Air Travel

Or so it would seem. Where to begin on this one?

For starters, not to disparage the efforts of BLS researchers or Bizjournals reporter G. Scott Thomas any more than is necessary, there hasn’t been a navigator on a U.S. commercial flight in approximately 35 years. The last reported navigator sighting was that of the hapless Howard Borden on the old “Bob Newhart Show.”

Otherwise, nothing in the report is false, exactly; the trouble is the context. Basically, there isn’t any. Utterly absent from the caricature is the reality that tens of thousands of airline pilots earn under $50,000 per year, many less than half that amount, and only a fraction will have the good fortune of landing with the right airline and accruing enough seniority for one of those celebrated six-figure windfalls — or what exists of them after the next round of cuts. The high wages garnered by senior crews at the best-paying carriers, of whom there are relatively few among the nation’s 100,000 or so airline pilots, skews the BLS data, implying that all pilots are, as a rule, compensated so handsomely.

That hourly rate, especially, is in sore need of asterisks. Sure, $118 an hour will strike the average citizen as awfully high, until you realize it pertains only to actual in-the-air time, which accounts for only a portion of crewmember duties and obligations. Thomas’ synopsis at Bizjournals includes this blatantly misinformed nugget: “Physicians have a clear edge over airplane pilots in annual earnings … but pilots have an edge of their own. They work a lot less, averaging just 1,038 hours per year.”

Heck, that’s fewer than 20 hours per week — a veritable part-time job — leaving plenty of time for golf, polo, and polishing the Bentley.

Typically, pilots are paid based on a schedule of 75-85 flight hours per month. Yes, that multiplies out to around 1,000 hours for the year. Actual monthly duty time, however, can be 150 hours or more, not including layovers. A pilot works 75 hours a month much the way a football player works one hour a week. All the preparation and paperwork of a journey by air — weather planning, preflight inspections, flight plan review, etc., etc. — are off the clock, strictly speaking, as are those nights at the Ramada or La Quinta.

Example: A pilot, let’s call him Steve, wakes at 5 a.m. in a hotel room in Jacksonville, with a scheduled departure for Washington at 07:00. Steve is a first officer for a major U.S. airline and makes $65,000 annually. He and his crew fly to Washington, where they have a 90-minute stay before taking off again for Boston. After a two-hour sit and a maintenance delay in Boston, they fly to Toronto, landing just after 5 p.m. An hour later, they’re dropped off at a hotel near the airport to spend the night. Total elapsed time from curbside to curbside: more than 12 hours. Total pay hours: fewer than five. Oh, and there’s a 4 a.m. wakeup call on tap for the next morning.

Repeat this scenario, or something close to it, 16, 17, or 18 times a month.

Most pilot contracts provide for a so-called duty-rig, guaranteeing compensation for a set portion of on-the-job time. At one airline I worked for, we called this the “one-third rule”: spend 12 hours on duty, get paid for four, regardless of time aloft. That was pretty generous. Even with those provisions, that $118 an hour is a farce once you do the division. Going by time on duty, which is, by any measure, a much truer gauge, a pilot’s $65,000 yearly income boils out to roughly $34 per hour. For a regional pilot — say a first officer with a salary of $23,000 — it’s about $12 per hour.

I’m not the only one fighting this fight. Last Saturday, the New York Times ran an opinion piece from Bob Buck, octogenarian airman and the author of several flying books. The piece was called, “Why It Makes Sense to Pay Pilots a Decent Salary.” I can think of plenty of reasons, each of them itemized, evaluated, and explored many times in this column, but unfortunately Buck skirts the core issue. Rather than highlighting the fact that pilots don’t earn the salaries often cited by media and airline management, he plays the hero card, delving into the inherent risks carried by every pilot into the cockpit — the responsibilities, in other words, that come with keeping hundreds of people alive. Not to downplay the immense amounts of knowledge, skill, and professionalism required to safely operate a jetliner, but this heart-tug argument has always struck me as backward. By attempting to justify salaries that, to a large extent, don’t actually exist, you’re nourishing the very myths that bring up this annoying conversation in the first place. And a large number of people simply don’t buy it, thanks to similarly irksome mythology that says modern aircraft essentially fly themselves; that pilots are merely on hand as backup instruments, etc. The exceptional industry safety record that pilots work hard to maintain sets up a bit of a Catch-22: Planes rarely crash, so what’s the big deal? It’s only when a pilot screws up that he gets any attention, at which point, in the public’s ill-informed eye, he looks foolish — and overpaid.

Buck’s Op-Ed also gets us mired in the controversy of vocational worth. What is a pilot, with hundreds of lives in his hands, “worth”? It’s a pointless question that segues into the tired old debate that pits teachers, cops and soldiers on one side of the altruism scale; athletes, celebrities and Dick Cheney on the other. Somewhere in there fall pilots, their exact placement usually varying with the debater’s level of aerophobia.

One venue to prominently splash the BLS/Bizjournals findings on the front of its business section was MSNBC.com. What I like best about this story is the accompanying through-the-windshield photograph of a pilot on the flight deck. Look at the captain saluting, as if he’s signing off on this nonsense. In one of the sharpest ironies I’ve encountered in some time, you’ll notice that he’s sitting at the controls of a Canadair Regional Jet. It’d be easy to mine a thousand words from this absurdly ill-chosen picture, but here’s the short version:

I see a guy about 55 years old. He cut his teeth flying commuters in the 1970s for $220 a week, until landing a job at Braniff in the late 1970s. The future looked bright. Until Braniff, once one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing airlines, went under. Then, he took a job at Eastern, starting over, per protocol, at the bottom of the list at probationary pay and benefits. Then came Lorenzo and the strike, and Eastern too was soon gone. Onward to USAir — again to the bottom, and another re-set of the pay and benefits clock. It seemed an acceptable bet — until yet again things turned sour and he was furloughed. Next he settled in with one of the growing regionals, where he made about $15,000 in his first year. Eventually, when his turn came, he upgraded to captain, and today he’s as comfortable as he can expect to be, looking at retirement in just a few years. He earns $70,000 or so — more than at any prior position. A respectable income, certainly, but that’s his big payoff after, what, 30 years of flying? Just out of view is the first officer. He’s 28 and a new hire, with fifty grand in college and flight school debts. He expects to bring home about $18,000.

So why enter this lousy line of work, with all its pitfalls and dangers and smashed-up dreams? Because you love it, of course, and because, should the cards come up right, you can be one of those lucky ones sitting pretty in a Boeing 777 en route to Shanghai — hopefully while you’re still young enough to enjoy it. As J.A. Donoghue, the editor of Air Transport World magazine, once put it, “Aviation does not attract the easily discouraged.”

One can argue that pilots themselves are much to blame for what has been a slow erosion of quality-of-life standards. It’s true that industry economics have changed drastically since deregulation, but aircrews, and their unions too, have not fully adapted. I’ve been a union member for several years, but the seniority system, with its huge rewards for those at the top and comparative crumbs for those at the bottom, is greatly out of step with a volatile, unstable industry that no longer ensures long-term tenure.

And the pilot mindset, especially at the lower, entry-level echelons, still hinges on tenets of intense self-sacrifice. Suffering for one’s art is at times noble — or even, for the most passionate devotees, nonnegotiable — but sleeping in your car or sharing a flophouse apartment with 10 starving colleagues, all for the chance to maybe land a job that offers a blue-collar wage, is, in many people’s eyes, something less than dignified or professional.

And among the piloting corps, dignity and professionalism are extremely common buzzwords. In-house publications, union newsletters, and even our flight manuals are constantly making didactic reference to that ubiquitous and increasingly vague concept: professionalism. It’s worrisome that pilots find themselves so preoccupied with this word, using it with such lack of discretion as to be render it meaningless.

I have a book here — an insider guide for pilots that tells you how to prepare for a job interview with an airline. One of the tips it offers is an admonishment not to wear shirts with button-down collars to the interview. These, it says, are “not professional.” Will somebody tell me what on the great green earth have collar buttons to do with being a professional?

A regional carrier I once worked at lectured its new hires about the virtues of, naturally, professionalism. The airline demanded its trainees wear ties to class and meet near-perfect standards of performance and behavior. Fair enough, but this same company paid us all of $14,000. Is that professional?

As a pilot with one carrier, I was told to make sure the knot in my necktie was the proper width. Then I would step into the cockpit of my freighter aircraft, where the floor was often so covered with filth, gum wrappers, dust and dirt, that a rapid decompression would probably have blinded the entire crew. How about some professionalism there?

Employees are shouldered with the role, unwanted or otherwise, of representing the company they work for. That company has the right to demand they present themselves in its desired image. But shouldn’t it work both ways? One regional pilot puts it this way: “I find it hard to take my job seriously because I am not treated seriously. Rather, I take the idea of my job seriously.”

Pilots have an obligation to uphold the honor of their trade, even, or perhaps especially, in the face of mistreatment. But that should involve more than insecure worrying about the minutiae of uniforms or facial hair. I say facial hair because I was once verbally harassed by a colleague after showing up to class with a two-day goatee. Our egos shouldn’t require such self-affirmative soothing or sartorial pomp. We already know that we’re professionals, or at least we should, and there is nobody in the world of labor, management, or the general public, who would deny this. A pilot obsessed with spit-polishing his shoes, like a fisherman wearing a tuxedo, is a fool. There are far more pressing threats to our careers than rogue tie-knots and stubble.

GO-AROUNDS

Re: Fuel hedging

One thing about the Southwest success at buying fuel in advance: it wasn’t the result of genius foresight that everybody thinks it was. At the time, oil was trading between $20 and $30 per barrel, after spending the better part of a decade at or below $12 per barrel. On the day it hit $30, I remember Gordon Bethune, CEO of Continental, predicting it would drop to the high teens. Nobody really expected it to go beyond the $15-$30 range. Southwest hedged at $25. Oil was trading around $20 when the $25 hedge was signed. It wasn’t necessarily to save money as it was to turn a cost variable into a constant. It became a brilliant move (and Southwest is happy to leave the impression that they were geniuses), but at the time is was only an average business decision.

– David Bunin

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

And here’s another one: the ever-expanding collection of electronic cords, adapters, chargers and gadgets I’m obliged to haul around with me. You know what I’m talking about. Anybody who travels regularly knows what I’m talking about. All of this, supposedly, to keep us “connected.” To make our lives easier and more productive.

Does it?

Don’t get me wrong. Riding the subway out to Logan, I love being able to pop in my earbuds and catch a few cuts from the Wedding Present, the Jazz Butcher or the Velvet Underground. And my MacBook Air is as essential for travel as a change of socks. But there is, or was, something to be said for that unplugged, disconnected age of not so long ago. If nothing else, our carry-ons were lighter, with more room for clothes.

The photo above shows the assortment of electronic gadget and gizmos I take with me pretty much every time I hit the road, be it for work or pleasure. As recently as a decade ago I owned none of this. I didn’t even have a cellphone until 2006.

Clockwise-ish, from upper left:

– That black case contains the camera that I used to take this picture. I currently use a Panasonic DMC-LX3. It’s a decent point-and-shoot with a Leica lens and super-long battery life. (The more recent pictures in my Flickr archives were taken with this camera.) I bring it with me on most, though not all, of my layovers and holidays.

– Earbuds. I recently upgraded to a pair of Klipsch and retired this Apple set.

– 32GB flash drive. For my backup files, and for transferring to and from my “master” computer at home.

– USB connector for camera (optional).

– Ethernet cord. Useful in those (too many) hotels where Wi-Fi is weak and a wired connection runs more robustly. Hotel-supplied Ethernet cords are often broken.

– Power adapter for laptop.

– AC adapter set. Essential when traveling overseas. One problem is, if I’m assigned to reserve status I often don’t know if I’ll be heading overseas until the last minute, so I’ve always got this with me.

– iPhone 4. Product unplug: Am I the only person who despises — and I mean really despises — the iPhone’s messaging keypad? Because the special function keys — caps, space bar, backspace and return — are so close to the normal character keys, I’m constantly capitalizing, spacing and backspacing when I don’t mean to. This happens in either the vertical or horizontal layout, and it’s especially annoying for those of us with fat fingers. It takes me five attempts to complete the simplest sentence.

– USB charger for iPhone.

– USB-to-AC connector thing for iPhone (optional, but a good thing to have).

– USB-to-Ethernet adapter (see Ethernet cord above).

And, in the middle of it all, my beloved MacBook Air.

All together, we’re looking at roughly five pounds of technology that, for all intents and purposes, is mandatory carry-on. Sometimes it’s slightly less, other times slightly more. Not shown, for instance, is my Flip video camera, which I bring on longer trips. ( Flip brought you this, among other works of directorial art.)

Thus the real must-have gadget is a decent case or container in which to consolidate all of this crap. For me, most of the more wiry components above fit nicely into an old business class amenities kit, which keeps them out of the way and avoids tangles. (How frustrating is it, meanwhile, that so many electronic devices require their own proprietary charging cord or adapter? Imagine if every lamp took a different kind of light bulb.)

The amenities case, together with the laptop, camera and phone, fit snugly into either of my larger carry-ons. Now that my flight case has been retired — a milestone previously detailed here — I typically go to work with two pieces of luggage:

The first is a custom crew roll-aboard from Luggage Works. At the moment I use the 26-inch LW with the plastic frame, which is much lighter than the more popular metal frame version. To make it even lighter, I’ve retrofitted the stainless steel retractable handle with an aluminum one.

I don’t know what “custom crew” means. I just thought it sounded cool. Over 95 percent of LW users are airline crew members, but anybody can order one.

A number of my colleagues use Travelpro bags (I’ve owned a couple of Travelpros over the years), but on the whole that brand is more popular with flight attendants than with pilots.

For a long time pilots resisted using roll-aboards at all. The thinking was that rolling your belongings was, like, too effeminate for the macho pilot (take me, for example). And so pilots would hand-haul their 40-odd pounds of personal luggage and pilot gear through the airport, toning their tough-guy biceps and making many a chiropractor happy.

By the way, have you ever heard somebody refer to roll-aboard bags as “roller board” bags? I was on a plane a few weeks ago and the flight attendant made an announcement reminding people to stow their “roller boards” handle-first into the bins.

My smaller bag, hung from my roller board using a hook that I designed myself, is a $300 Tumi briefcase that I bought about six months ago and quickly learned to hate, with its useless, miniature exterior pockets that I can barely squeeze my fingers into.

I’m something of a pro when it comes to short-notice, multi-climate packing. Here’s a tip: Go with lightweight clothing. What a concept, I know, but I’m amazed by how many people travel with heavy cotton jeans — even to hot climates. I own a lot of fast-dry synthetics. They’re not stylish, but when have I ever been? On the other hand I can launder a pair of pants in the hotel room bathtub and they’re dry before morning.

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GO-AROUNDS

Re: The Funniest Thing Ever Written

Several readers emailed demanding that I immediately scan and post copies of the 1988 “Guide to Harvard University Dining Services” booklet that I wrote about last week. A great idea, but the thing is 38 double-sided pages long. Tell you what: I’ll do it, but not for free. My price is $5, sent to my PayPal account. I figure if 20 people are interested, that’s $100, which makes it worth my trouble. Once I hit a hundred bucks I’ll send scans of every page to anybody who wants to see them, or else I’ll post them somewhere on my home site. If I don’t hit the $100 mark within the next 10 days I’ll refund your donations. (I really don’t expect to bring in much beyond that, as people will be waiting for the early birds to cover the cost.)

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Another factor is the aircraft type. Two-engine planes are subject to what we call ETOPS (extended twin-engine operations) restrictions, which might result in a different, less direct routing than a plane with four engines can accept. ETOPS rules require planes to remain within particular flying distances (three hours, most commonly) of an acceptable diversion airport. (The diversion airports themselves will vary, subject to weather.) Across the North Atlantic it makes little difference; two engines or four there are always adequate diversion options relatively close by. Over the Pacific, though, it’s a little different, and there might be considerable differences between a route operated by, say, a two-engine 777, and the same route operated by a four-engine 747.

We were flying from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York on a 757. While taxiing out, the plane’s air conditioning malfunctioned and the cabin temperature became very hot. After several minutes of troubleshooting, the problem could not be fixed and we taxied back to the gate. The captain explained that although it was permissible to continue on with the broken AC, a whole new flight plan was required, including an altered routing that would add over 45 minutes’ flying time — in turn requiring us to take on more fuel. We departed more than an hour late. I’m baffled. Why on earth would a broken air conditioner mandate a whole new flight plan and a longer routing?

For better or worse, crews are often reluctant to to explain the technical nitty-gritty of mechanical failures, and this is a great example of how, as a result, a passenger’s perception of the problem — in this case, “a broken air conditioner” — isn’t nearly the whole story.

Planes are not air-conditioned in the manner of your car or home; there is no air conditioner, per se. The machinery used to heat and cool the cabin is something known in pilot parlance as a “pack” (an acronym for pneumatic air cycle kit). Normally there are two packs, located in the belly of the aircraft. They are supplied by bleed air from the engines, adjusting temperature by means of a compressor, turbine and air-to-air heat exchanger; there is no coolant gas (i.e., Freon). These same packs are also responsible for pressurization, which is where the complications described above enter the picture.

A single functioning pack is adequate to maintain both adequate pressure and temperature. Thus if one fails, a flight can still be dispatched safely. However, you’ve lost your redundancy; if the remaining pack were to fail, pressurization and temperature control would be lost entirely. So, single-pack operation entails some important restrictions — namely a lower-than-normal altitude and the need to stay within a certain distance to a diversion airport at all times. The exact rules vary from plane to plane, but a typical example is having to remain below 35,000 feet and within 60 minutes’ flying time of a suitable landing spot (transoceanic flights are likely to be forbidden outright). Usually this increases both flying time and fuel burn. In this case, a flight from Puerto Rico to New York that was originally planned to be mostly over water now required a longer inland routing at a more fuel-thirsty altitude.

I was once on a flight from Chicago to Atlanta and we had to make an emergency landing in Nashville due to something that made it necessary to fly only as high as 10,000 feet. Due to such a low altitude, we were told, we would burn too much gas and could not reach Atlanta nonstop. Were they telling us the truth and how serious was the situation?

This sounds perfectly legitimate to me. See the previous question. Every so often a plane will be altitude-restricted due to this or that mechanical issue — perhaps something pressurization-related. This will increase fuel burn to the point where an interim stop is required. (Remember that you need enough fuel not only to reach your destination, but enough to reach at least one alternate airport, plus a substantial buffer on top of that.) This malfunction might be something that happens en route, or the flight might be planned that way from the start.

About a year ago I was working a flight from South America to the United States. Over the Caribbean, a pressurization malfunction dictated a prompt descent. Efforts to troubleshoot the problem failed, and so we had to stay low. Together with our dispatchers we ran some calculations, and sure enough, it would have been impossible to complete the flight without violating legal fuel parameters. And so we wound up diverting to Puerto Rico.

You speak of an “emergency landing.” Passengers have a habit for referring to any diversion or precautionary landing as an “emergency,” when most are in fact precautionary or even routine. Declaration of an emergency is reserved for situations that are a lot more urgent — such as when there is a risk of injury or damage to the airplane, when the extent of a problem is not fully known, and/or or when priority air traffic control handling is required. Knock on wood: I’ve made several diverts and one or two precautionary landings, but never an emergency landing.

My mother was on a flight that couldn’t take off because an engine wouldn’t start. They were towed back to the gate and had to have the engine started with the help of an external cart of some sort. Could you explain what causes an engine to fail to start, how the external is used, and why it’s safe to fly in this condition?

That “the engine would not start” doesn’t sound right. That’s not telling me much. Starting a jet engine is a multi-step process and the malfunction could involve any of several components — not all of which are ultimately responsible for the continued running of the engine. Again, an airplane is not a car, and a jet engine does not start, stop or run the way a piston engine does.

Jet engines are started using compressed air, which is normally supplied either by the APU (the small auxiliary turbine in the back) or another, already running engine. This air spins the engine’s compressors to a certain minimum RPM, at which point fuel is introduced. Combustion then accelerates the compressors and turbines to “idle” speed, and the starter (air valve) is shut off.

It sounds to me like there was a problem with the APU generating adequate duct pressure to get the compressors spinning to the necessary RPM. Why this may have been happening I can’t say. There are different possibilities (duct problem, valve problem, unusually high elevation …). And so, an external air machine — sometimes referred to as an “air cart” or “huffer cart” — needed to be hooked up instead. In fact, before the advent of APUs (the Boeing 727 was the first jetliner to have one), jet engines were always started this way.

Once up and turning, jet engines don’t shut off or “stall” the way the engines in cars sometimes do. However, if for whatever reason an engine failure occurred later in flight and was to be restarted, this air problem no longer applies. You can use the APU, the other engine or the speed of the airplane — the airflow itself pushing into the engine — to turn the compressors to the required RPM.

More on the weirdness of jet engines here and here.

I was on a Southwest flight from Chicago to Portland, Ore. We were at 35,000 feet and the air was very choppy. The captain came on and apologized. He told us that although it was much smoother at 37,000 feet, we were “too heavy” to climb that high and would have to ride out the bumps for a while. Really? Why would another 2,000 feet make that much difference?

For fuel economy, if not a smoother ride, higher is always better, but planes can climb only as high as their weight allows. As you climb, the air thins. Engine output is reduced, and the wing cannot support as much airplane as it can down low. A given cruise altitude must account for both high-speed and low-speed stalls, in both smooth and turbulent conditions. Over the course of a flight, climb capabilities improve as fuel is burned away. The allowable altitude at any given time isn’t something you ballpark; there are specific maximum altitudes based on very specific weights, and they must be adhered to. The difference between 35,000 and 37,000 can be fairly significant.

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Don’t believe me? You can always “Ask the Pilot.” This guy, I mean. Introducing my latest imitator.

For that matter, would any of these measures have prevented the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103? How about the bombings of Air India 182 or UTA 772?

Again the answer is no. It was bombs in the lower holds that got those planes.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m on a plane I worry a lot more about what’s going on below deck — in checked luggage and cargo — than I do about passengers and their carry-ons. The Transportation Security Administration tells us that all checked bags are scanned nowadays for explosives, and that’s about the most valuable thing the agency does for us. I just hope agents do it with as much over-the-top scrutiny as they use to paw through carry-ons looking for forks and toothpaste.

I’m traveling off-duty, just a regular old passenger. Approaching the body scanner, I “opt out,” as I always do. I’ll be taken aside for a thorough pat-down.

I don’t opt out because of worries about radiation. I do it because I find it appalling that passengers are effectively asked to pose naked in order to board an airplane. And because the scanners are strategically ineffective. I don’t “believe in them,” you might say. I mean, think about it: You’ve got a scanner at one checkpoint, but no scanner at the one right next to it; scanners at some terminals, but not at others. Are terrorists really that stupid? And what about overseas? If somebody is going to sneak something deadly through a checkpoint, it is far, far, far more likely to happen at an airport in Asia, Africa, South America or the Middle East, than in Peoria, Wichita or Cleveland.

Is this one of those “follow the money” situations? Are these machines really in the interest of safety? Is that what this is about? Or is it about the corporations who stand to make billions of dollars in their design and deployment? Why not explosives-sniffing dogs instead? Are they not just as effective, and cheaper and friendlier to boot? Or is that the problem?

I’m chatting with the TSA guard about this while he frisks me. He shrugs. “A lot of waste in government,” he says.

“Bag check!” A woman’s voice, loud.

Oh great. Off to the side, the X-ray machine has detected an extremely dangerous 6-ounce bottle of aloe vera gel in my roll-aboard.

“Is this your bag, sir?”

“Um, er, ah, yes.”

She sticks a gloved hand inside and pulls out the tube. The look she gives me — it’s a scolding sort of glare with an unmistakable glint of satisfaction.

“But … but it’s only half-full.”

“I don’t have a scale to weigh liquids, sir.”

“Why do you need a scale? You can just look at it. It’s a 6-once tube and obviously it’s only half-full.”

She doesn’t look. “Sorry. You cannot bring this through.”

“But …”

Plop. She throws my aloe into a waste barrel.

Aha! But in tossing it away like that, hasn’t she just admitted that the container is harmless? After all, if it was something potentially dangerous, you wouldn’t just fling it into the garbage.

Are TSA screeners looking for bombs, or are they looking for innocent liquids? I’m reminded of those tests I’d heard about, when, supposedly, water bottles were attached to mock-up bombs and sent through the X-ray machines. Screeners found the bottles, while the bombs went sailing through. “An Easter egg hunt for minor banned items,” in the words of former TSA chief Kip Hawley, from his upcoming book, “Permanent Emergency.”

“Look,” I say. ” Since you’re throwing that tube away, you’re telling me that you know it’s nothing harmful.”

Perturbed stare.

“So, like … can I have it back?”

She stares at me, clearly annoyed and unable to tell if I’m kidding or not.

I am kidding, of course. My gel is gone for good; another $4.65 into the TSA hole. But am I not correct at the same time? I’ve lost my property, but I feel that I’ve made a useful point and can walk away having established the upper hand. Yeah. I’m proud of my snappy little assessment: so tight, so logical and righteous!  Take that, TSA!

And it’s exactly at this moment, the screener’s eyes still fixed on me, that my cellphone goes slipping out of my hand. I drop it; catch it; drop it and catch it again. My arms are wiggling and flailing in a ridiculous little dance until finally the phone flies completely away from me. It goes clattering off a stack of gray bins and slides pathetically onto the floor — directly at the screener’s feet.

She picks up the phone and hands it to me. “Good day, sir.”

I skulk away feeling like the biggest goofball in the world.

And maybe this was a kind of divine intervention, a dose of humiliation engineered to shut me up and kick me on my way. A lesson summed up in two easy words: lost cause.

If the TSA’s tactical flaws are ever going to be fixed, it certainly won’t be me who gets it done. I spend too much time writing about it, and too much time worrying about it.

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GO-AROUNDS

Re: Airport bookstores, or lack thereof

As various emailers pointed out, not every airport bookshop is a glorified magazine stand. There are still some good retails options in U.S. terminals. Renaissance Books at Milwaukee, for example, got several kudos from readers. There’s Powell’s still at Portland’s PDX, I’m told. I can personally vouch for a place called BookLink (formerly a Borders franchise) at terminal A in Boston. Even JFK’s Terminal 3, for all its demerits, has a decent bookstore just inside the east-side security checkpoint, abeam gates 4 and 5.

And the following letter is from a vice president of Hudson Booksellers, one of the companies mentioned in my story:

Having been a buyer for airport bookstores for over 15 years, I have witnessed the amazing growth and diversification of airport bookselling, as well as the recent downturn, largely due to the e-book effect. Blending customer expectation with personal passion is the essence of our selection process. Yet, so frequently when we see Hudson in print, including in your article, we are pigeonholed as corporate peddlers of “airport books.” Clearly our message and product isn’t getting through the way we’d like.

Airport bookstores are in competition against many other product categories. For the last 15 years my team and I have been turning over every stone in trying to meet the challenge of bringing the best books to the most readers.  One of your reader comments mentioned — incredulously — discovering Roberto Bolaño at the airport in San Francisco. But that type of thing honestly happens every day at Hudson. We’ve sold hundreds of Bolaño’s novels, which are part of our core bookstore selection. You mention Gary Shteyngart, another personal favorite, who we have been promoting since “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.” We went all out with “Absurdistan” and sold over 26,000 copies the year it came out, which I believe was more than 25 percent of all copies sold. We have many great locations with a locally curated assortment that I would put up against Powell’s or Compass, etc. — in Denver, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Newark, Raleigh.

I am also surprised at your statement about your own book, “Ask the Pilot.” We have carried your book since it came out in 2004, selling over 1,000 copies in one LAX store alone — thousands more over the years — and we are still carrying it in a few locations.

Sara Hinckley
Vice President of Book Purchasing & Promotions
Hudson Booksellers

Author’s note: In retrospect, I ought to have been a little more gracious in my references to Hudson.  Indeed, many of the chain’s airport outlets are full-fledged bookstores with a very good selection, and the chain did stock and sell many copies of my book when it was new. (Though, honestly, the thing is so out-of-date at this point that I’m pleased when I don’t find it for sale.)

Sure, there are places selling books — there are lots of places selling books — provided you’re interested in one of a tiny sample of titles. There was something vaguely North Korean about walking the length of the concourse and seeing the exact same hardcovers, over and over and over and over — Steve Jobs staring out at me every 20 steps or so from the shelves of any of 50 different shops, all utterly indistinguishable from one another.

Not long ago almost every major airport had a proper bookseller. Nowadays they are harder and harder to find. Usually, what passes as a bookstore is really just a newsstand. The vast majority of these outlets are owned and controlled by one of two companies: Hudson Group and an Atlanta-based company called Paradies Shops Inc. Both conduct business under numerous sub-brands that hawk a very thin selection of bestsellers, business books, thrillers and pop-culture trash.

The terminal guide at DTW told me there was something called Heritage Books — two of them, in fact, one at either end of the hall. That got my hopes up. Maybe I’d score a copy of Gary Shteyngart’s new novel.

As they say, good luck with that. Turns out that Heritage is just one of those Paradies Dba franchises.

They did stock a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom” (yet not “The Corrections,” which was much better), and obviously no retailer can get by without a token Malcolm Gladwell or two, a gesture to the “sophisticated” reader who is seeking something headier than “American Sniper,” or the latest Suze Orman guide to success, or one of two — two! — books by Chelsea Handler.

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

On the bright side, though, am I correct in observing that America’s fascination with Sudoku has begun to taper off?

Lingering resentment, yes. Several years ago I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to get Paradies and Hudson to stock my own lousy little book, “Ask the Pilot — Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel.” I was stupid enough to think that the airport, of all places, might be a good selling point for a book exclusively about air travel. I’ll never make that mistake again. It was carefully explained to me that, no, it matters not what your book is about, captive audience be damned. What matters is getting on the company’s shortlist of airport-worthy bestsellers, or having your publisher pay for an airport promotion. Hudson carried “Ask the Pilot” briefly, into the fall of 2004, after which it disappeared from airports forever.

All of airport retailing, though, seems to suffer from a kind of dementia. This is something I explore in my famous essay, “What’s the Matter With Airports?” Enough already with the jewelry, the souvenir sweat shirts, the remote-control helicopters and the high-end luggage.

(The fixation with luggage is particularly strange to me. Who in the world buys luggage * after * they get to the airport? No wonder these places are always empty.)

How about something practical instead? Like a halfway decent bookstore.

But I digress.

Getting back to the positive…

Thanks to the many readers who contributed to my “Hidden Airport” collection. The idea, for those of you who missed it, is to highlight spots of unexpected pleasantness at U.S. airports. I showcased two: the garden adjacent to the Marine Air Terminal at New York’s LaGuardia, and the connector walkway between terminals B and C at Boston-Logan.

Several of you wrote in with pictures and descriptions of other little-knows oases. For example, the SFO Aviation Museum and Library at San Francisco International. But my favorite so far, I think, is the sculpture garden at the Greenville-Spartanburg (GSP) airport in South Carolina.  You can view it here in this interactive panorama put together by reader John Riley.

As to the worsts, they’ve obviously never been to the arrivals hall at Dakar (or, from what I’ve been told by several emailers, to N’djili Airport in Kinshasa, Congo). The best list, too, is a little strange. I’m unsure how fair it was including the Hajj terminal — a building that is open only six weeks each year and visited almost exclusively by pilgrims. Seoul’s Incheon airport is a well-deserved inclusion, but conspicuously absent is Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi. BKK ought to be there on aesthetic merits alone — its central terminal is one of the most stunning buildings I’ve ever seen.

I’m also disappointed to see JFK’s Terminal 5, the much overhyped home of JetBlue, rated near the top. As I’ve opined before, this building has to be one of the most disappointing airport projects of the last three decades. It’s certainly one of the ugliest. The airside view — the exterior as seen from the runways and taxiways — is criminally hideous. It looks like the back of a shopping mall; all that’s missing are some pallets and dumpsters. (Which is fitting, I suppose, given how the ongoing trend in airport design is to make terminals and malls utterly indistinguishable from each other.) On the inside … wow, hey, a food court. And although the terminal is only a few years old, already it’s overcrowded.

With scattered exceptions, U.S. airports don’t have a whole lot going for them. Putting aside aesthetics, cleanliness and a lack of public transport options, another thing that doesn’t help, and which you don’t hear about much, is that American airports simply do not recognize the “in transit” concept. All  passengers arriving from overseas, even if they’re merely transiting to a third country, are forced to clear customs and immigration, recheck their luggage, pass through TSA screening, etc. It’s an enormous hassle that you don’t find in most places overseas. Compare it to Singapore, Dubai, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and so on, where transit passengers walk from one gate to the next with a minimum of fuss.

Here’s how this hurts us: Flying from Australia to Europe, for instance, a traveler has the option of flying westbound, via Asia (namely Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Hong Kong) or the Middle East (Dubai, Qatar), or eastbound via the U.S. West Coast (Los Angeles or San Francisco). Even though the distance and flying times are about the same, almost everybody will opt for the westbound option. The airports are spotless and packed with amenities, while the connection is painless and efficient.

Change planes at LAX or SFO, on the other hand, and you’d have to stand in at least three different lines, be photographed and fingerprinted, collect and recheck your bags, endure the TSA rigmarole, and so on, just to change planes. Few passengers will choose this option, and I suspect it costs our airlines many millions annually in lost revenue. Indeed, this is part of what has made carriers like Emirates, Singapore Airlines and others so successful.

But now …

So that you don’t accuse me of harping on the negative, allow me to introduce a new feature. I’m calling it “Hidden Airport.” The idea is to highlight little-known spots of unexpected pleasantness at U.S. airports. It can be a place for some peace and quiet, an unusually good restaurant, etc. It should be somewhere out of the ordinary and relatively unknown — an escape spot.

I’ll start things off with two:

1. I’ve already written at length about the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. This historic art deco building, in a far southwest corner of LGA, adjacent to the Delta Shuttle, is one of the most special places in all of commercial aviation — the launching point for the Pan Am flying boats that made the first-ever transatlantic and round-the-world flights. Inside the cathedral-like rotunda is the 240-foot “Flight” mural by James Brooks, as well as Rocco Manniello’s Yankee Clipper restaurant — a good greasy-spoon place that is one of the few remaining non-chain airport restaurants. What few people know about, however, is the cozy garden just outside. Facing the building, it’s to the right of the main entryway, set back from the street. It’s a quiet, tree-shaded hideaway amid grass, flowers and shrubs. There’s even … well, I guess sculpture is the best description. Grab a sandwich from the Yankee Clipper and enjoy it on one of the wooden benches.

Getting there: Take the A Loop inter-terminal bus to the Marine Air Terminal. The spot is best appreciated in the warmer months, of course. Like the Marine Air rotunda it is outside of the TSA checkpoint, so you’ll need some time.

2. The connector walkway between Terminals B and C at Logan International Airport in Boston.  This isn’t one of the newer, elevated walkways with the inlaid sea life mosaics, cool as they are, but rather the old, main-level passageway between gates used by AirTran and Virgin America. Massport has installed a series of whimsically painted rocking chairs that face floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the runways. There’s relatively little foot traffic and, best of all, no public address speakers. It’s a quiet, sunny location to read, send some text messages or otherwise relax.

Getting there: From terminal C, walk toward B. From B, walk toward C. Stay on the main level; don’t take the stairways into the elevated walkways.

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.