"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Sunday, January 02, 2011

Well, he should just lose height then
Posted by Jill | 5:54 AM
You didn't read that wrong. The title of this post does say "height", not "weight".

It was one thing when you could just shrug and say an overweight airline passenger should just go on a diet. But perhaps when a passenger is too tall to fit his legs in the space allotted between rows, can we please just acknowledge that when airlines are trying to cram ever-more passengers on a plane, no adult in even the normal range of sizes is denied even basic comfort?
When Brooks Anderson boarded a Spirit Airlines flight from Chicago to Ft. Myer's, Fla., to spend Christmas with his family, he said he didn't expect to be standing for the next two-and-a-half hours.

"I was in an aisle seat and I clearly didn't fit into the seat at all," he said. "I couldn't even stuff myself in there."

The 25-year-old is 6'7" and as he tried to squeeze his knees under his chin, his tall frame proved to be too big to fit into Spirit's tiny coach seat.

"This is the most crammed I've been by far," Anderson said.

Even though he was in the last row of the plane, Anderson said the flight attendants wouldn't let him stick his knees out into the aisle, so he was forced to sit with them jammed into the metal tray table on the seat in front of him.

"It's incredibly painful," he said.

Anderson said he asked to be moved to an exit row seat, which typically has more legroom.

"The stewardess and I talked before the takeoff," he said. "She asked if anyone in the emergency row would switch spots with me [but] came back and said, 'You're stuck'."

Brooks Anderson stands at 6'7" and is shown here with his grandparents.

When none of the other passengers offered to help, Anderson said he decided to take matters into his own hands and asked if he could stand for the flight.

"I said, 'I need to do something about this, is it O.K. if I stand after the seatbelt sign is turned off?,'" he said. "She said it was O.K."

It got to the point where if the attendent wouldn't let him stand, Anderson said he seriously considered getting off the plane and missing the flight altogether.

"If I had to sit in my seat the whole time, I would have been in physical pain, with metal jamming into my knee caps for the whole flight," Anderson explained.

He then spent the remainder of the flight "dodging people going to and from the bathroom."

"It's like being in a subway car for two-and-a-half hours, which is awful," he said, adding that there was luckily no turbulence during the flight.

"It's bizarre," said Anderson's mother, Katie Anderson. "This was the first time he's been treated like this."


One could argue that if you're flying Spirit, you know that what you're getting is to be crammed into a sardine can. But other airlines aren't significantly better. Standing on a crowded subway train for a half-hour at rush hour is gruesome enough. But you paid two-and-a-half bucks for that ride. To pay hundreds of dollars (after including fees and taxes) to fly, and then be told that you have to stand if you don't want your legs crushed, means it's time to speak to the airline industry in the only language it understands: money. Just stay home. Now that there's Skype, you can have face-to-face conversations with your relatives that way.

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Friday, June 05, 2009

OK, now the Charles Widmore jokes are getting freaky
Posted by Jill | 5:50 AM
The crash of Air France #447 is starting to look more like a case of life imitating art every day. Turns out that the debris found in the Atlantic yesterday wasn't from the jet after all:
The search for clues into the crash of Air France flight 447 was thrown into confusion Thursday, after the Brazilian military said initially that it had recovered the first piece of floating debris from the plane, a structural support piece about eight feet long that might have come from the jet’s cargo hold. But by Thursday evening, the military said that information had been incorrect, and that the debris had probably come from a ship or another source.

Based on the initial reports from the military, experts postulated that the plane had broken up in flight, an idea for which there is now less evidence.

So what DID happen?

As much macabre fun as it may be to envision the plane as having crashed off some island where Ben Linus is running a ragtag band of people, the reality may be even more sobering:
The revelation came as Airbus, the manufacturer of the missing jet, issued a warning on Thursday to all its customers to follow established procedures when pilots suspect airspeed indicators are not functioning properly. The bulletin appeared to be the first hint that malfunctioning instruments indicators might have played an important role in the crash.

The message, approved by French investigators, said that the message had been sent “without prejudging the final outcome of the investigation,” but clearly it pointed to the possibility that mismanaging the plane’s speed could have been one step in a cascade of on-board failures, leading to the crash northeast of Brazil on Monday and the death of all 228 people on board.

The message noted that “there was inconsistency between the different measured airspeeds” in the Airbus 330 that crashed, one of several error messages that were sent by the plane’s automatic systems to an Air France maintenance base.

Airspeed on jets is measured by the combination of a tube that faces forward, called a Pitot tube, and an opening on the side of the plane known as a static port. The plane’s speed is determined by comparing the pressure in the Pitot tube that is created by the oncoming wind with the pressure from the static port.

The model that crashed, an A330, has three pairs of tubes and static ports. But other instruments can also be involved in calculating air speed, and the notice to airlines, called an Accident Information Telex, did not specify the nature of the inconsistency.

The message went to airlines that operate all Airbus models, from narrow-body A318 models to the double-decker jumbo A380.

Failure to manage an inconsistency properly has been cited in several crashes of big jets from various manufacturers. In 1996, a Boeing 757 taking off from the Dominican Republic crashed because the airspeed indicators of the captain and the first officer disagreed, and the crew mismanaged the problem. Mud wasps had nested in one of the Pitot tubes.

I'm no expert on flight. In fact, I'm a nervous nellie about flying. But this sounds like something that could happen more often than we want to think about.

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Tuesday, August 05, 2008

The vindication of Skybus
Posted by Jill | 7:06 AM
If you recall, I had a little adventure with the discount carrier Skybus the weekend it went out of business. Before the price of fuel began to skyrocket, the Skybus model seemed to be, if not solid, at least worth a try: Keep fares low and make your profits from selling stuff on the plane -- things like snacks, drinks, Skymall items, headsets, and other things most people don't use or could do very nicely without, but the costs of which are folded into the airfare.

The uncomfortable part of the Skybus model, aside from the fact that with $100+/barrel oil, it's untenable, is that the flight attendants were paid peanuts and made commissions off of what you bought. This of course meant that you bought drinks you didn't want and boxes of Swiss truffles for hostess gifts just so these young men and women could make enough money to keep a roof over their heads.

But now, with Skybus safely out of the way, other airlines are trying to come up with new ways to make money because they no longer can from selling tickets in a country used to air travel that's accessible to all. JetBlue is only the latest airline to take a page from the Skybus playbook:

JetBlue Airways said Monday that it planned to begin charging for pillow and blanket sets on flights of two hours or longer. The $7 sets, which passengers can keep and reuse, include a 10-by-12 inch pillow, a fleece blanket and a $5 coupon for Bed Bath & Beyond.

Buying the sets will be the only option for airline slumberers who do not tote their own; pillows and blankets will no longer be distributed free.

Last week, US Airways began charging $1 for coffee and tea and $2 for bottled water and soft drinks, a step already taken by some European carriers. Several airlines have begun charging passengers to check luggage and book tickets using their frequent-flier miles.

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Monday, April 07, 2008

Uh....about that Skybus post from the other day....
Posted by Jill | 6:27 AM
That's what I get for trying to save some money.

When I found that it would be about $300 to fly Continental or American to Raleigh-Durham out of Newark, and that renting an economy car was going to cost over $50/day out of that airport, I had decided to see what was going out of Stewart Airport in Newburgh, and that's how I found Skybus, flying into Greensboro, where rental cars were also less expensive. I'm a fearful flyer at best, so flying God-Knows-What Airlines was a real leap of faith, so that it got me there in one piece was cause for celebration, and then I was able to appreciate the overall zaniness of the concept.

I haven't yet totalled the additional costs I incurred getting home, from the $269 for a one-way fare from Raleigh-Durham to having Mr. Brilliant drive me up to Stewart Airport yesterday to pick up the car and the associated tolls and such, and the additional day of parking at Stewart. But I'd guess that I ended up spending more than I would have if I'd just taken the airport shuttle to Newark, flown American Airlines, and rented the car at RDU.

And I'm one of the lucky ones. Imagine the people stranded in Hawaii after Aloha Airlines went bust just a few days before Skybus did.

When I first wrote the post, I originally referred to Skybus as feeling like the Air America of airlines, in regard to that (pardon the expression) "flying by the seat of their pants" feeling, as if this were a giant experiement and let's see if it works. In retrospect, and especially after reading more about the airline's origins, there was definitely something dot-com-ish about the whole thing, from the T-shirt uniforms to the egalitarian first-name basis of the cockpit crew, to the airborne shopping mall, to the $10 ticket gimmick, to buying brand new planes for a startup, when most low-cost airline startups (such as the old People's Express) buy older planes from other airlines.

The only thing missing was the foosball table.

Skybus' CEO, Bill Diffenderfer, seemed to be the kind of Cool Guy who would run a company differently from the Jack Welches and the Bill Gateses and the other ruthless corporate titans we've come to associate with corporate America. Even Google, with its "Don't be evil" motto, is suspect now, given the bazillions of gigabytes of data on just about everyone housed on its servers. But Diffenderfer is a guy who wrote a book called The Samurai Leader: Winning Business Battles With the Wisdom, Honor and Courage of the Samurai Code as part of his OTHER career, to which he said he was returning when he "resigned" (=ahem=) on March 24.

Of course the samurai were also warriors who killed people, but that doesn't make as good copy as a corporate titan who believes in honor, courage, and the arts. It's no wonder that flight attendants were willing to work for $9.50/hour plus tips and commissions on what they sell.

But when your CEO is a guy who sees running an airline as a stepping stone but what he really wants to do is write books, and your business model is based on $62/barrel oil, was was that of Skybus, and oil goes to $104/barrel, it's difficult to make a go of things. How anyone could have not anticipated speculative increases in the price of oil, given the situation in the Middle East and profiteering by petroleum traders is another indication of the kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking that gave rise in the 1990's to companies like Kosmo.com. And when an already-caught-with-its-pants-down credit card industry that has parcelled out credit limits for just about anyone with a pulse, stops paying you until passengers have actually flown, it's hard to book your revenue to keep going.

I don't know if in an era of increasing fuel prices, it's possible for any startup airline, let alone one based on low ticket prices and scrambling for revenue via other means, from selling advertising blurbs on the safety lecture to selling chocolates and TSA-approved luggage locks on your planes. But when I think about the 450 Skybus employees who were unceremoniously dumped by their "code of honor" employer last weekend with no notice, and I think about how patient the flight attendants on my flight were with an elderly woman who needed practically a piggyback ride on an attendant half her size to get to her seat, who had obviously had a stroke and couldn't speak intelligibly and was deaf as a post; when I remember how they tried to give her the safety spiel in a way she could comprehend, and I think about them doing this for $9.50/hour, only to be left virtually on the tarmac with nothing but their Skybus T-shirts, my experience wasn't so bad.

I just hope that some other airline hires these people quickly. Because you don't do what these people did and take this kind of leap of faith unless you love what you do.

Especially now, when people hate airlines more than ever before.

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