Ask the Pilot

What have we come to when foreign airlines tout around-the-world travel that avoids the U.S.? Plus: Make your own airline route maps. And: Wizz Air?

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Flying, Airplanes, Security, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

Aug. 10, 2007 | All right, no doubt you caught the latest Transportation Security Administration alert. Allegedly, would-be saboteurs engaged in terror-attack rehearsals have been caught trying to sneak bomb-making materials past airport security. Over the past several weeks, we are told, screeners have confiscated various improvised components -- including, um, wires sticking from blocks of cheese. A new twist on the "dry runs" conspiracy we've been following for the past three years. I have decided not to author an entire column on this bizarre story because I run the risk of repeating myself for the umpteenth time. (For reference, click over to my earlier discussions, such as this one or this one.) I'm reluctant to dismiss the warning out of hand, but no less disturbing than the threat itself, provided that it's real, is the way we've accepted the government's account at face value. The alert was sounded on every major network, radio station and newspaper in the country, but I am yet to hear a single journalist ask the obvious question: Who were these alleged smugglers, and where are they now? Let me get this straight: People have been caught smuggling deadly components through airport security, and nobody knows or cares who they are? They must have names. Were they not arrested or held for questioning? Or did guards simply confiscate their rigged cheese and let them pass? How can it be that potential attackers disappear into the ether like that? Call me naive, but something's fishy. When it comes to airport security, we've been sheep from the very beginning, but this emerging pattern of willing submission to vague, unconfirmable threats from invisible "terrorists" is pushing things to a new level.

Speaking of airport security, passengers were detained last month aboard a Continental Express flight after a brief altercation broke out involving "American Idol" star Clay Aiken. (I'd never heard of Aiken before, but the story made quick headlines thanks to the pop-culture tinderbox that is the American media.) I received a letter from a man who'd been on the plane. "After landing, we were forced to remain on board for more than 30 minutes, without being told why," he writes. "Most of us weren't aware that anything had happened. Then, federal agents came onto the plane and interviewed people sitting near the 'altercation' site before 'releasing' us. At one point the flight attendant said, 'This is 2007, and you need to watch what you say on a plane.'" That really gets me. Apparently it's the travelers' job to keep their mouths shut, when it ought to be the authorities' job not to overreact.

"Air New Zealand Offers Round-the-World Routing Avoiding the U.S." That was a recent headline from U.K.-based Business Traveler magazine. For the past several years, fliers bound from Australia and New Zealand to Europe by way of U.S. stopovers have been raising a ruckus about security policies that require all passengers, even those merely in transit to other countries, to clear U.S. immigration formalities -- a process that includes fingerprinting, photographing and baggage rechecking. Air New Zealand has responded with the launch of a service from Auckland to Europe with a hassle-free transfer at Vancouver, British Columbia, eliminating its long-standing Auckland-Los Angeles-London route. Air Canada is following suit with a nonstop Vancouver-Sydney flight, bypassing its traditional layover in Hawaii, which, in the words of the magazine, "will enable global travelers to avoid the United States." What have we come to?

For evasive nonanswers to these questions and more, check out Bruce Schneier's interview with TSA major-domo Kip Hawley. There are moments when the Kipper does all right under Schneier's questioning, and seems to have a wry sense of humor. Which goes to show you how dysfunctional government bureaucracies can be, and how powerless their leaders are when politics and public perception, not reality, are calling the shots. Here's a seemingly reasonable guy in charge of an agency whose on-the-ground operations are in many ways farcical.

Note from a recent trip to Africa: Seen from 35,000 feet, the surface of the Kalahari Desert has the exact texture of 40-grade sandpaper, sprayed lightly green.

After Hungary's Wizz Air splashed onto the scene (sorry) a few years ago, I was sure we'd hit the bottom of the barrel as far as airline names go. Not so fast. Now comes Skybus, a low-cost entrant based in Ohio. Could they not have tried a little harder? You can make the cheap-fares point without resorting to such awful connotations. (PeopleExpress, for example, had the right idea.) At least when the name Airbus was coined in the late 1960s, flying was still dignified and the pejorative not so obvious. Folks don't think of buses as convenient and inexpensive; they think of buses as dirty, crowded and tedious. Which, yeah, I know, is exactly how they've come to think of flying (one irony being that buses today are often more pleasant and comfortable than planes). But do they have to rub it in?

Flyglobespan, an upstart offering cheapo fares between the U.S. and Scotland, is pretty bad, too.

And I still don't know what an "AirTran" is.

There's an airline in Kazakhstan called Zhezkazan Zhez Air. There are five Z's in that name. I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but a loud sneeze should be a close enough approximation.

A pilot friend of mine worked for a time in Azerbaijan. The national airline of Azerbaijan is Azul, which according to Mike is pronounced "asshole."

Next page: Guess which country's airlines didn't get the nod from the World Airline Awards?