December 28, 2009

Somewhere between prohibiting Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from flying and allowing him onto an airplane with explosives stashed in his briefs, there’s a gulf. Rather than bridge this chasm by focusing increased attention on the half million suspicious persons who have been identified, new rules will keep hundreds of millions of non-threatening passengers confined to their seats; books, blankets and computers protectively out of their laps in a response that will do little to address the real terror threat.

As could be predicted, the thwarted attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas day is resulting in a swift and sweeping - if not well-thought out response.

In television interviews, Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano is doing her best to explain what looks like a security lapse. In the past few weeks, Mr. Farouk was outed by his own father who went to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to explain that his son’s behavior was growing increasingly worrisome. The 23-year old’s name was added to the list of known or suspected terrorists. The list is 500,000 thousand names long and it is this sizable number that seems to have national security folks stumped.

“You have to understand that you need information that is specific and credible if you are going to actually bar someone from air travel,” Ms. Napolitano is quoted as having said on CNN. This is frighteningly reminiscent of the quote by President Bush who, when asked why an August 6, 2001 memo warning of Al Qaeda activity didn’t prompt some kind of national security response said, "There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to."

Herein lies the gulf. Without specific information, security professionals certainly can take preventive actions, short of actually barring people from flying, (like say, Cat Stevens)

Each day the Transportation Security Administration is responsible for screening two million air travelers in the United States with little differentiation in the amount of attention given to each traveler.

Can we ask that the when one of the 500,000 on that list actually buy an airline ticket that their passage through the security be given just a tad more attention than the family headed to Disney World?

We should also expect that some methods be used to leverage the information presented to authorities by conscientious folks like Mr. Farouk's dad. Simply adding names of suspicious folks to a list that doesn't get checked isn't even one step up from doing nothing at all.

December 27, 2009

As we opened Christmas presents the other morning, the kids and I took notes about who gave us what. That list, scribbled in the chaos of Christmas morning, becomes an important document when it’s time to write our thank you notes.



I got into the habit of writing thank you notes when I was a young girl. My mother was insistent that all four of her children should write letters to everyone who gave us presents. It didn’t matter if the gift had been delivered in person and the gift giver verbally thanked, or if the present came from a perfect stranger.

Each year in the spring, my brother and my sisters and I would arrive home from school to discover a box full of presents from England. These were Christmas presents that never arrived in season. That was fine with us. We fell on them with great enthusiasm coming as they did, so long after our Christmas gifts had lost their novelty.

The box from Europe always had really cool things. One year we got some very unique mechanical pencils and boxes of replacement lead. There were toys and other doodads you just didn’t see in the States. England was still a long way away back then. My siblings and I loved the stuff that came in those cartons. For quite a while I never questioned the reason or the source of the gifts and it wasn’t until I was old enough to write thank you notes that it even occurred to me that there was a person behind the loot.

As it turned out, there was a pretty interesting story there. They came from a woman who had been communicating with my mother since the two of them were 13-years old. They were pen pals. Their correspondence continued through high school and into adulthood. In fact, my mother and Nette still keep in touch going on 63 years now.

It will come as no surprise then, that when I was in junior high school, mom encouraged me to get a pen pal. It seems so quaint now, in the age of email and IM and cell phones to think of a time when if you had something to say to someone you sat down, wrote it out, revised it, addressed an envelope, found a stamp, walked to the mail box and trusted that your news would be transmitted to the recipient within a week or two and that you’d have a reply in the next month. It sounds like I’m remembering life in a past century and I guess I am.

In any event, that is the kind of expression in which I was encouraged to engage and I have over the years filled my share of diaries and journals as well. While I was not, nor am I now a prolific epistolarian, I’ve written two books, and worked as a journalist for three decades so I guess I’ve killed a tree or two at this point in my life.

The most dependable pen pal I ever had was my grandfather, Sam. Because he was very generous with me I was obliged to write thank you notes with some frequency. I might have resented having to write the letter but I knew once it went into the mail, I’d hear back from him promptly.

When his letter arrived, it contained two things; a personal and handwritten reply, which included an update on his life and comments and questions about mine, and also my original letter with each misspelled word circled and each grammatical error corrected.
My grandfather could not bear for English to be maltreated and that went for the spoken word too.

When we were together if I started a sentence saying, “There was this girl…” I’d hear, “You mean - a girl I know.” If I reported on some activity involving my brother by saying, “Me and Jamie…” I’d hear, “You mean - Jamie and I.”

The parallel track to my grandfather’s lectures on proper English was the vocabulary and spelling component. Sam had a prodigious vocabulary. Though I never learned if it was inadvertent or intentional, I never had a conversation with my grandfather when I didn’t learn the spelling and definition of at least one new word. You may be thinking that Sam was a bit of a scold, but that’s not the case. We’d play games together. Especially Scrabble. That was a favorite.

In short, my grandfather was fascinated with words. He was taken by their variety and elasticity, how one root could branch into many others. He loved the specificity and power and structure of words.

The other thing my grandfather loved was travel. And I think these two great interests clashed because while he appreciated learning about people and nations around the world, he was frustrated that his marvelous facility with English did not serve him in many of the places he visited.

For many years he entertained the idea of creating a universal language called Pip. He used to talk to me about it and one detail that I remember is that no word in Pip would be more than one syllable. Now I think that my grandfather was ahead of his time, working out in his mind a vocabulary of words that would serve the global village.

As far as I know, Pip did not go any farther than our dinner table conversations. It certainly did not bring my grandfather fame and fortune. Sam practiced tax and estate law and made enough money so that he was a frequent donor to Rutgers School of Law, where he received his degree. His daughter - my mother - recently helped create of a law library reading room in my grandfather’s name. That is a great gift to his memory.

So when I think about my mother and her father one of their greatest gifts to me was teaching me to appreciate words. When used properly they can bridge cultures, enlighten minds and bring ideas to life. So in this season of gift giving, I want to show my appreciation for the great lessons they taught me through thank you notes.

Very funny!

See the update on this post here

December 22, 2009

“The airport ramp is most dangerous workplace in the world.”
International Air Transport Association

Because they die one by one, the deaths of airport workers are little noticed events. While families grieve, news accounts focus on the question of whether airline operations were disrupted or air travelers inconvenienced.




If you think I’m overstating the case, view the coverage of the death of an unnamed Calgary airport worker on Monday. He died while de-icing a airliner, apparently falling to his death from the bucket of the de-icing equipment. The man worked for Servisair Canada, which provides an array of ground handling services to airports around the world.

Calgary International Airport spokeswoman Jody Moseley told The Canadian Press “It's a very unusual occurrence and a very tragic one." In fact, while it is indeed tragic, ground-based airport accidents are not unusual. They occur with startling frequency.

In November 2007, the U.S. General Accountability Office issued a report on ramp safety that showed in the five years previous, fatal airport ramp accidents were happening in the U.S. at a rate of six per year.

I’ve found no consolidated database tracking either worker injuries or damage to aircraft. The best I can come up with is a detailed spreadsheet, created by Bob Matthews from the FAA Office of Accident Investigation. Bob's numbers show from 1981 until May of this year there were 247 serious ramp safety events.

"My guess is that we've captured maybe 3 percent of the total events and probably 90 percent of serious events," he told me this afternoon.

I remember when I first heard about the problem, at a conference of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators in 2005. A member of the safety staff of Norway's Wideroe Airlines told me his airline was hard at work trying to reduce the number of accidents. After that I started paying more attention and saving and filing away the reports I heard about these kinds of accidents. Some of the thumbnail stories here, which are not inclusive, beg the question “Is enough being done to address this problem?”

• May 2009 - Miami International Airport - A worker loading baggage on an American Airlines B777 falls to his death.

• October 2008 - O’Hare International Airport - Three people are injured when a United Express SkyWest Airlines airplane collides with a Chicago Department of Aviation truck operating on the runway. The airport employee had to be cut from the truck.

• January 2008 - Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport - An airport lavatory service vehicle collides with a catering truck on the tarmac, killing the 19 year old driver of the lav truck.

• August 2007 - Raleigh Durham International Airport - The driver of an airport vehicle is killed in a collision with an American Eagle airplane.

• May 2007 - Newark Liberty International Airport – A worker is killed after being struck by a tail stand for an Eva Airlines Boeing 747.

• April 2007 - Detroit Metropolitan Airport - Two events in two days, one of them deadly. A ramp worker is struck by an airplane tug and killed. The driver of a de-icing truck flips the vehicle over. He is suspected of working while intoxicated.

• February 2006 - El Paso International Airport - Passengers on a Continental Airlines B737 are horrified to see a contract mechanic sucked into a jet engine while troubleshooting an oil leak.

• June 2005 — Reagan National Airport – The operator of a baggage loader gets lodged beneath a USAirways airplane and is killed.

• September 2003 — Norfolk International Airport - A tug operator gets pinned between the tug and the nose of a Northwest Airlines plane and is crushed to death.

• August 2001 — Reagan National Airport - A ramp agent walks into the propeller of a USAirways commuter plane at in Washington DC and is killed.

If injuries to airport workers and the threat to airline passengers weren’t enough of a concern, the commercial aviation industry ought to, at minimum, be motivated by the financial implications. Ground based airport events are second highest airline cost after fuel for many airlines around the world according to the International Air Transport Association.

IATA, which represents airlines and ground handling companies, estimates $4 billion is lost every year in damage to airplanes by baggage handlers, catering trucks and airport ramp vehicles. IATA warns that this number may vastly under represent number of dollars lost. Smacking a catering truck into a $50 million airplane can cause tremendous damage, putting the aircraft out of service for days or weeks. And the consequences can be even more dramatic.

In December 2005, a hole blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight causing a rapid decompression of the cabin at 26-thousand feet. Prior to the plane's departure from Seattle, an airport worker hit the side of the MD-80 airliner causing undiagnosed structural damage, which caused the rupture of the fuselage as the plane pressurized. Jeremy Hermanns, a passenger on the flight writes extensively about the experience on his blog.

While Hermanns and the rest of the passengers got the scare of their lives on Alaska Airlines Flight 536, it obviously could have been much worse. The danger is in diminishing the seriousness of the problem because the worst didn’t happen.

All of which is to say - as the Calgary airport’s spokeswoman suggests - that the death of an airport worker is a tragedy. But it is more than that. It is a symptom of a larger problem that should concern everyone who flies.

Click here for the full interview with Gary Kelly of Southwest.

December 19, 2009

In the not too distant future, Southwest Airlines, the company that made its reputation by playing industry contrarian may look more like the competition. In an interview, Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly told me the airline has matured to the point, "we have to be more than just a low fare carrier." (view the complete transcript on my website www.christinenegroni.com)

The transition became most evident earlier this year when Southwest broke its self-imposed exile and began flying to major airports like New York’s LaGuardia and Boston's Logan. In 2010, it plans another significant shift when it offers international service through code share flights to Canada on WestJet and Mexico on Volaris.

“Southwest has been a unique entity in the airline industry because they have been so non-traditional," said John Cox an independent airline consultant. "They are seeing the wisdom of becoming more traditional. Whether that will work, remains to be seen."

Perhaps the most important and least seen change in Southwest policy was its fare hikes. Kelly touted the decision in a speech to the Wings Club in New York last Thursday. New technological implementations on the airline website he said, enabled it to charge “higher average fares” while keeping more folks on the website actually booking tickets. While Southwest raises fares and every legacy airline advertising low, low, low ticket prices, the definition of a low fare airline is getting fuzzy.

“If you go back to two or three years ago, the legacy carriers were able to charge 30% more than Southwest would charge,” said Bob Herbst, who runs the website airlinefinancials.com. That’s no longer the case. “So many tickets are purchased via the internet, the lowest fare is the airline that makes the sale. The public is a lot smarter now when they book an airline,” Herbst said, “There’s a lot more level playing field.”

That is a point, Kelly seems to get. “We have a whole array of low fare competitors out there. Every single legacy airline posts low fares, the world is different and we have to adjust accordingly.” Kelly said, “Competition has changed and customer expectations have changed.”

So it was a case of role reversal when legacy carriers imposed baggage fees and Southwest, ostensibly the “no frills” carrier maintained its bags fly free policy. Did passengers notice? Kelly says yes. By his calculations the decision contributed to a 1% increase in market share this year.

“If you shift one percent,” from the legacy carriers to Southwest, that’s worth $800 million, he told me.

These dramatic departures have some employees worried and no one explains why better than John Gadzinski, a veteran Southwest pilot. When he first arrived at the airline, he told me it “recognized they didn’t own 747s and they were never going to be a flag carrier and fly to China, but Southwest could do the short haul domestic market ten times better than anybody else.”

And for 38 years the Southwest formula has meant uninterrupted profitability and such sustained growth that it now boasts more flights and more passengers than any other other U.S. carrier. But is Southwest at risk of busting its britches?

“The dream of all the employees is that Southwest matures and grows older like the actor who played Opie”, Gadzinski said. “You know how Ron Howard. never stops being a good guy? He was always true and honest and when he made movies, he made good movies. He never got into drugs or mistresses or any of that crap. When you look at the legacy carriers, the Americans the Uniteds the USAirs, you start seeing management practices that strayed from the core values.”

The missionary of that message seems to be Gary Kelly who told me the airline is in the process of a company-wide re-characterization of its identity. All the while, Kelly insists, remaining true to its quirky self. “There are so many things we want to tell our customers because we are not just one thing,” Kelly said.

All of this is significant to more than the 35,000 employees of Southwest, even more than the 100 million passengers who fly the airline, according to consultant John Cox.

“The business community has recognized that this scrappy upstart is more than a successful company. It has revolutionized an industry.”

"60 votes? Hah! Your country doesn't have democracy either!" the Chinese PM tells President Obama.

'Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen opened the gathering [at the last day of the Copenhagen climate change summit], saying that it is "not too often us leaders get a chance to chart out a new course for our planet." No such course was forthcoming. Minutes later, Chinese Premier Wen Jibao hailed his own nation's efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But he offered no give on the key matters that had been raised by the United States: China placing its emissions reductions within a binding treaty and subjecting them to outside verification. Wen indicated that China would keep its emissions limits voluntary and unilateral.'

Sourced here.

December 17, 2009

As anyone who has driven with a teenager knows, there is no more valuable teacher of driving skills than experience. Which is why I was so disturbed to read the comment of a Colgan Air executive speaking to a Wall Street Journal reporter earlier this month. Colgan, you remember was the regional airline handling Continental’s Flight 3047 into Buffalo, New York on February 12. The plane crashed into a neighborhood killing 49 people on board and one man on the ground. The National Transportation Safety Board has yet to issue a probable cause report on the accident.

The airline, in its submission last week to the NTSB, blames the pilots of Flight 3047, for losing situational awareness and failing to follow standard procedures.

With 3300 and 2200 hours respectively, Captain Marvin Renslow, and first officer Rebecca Shaw had more hours than many commuter pilots, some of whom start flying passengers on these smaller jets with as little as 300 hours.

“Flight hours aren't the best measure of skill,” a Colgan executive told Andy Pasztor. Pasztor’s article included the story of Charlie Preusser, a regional airline pilot who got his job with Colgan having just 383 hours in the cockpit.

I participated in the coverage of the Colgan Air crash for The New York Times. While reviewing the US accident history, I counted eleven crashes on regional airliners between 2000 and the Feb 12 accident in Buffalo. That’s more than one per year. Eight involved injuries or fatalities. The list below provides the dates, and aircraft tail numbers. This list seems to indicate a segment of commercial aviation that is not meeting standards the flying public expects and deserves.

List of regional airline accidents since 2000

1. Colgan Air 2.12.09 Fatalities 50 N200WQ (Continental Connection)
   
2. Pinnacle Airlines 11.13.08 Injuries no fatalities N8698A (Northwest Airlink)
3. Shuttle America 2.18.07 No fatalities N862RW (Delta Connection)
4. Comair 8.27.06 Fatalities 49 N431CA(Delta Connection)
   
5. Flying Boat Inc. 12.19.05 Fatalities 20 N2969 (Chalk's Ocean Airways)
6. Executive Airlines 5.9.04 No fatalities N438AT (American Eagle)
   
7. Corporate Airlines 10.19.2004 Fatalities 13 N875JX (American Connection)
8. Pinnacle Airlines 10.14.04 Fatalities 2 N8396A (Northwest Airlink)
9. Air Midwest Airlines 1.8.03 Fatalities 21 N233YV (USAirways Express)
   
10. Colgan Air 8.26.03 Fatalities 2 N240CJ (Ferry flight)
    
11. Peninsula Airways 10.10.01 Fatalities 9 N9530F

More updates as we get them...

He screwed a golf course...

And "It was a little painful, but pleasant too..." said one woman involved in the mix-up.

"Quick, set off another bomb in Iraq so people don't focus on the shit we're doing to our own people!"

"This [above] picture proves it!" said Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi on Monday, adding "If those bears didn't warm up the ice by sitting on it, we'd be fine right now."

It's begun: Rupert Murdoch paper plugging shit and very expensive film made by Rupert Murdoch studio.

There are fresh concerns over the mental health of Tony Blair following the release of a picture of the former British Prime Minister sitting on a toilet. The picture was taken during a break from the recent negotiations in Brussels over the post of President of the European Council - a post which Blair ultimately lost to Belgian PM Herman Van Rompuy.

The person who took the picture has decided to remain anonymous, but insists that he took the photograph out of a concern for Mr Blair's mental state: "I went to the bathroom and heard a person apparently talking to themselves in one of the cabins," said the source "It was very strange. He was mumbling things like 'This will be a people's turd...I...you know...want you all to...you know...understand...I cannot appease this turd any longer...it will stand turd to turd with all the turds and be a great turd...history will judge.' So I decided to force the door open to see what was going on and ended up taking a picture of Tony Blair on the toilet. And the weirdest thing was, that he was reading all of these things from a piece of paper, like he couldn't even take a s*#t anymore without convincing himself of his own historical greatness. The guy is clearly in denial."

The source for the photograph also added that he hopes the picture's publication will help rather than harm Blair "I mean, if this guy is self-conscious even while taking a dump in private, then maybe he needs some help. I hope my picture helps to move this process forward."

Meanwhile, Palestinians have been continuing their month-long celebrations following the failure of Mr Blair to win the EU presidency. "That means he will remain as a Middle-East peace envoy!" said one Palestinian in Ramallah "And this brings great joy and hope to all of us. He really is the man to get things done!"

Frank Bough, the seemingly wholesome BBC TV presenter who faced scandal in 1992 after it was revealed that he regularly visited sado-masochistic drug-fuelled orgies has hit out at golfer Tiger Woods. In a statement released to the media on Friday, Bough called on Woods to come clean regarding revelations that he was a serial adulterer: "Enough is enough. These sorded details are coming out drip by drip and it has to stop. He has gone too far and now he should come clean and face the music."

Senator Joe Lieberman (I- Connecticut) has dismissed reports that he has reached a secret agreement with medical insurance interests to oppose healthcare reform - one that promises Lieberman a very lucrative post-Senate career. "By the time my post-Senate-career begins, this current healthcare debate will be long over. No-one is going to care, frankly, about trying to connect the dots when they aren't there," said Lieberman at a press conference yesterday.


However, when pressed on the matter of whether he was opposing the so-called "public-option" favored by most Democrats for financial reasons, and in particular because he had been offered a multi-million dollar private-sector job in return, Lieberman remained coy: "Like I said, no-one will care by then what I do and frankly that is my own business. I don't rule out anything. Right now I am a Senator."


Lieberman, a former Democrat and vice-presidential candidate (on the Gore-Lieberman ticket in 2000) maintains a position in the Senate Democratic Caucus despite having left the party and endorsed Republican John McCain in the last presidential election. President Obama is believed to have personally lobbied to stop Democrats from stripping Lieberman of his current chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in light of the above.

The Senator has steadfastly opposed the inclusion of a public-option in the current Senate healthcare reform bill - critics have accused Lieberman of settling scores with Democrats after he lost a Democratic primary in 2006 to Democrat Ned Lamont. This led to Lieberman running as an independent - he won the election, although several opinion polls now put his re-election chances in 2012 at below 50%; other polls suggest a strong majority of Connecticut's voters support a public-option. Some have speculated that the Republican Party has privately promised not to field a viable candidate in Connecticut in the 2012 race in return for Lieberman's opposition to health-care reform. Yet, the Senator's latest comments appear to suggest different motivations may be at play.

The US raisin-producer Sun-Maid Growers of California is facing heavy criticism over a recently unveiled decision to "update" the image of a female grape-picker that has featured in its logo almost since the co-op was founded in 1912. Sun-Maid has defended the change, which critics have described as "slutty" and "too sexy" - with a spokesperson for the co-op stating: "Now was the right time to update our image. We feel that this particular change simply better reflects the times in which we now live."


Full story here.