White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

When Love Happened on a Snowy Valentine’s Day

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Thinking back on Valentine’s Days past, there is one which was not marked by flowers, chocolate and champagne. But there was love; total, absolute love. The purest love money can buy: Yes, money did change hands.

It was Feb. 14, 1983.

My wife Linda Gasparello, although it was before we married, and I lived in the horse country of Virginia on 5 acres that backed up onto vast conservation acreage, so we felt land-rich. We had two horses and one dog: a difficult but loved Siberian Husky named Woo. I thought, what better Valentine’s Day gift for Linda than another dog?

It was a mean evening, cold and snowy. But on my way home from Washington, I made my way to the animal shelter in Leesburg, Va., 28 miles from our home in The Plains.

I was driving a rather clumsy Ford F-250 pickup, which I had bought for towing a horse trailer. It was, of course, rear-wheel drive and it slid on snow and ice. But I was determined.

Shelters are not for the weak of heart; so many dogs deserving to be set free. That night, as I recall, there were about 20 all crying in their way,“Take me! Take me!” Each pleading for the protection of a forever home.

I told the young woman attendant that I was looking for a Husky or Husky-type dog. She showed me a tan-colored, cock-eyed inmate and insisted that it had Husky lineage – maybe because the shelter was about to close.

The weather window was about to close, too. So I scooped up the dog, a two-year-old female, paid the $12 fee and we were off.

It was a drive from hell. I fought to keep the truck from sliding off the road — no anti-lock brakes. My new charge fought to assure me that she was the right pick by licking my face, trying to position her 60 pounds on my lap and commenting between licks. Love can be pushy when it comes on four feet.

At home, she, still nameless, took over and established in minutes, including to Woo, that she was the new proprietor of the house. What to call her? Valentine, of course.

Valentine was not, perhaps, the prettiest dog – our vet thought she was a German Shepherd-Airedale Terrier mix — but she was right up there with the most loyal, the most caring and easily the one of the most gifted dogs we ever owned. Intellectually gifted, you might say. She got flustered when she saw Linda cooking in the kitchen but speaking on the television in the living room.

Valentine did it all: boating, running alongside the horses, keeping tabs on wandering Woo, or just sleeping near the fire.

On day one, she climbed the stairs to sleep at the foot of our bed, as she did for the 12-year span of her life. When arthritis hobbled her, she struggled up the stairs of our 18th-century house.

Valentine’s Day is about love. Love is waiting at the nearby animal shelter — reach out and be loved.

All the Rage for Gin and Tonic

If you are a gin and tonic person, you probably know it is as much or more about the tonic than it is about the gin.

All the rage among G&T aficionados is Fever Tree, now a hot stock on the London Stock Exchange. The secret: cane sugar, more quinine and natural ingredients. It is available in U.S. supermarkets.

Adventures in Flying: The Grand Canyon

I once flew into the Grand Canyon, where three people have been killed in a helicopter crash. The thermals are wicked there.

I had rented a Cessna 182 RG from Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix and took three passengers flying early one morning, before the famous thermals were due to develop. The tower at Grand Canyon Airport had warned me to remain 1,500 feet above the lip and to be aware of thermals.

I asked if there were any pilots’ reports – called “PIREPs” — of turbulence over the canyon. He said there were none.

I told my passengers we were in luck: It was going to be smooth flying. Off we went, overwhelmed with the sheer size and splendor of the great tear in the earth.

Then the airplane fell, maybe 200 feet, then shot up pitched to the side. Then up, down and sideways.

We were all over the sky until I got back over the rim and everything smoothed out. I do not believe any of my passengers flew in a single- engine airplane again.

The Things They Say

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” — Ernest Hemingway, from “The Sun Also Rises”

Airlines: The Uncomfortable, Dangerous Skies

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According to Greek legend, Procrustes was a rogue blacksmith who had an iron bed that he would invite to travelers to use, except that if they were too short, he would stretch them until they fit it and if they were too long, he would amputate the offending limbs.

Well, over at American Airlines, the spirit of Procrustes is alive and well.

They’re planning to reward you for your business by putting you in even smaller seats than you’re now squeezed into. They’re going to lop two inches off the space you’re getting on their new Boeing 737 MAX airplanes.

In fairness, I must point out that Spirit Airlines already has customers on their aircraft squeezed into the smaller seats. Others will follow suit.

Unbelievably, American and some airlines are going to compound their hostility to their customers by making the toilets even smaller than they are now. Soon they may reduce service to a kind of communal bedpan; that way they could cram in more seats.

But that’s not all. The airlines are already discussing a sub-coach fare, where you’d get the tiny seat and the dolls-house toilet, and you wouldn’t get any space in the overhead bins and your flight wouldn’t qualify for frequent-flyer miles.

The plan here is to get you to upgrade to a slightly larger seat, allowing you to carry your bag on board. The wise will take that option because otherwise, it looks like you’ll be paying a fee for your small bag to go into the hold. Crafty.
All this is glorious fun for late-night comedians — none of whom would be caught dead in coach, by the way. They’re all up front, if a private plane isn’t available.

But there’s a big safety issue here which the airlines, in their desire to get more bodies jammed into the wretched space available, don’t talk about. If there were an accident — and there will be one because safe as airline travel is, there are always accidents — people will be stuck in their seats because the gangways will be too crowded. Crowding makes for chaos.

The worst scenario – and I’ve discussed this with aviation experts aplenty over many years — is what would happen in those precious moments, either after a very hard landing with a collapse of the gear or a collision on the ground, before fire breaks out? Precious seconds when people in panic in the rear of the plane will most likely be fighting each other to get to the escape routes. And, of course, there will be some fool trying to get his or her suitcase out of the overhead bin.

Hijacking goes back to the earliest days of airplanes, but ramped up in the 1960s with hijackings to Cuba, and then the Middle East got into the game.

Pilots, airlines and the government knew there was a simple way of frustrating this: harden the cockpits with locks and steel bars. The White House knew about the fix, as did the FAA: I raised it with the White House, and friends raised it with the FAA.

But the airlines said it would be too expensive, which is always the first line of argument from people who don’t want to do something; the existential fear of spending money.

After 9/11, the cockpits were hardened almost overnight. I asked a former White House science adviser why the fix couldn’t have been done earlier, when people in aviation had suggested it. He told me, “I should have pushed that one harder.” Indubitably.

The unconscionable crowding of airliners, like the hardening of cockpits, will have to wait until the aviation community, the FAA and the public realizes that not only is flying in coach on an airliner today a horrible experience, but it’s also potentially dangerous, very dangerous.

 

Photo: “A true workhorse, the 757” 12 May 2009, 14:47 Cory W. Watts from Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

The Air Traffic Control System Is a Miracle, Handle with Care

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The air traffic control system is one of the miracles of our infrastructure: an essential and silent cornerstone of modern transportation. Not only is it the largest and most complex air traffic system on earth, but it is the most egalitarian. It integrates little Textron Cessnas into the same airways as Airbus A380s and Boeing 747s. It manages flights to the smallest airports and the largest.

To know how it works and to have been involved with it as a pilot is to love the system, to venerate it and to want to see it survive. The system was celebrated in “Pushing Tin,” the 1999 film with John Cusack and Cate Blanchett.

But it is falling behind the times. Like so much of the infrastructure it is getting old and has suffered from inadequate sustained funding for years. Attempts to modernize it have been haphazard, underfunded and subject to whims of contractors and Congress.

The first thing about the air traffic control system we have is that it works and it works safely. The second is that it is in real time: You can’t park airplanes in the sky while you fool with new ways of doing things.

The system’s governance has grown to sluggish and bureaucratic, but is the solution to create a corporation? Isn’t that the kind of thinking which gave us Amtrak?

The technical plans for the future of the air traffic control system come under the rubric of “NextGen.” That means using new technologies and changing from the present radar-based system to a GPS-based one. There is no doubt that it will be more efficient and get more airplanes into the sky and onto the ground with the same number of runways. FedEx has already proved that with a privately funded experiment in Memphis.

But NextGen will be a great upheaval. It involves converting from a system which works perfectly with humans at every stage to one which relies on advanced technology for the grunt work of air traffic separation.

It also will affect the air traffic controllers — the heroes of today’s system — who love what they do as much as the pilots who they direct. It is a band of brothers and sisters tied together by tension, excitement and the certainty that they make a difference and that what they do is unforgiving of sloth, stupidity or moodiness.

New systems will affect these extraordinary people bound together by the camaraderie of aviation – which is as strong a bond as I’ve ever found.

They will go, as airline pilots have, from being people who control things to people who manage systems; the art of air traffic control will be subsumed to the technology of air traffic control. No more seat-of-the-pants, just systems management. No more controllers like the one at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport who told me and my flying partner Mike Skov in bad weather, “Get in here! I’ve got a hole.” Or the controller at New York’s LaGuardia who said at 5 p.m., when I was stuck behind a line of jets, and the jet wash was causing my little plane difficulties, “Gentlemen, let me get the single out ahead of you, if you don’t mind.” I went. Machines don’t do kindness, people do.

Now the future of the air traffic controllers and, for that matter, the future of the whole system is in President Donald Trump’s sights. Tighten your seat belts, turbulence ahead.

The case for privatization is that the Federal Aviation Administration is too bureaucratic to manage the changes in the system which are needed. It suggests that the current system is failing. It isn’t. But it is falling behind the technology available: Its computers are old, systems date back to the post-World War II era.

What the FAA’s system needs now is steady funding to facilitate the technological revolution. It doesn’t need a system which will favor the airlines, UPS and FedEx. Can a company be expected to treat the small, rural airport and the small airplane with the same care it does now when money is the rationale?

Surely, there are other ways of streamlining the FAA bureaucracy and guaranteeing multi-year funding without flying into the clear blue yonder of privatization.