United Breaks Guitars awesomeness

If you have yet to see the above video about United Airlines purposely breaking a passenger's Taylor guitar, I wholeheartedly suggest you take a few minutes and watch United Breaks Guitars.

It is hilarious, and it details the airline's long-standing incompetence and criminal refusal to accept any responsibility for its negligence in purposely destroying a guitar, as witnessed by dozens of passengers.

You would think after this latest public relations blunder, someone at the country's worst major airline would think about taking steps to change the culture of this company. But as someone who has kept tabs on United's horrid customer-service reputation for the better part of a decade, I know it won't change a thing.

United has all the public-relations charm of Nurse Ratched.

It is a company that is irreparably broken.

You can see for yourself by reading thousands of customer-service complaints about the airline at untied.com, a web site which provides a courageous public service by shining light on the airline's years-long bumblings with scathing critiques. The vitriol is not only penned by passengers, it's also dished by employees who often tell harrowing stories about the company's complete disregard for safety. SOme of the whistleblowing stories on there are frightening.

One of these passenger letters was my own, a five-page, single-spaced screed, published back in June of 2002 in what was perhaps the angriest letter I've ever written to admonish a company for shabby treatment.

Thanks to the band responsible for the smash-hit United Breaks Guitars for jumpstarting this trip down memory lane. I'm re-printing my letter here:

To: Mr. Jack Creighton, CEO
CC: Aviation Consumer Protection Division

Dear Mr. Creighton:

There is a reason people are flying less nowadays. It has little to do with fear generated by the Sept. 11 attacks. It has everything to do with the fact companies like yours treat passengers like garbage.

Two summers ago, your industry went before Congress and promised to clean up its act after its deplorable performance through the peak travel season. Instead, all passengers face is longer lines, inexplicable delays and a further descent in service.

After that infamous summer, your company printed apologies for its blunders at the bottom of every itinerary. Typed, computer-generated words enhanced the warmth of the oh-so-sincere message.

Clearly, those words were nothing but lip service.

I am writing you today regarding my latest woeful experience on your airline, as well as the general malaise your company's incompetence has created in the flying public.

There are so many problems with your airline, I do not know where to begin. Let us start with my flight, United 428, from Denver to Newark, N.J., on April 19.

Upon arriving at the airport, I find the new security company, hired by United to replace Argenbright, has implemented strict new measures requiring every passenger to be finished with the check-in process one hour prior to departure.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this new procedure, except for the fact your staff is ill-equipped to handle it. And no passengers were ever notified regarding the change.

As is now standard, I arrived at the airport two hours prior to departure. But because you had so few personnel working in the front, I did not make it through this maze of a line until 50 minutes had passed. I was lucky.

An estimated 40 percent of the people in line did not enjoy such success and missed your new one-hour deadline. This resulted in general chaos and well-deserved anger, as passengers were re-booked on later flights to meet this new and previously unannounced change in procedure.

Lets skip that problem for a few moments. Lets pretend your ridiculously strict enforcement of a previously unannounced rule change never happened. Lets skip directly to the problems on board flight 428.

With the flight nearly completed, a freak thunderstorm hit the greater New York area and produced tornado-sized winds. Our flight was diverted to Washington Dulles. As aggravating as weather problems can be, I know they cannot be avoided.

What occurred on the ground at Dulles, however, was a disgrace.

After refueling the Boeing 777 at Dulles shortly after 5 p.m., ground control informed our pilot Newark would reopen at 6 p.m, and that we should be airborne no later than 5:45 p.m. and into Newark by 6:30 p.m.

Instead of making the best out of this situation, the heavy-handed pencil-pushers who run United Operations at Dulles decided to combine two smaller Newark-bound flights onto our plane.

First, we were told it would be one flight. So we watched all the passengers from this first flight climb aboard and find seats. After waiting nearly an hour, we seemed ready to leave.

But then United Operations told us they decided that passengers from yet another commuter flight would be transferred onto our plane. We had to endure the entire process again.

As one of your own flight attendants said shortly after the second announcement, "This isn't a flight. This is a disgrace."

At 8 p.m., approximately two-and-a-half hours after we could have left, we finally left for Newark. Aside from the fact we were denied food during the ordeal, we wasted countless hours on top of the initial weather delay.

Your operations department capitalized on our helplessness.

Your Newark Operations crew fared no better. Although we were only the third United flight to arrive after the fierce storm, according to a baggage handler, it took your ground crew 50 minutes to get our luggage onto the carousel.

Four hours after we were originally scheduled to land, already-flustered passengers had the added pleasure of waiting nearly an hour for their bags.

(And while we're on the subject of Newark baggage claim, I've stood in grimy New York City alleys less seedy than your baggage area. It is a cesspool).

But that is no surprise. From the beginning, starting with the awful security company you hired in Denver, to the end, every aspect of the trip brought nonstop aggravation. All of these problems fostered nothing but animosity toward your airline.

Of course, that animosity has existed since your wretched summer of 2001. But your poorly planned, knee-jerk responses to the Sept. 11 hijackings have only exacerbated these feelings.

Newly implemented measures are nothing more than a big dog-and-pony show, none of which would have stopped the tragedy. For all your PR-spin, you still do not X-ray every checked bag. You still do not bag-match, despite assurances to the contrary. You hassle your paying customers while allowing the real dangers to persist.

And all passengers get for your toothless measures are longer - and unpredictable - lines. An hour at check-in. Two hours in the security line. Another hour at the gate.

By the time I navigate the maze of your disgraceful check-in procedures and arrive at the gate, then fly to my destination, I may as well have driven. I can drive from Denver to Chicago, and arrive only two hours later than if I had flown United.

As more people realize this, many will choose that option, which will only have a worsening effort on your already-poor fiscal health.

Of course, these new procedures only magnified your pre-existing ineptitude. United already flirted with bankruptcy before that day, thanks to years of fiscal imprudence and the crescendo of anger during the summer of 2000.

While I have great sympathy and compassion for United employees who were affected by Sept. 11, I resent the fact United corporate shills milked the sympathy card before Congress and received a $15 billion bailout.

As a taxpayer, I am happy to support a troubled industry after the cowardly attack on our country. As a taxpayer, I am outraged you would request these funds under the guise of Sept. 11 relief, when in fact you are looking to recover from years of fiscal avarice and galling treatment of passengers.

Airlines go bankrupt for a reason, sir. One of which is because they can no longer meet the reasonable expectations of your customers. Why should taxpayers support your anemic airline when well-run companies, such as Southwest, turned a profit through bear-market times?

I have written my elected representatives, urging them not to grant you further financial relief and to let the free market work its course. I have also implored them to revisit the issue of passing a true passenger's bill of rights, which your lobbyists skillfully scuttled two summers ago.

Now, more than ever, passengers deserve that legislation. Two years later, you still treat customers as if you believe we are too inattentive to notice your incompetence or too apathetic to care. I can assure you the latter is not true. We have endured United's shameful conduct for far too long.

Thankfully, Jet Blue and Frontier are finally emerging as legitimate challenges to your monopoly of the Denver market. I am rooting for them to succeed, and will continue to fly them as much as possible.

You are not losing customers such as myself because people are afraid to fly. You are losing customers because you make it inherently inconvenient and aggravating to do so.

I long for the days when the worst complaints about airline service were regarding the food. Now, I hope for the day when United will follow Braniff and Eastern into the bankruptcy courts.

It is not out of any malice these wishes are born. Only when United is gone, however, will we receive efficient and responsible service from a major carrier in Denver. Until then, we can only vent our frustrations regarding your inane procedures, needless flight delays and empty promises.

Please save your canned apology letter for the endless list of affronts.

I've had enough of your company's hollow regrets. If you are not prepared to offer compensatory measures, such as additional Mileage Plus miles or class upgrades on future flights -- measures to show you are genuinely sorry -- than I have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with United.

Mr. Creighton, I understand you assumed the title of CEO only in recent months. I wish you well in your efforts to reverse the sagging performance of your company.

But after more than 50 trips in the last three years on your airline, there is only one lesson that reverberates through my mind.

At United, nothing ever changes.

Sincerely,

Squawking VFR

Taking a stab at Air France 447

Interesting story by Alan Levin in Monday's USA Today that suggests National Transportation Safety Board investigators could look to a plane crash from 35 years ago to perhaps explain what happened to Air France 447.

What's the connection?

Early focus of the Air France investigation has centered on the plane's airspeed indicators, which could have malfunctioned, causing the pilots to tragically misinterpret the readings of their most-needed instruments.

That sounds similar to what caused a Northwest Orient 727 crash in Bear Mountain, New York in 1974.

The USA Today story offers some nice play-by-play of the Northwest crash, but doesn't really get into the guts of the most important part -- the "why." Why did the pilots reacted the way they did to a malfunction, effectively stalling the plane and sending it into a graveyard spiral.

So we'll do that here.

A quick primer on the pitot-static system

There's six basic flight instruments that makes up what's known as the "six pack" in the instrument panel. Three of these -- the airspeed indicator, altimeter and vertical speed indicator -- receive their information from the pitot-static system.

(In bigger jets, the machmeter also receives its information from this system, which is important to note, given the accidents we're discussing. But in the interests of keeping this relatively readable, I'm not going to get into details that will put you to sleep).

In its simplest form, the pitot-static system is comprised of a pitot tube (rhymes with speedo) and a static port.

The pitot tube is typically mounted on a wing or the fuselage, depending on the aircraft, and looks like a little stick with a hole at the tip jutting into the wind. It measures the direct pressure of the air blowing into it. The static port, which is a little hole on the side of the plane about the size of a pinhead, measures atmospheric pressure.

Airspeed is measured by the difference between the direct pressure and atmospheric pressure is compared.

When the pitot-static system fails

Blockages in the pitot tube and static port, while not common, aren't particularly rare either. Ice can easily gunk up the pitot tube, so there's a heater on most pitot tubes. The static port can often get bug juice in or around it, so there's an alternate static source.

Even with those runarounds on potential problems, all pilots must know how those three key instruments are affected when the static port or pitot tube -- or both -- are blocked.

What happens when the static port is blocked?

Well, this is serious because it affects all three instruments. The altimeter will stop at the altitude at which the blockage occurs. The vertical speed indicator will show level flight, no matter if the plane is climbing or descending. The airspeed indicator will show a slower-than-actual speed in a climb and a faster-than-actual speed in a descent.

What happens when the pitot tube is blocked?

In a way, it's simpler, because only the airspeed indicator is affected. But it's also a more nefarious problem. The airspeed indicator will function as an altimeter, showing an increase in speed as the plane climbs, even if actual airspeed is constant.

Northwest Orient, 1974, Bear Mountain, N.Y.

So far, I've given you a lot of basic theory. Here's how it actually applies in the case of the Northwest Orient flight referenced in the USA Today piece:

Crews are usually trained in some capacity to maintain a constant-airspeed climb at such-and-such a power setting.

So imagine you're the pilots aboard this flight, thankfully a repositioning flight with only three crew members aboard. As you continue your climb through 16,000 feet, you notice that you're climbing at 300 knots when you should be at 200 knots.

(I don't know the actual figures for the 727 climb; I'm just using them as an example).

What are you going to do?

Keep in mind one of the basic rules of flight: Pitch plus power equals performance. These guys did what makes sense. They decreased their power and pitched the plane up in an effort to slow down to 200 knots.

Unfortunately, the Northwest pitot tube had iced over. Their airspeed indicator was showing a faster-than-actual indication, essentially functioning as an altimeter and increasing as they climbed. In reality, the pilots were on their target climb speed.

By decreasing their power and pitching the plane up, they slowed down to something slower than their stall speed -- remember that from our original Colgan post? -- and induced an aerodynamic stall and subsequently spun the plane into the ground.

AeroPeru 603

There's another crash not mentioned in the original article that's worth mentioning here, an accident involving an AeroPeru flight in 1996 that had multiple instruments fail because the nimrods washing the plane beforehand taped over the static ports and forgot to remove the tape.

It was a night flight in instrument conditions. These poor folks didn't know which way was up, how fast they were going, or whether they were headed up or down. They crashed into the ocean 25 minutes after takeoff.

There's a fascinating National Geographic special on AeroPeru 603 that I recommend watching on YouTube if you have a half-hour to kill.

While speculation centers on the pitot tube in the Air France crash and AeroPeru involves the static ports, this could nonetheless be a really strong comparison, in the sense that you have false instrument readings caused by massive problems in the pitot-static system ultimately leading to disaster.

Conclusions

Crews are trained how to spot anomalies between the instruments that would lead a pilot to realistically catch the error. On a typical flight in instrument meteorlogical conditions, there's a constant cross-check of the instruments in the six pack to verify and confirm information.

In the heat of the moment, could you miss something that leads to a crash? Absolutely. There has to be a lot that goes wrong to get to that point, but yeah, it is feasible.

You could make the argument that if the Air France 447 pilots had been distracted by a vicious thunderstorm and alarms buzzing about incorrect airspeed readings that there was enough confusion that they did precisely the wrong thing.

That's an awfully big leap to make at this point. I'm sticking to what I said the other day -- there's so much information still missing from the Air France puzzle, that it's not prudent to even make an educated guess as to what brought it down.

But since USA Today is offering up a theory, we'll dissect how it might have applied to Air France 447. Right now, it's as good a guess as any.

Update on regional airlines

In the wake of a string of deadly regional airline crashes, none more egregious than the Colgan Crash in Buffalo, the Federal Aviation Administration is finally taking some steps in the right direction.

It's listening to Squawking VFR.

After our special report detailing the safety chasm between mainline and regional airlines on May 19, the agency Wednesday recommended several changes that addressed the lapses that led to Buffalo as well as the overall safety of regionals.

A list of recommendations introduced included:

- Addressing fatigue. New rules governing flight and rest time for crews.

- Immediate development of a system for tracking pilots who repeatedly fail performance evaluations.

- Demand that mainline airlines ask their regional partners to "mirror their most effective safety practices."

- Upgrade training standards.

Overall, these are only ambiguous proposals, and there's a ton of pencil-pushing ahead before anything of substance gets done. But the fact the notoriously slow-to-act FAA is issuing these recommendations provides unstated acknowledgment of the severity in the safety gap between regionals and mainliners, which forgive me for mentioning, was first unearthed here at Squawking VFR.

A couple of things stand out from this report.

First, there's the simple fact that the Colgan crash in Buffalo is becoming a watershed moment for U.S. commercial aviation, the likes of which perhaps have not been seen since the crash of an L-1011 in Dallas in August of '85 that prompted sweeping interest, research and investment in equipment to help combat wind shear and microbursts.

Next, the most interesting of these proposals to me is the third, and it's also the one that leaves me most skeptical.

The FAA is essentially saying that regionals should be held to the same standards as the majors, which is great and everything. But one of the main reasons the majors contract with the regionals is because there is less-stringent requirements in place.

When you hire a pilot with 1,000 hours, you don't have to pay him or her as much as one with 10,000 hours. In terms of experience, it goes without saying that you get what you pay for.

And I'm skeptical of how that could really change or be legislated.

Don't get me wrong, it's good -- and past due -- that the FAA is trying. But whatever proposals they bring to the table will probably meet fierce resistance from the airlines and their lobbying minions.

I hope the proposals don't get watered down, because as I've stated before, the flying public deserves something more than the regional owners ducking the blame for an unenviable safety track record.

Air France 447

Despite overwhelming demand from my readers, I wanted to let you know the post on Air France 447 is going to be very slow in coming.

There's just so little to go on right now, that any speculation I could come up with would be merely a crapshoot.

Squawking VFR prides itself on at least making educated guesses when it comes to figuring out why planes fall from the sky. I can't come close to offering any insight right now, so we'll withhold the post until we can.

In the meantime, I've got a couple of other posts in the hopper that should be ready in the next few days.

A religious experience with Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers

Two things you need to understand about me and concerts.

1. Previous spontaneous concert-related road trips have ended in disaster.

A few years back, with a day off from work and an evening shift the following night, it dawned on me that nothing stood between me and a six-hour jaunt from Denver to Santa Fe to see the rollicking Philly-based band, Marah, play a little New Mexican bar.

This sounded like a terrific idea, so off I went down I-25 on a blazing summer day in a jeep with no air conditioning, my only companions a few Grateful Dead cassette tapes and the anticipation for the show.

I had seen Marah weeks before, when they blew the roof off some pissant dive bar on East Colfax in Denver, working themselves into a fervor worthy of a sold-out stadium crowd, not for the applause of a handful of mangy drunks sitting on bar stools.

Couldn't wait to see them again, sure that I was catching the next great American rock-n-roll act in its infancy.

So you can imagine that I vomited in my mouth a little when I pulled into the parking lot of that Santa Fe bar, walked to the door and saw a small 8.5x11-inch sign on the door that regrettably stated Marah's van, Adrian, had broken down in the Arizona desert, and that there would be no show tonight.

2. When it comes to seeing Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers, I have even worse luck.

Every time they scheduled a show nearby, often when I lived in Colorado, I was out of town, in the midst of a Broncos playoff run, chained to the desk, etc. It felt like I suffered a dozen near-misses.

When Mrs. VFR and I actually made it to the Gothic Theater to see The Peacemakers, nee The Refreshments, I felt thrilled. Much like the aforementioned Marah show, my anticipation for a ballyhooed live act zoomed sky high.

So when Mrs. VFR developed a violent migraine two songs into the performance that forced us to leave, the experience wasn't all that surprising, given my track record.

Two weeks ago, Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers played an underrated little venue called The Ark right here in our hometown.

Where was I? In Chicago.

Where was I the next night when they played Chicago? Back in Ann Arbor.

All this serves as a long-winded preamble to what transpired last Wednesday, when I noticed on their tour schedule that RCPM would play Fort Wayne, Indiana, approximately about 150 miles southwest of here.

The mind started whirring.

Baby sitting? My visiting mother-in-law could provide support. Work? I could surely sneak out a few minutes early, leaving me with just enough time to reach Fort Wayne before 8 p.m. Mrs. VFR? Graciously on board with the plan.

5:20 p.m. I grab a few albums off the messy stacks on the closet floor for the ride and get out the door. I'm a little bummed that it's a solo venture, and that no Facebook friends could see the genius of this quick-turnaround trip when I scrounged for last-minute comrades. But nonetheless happy that, yes, I would finally see a RCPM show.

6:48 p.m. I'm admiring the rural farmland on an empty I-69. A beautiful sunset cast orange rays on red barns. I let the stresses of the job and the soon-to-be no job recede for the first time in weeks as the Rockwellian landscape blurred together outside the car window.

Tranquility was short-lived.

I come around a curve about 10 miles north of the Michigan/Indiana border and find a sea of brake lights and orange-and-white-striped barricades across the highway.

"Road closed."

A state trooper directs all traffic onto a single-lane road off the exit ramp, and I start doing math. Seventy minutes to showtime. Sixty-seven miles to Fort Wayne. Zero on the speedometer.

This looks bad. Immediately wonder if I should give up and go home, if I was going to spend an hour in traffic, if this is just the latest in my series of RCPM mishaps.

7:02 p.m. After zig-zagging through backroads in an off-the-map small town, I've navigate the detour, get back on the interstate and presumably avert the crisis. I'm also in Indiana, having crossed the border at an unmarked site.

In my peripheral vision, I catch what looks like a black plastic garbage bag slowly blowing across the highway. It's not a plastic bag.

Upon closer review, I determine the object is a Frisbee-sized turtle huffing it across two lanes of traffic. He's on the striped center line when I veer to the right to avoid him.

I thought of a symbolic chapter in Grapes of Wrath that describes just such a scene. There's only one truck far off in my rear-view mirror. I think he's got a chance. Godspeed, Mr. Joad.

7:58 p.m. I arrive at Come 2 Go, the venue for the evening's entertainment. Here, I'm hit with the second curveball of the trip.

Come 2 Go is not the bar I assumed it was, with peanut shells on the floor, cheap swill on tap and a country twang in the Hoosier night.

It is a church.

A pot-bellied man wearing army fatigues and a beret collects my $10 entry fee. An illuminated cross hangs in the rear corner of the establishment and casts a t-shaped shadow on the floor below.

Pictures of mission trips and charity events are on the walls. Chairs are set up on a carpet that surrounds a stage that, to the church's credit, seems decked out in state-of-the-art sound and lighting equipment.

What to make of this development?

Mr. Clyne and his merry bandmates are known for enjoying their tequila during the show. Would this not happen? (No, it would not). Would they still be the fantastic live act I'd heard about?

8:50 p.m. The Peacemakers take the stage.

"How many of you have seen us play before," Clyne asks.

A smattering of hands go up, maybe a dozen.

How many of you have seen us play sober before," he asks.

Silence.

8:55 p.m. If you haven't heard of them, they're most famous for writing the theme song to Fox TV's "King Of The Hill," although fans appreciate them more for their straight-up rock that sways into an alt-country style at times.

The Peacemakers are sort of like the Jimmy Buffett of the Southwest, specializing in escapist tales about banditos, missions and south-of-the-border hookers. They bring a mass of hard-core fans to Mexico every year for a couple of hard-core shows.

That's the sort of vibe with which they they kick off the Fort Wayne show, keying up "Americano," one of their signature tunes.

In the crowd, there's about five or six of us rocking out in front of the stage, with maybe a dozen or so others crowding around nearby but demonstrating less enthusiasm. Approximately 50 to 60 others are in attendance, and they situate themselves near the back of the room.

It's a wacky group of concert-goers.

I'd estimate 30 percent of the people there had gray or no hair. Thirty percent were teeny-boppers too young to frequent any alcohol-serving establishments. I'm pretty sure none of the people in the two aforementioned groups had ever heard of Roger Clyne.

Of the remaining third, ranging from 20s to 40s, there's about 10 who seem to know the words to the songs.

Nearby, there's two twins with fiercely curly black hair who look like asexual Pat from Saturday Night Live. They would stand six feet from the stage expressionless and emotionless through the entire show.

There's also an obese man wearing a pony tail and a Randy Moss Oakland Raiders jersey, but he seems to be in much better spirits.

9:00 p.m. Americano finishes.

There's a few awkward claps, but silence in the room.

I fear this is going to be a dead crowd, and a mailed-in performance.

9:01 p.m. Clyne smoothly transitions into Counterclockwise, another excellent choice I hoped would make the setlist. It's got a catchy pop sound that's Mellencampian at times, which I figured would be a hit here in Fort Wayne.

9:24 p.m. Ladies and gentlemen, the national anthem:

So give your ID card to the border guard
Yeah, your alias says your Captain Jean Luc Picard
Of the United Federation of Planets
'Cause they won't speak English anyway

Everybody knows
That the world is full of stupid people
So meet me at the mission at midnight
We'll divvy up there

9:33 p.m. The crowd is stirring a little bit, just enough to eliminate the stony awkwardness.

Some of the folks, chiefly the asexual Pat twins, remind me of the people I met at the Christmas Cult Party of 1999, which I attended with my friend Brian Roth, at which I met Tom Petty, The Heartbreaker, not to be confused with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.

The vibe is the same.

So much like I did at that party, I attempt to view my fellow concert-goers with a wide lens and enjoy the wackiness for what it is: A rock concert in a church. A once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I'm even trying to look on the bright side. An audience from all walks of life -- teeny-boppers, grandmothers and a few toothless folk -- unified by the holy spirit of rock-n-roll. Reverend Roger Clyne presiding.

That's kinda cool.

11:02 p.m. Whatever thoughts there are about the crowd, there's no mailing it in from the band.

They put the finishing touches a 2-hour, 15-minute show that is well worth the drive down, well worth the years-long wait. All told, they probably played about 24 songs, reaching back into their early catalog for much of the setlist.

They spent the last half hour or so taking requests from the audience, and finished the night with "Switchblade," a request from yours truly.

I was just as impressed with them after the show. Mr. Clyne and his bandmates stayed around and chatted with anyone who wanted to talk. No big-timing it out of the venue or anything. They have some serious cred, but they don't take themselves too seriously.

They heaped a good deal of attention on a kid who stood up front who looked about eight years old, and was definitely attending his first concert, which was particularly good to see. The kid ate it up, and walked out with a pair of drumsticks, among other souvenirs.

The guy who appeared to be running the show at Come 2 Go also did a bit of crowd-working afterward, making sure everyone had a good time and chatting with his congregants, all in a sincere, genuine fashion.

All in all, the Come 2 Go people seemed like nothing but nice Midwesterners. Kudos to them for their show and hospitality.

Someday, I'd love to hear their story of how they started dabbling in the business of hosting rock acts. For this night, though, it was time to hit the highway and get home.

11:48 p.m. Back on the highway somewhere near Angola, Indiana, and I realize I haven't eaten anything but a granola bar and banana since lunch. Desperate, I stop for my first bout of fast food since September 2007, when I grabbed some Burger King on the way to Nathan's apartment for our very first project meeting.

"Welcome to Wendy's, can I take your order?"

"Yes, what's the least-disgusting thing on your menu?"

1:37 a.m. After a fairly brutal drive spent enveloped in a blanket of thick fog, I finally roll into D-Town. Two vile strips of fry-pit burger lurch in my stomach, and I'm thankful to be home.

I check on Baby VFR, eat some cereal and sack out as soon as my head hits pillow.

All in all, a very enjoyable experience for a Wednesday night.

Special report: Danger in the skies

If you want to live, don't fly on regional airlines.

Regrettably, that's the only reasonable conclusion I can draw after further analysis of the Colgan crash in Buffalo, an interview with a fellow pilot and a Squawking VFR study of National Transportation Safety Board aviation accident records.

I'm not trying to casually dump on a sector of the aviation industry that people love to kick around. But facts are facts.

Through inexperience, incompetence and gross negligence, regional airlines are consistently putting passengers in harm's way at a rate that exceeds their mainline counterparts.

And when accidents arise, the regional officials are happy to point the finger elsewhere, creating a culture that elicits defensive reactions and cover-ups instead of one that learns from mistakes and offers reform.

Along those lines, there's a ton to analyze and write about after last week's release of the cockpit voice recordings in the Colgan crash -- beyond the territory I've already covered in previous posts.

I'm going to save that for another day.

For now, I'm going to more broadly focus on the regionals. I don't want these statistics that I've unearthed to be missed amid the Buffalo rubble. They deserve their own post in the first-ever special report here.

These results are astounding. I never would have guessed the difference between the mainliners and regionals was so great until I bothered to see myself.

Discounting terrorism-related crashes, I've researched all NTSB scheduled-passenger aviation accident reports since 1995 to the present, looking at accidents that involved U.S.-registered aircraft operating on or above U.S. soil.

Here's what I found:

* Eight consecutive fatal accidents have involved regional airliners. Six of the eight, which have all occurred since May 21, 2000, were caused by pilot error, according to the NTSB.

* Ten of the past 12 fatal crashes have involved regional airliners.

* Mainliners have recorded their safest decade on record. The last fatal mainline crash came on Jan. 31, 2000, when an Alaska Air flight crashed into the Pacific Ocean due to mechanical problems.

* Unlike their mainline counterparts, regional accidents tend to be fatal. Eleven of the 12 regional crashes since 1995 have been fatal. Five of the 16 mainline crashes in the same timeframe resulted in fatalities.

* The disparity is even greater when you look at survivability. Occupants are more than four times as likely to die in a regional accident than they are a mainline accident.

Look at the number of fatalities per accident below versus the total number of occupants on board for regional airlines:

Date Airline Location Fatal/Total occupants
08/21/95 Atl. Southest Georgia 8/29
11/19/96 Great Lakes Quincy, Ill. 12/12
01/09/97 Comair Ida, Mich. 29/29
01/23/99 Colgan Hyannis, Mass. 0/4
05/21/00 Executive Air Scranton, Pa. 19/19
01/08/03 Air Midwest Charlotte, N.C. 21/21
08/26/03 Colgan Hyannis, Mass. 2/2
10/14/04 Pinnacle Jefferson City, Mo. 2/2
10/19/04 Corporate Air Kirksville, Mo. 13/15
12/19/05 Chalk Airways Miami, Fla. 20/20
08/27/06 Comair Lexington, Ky. 49/50
02/12/09 Colgan Buffalo, N.Y. 50/50

By my count, regional accidents have killed 212 of 238 possible passengers in these accidents, an 89.1 percent kill rate.

I'd venture to think that, as I did, most readers assume that aviation accidents tend to be fatal, that an 89.1 percent kill rate would be par for the course. But the statistics do not bear that out.

Not at all.

By contrast, accidents involving the mainline airlines, or "legacy" airlines if you prefer, are statistically much safer and much more survivable.

06/08/95 Valu-Jet Atlanta 0/62
12/20/95 Tower Air JFK 0/468
02/19/96 Continental Houston 0/87
05/11/96 Valu-Jet Everglades 110/110
07/06/96 Delta Pensacola, Fla. 2/146
07/17/96 TWA Long Island, N.Y.230/230
10/19/96 Delta LaGuardia 0/63
02/09/98 American Chicago O'Hare 0/121
11/01/98 AirTran Atlanta 0/105
06/01/99 American Little Rock 12/143
09/09/99 TWA Nashville 0/48
01/31/00 Alaska Point Mugu, Ca. 88/88
03/05/00 Southwest Burbank, Ca. 0/142
12/08/05 Southwest Chicago Midway 0/103
12/20/09 Continental Denver 0/112
01/15/09 US Airways Hudson River 0/155

Mainline accidents have killed 442 of 2,183 occupants in accidents, a 20.2 percent kill rate, and that's assuming you believe that TWA Flight 800 disintegrated over Long Island Sound because of a random spark in the center fuel tank.

(If you think I am counting aviation incidents in an attempt to bolster my numbers, I will state that I am counting only accidents, not incidents, as classified by the NTSB. There's a difference in the government's definition between the two. Accidents are generally more severe and involve structural damage).

How to explain the huge gap in numbers, in terms of frequency of accidents and survivability of them?

A friend of mine who works as a professional pilot, who came up through the regional ranks and now works at a mainline airline, describes significant diffences in not just the experience level of the pilots, but a difference in culture.

"I think professionalism, not rushing the checklist for the game of it, because it's cool to spit it out quickly, excessive talking, experience levels on a situation, are all so very different between the two."

"Checklists were a game for many at XXXXXX Airlines."

"The difference between the two were so big, and unfortunately, the more I know, teh less I want my family or me on the lesser regionals. Can't imagine flying on Great Lakes anymore."

If a seasoned pilot is worried about putting his family on a regional airline, so should you.

What's irksome is that, although it's printed in small type on a passenger ticket, most members of the flying public don't even realize they're purchasing a ticket on a Colgan or a Pinnacle.

They just know they're on Continental, and a plane painted with a Continental Express logo is waiting for them at the gate, ready to take them to Buffalo.

What they don't know, as seen in the stats above, can kill them.

The flying public deserves to know about the gaping differences between mainliners and regionals.

They deserve more than the blame-the-pilot responses they get from Colgan and others when things go wrong -- an injustice that will be looked at further in a future post.

Bottom line, they deserve a full investigation into the training practices and general culture at regional airlines, which sprouted largely when the industry was de-regulated in the 1980s.

The public deserves answers, and then reform.

A cornucopia of aviation thoughts

A Pilatus PC-12, the aircraft type involved in recent terrible Montana crash.

Ajira Air, as seen on "Lost."


Between a wonderful wife who's back to work, a wonderful-yet-sleep-adverse baby at home and the Great Job Search of 2009, it's been difficult to create a little mental elbow room for Squawking VFR lately.

Which is a shame, because the sky has been full of fertile blogging territory. Here's my best attempt to catch up with what's up in the aviation world:

Seat infringement

Last year, United Airlines officials say they received roughly 700 complaints about "seat infringement," corporate speak for overweight people allowing their girth to spill onto the poor soul sitting next to them.

United is now requiring overweight customers to purchase a second seat if they are infringing upon their seat mates and alternative seating is not available.

I have written many angry letters to United over the years. When I lived in Denver, they were usually the only airline available until Frontier emerged as a viable option. I've been ruthlessly dumped in unintended destinations, lied to about alleged "weather delays" that were not actual weather delays and generally treated like garbage.

Every time, I let United know about it.

So fair is fair: I applaud United for taking a stand, politically incorrect as it may be, against seat infringement.

I can't count the number of times I've had a flight ruined because of this awkward situation. Once, when I flew from Denver to Kansas City, the gut of the gentleman next to me engulfed the arm console and rested on my knee for the duration of our travels.

Another time, flying from Denver to Newark, the man next seated next to me couldn't rest his arms at his sides due to his girth. So instead his elbow rested in my rib cage for the entire four-hour flight.

By the end of the flight, I was ready to go berserk. You get to a point where you see an overweight person walking down the aisle during boarding and you send up a "Please God, don't let them sit next to me" plea.

No one wants to make these people feel bad, but the truth is that seat infringement is every bit as invasive, bothersome and unjust as the scourge The Recliners thrust upon us traveling folk.

I've paid for my postage-stamp-sized space at 35,000 feet. I'd like to use it.

Bravo, United.

Autopilot cited in crash

The National Transportation Safety Board issued a recent report on the 2007 crash of a Citation jet crash that killed six people, including four members of a University of Michigan organ transplant team.

The report concludes that one of the pilots inadvertently turned on the plane's auto pilot instead of the yaw damper, which is what he allegedly intended. The two buttons are next to each other on the console.

Sad deal all around.

Like the recently detailed Buffalo crash, I'm really struck by the simplicity of this conclusion. Are they really saying that if the pilots had only realized that they had made a rather innocuous mistake, they could have simply turned off the auto pilot and not crashed the plane?

Yeah, they are.

I have to think there's more to this story. There just has to be more there.

Auto pilots make a loud, audible beep when they are engaged, and then again when they are disconnected. This feature was created in response to the Eastern Airlines L-1011 crash in 1972 that I've mentioned before, when the crew became so engrossed with a small problem they didn't realize the auto pilot had disengaged and put the plane on a small, gentle descent into the swamps of the Everglades.

With the audible warnings, I just have to think the crew of this Citation knew the auto pilot was on.

Incidentally, my scariest moment in roughly 680 hours of flight time came thanks to a malfunctioning auto pilot.

On August 22, 2006, I was flying with my friend Tim, a fellow CFII, from Jefferson County Airport to Platte Valley Airpark, an all-but-abandoned landing strip about 17 miles directly north of Denver International.

The flight was mostly for fun, but I was also conducting Tim's biennial flight review.

Denver's Class B airspace extends over Platte Valley at 7,000 feet MSL, so we were below that at 6,500, which means approximately 1,500 feet above ground level.

We were in level flight squawking VFR on our way to Platte Valley with the auto pilot on when, without warning or reason, it started trimming the plane into a pitch-up attitude.

It kept trimming the nose up until the trim wheel hit the backstop. The nose rose at least 15 degrees pitch-up and would have easily gone through 20 -- past the critical angle of attack, if you remember my stall lesson from the Colgan post -- had Tim not fought to keep it down with all his might.

The sudden trim-up was bizarre, but the solution here seemed simple enough. Turn the auto pilot off.

I was in the left seat, and clicked the auto-pilot disconnect button near my left thumb on the yoke. It made the loud, audible beep that signified the disengagement. Except the auto pilot didn't turn off. It retained its grip on the yoke and trim wheel.

Tim cut the throttle to help him fight the pitch-up attitude, then we reversed into a pitch-down attitude of about 15 degrees. This wasn't good either.

At the same time, I pressed the auto-pilot button on the avionics console, trying to turn the damned thing off. Again I got the verbal cue that it had disconnected, but it again didn't actually disconnect.

Tim kept fighting the auto pilot. (This is really hard, by the way. Sort of like trying to steer a car after the power-steering quits).

I don't remember how far we deviated from target altitude, but it's possible that we busted up into the Class B or possible that we sunk below 6,000. I really don't remember at this point, but I know our altitude fluctuated by several hundred feet.

What I do remember our general flight path oscillating like a roller-coaster as we did this pitch-up, pitch-down dance. I remember being worried that the full-aft-trim auto pilot was going to stall us, and that with its grip on the yoke, the AP would somehow complicate our stall recovery.

Then I had the brilliant idea of pulling the auto-pilot circuit breaker. I reached under the yoke, and popped it out.

That worked.

The auto pilot released its grip on the flight controls, we leveled off and shuffled along to Platte Valley without further incident.

All in all, the whole thing probably lasted 30 seconds. Maybe 40. We never reached a crisis level, and the whole was over by the time we did anything but react and respond.

When we returned to our base at Jeffco, the owners of our flight school seemed incredulous when we explained what happened. Had we not been two CFIIs, I really think they would have assumed that one of the students had messed something up or not used the AP correctly and dismissed the incident.

But after our encounter, every student at our school got an auto pilot lesson, one that included learning exactly where the AP circuit breaker was on the dashboard.

Tim recalls: "It does scare me to think of what would happen to most folks flying those planes that don't get an autopilot lesson. Can you imagine that happening to a student during their first solo?"

Prior to this incident, I had suffered other auto pilot malfunctions, far less serious - things like it not picking up the localizer on a practice VOR instrument approach or not maintaining the programmed 500-foot-per-minute descent I had asked for.

One of my own instructors had once explained to me that the AP in the 172s gets "hot," and then it doesn't work so well. I have no idea if that's true or not, but there were times that the AP box in the avionics stack was indeed very hot, and that also worried me, from an electrical perspective.

I'm sure the auto pilot in the Cessna Citation II that crashed off Milwaukee is far more advanced than the rickety ones installed in our 172s and I want to make sure that I'm clear that I'm not comparing the two. I'm also not suggesting that what happened to me is what happened to the pilots of the U-M organ transplant plane.

I'm just relaying an experience with an auto pilot.

And why I have an inherent distrust of them.

Elsewhere in the media

I wrote a little bit about the role pilot fatigue may have played in the Colgan crash, and its impact in other aviation accidents. Salon.com's Patrick Smith goes further in-depth on the topic in this report, which is well worth a read, unless the idea of your pilots falling asleep at the yoke at 35,000 feet makes you uneasy.

Passenger lands plane

You may have read this story, in which a passenger took over the controls of a twin-engine turbo-prop King Air and successfully landed after the pilot died in Naples, Fla.

When I first heard this story, I sort of yawned, because the "passenger" was a private pilot and I figured the mainstream media was merely sensationalizing the story like it does with almost every oddball aviation occurrence and that he had some degree of turboprop experience.

But the more I read and the less I assumed, the more impressed I became with Doug White.

It turns out that White is a private pilot with a mere 130 hours of flight time, all in single-engine planes. He had never before manned the controls of a twin, which is a significantly different animal.

The general flight concepts are the same no matter what aircraft type: Pitch plus power equals performance. But comparing the flight characteristics of a single-engine Cessna with the King Air, well, it'd be a little like trying to fly a kite versus an anvil.

Add in retractable gear and a host of other complex systems that he wasn't accustomed to, and White had his work cut out for him.

I'd stop short of calling it a miracle, because his previous experience clearly gave him the necessary stick-and-rudder background to fly and land. But it's nonetheless a gutsy, poise-under-pressure performance that brought out his best under unfortunate circumstances.

"Lost" in aviation translation

For a show that prides itself on nailing down every last detail, one recent episode of my favorite television series left me a little disappointed.

If you watch Lost, you probably remember that the ol' gang returned to the island a few weeks ago by boarding a fictional Ajira Airways flight and flying straight into the path of the paranormal phenomenon that landed them on the island in the first place.

The gang boarded Ajira flight 316 in Los Angeles, which had a stated destination of Guam. But then the producers showed the Ajira flight in question being conducted in a Boeing 737-800 model aircraft.

This is a careless oversight by Lost producers: There's no airline on earth that's running trans-Pacific service with a 737, much more of a short-haul jet.

Perhaps an even worse transgression? Inside the plane, they showed Hurley, Benjamin Linus and company sitting in the first-class, top portion of a double-decked cabin.

The 737 doesn't have double-decked cabins.

In passenger service, that honor belongs only to the 747, a completely different bucket of bolts.

All around, a bad job by the Lost crew on simple technical matters that should have been caught before production.

Skepticism on Montana crash cause

I have my doubts that the terrible plane crash that killed three families in late March was due to an overloaded airplane, the cause drawing a lot of early speculation/attention.

Yes, there were 14 passengers aboard the 10-seat plane. Many of them were children, who obviously weight less than adults.

Furthermore, and probably more important, I'd expect an overloaded plane to crash on takeoff and not upon landing, after it had flown 1,000 miles and burned off hundreds of pounds in fuel.

Keep an eye on whether the investigation turns not only on weight, but on how that weight was balanced throughout the plane.

A plane can be at or under its maximum gross weight, but it also must be "balanced," i.e. the center of gravity of that weight must lie within a certain range, one usually measured in inches from the nose of the plane backward.

That distance is called the "arm."

Exactly where along the arm the center of gravity lies can affect the way the plane handles. If the C.O.G. lies outside the scope of the predescribed range, it can adversely affect those handling characteristics.

Still, I don't think the Montana crash is one that will ultimately be attributed to weight or balance issues. Investigators need to know why the pilot diverted from Bozeman, the original destination, to Butte.

One key question for me, beyond the weight and balance issues and the decision to divert, is how much prior experience the pilot had in the Pilatus PC-12.

I hope it's a lot. The PC-12 is one of the most powerful single-engine planes on the market. For all intents and purposes, it's a business jet that can zoom around at 350 knots. Except it's a powerful single-engine turboprop with the propeller mounted on its nose.

The one thing that's always struck me about the PC-12 is that any yahoo with a private pilot's license and complex and high-performance sign-offs in their logbook can legally fly an aircraft that's really one no beginner should be anywhere near.

I have no idea how many hours the pilot in this particular crash had in type. I really hope it's a ton and that experience has nothing to do with this terrible accident.

But when I heard it was a Pilatus involved, it reminded me that I've always thought it was odd that such a powerful plane could legally be flown in the hands of a short-time private pilot.

Close that loophole somehow, will you Federal Aviation Administration? If it didn't kill anyone in this crash, it's a matter of time before it's a factor somewhere else.

Coming up

If you're a frequent flyer and you love your family, you won't want to miss Squawking VFR's upcoming special report on the comparative safety of regional airliners and their legacy counterparts.

I've examined databases and crunched numbers for my first-ever special report. Let's just say the conclusions are eye opening, alarming and frightening. You don't want to miss it.