I caught a mention of this on the Marketplace Open this morning, and now Gulliver has picked it up. Apparently the Department of Transportation now requires more transparency in airline price advertising:
Beginning Jan. 24, the Transportation Department will enforce a rule requiring that any advertised price for air travel include all government taxes and fees. For the last 25 years, the department has allowed airlines and travel agencies to list government-imposed fees separately, resulting in a paragraph of fine print disclaimers about charges that can add 20 percent or more to a ticket’s price.
“Requiring all mandatory charges to be included in a single advertised price will help consumers compare airfares and make it easier for them to determine the full cost of their trip,” Bill Mosley, a department spokesman, said by e-mail in response to questions about the rule.
The government and the airlines are being guarded in discussing the full-fare advertising policy, since Spirit Airlines, Allegiant and Southwest have asked the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to block the proposed change, arguing that it violates their commercial free speech rights.
Yes, I suppose the First Amendment gives people the right to lie, dissemble, exaggerate, and defraud. Oh wait—regulation of commercial speech seems well-established in the U.S. Good luck, guys.
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if airlines change their booking software before the 24th. If you book flights between, say, Chicago and London, on aa.com, you can find one-way fares as low as—no kidding—$86 outbound. Of course, the lowest return fare is $466 (connecting through Toronto on February 14th), and taxes add another $204.30 for a total fare of $756.30. (Part of that includes the asinine £60 ($95) tax to leave Heathrow that probably won't die before the Olympics.)
The airlines will claim, of course, that they can't calculate the taxes and fees in some cases, like departing Heathrow, because they don't know from the start whether the customer will be subject to the tax. This is a technical problem that a competent programmer can solve, I think. Let's see after the 24th whether they solve it.
In 2011, I:
- took 8,198 photos, including 4,352 in Chicago, 881 in Japan, 588 in Portugal, and 337 in the U.K. (and only 71 of Parker). This is almost as many as I took in 2009 and 2010 combined (9,140), and more than I took in the first 8 years I owned a camera (1983-1991, 7,671).
- flew 115,845 km but drove less than 4,500 km
- visited 5 countries (the UK, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Japan) and 8 states (California, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Indiana, North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) in 35 trips. Sadly, this meant Parker boarded for more than 100 days
- spent more than 186 hours walking Parker, which partially made up for all those days being boarded
- wrote 539 blog entries, with the most consistency in the blog's 6-year history (averaging 1.48 per day with a standard deviation of only 0.11)
- got 2.3 million hits (object views) on the Daily Parker, and 1.7 million on Weather Now, including 47,956 and 181,285 page views, respectively. According to Google Analytics, the blog had 28,613 unique visitors, and Weather Now had 26,539.
- read only 34 books, but as these included the first four of the "Song of Ice and Fire" series, it should count as 46
- started and ended the year in the same place (Duke of Perth, Chicago)
- went to only 8 movies, 3 plays, 3 concerts, and 3 baseball games, which is terribly sad
Oh, and I also got a master's degree. (Almost forgot.)
The Air Force has released a report about a F-22 crash that killed the pilot:
Capt. Jeffey Haney had his mobility and vision restricted while flying an F-22 at 11,580 m feet and 1,925 km/h [true airspeed], at night, and then the jet cut off his oxygen supply. According to the accident report released last week, Captain Jeffrey Haney became distracted when his oxygen system stopped delivering oxygen. After initiating a descent, he allowed his F-22 to roll past inverted, unchecked. The fighter's attitude resulted in a vertical speed of 293 m/s.
According to the Air Force accident report (PDF), Haney "was recognized throughout his career for exceptional performance." On the accident flight, he was outfitted for cold weather (wore bulky clothing) and night operations (wore night vision goggles). That personal equipment would have "reduced mobility in the cockpit" and interfered with his "ability to look from side to side and down at the consoles" without bracing himself "on various areas in the cockpit." The applicable checklist for failure of the oxygen system includes activation of an emergency oxygen system. That system is actuated via a pull ring that requires 40 pounds of force to actuate and is mounted low and aft to the side of the pilot's ejection seat.
Right before the crash, Capt. Haney attempted to recover, pulling 7.4 G before slamming into the water at Mach 1.2.
The Air Force, naturally, blames the pilot, because the possibility that a $347m airplane has enormous design flaws doesn't exist in the defense appropriation universe. This continues the august tradition of military procurement that includes toy rifles that won't fire in jungles and over-reliance on GPS selective availability in UAVs.
Codey might want to play tug, but Roger couldn't care less:
Codey waits for me to put down the black flashy thing and start playing tug again:
Canon 7D at ISO-6400, 50mm, f/1.8 at 1/250, just a few minutes ago.
Every time I visit San Francisco, I stop here:
Today I only left with 400 g, which unfortunately I'll have to leave with my family. Well, unfortunately for me; knowing them, it won't last two weeks in the house. That's an acceptable outcome.
Given my activities yesterday (i.e., going through airport security), I found the latest interview with Bruce Schneier timely and once again correct:
As we came by the checkpoint line, Schneier described one of these aspects: the ease with which people can pass through airport security with fake boarding passes. First, scan an old boarding pass, he said—more loudly than necessary, it seemed to me. Alter it with Photoshop, then print the result with a laser printer. In his hand was an example, complete with the little squiggle the T.S.A. agent had drawn on it to indicate that it had been checked. “Feeling safer?” he asked.
To a large number of security analysts, [the billions we've spent on security theater] makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.
Yes. We spend money on high-tech, whiz-bang solutions to human-intelligence problems. The attack on 9/11 can't happen again in the U.S., not because of full-body scanners at airports, but because of reinforced cockpit doors and vigilant passengers. Should we let just anyone board a transport airplane without a security check[1]? No, of course not; but we should make the checks effective, rather than flamboyant.
Security, however, tends to ratchet up, because no one wants to be the guy who relaxed security right before an attack. And we know an attack will happen someday; nihilists are not easily dissuaded from their crimes. Still, one can hope.
You'll never guess where I am:
It's not so bad, really. Despite warnings of the busiest travel day of the year at O'Hare, it's quiet and relaxed at the moment. From curb to the other side of security took 14 minutes, which isn't a record for me but obviously didn't bother me either.
After a short flight, I'll have curry at Kennedy's tonight with some classmates, then Christmas with the family.
I forgot to post this photo from the Tsukiji fish market earlier:
It turns out Air France 447 may have crashed mainly mainly because of pilot error:
Almost as soon as [the flying pilot, 32-year-old Pierre-Cédric] Bonin pulls up into a climb, the plane's computer reacts. A warning chime alerts the cockpit to the fact that they are leaving their programmed altitude. Then the stall warning sounds. This is a synthesized human voice that repeatedly calls out, "Stall!" in English, followed by a loud and intentionally annoying sound called a "cricket." A stall is a potentially dangerous situation that can result from flying too slowly. At a critical speed, a wing suddenly becomes much less effective at generating lift, and a plane can plunge precipitously. All pilots are trained to push the controls forward when they're at risk of a stall so the plane will dive and gain speed.
The Airbus's stall alarm is designed to be impossible to ignore. Yet for the duration of the flight, none of the pilots will mention it, or acknowledge the possibility that the plane has indeed stalled—even though the word "Stall!" will blare through the cockpit 75 times. Throughout, Bonin will keep pulling back on the stick, the exact opposite of what he must do to recover from the stall.
The article includes a good portion of the CVR transcript in both French and English, including the moment seconds before the crash when the plane's captain—who was sitting in the jumpseat and not at the controls—finally realizes what Bonin is doing wrong.
It's a startling example of a pilot forgetting basic flying principles and a crew that fails to manage its own communications.