Live from Austin!

It had been some four years since I had last visited England. Given how little time off Americans get, visiting my family means not actually having a proper vacation that year, so I don’t get to go back as often as everyone would like. This time the visit was for a particular event: my brother Edward was getting married.

I know I have some friends who don’t really understand the whole “marriage” thing. As the saying goes, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” Here’s an analogy that might help:

Consider sports. It’s possible to watch a random sports game and get something out of it. However, most fans choose to support a specific team. They make a long term commitment to that team. They go to its matches even when the weather’s bad. They buy logo shirts and hats and scarves and memorabilia. They support the same team for years, even if it loses, even if they move to a different part of the country or a different part of the world.

Why do they do this? Clearly, committing to supporting one team in some way makes watching the games better. It enhances the experience. The committed supporter gets something out of the game that an uncommitted spectator simply doesn’t get, even if the actual game is the same.

So anyway, my brother was getting married, and we were to attend. And since it’s a long way to travel just for a couple of days, we planned to go a week early and spend some time with the family.

Shortly before booking the plane tickets, I learned that British Airways and Virgin Atlantic each have a “deluxe economy” class. BA call theirs World Traveler Plus, Virgin’s is Premium Economy. In either case, it costs about 15% more than the regular cattle class ticket. For that you get a wider seat that reclines further and has proper lumbar support and headrest, there’s more legroom, and you get proper food and free drinks, priority baggage handling, and so on. We decided to give it a shot; anything to make the 6-8 hour transatlantic hop more bearable.

Unfortunately, no US airline offers anything like it. They have cattle class, and they have the outrageously expensive first class, and that’s it. So we were stuck on an American Airlines flight to Chicago, where we had to change to British Airways for the rest of the journey. It was a bit like taking a Greyhound bus to your limo; I don’t know why BA picked American as their “OneWorld Alliance” partner airline.

In Chicago, we had to change terminals. Which meant leaving the secured area, walking across to the trains, getting the train to Terminal 4, and then going back into the airport and clearing security again.

Unfortunately, Chicago O’Hare’s Terminal 4 doesn’t have proper security facilities yet, as it seems to be last on their list for upgrades. (It seems they want to build a new Terminal 4 that works, then demolish the current one.) It’s also the terminal every single international flight leaves from, which means lots of people who look suspicious (i.e. not white and midwestern), which in turn means security is slower than normal.

At the far end of the shopping concourse, they had set up 5 makeshift security gates. Three lines of frustrated would-be travelers stretched the entire length of the concourse, past all the shops and restaurants, all the way to the building’s entrance doors.

After spending around 40 minutes in line, we reached the TSA person whose job it is to look at your boarding pass and passport. She said something unclear about needing a boarding pass. I looked at the boarding pass I had obtained from the online check-in. It said “Boarding pass” in large letters, and “You are now ready to fly”, and had a bar code. I explained that we had checked in for the flight online.

No, explained the TSA person, you have to get your boarding pass stamped. By the ticket desk. Hence defeating the entire purpose of online checkin. I looked at my watch nervously, and explained that we would never be able to make it through the queues again in time for our flight. The TSA staffer said we could jump the queue when we came back.

So, we left the queue and found the BA ticket desk. The woman there sighed and explained that it was a new rule the TSA had imposed, and nothing to do with BA. She stamped our boarding passes with a generic rubber stamp, and wrote something illegible over it with a ball point pen. We walked all the way back up to the front of the security line, and this time made it through. Good job, TSA; security theater at its finest.

Beyond the security barriers there was a small stand selling snacks at an outrageous markup. By this time we were tired and angry and hungry, so I gave in and got some Chex Trail Mix.

Once we were on the BA plane, things looked up. The seats were comfortable, with good back support, and headrests at head level. (I don’t know where US airlines get the midgets they use to design their seating.) Before long there was food and drink, and they remembered my vegetarian meal preference. I took a melatonin tablet, reclined the seat, and tried to nap.

When I wrote “alleged foiling of a terrorist plot”, I did wonder if I was being too cynical. Apparently not:

A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.

So, nobody was about to get on a plane after all, with or without explosive hair gel or deadly iPods. They hadn’t even carried out their first dry run.

And the fact that police felt they needed more evidence suggests to me that it will eventually emerge that there was very little evidence at all.

As a result of the latest alleged foiling of a terrorist plot, new restrictions have been placed on airline travelers flying between the UK and US. Specifically:

• No laptops.
• No PDAs.
• No iPods or other electronic audio or video players.
• No books.
• No cameras.
• No beverages or other liquids.

As someone used to flying, I don’t set foot on a plane without at least a book, an audio player to drown out the screaming children, and a large bottle of water. Now, they say everything on the above list must be checked in to the hold.

An 8 hour flight, plus 2+ hours at the airport, with no music, no video games, not even a paperback book? Check my SLR and laptop in, so the baggage throwers can destroy them or steal them, like they stole my iPod charger and camera charger? Are they insane?

Yet according to the BBC, they’re thinking about whether to make these restrictions permanent. If they do, I think the airline industry is finished. I can’t imagine voluntarily flying anywhere with those restrictions in place.

I’ve had some pretty hellish flights. Like being trapped for 4 hours on a motionless plane stuck on the runway with no air conditioning. Like flying across the Atlantic, with the ‘flu, on a plane full of cheerleaders. (Really.) Try to make me go through something like that with no books and no music and I’d be a wreck.

Ah, Las Vegas. It seems like only a couple of weeks since I was last here.

I left Cambridge on Sunday. The taxi company called back at 09:30 to tell me the taxi was outside. I looked, and told them it wasn’t, that I was sure, that I could see the entire length of our street from the doorway, and that I was standing on the front steps of the house.

I then got to hear the taxi dispatcher bawling out the driver. “You had me call back, and you’re not even there!” She repeated the address, and explained to him that the word “Seven” in the street name really was part of the street name. “He’ll be there in a minute.”

He was. He seemed a bit sheepish. I think he must be new to taxi driving, because he took the most bizarre route to the airport I’ve ever seen, zig-zagging down back streets until he hit the Charles River, then crossing the bridge and going via the new Big Dig tunnels which have finally opened.

I got to try a new airline this time. America Worst… Sorry, America West. Oh, who am I kidding? They’re not quite up to (or down to) the standards of AirTran, in that they do actually have their own gate at Logan, and real electronic flight boards rather than ones with little plastic letters. Nevertheless, their gate area is about the size of our apartment, and has no bathroom, so I sat in front of the ticket desks for a while and went through security close to boarding time.

The flight to Phoenix Arizona was straightforward, and they were good enough to warn us they wouldn’t be serving any food and that we should come prepared. On the flight I heard people talking about the beauty of the areas around Flagstaff, and I found myself pondering the mad idea of abandoning the whole eBU thing and hunting down Gita in the desert.

I found the gate at Phoenix easily enough, but when they plane came in they announced that it was broken. Some men with helmets on stood on ladders and poked the ailerons a bit, then they announced that they would need to find a replacement plane. They told us that this one had been vibrating unusually, and would need a complete test flight before they would be allowed to fly passengers in it.

I stretched out on the floor to give my back a rest; they were estimating that it would take them a couple of hours to get a replacement plane in place. I’ll give them one thing—their estimate was spot on. As I lay there I overheard other announcements. I couldn’t help noticing that there were two other America Worst flights delayed by hours because of mechanical faults, just in the nearby cluster of departure gates. An old woman was telling anyone who would listen that the America Worst plane she had arrived on that morning had had no heating working, and that it had been freezing cold at cruising altitude. Another old woman one-upped her with a tale of woe involving an America West plane and malfunctioning undercarriage.

Now, I’m sure that there are a lot of people who would have been praying at this point, but I was pretty calm. Sure, I was doomed to be hopelessly late arriving at my corporate event, but I was deep in the realm of Things Which Are Somebody Else’s Problem. There was absolutely nothing I could do, so I found an AC outlet and recharged the iPod, and played a couple of games of Snood on the GameBoy Advance.

I didn’t think about mechanical failures, because I know that it’s not rational to do so. On a statistical basis, I put my life in more danger when I cross the street. If I have any faith, it’s a faith in the power of random chance, chaos and probability.

So I certainly didn’t worry when they told us our flight had been moved to gate 13.

The replacement plane turned up, we embarked, it took off, it flew for around forty minutes, it landed in Las Vegas. Nothing untoward happened at all. It makes for a boring story, which is why you usually only hear about the times when strange coincidences do in fact foreshadow disaster. So next time you hear about an eerie coincidence, remember the canny and explicable tale of Flight 547.

[Previously “friends only"]

Even you haven’t been on a plane since September, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that the entire experience was awful.

It started at the airport, where less than half the check-in booths were staffed, and even the e-ticket counters had a long line of people. The terminal had been rearranged, and new walls added, to funnel everyone through one security checkpoint. Naturally there were only two scanners operating, resulting in more long lines. In addition to scanning, I was patted down, checked with the metal-detector wand, and my bag was drug-tested.

When they started boarding the plane, they checked everyone’s paperwork and ID cards a third time, and used the metal detector wand (again) on a few randomly-selected victims. Naturally they only had one person checking, and didn’t allow any extra time for the process—just the usual fifteen minutes. Hence the plane was guaranteed to be late taking off.

Leafing through the in-flight magazine, I learned that for security reasons we wouldn’t be served a meal, or coffee. Presumably it’s just too much of a risk that someone might take over the plane, armed with a plastic fork and a flimsy polystyrene cup of hot liquid.

When we arrived in Minneapolis, there was another twenty minute wait for the baggage to be unloaded. When it finally appeared, it appeared a few bags at a time, stretched over another twenty minutes or so. After a long time, it became clear that one of our suitcases wasn’t going to turn up. We joined another long queue to talk to the lost baggage staff, and gave them the relevant details.

We then tried to leave the airport. More than half of the exit ramps from the car park were unstaffed, and we had to sit in the car, inching forwards, for another twenty to twenty-five minutes.

The common element, of course, is drastic cost-cutting and massive understaffing—the result of the huge layoffs after September 11th. You might be given to wonder what happened to all the bailout money we (the taxpayers) gave the airlines—the tickets weren’t any cheaper than usual, clearly they didn’t spend it so that they could keep adequate staffing levels, and none of it went to the people laid off, so the only possible conclusion is that it’s going straight into the pockets of high-level management at the various airlines.

The next day, I called to see if they’d found the missing suitcase. The automatic voicemail message said to press 1 if I was calling about baggage I’d left on a plane less than five weeks ago, or to press 2 if I was calling about baggage I’d left on a plane more than five weeks ago. Conspicuously absent was an option to push if the damn airline had lost my suitcase.

Calling the local airport in Rochester was more successful; it has such a small staff anyway that presumably there wasn’t anyone they could lay off. We got to talk to an actual human being, who said my case was there. We went and collected it. They’d given me a voucher worth $25 off a flight, but only if spent before May. Gee, thanks.

The good news: Security guards at Chicago O’Hare successfully confiscated two small folding knives found in a Nepalese student’s pocket.

The bad news: Unfortunately, they failed to spot seven knives, a stun gun and a can of tear gas in his hand luggage as he carried them through the security checkpoint. He’d have carried them onto the plane if an airline employee hadn’t happened to search the guy’s bag at the gate.

A woman who works for the IS team on the floor above me is married to an Iraqi aerospace engineer. Unfortunately, because of bigotry around the time of the Gulf War, he found he couldn’t get an engineering job—so he opened a pizza restaurant.

On Saturday, after several threats, an arsonist torched their restaurant.

Here’s the report from the Boston Globe:

PLYMOUTH - When an arsonist torched Salah El-Ehmeada’s pizza shop early Saturday, one of the first things to burn was a photograph of his two small children dressed as Santa’s elves.

The picture hung near the cash register, where El-Ehmeada often stood, chatting with customers and sending drivers out on deliveries.

El-Ehmeada is not a US citizen, but his life has many of the trappings of middle-class America. He and his wife, Shari, a Massachusetts native and security systems engineer at IBM, drive a minivan. They live in an apartment in Marshfield and are saving to buy a house. Their oldest son attends South Shore Head Start.

But whoever set fire to the Pizza Pie shop in a West Plymouth strip mall near the town airstrip didn’t see them as just another middle-class family, said El-Ehmeada, because they were blinded by prejudice.

“This is un-American. America was not built on this,” he said, standing in the blackened shell of his restaurant.

Early Saturday morning, someone broke into the closed shop through a back door and set fire to a stack of paper bags beneath the cash register. Before they left, they opened all the gas valves on the stove, El-Ehmeada said.

Fire spread up the walls, burning pictures, ceiling tiles, and insulation. Firefighters smashed a plate-glass window and cut holes in the roof to douse the blaze.

The State Police fire marshal’s office considers it an apparent arson, but investigators have not characterized it as a hate crime. Other than El-Ehmeada’s Middle-Eastern background, there was no evidence at the scene that suggested that he was targeted because of his ethnicity, said Lieutenant Paul Maloney, a State Police spokesman. He added, however, that investigators can’t rule that out.

El-Ehmeada - “Sal” to customers who know him - came from a town in Iraq called Mosul, 400 miles north of Baghdad on the Turkish border. His parents sent him to Britain in 1980 to get a Western education, he said, and he never returned. He studied aeronautical engineering in Canada but could not get work as an airline mechanic - a victim, he said, of discrimination during the Gulf War. He moved to the United States in 1997 and opened Pizza Pie in 1999.

Plymouth police and fire officials would not release information yesterday, referring questions to State Police.

El-Ehmeada said that he has no doubt that his business was set on fire by someone filled with ethnic rage after last week’s terrorist attacks. The day of the attacks, El-Ehmeada said, he received six or seven telephone calls from people spewing racial epithets and slurs. The next day, he called police after finding a spent shell casing, placed on end, outside the shop’s front door.

He received several more threatening calls but things seemed to quiet down until 5 a.m. Saturday, he said, when authorities called about the fire.

Watching on television from his shop Tuesday morning, El-Ehmeada said, he felt the same shock and revulsion as the rest of America, with an additional touch of shame that the terrorist acts may have been carried out in the name of Islam.

“I felt like a guy who comes from a good family, a great family,” he said, “and he wakes up one day and his brother is a serial killer on TV.”

Sandra McDonald of Carver expressed distrust of El-Ehmeada as she shopped at a nearby store, saying that she had heard that he had a flight simulator on his computer. Otherwise, the reaction from surrounding neighborhoods in Carver and Plymouth was supportive. A steady stream of customers and friends stopped by to express their concern as El-Ehmeada tried to clean up. One woman brought apple cobbler and cookies.

Linda Blankenship of Carver took her three children into the smoky ruins.

“This is what prejudice does to people. Look around here and learn,” she told them. “This is the ugliness of racism and hatred.”

“He didn’t do anything,” said her daughter, Marykate, 11. “He was making pizza.”