economist Robert Frank, of Cornell, on the ways in which money does and does not buy happiness. The column comes up as a PDF here. The three are worth reading together.
In the same item yesterday, I mentioned that an NPR correspondent had sounded Chicken Little-ish about the recent tragic aerial crash over the Hudson, the only such collision in the many decades in which planes and helicopters have flown that route. Miles O'Brien -- ex of CNN, now of True/Slant, and pilot himself -- is much less polite about such coverage, in two items, here and here. Eg:
"Those of us who fly through this airspace are responsible for seeing
and avoiding each other. There are no air traffic controllers serving
as traffic cops here.
"And before you get yourself all spun up about this (I am talkin' to
you Sen. Schumer! [and the NPR guy]), before this tragic crash there has never been a mid
air collision like this in New York City.
"Over the years, many thousands of airplane and helicopters have
successfully and safely plied their way through this corridor of
airspace wherein the responsibility for collision avoidance rests
entirely in the cockpit.
"And the real truth is it makes flying in the New York City airspace
safer - because all the aircraft who fly in this zone are not taxing
already maxed out air traffic controllers.
"If tour helicopters had to check in with ATC every time they
alighted with a load of tourists, the system would bog down in a hurry.
"It is NOT the Wild West up there... It is a busy place with a lot of traffic and you have to pay
attention all the time. But that's New York for you. When two cars
collide in Midtown Manhattan, do we instantly insist the traffic laws
be changed?"
I'm with him.
UPDATE: I am also with my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg, here, in his life-extension maxim of "never take a helicopter ride for fun." I love airplanes and aviation; in the three China-based years that I've been away from flying I've actively missed the "aerial view," the particular perspective you get on the world from a few thousand feet up; like everyone who has thought seriously about flying, I know it brings risks. But helicopters are to me a different matter. If you've studied aerodynamics, you know that airplanes "want to stay in the air" -- if the engine fails, they turn into gliders, not plummeting objects. Helicopters "want to fall out of the air" -- yes, despite the limited ability to "autorotate" and avoid a direct plummet. I respect people who fly them, which is harder than flying airplanes. But I keep a respectful distance.
Three news updates: GDP, airplanes, health politics
1. GDP department: The NYT yesterday had a very good, double-length op-ed about the folly of relying strictly on GDP and its growth as a proxy for human happiness, social progress, or overall national success. (Simple illustration: home security systems add to national economic activity, but the need for them may illustrate a decline in real human happiness and wellbeing.) Back in 1995, the Atlantic had a very good cover story to very similar effect. I don't know whether it's discouraging that the same case has to be made again and again or encouraging to see similar logic being applied. But if you were interested in the NYT piece, the Atlantic one (by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe) is a worthy complement.
2. Airplane department: I mentioned shortly after the tragic Hudson River aerial crash that a person who had never driven cars - let's say an Amish farmer -- might look at traffic on a busy roadway and think: how do they keep from hitting each other?!? How can it possibly be safe? Similarly, people with no experience in airplanes might look at areas like the Hudson River "VFR corridor" and think: how do they keep from hitting each other?!? How can it possibly be safe?
If you would like to hear how this perspective sounds when applied in a news broadcast, there was a specimen on NPR's (of course generally admirable) All Things Considered this evening, here. Contrary to general assumption (and the specific assumption of this segment), air traffic controllers are not what keep airplanes from running into each other. William Langewiesche, a long-time pilot and son of a revered aviation writer, explained this point in the Atlantic in a story about controllers several years ago. In brief: "controlled" flight is crucial when airplanes are in clouds or when for other reasons the pilots can't see where they're going; and when flights are being sluiced and sequenced into busy airports. It's also mandatory for all flights at the altitudes where jets fly. But otherwise, the pilots are the ones keeping their planes from hitting each other, as car drivers and boat skippers do. This crash was a tragedy that should be studied, but not from the perspective of a person on a buggy who views a collision as a sign that roads are inherently unsafe. (Minor factual-error complaint after the jump.*)
3. Health department: In response to this item yesterday, I have received abundant correspondence to the effect of: especially after you've come back from China, how can you possibly be against free debate? It would be so wrong to ram a bill right down the throat of an unprepared Congress and public.
Yes, yes, we're all in favor of free debate. But organized efforts to shout down public officials at "town meetings" are not my idea of what Thomas Paine, John Peter Zenger, Socrates, and the rest were trying to promote. Nor is propagation of demonstrably false information, including the "death panel" scare that has most effectively been debunked by a conservative Republican Senator from Georgia.
Below and after the jump, a note from a reader who has "genuine" concerns about the Obama plan but is worried that irrational "birther"-style opposition will keep the serious concerns from being aired. I don't agree with all of his concerns, as noted below; but I think his analysis of the politics is right:
I completely agree with the observations you and [Steven] Pearlstein make about the Republican positioning on the health care debate. I also agree with
Steven's statement that "Health reform is a test of whether this
country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can
trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require
everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off."
However, that does not translate into automatic agreement on the plan
as proposed--a presumption that the advocates of the current health
care bill would have us accept as true.
Why this crash happened, in a "who was thinking what" sense, may not be known for a long time if ever. But the mechanical description of the crash sequence now seems clearer. The NYT has another of its useful aviation disaster graphics attached to this story. The graphic itself is a pop-up that is tricky to link to directly, so with full acknowledgment that this comes from the NYT site and with encouragement to you go to there directly, here's what it shows:
The airplane left Teterboro and headed for the Hudson; it leveled off at 1100 feet, which is the maximum altitude along much of the "VFR Flyway" for "uncontrolled" flight (explained here) along the Hudson; and for whatever reason it made a left turn and hit the helicopter from behind and below. This is a terrible tragedy for all involved, and sympathies to those families. Two points about the reaction:
- I am impressed by the realism and the relatively calm tone of this NYT story about how planes usually operate in the Hudson corridor. Here's why I'm somewhat surprised:
To someone with no experience controlling cars or trucks, it would seem incredible that drivers could whiz past each other in opposite directions on a two-lane road and not have head-on collisions all the time. They're so close to each other! How can it possibly be safe? Isn't anyone in control? And in fact, tens of thousands of people do die in road crashes each year. But since most people know about cars, they understand how drivers can watch out for other vehicles, how two-way traffic can usually be safe, and what kind of mistake, misjudgment, recklessness, or sheer bad luck can lead to a head-on crash.
But when it comes to aviation, relatively few people have first-hand experience steering planes or watching out for other aerial traffic. And because air disasters, when they happen, are so gruesome, it's natural for most people to think: they're so close to each other! How can it possibly be safe? Isn't anyone in control? In fact, avoiding collisions in the air is, in terms of sheer reflexes required, less demanding than avoiding them on the road. (Landing an airplane is more demanding than most aspects of driving; simply flying an airplane is not.) If you lose attention for five seconds in a car, you can be in serious trouble. In airplanes there's usually a lot more time to see what's coming toward you and decide how to avoid a problem. It's more like operating a boat in a harbor than like driving a car on a road. This may be why Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- who has trained extensively as a helicopter and airplane pilot (his certificate info here) -- struck the calmest note in the NYT story. He said, essentially: this is a terrible tragedy, and while we have to look for causes, it doesn't mean we have to go crazy or shut everything down. More or less the way car drivers respond after a road tragedy.
- I am less impressed by this AP story that tries to find a regulatory-negligence aspect to the disaster. The purported revelation is a recent Department of Transportation study showing that "on demand" air carriers, like the helicopter-tour company, are supervised less carefully than mainstream airlines are. Frankly, I would hope that airlines are always the most heavily-scrutinized part of the system, given how many more passengers' lives are at stake.
Let's agree that regulatory and safety-procedure issues may have played a large part in the terrible Colgan crash in Buffalo this last winter. And that there could be systematic problems in the on-demand flight business. Still: I'm willing to bet a lot of money that nothing whatsoever about this Hudson crash was related in any way to regulation of the helicopter company. After a disaster, it's natural to look for any factor that might in any way be related. But this is a huge logical stretch and a kind of scare-mongering.
On the other hand, the same AP writer did a very good story earlier this week about the latest development in the Air France crash over the Atlantic in June: the possibility that there is a systematic problem with the airspeed-sensing system in Airbus airplanes, which could have contributed to this and other incidents with Airbuses. More on that as it develops; no more on the Hudson crash unless there is new info. Again condolences.
August 8, 2009
The aerial collision over the Hudson
As with any airplane accident or disaster, it can take a while to know what really happened. That is certainly the case with the apparent collision a few hours ago between a small airplane and a helicopter off lower Manhattan. What follows is just some orienting info to put in context today's unfolding news -- and, below, a request to any current-pilot reader with access to a scanner.
It appears that a small Piper airplane (Arrow or Cherokee, initial reports differ -- doesn't matter for our purposes) hit a sightseeing helicopter over the Hudson River, sending both craft and their occupants into the river. The airplane had reportedly taken off from Teterboro airport in New Jersey, not far away. Here is what the relevant section of the New York "Terminal Area Chart" would look like for the airplane pilot planning a VFR -- "Visual Flight Rules" -- trip on this route:
Teterboro airport is the blue elongated-X shaped mark in the upper left corner. The reported crash site would be near the center bottom. The helicopter chart for the same area would look like this (both of these are way more legible in real life):
Why would an airplane and a helicopter be in the same area, and neither of them actively directed by air traffic controllers? Because there is a "VFR Flyway" over the Hudson that lets aircraft travel through on their own guidance, and providing their own look-out for other traffic, if they stay below a certain altitude. (Above that altitude is controlled "Class B" airspace for Kennedy, Newark, and LaGuardia airports.) The exact altitudes differ, but typically in this area the planes would stay at around 1000 feet to make it through. That's relatively low for an airplane -- it's often the elevation above ground level at which you fly the "pattern" in preparation for landing at an airport -- but more normal for a helicopter.
Because the New York VFR flyways, and their counterparts in other big cities, are very busy, there are all sorts of specific instructions for flying there. Usually there's one radio frequency that planes flying this route are all supposed to monitor, and on which they announce their positions. The last time I flew along the Hudson, it was 123.05, but it might have changed. Usually you're supposed to turn all the plane's exterior lights on, to make it as noticeable as possible -- and to keep to a limited speed, and observe other procedures designed to keep traffic moving in one direction away from opposing traffic. All these procedures, safety tips, and operational details are spelled out on the back of the New York "Terminal Area Chart," but since I don't have one any more, I can't show them. Any pilot-reader who can do a scan of the "VFR Flyway" procedures for the Hudson River flyway, please send it in.
For reasons still unknown, one craft or the other might not have been following those rules -- or one of them might have ended up in the "blind spot" from the other pilot's cockpit (it happens with aircraft as it does with cars). Pilots of sightseeing helicopters are presumably very familiar with this area and the associated procedures, so a starting assumption is that the airplane was doing something unusual -- for example, flying unusually low. But that's pure hypothesis.
Nearly three years ago, the pitcher Cory Lidle also crashed a small plane over Manhattan, but that was in different circumstances. (Here and here with other links.) That was a single-plane accident, not a collision -- and it happened over the East River flyway, which has a very different function than the flyway over the Hudson on the west. The East River flyway comes to an air-space dead-end when it run into LaGuardia's controlled airspace. The function of that flyway has largely been to give helicopters and seaplanes a way to get out of the Manhattan area. The Hudson river route, by contrast, is an actual throughway for planes traveling north/south past New York, in addition to being a favored sightseeing route. Here is an account from someone who flew there recently. I've flown the Hudson route many times -- always feeling as if I had to be very alert, but never feeling that another plane was dangerously near -- but never even thought of trying the East River.
Condolences to all affected. More information as it is available.
July 31, 2009
Discouraging news out of Oshkosh
For previous cheerier news, see here, here, and here.
The most absorbing drama in the small-plane world these past few months has been the separation between Alan Klapmeier, who with his brother Dale founded the now highly-successful Cirrus aircraft company; and the company itself. (For background on the Klapmeier / Cirrus saga, see Free Flight and this article. To see a recent sample of Alan Klapmeier in action, go here.)
The simplest way to think of it is this: Cirrus has essentially been the Apple of the small plane business. A "think different" approach compared with the rest of the industry -- for instance, the famous whole-airplane parachute that lets the craft and passengers drift to the ground in case of trouble. Very attractive design. Attention to nice little details. Using technology to make things simpler rather than more complex. And, with its SR22 models, an iPod / iPhone level of worldwide market success.
In this comparison, Cessna would be the PC equivalent -- staid, steady, established -- and Alan Klapmeier would be the Steve Jobs counterpart. Dramatic, attention-drawing, sometimes impossible, visionary, beyond doubt the personality of the company. Naturally better at explaining the disruptive potential of new technology than working through a spreadsheet to cut costs in tough times. I should say that I think of him as a good friend. (Below: Alan Klapmeier and the jet, earlier this week at Oshkosh, photo from Lane Wallace's post from the air show.)
So in the current downturn, as the company dramatically cut back to survive, Alan Klapmeier left as CEO of Cirrus. But he has been talking recently about raising money to continue development of the Cirrus Vision personal jet that had been his, well, vision since the time I first met him in Duluth ten years ago, and certainly long before that. From the Cirrus company's point of view, where his brother Dale and many long-time comrades are still major figures, selling the jet project to Alan Klapmeier would have both pluses and minuses. Plus: it would free the company of the heavy development costs but still keep the jet as an allied, fraternal project rather than letting it go to a real competitor. Minus: Cirrus would turn into a piston-airplane-only company, and although its piston/propeller planes are the market leaders, that would limit its potential. From the outside world's perspective, the main plus of any deal would be re-engaging Alan Klapmeier's energies in the business -- again, something like bringing Steve Jobs back into the main arena after his time at NeXT.
Just now the invaluable AVweb site reported that the deal had fallen through. I am biased in favor of all parties to this interaction and hope that something can work out. But for now, the news is that it hasn't.
July 29, 2009
Industrial glamor for the future
I mentioned earlier the beautiful old airplanes from the glamor days of air travel on display at the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual "Airventure" show in Oshkosh. That was yesterday; what about tomorrow?
Without getting into all the details -- I was only there for a day, I'm already fantasizing about the the full ten-day session one of these years -- here are a few:
The Terrafugia flying car -- or, more precisely, drivable airplane. Back in March, the Terrafugia took its first test flight:
Here's how it looks on the ground:
And, in a company video, in land-bound mode:
Another flying car, the Maverick, from a missionary/explorer named Steve Saint who is teaching indigenous Amazonian people to fly it to bring in supplies or get medical help. More on Saint and his jungle flying projects here and here.
Honda's personal jet:
Cirrus Vision personal jet (Cirrus officials doing the polishing)
The Tri-Motor actually flew today, at the annual overwhelming EAA "Airventure" fly-in and jamboree in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It flew before huge thunderstorms blasted through central Wisconsin and cancelled (a rarity) the afternoon airshow.
Tomorrow, some illustrations of modern-age and futuristic industrial glamor, of which happily there is a lot. All of this the result of an invitation from a friend with a Cirrus SR-22 (fancier version of the plane I used to own) to come out and see the show for a day. Also tomorrow, back to reality.
OK, here's one modern glamorous illustration: Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnight Two, which will launch craft into space, flew in before the storm. Contrary to appearances, that's all one plane.
July 14, 2009
Now if I were really ambitious in my flying plans
I mentioned recently a small-plane caravan flight along the route (more or less) of Lewis & Clark's trip to the Pacific. The same company, AirJourney.com, is sponsoring a more ambitious trip later this year.
Now, I'm not actually going to do this. Reason 1: I don't have an airplane any more. Reason 2: the landing in Narsarsuaq, Greenland for refueling is one I've heard about many times without ever wanting to attempt myself. (Problem: it's a landing you have to make, given the huge expanses of ocean on either side; the runway has ocean on one side and mountains on the others; the weather is often snowy, foggy, gusty; etc.) Reason 3: you have to wear a survival suit on the long over-water stretches, which makes you uncomfortable in the airplane and probably wouldn't save you in the frozen water anyway. Reason 4: expensive. On the other hand... flying at low altitudes over Europe! Approaching Greenland, Iceland, Scotland from the sky! Landing in Paris! Dreaming about it -- especially on Bastille Day: priceless, as they say.
Narsarsuaq on a nice day (from "Most Dangerous Landing Strips in the World" site).
Pilot suiting up for the run to Narsarsuaq in his Cessna 172, from this site:
In response to some previous queries: the planes making these journeys are typically very small craft flown by enthusiasts, not corporate big-shots in their jets (who could go nonstop anyway), and the fuel use/emissions factor is not that different from people taking long vacation drives. Overall climate-strategy discussions for another day. In response to another line of inquiry: I have no relationship of any sort with the AirJourney company -- don't know 'em, have never done business with them. Just tantalized by these plans.
July 10, 2009
If you would like to get REALLY deep into details about AF447
Yesterday I mentioned one informed hypothesis about the accident-chain that brought Air France 447 down into the Atlantic Ocean: pitot-tube trouble, leading to autopilot trouble, leading to manual control of the airplane, leading (perhaps) to overstressing of the plane's tail structure during severe turbulence. Details at the previous post. AF 447 rudder, below.
After the jump, two long and very detailed contrary arguments by people well informed in this field. I'm not going to go through and translate all the abbreviations in these analyses, because if you've gotten that far you already know (or can look it up yourself). Here we go:
Contrary analysis #1:
"a) Yes, losing airspeed data does disable rudder limit
protection, but not in the way you describe -- the Airbus disables
*active* rudder limit protection. Normally, rudder movements are
limited in various steps (6, I think) depending on airspeed. Once the
PRIMs disable themselves and rudder limit protection is inactivated
(which we know happened in AF447 from the ACARS messages), the rudder
is still limited at the exact same degree of deflection the system
ordered at the time of last known good airspeed data. In fact, that
deactivation is designed to *protect* the rudder limiter from
improperly responding to lower airspeeds and increasing allowed
deflection, so it does the exact opposite of what you imply in the last
update. Past a certain amount of time with bad data (I don't know it
off hand), the aircraft will not come out of alternate law and return
to normal law even if data seemingly returns to normal, and the rudder
protection limit will not reactivate based on airspeed. The rudder
limiter will only increase the amount of allowed deflection upon
deployment of slats, flaps, or gear (and it then releases to full
deflection, 31.9º if memory serves).
This recent post and preceding items mention the still-ambiguous mix of data concerning the crash of Air France 447 into the Atlantic six weeks ago. The plane's presence in a tropical thunderstorm was almost certainly the trigger for the problems. And what happened then?
From a reader involved in aviation, a hypothesis that it was a thunderstorm -> pitot tube -> autopilot -> rudder chain of events. Almost all airline disasters involve an "accident chain," a sequence of cascading failures that, if interrupted at any point, would not have led to a crash. In this view:
The plane got into a thunderstorm, where the updrafts and downdrafts are extremely powerful and where unusual conditions apply -- including the possibility of the plane being covered with ice;
Storm-related ice may have blocked the pitot tubes -- small probe devices that measure the force of the oncoming air. When compared with other data, pitot data lets the pilot derive the plane's airspeed. If the small openings at the front of the pitot tubes are blocked by ice or anything else, the pilots don't know the plane's speed, which is the most important single piece of info for keeping an airplane under control;
When the sophisticated, computerized, highly-redundant autopilot system detected bad readings from the pitot tubes -- or readings from some of the tubes that differed from the others -- it disconnected the autopilot and returned control to the captain. This is a safety measure to prevent an automated system from following bad data all the way to the ground;
When the human pilot took over, the absence of the autopilot gave him full control over the airplane's rudder. The autopilot and computerized guidance system included a "yaw damper," which limited sudden or severe movements of the rudder (which place strain on an airplane's tail);
While in the storm under manual control, the violent forces on the plane and perhaps movements of the rudder may have broken off the tail and sent the airplane down.
Pitot tube, on the underside of a plane's wing, pointed forward:
As the reader sums up the sequence:
My
personal opinion about what happened is as follows - one or both pitot tubes
iced over, which means that the air data computers are getting airspeed
indications more than 5 knots apart. In that case, the autopilots
disconnect, and the aircraft reverts to basic flight mode - which may be
thought of as a limp mode - and among other things the yaw damper is
turned off. Now the pilot has full rate authority on the rudder
and the stab. The airbus has a known weak tail [he cites this Wikipedia entry about the crash of American Airlines flight 587] --
they
got into some turbulence and it broke off. the airplane tumbled and came
apart... which explains no mayday call and the diagnostic message about loss of
cabin pressure.
I
note with interest that the rudder on both 447 and AA 587 were both found
intact.
After the jump, a note from an Airbus pilot who, on a very recent flight in Asia, reported problems that would exactly match this hypothesis for the Air France crash.
Yesterday I mentioned that (unsurprisingly) there was not yet any definitive word on the cause of the Air France flight 447 crash over the Atlantic off Brazil. It turns out that there has been this recent interim report from the French BEA, Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, about the basic facts of the disaster. Link is to a 72-page PDF in English. Nothing definitive, but this passage from the "Initial Findings" section reinforces previous hypotheses. For aviation and disaster buffs, lots of interesting detail. (Thanks to Neil Gordon.)
July 7, 2009
Preventing the next AF 447-style crash
Unless I've missed it in my time away from the internets, no one yet knows exactly what happened to Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean six weeks ago. But whatever went wrong, the problems were almost certainly related to the plane's having flown into the middle of a powerful thunderstorm. (As discussed here, here, here, and here, and illustrated by this match of the plane's route to reconstructed weather data.)
Why did the pilots find themselves (and their passengers) there? Mainly because NEXRAD-style displays like the one above simply don't exist in real time for weather over the oceans. They depend on readings from ground-based radar stations, which obviously are scarce in the open seas. As one correspondent pointed out in a previous post, "You know what we (meteorologists) call the oceanic regions? The big blue data void."
Comes now NASA with a research project designed to "provide aircraft with updates about severe storms and turbulence as they fly across remote ocean regions." Further details here. Sounds good to me. For an idea of what the planes are hoping to avoid, via NASA here is an astronaut's view of a thunderstorm near Brazil.
Airline safety usually advances, as in this case, in a learning-from-the-latest-disaster fashion. Sounds like a good project to me.
July 3, 2009
Now this makes me wish I were already back in the flying business
A company called AirJourney, "The Flying Adventure Journey Specialist," is sponsoring a joint small-plane fly-in next month along the route of the Lewis & Clark expedition.
Perhaps it is a stretch to claim, as AirJourney does in promos like what's shown below, that this is a deeply historical commemoration. But I flew much of this route in a small plane nine years ago (start in Minnesota, then down to Nebraska, then west) and to this day recall many vivid scenes, which I also described in my book Free Flight. The incredible breadth of the Missouri River, which in many stretches looked as it might have in the days of L&C. The carvings of Mt. Rushmore outside Rapid City, SD, which from above look surprisingly tiny and netsuke-like. The splaying delta and estuary of the Columbia River at the other end of the journey, at Astoria, Oregon, where it meets the Pacific. And a lot in between.
It's not a "rational" way to spend your time or money, but I've never forgotten the experience or regretted spending time and money in a similar venture. If you're not a pilot yet -- there's just barely time!
June 18, 2009
Sigh, out of range again
I am no longer based in China, but am not yet actually based anyplace else. So this might be the last dispatch for the next week, and it's on the fly from yet another airport wi-fi site. Sketchy for-the-record remarks:
1) After 60+ hours in America (and on the way out again): Life is so abundant! Even in a downturn -- and, yes, in Washington, not Flint. Everything looks so comfortable and lush! The air is so clean! (Today's reading in Beijing: "Hazardous.") And the cell phone coverage is so crappy! I can barely recall a moment in China when I was out of signal range. Today alone in Washington, half a dozen dropped calls. Yes, yes, I know the reasons for this. But the difference is impressive.
1A) Bad part of my character as revealed by travel (part 2,847): When approached by spare-change panhandlers I have to bite my tongue to avoid giving the "do you know what people put up with in China?" speech. Yes, yes, I know why this is wrong.
2) Positive aviation development of the week: flight of a new all-electric plane, here.
3) Negative journalistic development of the week: the Washington Post's insane decision to fire its media-political blogger Dan Froomkin. (I know Froomkin only through his work, not personally.) We all have heard the reasons that the press is under pressure by forces not of its making. This is an example of a self-inflicted wound. Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with? Some people tell me that it's a mistake to say that the Post's editorial page (and the weight of its op-ed lineup) has "become" neo-con and establishment-minded under its current editor, Fred Hiatt; the argument is that this is the Post's long tradition, which its anti-Nixon crusade concealed. I don't know. But I would have liked to have heard the argument about why Froomkin was the necessary next person to cut. More later.
4) "There will always be a China" anecdote of the day. This comes from a Chinese friend I know and trust but, for this person's own sake, will not identify. My friend asked a CCTV producer (whose name I also know) about the mystery I mentioned last week: what on earth the weird ... thing on top of the otherwise-clean CCTV tower was. Reminder:
Here is the report from my friend, recounting a conversation with the producer:
Me [my friend]: Do you know what that huge round thing protruding on the top of the main CCTV building is? Producer: What? Me: It looks like either a misshaped radar or a helicopter landing pad... Producer: Why are you asking? Me: Just curious. Producer: Well, don't be curious. You know it's a very sensitive period here at CCTV, because of Fang Jing's "spy-gate" incident. Don't ask such sensitive questions. Me: Why is it sensitive? That huge thing is right there on the very top of your landmark. Everyone could see it, even from far away. You've never thought about what it is? Nobody asks about it? Producer: No... No one. Seriously, stop asking about it!
Words to live by. With that, I leave you to my Atlantic colleagues for a week.
Good. Pilot of a Cirrus SR-22 gets into trouble while flying over North Carolina but has an option. As the Mount Airy News reports, the pilot
"...was at 6,000 feet when he declared an emergency, pulled the
parachute his plane was equipped with, let go of the control panel and
floated to the ground about one and a half miles into the woods off
Still Water Lane. "[He] was able to walk away from the site
and place a call to 911 to inform them he was searching for emergency
personnel and thought he had spotted some of them looking for him."
There are other recent developments involving Cirrus. (Positive: increasing production rate and recalling workers as worldwide sales pick up. Negative: found partly liable by a Minnesota jury for millions in damages after a crash in which a non-instrument rated pilot took off before dawn in bad weather and was killed, along with his passenger. The NTSB traced the probable cause of the accident to the "pilot's improper decision" to attempt the flight at all. More on these another time.)
Not so good. Beautiful and elegant Beaver float plane crashes while attempting takeoff near Anchorage last week. (Via Eric Redman.) Not-so-bad aspects: No one apparently hurt, and remarkable minute-long YouTube video shot by unbelievably gutsy young cameraman.
Constructive: In response to an airline pilot's observation, here, that he typically has less up-to-date weather info available in the cockpit than pilots of modern small planes like the CIrrus do, former FAA and DOT official Andrew Steinberg writes to say:
"What strikes me on reading this discussion is that
the slow pace of implementation of the NextGen air traffic system -- here
and in Europe -- means that we don't prevent these preventable accidents
(if it turns out that weather caused the demise of this [Air France 447] flight).
As you may remember, providing integrated weather displays to pilots, as
well as controllers, is a key part of the Next Gen effort. It's absurd
that commercial pilots don't have these tools. An article describing
how the weather product fits into Next Gen is attached."
The article in question is here. As for the difference this might or might not have made to the Air France flight itself, which got in trouble over the open sea, another correspondent says:
"You know what we (meteorologists) call the oceanic regions? "The big blue data void. "It is hard to explain that to people who only look at CONUS." [Continental US, which has radar stations and other monitoring tools wherever you look.]
And another airline pilot writes in to say:
Your point on higher-tech and more real-time weather information being available for GA ["general aviation," small private plane] pilots versus airline pilots is well taken, but disregards an important advantage us 121 [airline] pilots have over aircraft with these XM weather uplinks....
I fly for a Northwest, now Delta, regional and we have access to the same ACARS delivered weather updates as the big boys. [ACARS is an automated data-collection service that shares info among planes in the air.] Granted they are delivered in text and require manual plotting, but once done they are very accurate and enormously effective. Base and/or composite reflectivity radar maps can be very deceiving to a pilot flying at FL370, since a lot of the weather depicted on those maps is very low. ACARS coordinates and altitude of cell tops is often much better information, especially when considering whether to pick your way through a line at night or take a long detour. In addition the dispatchers themselves [airline employees who monitor the flights from the ground], being another human in the loop with even more information, can be invaluable in saving your bacon. Between myself, my FO [first officer], and my dispatcher, I've got three eyes on the problem- which I'd take over any Nexrad/XM maps any day of the week.
Now I admit I'm spoiled flying as I do mostly over the continental US. Transoceanic would be somewhat trickier given, as you say, the dearth of other traffic over the same route serving as guinea pigs. That said, given what I know about the resources available to the Air France pilots, I am at a loss for why they found themselves on the midst of such a violent storm.
Also constructive: Carl Malamud, the inveterate crusader for making "public" information truly available to the public, has put online a variety of Federal videos related to aviation, here. This is part of his larger FedFlix effort to digitize films and videos produced by the government, and his even larger PublicResource.org campaign for opening up public data.
June 11, 2009
Winding up
I'm aware of a ton of loose threads to be gathered up (about Air France updates, Obama's speaking style, urban design in China, design in software, boiled frogs, you name it). Soon.
But three years in China have now come down to three days; the movers arrive in nine hours; and I've happily spent my last reporting day -- at least of this stint in China -- in an uplifting fashion, at a tiny airport outside Beijing on a spectacular blue-sky day. Its managers and organizers have the dream of bringing convenient flight to remote communities across China.
I like the many dreamers and visionaries I have met in China, so I liked these people. And I liked that, in addition to their legacy aircraft (first pic), they were building their fleet with the same Cirrus airplanes I had known in the United States.
Legacy fleet:
Cirrus SR-22 (with Cirrus's man in China, Scott Jiang):
Back to packing. Loose ends soon.
June 9, 2009
An Airbus captain on getting into bad weather
Regarding one of the puzzles of the Air France 447 crash -- how a professional air crew ended up in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm -- an airline pilot writes:
As a point of reference I'm an A-320 Captain for NWA (soon to be Delta but happy to be getting a paycheck) with over 12,000 hours. While I agree that it's entirely possible and perhaps even likely that the Air France 447 crew did indeed proceed into an area that they shouldn't have I can say that if his radar isn't up to snuff or if they misinterpreted the presentation there are no other resources for them in that situation. At least over the continental US we have other aircraft reports and ground controllers who can make suggestions.
Most civilians (non aviators would I guess be a better term) are quite surprised to find that they have better access to up to date weather resources while sitting at home on the computer than I do. Once I'm airborne it's just the radar and who I can talk to on the radio (ATC, other aircraft, my dispatcher). While I'm told that modern business jets have satellite links to provide views and weather from various vantage points we who carry the most people do not. At main stations I can pull up numerous local and regional radar presentations which are very helpful. However when operating out of small stations this isn't always possible and once I get into my aircraft I'm blind except for the radar in the nose of the jet. It works well but it isn't foolproof, if I could see the same things airborne that I can while at a computer terminal we, my aircraft and passengers, would all benefit.
If any good can come of this accident I hope it will lead to a discussion and implementation of better weather resources for the airline industry. I'm proud of what we do and our overall safety record but this is one area where we could make great advances.
This is an important area where, strangely, small airplanes are actually better equipped for safety than most airliners. (Airliners are safer in just about every other way, from crew training to redundant backup systems, and despite the recent disasters are amazingly safe overall.) Starting in the early 2000s, handheld or tablet-sized displays capable of showing near-real-time Nexrad weather came onto the aviation market. They got the data via satellite services like XM/Sirius and could display info about storms, winds, and airport conditions that was only a few minutes old. Here's how a popular recent tablet model, the Garmin 696, looks. Its display screen is 7" diagonally, large enough to be very useful.
It can match the airplane's path to nearly-current radar information
(as with the storms shown in central Florida, above). Everyone
emphasizes that such displays are for "strategic" rather than "tactical" guidance
-- giving you a general idea of places to avoid, rather than tempting you to try to slalom your way around the worst parts of a storm.
Other
displays are mounted right on the panel and show how the plane's path
matches the surrounding terrain and any other planes in the vicinity,
along with the weather. This is a Cirrus cockpit, a fancier and more modern version of the kind of small plane I used to fly, with the weather (plus route, traffic, terrain, etc) displayed on the right-hand screen.
I don't know how much good these displays would do over the open ocean -- where, after all, there are no ground-based radar stations to support Nexrad-style displays. But more info, and more recent info, is always better -- and the captain is right about this literal blind spot for most airliners, which should be corrected.
June 8, 2009
Two aviation updates
First, about the battered but durable small-airplane, point-to-point travel movement, chronicled frequently over the past ten years (here, for starters), a retrospective from Bruce Holmes, long time "extrepreneurial bureaucrat" from NASA. Holmes was one of the three heroes of my 2001 book Free Flight and later a force behind the promising-but-doomed company DayJet. (Below, Holmes a few years ago, in a NASA photo.)
Holmes recently returned to his NASA-Langley stomping grounds to give a basically positive "lessons learned" discussion about the DayJet experience. Brief article about his presentation here; his summary below.
[DayJet] was a case of "the operation was successful, but the patient died,"
but it was only a start, Holmes said. It was a glimpse into an aviation
future in which, he added:
--"We need to get to carbon neutral (aviation operation),
--"We need to halve the operating cost and
--"We need scalable airspace capacity."
Godspeed on all fronts.
Second, about the unresolved question of why the Air France 447 crew found itself in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm, this from Bill McHugh, a private pilot in Louisiana:
You may or may not remember some years ago that a
737 flown by TACA Airlines made an emergency dead-stick landing on a narrow
levee near the NASA Michoud facility in eastern New Orleans (Google "taca
airlines levee landing"). It had lost both engines due to hail ingestion while
flying through a severe storm on approach to MSY [the main New Orleans airport]. The landing was successful,
with no loss of life or injuries. The captain was hailed as a hero by the
passengers and in the press (frankly, I was more impressed by the Boeing test
pilots who got the thing back off the ground a few days later).
A couple of years after the incident I was
attending one of those FAA safety courses at NEW [New Orleans Lakefront airport]. This course was about weather,
and one of the speakers was a guy who had worked the NEW and MSY towers for
many years. He told us that he had been working the tower the day of the TACA
incident, and that he had personally warned the TACA captain no less than three
separate times that the storm ahead of him was severe (can't remember what level
it was, but it was high) and that it probably contained embedded hail, but
that the captain had ignored the warnings and had flown directly into the
storm.
Point of the story: Even seasoned, professional
pilots do stupid things on occasion.
June 7, 2009
For more information about Air France 447
I have been preoccupied, or out of range, in the week since this disaster occurred and so hadn't read up on it. But here, for anyone who doesn't know about it, is a source that establishes beyond question one crucial point about the accident, and points to informed discussions of the many other aspects that are for now unknowable.
The source is this long and extraordinarily detailed dispatch by Tim Vasquez, of Weather Graphics in Oklahoma. Vasquez is a meteorologist, and his post is full of "SKEW-T" charts and other arcana that make me nostalgic for the rituals of "weather planning" from my flying days. But even for those baffled by the details, his sequence of charts -- based on very ambitious matching of flight-track data with a variety of innovative weather re-creations -- make this fact clear: AF 447 was passing directly through a large and powerful tropical thunderstorm when it stopped transmitting data (and presumably crashed).
This is Vasquez's Figure 12, showing the plane's likely path through Vasquez's recreated radar model of the storm. He requests on his site that some other charts, including the very clarifying Figure 13, not be copied elsewhere, because they "represent too much
original work." Fair enough. Check for yourself.
An emphasis on the weather as the proximate factor in the crash is important in deflecting attention from some early speculation about meteors, inherent wiring problems in the Airbus, and so on. But it leads to two other major areas of uncertainty, which might be resolved if the "black box" is recovered or might never be known for sure.
One is why the plane ended up inside the thunderstorm. Even big, powerful airliners do everything they can to avoid flying through thunderclouds. Radar problems? (Onboard radar gives a useful but imperfect view of oncoming weather.) Some other reason? No one knows now.
The other is how, exactly, the storm may have brought the plane down -- since most airliners survive such encounters, hard as they try to avoid them. Structural breakup, caused by extreme turbulence? (Imagine ocean liners or freighters having their hulls cracked by hitting huge waves in just the wrong way.) Devastating hail destroying the multiple "pitot tubes" -- the devices airplanes use to measure their airspeed, without which neither the autopilot nor the real pilots can function normally, in turn leading to catastrophic failure of guidance systems? Lightning doing damage in some unusual way, since airplanes are usually designed to withstand it? Some other factor? All this is now unknown. But the Vasquez site will point you toward as much extra discussion as you want. (For even more, the AF447 discussion thread here, on the generally entertaining Professional Pilots' Rumor Network, or PPRuNe.)
Thanks to Parker Donham for the Vasquez lead.
May 22, 2009
Now I truly feel like Mr. Beijing
I know people who've lived here for decades, for their entire lives, and have not had the full immersion in Beijing-ology that I have recently been exposed to: an air journey from Nanyuan Airport!
"Thirteen kilometers south of Tian'anmen, deep in Fentgai district, likes the purgatory of Beijing air travel: Nanyuan Airport. Only travelers with frightening karmic debt end up here -- and all clients of China United Airlines, formerly a military carrier, which bases its operations at Nanyuan."
Probably I have the karmic debt, and for sure I was traveling on CUA -- but I found the experience weirdly charming. It was like a little trip back into the Beijing I first saw in the 1980s: an airport in the middle of a rural neighborhood, trees all around the runways, little hutongs and five-story Mao-era apartments just outside the airport fence. Few intrusions of modernity, like: taxicabs with meters (you bargain) or the for-sissies effect of translated signage. This is definitely not the new Beijing Capital Airport. (Below, my fellow travelers for Linyi, headed toward our CUA airplane on the tarmac at Nanyuan. Linyi, in Shandong province, is another of those Chinese cities few foreigners have heard of but is larger than nearly any city in the US.)
I'll take my nostalgia wherever I can find it. This was an unexpected dose.
May 17, 2009
Finale on Colgan / Buffalo crash
I recognize that it is both heartbreaking and potentially cruel to keep going into details of what exactly led to the commuter-plane crash in February that killed all 49 people aboard the airplane and one person on the ground. (Previously here.)
But this story in The Buffalo News, based on the previous week's Federal investigative hearings, clears up one question and raises others about the flight crew's performance.
The newly answered question is why the plane's airspeed had decreased so much that an automatic "stick-shaker" warning was triggered, indicating that an aerodynamic stall was imminent. Because the earliest reports mentioned that the accident took place in cold and cloudy conditions, I had assumed that ice on the wings and airframe was slowing the plane down.
But according to NTSB evidence, the effect of icing was minimal. Instead, the flight crew had deliberately or inadvertently slowed the plane themselves, by pulling the throttle back to nearly the "flight idle" position -- and leaving it there. Reduced power is normal when descending or deliberately slowing for an approach, but apparently the power was left too low for too long as the plane's speed decayed to a dangerously low level.
The extraordinary NTSB animation of the flight's last 2 minutes and 39 seconds dramatizes how it happened. At time 1:40, the plane begins slowing from its cruise speed of about 185 knots. By 2:04 -- with the autopilot holding a constant altitude and the power setting still low -- it had slowed all the way down to 140 knots. That is where the power should have come back in, because the plane had reached its proper approach speed and shouldn't safely go much slower. But the crew left the power at idle, and within four seconds the plane was slowing below 130 knots - at which point the "stick shaker" gave its warning and, tragically, the pilot reacted in exactly the wrong way. The animation shows how quickly this all could happen, and what it looks like when a plane goes into aerodynamic "stall."
The effect of the pilot's wrong reaction to the stall warning has been frequently discussed in the wake of these hearings. The inattention to approach speed is in a way more puzzling, since it was not an instantaneous, instinctive thing.
About the public hearings on the terrible crash in Buffalo three months ago, in which 50 people died:
- Authoritative wrapup of the situation here by Andy Pasztor of the Wall Street Journal, who has had well-informed stories on this topic from the beginning.
- This more-complete information supports the hypothesis Pasztor raised early on, as discussed previously here, that the cause of the crash was a basic and fatal failure of airmanship. That is, at a moment when saving the airplane would have required pushing the plane's nose down -- to regain airspeed and avert an aerodynamic stall -- the pilot apparently fought the autopilot, which was trying to push the nose down, and succeeded in pulling the nose up. This further reduced airspeed and, apparently, put the plane into a full stall, at which point it stopped flying and fell to the ground. If you're not 100% confident on the difference between aerodynamic "stalls" and normal stalls, see the note after the jump.*
- The complete transcript of over-the-airwaves transmissions and in-cockpit chatter, available in PDF from the WSJ site here, has the intrinsic horrific fascination of any document of this sort. You know you are observing the routine preoccupations and chit-chat of people who don't realize, as you do, that they are in their final moments of life. I don't share the total astonishment of some commentary about how much of the en route talk is "unprofessional" -- about career plans and family problems and the rest. Given how things turned out, any banter whatsoever now looks very bad. But none of it would have mattered save for the one horrible error in judgment and reaction. Had the pilot pushed forward on the stick rather than pulled back, in all likelihood it would have been another normal flight -- albeit in rough winter conditions -- and he and everyone else would now be going about their regular lives.
- Of course the big question is how much the loosey-goosey atmosphere in the cockpit had to do with that awful error. Miles O'Brien, a pilot and ex-correspondent for CNN, has his thoughts on the subject here.
- This is NOT crash related, but for a way to see what it is like to descend into a cloud bank on an IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) landing, check out this YouTube video taken from inside the cockpit of a Cirrus SR-22 in the last three minutes of its approach to runway 16R at Van Nuys airport. (The Cirrus is a four-seat single-engine plane of the type that, as it happens, Miles O'Brien flies and that I used to own and fly before coming to China.) The shot does not concentrate on the instrument panel during the descent, which is what the pilot is obsessively scanning when he can't see anything outside the window. Also,the propeller appears to "stop" or move jerkily at times, just because of a strobe effect with the camera. But the beginning and end of the clip conveys something most passengers never see: how it looks to enter the clouds, and then finally to see the runway -- in this case, underneath quite a low cloud ceiling. Really, watch this and you'll have an idea of the mantra drummed into your head a million times in instrument-flight training: that you've got to watch the instruments and trust the instruments, because there is no other guide to where you're headed.
(UPDATE: YouTube appears to be getting Firewalled again in China, as happens from time to time. I posted this link while using a VPN, as I do most of the time to get around the firewall. But after hearing complaints from others, I turned the VPN off and couldn't reach YouTube from Beijing. Oh well.)
- Speaking of runway 16R at Van Nuys Airport, here is the site for a movie called One Six Right, about that very runway and the activity that surrounds it. It's for sale on DVD rather than free download, but it is visually very rich, eye-opening, and fascinating to watch. It also talks about all the routine safety measures that are normally built into aviation, and which in this Buffalo case didn't prevent a huge tragedy.
Here's the news that will make it all worthwhile! According to Mary Grady of AVweb, the easiest (legal) way for Americans to get to Cuba is, under new rules, to fly their own little planes there. Story here.
This has been theoretically possible for a long time, and in 2005, just before coming to China, I spent weeks trying to satisfy the Cuban and U.S. paperwork and preclearance requirements for flying a Cirrus SR-20 to Havana on a Christmas trip. I finally ran out of patience and time. But now...
Grady's podcast interview with the CEO of the company organizing the trips is here; that company's site is here. And for lessons there are little airports all over the place in the US. I'd be signing up for the trip if I were on that side of the world. Just trying to be constructive here.
April 26, 2009
Tech and cultural followups on that Air China flight
Two days ago I mentioned the strange results when an Air China flight headed for Beijing was instead diverted to Tianjin. To anyone who receives these posts by email, the results must have seemed even stranger than they were. Because of a glitch in our web set-up, only the first third of the post went out, omitting everything in the "after the jump" section. Sorry! The full version is available here. (Hint: if you saw the picture of a crash involving a "bread box" taxi, you saw the whole thing.)
Several people who were blessed in receiving the full report challenged its main hypothesis -- which, in a nutshell, was that the Chinese traveling public had learned not to waste energy getting furious about things that were entirely out of their control. Two reactions below.
From reader David:
I enjoyed your post about Chinese having "the serenity to accept the
things [they] can't change," though your hypothesis may need some honing.
A few years ago I was on a plane that landed in Zhengzhou due to a cracked
windshield. We were stuck in Zhengzhou for over 12 hours - including a time in
the middle when we were bussed to a hotel - and the entire time the passengers
berated the Air China reps for not being able to provide information as to when
we would be leaving except that we would not have to wait overnight. At times the
Air China reps were essentially surrounded by a scrum of passengers all yelling
until finally at about 4am we were able to get back on the plane.
I've seen airport rage in the States but never with that kind of herd
mentality, though I do appreciate the fact that Chinese seem to be able to yell
and create a disturbance without actually being all that mad down inside. There
were moments of levity among the passengers in between the rage. Perhaps the
facts in my experience were different enough to give the passengers the sense
that they could control the outcome of the situation whether true or not. Also,
the youtube of the Hong Kong woman going apeshit when she missed her plane
comes to mind. [More about the Hong Kong episode here.]
Next, PT Black, of Shanghai, sends a long and interesting report with a political edge. It begins this way:
Your comments about the delayed flight from SZ to BJ strike a nerve,
though, because just last week I had a very different experience flying
from Chengdu to Shanghai, also on Air China.
It continues after the jump. If you don't see anything more, it means that our RSS system is still messed up. Hope not! ____
In case you haven't heard quite enough about the King Air landing....
... you have come to the right place. For completeness' sake, three more very informative links, the first two of them from immediately after the flight last week:
1) From the federal government's FocusFAA site, interviews with and pictures of the Ft. Myers controllers whose voices you hear on the tapes of the final minutes of the flight.
2) Also from Focus FAA, an interview with the passenger-pilot himself, Doug White.
3) From the unauthorized FAA Follies site, this very informative post by controller Paul Cox. Worth reading for several reasons -- among them the controller mood revealed in the comments; Cox's arguments about how the FAA needs to change under Obama; and his explanation of the mentality with which controllers should face this kind of life-or-death emergency. Cox uses an analogy to sports, saying that as a kid he was only a so-so baseball player:
One thing I didn't really understand was how the coach used to say that you had to be out there WANTING the ball to be hit towards you, because in the infield, I didn't....
One dirty little secret about controllers is that for the vast majority of us, when we hear someone say "emergency", we WANT to be the one plugged in and working that sector or position. We WANT to have someone call with a wing on fire or an engine out or lost or stuck on top of clouds, so we get something interesting and captivating to do while we're plugged in.
Yeah, we consider a "save" to be just part of the job, just another day's work, and it is... but every truly good controller I know WANTS to be in that chair when that call comes in. (And as a side note, to the weak sticks and trainees out there... if you don't want those emergency calls, well, that's a good sign that ATC is probably not the job for you. For the sake of the flying public, go do something else, okay?)
Until I became a controller, and had that almost-jealous feeling watching someone work an emergency, I didn't really get what the coach meant when he said you gotta WANT the tough situation placed in your hands. Now I know just what that feels like.
As far as I am concerned, there is such a thing as Enough about this case, and it's now been reached. (But thanks to John Dowd for these links.)
Back to Beijing #2 (better news, Air China dept)
Twenty-plus years ago, traveling around China by air was anything but a peace-of-mind experience. The planes were mainly leftover Soviet junkers; the amenities were sparse; the general atmosphere called to mind Indiana Jones.
I've done a lot of crisscrossing of China by airlines these past few years, on carriers as big and established as Air China and as exotic as Spring Airlines and Deer. (Note for the uninitiated: never, ever get Air China and China Airlines mixed up. The first is the flag carrier of the People's Republic of China. The second is from the Republic of China, aka Taiwan.) Flights going out of either Beijing or Shanghai are usually late, but that's hardly unique to China. Overall, it's less stressful than the standard airport/airline experience in the US.
Last night, my wife and I were taking an evening flight from Shenzhen to Beijing. Departure 6pm, scheduled arrival 9:15. As we got close to Beijing, the ride became very bumpy, and then a bright light illuminated the whole cabin, simultaneous with a big BOOM. A bolt of lightning had hit the wing! Attention-getting but not necessarily dangerous: planes are designed to handle this, I explained to my wife and surrounding folk, in my most patronizing "let the pilot tell you" mode.
Then my wife noticed on the "your plane in flight" GPS map that we seemed to be heading away from Beijing and toward Tianjin, near the coast. I was warming up for another patronizing "let's settle down" reply, when the attendant came on and said that because "weather in Beijing is bad" (literally "天气在北京不好") we were indeed headed for Tianjin.
From an aviation point of view, what happened after that was more or less normal. The plane landed in Tianjin, maybe 75 miles from Beijing, the standard diversion site in situations like these. I had dreaded the idea of everyone being offloaded there and bused back to Beijing, along a notoriously jam-packed and dangerous road. Instead, periodically the attendants and then the captain came on the radio to say that we were going to wait things out and eventually fly back.
King Air pilot-passenger landing: yet more tape, yet more heroism all around
Via the Naples News in Florida, this update on the first 14 minutes of transmissions between Douglas White, the low-time single-engine pilot who found himself in control of a twin-engine King Air whose pilot had just died, and the controllers who talked him safely to the ground.
The segment released last week covered the final minutes of the flight, when White brought the plane in for a safe landing. These preceding minutes are if anything more dramatic. They open with White's desperate "emergency" call and also include the coordinating actions between Miami and Ft. Myers controllers to try to get White the information he needed. (Last week's audio is here, in a full 21-minute version that includes dead-air time with no transmissions; the new portion is here.) As the Naples News story says about the team effort recorded in this new tape:
Miami air traffic controller, Lisa Grimm, a commercial-rated
pilot with multi-engine ratings, scrambled to coordinate the emergency
with the Fort Myers TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) and with
the other controllers at the Miami air traffic control center...
Fort Myers air traffic controllers Brian Norton and Dan Favio took
over for Grimm, when White's plain reentered Fort Myers TRACON airspace...
Favio then contacted friend and King Air pilot Kari Sorenson in
Connecticut, to help relay the necessary procedure information to
White, so he could land the plane.
That was the hardest part of the ordeal, according to FAA officials,
because the information transfer needed to occur by relaying the
information among four people
The full sequence of recordings make clear the calm, inventive, above-and-beyond, and yes heroic efforts of everyone involved in the process, notably including the controllers. It is too bad the tapes were released separately because they are part of one narrative and emotional whole. Some of the events and tone in the final-approach tape seem quite different in light of what came before.
For instance, the amazing sangfroid of White as he brought the plane to a landing is a credit both to him and to the reassurances and detailed instructions he had received in the newly-released tape. The surreally calm and casual tone of the final-approach controller also seems to follow naturally from the initial segment and be exactly right in the circumstances. Air traffic controllers are not, as a rule, themselves pilots, and talking an inexperienced pilot down to the ground is something they are not trained to or expected to do. That they accomplished it in this case is a credit to everyone involved -- White and all the controllers. Any pilot who got in trouble would thank heaven for this kind of help.
April 17, 2009
Controllers speak on the King Air landing
I know this is not the major news story of the day. But it is what I find now jamming my email inbox, on reconnecting from the frontier of China, so I will note it for the record.
I have always liked, admired, relied on, gotten along with, and been a supporter of air traffic controllers. In the recent passenger-pilot landing mentioned here and here, I first noted that "the calm of all involved is incredible" and then, in a second installment, that the controller involved "was faultlessly calm, supportive, and reassuring, and for that he deserves great praise." I also quoted emails from two pilots about what they noticed in the exchange, including info that they as pilots would have expected to get.
I have received a very large number of responses from controllers who were anything but faultlessly calm. The majority of them take the quoted remarks as an outright slam on the controller, which was not at all the intent. One recurrent theme was: Well, asshole, I'd like to see how you'd have done under pressure! As I've made clear each time, I could hardly imagine handling things as well as the man who landed the plane, Douglas White. As for the controller: I respect people who do this job, and his calm played a very important part in this happy outcome. During probably the worst experience I've had aloft, which involved a thunderstorm over upstate New York a decade ago, the controllers from the Fort Drum site were an enormous practical and psychological help. As I called their supervisor to say, with gratitude, after I landed.
Fortunately one extensive email did arrive from a senior controller who is in print the way I assume him to be in the control room: calm, systematic, etc. His name is Paul Cox, of the FAA Follies site. He is based in Seattle and stresses that while he is speaking as a controller he most definitely not speaking for the FAA. This is the approach I've always respected from controllers. (You other guys, read and learn!) His comments below. Let me say, again, everyone involved performed very well -- in the controller's case, through the combo of projecting an air of perfect cool and finding a King Air pilot to ask questions of. In addition, the pilot performed almost miraculously. Over now to Paul Cox, who says:
Read your recent blog entries about the incident in Florida, and a few of the comments you published deserve some info. [Very long dispatch after the jump, but full of interesting details.]
Another view of the impressive passenger-pilot landing
From Dave Kammeyer, a pilot-reader who was more impressed by the pilot-hero in this recent case than with the much-celebrated air traffic controller.
I heard the audio of the King Air pilot the other day, and found it very interesting. You didn't mention it in your post, but frankly, when I imagined what would happen in a similar situation, I thought that the controller would be a lot more helpful.
It was like pulling teeth just to get a proper approach speed from the controller. As a pilot of little single engine aircraft myself, I was imagining the information I would need to get the plane on the ground, and things that I would want from the controller would be:
1. Flap and gear deployment speeds, which eventually were provided 2. The appropriate flap settings 3. The appropriate power setting for approach, which was never provided 4. How to operate the various controls, which the pilot figured out without any help from the controller
When I read the press accounts of the incident, they were really just NATCA [air traffic controllers' union] press releases, which heaped huge praise on the controller, who kept his cool, but failed to provide timely critical information. In this case I think that basically all of the credit belongs to the pilot, who figured out how to make an adequate approach without much help.
Imagining the situation where a non-pilot passenger was forced to take control in the same situation, I don't think that this controller could have gotten them on the ground. I don't understand why they didn't patch a King Air pilot onto the radio directly...
I will admit that some of the same thoughts occurred to me when listening. The controller was faultlessly calm, supportive, and reassuring, and for that he deserves great praise. But the real above-and-beyond performance here was by Douglas White, who suddenly was in charge of a high-powered twin-engine plane with a dead man slumped across the controls to his left. If Tom Wolfe were re-writing the intro to The Right Stuff, which so memorably begins with evocation of the slow, confident drawl of airline pilots who can't be ruffled by anything, he could do worse than to recreate this recording of a man landing an airplane he had never flown before, while returning from his brother's funeral, with his loved ones aboard.
Update: Jorge Guajardo, a pilot-friend who in his day job is Mexico's Ambassador in Beijing, notices one other intriguing element of the recording.
Dramatic listening: passenger-pilot landing the plane
For real-life drama fans, the air traffic control tapes of Douglas White being talked through the landing of a King Air airplane, after the professional pilot dropped dead at the controls, are riveting and, to put it mildly, admirable. An AOPA Online interview with White, including links to the recording plus the picture below, is here. The recording itself is here.
As news stories pointed out, White had a pilot's certificate but had done his limited amount of flying in an entirely different kind of airplane -- with one engine rather than the King Air's two, with different avionics and control systems, with much slower operating speeds. Plus, he had flown previously from the left seat -- the normal seat for the pilot -- rather than the right ("shotgun"), where he happened to be sitting when the pilot died.
In one sense landing any kind of airplane is the same, in that you're gradually slowing the aircraft as it comes closer to the ground. The most crucial information, which varies by model of plane, is the right speeds for the different stages of the approach. The speed at which you should initially descend. The speed below which you can safely lower the landing gear and the first "notch" of flaps. The speed at which you can fully extend the flaps. The "final approach" speed as you're bringing the airplane right down to the ground. The stalling speed, which you must always keep the plane above so that it doesn't just fall. In the recording, this info is what White keeps asking of the controller -- about an airplane whose basic up/down fast/slow right/left controls he understands but whose speeds he doesn't know.
The calm of all involved is incredible. All the more so after the emotional relief/breakdown you briefly hear from the pilot after he and his family are safely on the ground.
April 12, 2009
Alan Klapmeier on hope for general aviation
One of the heroes of my book Free Flight, and of this excerpted Atlantic cover story, was Alan Klapmeier, who with his brother Dale founded and ran the Cirrus Design aircraft company of Duluth, MN. Ten years ago, when I was spending time with them in a mainly-vacant hangar in Duluth, they had not delivered the first airplane to the first customer and were in promising-startup mode. Through most of the years since then, their mainstay SR-22 propeller plane has been the most popular single-engine plane in the world. More than 4,000 of them are in service in North America, Europe, South America, Australia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other places too. Like all airplane companies from Boeing on down, Cirrus has had to cut way back in the past year.
Manufacturing people are not always eloquent about their work and its implications. Alan Klapmeier is a dramatic exception. He is an interviewer's dream: able -- and all too willing! -- to talk for hours about why he made this decision versus that one, why he believes in his work, what his vision of the future is and how he plans to get there.
Klapmeier is still chairman but no longer CEO of Cirrus, for reasons I'd know more about if I were on scene to talk with him. But via the Cirrus owners' site I found this link to a speech he delivered recently at the Atlanta Aero Club. Index of Aero Club speeches here; direct link to video of Klapmeier's appearance here. From the video:
People who are interested in aviation will be interested in the whole hour-plus presentation. Klapmeier talks about the real-world barriers to the expansion of general aviation; Cirrus's upcoming models including its new jet; the problem of icing in small planes; and many other topics.
People who don't care about aviation but are interested in human nature, innovation, technical progress, and the kind of advances on which future U.S. prosperity depends might want to watch at least a few minutes. I think they give exposure to an impressive person who can not only "do" but also talk engagingly about what he is doing. We're used to encountering this kind of person in. say, the biotech or software world. This is a sample from the world of producing tangible, highly-complex physical objects -- working, by the way, in the only manufacturing category (aerospace) in which the U.S. has long produced a significant trade surplus.
The first eight or nine minutes, in which he discusses why small aircraft became an oddball specialist taste, give an illustration. (Forgive the first 45 seconds, in which he is fiddling with the projector.) From about minute 20 through minute 30 he talks about the problem of icing and pilot safety. From minute 30 onward, he talks about Cirrus's new "personal jet." From minute 45 onwards, an entrepreneur's perspective of Wall Street, derivatives, etc. But right at minute 37:00 through about 43:00 you get a full view of the entrepreneur's passion that I encountered when I first met him. This may give a little taste of why I thought I had come across an interesting story after that first visit to Duluth.
April 6, 2009
A good web site for difficult times
It's Lane Wallace's "No Map. No Guide. No Limits." here.
Lane is well known in the aviation world as a columnist for Flying magazine and author of books on adventure, science, exploration, and so forth. I've known her as a friend over the last decade, mainly through shared flying-and-writing interests. (As noted earlier, not that weird a combination of tastes.) Here's Lane, during some excursion, from her site:
As she has made clear in her writing over the years and in this new site, she has chosen a life of adventure partly in response to personal setbacks and losses. The premise of the site is related to Andrew Sullivan's popular "The View from Your Recession" feature: that many, many people have suddenly seen the "certainties" of their life disappear. The site is meant to discuss the ramifications of and best responses to this fact. And her relatively brief book "Surviving Uncertainty," available as a free .PDF download from the site, talks in detail about how to cope with situations in which you are plunged into the unknown. She uses illustrations from flying and mountain climbing to derive principles that would apply to, say, being laid off or losing a loved one. Worth checking out.
March 30, 2009
Outflanking the cheese beagles
Barring some truly startling new development, this will be the final dispatch about the beagle-enhanced war on cheese that Chinese customs and immigration officials are waging at the spiffy new Terminal Three of Beijing's Capital Airport. For the early chronicles of this war, start here.
A frequent and experienced visitor to China, who prefers to remain anonymous, has found a way to avoid the hostilities. The secret is to come into Beijing aboard Northwest, Continental, Korean, Aeroflot, or one of the other airlines whose international flights land not at Terminal Three but at PEK's plain old unmodernized Terminal Two. My travel expert reports:
I just flew into Beijing on the evening Northwest flight Monday night. They still use the old terminal, and there were no dogs nor, for that matter, anyone looking at luggage, just a guard at the door to keep the people outside from coming in to meet their friends.
So at least for now, that's probably the way to bring in your contraband.
The writer is a distinguished academic. Good to see book-learnin' being put to practical use.
For the record, the human aspects have been clarified. The airplane was owned by a prominent dentist and businessman from Redlands, California. Nine of the people killed were his family members: two daughters, their husbands, and the two families' total of five small children -- the owner's grandchildren. The other five people aboard were the pilot and another young family. (Fourteen people in all, not 17 as in some early reports.)
Again with the caveat that no one knows what happened, the fact that there were so many people aboard magnifies the tragedy but would not seem to have caused a crash. If an airplane is too heavy or has the weight misallocated between the front and rear of the plane, that problem usually shows up on takeoff or early in the flight. (As, for instance, in the crash that killed the singer Aaliyah and eight others in 2001, when the plane was too heavy and its center-of-gravity was too far aft. ) Too much weight can affect the way an airplane handles in turns and increase the risk that while turning it would "stall," or fall out of the sky. But with so little information, any such train of thought is pure speculation.
Deepest sympathies to the families and communities affected by this tragedy.
March 22, 2009
About this tragic plane crash in Montana
Obviously little is known for sure, except that it looks like a terrible tragedy involving a large number of children. Condolences to all affected. Three quick points.
1) The airplane in question, a Pilatus PC12, is a well-known, reliable, admired, sturdy craft. I have a friend who flew his family all around the world in one. I have flown several times in his airplane and once in another PC12. Picture below of a PC12 is from a European site; a picture of the airplane that reportedly crashed, N128CM, is on FlightAware.com, here.
2) The PC12 is a big, comfortable, spacious airplane. But if there really were 17 people aboard, that would be a lot. Cutaway view of interior in "executive configuration," from West Branch Air services, below. I believe that in other configurations it can be certified for a total of 12, two pilots and 10 passengers. Even if passengers are small and light, so total weight is not an issue, certification limits usually depend on the number of separate seats and seat belts available:
3) I have landed at all the airports involved in this flight -- Vacaville, Oroville, Bozeman, and Butte -- but particularly noted the flight's origin at the beginning of the day: Redlands, California (my home town). If it really was a plane full of kids on a skiing trip, this will be a community-wide disaster for some small California community. We don't know which one yet. Sympathies to whoever the grieving town and families turn out to be.
March 20, 2009
Harmonic convergence! Two of my obsessions in one place!
At last, my interests in (a) innovative small-airplane technology, and (b) the evolution of China's economy, come together in one bit of news.
According to Aero-News.Net, in this dispatch, the next owner of the assets, technology, designs, etc of the defunct Eclipse Aviation company could be -- the Chinese government. Rather, the state-run Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, CACC, which is in charge of the country's ambitions to have a counterpart to Boeing and Airbus.
Now, if we could only work in a beer, boiled-frog, or USB-related angle, I would have the world's most completely satisfying news item. And even with just the China+aviation elements, it's fascinating in its implications.
March 18, 2009
On the brighter side: some positive aviation news
I have a long queue of airplane-related items to work through - latest excesses of Security Theater, the still-toppling dominoes of Eclipse Aviation, etc -- but right at the moment, here is a sign of undeterred innovators in action.
A flying car! Or, a drivable airplane! Either way, earlier this month the Terrafugia "Transition" took its first flight.
YouTube footage of the first flight below. [UPDATE: Video has apparently been pulled.] Below that, a surreal "formation flight" shot. I like being in China because it's today's land of excitement, but it is good to see some excitement brewing back home.
Formation flight:
March 5, 2009
More on Newt and airplanes
If you'd like to hear more about Newt Gingrich's plan to "reform" air-traffic control from someone who really knows the subject, I heartily recommend this entry from Don Brown's generally admirable Get the Flick site. Brown is a retired air-traffic controller with a knack for explaining technical matters clearly - and with an attitude, which makes reading his accounts fun. I think he is closer to Andrew Sullivan's original mockery of Newt than to my more respectful reference. In any case, definitely worth considering if you care about the topic.
March 3, 2009
Let a thousand-and-one flowers bloom at the Atlantic!
(Following the previous thousand blooming flowers, here.)
I hear via my aviation grapevine that my colleague Andrew Sullivan is making fun of Newt Gingrich in general, and in specific for this idea about modernizing the US air-traffic control system:
[Newt says:] "One of the projects I'm going to launch -- we don't have a name for it yet -- is an air-traffic modernization project... You can do a space-based air-traffic-control system with half the current number of air-traffic controllers, increase the amount of air traffic in the northeast by 40 percent, allow point-to-point flights without the controllers having to have highways in the sky, and reduce the amount of aviation fuel by 10 percent." [Andrew asks:]
Why would I be even more terrified to get on a plane after that "reform"?
As for making fun of Newt in general, have at it! But on this idea, he turns out to be saying something smart.
To play the role of Mr. Gradgrind for a moment, if you're terrified getting on a plane, it has to be for reasons beyond the realm of the statistical or the "reality-based," since on average this is about the safest way you can spend your time. Often entire years pass without a single death from a crash on US airlines - something that can't be said of riding in a car, walking down the street, taking a bath, lying in your own bed, etc. Yes, when things go wrong, they're grisly, but traffic deaths, random murders, bathtub drownings, etc are also bad ways to go.
(And yes, yes, I realize that Andrew is exaggerating for effect.)
Still, there are risks both real and perceived in flying. The system Gingrich is talking about is designed to reduce at least the real ones.
What he has in mind is no doubt a variant of what is called "NextGen," for Next Generation Transportation. It involves a satellite-based navigation system (think: GPS) called ADS-B. Not everyone agrees on every detail of these new systems. But the approach as a whole constitutes a mature, vetted, sensible, picked-over-for-years proposal that has most everything going for it except the long, slow process of getting it accepted and implemented. I described its potential back in 2001 in this Atlantic cover story and the related book Free Flight. More available here, here, here, and here.
As for why this system is more modern: Today's air traffic control system is essentially like a telephone network in which you must ring up a central switchboard and ask an operator's help in placing each call. The new system would allow a lot more automated routing - with less needless, switchboard-operator-type human intervention but (as with anything in aviation) human and automated safety measures piled on triple-depth.
As for why it could be more efficient and ultimately safer: Today's system funnels a great deal of traffic through a small number of specified routes - which therefore become the only crowded places in the sky. A newer system would allow more planes to take a variety of courses, staying out of each other's way. (It doesn't solve the problem of too many airplanes wanting to land at the same few over-crowded airports, but as a side effect it is designed to make smaller, under-used airports more attractive and practical.) In a sense it's like the difference between cars, which can take a variety of routes through town, and trolleys, which go where the tracks are laid and nowhere else. I am oversimplifying, but there actually is something to Gingrich's plan. It's part of what is good about him, not what's bad.
Should this be the basis of the GOP's new program? They could do a lot worse -- and, as I'm sure Andrew agrees, they probably will.
February 20, 2009
More on China-US climate issues, more on F-22
- About China and the US cooperating on environmental/climate issues:
Yesterday I mentioned this detailed and valuable report from the Asia Society and Pew. It turns out that Brookings has just done something similar. Summary here, with links to PDF versions in both English and Chinese. Transcript of event unveiling the report here. I haven't studied the report carefully, but anything in this vein has to be a plus.
- About Mark Bowden and the F-22:
Yesterday I said that I enjoyed Mark Bowden's current article but disagreed with its implied endorsement of the F-22 fighter plane. It turns out that Sam Roggeveen, of the Lowy Institute's "The Interpreter" site in Sydney, has already taken up this topic and gotten a reply from Mark. Roggeveen's initial critique here; Mark Bowden's response here. I should note that, like Roggeveen, I did a double-take at the sentence in the original article saying that at least five other countries were now flying planes that matched or bettered the F-15. For context on that point, it's worth looking here. Also, this Reuters story from three months ago talks about the real-world difficulties in maintaining the "stealth" systems for radar-evasion that are supposed to be one of the F-22's main virtues.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, Atlantic-style (F-22 dept)
My Atlantic colleague Mark Bowden has produced another of his riveting narratives in the new issue of the magazine. His article is about the former US Air Force fighter pilot who is among the last to have encountered -- and beaten -- enemy airplanes in action. As Bowden points out, American pilots rarely have a chance to demonstrate their prowess any more, because no one is crazy enough to challenge them.
As a narrative and portrait of fascinating characters, this story is great. But for the record, I disagree with its implication that if the US doesn't build more F-22 fighter planes, it will pay the price in pilots' blood. Mark's case for the plane is more sophisticated than what the Air Force has typically claimed. His story doesn't say that if we don't build the F-22 we can't defend the nation. He says it's a choice between paying the price for defense in money -- or in pilots' lives.
Perhaps. I'm glad Mark wrote the story, because what to do about the F-22 is one of the next big defense decisions the Obama Administration must make. But as you consider his argument, you might also consider some of the material below, which offers other ways to think about the trade-offs this airplane represents.
Extra reading possibilities:
- In "Uncle Sam Buys an Airplane," in the Atlantic in 2002, I described the genesis of the "Joint Strike Fighter," now known as the F-35. Its whole rationale was the fear that the F-22 would become so expensive that the U.S. would never be able to buy and field more than a tiny force. The F-35 has had problems of its own since then, and the contract officer at the center of my story has since been jailed for corruption on an unrelated matter, but the economic questions remain. (Excerpt after the jump.)
- In "F-22, Fact vs Fiction," published in 2000, the fighter pilot and aircraft designer Everest Riccioni assessed the F-22's abilities relative to the F-15's and other planes and argued that in the real circumstances of air combat, it would offer few advantages to pilots that would justify its costs -- and that the excessive cost of the airplane jeopardized pilots, since it meant too small a fighting force. The link above opens his paper as a Word document.
- in "Preying on the Taxpayer," published in 2006, the Project on Government Oversight analyzed budgetary and performance questions about the F-22.
- In the new book "America's Defense Meltdown" (described here, no longer available for free download but in bookstores shortly -- and ready now for Kindle) Pierre M. Sprey and Robert Dilger argue that the US could best guarantee air superiority by canceling further F-22 purchases and instead choosing a radically less expensive alternative, which they describe in detail. Excerpts after the jump.
- And just as a bonus, if you've ever wondered what it is like to sit in an F-15 during an hour-long aerial combat drill, well, wonder no longer.
Please do read Mark Bowden's article, which you'll enjoy. Read these others too. Discuss and decide. That's why we're here!
UPDATE: Please see followup posts here and here. ____
One more possibility in the Buffalo crash: "tailplane stall"
Let me start with the same caution as in yesterday's item about this sad incident: it can take months or years to get the full explanation of an airplane crash, sometimes the real answer is never known, and any hypotheses now are tentative.
So my purpose yesterday was not to say definitively what had happened in the crash but instead simply to explain what a "stall" means in aviation, since the implications are so different from the normal sense of that term. And my purpose now is to explain the possibly complicating factor of a "tailplane stall," which is emerging in recent stories about the incident.
The "horizontal stabilizer," or tailplane, is the flat part of an airplane's empennage, or tail. (If this is not clear, check the NASA diagram here.) Like the wings of an airplane, the horizontal stabilizer is an aerodynamic surface, which provides lift. In essence, it is a wing mounted upside down. The curved, airfoil surface is on the bottom of the horizontal stabilizer, not the top as with a wing. The "lift" it provides is downward -- the purpose of which is to raise the nose of the plane. You can think of this like a see-saw: downward pressure at the back of the plane pushes the nose upward. This is necessary for reasons I won't get into, having to do with the center-of-gravity and center-of-lift of most airplanes.
When an airplane stalls, it is usually because the wings, which lift the aircraft as a whole, can no longer do so (as explained yesterday). This is a "wing stall," and when it happens the airplane stops flying and starts falling to the ground.
In an "tailplane stall," the upside-down wing at the back of the airplane can no longer do its job of "lifting" the tail down and thereby pulling the nose up. This usually happens because the tail becomes covered with ice. When it does, the airplane's nose suddenly pitches down. The airplane is still flying (since the wings still work) but is heading for the ground. This 23-minute video produced by NASA does a superb job of explaining the theory and practicalities of the problem. Also, it's a nice sample of the tone and approach of a lot of aviation-training material. (Other discussion of the video here and here.)
Here's why this matters. The WSJ report mentioned yesterday says that in the Buffalo flight's final seconds, the air crew pulled the plane's nose up as hard as they could. In "normal" stalling situations, this is exactly and catastrophically the wrong thing to do -- as every pilot knows through repetitive training. But in a tailplane stall, as the NASA video shows, pulling up is the right first thing to do. So if the pilots thought they were facing a tailplane stall, they could have -- mistakenly -- reacted in a way that made a normal, wing stall worse.
Other reports (including yesterday's in the NYT) suggest that tailplane icing is not normally a problem in the plane involved in this crash, a Dash-8, but that it is more common in the model in which the pilot had previously flown, a Saab 340. If this is true, it might suggest why the crew (may have) reacted in the wrong way for these circumstances. But here we enter the realm of speculation, subject to the caveats with which I began. It is a tragedy, which stalls in some form will probably help explain.
February 19, 2009
Alison Des Forges
Every person who died in the Buffalo airplane crash leaves behind grieving friends and family. I was saddened to learn of the loss of one person whom I knew only by reputation: Alison Des Forges, of Human Rights Watch, who had been a leading international figure in calling attention to the Rwandan genocide. This is old news to the world, but I learned it just now.
In 2001, the Atlantic ran Samantha Power's "Bystanders to Genocide." This passage describes Des Forges's reaction when she heard about the event in 1994 that touched off slaughter in Rwanda: the death of president Juvenal Habyarimana in, as it happens, an airplane crash:
America's best-informed Rwanda observer was not a government
official but a private citizen, Alison Des Forges, a historian and a
board member of Human Rights Watch,
who lived in Buffalo, New York. Des Forges had been visiting Rwanda
since 1963. She had received a Ph.D. from Yale in African history,
specializing in Rwanda, and she could speak the Rwandan language,
Kinyarwanda. Half an hour after the plane crash Des Forges got a phone
call from a close friend in Kigali, the human-rights activist Monique Mujawamariya.
Des Forges had been worried about Mujawamariya for weeks, because the
Hutu extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, had branded her "a
bad patriot who deserves to die." Mujawamariya had sent Human Rights
Watch a chilling warning a week earlier: "For the last two weeks, all
of Kigali has lived under the threat of an instantaneous, carefully
prepared operation to eliminate all those who give trouble to President
Habyarimana."
Now Habyarimana was dead, and Mujawamariya knew instantly that the
hard-line Hutu would use the crash as a pretext to begin mass killing.
"This is it," she told Des Forges on the phone. For the next
twenty-four hours Des Forges called her friend's home every half hour.
With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as
the militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya's
home. "I don't want you to hear this," Mujawamariya said softly. "Take
care of my children." She hung up the phone.
The significance of new WSJ info about the Buffalo crash
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, J. Lynn Lunsford and Andy Pasztor reported that investigators looking into the Colgan commuter-plane crash in Buffalo were beginning to think that the pilots' handling of the situation, rather than the intrinsic perils of "airframe icing" conditions, may have been the immediate cause of the tragedy. (Previously here; also, valuable posts here by Miles O'Brien and here by Patrick "Ask the Pilot" Smith of Salon.) The WSJ article, titled "Pilot Action May Have Led to Crash," quoted unnamed "people familiar with the situation" to this effect:
The commuter plane slowed to an unsafe speed as it approached the airport, causing an automatic stall warning, these people said. The pilot pulled back sharply on the plane's controls and added power instead of following the proper procedure of pushing forward to lower the plane's nose to regain speed, they said. He held the controls there, locking the airplane into a deadly stall, they added.
With all the usual caveats -- that it can take months or years to find out the real cause of airplane disasters, that sometimes the real cause is never known, that these unnamed sources might prove to be wrong, etc -- here is why this information could be significant. What follows is an Aerodynamics 101 explanation that would be obvious to people in the flying world but perhaps not so evident to the general reading public:
"Stall" is a very important word in aviation, but it means something entirely different from what most readers (or passengers) would assume. It has nothing to do with the operation of the power plant. That is, an airplane stall has nothing in common with an automotive stall. A car stalls when something goes wrong with the engine. An airplane stalls when something goes wrong with the flow of air over the wings. When birds flew into both engines of a USAir jet last month, the
engines lost power and stopped -- but the airplane didn't "stall."
The crucial point about aerodynamic stalls is that they occur when the wing's "angle of attack" into the air is too high. That is, the wing is angled so sharply into the oncoming wind that the air can no longer flow smoothly over the wing's top surface to generate lift. When the wings stop generating lift, the airplane becomes dead weight and falls right out of the sky.* A Wikipedia primer on the whole topic is here; a passage on "How a Wing is Flown" from Wolfgang Langewiesche's unsurpassed 1944 classic on airmanship, Stick and Rudder, can be found here,
via Google Books. (Yes, Wolfgang L. was the father of William
Langewiesche, now of Vanity Fair but for many years my Atlantic
colleague and flying mentor.)
For the pilot of any airplane, large or small, the practical implications of a stall center on whether you are pulling the airplane's nose up (by pulling the control wheel or stick backwards, toward your body) or pushing the nose down (by pushing the stick forward, away from you). Everyone who has ever flown an airplane has gone through stall-recovery drills. These involve climbing to a safe altitude; pulling the stick back more and more until you raise the nose so high and make the angle of attack so great that the airplane stalls and begins falling toward the earth; and then immediately pushing the stick forwardas the very first step in getting the airplane under control and flying again.
There are other parts of the recovery process, but "nose down," which means stick forward, is something you drill so many times that it's meant to become 100% reflexive. It is mildly unnatural -- when the plane is falling, the first thing you do is make sure the nose is pointing down -- but it is the only way to reduce the angle of attack, allow air to flow over the wings again, and turn what is a plummeting brick back into a flying machine. Think of the comparison with the "turn into the skid" advice that drivers get for handling a problem on icy roads. Everyone has heard this in driver's ed; a significant number of people have experienced it; virtually no one ever practices it. Even amateur pilots have practiced stall-recovery drills, starting with the all-important "nose down" step, many many times. The point is to make "nose down" second nature.
So if these reports stand up over time, and if the evidence ultimately shows that whoever was controlling the plane reacted in exactly the wrong way, it will be the rare case of a professional air crew, out of panic or for whatever reason, forgetting an elementary procedure that they certainly knew. After the USAir water-landing in the Hudson, many people observed that the casualty-free outcome was both an individual and a collective achievement. Individually, the air crew (pilot, copilot, attendants) reacted with supreme competence. Collectively, everyone involved did exactly what they had been trained to do. If what the WSJ says turns out to be what really happened, the Colgan-Buffalo crash will be a startling case of individual failure, which in turn will raise questions of how a professional air crew could have reacted this way. _____ * This Wikipedia graph gives an idea of how a stall develops -- and how it feels, when you're deliberately stalling an airplane in training drills.
As the angle of attack increases, the lift provided by the wings increases too. That is, as you pull the stick back, raising the nose of the plane and increasing the wings' angle of attack into the air, the airplane climbs. The further you pull the stick back, the greater the lift and the steeper the ascent -- up to a point. For the airfoil charted here, that point is an angle of attack of about 18 degrees. Beyond that critical stall angle, if you pull back further on the stick, the wind no longer flows smoothly over the wings. They suddenly stop developing lift, and the airplane simply falls. I've done that many times in training. Apparently in Buffalo it happened for real.
Update: After posting this, I saw an item from the WSJ's Scott McCartney making a similar point about the contrast between the airmanship on display in the USAir and Colgan episodes.
February 13, 2009
On the Buffalo airplane crash
For connectivity reasons, I am not in a position to write much about this tragedy. Thanks to this comprehensive post by Miles O'Brien, there's no need to. The analysis laid out here seems very, very convincing -- and does an artful job of balancing the necessary "it's too soon to be sure" caveats with the compelling "evidence strongly points in one direction" argument.
Many people know O'Brien from his CNN reports; though I don't know him personally, I think of him as a fellow Cirrus pilot -- he flies the same kind of small airplane I used to back in the US. Very much worth reading.
(Thanks to Jay Brodsky.)
January 26, 2009
Today's Security Theater update
Previously on the Security Theater concept here, here, here, and here, for starters.
1) From the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, or AOPA, a pro-small plane aviation lobbying group (of which I'm a member), indication that the Obama administration's general freeze on last-minute Bush regulations and diktats might stop implementation of one of the stupidest, least defensible, most purely theatric "security" measures, the creation of a permanent Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, over Washington DC. Yes, the Guantanamo orders are more important. But this could be significant too.
2) Conference summary, with video and links, from Cato's conference just before the inauguration on "Shaping the Obama Administration's Counterterrorism Strategy." Wide-ranging, useful to hear as the Obama team considers what, if anything, is worth preserving from the Bush "global war on terror." Useful complementary essay here.
3) Yesterday I drive to DC National Airport for the first time in more than a year and see the same big neon sign I remember so unfondly from days gone by. Security Threat Level: Orange.
Really, what is the point of this? 99.9% of the people who look at it don't even see it any more, since it's just part of the "boy who cried wolf" ignorable background. Anyone who does think about it has to wonder: is there a threat to the entire country? Just to Washington? Is there new information? Is there anything different I'm supposed to do? Does this sign have any purpose other than to make me just a little bit more fearful and a little bit more accepting of anything done in the name of "security"?
Yes, there are serious ongoing genuine threats to the safety of people in this country and many others, and we need to support all shrewd, effective measures to deter them. But does it occur to no one in the government that we do terrorists' work for them by making our own population cower all the time, rather than to be brave in the face of danger? Taking his lead from President Reagan, President Obama can say: "Transportation Security Administration, Tear Down This Sign!"
4) Someone has finally seen how security theater can become part of our economic stimulus plan. Playmobil is offering new action toys:
I grew up playing with little toy Army men who refought Gettysburg and Okinawa. My kids grew up with Star Wars action figures. Isn't it heartwarming to think of today's kids growing up with toy TSA security screeners! (Thanks to Gavin Bradley for this tip.)
January 23, 2009
Trouble in the software business: this time, it's serious!
Via my friend Bruce Williams, an accomplished aviator, flight instructor, and technology guy, I hear that the first-ever, 5000-person cuts Microsoft has just announced in its work force include the team responsible for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Williams himself, who was a major figure on that team across six versions of the program over 15 years, presented the news on his website under the headline: The End of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Of course there are other flight simulators. I've always loved X-Plane, even before its creator, Austin Meyer, started flying a real-world Cirrus airplane (fancier version of the kind I used to own). Still, there was something magical about even the earliest versions of Flight Simulator, with the familiar opening shot of a little plane ready to take off from the sadly now defunct Meigs Field in Chicago. At this fascinating site you can see screen shots from those embryonic versions, which provide a startling reminder of how much imagination you needed to apply when using the earliest computer games:
(See if you can detect any change in graphics in the intervening years: below is a screen shot of Flight Sim X, via Tom Bukowski at Smugmug.com:)
for
I don't mean to make light of real pain and hardship caused by software layoffs and those in all other industries. But the end of the FS era is poignant enough on its own to deserve a mention.
January 16, 2009
Two quick followups about the airplane in the Hudson
1) As mentioned yesterday, the captain of the airplane -- the one you can identify in the cockpit because he or she is in the lefthand seat, and the one you can identify in the terminal because (usually) he'll have four stripes on the epaulet or uniform sleeve rather than three for the first officer - is getting deserved credit for handling the situation with such coolheaded competence.
But, as mentioned in passing at the end of the previous note, he's not the only one who deserves praise. Another reason US airline travel is so safe is that flight crews -- typically, the two people in the cockpit plus the rest of the staff in the cabin, plus dispatchers and others on the ground -- are so systematically trained to support each other, work together, and check or offset each other's errors. Along with the cabin attendants and the New York rescue crews, the first officer, Jeff Skiles, undoubtedly played an important part in getting the airplane down safely and deserves celebration. The safe outcome involved good luck -- the time of day, the nearness of potential rescuers, the absence of congested river traffic at that moment -- but it was mainly attributable to an extremely high level of well-trained professional performance by all involved. That is why it is fine to consider it "heroic" rather than "miraculous." People did what they were trained to do, very very well.
2) I noted the silly error in an initial NYT report saying that "airliners are not meant to glide." Aerodynamically, every airplane is designed to glide - that is, descend gradually and under control even without engine power, rather than plummeting straight down if the engine stops. I mentioned that all pilots routinely practice gliding as part of "engine-out" drills. Several readers pointed out the more obvious illustration: virtually every airplane of any size glides down to the runway when it comes in to land.* Airline passengers can notice this by hearing the dramatic cutback in engine noise and power when the airplane is on its final approach. Yes, there is a difference between gliding toward a landing at "idle power," with the throttle pulled all the way back -- versus gliding with dead engines, with no power to call on for final adjustments or if conditions change. Still, gliding is normal, not an emergency in itself. ____ * Shorthand for the underlying explanation here. An aircraft's "total energy" is the combination of its airspeed and its altitude. When sitting on the ramp, a plane has total energy of zero. While in flight. it can trade one form of energy for another: with no adjustment in engine power, it will speed up if it descends, trading altitude for velocity. Or, again with no change in engine power, it can make the opposite trade off: climbing higher into the air, but at a lower speed. Because gravity is always trying to pull the airplane down, and because wind resistance (drag) is always trying to slow the airplane down, the engine must be running to keep the airplane in "straight and level" flight -- that is, with a constant speed and altitude.
The process of landing the airplane involves steadily reducing the plane's total energy - its airspeed plus altitude -- toward their lowest possible level by the instant of touchdown. As the airplane descends toward the airport, it will naturally speed up -- unless power is reduced at the same time. Mile by mile and then foot by foot, the pilot manages the plane's speed, altitude, and power -- toward the ideal of having it reach its lowest possible flying speed (stall speed) when its wheels are just above the runway's surface. There are variations for different kinds of aircraft, which land with different amounts of power and different margins of speed above their absolute minimum flying speed, but this is fundamentally why typical flights end in a glide.
In case you were wondering, about that airplane in the Hudson
Yes, it is right to view the pilot, CB Sullenberger, as a hero for the mental composure and technical skill he showed after he (reportedly) lost power in both engines.* Plus to celebrate the combination of luck and teamwork by aircrew and rescuers that allowed everyone aboard to get out of the airplane alive.
During my days of amateur piloting, I was always amazed by the rigor and discipline of professional airline crews. Every two years, those of us in the amateur business were required to go through Biennial Flight Reviews in which you'd fly with an instructor who would simulate various problems to see how you'd react. ("OK, you've just lost power, tell me where you're going to land." Or, when you're ten feet above the ground preparing to land, "A deer just stepped onto the runway - GO AROUND [abort the landing] now!") Many amateur fliers choose to get, or are required by insurance companies to get, "recurrent training" every six or twelve months.
But airline crews are drilled and tested and measured again and again and again, without letup, throughout their working careers. In their full-motion simulators, they're trained to respond to every disaster, and combination of disasters, that might possibly befall an airliner. Loss of power just as the airplane is taking off. Engine fire at low altitude. (Contrary to general assumption, problems at low altitudes are usually more dangerous than ones high altitude, since you have less time to deal with them before the airplane hits the ground.) Hydraulic failure along with the fire. Plus, being in the middle of a thunderstorm. And so on.
Some professional pilots are "smart" in the normal sense; some are not. Some are likable and admirable; some are bores or boors. But all of them are made to develop and maintain reflex-like responses to these emergencies. They are also forced to think through the decisions they would make if faced by disasters they will probably never encounter through their whole flying careers.
Why is riding a commercial airliner in the US statistically about the safest way you can spend your time? Partly it's because of the advanced, powerful, and multiply-redundant nature of the machinery, and because of the regulatory standards to which it's held. But the airlines' extraordinarily safe record also says something about the skill, responsibility, and judgment of (most) people flying the craft. As it happens, nearly all flights are routine, and it becomes tempting to think of their crews as glorified bus drivers. But they're conditioned to think, at every stage of every flight, What would I do if XXX went wrong, right now?
And birds? Birds are a much more serious worry for people flying airplanes than you would think, no matter the size of the plane. Obviously it's bad for the bird when it hits a hard metal or composite structure at hundreds of miles an hour. But it's surprisingly bad for the plane too. This detail in a recent NYT story rang true to me: "The impact of a 12 pound bird hitting a plane traveling at 150 miles
per hour is equal to that of a 1,000 pound weight dropped from a height
of 10 feet, according to experts on bird strikes."
Coastal airports are often near water; most airports are surrounded by a lot of grass; the combination means that flocks of birds often assemble where they can do themselves and the airplanes real harm. At an airport in Maryland I once aborted a takeoff in a small propeller plane -- the only time I've had to do so -- because, out of nowhere, dozens of Canada geese suddenly appeared in front of me. It's all too common, when approaching airports near water, to have to concentrate on flocks of seagulls (or crows, even away from water) in hopes that they will, by the very last instant, get out of the way and allow you to land.
And ditching in water? This is something that very few amateur or professional pilots have ever practiced for real.
To deal with an extremely serious problem -- failure of both engines, at least as now reported; to consider various options (on to Teterboro? back to LGA? what about the water?) while the plane is inevitably descending and each passing second narrows your choices; to decide on and commit to a course of action; and then to carry it out flawlessly .. all this deserves admiration, study, and thanks. So, yes, he's a hero. And one of several who emerged that day.
____
* And not to react in the somewhat grudging spirit of an initial report on the NYT site:
In a few weeks, a close comparison of radar tapes and cockpit
audiotapes will establish where the plane was when that clipped, urgent
conversation took place, and other investigators will try to figure out
why this one plane, flying through some of the world's most congested
airspace, was the only one to report a bird problem. [Perhaps because it was the only one that was hit???] The twin-engine
plane is supposed to be able to fly on one engine. But from early indications, it appears the pilot handled the emergency river landing with aplomb and avoided major injuries.
This story also said, as an aside, "Airliners are not meant to glide, although occasionally they have to." In fact, every airplane is designed to be able to glide, and controlling them in a glide, without power, is something that everyone routinely practices (as part of an "engine-out" drill.)
January 15, 2009
Year end pensees: more on security
OK, we're already 4% of the way into the new year of 2009. But there are still 10 or 11 days left in the current Chinese Year of the Earthen Rat, before we welcome the auspicious Year of the Golden Ox. So if I hurry I can get through my list of topics worthy of year end wrap-up. (Previously here, here, here and here.) This time, on security:
- Most important remaining symbolic change: getting rid of the abhorrently un-American, odiously Teutono/Soviet term "Homeland Security," and replacing it with something less Gestapo-sounding. Here is one suggestion: "Civil Security." The Integrative Center for [groan] Homeland Security at Texas A&M has a video on its site in which the director, David McIntyre, argues that "civil security" is both a better concept and a better name. Video is a little over seven minutes long, "civil society" discussion is in last minute and a half. Entire site worth inspecting.
- Latest evidence of the primacy of "security theater" over real security: this assessment of how many lives the U.S. can save and how much havoc it can prevent for each million dollars the TSA spends on air marshals -- versus using the money to harden cockpit doors or take other steps. About air marshals the study says:
An assessment of the Federal Air Marshal Service suggests that the annual cost is $180 million per life saved. This is greatly in excess of the regulatory safety goal of $1-$10 million per life saved. As such, the air marshal program would seem to fail a cost-benefit analysis.
More about TSA security theater on an ongoing basis from the Reason Foundation's Airport Policy and Security newsletter, from Bruce Schneier passim, and of course from the Atlantic's loci classici, here and here.
- Security theater takes a holiday in Beijing. Until just before the Olympics, there was no bag-check before you went into a subway station. Then airport-style bag-screening machines were installed at all the stations -- and six months later they are still there. They constitute an imperfect security shield, to put it mildly. Passengers themselves aren't checked at all, so you could get onto the subway with anything you wanted packed under a gigantic winter overcoat.(Picture below shows my standard Beijing winter attire, minus the mufflers, sweaters, big hat, long underwear, etc.)
Now, and heart-warmingly, the people running the system act as if they know it's just for show. Of the last 20 or so trips I've made on the subway, I've skipped putting my bag through the machine about half the times. Once it was because the security station was unattended; twice, because the person who was supposed to look at the x-ray screen was sleeping. The rest, because the attendants just waved me on or didn't give me a second glance. Everyone involved is acting as if this has become a nice public-employment project.
- My own personal act of (legal) Don't Tread on Me-ism, for when I move back to the US and resurrect my flying career. This article, by Dave Hirschman on the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) site, describes the change in the flying environment in Washington over these past seven years. Essentially it's become illegal for most anything except airliners or police helicopters to fly within about 30 miles of the capital - roughly as if cars and trucks could no longer operate anywhere in downtown DC. ( More here and here.) That's perfectly normal in China, where you practically never see flying craft except at big airports. For the US, it's a change. There is an exception, which involves going through Secret Service screening to obtain the right to fly as "close" to the seat of government as College Park, Maryland, whose very nice little historic airport is barely staying in business. As a little symbolic assertion of freedom, I'll go through the screening process when I get back.
(Further on pointless "security" measures involving small airplanes here, here, here, and here. For another time, full explanation of why these won't work.)
There is one more security theme that I'll also save for a separate post. It has to do with the potentially destructive and dangerous conception of "security" that President Bush harped on in his final press conference. Will try to do that while I can still refer to him as "the President" rather than "former President" GW Bush.
December 4, 2008
Aviation buffs only: heartening update on the Cirrus jet
Even non-buffs might be attracted to the several videos listed on this page, where Cirrus Design officials talk viewers through the concepts, trade-offs, and progress stages involved in building the Cirrus Vision, their forthcoming "personal jet."
I enjoy this not just because, in times of overall retrenchment, it's encouraging to see ambitious product development of any sort; and not just because in my dream life, in sharp contrast to my actual life, I would be able to have and fly one of these (~$1 million) airplanes. In my actual pre-China life I did own and fly one of their SR-20 propeller planes.
The extra pleasure for me is seeing the very people I first interviewed in Duluth ten years ago, when they had not yet delivered their first airplane to their first customer, having come so far while maintaining the same sense of excitement and passion. You'll see two of those people on the main video at the site: the CEO, Alan Klapmeier, who introduces the video, and the designer Mike Van Staagen, who when I met him was building models of cockpit interiors out of clay and wood and now is Vice President of Advanced Development. Such people bring us the new things we enjoy, and not just in the world of airplane nuts.
1) Another company covering a lot of territory with propeller-driven Cirrus SR-22 airplanes is Midwest Air Taxi, which is based in Iowa and says it serves 450+ airports in the sizeable area below:
2) As several readers have reminded me, for decades passengers in the Pacific Northwest, Florida, Maine, and a few other lucky, watery places have been familiar with a form of air taxi known as float-plane travel. One of the best-known companies is Kenmore Air, in Seattle -- known in particular to me because I took seaplane lessons at Kenmore in the late 1990s. There are few more enjoyable forms of flying for the pilot -- you go low and slow over interesting scenery, you usually get to land straight into the wind -- and where the topography allows it, it's a great way to travel too.
Attentive readers will be familiar with the trail of tears recounted here, involving the dashed hopes of the small-jet maker Eclipse and the pioneering air-taxi company DayJet. Sigh sigh sigh.
But all along, air taxi companies that have flown passengers not in the spiffy new Eclipse jets but rather in also-spiffy Cirrus SR-22 propeller planes have survived and have steadily been expanding their service. For background on the best known of these, SATSair, see this; for info on another called Miwok, see this. For more on the propeller/jet difference in business models, see the second half of this post.
Recently, there's another entrant, which will use the same Cirrus SR-22s to transport passengers on short-haul trips around the SF Bay area. It's called Indigo Flyer, and its service map is here (detailed pricing and route info at its site):
Will it succeed? Lord knows. But the entrepreneur in me, and the aviation enthusiast, and the person who thinks this air-taxi model actually has a future, all wish it the best. (Thanks to Chris Baker, my instrument-rating instructor ten years ago, for the tip.)
November 26, 2008
Not so thankful in Albuquerque today
It has been coming for a while, and today it came: Chapter 11 bankruptcy for Eclipse Aviation, pioneering maker of the Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet. For more background than you'd want to know, check the posts assembled here.
Gives an additional bittersweet twist to the splash page on the company's site, here, which (as of this instant) still has this message from another era. ________
You might say we're dreamers.
Eclipse
Aviation was formed with the humble intention of transforming the
aviation industry into something better than it was before. You can't
do something like that by half measures. That's why we embrace and
incorporate innovation, imagination, and boldness in everything we do.
There is an intensity and a passion here you just don't find anywhere
else. We love what we're doing, and it shows in all we do.
________
Possible grounds for residual thankfulness? That it's not "abandon all hope" Chapter 7 bankruptcy, as with its poor former client DayJet.
November 24, 2008
DayJet may have struggled in America....
... but its goal, operating plan, and marketing language live on in India!
Check out the site for MyJet, based in Mumbai, and its upcoming "Per Seat, On-Demand" air taxi service in the subcontinent. "Values" rendering from the site:
For background on this whole concept, see this article and this book. For the sad story of DayJet, which has just now filed for Chapter 7 ("no light at the end of the tunnel") bankruptcy, see the long skein of postings here. As for MyJet, I say: Godspeed! Attentation of success! And all other appropriate good wishes.
November 19, 2008
Realms converge: DayJet, VMware. Weird!
Time and again I've praised (or eulogized) DayJet, the radically innovative but now out-of-business air taxi company based in Florida. And I've praisedVMware, the still-in-business California company that lets you run Windows and Mac software seamlessly side-by-side on a Mac.
Now it turns out that one of VMware's main backers is... preparing to invest in the software from DayJet!
In my Atlantic article on DayJet earlier this year, I emphasized that it was, in its founders' view, a software company that happened to operate airplanes. That is, its real strength lay in the sophisticated algorithms for matching airplanes, passengers, pilots, and destinations. The weakness was the real-world big-ticket cost of the airplanes, which brought the firm down when the credit crisis began.
Paul Maritz, a Microsoft veteran who is now CEO of VMware, is according to this TechFlash report, interested in DayJet Technologies, a spin-off company designed to apply the DayJet systems elsewhere As the TechFlash story said:
There are some interesting clues as to why Maritz and others in the technology industry are excited about DayJet.
Georgia Tech professor George Nemhauser, who helped develop DayJet's
technology, said via phone that the system could help airlines,
trucking firms and other transportation companies plan more-efficient
routes between locations. Or, he said, it could be used by government
agencies to plan evacuation routes during public emergencies. The
original promise of the DayJet airline, he said, was to allow travelers
to book flights when they wanted them rather than relying on an
airline's set schedule.
"The whole idea is disruption
technology," said Nemhauser. "You get a plan for something, and then a
disruption occurs -- weather or something else -- and you have to make
a new plan very quickly."
What's left for me to dream of, in the convergence department? Maybe news that a craft-beer company is investing in software that will make it easier for me to speak Chinese.
Something on my desk that might not be on yours
A Chinese fighter plane! At least, a 1:48 scale model of one, the domestically-produced 歼-10, or J-10, courtesy of a friend at AVIC, China's giant aerospace company. Click for larger, including a glimpse of the teeny blue-suited model pilot inside:
And just down the street, at the main AVIC building, the full-sized J-10 itself, in a static display that I watched workers prepare shortly before the Olympics:
No larger theme for the moment; I just like having the model, which is made of metal rather than plastic and feels surprisingly sturdy.
November 15, 2008
Three more ways of looking at Eclipse
... the innovative, Albuquerque-based small-jet company that appears to be in deep economic distress. Background here.
- An irate perspective from a New Mexico political commentator, here. (Sample: "Eclipse has been on the ropes for years, yet our political and economic establishment kept pumping it up.")
- An apologia pro mananagement sua from Eclipse's now-ousted founder, Vern Raburn, here. (Sample: "The reason I got fired was simple: I pissed off the investors.") Note: the link above, to the original AINOnline story, is sometimes slow to load. If it doesn't work, a text-only cached version from Google is available here.
- And after the jump, official word from the Eclipse PR department about the whole dicey payroll situation. (Summary: No one got paid on payday, yesterday. They "will receive their pay" by next Tuesday.)
Here endeth the Eclipse watch for now. Thanks to Mary Grady, Jim Terr, David Strip. _______
Background: the "air taxi" model, discussed in these posts, this article, this book, and this website, is showing viability around the world -- especially with companies using relatively inexpensive SR22 propeller planes from Cirrus, rather than faster-but-costlier small jets. Transportation of every kind is under pressure because of worldwide economic collapse and environmental concerns, but in the circumstances air taxis are doing OK.
And the "Very Light Jet" movement, discussed at all the places above and also here and here, has led to the development of several smaller, cheaper jets that are thought to have a commercial future, of which the best known is the Eclipse 500.
But oh, my, the poor Eclipse company that actually came up with these new planes. As chronicled here frequently in the past, it has had management struggles and financial crises and legal disputes that have called its existence into question. The latest discouraging news is here and here and concerns such ominous subjects as not meeting the payroll and employees emptying their desks. (Update: more end-of-days news here.)
The general economic and credit chaos that is felling older, stronger companies in more established industries is obviously doing no favors to these startups. And anyone who has seen the life cycle of, say, the computer business knows that Wang, KayPro, Eagle, Altos, Victor, Osborne, and other once-promising firms went down but that the computer industry itself surged forward. So it may be with the Eclipse company and the transportation systems it helped make possible. But this is another sad chapter in the era's economic contraction.
September 28, 2008
Putin rears his head and confronts an American air taxi (updated)
From the Albuquerque Journal, this is what it looks like when an American small-jet company (Eclipse) prepares to open a production plant in Russia:
Maybe this is what we've been warned against? Thanks to David Strip.
Update: To clarify matters for several readers who wonder whether I'm alarmed about a Russkie takeover of America's strategically-vital air taxi industry: this whole post is in the "just a little joke" category. It is meant to be a joke concerning Sarah Palin's "Putin rears his head" construct and a joke about my own small jet/air taxi emphasis.
Now if only I could find a photo of Putin boiling a frog while he looks at a Cirrus or Eclipse airplane -- with a Windows Vista computer paralyzed by the Blue Screen of Death sitting in the background.
And, just to round out the joke, here is the standard "Putin Rears His Head" image widely circulating on The Internets:
September 20, 2008
Air taxi chronicles: bad news
Over the months, starting with this article, I have chronicled the ambitions and operations of the most highly publicized of the new air taxi companies, DayJet. Late last year, it began service in Florida and rapidly expanded to nearby southeastern states. This past May, it laid off some pilots and scaled back flights, saying that the worldwide credit freeze kept it from getting the working capital it needed to expand its network. Two months later, in July, it was expanding again, taking passengers to more than 60 cities. (General air-taxi background here and more broadly here.)
Yesterday, DayJet announced that it was flat-out suspending operations, grounding all but one of its Eclipse EA-500 jets and laying off virtually its employees.
The stated reason was the intensifying credit crisis. As the founder and CEO Ed Iacobucci put it in the company's press release:
"Twelve months ago our team launched a new regional transportation model. During the past year, we have demonstrated, beyond a reasonable doubt, that customers will sign-up, purchase, and become frequent users of this new service - the DayJet 'Per-Seat, On-Demand' model works. It is unfortunate that these developments have come at the same time our nation has fallen into the most serious capital crisis of our lifetime. Regrettably, without access to growth capital, we have no choice but to discontinue operations."
To me that is plausible as far as it goes. My posting today, hammered out during momentary access to The Internets, is explicitly a "to be continued" starter entry, because there are so many rich themes worth further exploration. I am already receiving leads about and will pursue them soon.
I mentioned one month ago that a friend in the FAA had warned me in 2006 that there was something funny in the way that Eclipse Aviation, pioneer of the very light, very cheap small-jet movement, had just gotten rush FAA certification for its breakthrough EA-500 jet.
Now a Congressional inquiry into the approval process is underway. Being still mainly off-grid, I am not able right now to go through the ins and outs of the arguments. But this report from Mary Grady of AVweb contains links to all the essential documents --the FAA Inspector General's statement, streaming video of the latest Congressional committee hearing, and much more. And here is Eclipse's statement on the topic.
Until I learn more, I am agnostic on the merits of this inquiry. Updates later, but for now here are the links for those who would like to inquire themselves.
September 9, 2008
Two air taxi updates
1. Miwok: As mentioned recently, yet another air taxi company has started up. This one, Miwok Airways, is using small, posh Cirrus SR22 propeller-driven airplanes and serving Southern California roughly between San Diego in the south, Oxnard in the northwest, and Palm Springs in the east.
The Air Taxi Law blog -- yes, there is such a thing, a sign in itself -- has more interesting info about the thinking behind Miwok. It also includes a service area map and this comment about its strategy:
Miwok's business plan is making several interesting assumption. First,
one assumption is that people will use an air taxi for much shorter
trips. While Miwok has entered a partnership with Enterprise Rental
Car, will the added factor of a rental car (even with a premium no wait
service) or a taxi at the destination outweigh the pain factor in just
driving your own car for such a short trip? Second, another assumption
is that the passenger is willing to trade low fares for a shared
airplane although Miwok will price the trip higher if no one else joins
your trip. Sharing an Eclipse is one thing. Sharing the back seats of a
Cirrus is a little more intimate, but still much more comfortable and
more room than a center seat on an airline coach class flight!
Also, I see that AVWeb has just put up an interview with Miwok's founder, here.
2. SATSair: This note from an employee of probably the best known air-taxi service that uses Cirrus airplanes:
I read your original article about Air Taxis years ago [2001] while I was a UPS driver. Now
I am a pilot at Satsair. They still have a way to go but it is a
brilliant plan almost like when fedex came out with the overnight
letter. Everyone needs the service, sometime they just did not know it, same way with air taxi.
This faith in the "ahah!" potential of the small-airplane taxi model is what motivates people trying to get these companies going. My thinking is: if times get tough enough in the print journalism business, like the ex-UPS driver I can consider other career options...* ______ *Note: this is a little joke, based on my having flown a Cirrus for many years. And things are actually great in this part of the print journalism business!
September 8, 2008
The coming of the air taxis, part 538
For years and years now -- nine years, to be precise, since this 1999 article in the NY Times magazine and my subsequent Atlantic article and book Free Flight -- I've been arguing that the mounting hassles of airline travel, and the emergence of radically cheaper, safe small planes, would make "air taxis" increasingly popular.*
DayJet, the best-funded and most widely-known of these services -- plus the one I have found most interesting -- ran into setbacks this summer during the credit and fuel-price crunch, but it now is expanding again. SATSair, which uses new, small Cirrus SR22 propeller airplanes for routes on the East Coast, has seen a significant rise in business this year.
Now comes Miwok Airlines, run by a software entrepreneur and Israeli AF air traffic controller named Gad Barnea, which will provide short-haul service using Cirrus airplanes in and around the LA basin. LA Times article on Miwok here; analysis by my friend Chet Richards here. The company plans to serve 40 small airports from roughly Oxnard to San Diego. According to a CaltTech professor quoted in the LAT, "It's not competition to the airlines but a competitor to driving."
I am way behind on the small-plane aviation news, because of the dreaded combination of (a) Olympics happening all around me and (b) actual writing to do.
As a place marker, two items: one positive, one.... interesting.
Positive news: Much more information about Cirrus Design's new "Vision" personal jet here, from Flight Blogger, and here, from Cirrus itself.
Among many other things, I love the idea that Mike Van Staagen. who when I interviewed him for Free Flight in Duluth nearly a decade ago was working on the interior for the then-revolutionary SR-20, is now a Vice President for the Advanced Design Group making this plane.
Interesting news: So much is happening so fast at Eclipse Aviation that I'll have to catch up another time. But for later examination: a few months after I moved to Shanghai, in September of 2006. I heard from a friend in the FAA that it was worth noticing the way the Eclipse certification had so rapidly been approved.
Now that there is business turmoil in the company, a Congressional investigation seems to have been opened into that exact topic -- according to this story in the Albuquerque Journal. For the moment I say... interesting. (Thanks to David Strip.)
July 28, 2008
This means something. I just don't know what (Eclipse Aviation)
After the jump, text of a press release just out from Eclipse Aviation, timed for the mammoth EAA Oshkosh AirVenture show, announcing that the company has received a new infusion of capital -- and that Vern Raburn, whose role in founding the company I described in Free Flight and whose airplanes I described in this recent Atlantic article, is out as CEO.
Rumors of something like this have been brewing for a long time. Good for aviation, bad for aviation, good or bad for Eclipse, I don't know and am not in a position to find out at the moment. But here is the press release, FYI. Good wishes to Vern, good wishes to the company, let's see where this leads.
Two months ago, the DayJet air-taxi company of Boca Raton, Florida, which I described in this Atlantic article, announced layoffs and a slowing of its expansion plans.
Today DayJet announced that it was expanding again -- very substantially, adding service to 15 cities in the Southeast, for a total of more than 60. Many of them had recently lost their normal airline service, as airlines (which have generally not raised prices as fast as their fuel prices have increased and therefore lose money every time they fly) have cut back. This business model has a future, I contend -- including companies that use not jets but deluxe propeller planes from Cirrus, like SATSAir.
July 4, 2008
Among the reasons to be proud on Fourth of July
First flight of Cirrus Design's new jet, shown on maiden trip Thursday morning in Duluth:
Background and info here from AVweb, source of the first photo, and here from Aero-News.net, and here from Cirrus itself, source of the second photo. And for background on the Cirrus story, your best source remains this.
I saw a hush-hush mockup of the plane in a hangar at Cirrus headquarters 22 months ago. Congrats on what is, for the business, very rapid progress toward first flight. USA! USA!
May 30, 2008
The one thing my colleagues didn't point out about Sydney Pollack
In theirgraciousencomia to the late Siydney Pollack earlier this week, my Atlantic colleagues pointed many of his admirable traits but didn't highlight* this one: avid pilot! As he said in an interview with AOPA Pilot magazine ten years ago:
"I don't have other hobbies. I've never been on a golf course, I don't play cards, and I don't collect art; but I love to fly airplanes."
Pollack decided to learn to fly when he grew irritated with the hassles of commercial airlines, and that was decades ago, back in what now seems the golden age of comfort aloft. And for better or worse, it was Pollack who convinced Tom Cruise to learn to fly, after Cruise starred in Top Gun. RIP.
* Jeffrey Goldberg mentioned that he "flew his own plane," though this could be read as in "he flew Northwest to Detroit."
May 22, 2008
Aviation buffs only: new model from Cirrus (updated)
The Cirrus Design company, of Duluth MN, brought its first all-new, designed-from scratch small airplane, the SR-20, to the market nearly ten years ago. Through the previous half-century, the other main manufacturers (Cessna, Beechcraft, Piper, Mooney, etc) had offered very, very gradual improvements in their propeller-plane lineup. When I was taking flight lessons a dozen years ago, I used rented Cessnas that had been built in the 1970s and designed in the 1950s.
Cirrus said that instead it would keep up a computer-industry-like pace of new products, making each existing model "obsolete" only because it kept having something better for people to buy. More or less it has lived up to that promise, with a series of improvements in engines, engineering, control systems, plus a recently announced "personal jet." (The story of Cirrus's emergence as a high-tech innovator in a previously dormant industry was part of my 2001 book Free Flight.)
This week Cirrus introduced the third fundamental redesign of its cockpit instrumentation. Its original SR-20 airplane had a then-impressive moving map system from the Arnav company. (I bought an early SR-20 in 2000 and flew it for six years, before selling it when moving to China.) Then it offered a snazzier system from Avidyne, with "Primary Flight Display" that in many ways made it easier to fly the airplane. This week it announced a complete new cockpit panel design, based on a partnership with the leading GPS company Garmin. It looks like this (click for detailed version):
Today's NYT story on DayJet and other new air taxi companies makes the important point that what has slowed them at the moment is not (necessarily) a flaw in their own business model but the general collapse of the U.S. credit market. Joe Sharkey of the NYT says of Ed Iacobucci, CEO of DayJet:
Just as his company, DayJet, had proved that there was a business in using small jets for short-haul, on-demand service and was poised to expand its market, the credit market froze.... "All of the metrics are wonderful," [Iacobucci] said. "We're getting repeat buys. We're getting people paying at the price points we want. But we haven't been able to raise the capital.
In case it's not obvious, companies like DayJet need to expand to succeed because of the same network-efficiencies principles that determine the value of cell phone systems, social-networking sites, companies like FedEx and eBay, and modern networks in general. The more people who are already connected, the more attractive it becomes for each new member to join. Thus the familiar Metcalfe's Law, from Bob Metcalfe: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the users it connects.
For an air taxi company, this means: the more cities it can fly to (that is, the more "nodes" in its nework), the more attractive it becomes to new customers and the more efficiently it runs (because fewer wasted return trips and "deadheads.") That is why the DayJet plan called for adding new cities every month. And this is why, according to the DayJet officials and others, their business plan would have supported continued expansion through this year and beyond -- in "normal" credit circumstances. Their plans had allowed for oil at well over $100 a barrel -- but not for an inability to get working capital at all.
Where, when, and whether small-jet taxi services will become successful is impossible to say. But it's worth noting, as this Times story does, that the impediment to date has not been the airplanes or the cost structure or customer demand but rather the current credit freeze, and whoever you want to blame for that.
May 13, 2008
Three more views (last, for now) on DayJet and air taxis
As advertised a while ago, here are excerpts from three additional and, to people following the story, intriguing perspectives on the potential of air-taxi services like DayJet and the problems DayJet itself has just encountered.
The long, detailed, and very-interesting-to-those-who-are-interested full documents come after the jump. Here's the gist, Executive Summary style:
#1 is from a inactive private pilot and very active airline passenger named John Schubert, who argues that air-taxi services like DayJet are already becoming so threatening to the major "legacy" airlines that the airline companies are fighting back as hard as they can, through lobbying and PR.
#2 is from a currently active private pilot and "serial entrepreneur" named Drew Eginton, who argues that DayJet tried to do too much too fast ("hypergrowth," was the term I quoted in my story") rather than expanding more cautiously. He also says that more attention should be paid to a controversial German aviation company named Thielert, which is embroiled in fraud charges now but in principle could have made, and might still, a big difference in air travel.
#3 is from the retired air traffic controller and "Get the Flick" blogger Don Brown, who says that in addition to consulting Russian mathematicians, "ant farmers" [see the story], etc, DayJet should have been sure to include air traffic controllers in its startup team.
To this one I have an answer: My story was long as published, but it started out a couple thousand words longer. Part of what melted away was a description of DayJet's successful interactions with local ATC officials. The key to the success was that DayJet planned -- and plans -- to go where the existing airlines don't; so if a route is already crowded, by definition that's a reason
All the details below.
____________________________
After the jump, via general-aviation news central here at its temporary HQ in Shaanxi province, China, another perspective on the DayJet situation. (Original Atlantic article here; recent news updates here and here.)
This is from Bruce Holmes, a prominent figure in my story (and in my 2001 book Free Flight, about the innovations that gave rise to Day Jet, SATSair, and similar companies.). He presents the "slowdown in growth is good for long-term success" outlook. Several other interesting items have arrived, which I'll add after I check with the senders to make sure they're meant for "publication."
Thanks to my friend Mary Grady of AVweb, an update -- and a somewhat brighter perspective -- about yesterday's news on layoffs at DayJet. The update, from AVweb's Russ Niles, here.
It includes, among a lot of other material, this point, very consistent with what I reported in my current Atlantic piece:
There is a business there. Iacobucci [Ed Iacobucci, CEO of DayJet] signed up 1,500 members, more than 500 actually flew and 50 flew more than 10 times. Whether it can survive fuel prices, the vagaries of the economy and the inevitable attack from the airlines if it gets too successful are questions that will be answered as the company progresses.
There is so much talent, of so many different forms, at the company that I give them the benefit of the doubt.
May 6, 2008
Not about NC/Indiana: significant air-taxi update
The excellent industry newsletter AVweb has just reported that DayJet, subject of this story in the current Atlantic, is scaling back expansion plans and laying off (an undisclosed number of) employees. Here is the story from AVweb:
Start-up air taxi operator Dayjet has announced it will "scale back" its immediate growth plans and lay off employees in all areas of its operations. In an email release today, company founder and CEO Ed Iacobucci did not detail the numbers of people let go. Iacobucci blamed weak capital markets and not the company's early performance for the decision. He said expanding the company to the point of profitability would require a $40 million capital infusion and he apparently couldn't find that money. "I won't dwell on this point, but suffice it to say that given the current state of the U.S. capital markets, the timing of our planned financing could not have been worse," he said.
Iacobucci said the "proof-of-concept phase" the company is now in has proved the market is there for the small-jet people mover system he envisioned but it has to grow from its current fleet of 28 aircraft serving 11 "Dayports" to as many as 50 aircraft branching out from up to 30 hubs to be profitable and that's why it needed the $40 million. While DayJet seems confident that it will eventually find the money and markets it needs, the larger question might be what the delay in doing so will do to Eclipse Aviation. DayJet is reported to be Eclipse's largest customer with orders for 1,400 of the estimated 2,500 aircraft on Eclipse's order book. Calls requesting comment from Eclipse were not immediately returned.
When I was at the DayJet headquarters three and a half months ago, the company was hiring like crazy and talking about its month-by-month expansion plans in cities served, passengers carried, and aircraft in the fleet. At the time it had five (I think) "DayPort" centers -- bases from which flights go to a variety of smaller cities. Apparently it has now grown to 11 DayPort centers serving 60-plus cities. The plan that was laid out to me was to get to 30 DayPorts serving 100-plus cities by the end of the year.
Whether this is a "growth slowdown" or an actual cutback, and what it portends, I obviously don't know. For now just passing on the news.
May 5, 2008
Air-taxi update, propeller plane division
My article on DayJet in the current Atlantic is about an air taxi service that uses new, efficient, relatively cheap small jets.
For several years, other air taxi companies have opened up using new, efficient, and relatively fast and comfortable small propeller planes, notably the four-seat Cirrus SR-22.
I've paid particular attention to SATSAir, which like DayJet is based in the Southeast. This week it announced that it had flown 16,000 such Cirrus trips in 2007, a 60% increase over the year before. Its press release made a point similar to what I heard at DayJet:
Traditionally, the use of the air cab service has been a remedy for driving trips of 2-5 hours, not a replacement for other forms of air travel. However, 2007 saw a shift with a significant number of new SATSair customers using the point-to-point air cab operation as a solution to their hub-and-spoke airline frustrations and woes, in fact decreasing the door to door travel times.
Several economists and aviation experts have written me to say that, in principle, the air taxi model just can't work in the long run. Too expensive; market too small; and so on. Could be. I'm just reporting that at several companies it's working now.
April 22, 2008
Two airplane-related items
1) My article from the May Atlantic, about Day Jet, is now up at the web site. Narrated slide-show available here. This is kind of a high-concept narration, in that what I'm talking about doesn't have all that much to do with the pictures displayed. But maybe you can look at the pictures with one half of your brain and listen to the words with the other.
2) Last month I mentioned that the first microbrewery in Redlands, California would soon open -- and right at the local small airport! Now I can attest first-hand that the Hangar 24 craft brewery is up and running and making very good Pale Ale and Orange Wheat Beer indeed. Its output is still mainly for restaurants or bars or a few local retailers, but on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons it offers on-site tours and tastings. Next events: Air Show/Beer fest on May 10; formal Grand Opening on May 31. I expect to miss them, but think of me if you attend.
The brew vats:
The beer taps, operated by Jessica Cook, wife of brewmaster Ben Cook:
March 23, 2008
I was born too soon, part 9,482
This week my home town of Redlands, California, (a) opens its first craft/micro brewery, which (b) is in a hangar right at the local small airport!
Ah, had this been true in the olden days, when I was in California and using this airport. Back then, the hangar was the headquarters for a flying-missionaries' group which has since moved to Idaho. Who says there is no theory of human progress.
I've had my complaints about this airport's management, which I'll now put in the Easter Sunday permanent-forgiveness file. If, unlike me, you are within driving or flying range of Redlands and its little KREI airport, go check it out. (And yes, yes, yes -- keep the people doing the drinking separate from those doing the driving or flying. Perhaps with this in mind, the brewery will mainly be a sampling-and-sales outlet, not a sit-down-and-guzzle site. No joke: I love my beer but have been fanatical about never having any for at least 12 hours before getting in a small airplane.)
Redlanders, enjoy!
January 23, 2008
Why is your flight so late? Another excellent explanation
Previously I mentioned this column by Salon's "Ask the Pilot" writer Patrick Smith, which laid out the fundamental reasons U.S. airline flights run into so many "unexpected" delays.
Here is another clear, logical, and authoritative explanation of the obstacles that simply aren't going to be removed by any of the frequently-discussed "solutions" to airline congestion. (Including the totallybogus idea that "opening up" military airspace would make any difference.) What would make a difference? Well, you'll have to read it for yourself and see.
This latest account comes from Don Brown, long-time air traffic controller who now writes his "Get the Flick" blog about aviation. It's long, but it's clear and interesting. Here's a hint about its point: if a runway can handle at most 60 planes an hour, and the airlines schedule 70 for that same hour, the planes will be late.
Airlines can make more money selling 70 airplanes worth of tickets per hour than they could if they limited themselves to the 60 airplanes per hour that the runway can handle. In fairness to the airlines, it’s not in their interest to limit themselves. It is easier to sell the tickets and blame the delays on the weather or the “antiquated” air traffic control system. Especially if the flying public doesn’t understand runway capacity limits and therefore fails to notice that the “antiquated” air traffic control system is delivering more airplanes to the runways than the runways can handle.
Think you'll go crazy trying to figure out how much a flight will cost, depending on whether you travel on a Wednesday in a month containing "r" or are willing to change planes in Tucson?
Yet another reason to come to China! (I say this as a fan of Chinese airlines.) Making a trip tomorrow from Beijing to Shenzhen. Four different airlines to choose from; a wide range of aircraft models; departures conveniently spaced through the afternoon. And fortunately the one factor I don't have to worry about is the price:
This is via CTrip.com, one of the main online travel sites. Yes, Ctrip often shows a range of fares; and yes, travel agents often have special deals for less than this official price. But this is s an interesting contrast to a similar array of US fares. In its own way it is weirdly comforting not to have to run the differential equations to see which is the best deal.
December 5, 2007
Aviation buffs only: Japan-Taiwan snapshots
After the jump, several more pictures from the recent Tokyo-Okinawa-Taipei flight in a Cirrus SR22. If you're not interested in small airplanes, never mind! (All photos clickable for larger version.)
There is no huge joke value to this one, but here is how the refueling crew at Taiwan's Taoyuan International Airport (outside Taipei, and known until recently as Chiang Kai Shek International) looked this afternoon. Kind of a midpoint between the Japanese and mainland Chinese approaches contrasted yesterday:
Some safety gear and a mechanized pump, as in Okinawa, Japan. A certain individualistic variation in stances and posture, as in Changsha, mainland China. And the cold-looking part of people's stance is because a ferocious post-typhoon wind was howling down the runway. For another time, how the Tokyo->Kagoshima->Okinawa->Taipei flight crew looked after the trip, standing in the same wind.
November 27, 2007
"The" way vs "a" way (Japan v China dept)
This is not a scientific comparison, but when i saw one scene I remembered another.
This is the recent scene: yesterday afternoon, Naha airport, Okinawa, Japan. Line crew gassing up a Cirrus SR22:
What I saw out my window around 11am today, from 8000 feet:
Why I'm in Japan
To travel "right-seat" with my friend Peter Claeys, who is Cirrus Design's China representative, as we ferry a Cirrus SR22 from Honda Airport outside Tokyo in Saitama Prefecture, past Mt. Fuji and down along the southern coast of Japan's main island, Honshu; past Kyoto and Hiroshima; to Kagoshima, on the southern island of Kyushu; and, after a stop, from there down the island chain to Okinawa.The next day, to Taiwan. Peter eventually needs to get the airplane to Macau; I will probably get off in Taiwan for some Chinese-manufacturing interviews. This is the planned route.
A year ago Peter and I had our challenges ferrying an SR22 from Changsha, in Hunan province, down to Zhuhai on the southern coast, for the Zhuhai Air Show. This time: we're not going to fly at all at night; we don't "need" to get anywhere by a particular deadline; we're going to big airports that we know have "AvGas" for planes like this one; and we're not flying in mainland China. This should be interesting.
Update: Actually, it was interesting. This update is from Okinawa, after two long flying legs on the first day. The rest of the journey, to Taiwan, might or might not happen, depending on how things develop with a typhoon now knocking around in Taiwan's area, and whose northern fringe we crossed on coming into Okinawa. (For aviation buffs: 30+ knot straight crosswind at 500 feet of elevation inbound on the ILS at Naha airport, which diminished to 11 knots at runway level. Quite a crab angle on the ILS, and quite a wind shear.)
The picture below shows how it looked this morning, soon after sunrise, as Peter walked to the plane at Honda airport and we prepared to scrape the rime-frost off the wings and head to the south.
November 22, 2007
Thankfulness is great, but what is the NYT thinking?
The Thanksgiving-day lead editorial from the New York Times, mindful of the difficulties many of its readers may have had in traveling to join their loved ones, praised President Bush for his wise and timely efforts to provide "Congestion Relief":
President Bush’s announcement this week of measures to reduce air traffic congestion was welcome news, especially his decision to open military air lanes along the Eastern Seaboard to commercial planes from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to the Sunday after. The administration deserves credit for not ignoring the mess...
Not to violate the spirit of Thanksgiving, but: are you kidding me???
First, military airspace is at best a minor factor in holiday air-traffic congestion. The worst air traffic congestion is around New York City. As mentioned earlier, there's not much military airspace there to begin with. Chapter-and-verse details after the jump. Anyone who has ever looked at an aviation chart knows this. (I know about it from flying small airplanes on the East Coast over the past ten years.)
Second, controllers already can open up the military airspace during peak holiday travel periods. See this blog by former controller Don Brown for more. To be clear about this: the new order gives controllers a power they already have and have used for years.
Third, the decision did nothing at all about the real problem: too many flights scheduled to take off or land at the same time from a limited number of runways.
So this decision has made, and will make, no difference in holiday travel congestion. Zero. This weekend's traffic will flow well, or poorly, depending on weather, and unanticipated screw-ups, and many other factors. But it will have nothing to do with this plan.
On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful not to have to wonder what kind of research went into a lead editorial like this.
About that plan to "speed up" Thanksgiving air travel
Sorry to ring in the Thanksgiving travel week on a discouraging note, but: the plan announced with fanfare from the White House last week, to reduce airline delays by opening up military airspace, is preposterous. It will not make the slightest difference in airline delays or the general neuralgia of Thanksgiving travel. You think the media were gullible about Administration claims five years ago? Gee, it's good to see that that will never happen again....
What's wrong with this plan?
1) Military airspace is not that big a factor in NYC area or BOS-WASH corridor travel, which is where the worst of the delays originate. The FAA has a great little website, here, which shows you the status of "special use airspace" (including military space) pretty much in real time. Here is how it looked mid-afternoon Friday EST last week -- a busy travel time!
It's not worth explaining all the details here, but the main point is: there aren't that many "special use" areas near the big East Coast airports. If New York City were where Camp Lejeune is, in North Carolina, then military airspace might be an issue.* But, umm, it's not. The NY-area special airspace that looks biggest -- the brown thing off Long Island, which says ZNY (meaning that its airspace is controlled by "New York Center") -- is a "warning area," which differs from those off-limits to airliners and is way out over the ocean anyway.
Luggage-cart rental stand, Tegel Airport, Berlin, this afternoon:
So, if you want to rent a cart, you can pay: one Pound, one Euro, one Swiss Franc, or one shiny American quarter, which at today's rates means:
Brits pay ~ $2.06
Europeans in general pay ~ $1.44
Swiss pay ~ $1.16
And my wife and I paid $0.25 each for our two carts, delighted as we were to find two quarters wedged into our pockets after the redeye from the U.S., en route to our new home in Beijing.
Is this legacy pricing from the days when the dollar really was strong? A means-tested scheme, reflecting Europe's patronizing view toward the puny dollar of modern times and what Yanks can afford? An expression of karmic gratitude for the American role in defending Berlin through the long decades of the Cold War and the intense months of the Berlin Airlift, when planes full of supplies for hungry Berliners landed at this very Tegel airfield?*
Could be any of 'em. But -- oooops! Five minutes later it turns out that when you return the cart, you get back whatever coin you put in. So technically all the chart means is that the quarter is physically about the same size as the other, mightier coins. Still, in the era of the shrinking dollar, something about this chart sticks in your mind.
* Before anyone feels obliged to mention it: Yes, I know that Tegel was in the French sector of Berlin, while Tempelhof was the main airport in the American sector. But you get the point. Footnote update!!: Andrei Cherny, who has a book on the Berlin Airlift out next year, reminds me that the airport was in French-controlled territory but most of the airplanes were of course American. I guess this is why we don't hear so many references to "the vast French air force darkened the skies" in accounts of the post-war era...
October 18, 2007
Beijing-Shanghai, DC-Boston: compare and contrast
Three weeks ago my wife and I flew China Eastern from Beijing to Shanghai and, thanks to traffic miracles on both ends and the absence of the usual Beijing departure hold, made it door-to-door in about four hours.
Today I flew US Airlines from Washington to Boston, a more-or-less comparable route, in just about the same door-to-door time. One difference: Beijing-Shanghai is more than half again as far (576 nautical miles, vs. 343). Another: often I've been loaded onto a 747 for the Chinese route, versus the Airbus 319 that is standard for US Air. But here's the general compare/contrast rundown:
1) Cost: Roughly $150 advertised fare on China Eastern, vs $385 for USAir. Edge to the Chinese, especially considering that the trip is longer. On the other hand, given the 7- or 8- fold difference in national per capita income, the US fare is obviously more "affordable."
2) Amenities: No contest. China Eastern is way nicer. Hot meals on all flights -- standard choice is "rice" or "noodles," meaning a choice of the side dish that will accompany chicken, fish, etc. Plus, free beer. (Yes, Chinese beer, but still.) On USAir today, tiny pack of pretzels and a soft drink. On the other hand, the "seat pitch" in Chinese airplanes seems an inch or two shorter than even for US economy class, with that much less leg "room."
Why is your flight so late? Finally, the explanation
An excellent analysis, by Patrick Smith in his latest "Ask the Pilot" column in Salon, is the most realistic description of the air-travel mess I've seen in the general press (if that term applies to Salon).
You should read the whole thing, but mainly: the culprit is not unusually stormy weather, aggravated (or not) by climate change. It's not antiquated air traffic control, though antiquated it certainly is. It's not a plague of little private planes.
Instead it's the collision of two big and contradictory facts: one is that the U.S. is short of runways in big-city airports, and isn't building any more. (Do you want another airport by your house? I do, but that's me.)
As mentioned two days ago, the DayJet company of Florida has just carried its first paying passenger on a small-jet "air taxi" trip. The trip was from Boca Raton to Tallahassee.
Dan Hobby, of Coconut Creek, Fl., writes to point out an implication that probably was obvious to those who have more Florida reference points in the brain than I do:
The DayJet from Boca to Tallahassee may be even more viable once the Florida Legislature convenes next year.
During session the direct flights are usually booked up, and one is often forced to fly to Tallahassee through Orlando or Tampa, adding additional time to the flight.
While legislators may be hesitant to be seen taking a DayJet flight, I suspect many lobbyists will make it their first choice.
The "for lobbyists only" image is one the air taxi business would presumably like to avoid -- their goal is to make the fares economically competitive, not Corporate Excess Lite. But the basic point is exactly right: Tallahassee, like Sacramento (an example that springs more readily to my mind) is a place a lot of people have to get to during certain periods, and where normal connections are not so convenient.
I'm still curious about what DayJet will charge in the long run, though presumably this first passenger knows.
September 16, 2007
Free Flight update #5: first DayJet flight
Six years ago, I was on the book-tour circuit discussing my book Free Flight, which had just come out. It was about several parallel innovations in the aviation biz -- more efficient engines, cheaper and better ways of building planes, safer ways to navigate and control the planes -- that might together make "air taxis" part of the solution to the misery of hub-and-spoke airline travel.
A standard interview question was: OK, when is any of this going to happen? And my standard answer was: I don't know, maybe the next five to ten years?
Last week -- right on my schedule! -- it happened. The DayJet company of Florida, mentioned here earlier when NASA pioneer Bruce Holmes went to work for them, carried its first paying customer of its first on-demand, priced-per-seat* trip.
In one way, the air-taxi era arrived even sooner than that. For a few years now, companies like SATSair have been offering a much cheaper form of previous air-charter services, using spiffy new propeller planes, mainly the 4-seat Cirrus SR22.
But DayJet's news is significant because it involves air taxis of a form most customers would feel comfortable with: namely small twin-engine jets (Eclipse 500 VLJs, whose evolution, like the Cirrus's, I described in the book).
This first trip was from Boca Raton, Florida, to Tallahassee, and its details show when and how the air-taxi model might work.
I am a fan of Chinese domestic air travel. The airplanes, Airbuses or Boeings, are new enough and safe-seeming, unlike the alarming Soviet-made castoffs we rode here in the mid-1980s. The attendants are chipper. It's hard to be sure, but the pilots seem fine. Every flight I’ve been on has offered a hot meal, and by U.S. airline standards the food is great. Buying tickets is easy – you can walk into the airport and pay in cash, or order online through a unique high-tech/low-tech process I’ll describe some other day.* Flights in China are usually late, but they’re late everywhere.
Most amazing of all, the airport experience itself – a phrase that makes you feel bad just hearing it in America – is as low-stress as it can be. Check-in lines move fast – OK, there’s no “line,” but once you get in the spirit you can fight your way up pretty quickly. Getting through security takes five or ten minutes tops.
There's one problematic exception, illustrated by this picture of the 900-person taxi queue, snaking back and forth like the line for U.S. security screening, earlier this evening at Shanghai's Hongqiao airport, but it is an exception, as explained below**:
What’s the trick with things (apart from Shanghai/Hongqiao taxis) moving as well as they do in China? I’m not sure, but this may help: Chinese airlines don’t encourage a lot of fussing around with “do these look like good seats?“ or “is there any space in the exit row?”*** My wife and I saw this in its pure form today when checking in for the five-plus hour flight from Urumqi back to Shanghai.
In case anyone doesn't know this: new flight sim in Google Earth
From the start Google Earth has been fascinating in its own right. But since its introduction about two years ago, it has been additionally interesting as a "development platform" -- a layman's glimpse at the sophisticated world of "geographic information systems," which are essentially ways of mapping complex data onto a real, visible map. (More info here. Subscribers only.)
The latest and in a way most surprising application to be laid on top of Google Earth is its new, semi-hidden flight simulator. You call it up with Ctl-Alt-A in Windows systems, and Cmd-Opt-A on the Mac. If that doesn't bring up the simulator, you don't have the current release of Google Earth. which you can find here. I haven't played with it enough to know whether it matches the best real flight sims, from Microsoft and X-Plane. Also, any flight simulator, IMHO, requires a joystick rather than control-key operation to be any good. But that it exists at all is interesting, and its connection to the worldwide terrain coverage of Google Earth is a plus.
Nice touch: the two aircraft it offers are the Air Force's F-16, its design influenced by John Boyd and his "fighter mafia" allies; and Cirrus Design's SR-22, its design determined by the Klapmeier brothers and their colleagues in Duluth. More info about the flight sim, which has already been extensively publicized in tech blogs, here and here.
August 28, 2007
Recognizing generosity: David Valentine and Raider Ramstad
This week in his Wall Street Journal "Middle Seat" column, Scott McCartney* compliments Denny Flanagan, a United Airlines captain who goes to unusual lengths to make sure his passengers enjoy rather than endure their flights with him. (Placing mass orders for food from McDonald's if passengers are stranded for hours, calling the parents of children traveling unaccompanied on his plane, etc.)
I have compliments to pass along to two of Flanagan's colleagues, United captains David Valentine, whom I have met, and Raider Ramstad, whom I haven't.
Last Saturday morning China time, when I was in the rural hinterland, I got a very early-morning mobile phone call from a friend on the U.S. east coast, where it was Friday night. For medical reasons I won't go into, it was a matter of life-and-death importance that a close friend of his in New York receive a certain medical supply, available in Shanghai, as soon as possible.
He had contacted the international courier companies -- DHL, UPS, FedEx -- and had learned that, between weekend-service issues and time allowed for customs clearance, they could not deliver it fast enough. Also, it wasn't clear that they could keep it cold, in its insulated box, long enough to survive all the stages and formalities of the journey Did I happen to know anyone flying from Shanghai to the US in the next day, who might hand-carry it?
Aerodynamics 101 (following JFK Jr crash discussion)
Four main questions from readers about previous post on the recent crash in Nantucket:
1) Was I suggesting that JFK Jr. was somehow negligent in not using this kind of parachute-equipped airplane? No. The very first Cirrus SR-20 was delivered to the very first customer within days of Kennedy's crash in July, 1999. Before that, FAA-certified planes with parachutes not for passengers but for the entire airplane didn't exist. The initial waiting list for these airplanes was very long. I placed an order not long after, and got mine in November, 2000.
2) If this kind of plane is so great, why don't I have one any more? Sold it before moving to China. For a while I fantasized about flying here. Hah.
3) Is it really true that, if you are in the dark or in a cloud and can't see the horizon (and are not flying by instruments), you will crash? Yes. Explanation after the jump. It has nothing to do with the risk of running into something you can't see.
4) Is it really true that, as claimed in William Langewiesche's article The Turn, if you have your eyes closed you can't tell if a plane is right side up or upside down? Yes. Explanation also below. Visual proof in this famed clip showing Bob Hoover, world's greatest pilot, pouring iced tea continuously into a glass while performing a barrel roll.
A small plane apparently crashed last night on Nantucket Island. First reports are never quite right, but it appears that the weather was terrible -- dark; very low clouds; mist and fog; sea, sky, and land in a blur. These are deadly conditions to fly in, and the same conditions in the same area killed John F. Kennedy Jr. 8 years ago.*
Here's the difference: the two people in the plane over Nantucket lived. They (reportedly) pulled the parachute on their small Cirrus airplane and came down safely on the island. A lot of hard-boiled aviators say that pilots shouldn't "need" a parachute, that if you're good enough you can always "glide it in," that they'll lose their edge if they have this security blanket, and so on. Anyone outside aviation thinks: that is nuts! If John Kennedy's plane had a parachute, he might have been scolded for being reckless and getting himself into a bad situation. But he would be alive to hear the scolding, and so would his two passengers.
Alan Klapmeier, president of the company that makes these parachute-equipped Cirrus airplanes (one of which I used to own), likes to say: The penalty for bad judgment should not be death. Amen.
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* Short explanation of the problem: if you can't see the horizon when you are flying, eventually you will lose control of the airplane and crash. Details for another time -- see William Langeweische's classic Atlantic article "The Turn" for more. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) In practice this means that you don't fly in such circumstances -- unless you have an instrument rating, which teaches you to fly without seeing where you are, and you're on an instrument flight plan, with controllers telling you where to go. Kennedy did not have an instrument rating, and the Nantucket plane appears not to have been on an instrument flight plan.
Both are based in Florida and have rundowns of news from Eclipse, Epic, Cirrus, Dayjet, Cessna, etc. and commentary on trends in the small-jet and "air taxi" industries.
One blog:
Esther Dyson's Flight School blog, about the annual for-pay conferences she holds on the industry.
One article:
In the new issue of Portfolio, Gabriel Sherman's report on the most controversial person in the small-jet movement, Vern Raburn of Eclipse Aviation. One of the two companies I focused on in Free Flight has gone on to be an out-and-out success: Cirrus Design, which has sold thousands of its innovative, parachute-equipped small propeller planes and dominates its part of the market. The other, Eclipse, has had a much rockier path. Many people still think it will transform the world of travel; many others think it's a house of cards. This article explains both sides.
One sample skeptical post:
From (my friend) Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group, who hints here at the reasons he appears in most VLJ stories as the "but there are critics" expert who says, "This is all a dream."
One video:
OK, this is to look at rather than to read, but still: Honda's new light jet in flight. Site is slow to load but interesting.
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The blog world is brimming with other VLJ-related information -- for instance, try the VLJ tag at del.icio.us -- but this is enough for now. (Past Free Flight updates here, here, and here.)
August 2, 2007
Writing, Flying, and Saint-Exupery
I've started reading Stacy Schiff's 1997 biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, about which I've heard only rave reviews and which indeed is wonderful so far. Every good omen that it will join A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh and Fred Howard's Wilbur and Orville on my list of first-rate biographies of fliers. I suppose that list should be extended to include Robert Coram's Boyd, about the military theorist and one-time fighter pilot John Boyd, and The Right Stuff, and....
But on the second page of her book, Stacy Schiff says something that rings completely wrong. Rather, it suggests to me that while she has admirably researched her subject, she has not made the imaginative leap to understanding what flying is about. She notes the obvious -- that Saint-Exupery was both a renowned writer and a career aviator -- and says:
Generally speaking the two are not professions that go well together. The writer lives with some detachment from experience, which it is his task to recast; a pilot works his trade with a fierce immediacy, perfect presence. One may reshape events; the other must nimbly accommodate them.
My experience and observation suggest exactly the reverse.
The pattern is too strong to be ignored: traditional conservatives (Heritage) and libertarians (Cato) have done a better job of of thinking about how a free society can defend itself without giving up its freedom than the Democratic or Republican establishment has. Unlike Democrats, they're not so worried about looking "weak" that they have to posture about every conceivable threat. Unlike the Administration -- well, they're sane.
Two well-known examples: Cato, for sponsoring the work of John Mueller, of Ohio State. (His influential 2004 essay, "A False Sense of Insecurity," is here in a large PDF file.) And, oddly enough, AEI, which apparently harbors an actual conservative among its neo-cons and "surge" enthusiasts. This is Veronique de Rugy, who has looked very critically at the homeland-security- industrial complex. I won't even get into Ron Paul....
A recent entry in the honor roll: James Jay Carafano, a West Point graduate who works at Heritage. His new essay, concerning the potential terrorist threat from small airplanes, is the first I've seen that both acknowledges there is some threat and proposes reasonable, proportionate steps to deal with it. Perhaps I'm biased because Carafano calls for elimination of the stupidest "homeland security" measure of all: the creation of a Potemkin air-defense zone called ADIZ, covering thousands of square miles around Washington. Even beyond my bias, this is a very good analysis.
Update: Ah, now this makes more sense. Veronique de Rugy is no longer at AEI but instead at a non-neocon, "classical liberal" plus libertarian stronghold, George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Phew!
July 16, 2007
Free Flight update #3: Bruce Holmes to DayJet
A hero of my book Free Flight was a civil servant named Bruce Holmes. He was a career pilot – he’d paid his way through graduate school at the University of Kansas by flying cropdusters for a commuter airline, towing banners, hauling caskets for funeral homes, etc – and a career civil servant, for NASA. For at least two decades he has prided himself on being an “entrepreneurial bureaucrat.” In effect this meant that he put existing big companies in touch with little startups, and both of them with government regulators, in hopes of fostering the growth of a new small-airplane industry. I often think of him as a counterpart to Tim Berners-Lee* – the man who, by creating standards for the World Wide Web, helped countless other people to become filthy rich.
Here is Bruce Holmes, in a more-bureaucratic-than -entrepreneurial-looking NASA portrait:
Yes, it could seem strange to include a $160-million-per-copy airliner as part of the revolution that may lead to more convenient air travel via smaller, less expensive airplanes. But the Dreamliner qualifies as an honorary part of the "Free Flight" movement in two ways:
The making of loyal Bose customer (unsolicited plug)
Product plug: It's hardly novel to sing the praises of active noise-reduction headsets for airplane travel. I first learned about them in my piloting days, when the Lightspeed 20K headset made the difference between retaining at least some hearing and having to yell "Whaaat????" "Say that again..." for the rest of my life because of the literally deafening engine noise inside most small-airplane cockpits.
I didn't buy Bose aviation headsets because they cost twice as much as the Lightspeeds or other models, but the Bose "Quiet Comfort 2" model for airline passengers is a much better deal -- and not only because I got it as a Christmas present from one of my sons. I almost never see Chinese passengers wearing these on Shanghai Air or China Eastern flights (which, by the way, have much better meal service than most US lines -- topic for another day). But among American and European passengers on domestic or international flights they are of course more and more common:
The book I had most fun writing was Free Flight, which came out six years ago. At the time, the hub-and-spoke nature of the airline system was driving passengers crazy with inconvenience and delay. Also at the time, a variety of entrepreneurs and innovators -- some in little garage-scale businesses, some within the federal government itself -- were dreaming up a system of decentralized, flexible, point-to-point air travel based on radically more efficient and less expensive small aircraft.
For a while after the 9/11 attacks, some people thought that nothing other than air-marshal-laden airliners would ever again be allowed in the sky. But the innovation continued, and the crowding, hassle, and inconvenience of the hub-and-spoke system have become worse than ever. Many of the projects that were gleams in the eye when I wrote the book are now going enterprises: for instance, Cirrus Design, which was then a little family operation, is now by far the most popular maker of small piston-engine planes in the world. (Disclosure: I bought one of Cirrus's earliest planes, at list price, after writing the book -- and sold it, for not that much less than I paid, on the used market when I moved to China last year. As reported earlier, my one experience in flying a plane in China was so chastening that I will not try that again.)
A whole string of other updates awaits. To begin with: the news last week that this same Cirrus company has entered the "personal jet" market with a new model of its own. More details from Cirrus here and from AVWeb here. Official portrait below:
the probable cause of a small airplane crash in Manhattan last October was the pilots' inadequate planning, judgment, and airmanship in the performance of a 180-degree turn maneuver inside of a limited turning space.
Because I was at the time en route to Burma, land of (among other things) little internet coverage, I did not then see two graphics-rich parts of the NTSB's proceedings. Recently I took a look at them: they are usefully, if tragically, clarifying.
Fighters planes over Shanghai (cont): Back to DEFCON5
According to a Shanghainese friend (whose name I’m omitting because, really, how much good can it do a Chinese citizen to be seeing discussing anything fighter-plane related with a foreign journalist?), the planes I saw zooming overhead recently were probably just on a training mission from a local air field.
Sure enough, a quick check with Google Earth shows an obviously- military airfield just north of town, on Chongming Island at the mouth of the mighty Yangtze.
I've spent most of my life in places with lots of airborne activity to notice and watch. I grew up near a major Air Force base. We heard sonic booms every day on the school playground and learned how far to "lead" the sound's origin when looking at the sky, so as to spot the jet traveling much faster than its sound. The base was also a center for B-52 operations. During the Vietnam War years, I'd see news footage of the unmistakable "Stratofortress" silhouette over a jungle and think, Yes, that's just how it looked over our house.
Here is something that is common knowledge in the publishing business but that few “normal” readers know: that the average article in a good magazine is much, much more carefully edited than almost any book. Yes, books can last forever while magazines go away after a week or month. But in a high-end magazine – like, well, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or one of a dozen others that invest in good copy editors and fact checkers – you’re far less likely to find typos, grammar errors, careless repetitions and contradictions, or simple made-up facts than you'll find in books.
For example: during a recent voyage-of-the-damned style long-haul overnight air trip, from Bangalore to Shanghai via Kuala Lumpur, I decided to read a book about aviation.
Cory Lidle crash: Maybe this will shame the lawyers out of the lawsuit
As mentioned earlier here and here, the Cory Lidle airplane crash last October was a tragedy through and through. The young wives of Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, no longer have husbands. Very young children may never be able to remember their fathers. My heart goes out to these families for the losses they will always feel.
But as also mentioned earlier, the case compounded tragedy with bitter farce when a lawyer representing the families sued Cirrus Design Corporation of Duluth, Mn., which made the small SR-20 airplane the men were flying, for “wrongful death” in somehow having caused them to crash the plane into a building on the Upper East Side. (Disclosure: I owned and flew the same kind of airplane for six years, until I sold it before moving to China last fall.)
At the time, everything about the lawsuit seemed like ambulance-chasing in the purest and crassest sense.
Matthew Wald has long covered the aviation-disaster beat (among other topics) for the New York Times. Through his stories he has struck me as being very, very conscious of all the things that can go wrong in the air. A healthy appreciation of the risks of flight is actually a desirable trait in pilots, but I had assumed that when he thought about pilots, especially amateur pilots, he would be in the "why would anyone take such a risk?" camp.
His story today in the New York Times is actually quite fair and calm sounding, which makes its conclusion the more sobering.
Many pilot-enthusiast forums (including my favorite, the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association site) are buzzing about this audio file, which indeed is quite incredible, plus incredibly embarrassing.
Basic plotline: at Sanford airport, just north of Orlando, a commercial jetliner tells air traffic control that it has a problem. The plane is coming in for a landing, with 100+ people aboard, and the pilots can't be sure whether the nose wheel has come down.
I had two things in common with Charles Simonyi when I lived in Seattle in 1999 and 2000: an interest in flying, and a friendship with Michael Kinsley, who introduced us at lunch one day in a dining hall on the Microsoft campus. The distance in all other ways was vast.
Simonyi was one of the company's true titans, second only to the incomparable BillG on the general-esteem scale. According to a recent article in Technology Review, Gates himself calls Simonyi "one of the great programmers of all time." I was a lowly short-term contractor at Microsoft, going to work each day adorned with the "orange badge of shame," the orange-colored ID for temp workers, as opposed to the blue badge for "real" employees. For six months I was on the team preparing the next upgrade to Word -- a program Simonyi had invented. From the (very nice) house my wife and I had rented in Seattle's Leschi district, on the slopes of the west bank of Lake Washington, we could see Simonyi's (futuristic and stupendous) destination-spa/home being finished on the opposite shore. Simonyi has frequently dated Martha Stewart. I have been more fortunate in my love life.
United Air Lines, San Francisco-Dulles, oversold plane, passengers fighting to avoid being bumped. My wife and I luckily end up with really nice seats. In keeping with our larger attitude these first few days back from China, we are actively grateful for every comfort.
While waiting for the flight we end up sitting in the area where all the flight attendants are congregating and chatting about their schedules. From this vantage point, 30 minutes before boarding time, we see two people who are obviously this flight's air marshals walk down the jetway toward the plane. To ensure the safety of the traveling public, I won't give further details, except to say:
Shanghai-San Francisco, UAL, 10 hours+ in the plane, the magic of business class! I am tall enough, and old enough, and have had enough experience with the 31" seat pitch in economy, to appreciate every minute in which my knees are not jammed into the seat ahead.
Bigger surprise: full set of metal cutlery with the meal, knife too!
Lidle lawsuit update: the myth of "aileron failure"
As mentioned earlier, the families of Cory Lidle and Tyler Stanger are suing the Cirrus Design corporation for "wrongful death" in the crash that killed both men last year.
Also as mentioned earlier, those families deserve every bit of empathy and condolence for the lasting consequences of their losses. If you know what it can mean to children to lose a parent this way, you can only wish these families the best.
But in light of extra details about purported grounds for the suit, I have no sympathy at all for the attorneys who, I can only assume, have used the families' grief to talk them into taking this misguided step.
To say it up front and clearly, the airplane crash last October that killed Cory Lidle, of the New York Yankees, and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was a terrible tragedy. In an instant everything changed not just for these two men but also for their wives and small children. Their families deserve the deepest sympathy. Their children deserve to hear through the years that their fathers were widely admired and well-liked men.
The dentist whose condo the airplane hit has now sued the families (really, the men's estates) for damages. On that I have no opinion. But according to this recent AP report, the families themselves have also sued the airplane's manufacturer, Cirrus Design, for "wrongful death," because of product liability, negligence, and other problems.
The pilot in the Rulon Gardner air crash has spoken, and has confirmed what seemed obvious about the crash from the facts. According to the Salt Lake Tribune:
The plane's pilot, Randy Brooks, sheepishly admitted Sunday night that their ordeal was the product of a moment of carelessness.
"I just got too close to the water and went in," said Brooks, who lives in Highland and is the owner and CEO of Barnes Ammunition in American Fork. "There was nothing wrong with the airplane or anything. I just screwed up."
Good for him for saying so. As for the screwing up itself....
February 26, 2007
Here we go again: Rulon Gardner plane crash
Another famous person has been in another publicized crash involving the same kind of small airplane I used to own and fly. Rulon Gardner, the charming, bulky, and admirable-seeming wrestler who pulled off an astonishing upset in the 2000 Olympics, was hurt when the Cirrus SR-22 carrying him and two other people hit the water in Lake Powell. All three got out of the plane before it sank but could easily have succumbed to hypothermia after their hour in the frigid water and night on the lakeshore waiting to be found and rescued.
Main point: I'm very glad they're all alive and (relatively) well.
Next point: What's going on here? Why so many high-publicity crashes in this kind of airplane?
A new record for stupidity in the "Global War on Terror"
All right, I am biased. The most egregious empty-symbolism measures to "protect" Americans often involve aviation -- because airplanes attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, because airplanes scare many people, and because the inconvenienced community of aviation enthusiasts is so small. Because tens of millions of people take commercial airline flights, some sanity eventually returns to TSA airline-screening rules. For example: allowing tiny tubes of toothpaste or hand cream back onto flights. The measures that affect small-plane travel tend to get stuck at their lunatic extreme, since so few people are exposed to them and see how nutty they actually are. When I was flying in the United States, I was one of that small number; that's why I'm biased.
I had thought that the rules for "defense" of Washington DC airspace against small planes set the standard in foolishness. But we have a new winner.
Recently I mentioned that the Hobbesian nature of public life in China was bringing out parts of my character I would rather leave concealed. I have received a variety of responses, ranging from "stop whining" to "you don't know the half of it." Here is the strangest complementary anecdote, from an unexpected source.
This is why, after one crack at it, I won't be doing a lot of small-airplane flying in China any more. Here is how a Cirrus SR-22 got fueled up at the main airport in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. (Man in the truck is Peter Claeys, intrepid Cirrus salesman for China. Other men, including the luckless one working the siphon, are involved in local aviation.)
Further travel adventures to be reported in the Atlantic.
The post-9/11 "security" restrictions in airspace around Washington have always been pointless. Now they may actually have killed people -- or helped to, and the ones who perished were not terrorists.
Good item in Slate on Cory Lidle, with one crucial error
Slate's "hot documents" feature has an informative item about the sad Cory Lidle crash. (Disclosure: "hot documents" was created, and most of the time is written, by my close friend Tim Noah, although not this item.) Unfortunately the item has one innocent but major error of logic, or of understanding how airplanes work.
The one significant fact to emerge about the Cory Lidle crash is that the other person killed was aboard the airplane with Lidle (rather than in the apartment building or on the ground), and was indeed an experienced flight instructor, or CFI. As mentioned yesterday, the whole effort to understand what went wrong goes in different directions, depending on whether Lidle, a newly minted pilot, was known to have had help in the cockpit. For one thing, the presence of a CFI makes the weather that day seem a less significant factor.
For the second time in a month, I have woken up (in China) to news of a fatal crash of exactly the kind of airplane that I used to own and fly. The plane was the Cirrus SR-20; the previous crash, which killed two prominent and respected Italian businessmen-designers, took place in bad weather over the Rockies; and this latest one, which of course killed Cory Lidle of the Yankees (and many other teams -- I saw him pitch for the A's in Oakland), took place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Such events are terrible and heartbreaking, and the people left behind never get over them. (My mother's father died in a car crash when she was three years old. The remaining 73 years of her life were full and happy and wondrous, but I believe there was never a day in which she did not think about the effects of that accident.) Anyone's first reaction has to be sympathy for all involved.
The second reaction is to wonder what it all means. Some things are obvious about airplane crashes from the start. Some seem obvious, and then change. Others never become clear. Here is what seems knowable, and not, about this crash at the moment -- with updates as known-facts change.
San Francisco isn't always sunny and isn't often warm. But it was both on Saturday afternoon, for the airshow portion of "Fleet Week." There is something dapper and 1940s-ish about the groups of sailors patrolling the streets in, yes, their Navy blues and white sailor hats. There is something I can only think of as pre-2001ish about the general public enjoyment of the air show -- and I mean that in a good way.
Early this week the New York Times carried the obituaries of Ivan Luini and Sergio Savarese, two Italian designers and entrepreneurs in their 40s who had been both successful and highly esteemed. I did not know either of them -- although close friends of mine were very close to Luini, and heartbroken by this news -- but I paid particular attention. The two men died in a crash of exactly the same kind of airplane I had owned and flown for the past six years.
Further travel adventures to be reported in the Atlantic.
