This change has meant that a lot of people are modifying their travel plans a bit — I’m certainly looking a lot harder at our travel plans for next year in an attempt to beat the surcharges on Thai, ANA, Asiana, and a few other carriers not called Lufthansa (where it is too late). Even among those who aren’t planning to travel, though, there’s a lot of anger. And there usually is a lot of anger around this time of year: status benefits change, upgrades are reduced, and it seems like everyone else has it just a bit better in a different airline’s program than you do in yours.

Over on FlyerTalk, a member posted a manifesto for those angry at this kind of stuff:

Every year, or several times per year, people seem to worry about switching programs, or where to go, or if to stay, and it all gets very intense.

This is an alternative set of ideas for those who get very anxious about airlines and the programs they offer.

1. Most important of all: marketing is a powerful tool that airlines have used very effectively over many decades. While it is impossible to completely escape its effects, the most relaxing thing you can do is to realize that your airline-related hysteria is primarily caused by the aura that the airlines still manage to have – notwithstanding the fact there is nothing at all special about them.
2. Never depend on an airline to do anything properly, such as get you anywhere when you need to be there, or get any of your stuff anywhere at all.
3. Do you get so anxious about every industry you deal with? Grocery stores? Banks? If you did, I’m surprised you aren’t in the hospital. See #1.
4. Airlines offer programs involving points, upgrades, and the like, entirely for their own benefit, without regard to what you might get out of it. They are not rewards for your loyalty in any way, shape, or form.
5. It is the ultimate goal of all airlines to make you think you are receiving benefits when in fact you are not.
6. The superiority of one airline’s program over another is always temporary.
7. You are not important to the airline, no matter how much you think you might be.
8. The following cannot all exist simultaneously, even for any subset of customers:
   • A generous upgrade scheme
   • A generous award flight availability scheme
   • A generous points earning structure
   • A quality product
9. The best you can hope for with airline programs is a sort of arbitrage situation, in which your above average knowledge allows you to get an above average amount of benefits. The airline will always attempt to reduce your ability to benefit in this manner.
10. The airline sets the rules. The airline can change the rules whenever it wants, without notice, and should always expect it to do so to its own benefit. Always consider your “assets” (points, upgrade credits) to be worthless, so that when they become worthless you will have lost nothing.
11. Have no expectations and you will never be disappointed.

I find this surprisingly refreshing. I loves me my status as much as the next person with “AC*E” printed on their boarding pass, and I’m tickled pink I requalified much earlier this year than in the past (no 40-minute trip to Los Angeles or one-way home from Vancouver for me!), but I think zorn makes a lot of sense with zir list, and I’ll endeavor to keep it in the back of my mind when I inevitably start screaming once the Air Canada program for 2012 is announced.

zorn’s point 9, however, has a shocking amount of truth to it, and gets to the heart of what I think drives a lot of FFs: We love the game. We love the system. It reminds me of nothing so much as being a phone phreak — it’s not exactly the places the system takes us, though that matters a great deal, but rather the idea of possessing a body of knowledge about a fairly opaque world that most people don’t care about, and where the details of that world are derived through experimentation and community knowledge sharing. It isn’t about trying to defraud the airlines (or the phone company, for that matter) — it’s about trying to understand something, and I occasionally think my ultimate dream job would be in network or operations management for a major international airline.

I can’t think of any reason why otherwise sane people would spend hours combing through the fare databases looking for mistakes, why our idea of a good time is reading the entire contract of carriage, or why we can describe, in some detail, the route structure of an entire airline alliance. It’s the only way I can explain having an entire list of upgrade and mileage-earning fare buckets at the tip of my tongue, or why I know what the spot price of a ticket to Toronto is on any given day. Much in the same way that a phreak could talk your ear off about MF signalling or the differences between N2 and T-carrier, I can spend hours about the intricacies of clearing a waitlist or how to work the system to your benefit during IRROPs (and why you should always, but always, take a bump if one is offered). This is interesting stuff, but it’s the sort of thing no normal human really needs to know. I know it’s trite to say there are two kinds of people in the world — there always are, but this time it’s true: you either care about this kind of stuff, or you’re not. Chances are if you’re fascinated with the minutia of running an airline you’ve been similarly obsessed about other opaque systems in your life. If not, well, too bad.

As for why the airlines inspire this level of devotion, it’s not complicated. zorn talked about that too. It’s marketing. This is from Delta, about a half-dozen years back:

I loved this ad when it came out, because it captured something fundamental about the experience of travel that’s difficult to put into words, and it manages to illustrate the passion that good travel can inspire. My new hands-down favorite, though, and the one that made me cry like a small child when I saw it for the first time earlier today, is the contemporary British Airways advert:

I know zorn is right: the airlines are no different from any other business I deal with on a daily basis. But they are the vehicle through which many of our dreams about travel, adventure, change, and possibility (and here you’ll have to excuse the expression) find flight. Airline marketing works because they are selling a product that most of us would buy anyway, simply because of what the product represents. Beer advertising makes it look as though you’ll meet lots of attractive women if you drink their product; that doesn’t actually happen. But get on an airplane and you really do end up somewhere else, even if “somewhere else” happens to be Pittsburgh. That’s awfully powerful.

Patrick Smith says that he became a pilot because, as a child, what fascinated him were the route maps in the back of the in-flight magazines, and the possibilities they represented. I was like that, too. Heck, I still am. It is just marketing, a bit of captive advertising, to let you know what the airline could do, if you gave it enough of your time and money, and with that potential comes a thousands dreams of far-away cities, strange lands, and new experiences. You either get this or you don’t, and you can be rational about your engagement with an airline or you can’t.

I’m trying to be rational about my relationship with Air Canada and the Star Alliance. But I’m not sure that it’s possible. Like I said, there are two kinds of people.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/11/for-love-of-the-game/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/new-york/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/new-york/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 04:59:27 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=895 Continue reading →]]> When I first got off the train in Paris at Gare de Lyon five years ago, I felt like I was home. It was the sort of place that was immediately familiar, even though I’d never been there before. I’m firmly convinced this was the product of a childhood steeped in French culture. It was like that in London, too, and for the same reasons: when you have these great cities as the touchstones of your literature and your movies, the sheer volume of media makes the geography real. New York was exactly the same way, except that it might have been even more real, in the sense that for my entire life I’ve been watching TV shows and movies set in New York City, and so much of what happens in those shows somehow seeps out into the wider culture — I think I knew, on an academic level, how much this was true, but I didn’t really understand it until I was riding up the approach to the Queens Midtown tunnel on a Friday night, looking out over the East River, and I realized that I wasn’t really going to encounter anything that was truly strange or dislocating.

The oddity and familiarity with the place only got worse after we came home. There I was, trying to write up this blog entry while K. was watching the premier of the remake of “Prime Suspect” on the PVR, and it was all I could do to not gawk at the scenery. The scenery, incidentally, really messed with my brain: ordinarily I don’t have to work very hard to take interesting or pretty photographs, but New York is probably one of the most photographed places in all of history. Every time I brought a camera up to my face, I felt like I was ripping off someone else. (Uh, or making an homage. Yeah, that’s it.) The artistic frustration was not helped by the high overcast that dominated most of our trip that rendered a very flat, very uninteresting light over the city.

So I ran most of the pictures I actually liked through a desaturation filter, and things turned out slightly better. New York seems to want black and white. I had, actually, toyed with the idea of leaving the DSLR at home and taking a film body and a big stack of Tri-X instead, and maybe I should have done that. But then I thought about how hard it was to get B&W film processed and scanned without spending a million dollars, and then I couldn’t find a 2CR5 battery, so that idea pretty much got abandoned shortly after it came into my head.

(I should also mention that, while I was playing with this idea, another one surfaced: “I know, I’ll take medium format gear to New York!” The logic being, apparently, that if you’re going to shoot film in the big city you might as well do it right. Um, yeah. See aforementioned comments about the cost of processing and scanning film, then double the projected numbers. Never mind the part where I don’t even have a transparency scanner anymore.)

Eventually I’m going to do some more post-processing on the raw files and see if I can’t create a Tri-X-ey look to some of the stuff, but I came home with some kind of virus that has made it difficult for me to stay upright for more than 20 minutes at a time, so that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

In the meantime, this post is really an excuse to put a plug in for the gallery, and tell a couple of stories about the trip that folks might find interesting. I wanted to come up with a consistent narrative here, but the virus is kicking my ass and I have to go lie down now.

The Other Other Other Half

We skipped the Staten Island Ferry in favor of a walk around lower Manhattan: the haze and fog made seeing the Statue of Liberty sketchy, and neither of us had through to bring a copy of “Let The River Run” so there wasn’t much point of riding the boat for the sake of riding the boat. Instead we walked up Broadway from Battery Park and found the famous “Charging Bull” statue. This is a bronze statue of, uh, a charging bull, supposed to symbolize the resilience of American capitalism. On this day in September, it was walled off by police barricades and guarded by no fewer than six NYPD officers, as a result of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests a few blocks away. In fact, much of Wall Street is fenced off; Wall Street proper is almost entirely barricaded, and pedestrians are funneled down a narrow sidewalk (that comes equipped with a vehicle barrier at knee height, which really
fucking hurts when you walk into it), and guarded by the usual contingent of NYPD and NYSE security personnel (all of whom are armed).

The symbolism wasn’t lost on me. And it wasn’t lost on me as I walked through the protestor camp at Zuccotti Park. Normally I’d dismiss these people as the dirty smelly hippies they are — but lately I’ve been rethinking that dimsissal, and coming to think that maybe they might have a point. One sign I saw said that if you were making less than $250,000/year, you probably had more in common with the hippies than with the banksters. And the author of the sign wasn’t wrong: we aren’t hurting for money in any way, shape or form (we did, after all, jet off to New York for the week), but the gap between us and the people who hold most of the money and the vast amount of the power in western society is so big it’s impossible to really understand. The distance, in other words, between me and the guy who hasn’t had a bath in a week and a half is a lot smaller than the distance between me and Jamie Dimon.

(I could make some joke here about being more concerned about being robbed while we were in Lower Manhattan than anywhere else we went in Manhattan, but that’s rather stale.)

Going into the Century 21 department store sank the final nail into the symbolism coffin for me. Century 21 is one of those great stories from 9/11 — about a department store that had been seriously damaged by the attacks on the World Trade Center (it really is right across the street), but they stayed, they cleaned up, and they re-opened within a year or so. I’d been told by a half-dozen people I needed to go and check it out, because the bargains were so unbelievably good, and they were: designer brand-names at rock-bottom prices! Except…

The day before, we’d walked through Saks Fifth Avenue, and I looked at clothes that cost more than I make in a month before taxes and deductions. I’m aware these things exist in the world, and I certainly don’t begrudge people their ability to buy these things, but what got me was the fact that there is an entire store devoted to selling this kind of stuff, and it’s a store that does really quite well. I know Saks isn’t all about the $6,500 dresses, but it does cost a lot to shop there, and when we walked through in the afternoon, it was relatively quiet — almost an air conditioned oasis away from the craziness of Fifth Avenue.

And then there’s Century 21, with the cast-offs of the fashion designer world — the discontinued, the slightly damaged, the out-of-season. Discounted. And the place was a madhouse — the kind of scene you see around Christmas, where you think you’re going to start slashing at someone with a sharpened Visa card. I don’t mean this as a criticism of C21 — really, I don’t. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this is what capitalism looks like in 2011: you have the ultra-rich, and their pleasant, quiet, well-tended shops with the sky-high pricing… and then there’s the mosh pit where the rest of us fight for the cast-offs. For the things the rich don’t want. (On that note, if someone wants to open a shop that sells turbine-driven airplanes that were passed over by the bizjet set, I’ll open a revolving account there.)

I can’t claim this is an air-tight parable. I can’t even claim it’s a wholly original thought. But there was something about what I saw, and the way it made me feel, that was impossible to ignore. Like I said, the protesters were a bunch of people I’d normally not give the time of day to. For some reason, though, I think they have a point, and I think it’s a discussion we have to have sooner rather than later. I’m the last guy to be calling for a class war, but I’m also starting to take the view that we need to think about getting some bricks together to build a wall, and probably sooner rather than later. (As in, “Up against it, motherfucker…”)

Cheap Laughs

K. had applied for tickets to a taping of the David Letterman show, and I’d indulged her on this, because I figured the odds of us ever getting to go were basically non-existent. Yet a couple weeks ago, she got a call from someone in the production office asking if we were still interested, so we set a date and the woman from the show told K. to call a guy for the details and the skill-testing question.

It turns out there’s a trivia question you have to answer in order to score Letterman tickets, but it also turns out that it’s trivial to answer the question if you actually watch the show. Which we don’t. So I spent 10 minutes Googling frantically to find out what other people had been asked, and what the correct answers were. (In our case, “The dude who owns the Hello Deli.” Oh, the question? “Who is Rupert Jee?”) It was a painless process, which is how we came to be standing in a huge lineup in front of the Ed Sullivan theatre on a sweltering afternoon surrounded by… people who are bigger fans of David Letterman than I am.

I’ll spare you the process: there’s a lot of waiting around in lineups. The saving grace is that some of this waiting happens in spaces protected by nuclear-powered air conditioners, so it made the waiting kind of pleasant. There is the requisite trip through the metal detector and search of bags. There are also several reminders of how you need to make sure to laugh at absolutely everything, and clap loudly at all times (it was a bit like being around Republicans during the second Bush administration). Though the logistics are annoying, the show itself is an impressive display of consistency and skill — the warm-up guy comes out, yacks for a little while, introduces various members of the band (including, as a nice surprise for me, Tom Malone), Paul Schaffer comes out, and then Letterman himself comes out and yacks at the audience for a couple of minutes. Then Alan Kalter starts talking, and we’re right into the show.

If you want to see what we saw, you can grab the show for yourself and see if you think it’s any funnier than I did. I wasn’t impressed, but I realize that I’m not Letterman’s target audience. He made a couple of jokes about Rick Perry’s tendency to execute people, that I thought were in bad taste unless he actually followed them through to their logical conclusions, which he didn’t. It’s unfortunate, too, because the jokes weren’t actually that funny, and I couldn’t help but wonder what Colbert might have done with that material given his audience.

Then again, there’s probably a reason why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are on cable, and not CBS. Letterman and his staff have to walk a very fine line between offending too many people and not being funny. So, like Leno, they try to split the difference. You don’t make jokes about Rick Perry being cruel and presiding over a system that kills innocent people; you make jokes about the fact that he’s an inarticulate rambly guy. Anyone you’re likely to offend with that kind of joke probably won’t be able to hold the thought together long enough to get a complaint letter drafted, let alone organize a boycott, so you’re probably safe. Go too far after the Republican party’s core values (war, hating gays, tax cuts for the rich, and killin’ people) and you’re likely to alienate a large and noisy segment of your audience.

On the gripping hand, there’s something respectable about Dave and his staff. The guy goes out there five times a week, 40+ weeks of the year, and tries, mostly successfully, to project this aura of Daveness, a kind of warm humor that is blandly acceptable to most people. And, as I say, for the most part it works. I know it’s not easy to come up with that kind of material over and over and over again, and so I have to give some grudging amount of props to the guy for pulling it off. God knows I couldn’t do it, but that’s probably why I have a blog with eight readers, and Dave Letterman has a building with his name on it on Broadway.

(Memo to Seth Rogan: we get it. You’re a pothead. Move on, please. Also, Poppy Montgomery, you don’t have to hide the accent. We know you’re not American. We don’t mind. See: Laurie, Hugh.)

The Letting Go

The next day, we came back down to Lower Manhattan to the 9/11 memorial. You have to pre-order tickets. I heard tourists at various sites complaining about their inability to get in to see this memorial. You’re probably aware that the thing just opened a couple of weeks ago. You may also be aware that getting in is, like many other things in New York, a process of lining up, getting searched, having your bag x-rayed, and going through a metal detector (see also, Empire State Building and David Letterman). Why, I can’t say exactly. But I have a theory.

The memorial itself is well done. I am not an architecture critic by any stretch of the imagination, but I found the whole space to be soothing, the security and nearly omnipresent police notwithstanding. It is not, to my mind, like Maya Lin’s Vietnam
memorial in Washington, which seemed to set the bar so high for this sort of thing. (One thing in particular about the Wall that provokes all kinds of tears is the proliferation of stuff around the Wall, left by family and friends of the departed. This hasn’t happened at the 9/11 memorial, yet, but I suspect it will in time, and maybe it will have more emotional resonance
for me.)

But the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and the scenery around the memorial, makes me think of something else: people don’t want to forget, and they don’t want to let go. The memory of the events, a decade ago, provides some kind of justification for… something. I don’t know what. It’s probably different for everyone who holds this belief, and I suspect that most don’t really understand it. But it’s there. The politicization of 9/11 was decried almost from the moment the towers fell, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and isn’t still happening.

I’m convinced the security theatre surrounding the memorial — you walk along 12th Avenue to get in, after screening, with the only thing separating you from the unscreened masses being a chain-link fence and a few Jersey barriers — is intended to evoke some kind of residual paranoia: “they’re out to get us.” Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not suggesting this was a cynical decision by any stretch of the imagination. But the way that “security” as a concept has been woven into every day life in the United States, the way in which concerns about terrorism have wormed their way into almost ever decision that gets made, is insidious.

That level of paranoia needs to be there, all the time, in order to continue justifying various decisions and various policies that dovetail neatly with the existing needs and wants of the kyriarchy. It is, in its basest form, a method of distracting people
from the real problems out there: income inequality, wildly disproportionate power levels in society, an endless series of wars in far-away corners of the earth (being fought, naturally, by the powerless), a foreign policy that invites further blowback, and a government that seems committed to abolishing the rule of law for the powerful and cloaking itself in secrecy so as to avoid accountability at all costs.

I know how crazy that sounds. But I also know how crazy the last decade has been, and I can’t remmeber a time in my life when I felt so disconnected and so mistrustful of the government — or, really, of anyone in any position of power. I used to entertain myself by reading Abbie Hoffman’s writings and laughing at his paranoia, but I’m starting to ask myself whether we’re not living through the same kind of thing, and whether he might have had a point (or eight). The Yippies were easy to laugh at, sure, but given the confluence of big business and big government, and how willing they are to fuck over the rest of us, were they really wrong?

Matt Stoller wrote an article about Occupy Wall Street as a church of dissent rather than a protest, and I think he’s broadly right. We’re seeing the beginnings of a movement, in a direction that isn’t immediately clear, and it seems right that it should spring up in Lower Manhattan. The Great Ungluing had a lot to do with what’s happened in the last ten
years, but the truth is we’ve been heading down this path for a while. 9/11 drew a big red circle around a lot of other stuff, though, and that helped to crystalize a lot of emotions. And now I find myself feeling a bit like Lewis Black in his more angry moments, and that maybe the hippies are right, and this is a really strange thing to realize.

At the same time, the thing they don’t tell you about the 9/11 memorial, and the World Trade Center site in general — and the reason why you have to walk along 12th Avenue — is that the whole thing is basically one big construction project. And I sat there in the shadow of the Freedom Tower (well, not exactly, given the way the sunlight falls on the site), in the metaphorical shadow of that terrible day a decade ago, and all around me was the rebirth of a neighborhood. In time, the World Trade Center site will be surrounded once more by office buildings and people living their lives, and that somehow seems like a fitting way to remember the loss and honor it. A part of me would like to think that, when everyone calms down and the x-ray machines and the metal detectors go away, the 9/11 memorial itself will become a place for the next generation of Lower Manhattan workers and residents to come and have lunch on a nice sunny day, aware of the past but not haunted by it, and not governed by the memory.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/new-york/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/and-thus-my-fall-is-much-like-my-spring/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/and-thus-my-fall-is-much-like-my-spring/#comments Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:25:45 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=858 Continue reading →]]> This is what 11,921 miles and six weeks looks like:

Once again, I have a staggering number of PNRs floating around in my iPhone and one hell of a lot of ground to cover over the next month and a half. And yet, I find this deeply soothing.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/and-thus-my-fall-is-much-like-my-spring/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/sked-changes/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/sked-changes/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:02:38 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=838 Continue reading →]]> United Airlines has killed my favorite flight. This was the flight formerly known as UAL055, the afternoon flight from San Francisco to Kailua-Kona. It worked on so many different levels: it allowed for connections from their afternoon departure from Victoria, and it meant there was a one-stop option to the Big Island that got me to Hawaii in less than 8 hours. It was great — it was ridiculously convenient and on-network, always a bonus when you’re thinking hard about mileage accumulation for your favorite frequent-flyer program.

Except that at some point in the past few months — like, between the end of June and now — that flight has disappeared. The only direct service to the Big Island from the west coast in the afternoon on Star Alliance now operates out of Los Angeles. Los Angeles itself is a one-stop destination from Vancouver Island. My super-convenient one-stop option has now turned into a 12 hour travel day featuring at least two, and on some occasions three, stops.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why this happened. I know Alaska has started up OAK/SJC-KOA services, and frequently at lower fares, so I suspect they’re probably stealing some of the origin/destination traffic from the San Francisco area. But I have to think that, for United, it makes more sense to flow passengers through SFO — which has better connections to the rest of the United States and Canada, to say nothing of the international services — than it does through Los Angeles. LAX’s Canadian services, to and from Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal, are all operated by Air Canada as United codeshares, so passenger flow through LAX is entirely dependent on another carrier.

Don’t get me wrong: I would a thousand times rather fly Air Canada to Los Angeles from Vancouver than United (the E90, for one thing, makes a huge difference in passenger comfort). But for me, this involves getting to Vancouver first. And that’s often not an easy proposition. Never mind that I can’t get United to sell me that ticket (YYJ-YVR-LAX-KOA) anyway. What United wants me to do is fly YYJ-SFO at 0622, fly SFO-LAX at 1200, and then fly LAX-KOA at 1545-ish. Either that, or spend on a hotel and have a 17-hour layover in San Francisco.

(This is one of those problems that would get immeasurably easier if I lived in Vancouver, where it is possible to get into San Francisco early enough to catch the morning SFO-KOA. Sadly, this isn’t an option for the Victoria departure, which leaves juuust late enough to make it an impossible connection, even with Global Entry, Star Alliance Gold status, and track shoes.)

So, fine. If I’m going to put up with a two- or three-stop harlequinade, I’ll fly both legs on Air Canada. The hard product is better, and this winter, at least, we’re getting the 767s with the new interiors, so if I decide to use my upgrades I’ll end up in a flat bed. Oh, wait, maybe I won’t: AC’s network managers continue to play with the timing of AC046/047, so that it is an awfully iffy proposition in and of itself, since the connections in HNL turn out to be incredibly tight. Gods help you if you’re checking bags on this route, since you’d better hope you can talk the AC check-in agent into interlining your bags through to Hawaiian (some will, some won’t); you don’t have time to claim and re-check. But hey, the free bag is going away on Air Canada transborder anyway, so maybe you won’t be checking bags to begin with.

Seriously. An hour earlier on departure would make all the difference in the world. That’s all I’m asking for.

I can’t shake the feeling that the Star Alliance carriers are trying to tell me something. That something seems to be “Fly Alaska.” AS has a hilariously convenient YYJ-SEA-KOA service — one stop, short travel time — that is often at a substantial discount to what I’m used to paying. Why don’t I fly them? Alliances, mostly, and miles. Which was an argument, back when the alliance actually got me to where I wanted to go without turning into an adventure and a half, but now I’m not so sure. (Also, I’ve done the West Coast-Hawaii route in a 737 before. I’d rather not do it again if I can get away with it.) Between the program changes at Aeroplan and this new schedule change with United affecting my most heavily traveled route, I guess I’m going to have to look hard at the numbers and see whether the perks I get from staying with Star carriers is worth it compared to the convenience I’d get and the money I’d potentially save on AS. (With the full knowledge that I can upgrade relatively cheaply on AS too.)

I guess at the end of the day what I’d really like is for that morning YYJ-SFO flight to leave earlier. As with the YVR-HNL on Air Canada, an hour would make all the difference in the world. For the want of an hour, though, I am once again thinking hard about jumping off-network, and I kinda suspect that at some point in the next year or so I’m going to take a test run on AS — probably once I’ve established I’m not going to make status for 2013 or something like that. And then I’ll go back to being just another price-sensitive customer with no particular loyalty to any airline or alliance, and that’ll be that.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/sked-changes/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/07/utilization-update/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/07/utilization-update/#comments Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:59:30 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=793 Continue reading →]]> I somehow missed this when it got posted last month, but for future reference, on the subject of Air Canada’s aircraft utilization for the W11 schedule:

AC is leasing two ex-HA 763s, one enters service on YYZ-DUB next week, the other does not arrive till the fall. These are fin 691/692. Fin 691 will fly YYZ-DUB with a slightly modified HA interior this summer.

The current plan is for these aircraft to replace two of the non-XM 763s (fins 689/690). Also in the plan for these aircraft is an interior upgrade in the Fall – which should include seatback TV and a North America Executive Class seat – no lie-flat suites. Note that I say “should” for the seatback TV – this is not yet 100% confirmed due to time constraints.

For the winter, fins 691/692 are presently scheduled to operate: YYC-OGG, YYC-HNL, YVR-OGG. Fin 687 will operate the Air Canada Vacations flying from the west (MBJ, CUN, VRA etc).

YVR-HNL is schedule to operate with the XM lie-flat product, though, this could change on certain days of week.

This is some of the best news I’ve heard about those airplanes in eons. Yes! Move off of routes I don’t actually fly! (Shame they’re getting rid of 689, though, and holding on to 687 — 689 is/was HPF, and as nice a non-upgraded airplane as you could want. 687 is HPD, which has stupid 1.5″ protrusions into an already narrow seat for the IFE controls, and is damned uncomfortable.)

• What happens when a DLH A388 comes to KSFO?
• Look at the monkey!
• Egregious food pornography
• Mostly chronological storytelling, mostly uncaptioned so good luck with the context
• Reasons to chase airline status, parts 3,421 to 3,584

Please enjoy!

This has proven to be something of a boon for communications, and I strongly encourage anyone traveling with a smartphone to look into it.

It’s 2011. I am often fond of rhetorically asking whether we are living in the future yet. Sitting in a laundromat on the other side of the planet from home, composing a blog post with a wifi access point in my pocket, while the 70-something obasan next to me sends text messages on her phone, I can safely say that in this department at least, yes, we are living in the future.

That changed on the way home from the islands last week. I got my first grope, thanks to the screeners at PHNL. Honolulu uses the milimeter wave devices (the only AIT gadget I’d even consider going through), and they were using it — much to my chagrin — as a primary screening tool for one lane. I have a big problem with this: it’s a strip search for some, but not others, and the whole point of AIT was that it was supposed to be used for alarm resolution only, not the primary screening. So when the glove-snapping TSA screener directed me to the MMW scanner, I said, “Yeah, no, I’d rather not.” “Opt out!” he shouted, snapping gloves some more.

I knew what was coming, of course. And I didn’t really care: ACA048 was delayed leaving (the inbound was late), so Lovely Wife and I had several hours to kill airside. I was willing to wait all day if necessary. So I went and stood in the penalty box and watched as the same screener tried to send Lovely Wife through the MMW scanner. Lovely Wife, who was right behind me — yep, that’s random — is now a badged radiation worker, with a lifetime dose profile at the National Dose Registry and everything thanks to her need to spend long hours in close proximity to a 30 mGy/min x-ray device. Though the MMW doesn’t use ionizing radiation, and though the total dose to both of us from flying ACA048 was probably higher than a backscatter x-ray device, I didn’t care: I told her to use the “badged radiation worker” excuse if they ever tried to send her through a scanner, and it worked like a charm. “Opt out!”

I was so proud. It’s a family thing.

The patdown itself wasn’t so bad — to me. I didn’t find the behavior particularly intimidating, and I didn’t think the search was as bad as it had been portrayed. They do, in fact, tell you exactly what they’re going to do before they do it. They do, in fact, run their hands up your legs until they meet “resistance.” They do, in fact, peer inside your waistband. The fact that I didn’t find it particularly intimidating or uncomfortable, however, doesn’t excuse the fact that I’ve seen people being arrested searched less thoroughly, and doesn’t change the way the whole process seems tailor-made to trigger anyone who has ever been sexually or physically abused.

Lovely Wife reports that her screener seemed more uncomfortable than she did. My guy didn’t seem particularly happy about the plan, either (I guess groping sweaty guys isn’t his idea of a good time). More than anything, I felt sorry for the screeners; any anger I had was directed at John Pistole and the rest of the TSA hierarchy for deciding that this is what life in the United States, circa 2011, is going to be like.

On a brighter note: ACA048 was, for the first time in what feels like eons, operated by a non-non-retrofitted aircraft! Normally the flights to and from Hawaii are worked by a trio of 767-300ERs that are oddballs in the Air Canada fleet — they have eight doors, four on each side, rather than two cabin doors and two window exits as was/is standard on 767s. Those of us who fly Air Canada a lot call them the “Three Amigos” (one of these planes was originally delivered to Spanair; the other two came from Asiana), and to say they’re not a nice product is… well, let’s put it this way — given a choice between an Amigo and a standard economy seat on Untied, I’d probably pick the Amigo. But it would be a tough sell.

The Amigos didn’t get the cabin refit, so they don’t have the lovely XM ExecutiveFirst suites with the lie-flat seats. Instead they have a wholly convention J seat in the “front” cabin. Air Canada sells this as “Comfort Plus,” and really it’s not bad — it is, after all, essentially what you get in J on a narrowbody Air Canada flight, plus it’s what we put up with for years while flying long-haul in J — but it’s not a pod. Anyway, I’m well acquainted with GHPD, GHPF, and GHPH, having flown all of them at one point or another, and generally many times. HPD is probably the worst of the lot — the audio controllers are built into the armrests and stick out about 1.25″ into the seat itself, making it kind of uncomfortable — and HPF is probably the nicest. This is a relative thing.

Anyway, Lovely Wife and I had noticed that the J cabin seat map for our return flight, rather than having the old 2x2x2 seating pattern that we’d come to know and love with the Amigos, was instead showing the new 1x1x1 pattern of an XM’d 767. With great trepidation, we burned some upgrade credits and secured seats in the front cabin. I listened to LiveATC while sitting in the Red Carpet Club, and when ACA047 checked in with PHNL tower we sauntered over towards Gate 24 to get a glimpse of our ride home.

One of the nicest things about PHNL is the open-air concourse, with great views of the ramp and exposure to all the jet noise and exhaust you can tolerate. Naturally, I love it. So I stood on the walkway and watched as the big Boeing made the turn off of Z and onto the apron. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see GHLV pull into position. I’m not ashamed to admit it: I cheered and gave a little fist-pump as soon as I saw the two overwing exits. HLV instantly became my new favorite 767 on the planet.

Owing to the late departure out of PHNL, we missed our connection from CYVR. But much to my surprise, after turning my iPhone back on in customs, I was greeted with a text message from Air Canada and their mobile application: specifically, did I know my booking had been automatically modified, and did I know I’d been rescheduled for a different set of flights? I was shocked — I’d never had a schedule change like this while flying with the iPhone app, and I was amazed it worked as well as it did. Picked up boarding passes at the connections desk and away we went; everything was already done.

It was probably the nicest batch of flights I’ve had in a long time. Very impressive.

Bout-rigging has been alleged for decades. Retired wrestlers occasionally admit it. In 1996 two former wrestlers about to go public with evidence died of a rare respiratory illness within hours of each other (no wrongdoing was found). A statistical examination of bouts over 11 years by University of Chicago economists clearly identified rigged matches (to let borderline wrestlers retain their rank). Still, the JSA always denied foul play. The body even sued those who dared to disparage the sport of emperors, which traces its lineage back more than a millennium.

Today’s charges will be harder to evade. Evidence is provided by erased but reconstructed text messages on the mobile phones of a dozen wrestlers and stablemasters. These were confiscated by police during an investigation last year over sumo’s links to baseball betting (illegal in Japan) and ties to the yakuza, Japan’s mob. “Who do I owe a win to now?” one wrestler texted another last March. “Will you let me win at the next tournament? If not, I want the 200,000 back,” texted another in May, according to police leaks to the media.

Yomiuri Shimbun, Sumo rigging probe: Long slog ahead:

Getting to the bottom of the sumo match-fixing scandal that has plunged the ancient sport into what could be the biggest crisis in its history is certain to take much longer than expected because of difficulty analyzing evidence and uncooperative wrestlers, a special investigative panel has disclosed. All signs are pointing to a protracted effort to fully reveal the details of the scandal and decide on punitive action against wrestlers and others involved, according to the panel. The independent investigative body headed by Waseda University Prof. Shigeru Ito submitted an interim report Monday to an emergency meeting of the Japan Sumo Association at Ryogoku Kokugikan.

Asahi Shimbun, Low-ranked wrestler played a key role in sumo scandal. Looks at the role of a 31 year-old sandanme wrestler named Enatsukasa, who may have been responsible for coordinating a lot of the match rigging. I include this mostly because it is the first time I’ve ever seen the term “dohyo diver” in print.
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