April 11, 2024 THE PHOTO ABOVE was taken in Boston, a week or so ago in the newly expanded section of terminal E. The plane is an Airbus A340. But what’s important is that yellow box. See it, along the right edge of the main boarding door? Any guesses what it’s for? Turns out it’s a sort of dry-erase board — an empty placard onto which crewmembers can write greetings to the passengers. “Welcome aboard,” and that kind of thing. Maybe everyone signs their names, or someone draws a whimsical sketch of mountains or a palm tree, depending where you’re off to. On the interwebs you can see reels and ..read more

March 19, 2024 TEN YEARS AGO this month, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The wreckage was never found. There’s a solid chance the wreckage will never be found. And although that’s unfortunate, I think we can pretty well deduce what happened: the plane was intentionally brought down by one of the pilots, most likely the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, in an act of murder-suicide. It was ditched somewhere in the Indian Ocean — landed, if you will, on the surface of the sea — where it sank to to the bottom and rests today, undetecte ..read more

March 4, 2024 HERE’S THE perfect segue from last week’s post. If you missed it, we were talking about the hype and hyperbole that seem to follow every minor incident these days, a phenomenon that I blame, in part, on the dearth of legitimately serious accidents. It often feels as if flying is getting more dangerous, when statistically we’re safer than ever. To wit, according to the annual report just released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) 2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history. Not a single fatal accident was recorded involving a comme ..read more

February 9, 2024 So, earlier this week the U.S. Senate shot down the move to increase the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 67. The measure lost by a single vote. Lawmakers succumbed to pressure from the Air Line Pilots Association, which spent months lobbying against the change. The matter now goes to committee and there’s still a shot it could pass. But I wouldn’t count on it. ALPA opposed the measure, but many of its constituents, including myself, did not. The union spun the whole thing as a safety issue, and warned of air travel becoming more “complicated” if it went through. The simpl ..read more

January 8, 2024 POOR ALASKA Airlines. There they were, leisurely mulling the finer points of their merger with Hawaiian, wondering which visage to paint on the tail, when the 737 MAX-9 stole the show. Pop went a fuselage plug on flight 1282, decompressing the jet and scaring the daylights out of everyone on board. The plane landed safely, but now a number of MAXes are grounded as regulators focus on attachment bolts. The MAX can’t catch a break, either. This is the plane that spent two years on hiatus after the crashes of Lion Air flight 510 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, until its twice ..read more

December 21, 2023 THE OTHER DAY I came in from overseas. At immigration I used the Global Entry line, as I normally do. The process was easy: a quick facial recognition scan and I was through. Later I started wondering about that scan. Where did immigration authorities (CBP) get the biometric information used to identify me? I don’t recall signing over a scan of my face. Do you? Not to sound paranoid, and I’m not saying we should object, necessarily. But the question is important: how do they know what we look like, and who gave them this data? Maybe we did. It could happen when applying for ..read more

December 4, 2023 OVER THE WEEKEND, Alaska Airlines announced it will purchase Hawaiian Airlines for a reported $1.9 billion. If approved, the merger will form the nation’s fifth-largest carrier. I find this interesting for a number of reasons — though probably not the ones most people are talking about. You can pop over to the other news and travel sites to learn about how this union does or doesn’t make sense, strategy-wise. You can read about loyalty programs, stock prices, and the alleged woes of yet more industry consolidation. My take is more fun: Alaska and Hawaii. Our most geographicall ..read more

November 21, 2023 I SHOULD PROBABLY say something about the off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot who made headlines after attempting to shut down the engines of a Horizon Air regional jet en route to San Francisco. Joseph Emerson, 44, who was riding in the cockpit jumpseat, faces multiple counts of attempted murder. Emerson says he believed he was in a dream-state at the time after dosing on psychedelic mushrooms two days earlier. He’d been traumatized by the death of a close friend, and, it has been reported, was dealing with longstanding mental health issues. Where the drug use and mental health ..read more

AN OLD-TIMEY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SESSION. Eons ago, in 2002, a column called Ask the Pilot, hosted by yours truly, started running in the online magazine Salon, in which I fielded reader-submitted questions about air travel. It’s a good idea, I think, to touch back now and then on the format that got this venerable enterprise started. It’s Ask the Pilot classic, if you will. Q: I appreciated your rant about excessive public address announcements at airports and during flight. However, announcements from the cockpit can’t escape attention. Seriously, can some of your fellow pilots please st ..read more

September 13, 2023 THIS FRIDAY is Cloud Appreciation Day. There’s really such a thing, says the Cloud Appreciation Society. There’s such a thing as that, too. Sure, why not? Who doesn’t like clouds? PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR Those second two are a spectacular example of cumulonimbus. Thunderstorms, in other words. These are the clouds aviators avoid. They’re picturesque, but as atmospherically unfriendly as clouds can be. Any type of cumulus cloud — the white fluffy ones — generally indicates unstable air and turbulence of varying degrees. But while fair-weather cumulus are by and large harmles ..read more