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September 30, 2018

The Boeing 747 turns fifty years old today.

Smithsonian magazine has published an essay of mine about the plane for its “American Icon” feature. You can read it here. It appears in the magazine’s print version as well.

The longer, unabridged version is below.

FIFTY YEARS AGO, on the last day of September in Everett, Washington, the first Boeing 747 was rolled from the hangar. Onlookers were stunned. The aircraft before them, gleaming in the morning sunshine, was more than two-hundred feet long and taller than a six-story building.

An airplane of firsts, biggests, and superlatives all around, the 747 has always owed its fame mostly to feats of size. It was the first jetliner with two aisles — two floors, even! And enormous as it was, this was an airplane that went from a literal back-of-a-napkin drawing to a fully functional aircraft in just over two years — an astonishing achievement. //

Say what you want of the DC-3 or the 707 — icons in their own right — it’s the 747 that changed global air travel forever.

And it did so with a style and panache that we seldom see any more in aircraft design. Trippe isn’t the only visionary in this story; it was Boeing’s Joe Sutter and his team of engineers who figured out how to build an airplane that wasn’t just colossal, but also downright beautiful.

How so? “Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems,” wrote the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in an issue of The New Yorker some years back. “How to meet the ground and how to meet the sky—the top and the bottom, in other words.” Or, in Boeing’s case, the front and the back. Because what is a jetliner, in so many ways, but a horizontal skyscraper, whose beauty is beheld (or squandered) primarily through the sculpting of the nose and tail. Whether he realized it or not, Sutter understood this perfectly. //

The picture at the top of this article shows the prototype Boeing 747 on the day of its rollout from the factory in Everett. It was September 30th, 1968. I love this photo because it so perfectly demonstrates both the size and the grace of the 747. It’s hard for a photograph to properly capture both of those aspects of the famous jet, and this image does it better than any I’ve ever seen.

Across the forward fuselage you can see the logos of the 747’s original customers. The one furthest forward, of course, is the blue and white globe of Pan Am. Pan Am and the 747 are all but synonymous, their respective histories (and tragedies) forever intertwined. But plenty of other carriers were part of the plane’s early story, as those decals attest. Twenty-seven airlines initially signed up for the jumbo jet when Boeing announced production.

My question is, can you name them? How many of those logos can you identify?

No, there’s not a butterfly garden or koi ponds like the ones in Singapore, or the soaring ceilings and waterfalls you’ll find elsewhere. But what Amsterdam lacks in flair, it makes up for with a workmanlike functionality and plenty of quirky charms. It’s got something even the biggest and flashiest airports often lack: character.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the crash, a memorial was dedicated overlooking the Tenerife airport, honoring those who perished there. The sculpture is in the shape of a helix. “A spiral staircase,” the builders describe it. “a symbol of infinity.” Maybe, but I’m disappointed that the more obvious physical symbolism is ignored: early model 747s, including both of those in the crash, were well known for the set of spiral stairs that connected their main and upper decks. In the minds of millions of international travelers, that stairway is something of a civil aviation icon. How evocative and poetically appropriate for the memorial — even if the artists weren’t thinking that way.

ONE OLD ADAGE defines the business of flying planes as long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Moments of sheer ridiculousness, maybe, are equally as harrowing. One young pilot, when he was 22 and trying to impress the pretty Christine Collingworth with a sightseeing circuit in a friend’s four-seater, highlighted their date by whacking his forehead into the metal pitot tube jutting from the wing. Earning a famous “Cessna dimple,” so he chose to think, would be the stupidest thing he’d ever do in or around an airplane.

That was a long time ago, and a long way from this same pilot’s mind during a late-night cargo flight in the winter of 1998:

It’s eleven p.m. and the airplane, an old DC-8 freighter loaded with pineapples, is somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle, bound from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Cincinnati. The night is dark and quiet, void of moonlight, conversation, and for that matter worry. The crew of three is tired, and this will be their last leg in a week’s rotation that has brought them from New York to Belgium and back again, onward to Mexico, and now the Caribbean.

They are mesmerized by the calming drone of four high-bypass turbofans and the deceptively peaceful noise created by 500 knots of frigid wind hissing past the cockpit windows. Such a setting, when you really think about it, ought to be enough to scare the living shit from any sensible person. We have no business being up there — participants in such an inherently dangerous balance between naïve solitude and instant death, distracted by paperwork and chicken sandwiches while screaming along, higher than Mount Everest and at the speed of sound in a 40 year-old assemblage of machinery. But such philosophizing is for poets, not pilots, and also makes for exceptionally bad karma. No mystical ruminations were in the job description for these three airmen, consummate professionals who long ago sold their souls to the more practical-minded muses of technology and luck.

Patrick Smith, of Revere, Massachusetts, a fourth-generation descendant of English tea sellers and Neapolitan olive growers, is one of these consummate professionals. He is the second officer. His station, a sideways-turned chair and a great, blackboard-sized panel of instruments, is set against the starboard wall of the cockpit. Now 34, Patrick has seen his career stray oddly from its intended course. His ambitions of flying gleaming new passenger jets to distant ports-of-call have given way to the coarser world of air cargo: to sleepless, back-of-the-clock timetables, the greasy glare of warehouse lights and the roar of forklifts — realities that have aroused a low note of disappointment that rings constantly in the back of his brain.

December 4, 2021

IT WAS thirty years ago, on December 4th, 1991, that Pan American World Airways ceased operations.

This is possibly, maybe, the most significant (and unfortunate) anniversary in airline history, marking the death of history’s most significant airline.

Pan Am’s firsts, bests, longests, mosts, and whatever other superlatives you might come up with, are untouched, and untouchable. Its achievements include conquest of the Pacific Ocean and launch of both the 707 and 747, the two most influential jetliners of all time. Founded and led by a visionary entrepreneur from New Jersey named Juan Trippe, the airline’s network would reach into every nook and corner of the planet, its blue globe logo among the world’s most widely recognized trademarks. It was the only airline to have its own Manhattan skyscraper — the Walter Gropius-designed Pan Am Building, soaring over Grand Central Terminal.

The carrier’s slow and ignominious decline, punctuated by the sales of its most valuable assets and — for a final coffin nail, the Lockerbie bombing — is a tale of hubris, poor management, the volatility of a deregulated airline industry, and plain old bad luck. Most agree that the final chapter began around the time of the disastrous merger with National Airlines in 1980.

The 747 was Boeing’s greatest achievement — indeed it was one of the greatest achievements in the whole history of American industry. Boeing has long since lost its way, and there are those who doubt the planemaker will survive long term. To think, the company that conceived something as legendary as the 747 hasn’t designed a truly new airframe in thirty years, and is apparently content churning out 737 derivatives until the end of time.

The final plane was delivered to Atlas Air, a New York-based cargo carrier that is the world’s largest operator of 747s. The plane, registered N863GT, wears a decal near the nose honoring Joe Sutter, the Boeing engineer who ran the 747 design team.

There isn’t much I can say about the 747 that I didn’t say here, in 2018, when the jet celebrated its 50th birthday. It’s nothing if not the most influential and historically significant airliner of all time. And also one of the prettiest.

The 747 entered service with Pan American on January 21, 1970. The Atlas Air jet delivered on Monday was number 1,574 of a production run that spanned five decades. Of the 27 original customers, Lufthansa is the only one still flying them.

When it debuted, the 747 was more than double the size of any existing plane. Yet it was conceived (literally on the back of a napkin), designed, built, and flown, in a period of only two years. Of all its accomplishments, milestones and accolades, that one might be the most startling.

I flew aboard the 747s of Pan Am, El Al, British Airways, Air France, Northwest, United, Delta, South African, Royal Air Maroc, Singapore Airlines, Qantas, and Thai Airways. I’d like to add a few more to that list while I can.

But of all the half-baked measures we’ve grown accustomed to, few have been sillier than the longstanding policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same X-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. In the United States, this went on for a full twelve years after September 11th, until finally a program was put in place allowing crewmembers to bypass the normal checkpoint. It’s a simple enough process that confirms the individual’s identity by matching up airline and government-issue credentials with information stored in a database. That it took twelve years for this to happen is a national embarrassment, especially when you consider that tens of thousands of airport ground workers, from baggage loaders to cabin cleaners and mechanics, were exempt from screening all along. You read that correctly. An airline pilot who once flew bombers armed with nuclear weapons was not to be trusted and was marched through the metal detectors, but those who cater the galleys, sling the suitcases, and sweep out the aisles were been able to saunter onto the tarmac unmolested.

If there has been a more ringing, let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it. The TSA will point out how the privileges granted to tarmac workers have, from the outset, been contingent upon fingerprinting, a ten-year background investigation, crosschecking against terror watch lists, and are additionally subject to random physical checks. All true, but the background checks for pilots are no less thorough, so why were they excluded?

Nobody is implying that the hardworking caterers, baggage handlers, and the rest of the exempted employees out there are terrorists-in-waiting. Nevertheless, this was a double standard so titanically idiotic that it can hardly be believed. Yet there it was, for longer than a decade.

Why am I bringing this up if it’s no longer happening? Because it’s still making my head spin, for one. But also, more valuably, it gives us insight into the often dysfunctional thinking of the security state. And past as prologue: such wasteful procedures, embedded for so long, can only make us skeptical about the future. //

The 1960s through the 1990s were a sort of Golden Age of Air Crimes, rife with hijackings and bombings. Between 1968 and 1972, U.S. commercial aircraft were hijacked at a rate of — wait for it — nearly once per week. Hijackings were so routine that over a four-month period in 1968 there were three instances of multiple aircraft being commandeered on the same day. Later, in the five-year span between 1985 and 1989, there were no fewer than six major terrorist attacks against commercial planes or airports, including the Libyan-sponsored bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 that killed 329 people; and the saga of TWA flight 847.

Flight 847, headed from Athens to Rome in June 1985, was hijacked by Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols. The purloined 727 then embarked on a remarkable, seventeen-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers were removed, split into groups, and held captive in downtown Beirut. A U.S. Navy diver was murdered and dumped on the tarmac, and a photograph of TWA Captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an unforgettable icon of the siege.

I say “unforgettable,” but that’s the thing. How many Americans remember flight 847? It’s astonishing how short our memories are. And partly because they’re so short, we are easily frightened and manipulated. Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six terror attacks against planes in a five-year span. Imagine something like the Bojinka plot being pulled off successfully. The airline industry would be decimated, the populace frozen in fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion—of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties. What is it about us, as a society, that has made us so unable to remember and unable to cope? //

IN PERSPECTIVE: THE GOLDEN AGE OF AIR CRIMES

American had bucked more than three decades of design fads. It’s distinctive silver skin, tricolor stripe and gothic “AA” logo dated back to the days of the its 707 “Astrojets.” Heck, my first ever airplane ride, in 1974, was on an American 727 decked out in the very same paintjob that, until last year, was American’s signature.

It was never anything beautiful, but what distinguished it was the logo — the famous “AA,” its red and blue letters bisected by the proud, cross-winged eagle. This was one of the last true icons of airline branding left in the world. Created by Massimo Vignelli in 1967, it was everything a logo should be: elegantly simple, dignified, and instantly recognizable.
AA-classic-logo

The redesign features a U.S. flag motif tail, a faux-silver fuselage, and an entirely new logo that is so unspeakably ugly that it nearly brings tears to my eyes.

The logo — the trademark, the company emblem, to be reproduced on everything from stationery to boarding passes — is the heart of an airline’s graphic identity, around which everything else revolves. It has been said that the true test of a logo is this: can it be remembered and sketched, freehand and with reasonable accuracy, by a young child? The Pan Am globe, the Lufthansa crane, the Delta tricorn, Air New Zealand’s “Koru” and many others meet this criterion beautifully.

As did the AA emblem. Maybe they need a tweaking or two over time, but the template of such logos — the really good ones — remains essentially timeless. American Airlines had one of the really good ones. And if you’ve got something like that, you dispense with it at your peril.

Over the years, there have been countless aviators who, confronted by sudden and harrowing danger, performed admirably, with just as much skill and resolve as can ever be hoped for. But they weren’t as lucky. By virtue of this and nothing more, they and many of their passengers perished.

And if we’re going to lavish praise on men like Sullenberger, who did not perish, what of the others like him whose stories you’ve likely never heard, mainly because their planes didn’t come splashing down alongside the world’s media capital.

I give you Al Haynes, the United Airlines captain who, ably assisted by three other pilots, deftly guided his crippled DC-10 to a crash landing in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989. A disintegrated engine fan had bled out all three of the plane’s hydraulics systems, resulting in a total loss of flight controls. Using differential engine power to perform turns, all the while battling uncontrollable pitch oscillations, that Haynes and his crew were able to pull off even a semi-survivable landing (112 people were killed; 184 survived) is about as close to a miracle as you can get.

How about Donald Cameron and Claude Ouimet, the pilots of Air Canada flight 797, who managed — barely — to get their burning DC-9 onto the runway in Cincinnati in 1983? It took so much effort to fly the plane that they passed out from exhaustion after touchdown.

A pilot would take a daylight ditching in a river over either of those, no question.

Or consider the predicament facing American Eagle Captain Barry Gottshall and first officer Wesley Greene three months earlier. Moments after takeoff from Bangor, Maine, their Embraer regional jet suffered a freak system failure resulting in full and irreversible deflection of the plane’s rudder. Struggling to maintain control, they returned to Bangor under deteriorating weather. Visibility had fallen to a mile, and as the 37-seater approached the threshold, Gottshall had to maintain full aileron deflection — that is, the control wheel turned to the stops and held there—to keep from yawing into the woods. Theirs was pure seat-of-the-pants improv. A fully deflected rudder? There are no checklists for that one.

In 2016, Clint Eastwood gave us a movie called Sully. All well and good, but why don’t we have a Haynes or a Cameron or a Gottshall movie? How about a John Testrake movie, or one about Bernard Dhellemme? Google them if you need to; their stories are even more incredible than the ones above.

Electrical and other engineers should understand basic features when selecting, specifying and applying electrical distribution systems. To narrow the broad scope of electrical distribution, this discussion will focus on practical considerations for specifying electrical distribution systems.

This information will focus on common low-voltage 480/120-volt electrical distribution equipment encountered in many types of facilities and will touch on medium-voltage equipment. Also, basic considerations for rooms housing these pieces of electrical equipment will be highlighted.

Learning objectives:

• Understand basic features when selecting and specifying electrical distribution equipment.
• Know the types of overcurrent protection devices (molded case circuit breakers, insulated case circuit breakers, low-voltage power circuit breakers and fuses.
• Learn about switchboards as outlined in UL 891 and switchgear as outlined in UL 1558.
• Learn about panelboards, transformers and other electrical equipment.
• Understand basic room and space requirements for the electrical equipment.

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust. //

Many software projects emerge because—somewhere out there—a programmer had a personal problem to solve.

That’s more or less what happened to Graydon Hoare. In 2006, Hoare was a 29-year-old computer programmer working for Mozilla, the open-source browser company. Returning home to his apartment in Vancouver, he found that the elevator was out of order; its software had crashed. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, either.

Hoare lived on the 21st floor, and as he climbed the stairs, he got annoyed. “It’s ridiculous,” he thought, “that we computer people couldn’t even make an elevator that works without crashing!” Many such crashes, Hoare knew, are due to problems with how a program uses memory. The software inside devices like elevators is often written in languages like C++ or C, which are famous for allowing programmers to write code that runs very quickly and is quite compact. The problem is those languages also make it easy to accidentally introduce memory bugs—errors that will cause a crash. Microsoft estimates that 70% of the vulnerabilities in its code are due to memory errors from code written in these languages.

Most of us, if we found ourselves trudging up 21 flights of stairs, would just get pissed off and leave it there. But Hoare decided to do something about it. He opened his laptop and began designing a new computer language, one that he hoped would make it possible to write small, fast code without memory bugs. He named it Rust, after a group of remarkably hardy fungi that are, he says, “over-engineered for survival.”

Seventeen years later, Rust has become one of the hottest new languages on the planet—maybe the hottest.