Air Travel

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, and to date only one has crashed. That's a better per-unit hull loss rate than for any Boeing model. 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.

Perhaps they even had the special misfortune of sitting next to a rude fat person, the kind who doesn't even seem contrite about infringing on someone else's severely restricted personal space -- a portly cousin to The Armrest Hog, The Seat-Kicking Kid or Reclines Right Into Your Lap Guy.  There's no shortage of rude people of all sizes, but it seems like everyone's got a story about that whale who made a two-hour or three-hour or even five-hour flight pure hell for the adjacent paying customers. (The fact that airlines try to keep costs down by packing passengers in like sardines and routinely overbooking flights has nothing to do with it, evidently.) And most of those people think charging larger customers double to make everyone a little less miserable is a perfectly reasonable solution.

Which is why part of me is glad the Kevin Smith debacle happened -- though I'm terribly sorry he had to go through it -- because it put a recognizable face on the experience of flying while fat. See, those of us who are and/or love people to whom airlines' "person of size policies" apply don't automatically envision the discomfort of getting stuck next to a fatty; we envision the physical and emotional pain of being the fatty crammed between two potentially hostile strangers, at the mercy of flight attendants who might decide we're fine on one flight and a "safety risk" on the next. As a commenter at my body image blog put it (I might have deleted an expletive or two):

[T]his one really means something to me... he's talked about it being humiliating. This specific language really personalizes it, makes it concrete. It's not just an inconvenience or bad business. It's personal and it's HUMILIATING and it's important to name that and not shy away from it."

Here's the first thing I think of when this issue comes up, for instance: The weekend my mom was dying. Two of my siblings and I got to her bedside within hours of getting the call that she'd had a massive heart attack. Our other sister took two days to get there. She could fly coach, technically, with a seatbelt extender and the armrests digging into her sides. But she couldn't afford two seats, especially on such short notice, and knew she might be forced to buy another if the airline decided she was too big to count as a single human being. She knew she might be bumped from the flight she'd paid for, and forced to wait around for one that was less full, for who knows how long, while our mother's organs were shutting down in another country. And she knew that even if she was allowed to fly on the flight she'd booked, there was every chance she'd end up sitting next to someone who would spend the whole time sighing heavily and throwing her dirty looks -- then probably spend the rest of her life telling the story of being next to that awful fat woman on a flight from Boston to Toronto, that disgusting creature who just booked a single seat without a thought to the people who would have to brush up against her monstrous bulk for a couple of hours, like she had to be somewhere so important it was worth inconveniencing strangers.

So, rather than deal with any of that, my sister chose to drive a thousand miles as fast as she could, hoping she'd get there in time. While she was on the road, the doctors informed us that there was nothing else they could do, so the whole family's focus shifted from wondering whether Mom would make it to wondering whether my sister would. A nurse reassured us that Mom would hold on long enough ("They always wait for their babies") and as it turned out, she did. Just. But that agonizing day of asking my mother to please hang on a little longer -- while she was wracked with pain beyond the reach of morphine, moaning like a wounded animal when awake enough to communicate at all --  is the first thing I always think of when the debate about whether fat people deserve affordable air travel comes up. You think of some lumbering beast who had the gall to "steal" an inch of your seat that one time. I think of a dying woman waiting for the last of her babies to say goodbye.

I also think of my tall, 300-pound friend who flies a lot for business, and is terrified that one day she'll suffer Smith's fate, then have to call her boss and say, "Yeah, I won't be able to make the meeting you were sending me to, and I might need to expense the cost of a second ticket, and if we want to make sure this never happens again, you'll have to pay twice what it would cost to send a thin person up front." And I think about the fact that she doesn't live in any of the few cities or one state in the entire country that prohibit discrimination based on body size. And I wonder, like she does, how long it would be before she lost her job to someone who fits better in a coach seat.

I think of the non-famous people who have been thrown off flights for making thin people uncomfortable -- the brother and sister on their way home from their mom's memorial service, the man who didn't make it to a family funeral at all, the man living on disability who couldn't afford a second seat to meet with doctors about a liver transplant -- and all of the commenters at my blog who say, every time we talk about this, "I'm terrified to fly" or "I just don't fly." Not because they have anxiety disorders, or they were traumatized by "Lost," or because airplane terrorism has done its job on them -- because they're fat. And they can't afford two seats. And even if they're just small or lucky enough that they can probably avoid being escorted off the plane like a criminal, the risk of smaller-scale humiliations -- sitting next to someone who complains about their size; absorbing flight attendants' naked disdain; overhearing someone say "I hope I don't have to sit next to her"; being told, as Smith's seatmate on his later flight was, that they should really purchase two seats in the future to avoid making other people uncomfortable; plus the aforementioned dirty looks and heavy sighs -- is often enough to keep them at home. It's enough to make people say things like, "Maybe I don't really need to see my family this year" and "I won't bother applying for a job that requires travel" and "It's just easier to vacation close to home" and "If I start driving now, I think I'll get there in time to say goodbye."

I think of the people who tell me they've tried to "do the right thing" and book two seats, because they could afford it and wanted to avoid the hassle -- only to find that the airline's reservation system makes it nearly impossible and customer service representatives had no idea how to help them. I think of the ones who did manage to book two seats, then were forced to surrender one anyway, because the flight was overbooked -- they eventually got refunds, but not all the space they paid good money for, hoping to avoid as many of those smaller humiliations as possible.

I think of the thousand humiliations, small and large, most fat people have already endured in their lives -- the insults from family and "friends," the cow-calls on the street, the discrimination, the bullying, the news every day that their bodies constitute a horrifying crisis for the American public. I think of how dreadfully uncomfortable it is, physically and emotionally, to fly in a fat body that isn't bruised by the armrests and doesn't require a seatbelt extender, and how much worse it would be if I weighed significantly more, like some of my family members and dearest friends do. I think of how few people would be willing to raise the kind of fuss Kevin Smith has (let alone how few fat folks could get so many people to listen) because they would automatically be too ashamed of themselves if a flight attendant made a public spectacle of removing them from an aircraft.

And then I read Southwest's apology to Smith, which includes such gems as "If a Customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a Customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement." And I think, first, "If we allowed a cramped, restricted seating arrangement? Because 'The Greyhound of the Skies' is positively roomy when there are no fat people on board?" And second, I think, "Translation: Fat paying customers' fully expected discomfort only becomes a problem for us if it also makes the paying customers we care about uncomfortable."

And then, against my better judgment, I read the comments sections on articles about this issue and see things like "Fat people should be imprisoned for over consumption. They've eaten more than their share! I'm glad I wasn't sitting next to this hog" and "I have travelled next to someone like, sweaty, panting, snoring, knocking drinks over at a sigh because the table was resting on him... Should have gone as cargo," and right here at Salon, "Fat people are disgusting. They should travel by ox cart or something. I mean really. Do they need to inflict their smelly fatness on everyone else?" (That person even finishes with a little straight-up eliminationist rhetoric for good measure.)

And I read comments from lots of people who are less openly hateful, but still think that fat people should buy two seats or lose weight or stay home -- not that the airline has any responsibility to, say, ensure that adequate seating is available for everyone or treat people of all sizes like equal (not to mention individual) human beings -- and you know what I think? Forgive me, but sometimes there's no other way to say it: Fuck you. That's what I think.

 

What happened next was a classic example of the power of social media, the changing world of corporate public relations, and our own deeply divisive attitudes about weight. Smith kept right on tweeting his expletive-rich version of the story, and his followers spread it faster than it takes to fly OAK to BUR.

Did Southwest muck it up spectacularly with regard to Smith? Sure looks like it. Smith claims that, according to the airline's own written policies, he wasn't violating any of its requirements. He could put his armrest down. He could buckle his seat belt without an extender. And even if he had exceeded the company's safety restrictions because of his size, you'd think they'd have figured out a less fat-shaming way to work with their paying customers than ignobly hauling them off the plane.

Instead, after booting Smith, Southwest lamely offered him a place on another flight and a $100 voucher. Smith understandably called BS on that, and continued to tweet his rage. "Wanna tell me I'm too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM @SOUTHWESTAIR," he wrote. He also posted a special edition of his "smodcast" on his "portly misadventure" with the unambivalent name "Go fuck yourself, Southwest Airlines."

It was a sentiment echoed by many of Smith's fans and followers, who tweeted their support and their own horror stories of public humiliation. "I must say I teared up when I read how you were treated by SW Air. I would die," wrote one Twitter follower, while another vented, "Does it matter that he's a millionaire? What matters is that we fat people get mocked by dickheads most of our lives, it's wrong." And our own Kate Harding offered her take on the dustup on her Shapely Prose blog.

Of course, along with outrage over Southwest's customer service fail came plenty of vitriol against the plus-sized. "Just because you are lazy as most obese people are doesn't mean you should get special treatment" griped a commenter on ABC News, while another noted, "You made the choice (and think it is funny) that you eat poorly and are overweight. You need to take personal responsibility for that which includes paying consequences for that weight."  A few even more cynical souls noted that the publicity storm is well-timed to the new movie "Cop Out" he has coming out later this month. Smith's tweeted response? "HA! This is the first flick of mine that DOESN'T need free publicity."

Yesterday, Southwest issued a public statement on the incident and its tussle with "not so silent Bob" explaining that Smith, who by his own admission says on his smodcast that, "When I fly Southwest, generally, I like to buy two tickets ... Even if I'm traveling alone I tend to buy two seats," was flying standby on a single ticket that fateful Saturday flight. He therefore couldn't board until the plane was full, which contributed to the ultimate mortifying event.

"Southwest instituted our Customer of Size policy more than 25 years ago," the airline continued. "The policy requires passengers that can not fit safely and comfortably in one seat to purchase an additional seat while traveling."

It was a carefully crafted and decidedly unheartfelt response to a very human experience, and one that will not likely satisfy customers already skeptical of an airline that has also 86'ed miniskirt wearers and toddlers. Nor did it address Smith's claims that he did in fact meet the airline's size restrictions. (Smith, meanwhile, made it on to another flight -- and taunted Southwest with "Hey @SouthwestAir! Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off!")

But though the situation is now somewhat resolved, it highlighted a dilemma facing Southwest -- and every other airline in the sky. Kevin Smith is not the only fat guy in America, nor is he the biggest. Southwest's corporate embarrassment is just a spectacularly public version of a scenario being played out on flights all over, every day.

There are no easy answers. I don't want to see people penalized and humiliated by being kicked off airplanes they've already boarded. And Southwest's ejection of Smith highlights how easy it is to get these safety policies wrong wrong wrong.

As I've written before, I also have flown next to individuals who clearly did not fit into their seats, who didn't hesitate to snap up the armrest and help themselves to my space. So if we're ranting about corporate sizeist unfairness, surely we can also spare some griping for the person who gets on an airplane with the expectation that the thin person next to him has real estate to surrender. Guess what -- slender people don't have a monopoly on being rude.

And without any extensive knowledge of physics, I'm pretty sure airplanes cannot become efficiently airborne if they exceed certain weights -- that's not discrimination, that's danger. It's not a simple case of one person, one ticket, when the laws of aerodynamics themselves tell us it's about the weight of craft -- especially when you're dealing with those smaller Oakland to Burbank style shuttle planes.

Mocking the overweight -- telling them it's their fault if they're big and they can "fly cargo" if they don't like it -- doesn't do anything to solve the problem. But there's also a vast difference between that level of cruelty and what ought to be a clear-eyed assessment of potential safety and comfort. Is it biased to acknowledge that? While Smith may indeed fit comfortably in one of those indisputably horrible, too small airline seats, a lot of people can't -- and that's not going to change. Airlines have to figure out how to accommodate all their passengers, regardless of size, in a way that's safe, equitable and not embarrassing -- for everybody. Because there are a lot more people with phones and Twitter accounts than there are planes in the sky.

I don't know why this irks me as much as it does. There's something undignified about it. And with all the racket from the engines, nobody aft of the wings can even hear. Can't they wait until the plane is on a taxiway? It's not as if it doesn't take another 20 minutes to reach the gate.

A similar thing goes on in the cockpit, courtesy of impatient air traffic controllers who apparently don't understand that pilots in the throes of landing a plane are busy. You're still at a hundred knots or more, with the reversers up, making your callouts, and here's ATC rattling off instructions: "Flight 78, roll to the end, turn right on taxiway T to taxiway GG and hold short of runway 16R, monitor tower on 123.7..."

Hah? What? Who? And if you don't answer back within three seconds, they get upset. Everything else about flying seems to move in ultra-slow motion, from the boarding process to the security lines. Why the rush with the announcements and instructions?

Just asking.

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But on a more important note...

Last Tuesday the National Transportation Safety Board revealed its findings on the crash of Colgan Air (Continental Connection) Flight 3407, the Dash-8 turboprop that went down near Buffalo on Feb. 12, 2009. For the most part, the board's conclusions merely reiterate what we already knew:

Essentially, during final approach, crew inattentiveness allowed the aircraft to slow to a point where a stall-warning system activated. The proper reaction to the warning would have been to add power and keep the plane's nose either neutral or slightly low. Capt. Marvin Renslow got the first part right, but he inexplicably pulled back on the control column, raising the nose and throwing the plane into an aerodynamic stall. It then crashed to the ground, killing everybody on board.

For in-depth analysis of the accident, including technical discussions of stalls and warning systems, see my prior columns here and here.

The idea of pulling back on a control column to offset an impending stall violates even the daftest pilot's most rudimentary intuition, never mind his training. It's not a whole lot different from standing on the accelerator when you mean to stand on the brake. Why Renslow did this is anybody's guess. Some have speculated that he may have believed the aircraft was suffering a horizontal stabilizer stall rather than a stalling of the wings, in which case his actions made more sense. But he had no real reason to think this, as the stall-warning system (a combination of an alarm and a so-called stick pusher) is tied to the wings, not to the stabilizer. Perhaps, or even probably, it was nothing more than panic. As an NTSB psychologist put it, Renslow's response was "consistent with startle and confusion."

That startle and confusion would have been exacerbated by the fact that, as Renslow saw it, the plane should not have been stalling. Prior to takeoff, in anticipation of possible icing conditions, Renslow had armed a system that would trigger the stall warning at a higher-than-normal speed. However, he and his first officer, Rebecca Shaw, mistakenly left their airspeed reference indices at the normal values. Thus the warning system was reacting to ice that wasn't present, and based on what their airspeed instruments were telling them, a stall warning made no sense. This confusion does not justify the deadly mistake of pulling back instead of pushing forward, but it certainly was fuel to the fire. As were a host of contributing factors, such as Renslow's (very) spotty training record, chatter in the cockpit, Shaw's sinus trouble and possible crew fatigue.

In many ways the crash represented a perfect storm of everything that is wrong and dysfunctional about regional airlines, from the absurdly low pay (Shaw earned a salary of about $17,000) to the long hours and hostile working conditions. I'll remind you, as I have in the past, that regional flying is by no means unsafe; the fact that accidents remain so few and far between is a testament to the thousands of highly skilled and well-trained regional pilots out there performing admirably in tough conditions. But to keep things safe -- indeed, to make them safer -- we need to be proactive. Carriers and regulators need to work together with an eye toward better hiring and training standards, better working conditions, and improved flight and duty time rules.

On that last issue, the NTSB was unable to reach a consensus on whether pilot fatigue had played a role, recommending only that airlines address the practice of "commuting" -- that is, pilots flying to work assignments from distant cities, sometimes several time zones away. Both Renslow and Shaw had commuted to Newark prior to their final workday -- Shaw coming all the way from Seattle — and spent the night dozing in the airline's airport crew room.

"This commuting issue is one that everyone wants to turn their head away from," said NTSB chair Deborah Hersman. "The pilots don't want to talk about it; the airlines don't want to talk about it."

I was a little stunned by this. Granted, commuting is a factor if we're going to talk about fatigue at regional airlines. But what about the pilots' work schedules themselves? It worries me that commuting, rather than the Federal Aviation Administration's inadequate duty time and rest rules, is going to get the bulk of public attention.

More than 50 percent of crew members commute, pilots and flight attendants alike. Commuting can be complicated and, I admit, occasionally stressful. Airline employees almost always ride standby, and company rules require us to allow for backup flights in case of delays or cancellations. This can mean having to leave home several hours before sign-in, in some cases a full day prior. But on the whole pilots are pretty good at getting adequate rest prior to work. Once that work actually starts, however, a schedule can be highly demanding. Regional pilots routinely work 12-, 13-, even 14-hour days, flying multiple legs in and out of busy airports, sandwiched between minimum-rest layovers. Actual flight time is held to a maximum of eight hours, but the time spent on duty — waiting out delays, transferring between flights, etc. — is not as strictly regulated. (Neither is it always compensated for; per-hour salaries are similarly based on airtime, not ground time.)

And although the opportunity to commute is a privilege that allows crews to live where they please, it can also be a necessity. Aircraft and base assignments change frequently, and having to uproot and move each time a new bid comes out — especially if you're making $30,000 or less and trying to support a family — would be enormously disruptive and expensive. Moreover, can you really expect a junior pilot or flight attendant to live in Boston, New York City or any other expensive metropolitan area on a regional airline salary?

Word on the street is that regulators might attempt to rein in commuters, restricting the number of hours a crew member can spend in transit prior to signing in for duty. This, I think, is a bad idea, and I would recommend focusing first on revising the FAA's inadequate rest and duty provisions. Regulating commutes would be extremely difficult, and at some point you're attempting to regulate what somebody can or can't do in what is essentially his or her spare time. Are you suggesting a pilot shouldn't commute the morning of a trip? Well, why is catching a flight necessarily more fatiguing than anything else he might be doing that morning? Etc.

For those of us assigned to international routes, commuting is comparatively easy, and the work assignments generally less stressful. Duty periods tend to be longer — many of them overnight flights to Europe or beyond — but we have fewer of them. I typically commute three, sometimes four times each month, while a regional pilot might have to do it five, six, seven times or more. And with augmented crews we get scheduled rest breaks en route, together with long layovers in nice hotels. Many long-distance commuters will bunch their assignments together into one or two continuous stretches totaling anywhere from 10 to 15 days. This means having to spend a night or two in a hotel or crash pad between trips, but requires only one or two flights to and from home each month.

My commute is about as easy as it gets. I've got gobs of departures to choose from, and it's a short flight with no time zone changes. I've met plenty of colleagues who commute coast to coast, and one or two who do it from Europe. I know of a flight attendant who makes the trip to his base in New York from Santiago, Chile, and have been told about a now-retired Eastern Airlines captain who commuted to Atlanta all the way from New Zealand.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Not all the news recently is bad or controversial. You probably missed it, but Monday, Feb. 8, was something of a historic day in commercial aviation. That afternoon, Boeing's 747-8, the newest variant of the company's iconic jumbo jet, completed its long-awaited inaugural flight.

The 747 is arguably the most important aircraft in aviation history. When it debuted in 1969, it was more than double the size of any existing aircraft, with economies of scale that made long-distance air travel affordable for millions. And it did so with an aesthetic dignity seldom seen anymore in commercial transport. Forty years on, this newest version is bigger, sleeker and packed with technological advances, yet it remains true to the 747's original profile. No, it's not the biggest commercial jet anymore, but it remains the most elegant.

For more, see my essay comparing the 747 and the Airbus A380.

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And lastly, apropos of last week's introduction to "Captain Steve," the Ask the Pilot knockoff ... To those of you who sent letters: Thanks for the moral support. Meanwhile the whole thing got me thinking. I'm somewhat surprised there aren't more of these gigs out there. That is, more experts from this or that unusual profession writing, answering questions, and otherwise sharing insights. Much the way there's a "Dummies" book for just about every pursuit, it strikes me there must be a market out there for some good insider info. If nothing else, there's a pleasure that comes from reading about certain lines of work — especially those we're glad not to be doing ourselves.

A little of this is already out there, obviously. Not all purveyors specialize in Q&A forums the way I do, but various trades have their commentators and storytellers of record. The most famous of them is probably Anthony Bourdain. Though if you ask me, his popularity is less about any compelling backstage glimpse than simply exploiting our obscene infatuation with food.

More talented is Atul Gawande, the surgeon, author and commentator, whose insights into the world of medicine often appear in the New Yorker. I usually find them riveting and can't put them down, even if I'm reading through a haze of extreme jealousy. Not only is Gawande wealthier, more famous and a better writer, but he's younger than me.

Where can we take this? "Ask the Exterminator." "Ask the Systems Analyst." "Ask the Bouncer."

Er, well, maybe the idea is more limited than I thought. Of course the important thing isn't so much the profession itself, but rather how it's presented. I have no predisposed interest in cuisine, for example, yet I thoroughly enjoy Bourdain's essays (and, to a lesser degree, his TV show). I use this same standard for measuring my own success. My most savored letters are those from devout readers who openly admit that they couldn't care less about flying. That's about as flattering as it gets.