Air Travel

Several e-mailers raised this same complaint, and I see your point. Noise levels on planes aren't nearly as excessive as those in terminals, but come to think of it, there is an awful lot of yammering going on. There can be up to a half-dozen cabin P.A.s before your plane even reaches the runway, sometimes in multiple languages. Is this really necessary?

To some of these announcements we grant a pass. Surely there's nothing out of line about a brief welcome-aboard speech, for example, or other practical reminders. However, if there is one hideous and glaring example of excess, it has to be the pre-departure safety briefing. Is there anything more tedious?

In America, commercial flying is governed by a vast tome known as the Federal Aviation Regulations, or FARs -- an enormous, frequently unintelligible volume that personifies aviation's flair for the ridiculously arcane. Of its crown jewels, none is a more glittering example than the safety briefing -- 25 seconds of useful information hammered into six minutes of prolix rigmarole so weighed down with extraneous language that the crew may as well be talking Aramaic or speaking in tongues.

Whether prerecorded and shown over the entertainment system, or presented "live" the old-fashioned way, the demo has become a form of performance art, a campy adaptation of legal fine print brimming with ornamental gibberish. "At this time we do ask that you please return your seat backs to their full and upright positions." Why not, "Please raise your seat backs"? Or, my favorite: "Federal law prohibits tampering with, disabling, or destroying any lavatory smoke detector." Excuse me, but are those not the same bloody things? Doesn't "tampering with" pretty much cover it?

With a pair of shears and some common sense, the average briefing could be trimmed to half its length, resulting in a lucid oration that people might actually listen to. All that's really needed is a short tutorial on the basics of exits, seat belts, flotation equipment and oxygen masks. That shouldn't take more than a minute or two.

Once upon a time, when riding along as a passenger, I would shoot dirty looks at those who ignored the demo, and even made a point of paying undue attention just to help the cabin staff feel useful. After a while, realizing that neither the FAA nor the airlines have much interest in cleaning up this ornamental gibberish, I stopped caring. (Note: This does not excuse those passengers who insist on carrying on conversations over the announcement, effectively doubling the volume. Whether we need to hear a flight attendant explain the operation of a seat belt is open to some debate; we definitely don't need to hear the guy in Row 25 talking about his favorite seafood restaurant.)

Meanwhile, reach into your seat pocket and you'll discover a pictorial version of this same fatty babble: the always popular fold-out safety card. Similar to the demo, these are a pedantic nod to the FARs. The talent levels of the artists speak for themselves; the drawings appear to be a debased incarnation of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

When I was a kid I used to collect these briefing cards. My friends and I called them "escape cards." I had examples from TWA L-1011s, Braniff 727s, Allegheny DC-9s and so on. Poke around the Web and you'll see that I wasn't the only one.

Still worse are the cards spelling out the emergency exit row seating requirements. The rules covering who can or can't sit adjacent to the doors and red-handled hatches were a controversy for some time, and one result was a new standard in FAR superfluity -- an excruciating litany set to cardboard and packed with enough regulatory technobabble to set anyone's head spinning. Exit row passengers are asked to review this information before takeoff, which is a bit like asking them to learn Japanese in 12 minutes.

Look, blame the FAA for this silliness. It's typical of the agency's self-defeating obsession with minutiae and its forest-for-the-trees micromanagement of safety.

Crew members, though, can always make a bad situation worse, and some of you sent e-mails griping that pilot P.A.s are often as superfluous as those from cabin crew. This had me feeling self-conscious and a bit microphone-shy on my last work trip. I won't argue that my own announcements are short, but I avoid the folksy "Like to thank y'all fer flyin' with us today" kind of thing, and I stay away from jargon. If ever you catch me uttering the phrase "at this time," then clearly I've gone over to the dark side.

Here, how does this sound:

Good morning, ladies and gentleman, from the cockpit. We'd like to extend our welcome aboard Flight 96, nonstop service to São Paulo, Brazil. This is First Officer Patrick Smith speaking; I'm joined today by First Officer Neil Armstrong and Capt. Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin.

Our flying time to São Paulo will be nine hours and 20 minutes. Our route of flight, for those of you interested, will take us slightly west of Bermuda, then down across the Caribbean, passing just east of the island of Trinidad. We'll make landfall again near Georgetown, Guyana, and those of you on the right side should catch a nice view of Venezuela's Orinoco River Delta. Eventually we'll cross the Amazon River overhead the city of Santarém; then southbound passing over Brasilia before beginning our descent into São Paulo. Weather on arrival should be hazy skies and a temperature of around 90 degrees Fahrenheit -- about 32 Celsius.

We're waiting for some final luggage and freight to be loaded, and expect to be pushing back on time. We should be looking at a slightly early arrival, depending on the length of the takeoff queue. We'll give you a more accurate ETA once in the air. Again, nine hours and 20 minutes en route, and we hope you enjoy the flight. Thank you.

That's a template -- names, flight time, routing, arrival weather, departure status -- that I stick to very closely. Like I said, it's not short, but I try to keep it practical.

It varies from carrier to carrier, but guidelines do exist outlining the acceptable tone and content of crew-member announcements. Sayeth your General Operations Manual, Chapter 5, Verse 12: Do not discuss politics or religion. Off-color jokes, innuendo or slurs of any kind are forbidden. Thou shalt maintain only nonconfrontational rapport, lest the Chief Pilot summon and smite thee. (I strongly advocate that the recitation of college football scores be added to the list of prohibitions, but that's just me.) Rules might also restrict -- and not without good intentions -- the use of potentially frightening language or alarming buzzwords. One airline I worked for had a policy banning any announcement that began with the words, "Your attention, please."

"Your attention, please. Southeastern Central Nebraska Tech has just kicked a last-minute field goal to pull ahead of North Southwestern Methodist State, 31-28."

Another no-no is launching into complicated, jargon-rich explanations. "Yeah, uh, ladies and gentlemen, looks like 31L at Kennedy just fell to less than an eighth. It's under 600 right now on all three RVR. They're calling it Cat-III, and we're only Cat-II up here, so, um, we're gonna do a few turns over the VOR, then spin around and shoot the ILS to 22L. They've got a 300 and a half over there."

Um.

To me, the important thing is to avoid overburdening people with information they can't use. Take the weather. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my hunch that nobody cares that the wind is blowing from the southwest at 11 knots, or what the dew point is. They want to know if it's sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy, and what the temperature is.

The only thing worse, maybe, than a pilot trying too hard to be informative is a pilot trying to be cute.

For that, let's flash back to the early 1990s and my very first airline job.

Our 19-seater had no flight attendant, and it was the responsibility of the first officer to give the safety demo, providing the opportunity to hone his or her public speaking skills. With most regional copilots qualifying for food stamps, this also was a natural segue into researching a second career. Namely, comedy. Southwest's stand-up routines have nothing on the wisecracking and ad-libbing heard at Northeast Express Regional Airlines, circa 1992, believe me. Of course, I know of no airline pilot ever taking the stage at a comedy club, which is a testament to just how awful most of these routines were. "But seriously, folks, your seat cushion becomes a flotation device! Is this thing on?"

Other planes had built-in cassette players, through which all regulatory announcements were taken care of by a sober-sounding fellow with a voice like James Earl Jones. Side A was the safety demo, which would run and then automatically stop. When the time came, you'd flip to Side B for the pre-landing spiel. With the tape decks on hand, I’d sometimes carry albums to work. Out on the apron between flights, I’d have lunch (usually something from Spinelli's, over in East Boston, which would splatter my shirt with enough tomato sauce to make it look like I'd murdered my passengers) and listen to music. One thing led to another, of course, and every now and then riders would be treated to the greatest hits from Patrick Smith's collection of 1980s alt-rock.

The idea was to play a couple of songs while people got comfortable, then switch it off once the engines were started. Occasionally I'd forget, and the music kept going. Neither I nor the first officer could hear a note of it, strapped with headsets, but I'm sure some people dug it. What could be more consoling to passengers, already agitated and uncomfortable, than belligerent rock music mixed with the din of thousand-horsepower engines?

En route to Burlington, Vt., one evening, the noise was enough to prompt a weary-looking businessman to stick his head into the cockpit and ask, "Could you please turn that racket off?" Oh hell, I thought, the tape! I reached for the player, then paused with my finger on the switch and asked him, "You mean the music, or the engines?"

Before I go, a clarification:

Two weeks ago, in my critique of Der Spiegel's analysis of last year's Air France disaster, I wrote the following:

"There are upward of 600 A330s in service around the world, plus another 350 of its almost-identical twin, the A340. Together they have flown tens of millions of air miles, and to date only one has crashed. That's a better per-unit hull loss rate than for any Boeing model."

Actually the A3340/A340 model has suffered three hull losses in commercial operations -- two flown by Air France and one by Iberia -- versus only one for the Boeing 777. I was trying to make a comparison between fatal accidents. The first two Airbus mishaps were runway overrun incidents -- including one covered at length by yours truly, here and here -- in which nobody was killed. Air France 447 was the first and only deadly accident involving an A330 or A340.

In either case, however, the math is wrong, since there has never been a fatal 777 crash.

What I was trying to say and what I wrote were quite different, and I concede it was sloppy reporting -- not to mention embarrassingly ironic since it occurred in the context of my snarkily criticizing a Der Spiegel reporter for his own misleading comments.

Let me try again:

"There are upward of 600 A330s in service around the world, plus another 350 of its almost-identical twin, the A340. Together they have flown tens of millions of air miles, and to date only one has been involved in a fatal incident. That's a better per-unit hull loss rate than for any Boeing model save the 777."

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

But when, last month, CNN covered the story of a passenger kicked off the jauntily named Jazz Air for having "brutal" B.O. , the comments section of its Web site lit up with complaints about the most despised menace of all in the friendly skies: babies. On the one side, there was the sentiment summed up by the poster who wrote, "Babies should be banned from planes, movie theatres, restaurants, and any other public place for that matter. The rest of the world don't think your kid is as cute as you do." And in the other corner were requests like, "Can we just ban annoying, whining adults from planes who complain about children? Or maybe we can give them Nyquil so the rest of us with a heart don't have to deal with them."

Such was the fury over the issue that last night, CNN posted a follow-up specifically on babies and air travel, featuring advice from a psychologist who says, "The other people on the plane do not have to be subjected to your child crying. It is absolutely not something that they should be expected to endure. They can't leave. So if you're flying, it means that you may have to get out of your seat and walk around, pace the airplane and make sure your child has a pacifier and a bottle. You may be tired at the end of the trip, it may not be a great flight for you, but that's your job as a parent."

In 10 years of parenting, I have flown roundtrip with my children exactly three times, so I have way, way more experience listening to other people's babies scream and having other people's toddlers kick my seat than anyone has putting up with mine. And I've still got to say: If you think you "absolutely" should not be expected to endure children fussing on a plane, you are going to be one miserable, bitter traveler. Oh, wait! Maybe you already are!

As soon as the CNN story posted, the commenters again came out swinging, racking up nearly 3,000 posts in a matter of hours. While many took the rather reasonable stance typified by the poster who said, "Wow, we do live in a society and babies are a part it," others had a somewhat dimmer view.

"I do not want to hear babies screaming on a flight. Period," wrote one gentleman. "When I travel, I am usually working and very tired. I use the flight to catch up on rest. If your child cannot stay quiet, or at least be quieted down quickly, then don't fly with them, because you will hear from me directly." I'm sure he's a delight with the flight attendants, too. Of course, the old chestnuts were also in heavy rotation: "You are selfish and only thinking of yourself," wrote one user, while another added that, "If as a parent you are unable to adequately handle the rigors of parenting in various stressful situations (such as an airport) then perhaps you should not have had children to begin with."

But perhaps even more deeply at odds with reality were the commenters who echoed the CNN story itself, the ones who blithely observed, "Think ahead of every eventuality beforehand and be prepared for it. Apart from one instance when one baby was sick, I have never had an unruly, noisy or disruptive child," and, "Those of us who were lucky enough to have competent parents didn't annoy the heck out of too many other people." See? If your kid cries while the guy in 23F is working on his PowerPoint presentation, it is so your fault.

Does society lack for lousy parents and bratty kids? I don't see us running out of either any time soon. So it's surely a good thing that, within that lightning rod CNN story, there were plenty of wise reminders that parents traveling with kids should err on the side of preparation and attention to their offspring and courtesy to their fellow passengers. It doesn't, however, change the fact that kids are loose cannons who often, just for the hell of it, make noise and poop in their pants.

If the wailing baby in front of you is bumming you out, that's understandable. If you think "you should buy a muzzle for your kid" or that the parents need to "remind me to get a seat next to you during every flight you take from now on so I can scream in your ear the entire way," you may want to consider the possiblity that you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. And that's the real great illumination of the CNN story -- something many of us already know all too well. Sure, flying sucks and the planet is full of rude, clueless people, but if you really want to see some outrageously childish stuff, just go straight to the comments section on any story about how other people ought to behave.

What should happen to the controllers who allowed this to happen? That's not for me to say, but I do have one question for them: What were you thinking? Archived air-to-ground communications are easily accessible on the Web, and the media adores any sort of aviation controversy, whether or not lives are ever in actual danger. Yes, this is a much bigger story than it ought to be, but I'm not surprised that we're dealing with it. 

Now, as for more weighty matters ...

Here at my hometown airport, Boston Logan, the first of Transportation Security Administration's new full-body scanners was wheeled into place earlier this week. More will follow. In Europe, several of the machines are up and running.

This is the latest and one of the more disheartening developments in our long war on the abstract noun called "terrorism." What's next, I have to ask, in this unwinnable arms race/shell game? Richard Reid hides a makeshift bomb in his sneakers, and from now until the end of time we all have to take our shoes off; radicals in London come up with a supposed liquid explosives scheme, and we're forever forced to sequester our toiletries into tiny containers; a guy puts a bomb in his underwear, and sure enough we're required to parade naked before getting on a plane. Where will it end? Or is this the end?

If, a decade ago, we were told that people would soon have to appear naked in order to board an airplane, the claim would have been met by peals of laughter and/or howls of outrage. But here it has come to pass, and what's our reaction? One or two muffled complaints and quiet acquiescence.

"Well, if it means we're safer ..."

That's what people say. Except -- never mind for a minute the perils of swapping away rights for false security -- they don't even mean it, in the first place. Safety? Is that what this is about? Obviously not. After all, you're far more likely to be killed in a highway crash than be blown up on an airliner, so why aren't we out there spending billions and stripping away our liberties in the name of highway safety? We still hear righteous cries of fascism any time the cops set up DWI roadblocks -- heaven forbid "the man" make me blow into a tube -- but sure, I'll doff my boxers if it protects me from "terror."

And somewhere, beneath all of this, rests the uncomfortable, seldom acknowledged reality that, no matter how hard we try, we're never going to make our airports and airplanes completely safe by means of  banning, confiscating and X-raying. There will always be a way to skirt the system. And as I've said before, the real job of keeping terrorists and criminals away from planes belongs to law enforcement and intelligence -- to the FBI, CIA, Interpol -- not to TSA screeners on the concourse.

Is anybody listening? I didn't think so.

Anyway, onto something more fun ...

I'm excited, I think, to announce that Ask the Pilot now has its own Facebook page. I say "I think" because the idea wasn't mine and the page remains, shall we say, unauthorized. It's the work of Steve Hartman, one of my more devout apostles. Steve says the page is great, but truth be told I've never been to Facebook in my life, and I'm afraid to look. Let me know if he needs to be reined in. 

Though, actually, neither security nor Facebook were on my to-do list for this week. What I really wanted to talk about was a recent article in Der Speigel. Last week, the online unit of the highly respected German magazine ran a splashy (terrible pun, I know), 2,800-word analysis of last year's yet-unsolved Air France disaster. Many of my readers have been curious to know if Spiegel's reporter, Gerald Traufetter, had the facts right.

On May 31, 2009, Flight 447, an Airbus A330 headed to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, crashed into the ocean off northeast Brazil after an apparent encounter with powerful storms. The accident was covered in this column in four separate installments, here, here, here and here.

To what extent weather and/or mechanical failure may have played a role remains a mystery, and may never be fully understood. Traufetter gives it a try, and does a reasonable job when it comes to the overall scenario; there's nothing blatantly inaccurate or misleading in the piece. However, it definitely spits and sputters when it comes to the small stuff. I couldn't help wincing on several occasions. Let me pick my way through and show you a few examples which are instructive not only in the context of this particular story, but are typical of the oversimplifications and inaccuracies that infect almost all mass-media aviation reportage. I hope my clarifications will provide some how-it's-done insights that you'll find interesting:

I began to get nervous with the very first line…

"The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris last year is one of the most mysterious accidents in the history of aviation. After months of investigation, a clear picture has emerged of what went wrong."

The second sentence seems to directly contradict the first, which itself isn't really true. One of the most mysterious accidents in the history of aviation? The recent history of aviation perhaps, but going back over the decades one finds any number of unsolved crashes, some of them a lot more mysterious than this one. Crashes might be few and far between, but they do occur and we don't always determine a cause. Planes have disappeared without a trace. With this one we at least have physical evidence and can bracket what went wrong.

"Many frequent flyers have since opted for daytime flights across the Atlantic because pilots can recognize storm fronts more easily during the day."

Many frequent flyers? Have they? I'm suspicious, and in any case there are very few daytime, east-to-west transatlantic crossings. Most flights go at night -- to allow for connections and for optimum aircraft utilization.

"A half moon lit up the Atlantic Ocean on the night of May 31, offering reasonably favorable conditions for a flight through the dangerous intertropical convergence zone."

Major foul on this one. I'm hoping it was a gaffe in the translation from German to English. "Dangerous," he says. The intertropical convergence zone is an area of latitude on either side of the equator in which tall and fierce thunderstorms sometimes erupt. On moonless nights these storms -- and smaller turbulent buildups as well -- can be difficult to pick out, visually. But that's what on-board radar, datalink weather updates, and real-time pilot reports are for. And although storms in the ITCZ can be powerful, they tend to be isolated and comparatively easy to circumnavigate. Commercial aircraft do not fly in "dangerous" areas; meanwhile, thousands of flights navigate through the ITCZ every day. Unpredictable? Sure. Challenging? It can be. But dangerous? Absolutely not. A terrible choice of words.

"Captain Marc Dubois ... has more than 70 tons of kerosene pumped into the fuel tanks."

Here the author is discussing preflight preparations on the ground in Rio. This is getting nitpicky, but people might find it interesting: The captain does not, as a rule, determine or supervise fuel loading. The required amount of fuel is set in advance by an airline's dispatchers and flight planners, in strict accordance with a long list of regulations. A captain has the final say and can always request extra, but initial fuel planning is not part of his job.

The applicable regulations are intricate and can vary country to country (an aircraft is beholden to its nation of registry, plus any local requirements if they're more stringent). The U.S. rule is a good indicator of how conservatively things work: For flights going overseas, there must always be at least enough fuel to carry a plane to its intended destination, then to its designated alternate airport(s), plus another 30 minutes buffer,  plus yet another buffer representing 10 percent of total flight time. Sometimes two or more alternates have to be filed in a flight plan (another batch of rules), upping the total accordingly. The preflight paperwork includes a detailed breakdown of anticipated burn. En route, the remaining total is cross-checked against the predicted total as waypoints are passed.

"It's only by means of a trick that the captain can even reach Paris without going under the legally required minimum reserves of kerosene that must still be in the plane's tanks upon arrival in the French capital. A loophole allows him to enter Bordeaux -- which lies several hundred kilometers closer than Paris -- as the fictitious destination for his fuel calculations."

Ooh, a loophole, and a "fictitious destination." Must be scandalous. Except that it's not. Inflight redispatching is common and does not change the fact that an aircraft must, at its redispatch point, still have enough remaining fuel to reach its destination and any required alternates, plus a buffer. The author is setting up a scenario that suggests the crew may have been shy about diverting around storms due to worries about fuel or a possible diversion.

"'Major deviation would therefore no longer have been possible anymore,' says Gerhard Hüttig, an Airbus pilot and professor at the Berlin Technical University's Aerospace Institute. If worse came to worst, the pilot would have to stop and refuel in Bordeaux, or maybe even in Lisbon. 'But pilots are very reluctant to do something like that,' Hüttig adds. After all, it makes the flight more expensive, causes delays and is frowned upon by airline bosses."

The insinuation here is complete bull. Obviously an unplanned fuel stop is not an ideal situation, and sure, pilots are reluctant to embark on a major deviation to avoid en route storms. But, believe me, they'll do it if it's the proper thing to do. The idea that pilots would press on through a dangerous storm to save time or money, or in fear of reprimand, is highly offensive. "Airline bosses" aren't fond of diversions, you're right. Neither are they fond of accidents that kill hundreds of people, and no respectable carrier would ever call any crew onto the carpet who'd made an unplanned fuel stop because they opted to give powerful thunderstorms a wide berth.

Although we'll never know for sure what the pilots were looking at on their radar, the weather encountered by Flight 447 may not have been all that severe. Failure of the plane's airspeed probes and subsequent loss of its control systems was probably the critical factor, and could have occurred in weather that, by itself, wasn't dangerous.

And who is Gerhard Hüttig, and was he taken out of context? His being an "Airbus pilot" does not mean that he flies for an airline, and as I've pointed out in past columns, aviation academics (professors, researchers, etc.,) are often terrible sources, possessing limited knowledge of the day-to-day realities of commercial flying.

"The Sensors Fail. It's hard to imagine a more precarious situation, even for pilots with nerves of steel: Flying through a violent thunderstorm that shakes the entire plane as the master warning lamp starts blinking on the instrument panel in front of you. An earsplitting alarm rings out, and a whole series of error messages suddenly flash up on the flight motor."

I'll give you that, though presumably he means "monitor" not "motor," which I think is a reference to one of the cockpit display screens.

"Did the pilots on flight AF 447 know about the airspeed indicator failures experienced by colleagues on nine other aircraft belonging to their own airline? Air France had indeed distributed a note about this to all its pilots, albeit as part of several hundred pages of information that pilots find in their inbox every week."

I can't speak for Air France, and "several hundred pages" strikes me as a real stretch, but he makes a fair point. Pilots are routinely inundated with reams of technical arcana: manual changes and updates, memos, bulletins, alerts. This material is dull and often impenetrably dense. Determining what's important can be difficult.

"… it's unclear who was controlling the Air France plane in its final minutes. Was it the experienced flight captain, Dubois, or one of his two first officers? Typically, a captain retreats to his cabin to rest a while after takeoff."

Not exactly. Flights longer than eight hours' duration typically carry at least one extra pilot -- normally an extra first officer -- which allows for a series of rotating breaks. Essentially each pilot spends a third or so of the flight off-duty, as it were, relaxing or sleeping. As for who gets the first break, beginning shortly after takeoff, well that depends. And what's this about "his cabin"? The size and luxuriousness of on-board rest facilities varies with airline and aircraft type -- it might be just a cordoned-off seat in business class, or it might be a spacious room with comfortable bunks and a changing area -- but always they are shared. This is a jetliner, not a cruise ship. The captain does not have a cabin of his own.

Also there's the implication that the first officer is, by definition, less experienced than the captain. Without getting into the nuances of airline seniority bidding, this is usually the case but not always. Either way, all three crew members are fully qualified to operate the aircraft in all regimes of flight, including emergencies.

"In contrast to many other airlines, it is standard practice at Air France for the less experienced of the two copilots to take the captain's seat when the latter is not there. The experienced copilot remains in his seat on the right-hand side of the cockpit. Under normal circumstances, that is not a problem, but in emergencies it can increase the likelihood of a crash."

Another major foul, and using terms like "less experienced" gives a totally wrong impression. It's tempting to prefer that the most "experienced" pilot be in the captain's seat as an emergency is unfolding. I would prefer the best pilot to be there. Experience and skill are not necessarily one in the same. As it happened, both first officers were present, both were fully qualified to operate the aircraft, and on which side of the cockpit they were sitting really didn't matter. A plane can be flown, and all of its systems operated, from either seat.

"Not long after the airspeed indicator failed, the plane went out of control and stalled … According to this scenario, the pilots would have been forced to watch helplessly as their plane lost its lift. That theory is supported by the fact that the airplane remained intact to the very end."

You lost me here. I don't understand this conclusion at all. If the plane goes out of control and stalls, you would expect it to not remain intact to the very end. But it was intact, apparently, rapidly descending and striking the water belly-first, in a right-side-up, mostly flat attitude.

Did the airspeed sensors fail? How did they fail? How did the plane's complex computerized flight control system react? And how, in turn, did the pilots react? Did their errors compound a serious but survivable emergency, or were they doomed from the beginning? It's likely we'll never know for sure.

Another pressing questions is whether Airbus was already aware of potentially faulty speed sensors on some of its aircraft, and whether it should have done more to alert airlines and crews. Prior to the Air France disaster, other A330s suffered failures similar to the one suspected to have been a factor in the crash of Flight 447.

The more comforting news is that operators and pilots are now well aware of this potential problem, and are better prepared to respond should it happen. Airbus has designed an improved warning system for sensor malfunctions. Granted, some open questions remain, but in the meantime, should passengers be wary of these planes? The practical answer is no. There are upward of 600 A330s in service around the world, plus another 350 of its almost-identical twin, the A340. Together they have flown tens of millions of air miles, with only one fatal accident. That's not to brush controversies or responsibilities under the rug; it's to remind you of the extraordinary rarity at which accidents like this occur. 

Next time: The babble of the takeoff safety briefing

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

Recordings from mid-February -- during a weeklong winter break for many New York schoolchildren -- were posted last month on a Web site for air traffic control-listening aficionados.

The child can be heard on the tape making five transmissions to pilots preparing for takeoff.

In one exchange, the child can be heard saying, "JetBlue 171 contact departure." The pilot responds: "Over to departure JetBlue 171, awesome job."

The child appears to be under an adult's supervision, because a male voice then comes on and says with a laugh, "That's what you get, guys, when the kids are out of school."

In another exchange, the youngster clears another plane for takeoff, and says, "Adios, amigo." The pilot responds in kind.

The FAA said the control tower is a highly secure area for air traffic controllers, supervisory staff and airport employees with a need to be there. FAA spokesman Jim Peters said children of the tower's employees are allowed to visit but would need to get approval from the FAA first.

The union representing air traffic controllers condemned the workers' behavior.

"It is not indicative of the highest professional standards that controllers set for themselves and exceed each and everyday in the advancement of aviation safety," the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said in a statement.

Smith submits that he was not presenting an inconvenience or hazard in accordance with Southwest's own rules, in which case Southwest may have erred.

Naturally this whole topic will slide into a cuss-filled discussion about why the seats have to be so damn small in the first place. To which I respond: in order to keep airfares as cheap as the public demands they be. Per-seat margins for airlines are razor thin, and the only way to keep economy tickets affordable for everyone is to configure aircraft the way they are configured.

Contrary to what people think, aircraft seating layouts have not really changed over the last 30-plus years. Airlines are not, in fact, cramming in more seats, as conventional wisdom holds. There is no less legroom or arm space than there ever has been, really. A 737, just to pick one (Southwest has an all-737 fleet), has always had six seats across in economy class, with roughly the same amount of average legroom as you'll find today. If anything there is slightly more room in economy than there used to be. Newer models like the A320 series, for instance, are slightly wider than older narrow-body standards such as the once-common 727, 707, etc. And certainly a wide-bodied A330 or 777 is a better ride than, say, an old DC-10.

What's changed, of course, is our average waist size.

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Now let me hit a few things from the letters forum a couple of weeks ago. Readers segued nicely from my "You know what bugs me?" rant — about flight attendants who make the welcome speech while the plane is still screaming down the runway — to recording their own long litany of complaints.

First on the list is a comment from "websmith."

"What's really annoying," submits websmith, "is when the airlines tell you that there's no first class seats available ... and the first thing that you see upon boarding is a flight attendant or pilot sitting in first class for free. Apparently these entitled astronauts don't realize who is responsible for them having jobs."

Not quite. It is true that employees riding standby will sometimes be upgraded to a vacant seat in first or business class. However, it is not true that said seat will be denied to a paying passenger in order to make this happen. I cannot tell you why the opportunity to upgrade wasn't available on a given flight; the rules for mileage redemption and whatnot can be Byzantine and hard to follow, and they don't always seem to be fair. You can direct your complaint to the airline's pricing, marketing or frequent flier departments. All I can tell you for sure is that no premium seat is ever blocked for the benefit of a freeloading employee. If one of us is sitting there, that seat was not open for upgrade and would otherwise be going out empty.

One exception to this would be an occasion when an on-duty crew member is being repositioned — deadheaded, as we say. Work rules may stipulate that a repositioning pilot is entitled to a seat in business or first. Though even this is very rare on domestic routes — it's mostly an international thing.

Why do I have a feeling you don't believe me?

Next up is a letter from reader Douglas Moran.

"You know what really bugs me?" he asks. What really bugs Moran is "How friggin' loud it is in airports." He goes on to describe the typical gate-side cacophony of cellphone conversations and incessant public address announcements.

Ah, now we're on to something. There are few of us who wouldn't sympathize. And apparently Moran has not been a regular reader of my column, or he would know that I've long been an airport noise crusader (er, complainer).

If anything, the problem is getting worse, and it's a peculiarly American phenomenon. Latin American airports are sometimes clamorous, but those in Europe and Asia are often blissfully quiet. One of the things that struck me about Korea's fabulous airport, Incheon International, was its cathedral-like calm. In the States it's another story. Here's a cut from the new edition of my book:

If American airports need to borrow one idea from their counterparts in Europe and Asia, it's that passengers need not be bombarded by a continuous loop of useless and redundant public address announcements. In many U.S. terminals you'll have three or more announcements blaring simultaneously, rendering all of them unintelligible in a hurricane of noise. Furthermore, we must seek and destroy every last one of those infernal gate-side monitors blaring CNN Airport Network. These yammering hellboxes are everywhere, and they cannot be turned off. There is no button, no power cord, no escape. Not even airport workers know how to shut them up.

The problem isn't about crowds. For the most part it isn't the passengers themselves who create all the racket, but rather the profligate means through which we attempt to control, cajole and entertain them.

I was at JFK not long ago, trying to find a quiet spot to read between flights. It was late in the evening and the terminal was more or less deserted. Yet the decibel level was at full-on headache thanks to the endless security warnings and CNN chatterboxes. The departure lounges were empty, but the announcements were still playing and all of the TVs were going. Not only was this an assault on my senses, but an offensive waste of energy to boot.

(On that second point, I noticed the moving walkways and escalators were also running nonstop, even without riders. What could be more wasteful than powering thousands of pounds of moving sidewalk when there's not a pedestrian in sight? And what is it that prevents Americans from installing those motion-sensitive triggers that the rest of the world always seems to have?)

Curious, I tracked down a couple of employees, including a supervisor, and asked if they could turn a few of the TVs off or, at the very least, lower their volume. Neither of the workers had any idea how the sets were controlled. "You'd have to ask the Port Authority," I was advised with a shrug.

And good luck taking matters into your own hands. There is a neat little device on the market called TV-B-Gone — a universal, remote-control off button that fits on your key chain. A surreptitious tip of the hand, and bing, off goes any TV within about 40 feet. A major coup, you think?

Alas, TV-B-Gone is effective only against a small percentage of sets, not including most of CNN's. The makers of the blasted electronic cyclops have caught on, and screens are now insulated against tampering. Merciless as it sounds, they've installed blockers that effectively force you to watch. Not even the volume is adjustable, and not even those companies on whose turf the broadcaster is operating — the airlines — or the customers they are aggravating, can do anything about it. Talk about capturing your audience.

And while I don't want to take this too far, isn't there something just a tad creepy and Orwellian about televisions that cannot be turned off?

I have a feeling that somewhere out there is a survey in which a majority of travelers insist that they enjoy and appreciate the chance to watch TV at the gate. That may well be true, and I am not suggesting they be denied this privilege outright. But a license to entertain and a license to harass are different things. If the TVs have a right to be there, we should also have the right to get the heck away from them, should the desire arise. That's what's missing.

But television is only one facet of the noise plague, and not the worst offender. That dubious honor goes to the insane cycle of public address announcements that bellow endlessly from the terminal sound system. As I type this article, I'm sitting at Gate B18 at the U.S. Airways facility at Logan Airport in Boston. I am pleased to report there are no TVs. There is, on the other hand, an eternal barrage of nonsense crackling from unseen speakers. I've been counting, and there's a maximum of about 10 seconds between announcements.

And virtually none of those announcements, by the way, serves any useful purpose. Why, for instance, are we being told about TSA's liquids and gels restrictions after we've passed through security? Ditto for the dissertation on curbside parking regulations. We can also do without the numerous airport promotional spots. Did you know that Boston's Logan airport offers more daily flights than any other airport in New England? No kidding, I thought it was Bangor, Maine. Not to mention I am already at Logan Airport and thus I fail to see the value of a promotion whose purpose is to get me here.

And don't get me started on "threat-level orange" or my good-citizen duty to turn in fellow passengers for "suspicious behavior."

Between these extremely important proclamations we're treated to (some) music and (much) advertising, courtesy of "Airwaves, the Sound of Boston Logan." This is the airport's in-house, prerecorded "radio" station. Airwaves delivers "high-quality programming 24 hours a day, seven days a week." I know this because that, too, is being broadcast at regular intervals, together with a pitch inviting customers to purchase ad time, through which they can "reach [which is to say annoy] tens of thousands of air travelers."

Periodically drowning out this brain-scrambling sound storm are the slightly more valuable gate-side pages and boarding calls. Of course, no attempt is made to first pause whatever is already playing. The second wave of blather is simply added to the first one — except it's louder. At some airports this sonic layering is unbearable. I have heard up to four P.A. calls playing simultaneously.

At Logan, even the moving walkways have their own separate sound system, with directives to attend to children and the warning, "The moving walkway is nearing its end." Do we really need this coddling claptrap? As if people can't figure out when they need to start moving their feet again? (Of course, you're supposed to walk on a walkway, not stand and block the way, but that's a complaint for a different time.)

Then you've got the shrieking kids, the beeping carts, the cellphone chatter and so on. It's a multi-front attack that, short of applying headphones or earplugs, is virtually inescapable, seeping into every nook and corner of the terminal, at all hours of the day or night.

If ever all of this struck me in a moment of intolerable clarity (and hilarity), it was the night last Christmas in JetBlue's new shopping mall — er, terminal — at JFK, where, rising above the din, just barely audible, were the strains of Bing Crosby singing "Silent Night."

Flying is stressful enough, and nothing pushes already jangled nerves over the edge more quickly than excess noise. Do we really need this? What are they thinking?

Ironically, the actual loudest things at an airport — the airplanes themselves — are almost never heard, buffered behind walls of glass and concrete. And it's not until you step aboard your plane that you finally find some peace. The transition from terminal to cabin is almost palpable. So long as there isn't a baby nearby, the cabin is a welcome sanctuary of sudden quiet. (Though not everywhere. Some airlines have, you guessed it, taken to playing music and promotional spots during the boarding and disembarking process.) And for exactly this reason we all should be very concerned about proposals that would allow the use of cellphones while aloft.

Once on board, for the quietest ride en route, try to sit as far forward as possible. The loudest seats are usually in the back, near or behind the engines. Airplane acoustics are strange, and the difference between forward and aft can be quite substantial. If you're seated in a back row, engine noise comes at you in a deep, loud roar. Up front, on the very same plane, it can be almost completely silent.

And finally, one more player in the what-bugs-me game ...

"What makes an airport terminal like a casino?" a poster called "mgriscom" wants to know. "With very few hidden and randomly placed exceptions, there are no clocks."

I usually wear a watch, and this is something I've never really thought about, but mgriscom is right, you don't see clocks in airports, which doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that punctuality is part and parcel of flying.

However, here's a trick: All you need to do is check out one of those arrival and departure monitors. They tend to be conveniently placed, and they almost always display the exact local time, usually along the bottom or top of the screen — provided some idiot hasn't turned them off with his TV-B-Gone.

Not only will they tell you the time, but best of all they are silent!

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