Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?

Welcome to government for the benefit of government officials and their hangers-on.

Only luck and falling oil prices saved Washington from having to face mass bankruptcy of the airline industry last year. Now the specter is rising again. Fuel prices are up. Traffic continues to plummet amid a global recession. United Airlines last week mortgaged its spare-parts inventory to raise cash at a usurious 17% interest rate.

Yet the Obama Justice Department has come out of the blocks trying to scuttle a promising experiment to stabilize the chronically unprofitable U.S. airline sector. The new administration seemingly won’t let companies fail, and won’t let them succeed either.

The airline industry’s self-help solution has been an evolving trio of international alliances, partly blessed with “antitrust immunity” by the U.S. Department of Transportation. One, the Star Alliance led by United and Lufthansa, is currently poaching Continental from a rival alliance, SkyTeam. DOT was set to approve their application last week when Justice belatedly intervened with a 58-page complaint about why the pact should be restructured.

To anyone drilled in the antitrust mindset, Justice’s argument won’t seem outlandish. It frets about reduced competition on this or that international route, and sees little chance of competitive entry by new carriers despite fat profits that presumably would be on offer. It argues, in a fashion typical of antitrust these days, that nonstop flights are a market unto themselves, so connecting flights on the same routes don’t count.

But the real fulcrum is Justice’s insistence, or plea, that DOT should set a high bar for antitrust immunity, because antitrust enforcement has been such a gosh-darn boon to consumers.

Justice offers no supporting evidence for this proposition, which has resisted academic verification. And in dismissing the “putative” benefits of immunized airline alliances, Justice fails even to acknowledge the one benefit that Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has emphasized: “These alliances are life savers for airlines. That is the premise from which we start. We believe it. The airlines believe it.”

In part, such alliances are substitutes for international airline mergers (which are prohibited under U.S. law), but are more interesting than mergers, thanks to the flexibility with which carriers can enter and exit cooperative agreements with each other.

The antitrust mindset naturally sees such cooperation as always harmful, inflating prices and gouging consumers. But then why does organized labor oppose the deals? Shouldn’t workers favor alliances if they reduce competitive pressure on wages? Yet Justice’s intervention came after United’s pilots ran a full-page ad in Roll Call attacking the company’s own deal.

And why do carriers lobby against each other’s pacts? Shouldn’t they favor anything that leads to oligopoly pricing? And what to make of Continental’s decision to jilt SkyTeam and jump to Star, shifting the competitive balance on the North Atlantic?

Obama antitrust chief Christine Varney doesn’t have much good to say about her Bush predecessors. But she praises their record of cartel-busting. She might examine that record for what it actually says about the incentive to collude.

It shows, for one thing, that companies are inclined to snuggle up mainly to share losses and preserve capacity in a downturn or to curb the free-riding of powerful customers. When profits are available, on the other hand, they quickly go back to competing to maximize their respective shares rather than colluding to limit their individual upsides.

These incentives would very likely prevail in the highly flexible airline alliances. Such alliances are no miracle cure for what ails the domestic carriers, but they would open a window to let us see beyond antitrust’s indiscriminate prejudice against cooperative acts by competitors.

Of course, this would fly in the face of Ms. Varney’s agenda, which is to expand the bailiwick of the Washington antitrust bar. Even now, she has turned her attention from airlines to the mobile-phone business on the theory that any industry that hasn’t collapsed into government receivership must be doing something wrong.

Mr. Obama blabs about the evils of lobbying, but his administration is fast becoming the greatest fillip to lobbying ever seen. Ms. Varney has now horned in on the DOT’s action, forcing the airline business and all its camp followers to come and pay tribute. Her choice of targets is obviously designed for political effect. Airlines and mobile-phone operators both touch the public in ways that leave the public frequently annoyed.

What we’re seeing here and elsewhere from the new administration is not some rebirth of thoughtful liberalism, but a spastic descent into machine liberalism — government for the benefit of government officials and their hangers-on. Mr. Obama, however, may not be so pleased with the result if it means he must soon add the airlines to the collection of failed industries being run out of the White House.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr., Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701148185808655.html

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Passenger fixes faulty airliner

The airliner landed at Glasgow only 35 minutes late

Holidaymakers avoided a long delay to their flight home when a passenger fixed a mechanical problem with their plane.

Passengers on Thomas Cook flight TCX9641 from Menorca were told to expect an eight-hour wait while an engineer was flown out from the UK.

One passenger then identified himself as a qualified aircraft engineer and offered to try to remedy the fault.

He was successful, and the plane landed in Glasgow only 35 minutes late.

A spokeswoman for Thomas Cook said the company followed strict procedures to ensure the man was qualified to work on the aircraft, a Boeing 757-200, during the incident on Saturday.

The passenger worked for another airline, Thomsonfly, which has a reciprocal maintenance agreement with Thomas Cook.

“When they announced there was a technical problem he came forward and said who he was, ” she said.

“We checked his licence and verified he was who he said he was, and he was able to fix the problem to avoid the delay.

“We are very grateful that he was on the flight that day.”

Holidaymaker Keith Lomax, from Stirling, was travelling home from a week’s break with his wife when the plane’s captain announced the expected delay.

“We were in the plane, ready for take-off, when he announced there was a technical problem and that an engineer might have to be flown out from Manchester to fix it,” he said.

“Then a stewardess told us there was an engineer on board and they were checking out to see if he could work on it. He was obviously successful. When he came back onto the plane there was a round of applause from the back of the aircraft.

“It was reassuring to know the person who had fixed it was still on the aeroplane. What are the odds of something like that happening?”

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8136193.stm

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Round-the-world solar plane debut

 

Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard has unveiled a prototype of the solar-powered plane he hopes eventually to fly around the world.

The initial version, spanning 61m but weighing just 1,500kg, will undergo trials to prove it can fly at night.

Dr Piccard, who made history in 1999 by circling the globe non-stop in a balloon, says he wants to demonstrate the potential of renewable energies.

He hopes to fly a later version of the plane across the Atlantic in 2012.

The flight would be a risky endeavour. Only now is solar and battery technology becoming mature enough to sustain flight through the night – and then only in unmanned planes.

But Dr Piccard’s Solar Impulse team has invested tremendous energy – and no little money – in trying to find what they believe is a breakthrough design.

“I love this type of vision where you set the goal and then you try to find a way to reach it, because this is challenging,” he told BBC News.

Testing programme

The HB-SIA has the look of a glider but is on the scale – in terms of its width – of a modern airliner.

The aeroplane incorporates composite materials to keep it extremely light and uses super-efficient solar cells, batteries, motors and propellers to get it through the dark hours.

 

Dr Piccard will begin testing with short runway flights in which the plane lifts just a few metres into the air.

As confidence in the machine develops, the team will move to a day-night circle. This has never been done before in a piloted solar-powered plane.

HB-SIA should be succeeded by HB-SIB. It is likely to be bigger, and will incorporate a pressurised capsule and better avionics.

It is probable that Piccard will follow a route around the world in this aeroplane similar to the path he took in the record-breaking Breitling Orbiter 3 balloon – travelling at a low latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. The flight could go from the United Arab Emirates, to China, to Hawaii, across the southern US, southern Europe, and back to the UAE.

Measuring success

Although the vehicle is expected to be capable of flying non-stop around the globe, Piccard will in fact make five long hops, sharing flying duties with project partner Andre Borschberg.

“The aeroplane could do it theoretically non-stop – but not the pilot,” said Dr Piccard.

“We should fly at roughly 25 knots and that would make it between 20 and 25 days to go around the world, which is too much for a pilot who has to steer the plane.

“In a balloon you can sleep, because it stays in the air even if you sleep. We believe the maximum for one pilot is five days.”

The public unveiling on Friday of the HB-SIA is taking place at Dubendorf airfield near Zürich.

“The real success for Solar Impulse would be to have enough millions of people following the project, being enthusiastic about it, and saying ‘if they managed to do it around the world with renewable energies and energy savings, then we should be able to do it in our daily life’.”

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Full article and photos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8120026.stm

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Missing for 50 years – US nuclear bomb

Colonel Howard Richardson ditched the bomb off Tybee Island

More than 50 years after a 7,600lb (3,500kg) nuclear bomb was dropped in US waters following a mid-air military collision, the question of whether the missing weapon still poses a threat remains.

In his own mind, retired 87-year-old Colonel Howard Richardson is a hero responsible for one of the most extraordinary displays of aeronautic skill in the history of the US Air Force.

His view carries a lot of weight and he has a large number of supporters – including the Air Force itself which honoured his feat with a Distinguished Flying Cross.

But to others, he is little short of a villain: the man who 50 years ago dropped a nuclear bomb in US waters, a bomb nobody has been able to find and make safe.

‘Top-secret flight’

Shortly after midnight on 5 February 1958, Howard Richardson was on a top-secret training flight for the US Strategic Air Command.

It was the height of the Cold War and the young Major Richardson’s mission was to practise long-distance flights in his B-47 bomber in case he was ordered to fly from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to any one of the targets the US had identified in Russia.

The training was to be as realistic as possible, so on board was a single massive H-bomb – the nuclear weapon he might one day be instructed to drop to start World War III.

As he cruised at 38,000 feet over North Carolina and Georgia, his plane was hit by another military aircraft – an F-86 Saberjet fighter, which was destroyed by the collision - gouging a huge hole in the wing and knocking an engine almost off its mountings, leaving it hanging at a perilous angle.

At his home in Mississippi, Colonel Richardson said: “All of a sudden we felt a heavy jolt and a burst of flame out to the right.

“We didn’t know what it was.

“We thought maybe it was something from outer space, but it could only be another plane.”

The colonel thought his number was up. His bomber started plummeting to earth and he struggled with the flight deck to get any kind of response.

“We had ejection seats – I told ‘em: ‘Don’t hit the ejection seats just yet. I’m gonna see if we can fly.’”

As he dropped to 20,000 feet, he somehow got the damaged craft under control and levelled out.

He and his co-pilot then made a fateful decision which probably saved both their lives and the lives of countless people on the ground.

The B-47′s engine was left hanging from the plane

Colonel Richardson told me that the decision was instantaneous – and he still has no doubt it was the right thing to do.

They would ditch their nuclear payload as soon as possible in order to lighten the aircraft for an emergency landing and also to eliminate the danger of an enormous explosion when they made their unsteady arrival at the nearest available runway.

“The tactical doctrine for Strategic Air Command gave me the authority to get rid of it (the bomb) for the safety of the crew – that was the number one priority,” Colonel Richardson said.

He managed to direct the B-47 a mile or two off the coast of Savannah and opened the bomb doors, dropping the bomb somewhere into the shallow waters and light sand near Tybee Island.

He then managed a perfectly executed descent from which he and his crew walked away unscathed.

The pilot of the other aircraft, an F-86 fighter jet, also survived, after his ejector seat shot him clear of his aircraft.

Immediately after the crash, a search was set up to find the unexploded nuclear weapon, buried somewhere too close for comfort to the US’s second-largest seaport and one of its most beautiful cities.

Numerous other searches have followed, both official and unofficial, and each of them has also proved unsuccessful.

So the bomb remains tucked away on the sea-bed, in an area which is frequently dredged by shrimp fishermen, any one of whom could suddenly find that they have netted something a touch larger and scarier than a crustacean.

How dangerous the bomb is after all these years is a matter of hot debate.

The US Air Force insists it is safest to leave it wherever it is, and Colonel Richardson is adamant that it is incapable of a nuclear explosion because it lacks the vital plutonium trigger.

‘Practice mission’

He said these were routinely left out of the bombs used on training flights.

“This was just a practice mission. We were continually working out any problems, that’s why we had to practise – we wanted to be perfect,” he said.

But his case has been vigorously contested by opponents who raise apocalyptic fears of a thermonuclear explosion which could destroy much of the US eastern seaboard.

Fears have also been expressed that the bomb could be located and recovered by a terrorist group, and there are even some who believe that may already have happened.

For Colonel Richardson, the event which shaped his life has not ended quite the way he thought it would.

“I’ve been living with it now for 51 years.

“We had an accident and I landed the aircraft safely… I did get a Distinguished Flying Cross from a general for that.

“I thought that would be the story. That’s not the story – everything’s about the nuclear weapon.”

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8107908.stm

The words: “an F-86 Saberjet fighter, which was destroyed by the collision”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassaw_Sound

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Argentine golden shipwreck found

A vessel which sank carrying $18m (£11m) in gold and silver ingots has been found in the Magellan Straits off the coast of Argentina.

The cargo belonged to Argentine mining companies Cerro Vanguardia and Minera Triton and was on its way from mines in southern Argentina to Europe.

The boat sank in heavy seas in mysterious circumstances in January.

Although the vessel has been found, it is unclear if the nine and a half tons of cargo remain on board.

The Chilean fishing boat, the Polar Mist, set sail from Santa Cruz in southern Argentina for the port of Punta Arenas in Chile.

The bullion was heading first to Santiago in Chile, and then on to Switzerland for sale.

But a day after setting sail, the crew abandoned ship in a heavy storm.

Gold on board?

The ship was found 24 hours later by a Chilean tug which tried – and failed – to bring it into port.

It went down in deep waters 40km (25 miles) off the coast.

Now in an operation to find the gold, a specialist boat carrying sonar equipment sailing under the orders of the Argentine mining companies and the international insurer Lloyds has found the wreck.

But the million-dollar question is, will they find gold on board?

Many questions have been asked about why a fishing boat was used to transport bullion and about the circumstances under which the boat was abandoned.

Because of high winds, a new attempt to investigate the wreck further is expected only when the heavy weather subsides.

Argentina has become an important gold producer.

In the last decade, former President Nestor Kirschner and the present one, his wife, Cristina Fernandez have done much to attract foreign investment in this area.

Five mines are now active, and two more are opening this year, most of them in their home province of Santa Cruz.

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Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8110483.stm

Photo: http://en.mercopress.com/2009/02/23/contacts-to-recover-gold-loaded-sunken-vessel-off-patagonia

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The Sea Still Claims, but Not for Eternity

Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart.
Farewell, first lady of the air.

Watching Brazilian divers haul up the gleaming tricolor tail of Air France Flight 447, one can’t help but wonder what happened to the romantic notion that countless guitar-pickers have celebrated in “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight” since 1939, two years after she went missing somewhere in the South Pacific.

Doesn’t anyone just vanish at sea anymore? Are all those episodes of “Lost,” not to mention “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” just historic fiction?

Early reports said the jet had gone down with 228 aboard in radio silence, in the middle of a towering tropical storm, untracked on any of the world’s radar screens and in a swath of ocean three times the size of Europe. If anything looked fated for a cliché Bermuda Triangle ending, with the deep refusing to yield up its secrets, this was it.

But this was 2009, not 1937, and after just one false alarm over some errant flotsam, the Brazilian Navy had a verifiable piece of the jetliner and more than 40 bodies. Not to deny the sadness of so many lives lost, but the abyss suddenly looked more like a subway grating — you might or might not be able to reach the silvery gleam below, but you knew what it was.

The awesome majesty of fate had stunned people who assumed that jetliners were always in contact with a tower and that flying into a thunderstorm was more or less safe. That notion has now evaporated like ocean mist, unveiling what promises to be a long dogfight among avionics experts over the merits of fly-by-wire technology.

“That was then and this is now,” said Donald M. Goldstein, one of Ms. Earhart’s many biographers. “Those were country boys looking for her and they didn’t have the technology. We’d have found her today for sure.”

Why Flight 447 went down will be investigated for months. But the details of how its wreckage was recovered so quickly also feel scant. Could the Brazilian military really have gotten so lucky so fast? There has been open speculation by technology experts that the crash, and even the subsequent implosions of oxygen bottles aboard, could have been picked up by hydrophones originally laid to track Soviet subs and foreign missile tests. Now the French have dispatched an attack submarine to hunt for the pinging black boxes. The United States Navy publicly flew some listening gear to Brazil; if its submarines were already in the area, it did not say so.

Christine Negroni, an aviation safety specialist and freelance writer who has been helping The New York Times with its reporting of the crash, said G.P.S. coordinates would have tagged each automatic message beamed via satellite from the airplane’s sensors to Air France’s maintenance department saying the flight computer had failed and cabin pressure was gone.

In Ms. Earhart’s case, the inexplicability of her vanishing was heightened by the fact that she was being carefully watched.

Yes, she was trying to spot an island only a mile long after flying all night over the South Pacific, and she was unfamiliar with her newfangled directional gear and may even have snapped off her radio antenna on takeoff.

But she and her co-pilot were hardly alone over the ocean. She was the world’s “Lady Lindbergh,” an international celebrity, the wife of a publishing heir and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca was near her target island to guide her in, and within an hour of her last radio message — which sounded as if she expected to find the island below but wasn’t seeing it — the Navy began a two-week search that drew in a battleship and an aircraft carrier and cost taxpayers $4 million in the middle of the Depression.

By failing to find any trace of her, they spawned a host of conspiracy theories: She had landed on another island and died of starvation. She was captured by the Japanese and executed or forced to broadcast as Tokyo Rose. She survived, moved to New Jersey and married a man named Bolam.

Later this year, Hillary Swank will play her in a movie, burnishing Ms. Earhart’s legend as Jimmy Stewart did that of Glenn Miller, the bandleader who disappeared on a military flight over the English Channel on his way to entertain the troops who had liberated Paris.

Mr. Miller’s plane, like Ms. Earhart’s, was never found. But that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French pilot and author of the children’s classic “The Little Prince,” eventually was. He was lost over the Mediterranean while on a reconnaissance mission from Corsica in 1944, flying with the Free French.

In his case, the veil was lifted slowly. A fisherman found his silver ID bracelet in 1998. A diver found his P-38 Lightning two years later, and in 2003, parts were raised to the surface and positively identified. (His body may be that of a man in French uniform who washed up 50 miles away and was buried in Carqueiranne, but it has not been tested.)

Mr. Saint-Exupéry, who grew up flying light mail planes with no instruments, wrote somberly about the risks he took during the war. And, according to Stacy Schiff, a biographer, he “expected to fall out of the sky.” He disdained cockpit technology and even the automatic doors he found when he lived in New York.

“When she read of Saint-Exupéry’s disappearance, Anne Morrow Lindbergh put her finger instantly on the reason for the ache it caused,” Ms. Schiff wrote in an e-mail message, referring to the wife of Charles Lindbergh and the mother of their kidnapped baby, who was never found. “There is a huge, terrible difference, noted a woman who would have known, between ‘dead’ and ‘lost.’ ”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/weekinreview/14McNEIL.html?ref=global-home

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Lightning Rods and Sideshows

The Eiffel Tower under construction in early 1888.

Ever since its appearance on the Parisian skyline in 1889, the Eiffel Tower has drawn criticism and praise aplenty. Among its earliest detractors, Guy de Maupassant saw the tower as an affront to his nation’s proud cultural heritage and dined regularly in its restaurant because that was the one spot in Paris from which he didn’t have to look upon “this giant and disgraceful skeleton.” (Other­wise, he complained, “you see it from everywhere . . . an unavoidable and horrid nightmare.”) Maupassant’s contemporary Paul Gauguin stood at the opposite end of the spectrum, hailing the tower as a “triumph of iron” and an exciting new art form. But across the board, as Roland Barthes has noted, the Eiffel Tower “attracts meaning, the way a lightning rod attracts thunderbolts.” Indeed, to offer an opinion of this monument is to comment, wittingly or otherwise, on the past, present and future of French civilization.

In “Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count,” Jill Jonnes examines — with splendid attention to detail, if not always with writerly finesse — the importance the tower assumed in its own historical moment. Built by the engineer Gustave Eiffel as the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the vaulting iron structure was intended, Jonnes writes, as “a potent symbol of French modern industrial might, a towering edifice that would exalt science and technology, assert France’s superiority over its rivals (especially America) and entice millions to visit Paris.” These were pressing goals, for by 1889, the French government had — after a century of pendulum swings between the forces of revolution and reaction — reinvented itself yet again, as the Third Republic. To other European leaders, monarchs almost to a man (or woman), this was an unwelcome development; faced with their opposition, France sorely needed to assert the health and robustness of its new regime. The United States posed a somewhat different threat: its industries were booming, its cities were expanding and its people had recently erected the world’s tallest structure, the Washington Monument. About 1,000 feet high, Eiffel’s tower would be almost twice the height of that daring obelisk — and so put the Americans in their place.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that such broad-based international-­affairs issues dominate “Eiffel’s Tower,” which instead recounts a series of smaller, more personal stories that took the 1889 exposition as their backdrop. As her subtitle reveals, Jonnes, the author of “Conquering Gotham” and “Empires of Light,” takes a remarkable cast of characters and documents their respective experiences at the fair. Buffalo Bill, for instance, brought his crowd-pleasing Wild West revue to Paris for the occasion, while Thomas Edison traveled there to unveil his new and improved phonograph; both men were overnight sensations — as was Bill’s star performer, Annie Oakley, whom the poly­gamous king of Senegal attempted to buy for 100,000 francs. The artists who displayed their work at the exposition included James McNeill Whistler, whose portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell won a gold medal, and Gauguin, who didn’t sell a single painting but who did manage to pocket an exotic sculpture fragment that he found at the fair’s Khmer temple. Each of these characters — in different ways and to varying degrees — used the fair as a forum for an idea or a worldview that was to have lasting implications for French culture. (Though this statement may sound dubious in regard to Buffalo Bill, Jonnes credits him with inspiring the abiding “French love affair” with the Wild West. Which, moreover, had some surprising early adopters: “After attending the Wild West show, Paul Gauguin bought a Stetson to wear.”)

Buffalo Bill in a studio portrait taken during the World’s Fair, 1889.

Yet of all the exposition’s trailblazers, none is obviously more central to Jonnes’s narrative than Gustave Eiffel, the visionary engineer-cum-millionaire whose success as a builder of bridges and aqueducts emboldened him to apply his innovative technology to the construction of the tower. In so doing, he offended his nation’s traditionalists, several prominent writers, artists and architects among them. While Eiffel hurried to get the thing built in time for the exposition’s opening, his adversaries condemned it as “a black and gigantic factory chimney,” “a lighthouse, a nail, a chandelier” and a “funnel planted on its fat butt.” (This last insult came courtesy of Charles Garnier, the architect responsible for the city’s magnificent Paris Opéra, whose ornate Beaux-Arts design could not have been more different from the radically pared-down, industrial look of Eiffel’s creation.) As has too often been the case in debates about “French” taste, the attack on modern style was laced with anti-Semitism: on the basis of his last name, Eiffel, a French Catholic, was branded “nothing more nor less than a German Jew,” and his masterpiece “une tour juive.”

Unfazed by the critics, Eiffel defended his choices on aesthetic as well as technical grounds. “I believe that the tower will have its own beauty,” he declared. “The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use. What was the main obstacle I had to overcome in designing the tower? Its resistance to wind. And I submit that the curves of its four piers as produced by our calculations, rising from an enormous base and narrowing toward the top, will give a great impression of strength and beauty.” Although Jonnes does not make this point, her protagonist’s brief, elegant statement of form-follows-function anticipates some of the 20th century’s most significant achievements in architecture and design. In this respect, Eiffel’s tower effectively — and literally — embedded the modern in the French cultural landscape.

In James H. S. McGregor’s “Paris From the Ground Up” — which offers an informative history of the city’s art and architecture — the Eiffel Tower necessarily plays a smaller role, occupying only four pages of a book that, by contrast, devotes a 30-page chapter to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. But those four pages are invaluable, as they explain with admirable economy a crucial fact that Jonnes, oddly, never mentions: Eiffel’s engineering genius consisted in combining linear and curvilinear support systems — recti­linear cross-braced pylons and arches. This insight is typical of McGregor, who has written three other books in the From the Ground Up series and who is at his best when elaborating on the technical aspects of Paris’s buildings.

Unfortunately, McGregor sometimes carries this interest too far. His Notre Dame chapter, for example, quickly goes from illuminating to mind-numbing, for he seems never to have met a Gothic architectural term he didn’t like. Transept and buttress; trumeau and nave; tympanum, apse and archivolt — the gang’s all here, as well it should be. Yet as the author remarks of the cathedral’s exterior decorations: “The array is dizzying both to the eye and to the mind,” and not in a good way. By the same token, in cataloging at such length what it once took to create “an architecture of the sky” — as Gothic structures have been called — McGregor indirectly reveals what Eiffel, seven centuries later, was up against when he redefined this concept for the modern age.

Caroline Weber, a professor of French literature at Barnard College and Columbia University, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/books/review/Weber-t.html?ref=global-home

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See also:

10 things you didn’t know about the Eiffel Tower

It suffers from shrinkage.

Not counting its antenna, the iron tower is about 984 feet tall. But on cold days it’s roughly 6 inches shorter.

The paint is wet.

Or at least some of it is.

Twenty-five workers began brushwork in March on a top-to-bottom repainting job that’s expected to take 18 months. When done, they will have applied 60 tons of paint in three shades of brown (darkest at the bottom, lightest at the top).

The tower needs repainting every seven years, and it hasn’t always been brown.

For a brief spell in 1899, the tower was painted ochre yellow. And from 1954 to 1961, it was brownish red, a bit like the Golden Gate Bridge.

It wasn’t Eiffel’s only big-ticket gig.

By the time engineer and architect Gustave Eiffel began building the tower for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, he had already put up more than 50 bridges in Europe.

He was also a key part of the French effort to build a canal in Panama — an effort that fell through. (Americans redesigned the project and finished the job about 35 years later.)

The tower, meanwhile, took about two years to build, with completion March 31, 1889, several weeks ahead of the exposition’s opening day.

It would make a fine billboard. In fact, it already has.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, three of its sides held vast advertisements for Citroen cars. While occupying Paris during World War II, German troops hung a sign from the tower trumpeting their victory. In 1979, a Greenpeace protester unfurled a sign that said “Save the Seals.”

A company called Apoteo Surprise will flash a personal message under the Eiffel Tower — for a price.

It outdraws New York’s Empire State Building, big time.

From 2003 to 2008, the Parisian tower’s annual visitor count grew from 5.9 million to 6.9 million. (The Empire State Building’s operators report “more than 3.5 million” visitors a year.)

The Paris tower is open every day and includes two restaurants. Summer hours are 9 a.m. to 12:45 a.m.

It’s more expensive than the one in Las Vegas.

Through March 26, 2010, the cost of an elevator trip to the top of the real Eiffel Tower is 13 euros for an adult. (That’s about $17.25, by current foreign exchange rates.)

Cost of the Eiffel Tower Experience at Paris Las Vegas in Las Vegas: $10 for an adult.

And no, you can’t climb to the top of the tower in Paris. (It’s 1,665 steps, or maybe 1,671, depending on who’s counting.) Also, wheelchair users aren’t allowed at the top.

Even before it was done, some French big shots decided it was barbarous, stupefying and odious.

In 1887, as construction began, composer Charles Gounod, writer Guy de Maupassant, painter William Bouguereau, architect Charles Garnier and scores of other sensitive French creative types signed a petition in protest, labeling the tower “useless and monstrous … a gigantic black factory chimney, its barbarous mass overwhelming and humiliating all our monuments and belittling our works of architecture, which will just disappear before this stupefying folly … this odious column of bolted metal.”

Picture dated March 31, 1889, shows the Eiffel Tower in Paris just after it was built.

Way back when, Chrysler stole its thunder.

But who’s laughing now?

The tower was the tallest building in the world until the Chrysler Building went up in New York in 1930.

But look at the bottom lines. The tower has been a reliable money-maker. Despite a scandal over 15 workers embezzling ticket revenue, the Paris city agency running the tower reported 2007 operating income of 59.8 million euros and operating profit of 1.5 million euros.

Chrysler? Bankrupt.

One of the views from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

It’s in a relationship.

In 2008, a 36-year-old San Francisco woman, formerly a member of the U.S. Army and a champion archer, “married” the tower and changed her name to Erika La Tour Eiffel.

It’s in bookstores now.

There’s a new book out, “Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count.” The author is Jill Jonnes, and some of the nine previous nuggets come from her work. Many others come from the tower’s own website at www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk.

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Full article and photos: http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-trw-eiffeltower-pg,0,7417237.photogallery?index=1

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Socotra Island

Isolated from continental land masses for 18 million years, Yemen’s Socotra Island showcases an alien-like landscape with unusual plants and animals, such as the blood dragon tree and desert rose. Its high degree of biodiversity has earned it the name the “Galápagos of the Indian Ocean.”

Socotra is the largest of four islands of the Socotra Archipelago. Its long geographic isolation has given rise to an abundance of flora and fauna found only on the island. Of Socotra’s 825 plant species, 37% are endemic. Ninety percent of its reptile and 95% of its land snail species are also unique to the island.

This species of dragon’s blood tree is unique to Socotra. The tree is so named because a red resin drips from its bark when pierced.

The desert rose is one of the unusual sights of Socotra. Its trunk, which can grow quite bulbous, stores water as a safeguard against dry spells.

An Egyptian Vulture, one of 192 bird species that can be found on Socotra.

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Full article and photos: http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-socotra-pg,0,7583685.photogallery?index=1

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Storm threat to modern aircraft

 

Electrical problems could result in the loss of vital control systems

It is possible that the fury of an equatorial storm brought down Air France flight 447.

The plane’s flight path seems to have taken it through what meteorologists call the inter-tropical convergence zone.

This is where two air masses meet, sending huge storm clouds more than 40,000ft (12,000m) into the sky.

Eight years ago, former British Airways captain Roger Guiver was confronted with an enormous storm during a flight from Cape Town to London Heathrow.

“You take weather like that extremely seriously,” he says. “You don’t go anywhere near it.”

There are two potential dangers – lightning and severe turbulence.

Lightning

Lightning can strike anywhere – the charge flows around the plane’s skin and can damage electrical systems.

“Static wicks” on aircraft wings are meant to dissipate electricity

But aircraft wings have what are called “static wicks” which dissipate the electricity safely.

Bored, long-haul passengers looking out of the window at the wings will spot them – thin, aerial-like structures, trailing in the slipstream.

Roger Guiver says one dramatic warning of a possible lightning strike is St Elmo’s Fire – static that flickers over the windscreen as the plane flies through a storm.

But lightning almost never causes air crashes, at least directly.

The respected Aviation Safety Network database lists just 15 incidents in more than 50 years of aviation history.

The worst was the loss of an Iranian Air Force Boeing 747 in 1976 near Madrid. Lightning ignited vapour in a fuel tank, causing an explosion.

Electrical faults

If lightning did strike AF 447, it is more likely to have caused the electrical faults mentioned in automated maintenance messages which were sent out over a satellite network shortly before the plane disappeared.

But electrical problems may in turn have resulted in the crew losing vital control systems, or a fire.

The pilot’s main weapon against turbulence is weather radar – the receiver mounted in the nose of the aircraft can pick up signs of storm clouds ahead, which are displayed in the cockpit.

Crews aim to fly at least 10 miles (16km) around the worst storms, for reasons of safety and passenger comfort.

But it is not an exact science. Weather radars detect moisture primarily, and sometimes struggle to identify ice crystals, which can be present in the worst storm clouds.

At night, storms cannot easily be seen by eye.

Turbulence

Pilots try to avoid ending up in big storm clouds because of the forces they can impose on a plane.

At cruising height, the plane must be kept to precise speeds – the altitude means changes of speed can cause stalls.

But in a storm, the plane can be lifted up or thrown down in the turbulence, making it difficult for the autopilot to fly within the limits.

“It’s not frightening for us, but it’s awful for the passengers at the back,” says Roger Guiver.

Investigators will want to discover if the Air France Airbus suffered such severe turbulence that it caused catastrophic structural damage – the loss of a rudder, engine mounting, or even a broken wing.

This would be extremely rare.

The wings on newly designed aircraft are literally tested to destruction by bending them at least 50% beyond the kinds of forces produced in a storm.

As ever with air accident investigations, finding the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder is key.

They may be up thousands of metres below the surface.

Map of the plane’s route

But the US National Transportation Safety Board says the homing beacons they carry should be detectable down to 14,000ft (4,300m).

Retrieving them is tricky but, as military salvage experts point out, these days there is no place on the ocean floor where remotely operated vehicles cannot go.

The boxes and key sections of wreckage may be winched up, so that investigators can begin the task of explaining the fate of flight AF 447.

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Full article and photos (1), (2) and (3): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8079591.stm

Photo (4): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8079122.stm

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See also:

L’Airbus d’Air France volait à une vitesse “erronée” et s’est désintégré en vol, selon les messages captés au sol.

Airbus devrait publier une “recommandation” validée par le Bureau d’enquêtes et d’analyses (BEA), jeudi 4 juin, destinée à toutes les compagnies utilisant des biréacteurs A330 et rappelant que, en cas de conditions météorologiques difficiles, leurs équipages doivent conserver la poussée des réacteurs et l’assiette correctes pour garder l’avion en ligne.A ce stade de l’enquête, deux faits se dégagent : la vitesse de l’Airbus, disparu le 31 mai dans l’Atlantique sud avec 228 personnes à bord, était “erronée” et un enchaînement d’événements catastrophiques a conduit à sa désintégration en vol. Ce que confirment les messages émis automatiquement par l’appareil au cours des quatre dernières minutes de son vol, entre 23 h 10 et 23 h 14 locales (4 h 10 et 4 h 14 de Paris).

Un journal de Sao Paulo, le Jornal da Tarde, a eu connaissance de la chronologie et de la teneur de ces messages, selon lui grâce à une source proche de la compagnie française. Ces informations ont été publiées, mercredi 3 juin, par le très sérieux Estado de Sao Paulo (les deux quotidiens appartiennent au même groupe de presse).A 23 heures, soit vingt minutes avant l’entrée prévue de l’Airbus dans l’espace aérien du Sénégal, le pilote envoie un message signalant qu’il traverse une zone de fortes turbulences, dans des cumulo-nimbus chargés d’électricité et des vents violents. Les satellites météo attestent que les vents soufflaient à 160 km/h.

Les problèmes commencent à 23 h 10 lorsqu’un message signale la déconnexion du pilote automatique. On ignore si cette opération a été effectuée par l’équipage ou si elle a été provoquée par les systèmes de sécurité. Cette déconnexion intervient, en effet, automatiquement lorsque les ordinateurs détectent une panne grave.

Des pannes multiple

L’équipage a-t-il voulu dévier de sa trajectoire pour éviter les zones les plus dangereuses ? Si oui, l’opération s’annonçait délicate. Selon un pilote cité par l’Estado, le contrôle manuel d’un avion à haute altitude est “extrêmement difficile”. Une chose est sûre : à partir de cet instant, l’Airbus est piloté manuellement.

A la même minute, un autre message informe que le “fly-by-wire”, autrement dit les commandes électriques de vol qui activent les volets et les ailerons, passe sur le régime “alternative law”. Cette alimentation de secours est actionnée automatiquement en cas de pannes électriques multiples. L’avion conserve alors suffisamment d’électricité pour voler, mais plusieurs systèmes de contrôle de la stabilité de l’appareil sont détériorés. Dans une telle situation, une alarme sonne pour alerter le personnel de cabine.

A 23 h 12, deux autres messages auraient signalé des pannes dans deux équipements fondamentaux, Adiru (Air Data Inertial Reference Unit) et ISIS (Integrated Standby Instruments System). Ces ordinateurs fournissent des informations capitales sur l’altitude, la vitesse et la direction du vol.

A 23 h 13, de nouveaux messages indiquent des pannes électriques dans l’ordinateur principal (Prim1) et l’auxiliaire (Sec1) de vol. L’ultime message est envoyé à 23 h 14. Il signale : “cabine en vitesse verticale”. C’est l’indice d’une dépressurisation, cause ou conséquence d’une désintégration en vol.

Dans les milieux proches de l’enquête, on conteste formellement la chronologie des informations – et notamment la panne de l’Adiru et de l’ISIS au moment indiqué – tout autant que les conclusions “hâtives” qu’en tire l’Estado.

Les informations de la presse brésilienne tranchent avec la prudence affichée par le BEA français en charge de l’enquête. Lors d’un point presse, mercredi 3 juin, Paul-Louis Arslanian, directeur général du Bureau, a insisté sur les difficultés de l’enquête qui “venait seulement de commencer et ne sera pas facile”. Il a ajouté : “Nous avons déjà rassemblé beaucoup d’éléments.” Il a, par exemple, confirmé l’émission de messages automatiques durant environ trois minutes avec “une grande concentration de messages sur une minute”.

Ces messages, a ajouté M. Arslanian, “donnent des indications. Reste à les comprendre et à les mettre en perspective”. Quant aux deux “boîtes noires” qui contiennent les conversations de l’équipage et les paramètres du vol, M. Arslanian n’est pas “d’un optimisme total sur une éventuelle récupération”, mais le BEA a “déjà travaillé sans enregistreurs”, précise-t-il. Un premier rapport devrait être rendu à la fin du mois de juin.

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Full article: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2009/06/04/l-airbus-d-air-france-volait-a-une-vitesse-erronee_1202293_3224.html#ens_id=1200707

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See also:

Airbus Warns of Speed Problems After Jet Crash

 

Brazilian aircraft crew on search for the missing airliner

In the first hint that malfunctioning airspeed indicators played an important role in the crash of an Air France jet bound for Paris earlier this week, Airbus issued a warning to all its customers to follow established procedures when pilots suspect the devises are not properly functioning. The message, approved by French investigators, said that the reminder was sent “without prejudging the final outcome of the investigation,” but clearly pointed to the possibility that mismanaging the plane’s speed had been one step in a cascade of on-board failures, leading to the crash northeast of Brazil 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. The inconsistency was among the error messages that were sent by the plane’s automatic systems by radio back to an Air France maintenance base.

The warning was issued as the Brazilian air force on Thursday recovered the first piece of floating debris in the Atlantic Ocean from the Air France jet that crashed, and as more questions than answers were emerging over how and when the plane may have broken apart.

The Brazilian military Web site reported that a helicopter crew extracted a structural support piece about eight feet long — which might have come from the jet’s cargo hold — about 340 miles northeast of Brazil’s Fernando de Noronha islands. It also recovered two buoys, which airplanes carry as standard emergency equipment.

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. By comparing the pressure in the Pitot tube that is created by the oncoming wind with the pressure from the static port, an airspeed instrument can determine out how fast the plane is moving through the air. 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 of the Airbus products, from narrow-body A318 models to the double-decker jumbo A380.

Failure to properly manage an inconsistency has been cited in several crashes of big jets of various manufacturers.

The Airbus notice refers to the Quick Reference Handbook and the Flight Crew Operating Manual, which is a more detailed volume that is also kept in the cockpit.

For all the models, however, the advice is the same: keep the plane level and keep the throttle setting in place, while troubleshooting the problem.

So far, the scant physical evidence from the crash has not helped investigators determine a cause.

A senior Brazilian military official said that a 12-mile-long fuel slick found on the surface of the ocean seemed to rule out a mid-air fire or explosion as the cause of the disaster.

But a pilot for Air Comet who was flying in the vicinity on Sunday night told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in Thursday’s edition that he saw a bright flash of white light at the same time the Air France Flight 447 disappeared about 700 miles off the coast of Brazil on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

The chief executive of Air France, Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, said at a private meeting with families that the plane disintegrated either in the air or when it slammed into the ocean, and that and there were no survivors.

In acknowledging that it had found more debris on Thursday, news reports quoted a Brazilian military official as saying the color suggested it was internal parts of the plane.

“We don’t know if it’s the fuselage, (but it’s) probably internal because we found brown, white and two yellow bits,” Ramon Borges Cardoso, the director of the Air Space Control Department, said on Brazil’s Terra web site. “That doesn’t correspond to the external part of the airplane but rather the internal part, where you have the baggage hold, seats and covers.”

Mr. Cardoso said ships in the area were collecting debris to take to the operations base in Fernando de Noronha, a 12-hour round trip.

Experts are questioning whether extreme turbulence, a direct lightning strike, the speed of the aircraft during the stormy weather, or a pre-existing problem with the plane might have caused it to break up only four hours into the 11-hour flight.

Without the black boxes containing the plane’s voice and data recorders — which officials say may never be recovered the from the ocean — the only clues besides the scant debris exist in the series of 10 satellite signals.

The pilot sent a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time indicating that the plane was passing through an area of black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds, usually containing lightning and violent winds, according to The Associated Press. The news service, quoting an unidentified aviation official, presented a chilling timeline of events in the cockpit that reveal the plane’s ensuing problems within a 14-minute span, but not what caused them.

About 10 minutes after the manual signal, the plane sent out a series of automatic messages to indicate the autopilot had disengaged, a computer system had switched to alternative power and that controls to keep the plane stable had been damaged. About three minutes later, more automatic messages reported the failure of systems to monitor air speed, altitude and direction.

The last automatic message, which was received at 11:14 p.m. local time, signaled a loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure.

The system controlling these automatic signals, installed on all newer Airbus models, does not indicate the airplane’s location. Rather, it is designed to speed maintenance efforts by alerting maintenance technicians on the ground to problems before a plane lands, so they can be cleared up without delaying the next flight.

William R. Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va, said in a telephone interview Thursday that the pattern of debris could indicate an in-flight break-up. Big debris that floats, Mr. Voss said, is generally not a flat sheet of aluminum, like part of the fuselage, but a more box-like structure, often the tail, and the tail often comes off first.

In this case, he said, searchers have come upon a big floating piece that was on the airplane’s likely track, indicating that it separated from the plane at high altitude, early in the event.

He noted that what was first reportedly radioed back from the automatic system was the auto pilot disengaging. This occurred, Mr. Voss said, either because a pilot saw something going wrong and took manual control or because the computerized auto pilot had a problem “and gave it back to him.”

“The sequence is pretty consistent with things going to hell from there,” he said.

Eleven planes and helicopters are involved in the search operation, the Brazilian military said, including a French ship with two remotely controlled submersible crafts that can be used to explore as deep as 19,600 feet and a United States Air Force P-3 Orion. A spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, Ted Lopatkiewicz, said his agency had worked with “civilian and military U.S. government agencies” to look for radar or satellite data for the area at the time of the crash but had not found any.

The federal safety board said late Wednesday that it would be part of the investigation; under international treaty, it will be involved because the engines were manufactured in the United States by General Electric. The role of the engines in the crash, if any, has not been determined.

But unlike other crash investigations that the agency joins, it will not be sending representatives, at least not yet. Peter Knudson, an agency spokesman, said that at the moment “there is no place to go.”

In many international crashes, the safety board makes its laboratory available for deciphering the cockpit voice recorder and helps in interpreting the flight data recorder. But in this case, involving a French airline and a European-built plane, that work will probably be done in France, experts said.

The main value of the debris found so far may be as a clue to the location of more important parts of the plane that are certain to have sunk, notably the black boxes. Each is equipped with a device that sends out an audio beep that in favorable conditions can be heard at 5,000 meters — about 3.1 miles. That signal begins to fade after 30 days.

The ocean is more than four miles deep in some parts of the area, and, while water is an excellent transmitter of sound, the sound waves are reflected at boundary layers where the water changes temperature, according to Duncan W. Schofield, a principal engineer at Honeywell, which built the boxes. Searchers can lower microphones to listen, but those are towed through the water at a few miles per hour, increasing the need to narrow the search area.

Aviation experts said the flight data recorder was designed to track more than 400 categories of data, including the strength of turbulence and the functioning of various cockpit systems. And the cockpit voice recorder, if recovered, would indicate who was in the cockpit.

More than four hours into the flight, the captain, who is required to be at the controls for takeoff and landing, would typically have gone off for dinner and a nap, according to airline experts, leaving a relief pilot and the first officer at the controls, both typically less experienced but well qualified for what is ordinarily a very quiet phase of flight.

The plane was flying through an area of powerful thunderstorms, but there is no clear indication that the weather was unusual for the region.

“I don’t see anything unusual about these storms,” said Timothy A. Vasquez, a former Air Force meteorologist whose company, Weathergraphics, published a Web page showing the plane’s path and satellite data of storm intensity at the time of the crash. “Planes have flown through a lot worse; I’ve seen worse squall lines in Kansas and Missouri,” he said.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/world/europe/05plane.html?hp

Photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/8086127.stm

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The End of the Affair

The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies.

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.

Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy “1 horse-power.”

In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool. A knight in ancient Rome was bluntly called “guy on horseback,” Equesitis. Chevalier means the same, as does Cavalier. Lose the capitalization and the dictionary says, “insouciant and debonair; marked by a lofty disregard of others’ interests, rights, or feelings; high-handed and arrogant and supercilious.” How cool is that? Then there are cowboys—always cool—and the U.S. cavalry that coolly comes to their rescue plus the proverbially cool-handed “Man on Horseback” to whom we turn in troubled times.

Early witnesses to the automobile urged motorists to get a horse. But that, in effect, was what the automobile would do—get a horse for everybody. Once the Model T was introduced in 1908 we all became Sir Lancelot, gained a seat at the Round Table and were privileged to joust for the favors of fair maidens (at drive-in movies). The pride and prestige of a noble mount was vouchsafed to the common man. And woman, too. No one ever tried to persuade ladies to drive sidesaddle with both legs hanging out the car door.

For the purpose of ennobling us schlubs, the car is better than the horse in every way. Even more advantageous than cost, convenience and not getting kicked and smelly is how much easier it is to drive than to ride. I speak with feeling on this subject, having taken up riding when I was nearly 60 and having begun to drive when I was so small that my cousin Tommy had to lie on the transmission hump and operate the accelerator and the brake with his hands.

A 1950 Studebaker Commander Convertible, with its famous ‘bullet-nose’ front end.

After the grown-ups had gone to bed, Tommy and I shifted the Buick into neutral, pushed it down the driveway and out of earshot, started the engine and toured the neighborhood. The sheer difficulty of horsemanship can be illustrated by what happened to Tommy and me next. Nothing. We maneuvered the car home, turned it off and rolled it back up the driveway. (We were raised in the blessedly flat Midwest.) During our foray the Buick’s speedometer reached 30. But 30 miles per hour is a full gallop on a horse. Delete what you’ve seen of horse riding in movies. Possibly a kid who’d never been on a horse could ride at a gallop without killing himself. Possibly one of the Jonas Brothers could land an F-14 on a carrier deck.

Thus cars usurped the place of horses in our hearts. Once we’d caught a glimpse of a well-turned Goodyear, checked out the curves of the bodywork and gaped at that swell pair of headlights, well, the old gray mare was not what she used to be. We embarked upon life in the fast lane with our new paramour. It was a great love story of man and machine. The road to the future was paved with bliss.

Then we got married and moved to the suburbs. Being away from central cities meant Americans had to spend more of their time driving. Over the years away got farther away. Eventually this meant that Americans had to spend all of their time driving. The play date was 40 miles from the Chuck E. Cheese. The swim meet was 40 miles from the cello lesson. The Montessori was 40 miles from the math coach. Mom’s job was 40 miles from Dad’s job and the three-car garage was 40 miles from both.

The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin—a motorized cup holder. Americans, the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-climate wine cellar. That was a day’s walk away.

Henry Ford and his Model T.

We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way,

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart’s more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at gophers with a mashie.

Louis Chevrolet sits behind the wheel of his prototype car in 1911.

We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.

I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?

And there’s the end of the American automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more conveniently located.

The American automobile is—that is, was—never a product of Japanese-style industrialism. America’s steel, coal, beer, beaver pelts and PCs may have come from our business plutocracy, but American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic, but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool.

Preston Tucker, in one of the few Tucker cars produced, celebrates being acquitted of charges of fraud over the failure of his automobile business in 1950.

America’s romantic foolishness with cars is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old boys haven’t got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation is even now calculating a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations to locate and subdue these reprobates.

Among certain youths—often first-generation Americans—there remains a vestigial fondness for Chevelle low-riders or Honda “tuners.” The pointy-headed busybodies have yet to enfold these youngsters in the iron-clad conformity of cultural diversity’s embrace. Soon the kids will be expressing their creative energy in a more constructive way, planting bok choy in community gardens and decorating homeless shelters with murals of Che.

I myself have something old-school under a tarp in the basement garage. I bet when my will has been probated, some child of mine will yank the dust cover and use the proceeds of the eBay sale to buy a mountain bike. Four things greater than all things are, and I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t bicycles. There are those of us who have had the good fortune to meet with strength and beauty, with majestic force in which we were willing to trust our lives. Then a day comes, that strength and beauty fails, and a man does what a man has to do. I’m going downstairs to put a bullet in a V-8.

P.J. O’Rourke is the author of 13 books, including “Driving Like Crazy.”

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203771904574173401767415892.html

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Cum Laude in Evading Bandits

One of the great failures of American universities is that they are far too parochial, rarely exposing students to worlds beyond our borders.

If colleges provide credit for dozing through an introductory Spanish class, why not give credit for a “gap year” in a Bolivian village? If students can learn about microfinance while sitting comatose in 9 a.m. lectures, couldn’t they learn more by volunteering with a lender in a Bangladesh slum?

So with summer starting, it’s up to students themselves to self-educate by setting off on their own. I hold my “win a trip” contest precisely to encourage such trips — I’m just back from visiting five West African countries with a University of South Carolina student. Yet when I encourage students’ wanderlust, questions invariably arise: Will I be safe? How do I avoid robbers and malaria?

In response, here are 15 tips for traveling to even the roughest of countries — and back:

1. Carry a “decoy wallet,” so that if you are robbed by bandits with large guns, you have something to hand over. I keep $40 in my decoy wallet, along with an old library card and frequent-flier card. (But don’t begrudge the wallet: when my travel buddy was pickpocketed in Peru, we tried to jump the pickpocket, who turned out to be backed by an entire gang … )

2. Carry cash and your passport where no robber will find it. Assuming that few bandits read this column, I’ll disclose that I carry mine in a pouch that loops onto my belt and tucks under my trousers.

3. Carry a tiny ski lock with a six-foot retractable wire. Use it to lock your backpack to a hotel bed when you’re out, or to the rack of a train car.

4. At night, set a chair against your hotel door so that it will tip over and crash if someone slips in at 4 a.m. And lift the sheet to look for bloodstains on the mattress — meaning bed bugs.

5. When it gets dark, always carry a headlamp in your pocket. I learned that from a friend whose hotel in Damascus lost power. He lacked a light but was able to feel his way up the stairs in the dark, find his room and walk in. A couple of final gropes, and he discovered it wasn’t his room after all. Unfortunately, it was occupied.

6. If you’re a woman held up in an isolated area, stick out your stomach, pat it and signal that you’re pregnant. You might also invest in a cheap wedding band, for imaginary husbands deflect unwanted suitors.

7. Be wary of accepting drinks from anyone. Robbers sometimes use a date rape drug to knock out their victims — in bars, in trains, in homes. If presented with pre-poured drinks, switch them with your host, cheerfully explaining: “This is an American good luck ritual!”

8. Buy a secondhand local cell phone for $20, outfit it with a local SIM card and keep it in your pocket.

9. When you arrive in a new city, don’t take an airport taxi unless you know it is safe. If you do take a cab, choose a scrawny driver and lock ALL the doors — thieves may pull open the doors at a red light and run off with a bag.

10. Don’t wear a nice watch, for that suggests a fat wallet and also makes a target. I learned that lesson on my first trip to the Philippines: a robber with a machete had just encountered a Japanese businessman with a Rolex — who now, alas, has only one hand.

11. Look out for fake cops or crooked ones. If a policeman tries to arrest you, demand to see some ID and use your cell phone to contact a friend.

12. If you are held up by bandits with large guns, shake hands respectfully with each of your persecutors. It’s very important to be polite to people who might kill you. Surprisingly often, child soldiers and other bandits will reciprocate your fake friendliness and settle for some cash rather than everything you possess. I’ve even had thugs warmly exchange addresses with me, after robbing me.

13. Remember that the scariest people aren’t warlords, but drivers. In buses I sometimes use my pack as an airbag; after one crash I was the only passenger not hospitalized.

14. If terrorists finger you, break out singing “O Canada”!

15. Finally, don’t be so cautious that you miss the magic of escaping your comfort zone and mingling with local people and staying in their homes. The risks are minimal compared with the wonders of spending time in a small village. So take a gap year, or volunteer in a village or a slum. And even if everything goes wrong and you are robbed and catch malaria, shrug it off — those are precisely the kinds of authentic interactions with local cultures that, in retrospect, enrich a journey and life itself.

 

Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opinion/31kristof.html?ref=opinion

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In Alaska, a Wilderness to Call Your Own

While the Inside Passage in southeastern Alaska is a popular route for cruise ships, there are still portions where civilization only exists on the fringes of the backcountry. Left, the Three Lakes Loop Road in the Tongass National Forest.

Cascade Creek in Tongass National Forest. This part of Alaska gets more than 100 inches of rain annually.

On the waterfront in Petersburg, a fishing town on the northern end of Mitkoff Island, in the Inside Passage of Alaska.

Nestled in Tongass National Forest, Cascade Creek Cabin offers access to a hiking trail, waterfalls, a whitewater canyon and pristine lakes.

Nestled in Tongass National Forest, Cascade Creek Cabin offers access to a hiking trail, waterfalls, a whitewater canyon and pristine lakes.

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Full article and photos: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/travel/31alaska.html

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See also:

In Alaska, a Wilderness to Call Your Own

With Baird Glacier in the background, kayakers cross Thomas Bay.

AS I lifted my kayak paddle out of the waters of Thomas Bay in Southeast Alaska, I paused for a moment to listen to the soft susurration of rain on the surface of the water. Gossamer veils of fog lay over the dark spruce and hemlock hills that disappeared in the mist above me. In the background, the roar of Cascade Creek provided a constant backbeat, a reminder that this part of Alaska really is a rain forest, getting more than 100 inches of rain annually.

It’s a good climate for ducks, and later, back at our cabin perched on the pebbled beach of the bay, I watched a line of waterfowl paddle by, diving under the water then coming up with fish in their beaks. Tilting their heads back, they slid their catch down their long necks.

My husband, my son and I had arrived at the cabin earlier that day, on a water taxi out of Petersburg, a fishing town on the northern tip of Mitkoff Island, in the Inside Passage of Alaska, about 16 air miles southwest of our destination. Air or boat was the only way to get there, which was just the way we wanted it. In planning my family’s trip, I had been looking to get off the grid, somewhere without roads or electricity or other tourists, so that we might really experience Alaska on its own terms. But with a 9-year-old whose camping experience was limited to a few nights in a tent in our front yard, backpacking into the wild seemed impractical.

Then, browsing online one night, I’d stumbled across the idea of renting a public-use cabin. These are simple backcountry accommodations offered by various state and federal agencies in Alaska at bargain rates — about $35 a night. A cabin, unlike a tent, has a roof. And a wood stove by which to dry our supposedly waterproof boots. And hooks to hang all our newly purchased L. L. Bean rain gear. The one that caught my eye, Cascade Creek Cabin, was in the Tongass National Forest, a swath of 17 million largely roadless acres. The online description promised “Berry picking and wildlife viewing,” plus a hiking trail with “access to waterfalls, a whitewater canyon, pristine lakes and alpine areas frequented by mountain goats.” I signed us up.

And so, at 8 a.m. on a misty August morning, the three of us headed out for our two-night adventure. We were toting sleeping bags and pads, a camp stove and cooking gear, food for three days — including halibut we’d caught on a fishing expedition the previous afternoon — and a supply of fresh water. On top of the boat were the two kayaks we had rented for our stay. Scott Roberge of Tongass Kayak Adventures, who had rented us the gear and who was dropping us off at the cabin, added to our pile a bag of spray skirts, life vests and other kayaking supplies, including an emergency kit and a radio we could use if disaster struck.

Like hotels, cabins have check-in times, and we pulled into Thomas Bay well before our scheduled noon arrival. As we motored up, we could see the trim brown cabin sitting at one end of a half moon of pebble beach; at the other end, Cascade Creek tumbled into the glacial gray waters of the bay. A skiff was moored in the water out front, and smoke curled from the chimney. The previous night’s guests were still in possession, so we dropped our bags outside and decided to check out the Cascade Creek Trail at the opposite end of the beach.

As we walked along the beach, a pair of bald eagles flew out of the trees and over the bay. The sleek head of a seal bobbed to the surface to get a better look at us. According to a book of hiking trails I had picked up in Petersburg, the first mile of the trail was rated “easiest,” and we happily made our way along, first on a softly padded trail that led past moss- and lichen-covered tree trunks, and then on a series of boardwalks installed by the Forest Service. Stretched over the boards was a black plastic mesh for traction. That seemed like overkill until we crossed the wooden bridge over a waterfall, where the trail took a sharp turn upward.

It was raining by that point, and the trail alternated between steep sets of log stairs — the Forest Service seems to have been conducting a contest on how many ways you can turn logs into steps — puddles and slick muddy trails that sucked at our boots. My son’s feet were quickly soaked, and at one point I fell and hit my elbow so hard that my entire hand went numb for a good 10 minutes.

After an hour of hiking we hit a big blow-down area, with tree trunks scattered like pick-up sticks across the trail. Gingerly we climbed over the fallen trunks, trying to keep the outline of the trail in sight.

According to the trail description, about two and a half miles in we would reach a junction that would take us to Falls Lake. There we’d find a rowboat that we could take to yet another trail, which would eventually lead us to Swan Lake.

But among the scattered trees, it was hard to know how far we had come — or how much farther we had to go — and our determination was faltering. With the rain coming down harder, we decided to turn back.

By the time we made it back down to the beach, it was a little after noon, and we were greeted by the putt-putt of the outboard motor as the previous night’s tenants headed home. The cabin was ours. We quickly reconnoitered the place: Inside were two sets of bunks — one single, one double — a table and benches, a work counter and a wood stove (there was also a diesel stove, which we left untouched). A small cache box on the exterior wall provided safe storage for food. The front porch looked out over Thomas Bay and the beach.

An outhouse and a woodshed stocked with logs and axes were out back, connected to the cabin by a boardwalk. Blueberry bushes surrounded us. A small stream rushed along to the bay.

We settled in, getting the wood stove going and then propping our boots around it to dry. Earlier tenants had left behind a miscellany of items, among which we discovered a trivia game called Alaska Wild Card. Over lunch, the three of us competed to answer questions about the 49th state and its flora and fauna. “In Southeast Alaska, approximately 80% of bald eagles nest in which kind of tree?” (Sitka spruce.) “What does Denali mean?” (The High One.)

A key source of entertainment was the guest register, which had entries dating back decades. Flipping through it, we soon learned that we were hardly the only people to find the Swan Lake trail too daunting. And, as the rain kept coming, varying from a fine mist that barely kissed our faces to a downpour that turned the nearby streams into gushing faucets, we discovered that we weren’t the first to experience that aspect of the Alaskan climate firsthand either. “Rained every day,” wrote one correspondent, who had visited the cabin 20 years ago.

It was hard to know how seriously to take some of the entries. One writer claimed to have found a bear in the lower bunk. A member of the Harr family from South Dakota noted that they had “caught dolly varden, cod and some other fish but no salmon or halibut. Jerry got a bear that I skinned for him. Fun.”

And what had happened to the fur trapper who, in 1997, recorded a tale of woe, with his boat engine quitting, his food supplies and cigarettes gone and no way of letting the outside world know? “I will never leave town again without letting people know where I am going,” he’d vowed.

After our afternoon paddle, we cooked dinner, grilling our fresh halibut fillets over a wood fire that we battled to keep going in the rain.

As a kind of cabin-warming gift, our Petersburg travel agent had given us a slim volume entitled “The Strangest Story Ever Told” by Harry D. Colp. Mr. Colp had been a gold prospector in the area in the early part of the 20th century, and in the 1930s he had written up his experiences, but put them aside and never published them. In the 1950s, his wife discovered the manuscript in a box and had it published in a small edition.

AS the long Alaskan summer evening waned — we were getting about 16 hours of daylight — we retreated to our bunks, and I put on a headlamp and read aloud from the memoir. As it turned out, our peaceful spot was known by the locals as the Bay of Death because a landslide had wiped out a village of 500 Tlingit people here in 1750. And their unquiet ghosts had seemingly haunted the place. In each chapter, Mr. Colp told of prospectors who had come to the area to search for gold and how they’d seemingly been driven mad by malevolent spirits. In one, a grubstaker named Charlie is set upon by “the most hideous creatures. I couldn’t call them anything but devils, as they were neither men nor monkeys — yet looked like both. They were entirely sexless, their bodies covered with long coarse hair, except where the scabs and running sores had replaced it.”

Charlie, understandably, had hightailed it out of there.

We, on the other hand, were visited only by a small cruise boat that motored through the bay, seemingly on its way to somewhere else, and by a set of porpoises that gracefully curved through the water. Even the porcupine that we’d been told had been plaguing the cabin stayed away. Maybe he was trying to keep out of the rain, too.

Things were so quiet, in fact, that we slept in the next morning, then foraged for blueberries in the bushes around the cabin to make blueberry-studded pancakes. The boys chopped wood, splitting the enormous logs in the woodshed into manageable pieces. I read. My son read. We went out for a paddle up the coast headed toward Scenery Cove and Baird Glacier, at the northern edge of the Stikine Ice Field, a remnant of the once vast ice sheets that covered much of North America in the Pleistocene Epoch. If the previous day had been rainy, this one seemed record-breaking, with water falling straight out of the sky and the pure aquatic rush down mountains providing a constant soundtrack.

That night we sautéed the halibut with some white wine and read about more spooky doings on our peaceful bay.

The last morning after breakfast, the skies lightened, so we went out for a paddle to Ruth’s Island nearby. As we approached the rocky point at the island’s southern tip, a group of curious seals appeared, popping their heads out of the water just feet away from the kayaks and then making a big show of splashing into the bay behind us.

The water taxi was coming back to pick us up at about noon, and as we paddled back we saw that the cruise boat that had motored through the bay the night before was now moored at the far end of the beach near Cascade Creek. As we were loading our kayaks onto the boat for the trip back to Petersburg, a floatplane suddenly came roaring overhead, skimming above the treetops as it came in for a landing on a nearby bay. Moments later it reappeared and taxied up to the cruise ship, no doubt letting off a new group of guests for an Alaskan adventure. That was fine, I thought, but it really didn’t beat a cabin and a wood stove and the soft sound of rain on the roof.

WHERE CIVILIZATION EXISTS ON THE FRINGES OF THE BACKCOUNTRY

When I started planning my family’s trip to Alaska I knew I wanted to spend part of our stay somewhere truly remote, unreachable by road and far from other people. Backpacking into the wilderness seemed daunting (I had read “Into the Wild,” Jon Krakauer’s account of Christopher McCandless’s death in the Alaskan wilderness), but using a cabin as a base seemed to provide the right mixture of getting away from it all and relative comfort.

It was relative, though: While cabins are a step up from tents, they generally have no electricity, indoor plumbing or heat other than a wood or oil stove. They do have bunks, but no mattresses, cooking stoves or utensils. Plan on bringing sleeping bags, pads, a cookstove and cooking gear, and all necessary food and drinking water (or a water purifier). Firewood is usually available, but not guaranteed.

At www.recreation.gov you can search by location, dates available or special features, and the Web site is a good place to start looking for a public-use cabin. It includes cabins and campsites on federal lands throughout the United States. There are also cabins on state land available from the Alaska Department of Parks and Outdoor Recreation (dnr.alaska.gov/parks/cabins/index.htm).

I began with some basic parameters: We were planning to be in Alaska in early August, wanted to travel part of the Inside Passage by ferry and wanted a site with hiking trails nearby. I quickly closed in on the Cascade Creek site, which was within the Tongass National Forest, and booked it after setting up the required free account on recreation.gov. Our cabin was $35 a night, and because I ended up changing our dates slightly, I also had to pay a $10 rebooking fee. Rules put in effect this year allow only one change of date.

Many of the bigger towns along the Inside Passage (again, bigger is a relative term) are served by Alaska Airlines with service from Juneau or Anchorage and with connecting flights to Seattle. Flights between Juneau and Petersburg are $198 each way. The more scenic way to travel is by the Alaska Marine Highway (www.dot.state.ak.us/amhs) , the state’s ferry service. The fast ferry, the Fairweather, sails every Tuesday and Friday from Juneau to Petersburg, leaving at 8 a.m. and reaching Petersburg by noon. The adult one-way fare is $66. Children 6 to 12 are half price. Children under 6 travel free.

Dealing with the logistics of travel within Alaska can be confusing and difficult from afar, so we used an Alaska-based travel agency to book our connections and accommodations other than the cabin. We used Viking Travel, which happens to be based in Petersburg and specializes in custom Alaska tours (800-327-2571; www.alaskaferry.com). They build all your choices into one package, to which they add a 10 percent fee.

We found that extra expense worth it, since Anne Volk, our agent, knew the ferry and flight schedules and was able to do things like line up a water taxi ride to the cabin and back. The outfitter she used was Tongass Kayak Adventures (www.tongasskayak.com; 907-772-4600). For clients who are arranging their own travel, the owner Scott Roberge charges $200 each way for locations within an hour of Petersburg. He also rents kayaks, $60 a day for a double; $50 for a single. They come with life jackets, spray skirts and an emergency kit, including flares and a radio in case something goes seriously wrong. That last bit of equipment was particularly welcome, as there was no cellphone coverage anywhere near our cabin — which was exactly how I’d planned it.

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Full article and photo: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/travel/31alaska.html

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Beaches in America

Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii

Siesta Beach, Sarasota, Fla.

Coopers Beach, Southampton, N.Y

Coronado Beach, San Diego

Main Beach, East Hampton, N.Y.

Coast Guard Beach, Cape Cod, Mass.

Cape Florida State Park, Key Biscayne, Fla.

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Full article and photos: Dr. Beach’s top 10 beaches in America 2009: http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-bestbeaches09-pg,0,3449342.photogallery?index=1

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A Passage Into the Primeval on a Bayou Lake in East Texas

The steamboat Graceful Ghost begins one of its daily tours near Uncertain, Tex.

EVERY visitor to Caddo Lake on the Texas-Louisiana border seems to come away with a profoundly personal impression. Anglers prize Caddo, the only naturally formed lake in Texas, for its trophy bass; canoeists rate its twisting, interlocking bayous among the most challenging to navigate.

Environmentalists cherish its 26,000 acres as a rare, if not singular, wetlands environment. Caddo is more of a large bayou, composed of many smaller waterways. It is home to over 200 species of birds; hundreds of kinds of mammals, reptiles and fish; and countless plants, most prominently the towering baldcypress — some as old as 400 years — that erupt from its surface like limbs of drowned giants.

The lake is home to over 200 species of birds, including a great blue heron, taking flight near the town of Uncertain.

But what struck me about Caddo Lake the first time I saw it was the powerful suggestion of the supernatural that it evoked. Honestly, it’s kind of a creepy place.

Spectral shapes shift in the mist that rises from its cilantro-colored surface; ghost stories seem to ooze from its forested shores. Spanish moss dangles like serpents from cypress branches; spooky tales lurk behind the wary eyes of egrets and rabbits.

An old fish camp. Anglers prize Caddo for its trophy bass.

Natural beauty by itself can stop you dead in your tracks, but Caddo also works on the primal circuits. It sticks with you.

That, perhaps, is why my wife, Ann, and I return every few years to the lake, which sits about 15 miles west of Shreveport, La.: to make sure that what we saw the first time really existed; and maybe to figure it out, learn from it, even befriend it.

For John Winn, 48, one of the lake’s most prominent guides, Caddo has been a lifelong companion. “In a way, this lake raised me,” he said, piloting his shallow-draft Go-Devil boat through the cypresses, which in early spring were equal parts dead graying foliage and new green growth. “Most everything important I’ve ever done has been on this lake.”

Among Caddo’s many mysteries is its genesis. The lake was named for the Caddo Indians, who settled in the area in the early 1600s. There are two theories of its creation: The Caddo Indians held that it was formed by an earthquake and flooding; other, more recent histories say it was the result of the Great Raft — a huge logjam in the Red River, which in the early 1800s forced enough water into Big Cypress Bayou to create the lake.

At the same time, the bayou became deep and wide enough to handle big steamships, which began heading up the Mississippi from New Orleans, then northeastward on the Red River and all the way to the hamlet of Jefferson, 15 miles west of the lake.

As the 19th century progressed, Jefferson became Texas’s second-largest port after Galveston, a jumping-off point for goods headed for the fast-developing West. The town boomed, and the lake was a favored hideout for criminal elements drawn to all the new money — leading to the claim that, during this era, there was a murder a day in the area. Maybe it is the ghosts of these murderers and thieves that give the lake such a preternatural spookiness: what happened at Caddo, stayed in Caddo.

Sometimes, the legends around Caddo cross over into the popular imagination.

“I get requests all the time for Bigfoot tours,” Mr. Winn said, stroking at a gray-and-black beard. “Fine. But I’ve been out here all my life. I know places out here that the fishes don’t know about. I’ve never seen Bigfoot.”

Mr. Winn turned the Go-Devil down one of the lake’s 42 mapped and marked “boat roads” in search of the animals that definitely inhabit the lake. A spring cold snap seemed to be keeping the alligators out of sight, but we saw plenty of turtles and frogs, hawks and vultures soaring overhead.

The most interesting thing we saw was a beaver dam — a good five feet high and half again as wide, banked up against a cypress tree — looking every bit as solid as an Allied bunker. “These beavers back in here will get to be 70 pounds or so, and it’s all muscle,” Mr. Winn said. “There’s not much that can stand up to one except maybe for a gator, and even they find them too tough to eat.”

Like a lot of ecological treasures, Caddo has been rather routinely abused, first by that steamboat traffic in the 19th century, then again, beginning in 1910, when prospectors built the country’s first “over-water” oil rigs to tap what was hoped to be infinite reserves in East Texas.

In the last 20 years, Caddo has been assaulted by more-contemporary culprits, including mercury and other pollutants from past industrial excesses. So far, with the aid of several environmental organizations, the lake’s defenders have kept much of the vicissitudes of the 21st century at bay. It is one of 26 areas in the country designated for protection by the Ramsar Convention, a 1970s treaty that seeks to protect wetlands by asking participating nations to designate, put to “best” use and, if necessary, completely protect certain areas.

“Everyone who lives here, and who visits, seems much more sensitive about preserving Caddo these days,” Mr. Winn said. “But it’s still fragile. You can break it real easily.”

Aside from an eclectic collection of weekend homes, there are only a few populated areas around the lake, including Karnack (population 2,500), where Lady Bird Johnson was born in 1912, and Uncertain (population 150), where we put up for the night at the comfortable, funky three-bedroom wood lake house called the Moonglow Lodge, just half a block from the lake.

Local highlights include the Uncertain General Store & Grill, where you can treat yourself to a stalwart array of fried swamp food like shrimp, French fries and hush puppies; and the local Fina station, where I filled up my Jeep and chatted up some assembled locals who were sipping coffee and staring at me. I wondered if people in those parts ever tired of jokes about the town’s name. (For example: “Am I in Uncertain?” “Yep.” “You sure?”)

They all nodded, and didn’t smile when they did.

(Actually, the town got its name back in the steam shipping days when it became the drop-off point for all goods headed back downriver to New Orleans that had lost their tags for other river ports.)

If you want to take a break from the forest primeval, there is the aforementioned town of Jefferson, population 1,954. It fell on hard times in the late 19th century, when the Army Corps of Engineers broke up the Big Raft again, and Big Cypress Bayou and Caddo lost so much water that the big ships couldn’t make it that far inland anymore. Then in the 1970s, the city set out to promote itself as a tourist destination, and today there are a daunting 36 bed-and-breakfasts, and 10 antique stores.

The red-brick Jefferson Historical Museum.

There’s much to be learned on a stroll through Jefferson’s well-stocked museum, the restored Excelsior House Hotel and quiet streets lined with restored antebellum homes.

But the lake always beckons me back, and so on our final morning, we made our way to Caddo Lake State Park to take a hike that has always added a coda to our visits. It’s just a mile or so loop, but for some reason, we have never been able to complete it without becoming lost.

We started off under thick cloud cover and felt confident as we reached the halfway point at a park road. The air was cool, and the park was alive with the sounds of birds; crossing over a small bridge, I even spotted a furiously wriggling water snake — another highly reclusive local inhabitant.

A turtle crosses the road in Uncertain.

But looping back toward the lake, our internal compasses failed us, and, as on previous hikes, we passed the same stone pavilion. Most people would call this a teaching moment, but to me, it was just an old friend playing an old joke once again.

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Full article and photos: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/travel/escapes/22Caddo.html

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Eclipse Chasing, in Pursuit of Total Awe

Solar and lunar eclipses worked their power to fascinate in Jordan in 2005, Siberia in 2008, Cape Town last January and Australia in 2002. This July, an eclipse chaser’s holy grail, a total solar eclipse, will blot out the sun over parts of Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

ON July 22, the 21st century’s longest total solar eclipse will darken the sky along a narrow corridor of the Asian landmass and the Pacific Ocean. An otherworldly black disk will replace the sun for about six and a half minutes, and from India through China to the sea off the southern coast of Japan, spellbound adventurers will be out in force to see it. I wouldn’t miss being one of them.

I saw my first total solar eclipse in Hungary in 1999, at just past noon on a clear summer day. My friend Tamás and I were visiting his parents in Zánka, a village on the shore of Lake Balaton, and as the time drew near we stood chattering in the backyard, expectant but, as seems clear now, unprepared.

As the moon obscured more and more of the sun, the sky darkened to a shimmering violet. Cicadas, confused by the noontime dusk, began calling out their evening song. The temperature dropped. A breeze kicked up. When the eclipse was total, I removed my special eclipse glasses — essential for viewing the eclipse phases safely — casually looked up at the sun, and staggered back a little, my brain reeling.

The transformation of reality in a total solar eclipse is indescribable. I was mesmerized, disoriented, shocked, as if I had slipped through a wormhole to an alternate universe. I was the unwitting star of a “Twilight Zone” episode.

Mere minutes later, the sun peeked back out from behind the moon and all was familiar again. As suddenly as it had begun, my first total solar eclipse was over. But, like thousands of others around the world, I was hooked.

A growing number of eclipse-chasers, or umbraphiles, as they are also called, travel to the corners of the earth specifically to see total solar eclipses, and tour operators have sprung up to get them there. Beyond providing the thrill of standing on the moon’s shadow, or umbra, an eclipse is often the centerpiece of a travel adventure in exotic climes.

Umbraphiles have chased eclipses to Kazakh lakes, Zambian safari country and Algerian deserts. They have chartered ships to take them to the North Atlantic, the Caribbean and the middle of the Pacific. They’ve taken flights over the North Pole, faces pressed against tiny, frost-trimmed windows to view an eclipse from 35,000 feet.

The myths about eclipses are colorful: the sun and moon fighting or making love, hungry wolves or snakes devouring the light. But the ancient Chinese tale, that an eclipse is caused by a dragon swallowing the sun, seems especially apt. Eclipse fanatics are willing to spend any amount of time and money chasing that dragon.

The best eclipse tours are generally run by operators who understand local conditions, which may be chaotic for travelers, and have secured reliable transportation and the best accommodations and viewing spots. Since clouds can obscure the view of an eclipse, tour operators schedule observations in spots that are most likely to provide clear weather. Most tours feature lectures on both the science of eclipses and the art of observing them, including the all-important mantra for first-timers: Don’t bother with cameras and other distractions; just sit back and enjoy.

The experience evokes language laden with the mystical and the narcotic. “An eclipse is a glimpse of the world from a little outside our usual perspective,” said Liz O’Mara, an interactive marketing manager from New York and a veteran of three eclipses. “From that vantage point I can most easily see our position in the universe.”

Glenn Schneider, an astronomer at the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona who has seen more total solar eclipses (27) than the Yankees have won World Series (26), puts it in more scientific terms: “Totality is stronger than opioids or pheromones.”

The perfect alignment of the earth and the moon that obscures the sun in total eclipse occurs only every 16 months or so, lasts no more than seven and a half minutes (typically only three or four), and is visible from less than 1 percent of the earth’s surface. The last one visible from within New York City was in 1925 and lasted no more than a minute; the next happens in 2079. If you’re very young and healthy, you can wait for an eclipse to come to you. Otherwise, you must chase one down.

And chase we did. In March 2006, Tamás and I met in Ghana for our second eclipse. We flew in to Accra, the capital, and hopped on a bus to Cape Coast, about 90 miles southwest. Rather than join the apparently raucous party of eclipse-chasers on the beach outside town, we shared the moment with a local group — the four-person staff of the Mighty Victory Hotel. As the moon crept along the sun’s surface, I suddenly grew anxious. Would it be as awe-inspiring as I had remembered?

I needn’t have worried. As the last diamond of the sun slipped behind the moon, I was once again transported to the Twilight Zone, this time for three minutes and 20 seconds.

This year’s eclipse will be my first in the company of fellow chasers — 86 umbraphiles led by Rick Brown, a commodities trader from Long Island. We’ll gather in a private viewing spot outside Wuhan, China, just after sunrise. Together we’ll perform rituals to ward off the clouds, don our eclipse glasses and wait. At the moment of total eclipse, even the seasoned veterans are likely to cry out with religious fervor.

It all seems a bit much — until you’ve seen one.

Bill Kramer, a computer consultant from Ohio who runs an eclipse-chasing Web site, describes himself as a cynic about most of things purported to be marvelous, but not this experience. “An eclipse,” he said, “is the one thing that actually lives up to the hype.”

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For dates and Google maps of past and future eclipses, consult:

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/travel/17journeys.html?8dpc

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The Scary Skies

Frightening revelations at hearings on the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407

AVIATION EXPERTS say that airplane crashes are usually the result of a collection of failures. After three days of hearings last week into the crash of Buffalo-bound Continental Connection Flight 3407 on the snowy night of Feb. 12, we know that the frightening failures began long before the doomed turboprop plane took off from Newark, N.J. The details that emerged should make even the most experienced air traveler nervous.

Capt. Marvin Renslow, 47, listed just one of the three times he failed a critical pilot test when applying for a job with Colgan Air, the operator of the crashed airliner. He failed twice more after he was hired. First Officer Rebecca Shaw, 24, had gone 36 hours without proper rest (regulations require eight hours of rest before flying) by commuting from her home in Seattle on two flights. The hearings revealed that 78 of the 137 Newark-based pilots for Colgan had commutes ranging from more than 400 miles to more than 1,000 miles. Both Mr. Renslow and Ms. Shaw apparently violated company rules by sleeping in the crew lounge at the Newark airport. So low were their wages that they each had at one time held side jobs while working for the airline. Mr. Renslow ($55,000) stocked grocery shelves in a store near his Tampa home; Ms. Shaw ($16,200) worked in a coffee shop.

The problems in the cockpit were astounding. Cockpit voice recorders picked up Mr. Renslow and Ms. Shaw chitchatting about their lives and careers, in violation of federal regulations that prohibit nonessential conversation below 10,000 feet. They were on their final approach to Buffalo Niagara International Airport in the middle of a snowstorm when Ms. Shaw said, “I’ve never seen icing conditions. I’ve never de-iced. . . . I’ve never experienced any of that.” They were oblivious to the ice buildup on the plane’s wings and to the rapid decline in airspeed. Only the shaking of the pilot’s yoke got Mr. Renslow’s attention. But instead of allowing the plane to descend to pick up speed, he yanked the nose of the aircraft up. The plane crashed seconds later, killing all 49 on board and one person on the ground.

Regional air carriers are an essential part of American air travel. According to the Regional Airline Association, about half the scheduled flights in the United States are flown by them, and 74 percent of the nation’s airports are served only by regional airlines. The association says that its members must meet the same safety standards for training, maintenance and flight operations that the Federal Aviation Administration sets for large commercial airlines. But as last week’s hearings made horrifically clear, there’s a gap between what is supposed to be and what is. Considering that the past five crashes of commercial passenger aircraft in this country have all been of regional carriers, we hope that the shocking testimony leads to increased vigilance that will close that gap.

Washington Post, Editorial

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051701788.html?nav=hcmoduletmv

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After 43 Years, a French Town’s Nostalgia for Harry and Joe Lingers

Until 1966, the NATO base in Châteauroux, France, was home to a huge supply center, aircraft repair unit and 8,000 Americans.

More than 40 years ago the American military left this town in central France, but Harry and Joe stayed on.

The two Americans had been here because France was a member of NATO and Châteauroux housed the largest American base in Europe, a huge supply center and aircraft repair unit with about 8,000 Americans and 3,000 French civilian employees — cooks, chauffeurs, barbers, accountants, carpenters.

But in 1966 de Gaulle decided that France, which had survived two world wars with the help of soldiers from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, could stand on its own militarily, so he withdrew France from the military side of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and told the Americans to leave.

For many here in Châteauroux of the older generation, the years at the NATO base were the good old days, with well-paying jobs plentiful at the base and splotches of color — as off-duty Americans sported Hawaiian shirts and tooled around in their brightly colored Chevrolets and Oldsmobiles — in the dreary grayness of postwar France. About 450 weddings were celebrated between American servicemen and Frenchwomen in City Hall.

Of course, not everyone welcomed the Americans. Communists and Socialists regularly smeared walls with “U.S. Go Home.” But now, as President Nicolas Sarkozy leads France back into the bosom of NATO, some are wondering hopefully whether those years might be coming back.

If the Americans returned, “it would not disturb me,” said Sophie Bara, a woman in her 40s who works for a government agency, understatement marking her voice. “They’re talking about it.”

Even today, however, the Americans are not entirely gone. In January, 1952, Joseph Gagne, a native of Augusta, Me., who had landed on the Normandy beaches, got wind of the plans to build a base here. So together with his French wife, Jeanine, he opened a hamburger restaurant, Joe from Maine, in narrow Rue Ledru Rollin. Joe died this month at the age of 86 in a local hospital, but his daughter Annette still serves up hamburgers, hot dogs and Tex-Mex dishes six days a week.

“The customers are now French, though G.I.’s who served on the base back then continue to come back, or their children,” said Annette, entertaining a visitor between meals under a faux-Tiffany lamp that read, “Schlitz on Tap.” “When Dad opened in January of 1952 the French didn’t know what a hamburger was,” said Annette. “We made our own ketchup; we got spices on the base.”

Beneath the restaurant is a vaulted stone cellar, about 30 feet square, now used for storage, where American airmen once quaffed endless amounts of beer, chain smoked and danced with French girlfriends. The vaulting is covered with their carved names. “Benny. Tom. Fagan.”

Harry leaves an even bigger mark on the city. In the 1960s a local entrepreneur, Paul Picard, the owner of a baked goods business, was impressed by the strange square white bread that the American servicemen ate. Like other Frenchmen accustomed to long, crusty baguettes, Mr. Picard had never seen anything like it, yet he thought it offered possibilities.

So he visited bakeries in the United States to learn how it was baked, then returned to France where he essentially re-engineered Wonder Bread. To give it an American flair, he called it Harry’s American Bread and decorated the packaging with the stars and stripes of the American flag. No one can say who Harry was, probably just a name that sounded American.

Though the base closed too soon for Mr. Picard to sell his bread there, it soon became a hit with the French. Now Harry’s huge baking plant outside Châteauroux bakes about 130 million loaves of white bread and other bakery products a year. That is about one-third of what Harry’s produces at other plants scattered across France. Its six bakeries spread across France make it the largest producer of packaged baked goods in the country.

Mr. Picard is now retired to a chateau in the region, where he collects vintage racing cars; his company is owned by an Italian food multinational. But the factory here with its 400 employees, plus another across town, makes Harry’s the second largest employer in the region. The leader, an auto parts company, is shedding jobs fast because of the auto industry slump, so Harry’s will soon be No. 1.

“He was a visionary,” said Jacques Laurent, 42, the plant manager, describing Mr. Picard. White sandwich bread, he concedes, is “secondary in France,” where only about 7 percent of the bread market is sliced sandwich bread. “The French eat baguettes,” he said. Still Harry’s continues to churn out new products, many with an American flair, like Doo Wop, a snack for kids, and a crustless white bread for children who won’t eat the crust. Harry’s bakes hamburger rolls for Quick, a local competitor of McDonald’s, though not for Joe From Maine, which bakes its own.

Châteauroux, with its 66,000 people, has never been in a league with Paris, Versailles or Chartres. It has some charming back streets but no soaring cathedral, and its oldest church, St. Martial, is opened to visitors only by appointment. Its modern town hall has the charm of an automobile inspection station. When the writer Edith Wharton visited Châteauroux while touring France in 1906 she described it as “undeniably disappointing.”

Still, in recent years the rising tide of the French economy lifted Châteauroux, and now the crisis threatens to shake it. The city’s mayor, Jean-François Mayet, muses about what the return of a NATO base might bring. The landing strips built by the Americans in 1951 are still there, and Châteauroux’s airport does some business with freight, aircraft repair, pilot training and charter flights.

“Let them come, though things are no longer the same,” Mr. Mayet said. “The presence of the airport could be useful. There is a place for the Americans to come to.”

For others, though, the American period will always remain the golden age. Last year, Michel Blanchandin, 74, who worked on the American base straight from school operating an I.B.M. punch card machine, gathered with about 150 other former employees to form an association, to keep alive the memory of those years. Some members still drive old Chevrolets, Mustangs and Cadillacs.

Could the Americans return? “No,” he said, “the context is not the same. There is no cold war.” He thought a moment, then added, “If they came, we’d welcome them.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/world/europe/27france.html

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How Airlines Try to Avert Growing Bird Strike Risk

An aircraft taking off from Heathrow: There’s a growing incidence worldwide of collisions between passenger jets and flocks of birds.

Last week’s miraculous escape for the 155 people on US Airways flight 1549 that ditched in the Hudson River has thrown the spotlight on the growing dangers to air traffic posed by bird strikes. Engineers, airlines and airports have been working on the problem for years.

Bird strikes of the type that forced US Airways Flight 1549 to land in the Hudson River in New York last Thursday are becoming increasingly common because of stricter wildlife conservation rules that are boosting bird populations.

“We’re in competition for airspace,” said bird strike expert Richard Dolbeer, who headed the US Bird Strike Committee until last year. The population of Canada Geese in the US, for example, has almost quadrupled since 1990, and the number of bird strikes increased to 7,600 from 1,750 in the same period.

Even small birds can cause significant damage because of the high speeds at which jets travel.

Experts in Germany have observed a similar trend. Heinrich Weitz of the German Committee for the Prevention of Bird Strikes in Aviation reported an increasing tendency. “We have to decide: either more nature protection or more flight safety,” Weitz says.

In addition to rising numbers, the animals have also adapted to urban environments. “Traffic doesn’t bother them,” says Dolbeer. Besides, modern airliners are far quieter than they used to be, which means the birds often don’t notice the jets until it’s too late.

Scientists are now experimenting with ultraviolet paint, which birds can spot more easily, to avoid collisions. The best solution would be a radar system for pilots and air traffic controllers to identify flocks of birds quickly. But such a system is still in the early stages of development.

Safety requirements for large passenger jets state that engines must be able to emerge unscathed from collisions with birds weighing up to two kilograms (4.4 pounds). However, dozens of bird species are heavier than that — in North America alone, 36 types of birds weigh in excess of two kilos

Costly Problem

Bird strikes cause damage worth more than $1 billion per year worldwide. Engines have to undergo costly repair or be replaced, and flights have to be cancelled. According to the US Bird Strike Committee, there were 56,000 bird strikes in civilian air traffic between 1990 and 2004. The committee comprises airlines, airports, pilots and bird experts.

A bird strike caused the engine failure of US Airways Flight 1549, which landed in the Hudson River last Thursday. Bird populations are growing as a result of stricter wildlife conservation rules.

Bird collisions are a constant risk, and the passengers don’t always come off as lightly as they did in the “miracle on the Hudson” — in 1960, 62 passengers died when a bird strike caused the crash of a Lockheed L-188 in Boston. In 1988, a flock of speckled pigeons collided with a Boeing 737 in Ethiopia, causing the death of 35 people. In 1996 a Lockheed C-130 of the Belgian air force crashed over Eindhoven in the Netherlands, causing 34 deaths.

Aircraft engineers are working to make engines less susceptible to bird strikes. Given that an Airbus A320 weighs around 60 tons and a large bird two kilos, it’s surprising how much damage a collision can cause. But because of the speed involved, a strike can unleash forces that are 10,000 times as great as the bird’s weight, which can lead to massive deformation of the engine’s fan blades or even complete engine failure.

Firing Dead Birds at Aircraft Engines

Jörg Frischbier of Munich-based engine manufacturer MTU has been researching the effect of bird strikes for years. During the engine development phase, collisions are simulated by computer. When engines are completed, dead birds are fired at the engines to test the construction.

When a goose or a duck strikes an engine, it’s essential that the fan blades hold. “We often have to make them thicker so that they can withstand such incidents,” says Frischbier. While the worst damage is usually inflicted on the front part of the engine, fragments can also penetrate deeper into the high pressure compressor, which reduces engine thrust.

Aircraft engineers are working to make engines less susceptible to bird strikes, for example by strengthening the fan blades. A strike can unleash forces that are 10,000 times greater than the bird’s weight, which can lead to massive deformation of the engine’s fan blades, and total engine failure in the worst case.

The mechanical stress caused by a bird strike is always greatest when an aircraft is just taking off because that’s when the engine is already operating at full thrust while the aircraft is moving forward at relatively slow speed.

Frischbier said the likelihood of significant engine damage and even shutdown increases with the size of the bird. It’s around 30 percent with a 500 gram (1.1 pound) bird and 80 percent with a five-kilo (11 pound) bird. But the likelihood that bird strikes could affect both engines is significantly less — about 10 percent in a collision with a flock of two kilo birds, or 20 percent with five kilo birds.

“Those are extremely rare cases, you can count them on the fingers of one hand” said Axel Raab, spokesman for Deutsche Flugsicherung, the company responsible for air traffic control in Germany.

But that is what happened to the US Airways flight whose passengers owe their survival to the calm response of experienced pilot Chesley Sullenberger, now a being hailed as a hero.

Airports have tried to make themselves as unattractive as possible to birds by felling trees and removing bushes to deprive them of nesting places, or by planting special grass that is short of nutrients. Some airports even use birds of prey to chase away birds, or they play animal sounds via loudspeakers. Sometimes signal pistols are used to scare them off.

Pilots can lessen the risk by switching on their landing lights at altitudes of less than 3,000 meters to make it easier for birds to spot them.

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,602092,00.html

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The Afterlife of Near-death

Passengers stood on the wings as they awaited rescue.

Every experienced flier has sensed a whisper of death in a blast of turbulence at 25,000 feet, and many will swear they’ve heard their names called, loud and clear.

It’s not a moment people forget.

“All I could think about,” said a 50-year old nurse who’d recently been in a plane that lost an engine, “was my garage. How I hadn’t cleaned it, and how messy it would be when someone came in and saw it. It’s crazy what you think about.”

The mind reels in the presence of death.

From the shore and TV screens, the evacuation of a US Airways jet that ditched in the Hudson River on Thursday looked almost stage-managed, a slow-motion rescue complete with heroes and zero death.

But on the inside — and inside the passenger’s heads — the action was far wilder.

No one knew how long that plane would stay afloat, and those with a strong imagination surely glimpsed what could come: icy water moving shoulder high and higher; a shrinking, dark pocket of air; bobbing heads wheezing their last breaths. One man stripped to his underwear, in case he needed to swim; a mother climbed over seats with her baby to avoid a stampede.

Recollections of brushes with death are often infused with a quality close to madness. “Though my senses were deadened, not so the mind: its activity seemed to be invigorated, in a ratio that defies all description,” wrote Rear Adm. Sir Francis Beaufort, who fell off a boat in Portsmouth harbor on June 10, 1791, certain that he would drown.

Some pray, others leap into action; many report feeling a floating sensation. Yet it is the way the experience lingers in the imagination that may be most important, both for the immediate aftermath and for the months and years to follow. And while some sink into despair, struggling with jagged images of their near-extinction, for many the experience has an entirely different meaning.

“There’s a host of people who speak about being horrified, traumatized, who talk about a distortion in time afterwards, almost as though the accident or experience happened moments ago,” said Kenneth Manges, a clinical psychologist in Cincinnati who has treated survivors of floods, fires and armed robberies. “But others come through the trauma re-energized, with new sense of living and vitality — they’re very grateful, and feel blessed to have survived.”

This response mirrors what researchers call near-death experiences, in which people — surgical patients, heart attack victims who have been resuscitated — report transformational experiences, in the fogged cleft between life and death. In series of studies of such cases, including hundreds of patients and survivors of accidents, Dr. Bruce Greyson, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, has found that most do not qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis. People who report out-of-body experiences, or sensations of floating, or religious transformation, often are preoccupied with the experience afterward, but do not see it as having a negative impact on their lives.

On the contrary: near-death experiences may protect many people from the anxiousness, the hyper-vigilance and nightmares that characterize post-traumatic stress.

“I do not advance that view from any theoretical perspective, but purely from the empirical evidence that the more positive near-death experiences tend to leave people with a sense of meaning and purpose in the traumatic experience and in life in general that buffers long-term emotional distress,” Dr. Greyson wrote in an e-mail. “The positive emotion in the experiences seems to leave them with a feeling of enhanced self-worth and a sense that they are not alone in dealing with life’s traumas.”

As they gain distance from the event, some people who see meaning in it may unintentionally embellish the experience, amplifying its religious or transformational qualities: What did not kill them made them stronger, closer to their children, to themselves, to their church.

For all of those who escaped Flight 1549 as the plane floated in the Hudson on Thursday, the very public nature of the accident could also affect its impact. Paul Greene, a professor of psychology at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., and coauthor of the book, “FDNY Crisis Counseling,” said that the survivors will be barraged by images of the experience, in newspapers and on TV and the Internet, as well as by questions that might not be so easy to answer.

“They’ll have expectations to deal with, people asking them, ‘What did you learn in the final moment, what epiphany did you have?’ ” he said.

On the other hand, Dr. Manges said, the collective success of the evacuation, and the outpouring of concern, may give survivors some comfort. “Some may feel less isolated as a result of that,” he said, “and people who are isolated are at risk for post-traumatic stress.”

For whatever churning consumed the minds of those 155 people on board, they were just as responsible for their own escape as were the police and rescuers. “That pilot was a hero, fabulously trained, and the flight attendants, too,” said Lee Clarke, a sociologist at Rutgers University and author of “Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination,” “but if those people didn’t keep their wits about them, they would not have made it — they were heroes, too.”

Like survivors of many previous emergencies, including 9/11 and the evacuation of an Air France flight that skidded off a runway in Toronto and crashed in 2005, they did not lose control. They were civilized and practical, whether obsessing about God, glory or the garage.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/weekinreview/18carey.html

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