When, back in October, a Northwest Airlines flight went AWOL over Minnesota, dropping out of radio contact and wandering off course, I had the same reaction as most people. What happened was shocking and unacceptable, I felt. It was embarrassing to pilots everywhere. Moreover, I had a difficult time imagining how two professional airmen could allow such a bizarre thing to happen. How was it even possible? The majority of my colleagues felt the same way.
The problem was, all we had to go on was the media's condensed presentation of the event: Two pilots, focused on their laptop computers, lost track of where they were and overshot their destination.
But was it really that simple?
Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario:
Flight 188 is en route from San Diego to Minneapolis, somewhere around Denver, when a flight attendant calls the cockpit to let the captain know his crew meal is ready. The captain takes his tray, and uses the opportunity to step out and use the lavatory.
While he is out of the cockpit, the first officer receives a call from air traffic control, asking him to contact the next sector on a new frequency. The instruction for the change sounds something like this: "Northwest 188, contact Denver Center now on 125.9."
The first officer acknowledges by repeating the information back to the controller, then setting the new frequency into one of the VHF radios.
"Good evening, Denver Center," he says next. "This is Northwest 188 with you, level at three-seven zero [37,000 feet]."
Radio frequencies are at least five digits long (often six digits overseas), and as you might expect, it's not unheard of for a pilot to accidentally transpose a couple of numbers. This happens from time to time and is seldom if ever dangerous. The situation is normally corrected after a minute or two, often because the incorrect frequency is completely silent: The crew gets no response, and there is no chatter from controllers or other pilots.
Aboard Flight 188, the first officer mixes up the numbers and dials in a frequency for Winnipeg, Canada, instead of Denver. Let's call this Factor 1.
Winnipeg is hundreds of miles away, and controllers there do not hear him. They are unable to acknowledge his call or correct his error. At the same time, however, Flight 188 is at a high enough altitude that transmissions from other aircraft under Winnipeg's control are clearly audible in the cockpit. Thus there is plenty of chatter coming over the radio. This leads the pilot to believe he is on the correct frequency. Let's call this Factor 2.
A short time later the captain returns. He too hears the radio chatter and has no reason to think anything is wrong. Factor 3.
When a pilot comes back from a restroom break, it is customary for the other pilot to brief him of any changes, such as a new altitude or heading assignment, revisions to the routing, radio frequency changes, and so forth. In this instance, nothing is said. The captain is not told of the frequency change, or about the fact that nobody acknowledged the first officer's call. This would be Factor 4.
Neither does the first officer, having received no reply, make a second attempt to contact ATC. Factor 5.
Why he neglects to do these things isn't clear, but neither is it shocking. After all, few things are more routine than dialing in a new radio frequency and, as we say, "checking in." This can happen dozens of time over the course of a flight, and failure to get a response from ATC on the first call is not uncommon, especially when a frequency is busy. Occasionally, when the chatter is unusually heavy, you wait for them to contact you. In addition, the first officer is distracted by the commotion and security rigmarole required when opening and closing the flight deck door. It's possible that he's simply forgotten. Factors 6, 7 and 8.
Soon thereafter, back on the correct frequency, Denver Center is trying to get hold of Flight 188, wondering why it never checked in. They call many times, to no avail. Minutes later, there is a shift change at the facility. For reasons unknown, the new controller is not told about the failure to reach Flight 188. Had he known about this, there are steps he could have taken to help track down the wayward flight. But he didn't. Factor 9.
As they fly along, unknowingly out of contact, the captain and first officer then get into a long discussion about the airline's new scheduling system for pilots. The first officer takes out his laptop and gives the captain a short tutorial on how to bid his monthly schedule. The captain takes his computer out as well. Neither computer is on for more than five minutes, but clearly both crew members are distracted. Factor 10.
On they fly, still out of contact with ATC. Worsening matters is a hundred-knot tailwind, and the fact that the pilots have their navigational screens set to the highest mileage range, which compresses the distances and waypoints and makes any deviation less noticeable. Factor 11.
At one point Northwest attempts to contact the plane via the on-board datalink system known as ACARS. On some aircraft, an incoming ACARS message is indicated by an audible chime. But on this one there is just a small light, and it stays illuminated for only 30 seconds. The message goes unnoticed. Factor 12.
Eventually a flight attendant calls on the interphone to ask about their arrival time. At this point the flight is directly over Minneapolis.
Depending on traffic, runway use, etc., arrival patterns can sometimes take a flight several miles beyond its destination before turning back again, but this is different. The crew realizes something is wrong. They track down a Minneapolis frequency, establish contact, and begin to receive instructions for landing. ATC is naturally suspicious, and puts the aircraft through a long series of turns to be certain the pilots haven't been hijacked and are in full control. Finally Flight 188 is cleared to land.
When the Airbus gets to the gate, the FAA and FBI are among those waiting.
And we all know the rest.
This scenario is based on a secondhand account written by a pilot who happens to be a friend of Flight 188's captain. The pilot's letter has been cited in news articles and blogs. I've paraphrased here and there, and rounded things out for clarity. I cannot know for certain if the details are accurate, but certainly they take what was, on the surface, a startling and borderline implausible story, and make it plausible.
In other words, laptops were only part of what went wrong. This was more than a pair of pilots zoning out under the glow of their computers. It was something less overt: a combination of small errors and oversights, not all of them of the crew's doing, creating a loss of what a pilot calls "situational awareness."
When it comes to aviation incidents, things are seldom as simple as they first seem, or as the media frames them. Here on Salon I have made my living emphasizing that point. I should pay more heed, maybe, to my own advice. I'm annoyed at myself for not being more suspicious of this incident from the start.
I'm just as annoyed that this story made such a splash in the first place and has spent so much time in the media spin cycle. It never deserved it. The airplane and its occupants were never in peril. The deviation occurred during the cruise portion of flight, with the aircraft plainly visible on ATC radar and in no danger of colliding with other aircraft or the ground. When it landed in Minneapolis, the jet still had two hours of fuel in its tanks and was only 15 minutes behind schedule, including a 35-minute delay out of San Diego.
The pilots are by no means off the hook. The entire mess could have been avoided had the frequency error been caught early on, as it should have been, and clearly both succumbed to a needless distraction. But do they deserve to be publicly excoriated and banned from ever again flying?
The pilots had their FAA certificates stripped through emergency revocation almost immediately, prior to any formal investigation. Reportedly, not everybody at the FAA thought this was the best of course of action, but pressure to do so came all the way from the White House. The media firestorm dictated that somebody had to be punished, and fast.
In summary, the saga of Flight 188 remains an embarrassing error. But not as scandalous an error, or as reckless an error, as it first appeared.
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Which is all the more reason why our elected officials should back off and avoid pushing for federal legislation, as some have been doing, that would ban laptops and other devices from cockpits. Never mind that some carriers require pilots to carry laptops in the cockpit, for access to important charts and manuals; most of them already prohibit their recreational use. Is a federal law going to make any difference? Of all the things government could be doing to improve air safety, for any lawmaker to spend five minutes writing up legislation on computers is shameful.
As a general rule, anything a politician says or proposes about commercial air travel should be looked on with heavy skepticism. This isn't to say that every once in a while something intelligent and useful doesn't emerge from Washington.
Case in point: the Airline Safety and Pilot Training Improvement Act of 2009, passed by the House of Representatives earlier this fall. If voted into law, the measure will bring welcome changes to pilot training and hiring protocols. Not everyone is convinced the measure will pass the Senate, but it soared through the House by a vote of 409-11.
The legislation comes on the heels of last winter's Colgan disaster near Buffalo, N.Y. Fifty people were killed when the Dash-8 turboprop, operating as Continental Connection Flight 3407, fell on a house after stalling in bad weather. In addition to highlighting fatigue issues, the crash revealed the controversial hiring standards of many regional airlines.
The new law would require that pilots possess an FAA airline transport certificate (ATP) in order to be eligible for a cockpit job with any commercial carrier operating under Part 121 of the Federal Aviation Regulations -- that is, almost all of them. Requirements for an ATP include a minimum of 1,500 hours of flight time (broken down over various categories), and the satisfactory completion of a written test and in-flight examination. In recent years, regional airline new hires have been coming on board with as few as 250 total flight hours.
Additionally, the law will somewhat redefine the ATP certificate, with a focus on the operational environment of commercial air carriers, requiring specialized training in things like crew coordination, cockpit resource management and so on.
You'd take that for granted, but believe it or not, the existing ATP requires no specific training in airline procedures, and no prior experience in large aircraft or those requiring more than one pilot. One needs to pass a written exam and in-flight evaluation in a multi-engine aircraft, but you can obtain an "airline transport pilot" certificate having logged 1,500 hours flying Pipers and Cessnas.
The changes will make it easier to weed out those pilots who lack the acumen for airline operations. For those who progress, it will allow an easier transition from general aviation to the high-demand training environment at a regional. It will lower their training costs and, ultimately, make for safer cockpits.
As I've written before, logbook totals aren't always a good indicator of skill or performance, but it's hardly unreasonable to set the acceptance bar at or near the ATP standard. And in many ways this would represent a return to historical norms. In years past, the typical civilian new hire needed to accrue between 1,200 and 2,000 hours to be taken seriously by a regional airline.
(One concern I have is for those pilots already hired into cockpits with qualifications that don't meet the new standards, including many who are currently on furlough. Can they be called back to duty under the old rules? I presume they will be grandfathered in, which is only fair.)
For a would-be pilot, obtaining an ATP will entail a financial investment approaching or exceeding six figures. Theoretically, at least, this should encourage the regionals to begin offering better wages and benefits if they want to attract and retain experienced crews. For the time being, average first officer pay begins at around $20,000 a year. (I say "theoretically," because pilots have a terrible habit of, shall we say, suffering for their art.)
Rep. Jerry Costello, chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee, calls the Airline Safety and Pilot Training Improvement Act "the strongest aviation safety bill since the creation of the FAA in 1958."
That's pretty strong, but on the whole I see something good for everybody: airlines, pilots and passengers alike.
Let's start with a new video. In September I wrote a column on the facts and fallacies of air quality on commercial planes. I explained how cabin air is considerably cleaner than the traveling public assumes, and I went after the myth that pilots tinker with oxygen levels during flight. If you're still skeptical, I've uploaded a five-minute demo, taken in the cockpit of a 767, showing how air conditioning and pressurization are controlled. You can watch it here.
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As it happens, that video was shot during a flight over central Brazil, not far from the scene of a horrible midair collision three years ago. In September 2006, a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 bound from Manaus to Brasilia with 154 people on board collided with an executive jet carrying seven Americans. The smaller plane remained flyable and made an emergency landing at an air force base. The 737 plunged into the Amazon jungle -- in a region so inaccessible that indigenous Kayapo Indians used machetes to help emergency crews reach the scene. There were no survivors, making it the worst-ever crash in the long and storied history of Brazilian aviation.
The accident was covered extensively in this column, here and here.
Also covering it extensively was Joe Sharkey, business travel columnist for the New York Times. Sharkey was a passenger on the executive jet and survived to tell his story. He wrote about the incident in the Times and in his personal blog, and he was interviewed widely by the U.S. and international press (including yours truly for this October 2006 column in which he describes the collision in startling detail). Sharkey has been loudly critical of Brazil's handling of the investigation, and of its air traffic control system. The pilots of the executive jet were detained without charges for ore than two months, and indeed shortcomings in the Brazilian ATC, which is run by the country's military, appear to have been the chief culprit.
Well, in one of the strangest stories of the year, Sharkey is now being sued for defamation on the grounds that he insulted the national honor of Brazil. The plaintiff is Rosane Gutjhar, a resident of Curitiba, a large city in southern Brazil. Gutjhar, whose husband was killed in the crash, wants a retraction and $280,000 in damages. The suit is based on a provision of Brazilian law that permits private citizens to claim damages for perceived insults against the nation's dignity.
Gutjhar says that Sharkey described Brazil as "archaic" and called its citizens "idiots." Sharkey categorically denies this. The quotes cited in the lawsuit, he says, were falsely attributed to him through reader comments (made by Brazilians) published on a Brazilian news Web site. That ought to be easy to prove, and ought to be grounds to have the whole thing dismissed, but lawyers have told Sharkey that he needs to take the lawsuit seriously.
Should it continue, it presents serious implications for journalists.
"Brazilian judicial authorities should dismiss this case," said Carlos Lauría, coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, in a statement. "Sharkey has the right to report on this tragic accident and voice his opinion on the ongoing investigation."
According to the CPJ statement, thousands of businessmen, politicians and public officials have filed lawsuits in recent years against media outlets and journalists as a means of controlling criticism. "The lawsuits are filed in a politicized climate in which lower court judges routinely interpret Brazilian law in ways that restrict press freedom," CPJ reports. Added Carlos Lauría, "The case again Joe Sharkey and the onslaught of civil and criminal complaints against Brazilian journalists are unbecoming of a robust democracy such as Brazil."
I couldn't agree more. If the Brazilians are concerned that others look at them as second-class world citizens, they should think twice. This is banana republic stuff.
"Such libel suits pose a threat to the free speech of American policymakers, scientists (lawsuits over research that someone doesn't like), travel reviewers, and even sportswriters who might 'offend Brazil's dignity' in the walk-up to the Olympics," said Sharkey in an e-mail. "Especially if they start writing about things like crime and infrastructure problems in Rio de Janeiro."
Meanwhile those two American pilots are currently being tried in absentia by a Brazilian court, while an investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has cited faulty air traffic control protocols as the primary cause of the catastrophe.
I fly regularly to Brazil. The quality of air traffic control at and around the big cities is generally excellent and virtually no different from that of Europe or the United States. Over remote areas, however, things are more challenging. Amazonica Control is the agency in charge of most airspace over the immense Amazon basin. Here, radar coverage is limited and radio communications sometimes intermittent. Controllers can be difficult to reach, and often sound as if they're talking through a tin can and string. Transmitting and receiving even simple instructions can take multiple attempts.
On the whole, though, the problems I experience are more an inconvenience than a danger. VHF voice communications are always troublesome when flying over remote areas (this is one of the reasons they don't exist when flying over oceans), and I have never felt that conditions over Brazil were unsafe. If they were, dozens of daily flights operated by American, European, Middle Eastern and Latin American airlines wouldn't be going there. (As many as 10,000 people per day pass through Brazilian airspace aboard U.S. jetliners alone.) At the same time, no, Brazil's ATC system is not as good as it should be. Just as the country's authorities aren't coming clean about the collision, or being reasonable in their case against Joe Sharkey.
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Speaking of people in the media...
You know who makes me laugh? Richard Quest makes me laugh.
Richard Quest is the bespectacled, supercharged host of the CNN shows "Quest Means Business" and "CNN Business Traveler." He's definitely an acquired taste, and there are those who find him repellent. Personally, I find his thundering voice and over-the-top persona to be equally hilarious and riveting. He makes me tired just watching him. I wouldn't have that much energy if you poured a jug of kerosene over my head and lit me on fire.
Love him or hate him, Quest is one of the most knowledgeable sources out there when it comes to air travel. He knows his airlines, his planes and his airports better than anybody else on television.
He recently hosted an excellent segment about British Airways' new all-business class service between JFK and London City Airport. The route is flown by an Airbus A318 outfitted with 32 sleeper seats. The unusually short runway at London City entails substantial weight penalties for takeoff, requiring a fuel stop on the westbound leg. For this, B.A. has smartly chosen Shannon, Ireland. Not only is Shannon uncrowded and user-friendly, but passengers can clear U.S. Immigration formalities on site, eliminating the need to do so in New York. Quest took the opportunity to give a little run-through of the history of the Shannon airport, with historic photographs of Lockheed Constellations, de Havilland Comets and the like.
Back in the day, prior to the advent of long-haul nonstops, Shannon was a bustling refueling station for flights traveling between Europe and the U.S. Transit passengers would mill around the terminal, giving rise to what became the world's first duty-free shop. The airport is still used sporadically as a "technical stop," as the refueling gigs are called nowadays, mostly by military flights and the occasional charter. It's also a tourist hub for western Ireland, served by most of the big American carriers.
Shannon's history is similar to that of Gander, Newfoundland, another former stopover point for postwar propliners and 707s. But while Shannon has held its own, Gander has become a forlorn and deserted place. I dropped into Gander once or twice when I flew freighters for DHL. This photo, taken in 1998, I think tells it all. I don't know what the Newfoundland equivalent of tumbleweeds might be, but there should be lots of them rolling around the apron at Gander.
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Security follow-up
Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent, has been appointed by President Obama to lead the Transportation Security Administration. He replaces Kip Hawley, whose tenure fostered and entrenched some of the agency's worst policies. Southers' appointment has been welcomed by both industry and passenger groups, and he is widely seen as a likely advocate for sensible reform. TSA's screening rules are such a basket case of waste and folly that it's tough to be optimistic, but let's hope those observers are right.
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And in closing, something fun: While I'm constantly critiquing airline logos and liveries, it dawns on me that I've never critiqued airline alliance logos or liveries.
I'll make this quick.
The three big partnerships are SkyTeam (headed by Delta and Air France), Star Alliance (United, Lufthansa and Continental, among others) and Oneworld (American, Qantas, British Airways, etc.). All three utilize a circular logo.
SkyTeam's is the winner. The ribbon motif and arcing typeface are elegant and refined.
Oneworld's purplish blob is boringly corporate. (Plus, that name, "Oneworld," has such uncomfortable overtones.)
Star Alliance's is hideous -- a clunky assemblage of pyramids (triangles? diamonds?) that looks as if it had been designed by a sixth-grader. And the shape of texture of those faux diamonds are a dead ringer for the Delta "widget," which is a tad ironic since Delta belongs to SkyTeam, not to Star.
Member airlines have taken to painting select aircraft in full alliance colors. None of the three, in my opinion, looks particularly fetching when spread billboard-style over the side of a plane. Here's Star, Oneworld, and SkyTeam.
You be the judge.
Next time in Ask the Pilot: The inside story of Northwest 188. Plus, a new bill in Congress calls for big changes in pilot hiring practices.
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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.
William Langewiesche has a new book out, exploring last January's crash landing of US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River. "Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the 'Miracle' on the Hudson"
Maybe that's a tad over the top, but it's hard for me to argue. As I've expressed before, nobody does a story better than Langewiesche. His work is immaculate and exhaustive, and he's an exemplary wordsmith to boot.
Nevertheless, there's a certain aspect of the Flight 1549 saga that nobody, not even Langewiesche, has really bitten into.
As the general public sees it, Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and consummate flying skills. As Langewiesche sees it, the real hero wasn't Capt. Sully, but the electronic wizardry of the Airbus A320, which was able to deftly manage the angle and speed of its perilous glide pretty much on its own.
I submit that neither plane nor pilot deserves as much credit as they've been given. The most critical factor was nothing more than plain old luck -- specifically, the time and place where things went wrong. As it happened, it was daylight and the weather was reasonably good; there off Sullenberger's left side was a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country's largest city and its flotilla of rescue craft. Sullenberger performed admirably in the face of a serious emergency, as did his jetliner. He needed to be good, but he needed to be lucky as well. He was. Had the bird strike occurred over a different part of the city, at a slightly different altitude, or under slightly different weather conditions, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent, skill or fly-by-wire technology was going to matter.
I dare suggest that if you could put a hundred crews, flying pretty much any modern airliner, in Sullenberger's exact situation, the results would be more or less the same. Thus the passengers owe their survival not to miracles, talent or the fail-safe genius of the A320, but to the less glamorous forces of luck and, to use a word I normally dislike, professionalism.
Sullenberger, to his credit, has been duly humble. He has acknowledged the points I make above, and has highlighted the unsung role played by his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles. The media pooh-poohs this as false modesty or self-effacing charm, when really he's just being honest. As for the magic of his airplane, Sullenberger told Christine Negroni of the New York Times that Langewiesche "greatly overstates how much it mattered."
Separately, Langewiesche's analysis, with its emphasis on the role of cockpit automation, is helping to perpetuate the stubborn and widespread belief that pilots are fast becoming obsolete. It is hardly the author's fault if a book reviewer misinterprets his conclusions, but consider this from Times book critic Dwight Garner:
"What the public doesn't understand ... is the extent to which advances in aviation and digital technology have made pilots almost superfluous ... Mr. Sullenberger's airplane, an Airbus A320, was nearly capable of guiding itself gently to the ground, even after losing both of its engines."
Wow. OK, timeout.
Incidentally, William Langewiesche, Christine Negroni and Dwight Garner all are fans of and/or occasional contributors to this column, and I'm hoping not to offend my influential regulars or the companies they work for. But hang on and let me circle the wagons.
I do a fair bit of myth busting in this column. It comes with the territory, I suppose. Air travel has always been rich with conspiracy theories, urban legends and crackpot notions. Where this all comes from is easy enough to understand: Commercial flying has exactly the right ingredients to nurture paranoia -- it's scary to millions of people and steeped in secrecy. Airlines, it hardly needs saying, aren't the most forthcoming of entities, and even the most elementary technicalities of flight -- how does a plane stay in the air? -- aren't understood by vast numbers of travelers.
I've heard it all. Nothing, however, gets me sputtering more than misunderstandings about cockpit automation -- the idea that modern aircraft essentially fly themselves, with pilots on hand merely as a backup in case of trouble. "Baby sitting a flying computer" as one smartass letter writer recently put it here on Salon.
This is so far from the truth that it's difficult to get my arms around it and begin to explain how. Baby sitting a computer? Really? I'll keep that in mind during my next recurrency training and simulator check; the next time I'm weaving around thunderheads over the Amazon; shooting a VOR approach in Africa in a rainstorm at 4 a.m., or setting up for an ILS in blowing snow and a quarter-mile visibility.
But never mind the extremes. If I were to take even the most routine, trouble-free and "automated" flight, from the preflight planning stage to block-in at the destination, and break it down event by event, explaining each of the hundreds of decisions and inputs made by the crew, big and small, from rote procedure to the unexpected judgment call, I would be typing for the next three days.
Would it do any good?
Forget about the New York Times for a minute. Two weeks ago National Public Radio ran a piece on "Morning Edition" looking at the Northwest 188 incident (the flight that wandered off course after both pilots became distracted by their laptop computers). The segment included this exchange between host Renee Montagne and guest Michael Goldfarb, an aviation consultant and former Federal Aviation Administration chief of staff:
Montagne: Now, for us passengers, the pilot says hello. He might alert us to turbulence during the flight, but we tend to think that the pilot and the copilot are flying the plane. What exactly does that mean, flying the plane?
Goldfarb: Well, it doesn't mean what it meant 30 years ago. There's so much automation in the cockpit that, literally, an aircraft taking off from Los Angeles and landing in New York can have very little attendance by the crew.
What total nonsense. And Montagne's comment, "We tend to think that the pilot and copilot are flying the plane." Tend to think? I have never been so insulted.
As I wrote in a column in October, a jetliner can, in theory, take itself laterally from waypoint to waypoint along a preprogrammed route -- a basic, skeletal outline of the flight. But the idea that a jet will "fly itself" to the destination without meaningful input from the crew is preposterous and downright offensive to anybody who flies for a living.
One of the media's big mistakes is a reliance on aviation academics and bureaucrats -- professors, directors, consultants, researchers, etc. -- rather than pilots, for its expertise. These people are bright and knowledgeable, but they're often highly unfamiliar with the day-to-day operational aspects of flying planes.
Having said that, pilots too are occasionally part of the problem. By grossly oversimplifying things, we paint a caricature of what flying is really like, at the same time undermining our value as employees. It's no wonder so many people think pilots are overpaid if we're saying things to the press like, "The plane will fly to its destination without any input from the pilot at all," to quote an American Airlines pilot talking to CNN a couple of weeks ago.
You might sometimes hear a pilot describe a given aircraft as "simple to fly." Indeed, a few months back, Miles O'Brien, CNN's former aviation expert and himself a pilot, made this very comment in reference to an Airbus A320. Simple, yes, but only in the context of an airline pilot's prerequisite level of expertise.
The analogy I'm fond of making is the one about aviation and medicine. Out in the field, automation helps a pilot in the same way that it helps a surgeon. It makes flying easier, but it does not make it easy. Like O'Brien and his Airbus, you might hear a surgeon make a comment about the "simplicity" of a certain procedure or operation. That in no way implies that the layperson could give it a go and be successful, and it does nothing to diminish the knowledge and experience required to perform at that level in the first place. The technology is advanced and expensive and ultimately engineered to keep your customers safe and alive. But to understand how this equipment works, and to use it properly ... well, you still need to be a doctor, or a pilot, first.
Even passengers get into the fray. A month ago I was sitting in economy class when our plane came in for an unusually smooth landing. "Nice job, autopilot!" yelled some knucklehead behind me.
Funny, I concede, but wrong. It was a fully manual touchdown, as the vast majority of touchdowns are. Most jetliners are certified for automatic landings -- "autolands" in pilot-speak -- but in practice they are rare. In any case, the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could talk about all day. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn't need to practice them twice a year in the simulator, or need to consistently review those tabbed, highlighted pages in my manuals. It's there if you need it -- for that foggy arrival in Buenos Aires, with the visibility sitting at zero -- but it's anything but simple. Guess what: An automatic landing is, in most respects, more challenging, more complicated and more work-intensive than a manual one.
But at some point we won't be having these discussions, as pilots are phased out and airplanes become fully automated. Right?
On Oct. 27 I appeared on a local TV talk show here in Boston. I was one of two guests. The other was Missy Cummings, a former U.S. Navy pilot turned researcher/academic, now an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Cummings is of the mind that pilots are becoming expendable, and that the jetliner as we know it will eventually be replaced by fully automatic aircraft controlled from the ground.
This is so laughably far from reality that, again, it's hard to get my arms around it and begin to explain. But apparently Cummings' reality is a different one, and she contended on air that it's "just a matter of time" before the crew is engineered out of the picture.
I became visibly annoyed at this, but it was two against one. The host, Emily Rooney, who I need to point out has no aviation background or expertise whatsoever, was in eager agreement with Cummings. "We don't need them," Rooney said flatly of pilots.
The conversation continued after the cameras were off. "Drop by my lab sometime," Cummings said to Rooney (by this point Cummings was refusing to speak or make eye contact with me). "And I'll show you how to fly a UAV with your iPhone."
UAV is "unmanned aerial vehicle," like the military drones used over Afghanistan and Pakistan. These highly sophisticated, remote-control craft carry no occupant and are guided from the ground. But to compare a UAV to a commercial airliner is ultimate apples and oranges. I am happy, assistant professor Cummings, that you are able to send commands to a robot plane using an iPhone. But I would like to see your iPhone perform a high-speed takeoff abort after a tire explosion, followed by the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see your iPhone troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring an emergency diversion over mountainous terrain. I'd like to see it thread through a storm front over the middle of the ocean. Oh, heck, even the simplest stuff.
Point being, there are so many contingencies large and small, so many subjective decisions required on every flight -- situations that you simply cannot get a grasp of remotely. Never mind for a minute whether or not we can come up with a pilotless airliner. Why would we want to?
And what sort of time frame are we talking? (This past September a CIA drone went out of control over Afghanistan and had to be shot down.) Look, I am not a Luddite. But I also fly for a living. Yeah, that makes me an advocate, but it also gives me a very healthy sense of just how far-fetched this idea of pilotless planes truly is. Someday, perhaps. In our lifetime? No chance.
Of course, the only people more insufferable than assistant professors and aviation consultants are the desktop simulator buffs who think they can hop into a 767 and fly it like a pro. They were given some false confidence back in 2007 when the popular show "MythBusters" tried to find out if a nonpilot could land a plane. They got themselves a NASA simulator stripped down to represent a "generic commercial airliner" -- which is to say a rather unrealistic one. A seasoned pilot, stationed in an imaginary control tower, carefully instructs the hosts via radio. On the first try, they crash. The second time, they make it.
But all they really did, essentially, is land a make-believe airplane in a contrived, tightly controlled experiment.
To be fair, the question of whether a nonpilot could land an actual jetliner depends somewhat on the meaning of "land." Do you mean from just a few hundred feet over the ground, in ideal weather, with the plane stabilized and pointed toward the runway, with someone talking you through it? Or do you mean the whole full-blown arrival, from cruising altitude to touchdown, requiring all sorts of maneuvering, programming, communicating and configuring?
You've got a fighting chance with the former. The touchdown will be rough at best, but with a little luck you won't become a cartwheeling fireball. But the scenario most people envision is the one where, droning along at cruise altitude, the crew suddenly becomes incapacitated, and only a brave passenger, who has perhaps a little desktop sim time under his belt, can save the day. He'll strap himself in, and with the smooth coaching of an unseen voice over the radio, try to bring her down.
Try this a thousand times and I reckon you'll have a thousand crashes.
Don't believe me? Let's try it. I need a willing participant who does not have a pilot's license or any formal flight training. We'll rent out a full-motion Boeing simulator and the instructor will set things up for 35,000 feet, somewhere over the middle of the United States. Ready, set, go. In you come and sit down. The rest is up to you. All of it.
If you crash, you foot the bill and I get to mock you in Salon. If you make it, I foot the bill and write a five-page retraction carefully detailing your heroics.
Any takers?
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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.
First up, a brief statement regarding the United Airlines pilot detained in London after failing a Breathalyzer test. Erwin Washington, 51, was one of three pilots scheduled to operate United Airlines Flight 949 from Heathrow to Chicago's O'Hare airport when he was detained by authorities who were alerted by another United employee.
For those of us who fly for a living the timing of this couldn't be worse, what with last month's embarrassment of the two Northwest pilots who wandered off course after becoming engrossed in their laptops. Seems it only takes a minor scandal or two to wipe out all of the respect (and sympathy) previously accrued by way of our old friend Capt. Sully.
Believe me, a pilot showing up for duty under the influence isn't going to be held in high esteem by his colleagues. But more important, I need to make clear that although this isn't the first time such a thing has happened, it shouldn't give the traveling public the wrong impression. These rare and isolated incidents are not a symptom of some dangerous and unseen crisis. I understand and expect that passengers will worry about all sorts of things, rational and otherwise. But as a rule, whether your pilots are intoxicated should not be one of them. My own personal observations are hardly a scientific sample, but I have been flying commercially since 1990, and I have never once been in a cockpit with a pilot I knew or suspected was intoxicated.
The Federal Aviation Administration blood alcohol limit for airline pilots is .04 percent, and we are banned from consuming alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. Pilots must also comply with their employer's policies, which tend to be tougher. Most airlines impose a 12-hour consumption restriction. Drug and alcohol testing is random and frequent.
This is not something pilots tend to play fast and loose with. Why would they, with a career hanging in the balance? Violators are subject to immediate, emergency revocation of their pilot certificates.
And Britain's regulations are considerably stricter that those of the FAA. The legal limit is set at 20 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood. That's one-fourth the British limit for driving, and equates to about .02 percent blood alcohol level. It's possible for a pilot to be in full compliance with the time restriction and not feel any of the typical signs of intoxication, yet still be in violation. The same can sometimes be said for our own .04.
No, that is not an excuse for Washington or anybody else; I have no problem with a requirement that pilots abide by a higher, more conservative standard than others. If we need to be extremely careful, so be it, that's part of our job. But it's something to think about, and passengers should realize that "flying drunk" isn't as clear-cut, or as wildly negligent as it might seem.
It is also true that more than one airline pilot has been pulled aside after a passenger, Transportation Security Administration guard or other airport worker suspected intoxication, only to be vindicated after testing. Typically in such cases, the papers and TV news hastily report the initial suspicion, but not the eventual results.
Having said all of that, it should go without saying that alcoholism exists in aviation just as it exists in every other profession. To their credit, air carriers and pilot unions like Air Line Pilots Association have been very successful with proactive programs that encourage pilots to seek treatment. This has helped keep the problem from being driven underground, where it's more likely to be a public safety issue.
Not long ago I flew with a colleague who participated in the highly successful HIMS program -- an intervention and treatment system put together several years ago by ALPA and the FAA. HIMS has treated more than 4,000 pilots and records a success rate of approximately 90 percent, with only 10-12 percent of participants suffering relapses.
I asked that colleague if, prior to going into HIMS, he'd ever knowingly flown under the influence. He said, "No."
And I'll leave it at that.
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Let's move on, because what I really want to talk about this week is nothing.
And by "nothing" I mean the deafening silence that marked the passing of Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009. That was the eighth anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 near Kennedy airport in New York City -- the last large-scale crash involving a major U.S. airline anywhere in the world.
We've seen a handful of disasters involving regional planes since then -- the worst of them being the 2006 crash of Comair Flight 5191 in Lexington, Ky., and last February's Colgan Air tragedy outside Buffalo. But aside from a young boy killed when a Southwest 737 overran a snowy runway in Chicago in 2005, our largest airlines, operating some 10,000 daily flights between them, have been fatality-free. Eight years is a record going back at least to the dawn of the jet age a half-century ago.
Here we are amid what might be called the safest stretch in modern commercial aviation history, but you wouldn't know it listening to the media. Passengers learn instead of frightening-sounding mishaps like that of the United pilot and the totally overblown Northwest incident two weeks ago. Heck, a plane blows a tire and CNN will have its cameras out for live coverage of the touchdown, but I have yet to come across a single mention of the significance of yesterday's anniversary.
No news is no news, I guess.
This eight-year run (and counting) is owed to several things. Better training is not the least of them, along with improved cockpit technology and other aircraft safety enhancements. We have engineered away many of what used to be the most common causes of disaster.
Yes, we've been lucky too. And while I hate to say it, that luck will run out at some point. When the inevitable crash does come, I only hope that somebody besides me takes the time to point out the unprecedented streak that preceded it.
American 587 was an Airbus A300-600 bound from JFK to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. The plane went down on Nov. 12, 2001, after the first officer, Sten Molin, overreacted to an encounter with wake turbulence spun from a Japan Airlines 747 that had departed moments earlier. Molin's overzealous use of the plane's rudder caused the entire vertical fin to separate. Airborne for less than three minutes, the jet plummeted into the Rockaway section of Queens. All 260 passengers and crew were killed, along with five people on the ground.
The rudder is the large movable surface hinged to the aft edge of the vertical stabilizer -- that is, the tail -- used to control the side-to-side "yawing" motion of an airplane. It is controlled either through the autoflight systems or, if need be, manually through a pair of foot pedals at either pilot's station. Here is a view of the first officer's station of an A300-600.
The voice and data recorders show that Molin commanded a full deflection of the rudder. Fully deflecting a plane's rudder is somewhat akin to yanking a car's steering wheel 90 degrees, so most larger planes, including this one, are equipped with segmented rudders and automatic limiters, reducing the available rudder travel as speed increases. The faster you're flying, the less available movement. Even had the limiting systems somehow failed, Flight 587 was, at the moment of its doom, sufficiently below the speed at which maximum deflection, intentional or otherwise, should have damaged the structure. Pilots call this "maneuvering speed." Barring any structural anomaly, it seems there was no reason for Flight 587's vertical stabilizer to fail.
Except for two things. First, Molin applied maximum pressure rapidly and in both directions, repeatedly swinging the rudder to the left and to the right. A plane's airworthiness certification standards are not based on such unusual, alternating applications of extreme force. Second, the A300's rudder controls are unusually sensitive, and resultant movements, even at low speeds, may be more severe than a pilot intends. In other words, Molin didn't realize the level of stress he was putting on the tail.
Clearly he overreacted, but he didn't have reason to think his inputs were going to rip the tail off, and he was not the only pilot surprised to learn that full deflections below maneuvering speed, however irregular, are risking structural catastrophe.
There also remains the chance that the A300's carbon-fiber tail may have played a role in the accident. Carbon-fiber components are stronger and lighter than traditional metals, but damage tends to occur internally in a way that is hard to detect. And Airbus tails are built to withstand lesser -- though still quite forceful -- amounts of stress compared to Boeing jets.
In 1994 the same plane involved in the accident made an unscheduled landing in the Caribbean after it struck unusually rough air at 35,000 feet. Could this have resulted in a structural weakness, more or less undetectable, needing only the right set of circumstances to manifest itself? The recovered portions of 587's tail were put through advanced CT scanning and analysis, to no significant findings.
Flight 587 was well-known among New York City's Dominican community. In 1996, merengue star Kinito Mendez paid a sadly foreboding tribute with his song "El Avion." "How joyful it could be to go on Flight 587," he sang, immortalizing the popular daily nonstop.
For more facts and findings pertaining to Flight 587, please revisit this 2004 column. And in closing, since everybody seems to be in such a negative and morbid state of mind these days, here's a list.
History's 10 Worst Aviation Disasters Involving Major U.S. Air Carriers
Not Listed
Also, for what I think are sensible reasons, I've omitted those aircraft involved in the 2001 terrorist attacks.
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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.
For those of you who live in a cave and didn't catch it, back on Oct. 21, both pilots of Northwest Flight 188, an Airbus A320 bound from San Diego to Minneapolis, went mentally AWOL somewhere over Minnesota -- distracted by their laptop computers, so they say -- missing a series of air traffic control calls and straying off course. The incident sparked a media frenzy that lasted nearly two weeks.
Now, as I feared might happen, the witch hunt is on: Politicians are weighing in, pushing for federal legislation that would prohibit pilots from using laptop computers and other devices while flying.
First on this square-wheeled bandwagon is Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., who wants to ban all nonessential gadgets from the cockpit.
"With dozens or sometimes hundreds of lives in their hands," said Sen. Menendez, "we need to ensure that pilots are focused on one thing only: getting their aircraft from point A to point B safely and efficiently."
"What's true in a car is generally true in an airplane," he added, demonstrating an exquisite knowledge of how jetliners are operated, "and we need to address distracted flying, just as we are addressing distracted driving. The fact that there isn't already a prohibition on 'texting while flying' for airplanes seems reckless."
Well, except that such rules do in fact exist. Almost all airlines prohibit the personal use of computers in the cockpit, and the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) restrict a pilot's use of certain other devices just as they do for passengers. Is a federal law going to make any difference?
And if Menendez is truly that concerned about "distraction," why is he not weighing in on the improvement of flight and duty time regulations, which, believe me, are a much bigger threat to safety than a pilot's laptop or iPhone.
Chiming in with Menendez is his colleague Al Franken of Minnesota. Now, I was a fan of Franken going back to his early days on "Saturday Night Live" in the 1970s (Franken & Davis, not Stuart Smalley), but I wish he'd butt out of this.
"As passengers, we open our laptops on airplanes for one reason," wrote the senator in a statement. "To distract ourselves from the fact that we're flying. But airline pilots can't be distracted from constant monitoring of their aircraft and traffic."
Constant monitoring? What does that mean, Al? I can't argue with the gist of your concern -- like anybody else you want pilots to be, as we say in the biz, situationally aware. But how much do you know, honestly, about what goes on in a cockpit at 35,000 feet during cruise flight -- about which things pilots need to monitor, and how?
"We all pay a lot for air travel," added Franken. "I think an attentive pilot should be included in that ticket price."
Now he's being cute, and so I can't resist: This is ripe for argument, Senator, but I'll submit that we don't pay a lot for air travel, comparatively speaking. Airfares have been in decline for each of the past 10 months, and on average we're paying the same to fly today that we were paying in the 1980s. And, of course, an attentive pilot (two of them to be more accurate, and sometimes a third or fourth) is included in that ticket price -- though one of the reasons they are earning 20-40 percent less than in years past is because that ticket price is so low.
I'm just saying.
Although what occurred over Minneapolis was an obvious dereliction of duty on the part of the crew, the media's fixation on the event was and remains vastly disproportionate to any danger the passengers faced. To have members of the U.S. Senate joining the fray ratchets up the hysteria even more. Of all the things government can and should be doing to improve commercial air safety -- from overhauling the lunacy of the Transportation Security Administration to dealing with the very real dangers of lithium-ion batteries carried as cargo -- for any lawmaker to spend even five minutes on a proposal like this is shameful. Alas issues involving batteries aren't very sexy, lacking the more scandalous aspects of our wayward pilots and their PCs.
And what exactly constitutes a distraction? Are Franken and Menendez suggesting that, for example, a pilot on a nine-hour flight be banned from snapping a photograph while traversing the grandeur of Greenland, or shooting a few seconds of video? I try not to overuse the word "preposterous," but in this case it's perfect. Such rules would do nothing -- nothing -- to enhance safety. Should pilots be banned from eating meals or carrying on conversations? Is everything under suspicion save for staring straight ahead?
Ultimately, I think there are two underlying factors at work here.
First, despite my best efforts over the past seven years, the truth remains that a vast majority of people have no real idea what the environment of a cockpit is like. They have little understanding of what an airline pilot actually does up there, and what the repercussions of certain mistakes are -- or aren't.
Pilots are at times extremely busy; at other times there are long stretches of low workload. Duties come and go, ebb and flow, and an aircraft will not suddenly flip upside down or come screaming out of the sky if a pilot's attention is temporarily diverted. Indeed it often needs to be diverted. If you want to guarantee more tired and brain-fried pilots, the best way to do it would be through some of that "constant monitoring" that Sen. Franken seems to be hinting at.
Meanwhile, nervous passengers hear the term "pilot error" and it frightens them. Occasionally it should, but I don't always like that term because it fosters the ridiculous idea that any error is a potentially fatal one, and that for a flight to be safe its pilots cannot in some way err. In practice pilots make minor, inconsequential mistakes all the time -- just as any professional does in any line of work. There is no such thing as a perfect flight, and we will not, ever, engineer, automate or legislate this reality away. Considering the rarity of crashes, people should be more comfortable with that.
I also sense that this is yet another manifestation of people's distrust and dislike for airlines. Pilots, more so than most airline employees, usually escape the traveling public's wrath, but we're not immune (especially when people have this crazy, ill-formed idea that pilots are bringing in huge salaries in exchange for little or no actual work). Politicians smell blood, and this is an easy way for them to look good. Really, what's to lose in any legislation that in some way takes airlines to task?
Am I absolving the Northwest pilots of blame? Am I advocating that crews should be allowed to break out their laptops to play computer games or surf the Internet while flying? No. But here again we are witnessing one of this country's most wasteful and self-defeating tendencies: that of coming up with unrealistic, zero-tolerance solutions to problems that are either greatly exaggerated, badly misunderstood, or that don't exist in the first place.
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Lastly, a quick thanks to the many readers who sent condolences and other kind words after the death of my mother. I received more than 150 e-mails during the past several days, in addition to the dozens of posts left in the letters section of last week's column. I could not respond to everybody with a personal thank-you, but all of your letters were appreciated.
I was going through some of my mother's things a few days ago, and among the items I found were her American Airlines stewardess wings, an "AA" eagle lapel pin, and a "Stewardess Corps" pendant, all from 1965. They are rendered in sterling silver -- tarnished but beautifully engraved.
It should go without saying that airlines no longer give out sterling silver wings.
The first airplane I was ever on, big or small, was an American Airlines Boeing 727, in April of 1974. We flew from Boston to Washington, D.C., and they served sandwiches and cheesecake -- yes, in economy class on an 80-minute trip. I remember the stewardess asking if I wanted seconds.
The photo you see here, taken by my mother, shows me and my sister walking up the stairs to that airplane.
There are some definite date markers in that shot -- the haircuts, the clothes, the old-timey air-stairs in lieu of the modern jet bridge.
Astute viewers will notice one thing that hasn't changed, though: the American Airlines livery. I know of no major carrier that has stuck with the same color scheme and logo for so long. The bare polished aluminum, the gothic tail bird and tricolor cheat; there's nothing particularly beautiful about it, but I hope they keep it going -- if for no other reason than it bucks the annoying "in motion" livery theme that is now so common among airlines. Take a look at the tarmac palette these days -- there are enough streaks, swishes, swirls and curls out there to make anybody dizzy, most of them indistinguishable from each other. Carriers want to appear slick, sleek and modern, but they've jettisoned their identities in the process.
I am really fond of those drive-up stairs. There's something dramatic about stepping onto a plane this way: the ground-level approach along the tarmac followed by the slow ascent. The effect is similar to watching the opening credits of a film -- a brief, formal introduction to the journey. By contrast, the jet bridge (Jetway if you prefer) makes the plane itself feel almost irrelevant; you're merely in transit from one annoying interior space (terminal) to another (airplane cabin). Many of the overseas routes I fly find me at airports that still employ stairs, and I always get a thrill from them.
All right, except for those times when it's 95 degrees and I've got 90 pounds of luggage.
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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.
Last week, Pamela Root and her 2-year-old son were booted off a Southwest Airlines flight because the boy wouldn't stop shouting, "Go, plane, go!" and "I want Daddy!"
I'm really tempted to say nothing more on the subject, since that sentence alone is plenty to spark a spirited argument about whether overly permissive parenting or a lack of respect for harried moms (and lack of sympathy for cranky kids) is the greater scourge facing society today -- and if I stay out of it, at least none of the ranting will be directed at me. Alas, I get paid to express opinions, so here we go.
My opinion: As a society, we do not have enough respect for harried moms (and dads, but it's usually moms) or sympathy for cranky kids, generally speaking. I believe this is an important feminist issue. I believe any adult who travels by air and claims she's never wanted to scream "Go, plane, go!" at the top of her lungs while sitting on a tarmac is probably lying. I also believe, however, that unless he has special needs that make public screaming both more likely and far more difficult to end, a toddler hollering in a closed space for a prolonged period about something other than physical pain is very unlikely to evoke much sympathy. And the adult in charge has a responsibility to try to calm him and reinforce that this is inappropriate public behavior.
Before parents start huffing that I obviously don't have kids or know what it's like -- and you're right, I don't -- let me clarify a few things about those last two sentences. First, the key word is "try." Some toddlers simply will not shut up for love or gummi bears. I get this. I've worked in daycare. I've been a nanny. I have nieces and nephews, one of whom does have special needs that made him extremely tantrum-prone when he was young. And of course his parents still had the same responsibility (not to mention natural desire) to try to calm him -- which they took very seriously, though it was often a losing battle. So I try to give all parents the benefit of the doubt, not knowing their situation, when the screaming starts. And even when it doesn't stop for a while. If I can see that the adult is trying to get the outburst in hand, and the kid is simply having none of it, I chide myself for my own knee-jerk uncharitable thoughts and try to focus instead on how frustrated that parent must be, what a crappy position she finds herself in. I believe this is The Decent Thing to Do. But at the same time, there really are parents out there who do nothing, or almost nothing, when their kids start making life miserable for everyone else on a plane or in a restaurant or in a store -- and I reserve the right to smugly judge them, dammit.
That point -- that such slacker parents exist, though they are clearly not all or even most parents -- really can't be emphasized enough in these debates. Because it seems to me, everyone who's ever been the parent of a young child has a story about the kid acting out in a way that led to a dirty look or a nasty comment from a stranger, which then leads them to think, "That could have been me -- so screw you, impatient, selfish childless person who objects to screaming children! You have no idea how hard it is!" I can appreciate that. If someone was rude to you when you were trying your best to calm your child, that person is what's known as an asshole. It wasn't fair. They shouldn't have done that. But the existence of child-hating assholes does not rule out the existence of asshole parents, and the latter are the topic at hand just now. It's like we lady bloggers are always telling men who whine, "But we're not all like that!" -- as if that news flash should end any conversation about sexist male behavior. We know you're not all like that, and if the shoe doesn't fit, you don't have to wear it. Still, some of your ilk are indeed like that, and that's whom we're discussing.
A few years ago, a cafe in a Chicago neighborhood near my own made national news when the owner, Dan McCauley, put a sign on the door that read, "Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven." Neighborhood parents went bazoo and organized a boycott, but four years later, both the cafe and the sign are still there; there wasn't sufficient outrage to change the policy. I can only assume that's because the controversy was not really about child-hating meanies versus beleaguered parents trying their very best, but about a reasonable small business owner versus a bunch of selfish jerks. Before the sign went up, as the New York Times reported:
Children were climbing the cafe's poles. A couple were blithely reading the newspaper while their daughter lay on the floor blocking the line for coffee. When the family whose children were running across the room to throw themselves against the display cases left after his admonishment, Mr. McCauley recalled, the restaurant erupted in applause.
If you're not the kind of parent who would let your child throw herself against a display case for kicks, I have no beef with you. Most people probably don't. Those who would be nasty to a parent who's engaged in the process of teaching a child that acting like a child is, unfortunately, not always completely appropriate deserve just as much scorn as parents who ignore their precious little pole-climbers. But can we at least agree that those parents deserve it, too? Can we agree that parents who read the newspaper while their kids blatantly interfere with a business's operations and drive strangers nuts might actually have earned the negative judgment of other patrons? Because I am really sick of hearing that I'm the selfish one when there are real, live parents who say stuff like, "You go to a coffee shop or a bakery for a rest, to relax, and that you would have to worry the whole time about your child doing something that children do -- really what they're saying is they don't welcome children, they want the child to behave like an adult," as ejected A Taste of Heaven patron Kim Cavitt did to the Times. There is a big difference between not welcoming children and trying to maintain a public space where one person's child won't prevent everyone else in the room from relaxing -- i.e., expecting the parent to behave like an adult.
As far as Pamela Root goes, I have no idea what she did to try to soothe her son while he was yelling, or whether she deserves opprobrium by my standards or anyone else's. According to reports, she planned to feed her son when the plane took off -- in hopes of avoiding ear pressure-related screaming -- after which she expected he would fall asleep, as he had on previous trips. Apparently, the flight attendants did not warn Root that she was at risk of being removed from the plane if she couldn't calm the boy, which might have made a difference in her response. (Before they returned home the next day, she "warned him what would happen if he acted up, that we'd get kicked off the plane," which seems to have helped.) Root and her son had flown before and eventually made it home without incident, so it obviously wasn't a chronic problem. But I still can't blame the flight attendant who said, "We've heard that before," when Root tried offering assurances that he'd be fine after takeoff. And I know I've sat on tarmacs with dozens of squawking children who were not removed from the aircrafts, which leads me to believe there was probably something different about this one. (Would it be news if Southwest or any other airline were in the habit of kicking out 2-year-olds just for acting like 2-year-olds?) And I know that parents often become desensitized to the noises their young children make, and learn to tolerate a lot more racket than the rest of us can bear, which can become problematic in a space like a plane.
So, without having been there, I can't really judge whether Root messed up, the flight attendants messed up, or both sides bear equal responsibility for turning a fairly common problem into a newsworthy incident. I can, however, say that I don't look forward to the inevitable screeds on how parents today suck or on how childless people suck for not being more understanding when 2-year-olds scream their heads off incessantly. The truth is, there are real child-haters (and parent-haters) out there, and there are real parents whose flagrant disregard for the comfort of anyone but their obnoxious offspring makes everyone around them miserable. But most of us fall into neither category. Most of us are just doing our best to get along.
So, fellow childless people, please try to remember that the kid crying behind you on a plane might be terrified or in pain, and his parents are probably trying really hard to soothe him. And parents, please try to remember that those of us who complain about crappy parenting we've witnessed are probably not talking about people like you -- unless you actually are one of the ones who would completely ignore your kid throwing herself into a display case or kicking a fellow passenger's seat for two hours. If you are one of those, then yes, my fruitless womb and I are judging you. And we'll stop being annoyed that your child acts like a child just as soon as you start acting like a grown-up.
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