Evacuating the A‑380

 Travel  1 Response »
May 122007
 

Tim poin­ted me at the video of the test run for evac­u­at­ing the A‑380 — it’s worth a look. I noticed, how­ever, that it was­n’t exactly a very real­ist­ic test. If you read the page rather than just leap­ing to the video, you’ll see the dis­cus­sion of an earli­er MD-11 test where a woman over the age of 45 tripped and fell; bear that in mind when you watch the A‑380 evac­u­ation video.

What struck me about the video was that the evac­u­ation was not only car­ried out in ideal con­di­tions, but the par­ti­cipants were also all ideal. All between the ages of roughly 20 and 45, all wear­ing com­fort­able trousers, none of them over­weight, none of them car­ry­ing or cajol­ing chil­dren or babies, none of them in wheel­chairs or con­nec­ted to oxy­gen sup­plies, none of them in high heels or flimsy dresses (or good suits, come to that). All were fit and able to jump on the slide without hes­it­a­tion. In a plane car­ry­ing over 850 people, what pro­por­tion will be in some way encumbered, and how big a dif­fer­ence does that make to the evacuation?

In a lot of ways the video reminded me of the films that are always being shot around Van­couver. One I saw being shot at Van­couver air­port had lots of extras tow­ing bags around pre­tend­ing to go some­where and looked unreal­ist­ic for the same reas­ons — no-one was over­weight, or eld­erly, or had babies or chil­dren, unlike every air­port I’ve been to recently.

Liquid Matters

 Rants, Travel  1 Response »
Oct 032006
 

I see from the TSA web­site that we’re now allowed small quant­it­ies of liquids on board flights in the U.S.A., and I assume oth­er coun­tries will also start allow­ing these items. And knit­ting needles and books are still allowed, so we’ll have some­thing to do on the flights. The thought of a long flight to Aus­tralia or Europe with noth­ing to do was not pleasant…

And you can now buy cans of drink again in the secure board­ing areas. I nev­er under­stood that par­tic­u­lar ban, I must admit. If you think about it, who­ever decided on that ban ascribed an abil­ity to plan and execute that far exceeds any­thing any­one is likely to pull off without being found out some­where along the way. To get some sort of liquid explos­ive into a can of soft drink (pop) in a vend­ing machine in the secure area would be hard enough, but then mak­ing sure the right per­son gets to that par­tic­u­lar can without any­body else acci­dent­ally get­ting in first seems impossible to me, if you pos­tu­late that the per­son who is meant to get the can has to act nor­mal so as not to attract atten­tion. And then mak­ing sure the can does­n’t leak at any stage, par­tic­u­larly when it goes thump into the tray… Over­all I think the risk of someone mak­ing a bomb out of ingredi­ents passed along in that way is infin­ites­im­al. Any­one that organ­ized would choose oth­er, easi­er meth­ods. Bruce Schnei­er calls this secur­ity theat­er; his blog should be required read­ing for whomever sets the rules as well as those hav­ing to carry them out. For the rest of us, par­tic­u­larly those sub­ject to the rules, his art­icles show clear think­ing. For example, this piece dis­cuss­ing the air­plane secur­ity meas­ures and how the Lon­don ter­ror­ists who star­ted the liquids scare were appre­hen­ded. Highly recom­men­ded reading.

Hawaii 2006

 Travel  No Responses »
Aug 242006
 

We had a fam­ily trip to Hawaii (the Big Island) in the last week where I could reas­on­ably fly before I got too big. Mind you, I was still big and bulky and quite glad of being able to float along in the water. I took quite a few pho­tos, but these two are the only ones I deemed worthy of pub­lish­ing. They’re from the “saddle road” between the vol­ca­noes on the Big Island. 

I found the con­trast between the new lava, the old lava, and the no-longer-vis­ible lava on this photo to be the inter­est­ing part: View from Saddle Road on Hawaii

and the con­trast of the new lava with the tree, the grass, and the moun­tains was what made this photo interesting: tree on Saddle Road on Hawaii

A380 Size Implications

 General, Travel  4 Responses »
Aug 122006
 

I’ve been a bit con­cerned about the idea of fly­ing in one of the Air­bus A380 jets (assum­ing they ever actu­ally deliv­er one to an air­line I fly on, that is). I haven’t been con­cerned about the safety of the big plane, but rather the logist­ics and com­fort. Although, with the latest ter­ror­ist scares, I’m begin­ning to won­der about the safety of fly­ing on these big planes.

Although in the­ory a double-deck­er plane has room for a fit­ness centre, spa, and cock­tail lounge, most air­lines will take the oppor­tun­ity to cram as many pas­sen­gers in as they can. How many that is will depend on the air­line, just the same as it does today for oth­er planes. 

So, what does a plane hold­ing 550 people imply? It implies the same prob­lems as with a Boe­ing 747 that holds around 450 people, only more so. Let’s assume the air­lines in gen­er­al keep the same seat pitch, seat widths, and legroom as for the 747 or Air­bus A340, so the com­fort level on board is roughly the same. Then there are two sets of prob­lems I see. One is the logist­ic­al one of cop­ing with get­ting that many people on and off the plane, and the oth­er pre- and post-flight hand­ling. Board­ing time and dis­em­bark­ment time will depend on wheth­er air­ports have the mul­tiple jet­ways to ser­vice the mul­tiple doors; some already do for the 747 but it’s a good ques­tion as to how many air­ports will make the invest­ment early on or wheth­er they’ll wait until there are lots of A380 planes fly­ing to incur the cost. Bag­gage hand­ling and cus­toms and immig­ra­tion form­al­it­ies are already pain points when 747 planes from mul­tiple des­tin­a­tions land close togeth­er; they will likely get worse with the big­ger planes as they’re cost centres for air­ports, not rev­en­ue generators.

And then there’s the secur­ity angle. Will the big­ger planes be big­ger tar­gets for ter­ror­ists? They’re not that much big­ger than a 747, but it seems likely to me that under the “max­im­um bang” the­ory, ter­ror­ists would aim for the largest num­ber of people they can get at once. To min­im­ise this danger, secur­ity checks at the gate are likely, which will fur­ther increase the board­ing time, assum­ing that some amount of cab­in bag­gage con­tain­ing books, knit­ting etc will be allowed on board to try to keep the pas­sen­ger bore­dom level reas­on­able. As an aside, if the pas­sen­gers are not going to be allowed to bring along means of enter­tain­ing them­selves, and the air­lines aren’t going to widely imple­ment indi­vidu­al in-flight video sys­tems, I hope the flight attend­ants are pre­pared to cope with more cases of air rage.

So what’s the answer? Apart from avoid­ing travel com­pletely, that is, which isn’t always pos­sible. Avoid­ing large hubs isn’t pos­sible for many trans-ocean­ic jour­neys, avoid­ing the large planes for these jour­neys also won’t be pos­sible in many cases. It looks like the cost of air travel is just going to increase, in money, time, and irrit­a­tion. The biggest win­ners are prob­ably going to be the phar­ma­ceut­ic­al com­pan­ies that make the rem­ed­ies to help pas­sen­gers sleep, or to calm them down. I can just see it now, flight attend­ants ask­ing “Would you like some melaton­in with your ginger ale to help you sleep?”.

Airline Thoughts

 General, Travel  9 Responses »
Aug 112006
 

In the after­math of the latest round of air travel restric­tions, it seems to me there will be quite a few rami­fic­a­tions for the travel industry, if these restric­tions stay in place for any length of time. Here are some of the ones I see, in no par­tic­u­lar order.

  • Full-ser­vice air­lines will have a fight­ing chance again, as long as they actu­ally provide the amen­it­ies that used to be expec­ted for travel, such as food, drink (even if non-alco­hol­ic), pil­lows, blankets, in-flight video sys­tems, and magazines. 
  • Flights will be full of tetchy bored people whose elec­tron­ic toys were taken away from them curs­ing the noisy bored chil­dren whose toys were taken away from them.
  • Boe­ing’s decision to cre­ate a plane for point-to-point travel rather than hub and spoke looks like the right one. Flights from Heath­row and Gatwick (the big air­ports) were the tar­get points rather than those from smal­ler air­ports; flights from smal­ler air­ports may be used as a way to get mater­i­als onto oth­er flights (if there are no secur­ity checks between land­ing from one flight and get­ting on the next) but are less likely to be tar­gets them­selves. Tak­ing flights from small air­port to small air­port will also avoid the longer secur­ity-check­ing delays at lar­ger airports.
  • Secur­ity screen­ing of bags as you get on the plane is likely to start, to enable people to take some cab­in baggage.
  • Cheap air­lines which have been try­ing to stop people check­ing lug­gage and only take on hand lug­gage are going to have a hard time.
  • Com­pan­ies that sell really good pad­ded bags so you can check your laptop without wor­ries will find a lot of cus­tom­ers. People should also give more thought to secur­ing the data on their laptops when they check them, but most prob­ably won’t both­er. Insur­ance com­pan­ies will have to cope with a lot of claims for lost and dam­aged laptops, iPods, etc.
  • The mid-80s fash­ion for see-through briefcases and purses will be rein­vig­or­ated. I had one of these purses, it was actu­ally quite handy being able to find things quickly in it.
  • Air tax­is will start to become pop­u­lar as people try to avoid the increas­ing unpleas­ant­ness of com­mer­cial air travel.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how this all plays out, and wheth­er the vari­ous Air Trans­port author­it­ies man­age to come up with real, effect­ive secur­ity meas­ures that don’t incon­veni­ence the inno­cent too much. I’m just glad I don’t need to travel any­where much in the near future.

Crochet Danger

 Crafts, General, Travel  5 Responses »
Dec 052005
 

I had to laugh at Eve’s link to the story of the weenie who was scared of knit­ting needles (while admit­ting I first saw the link at whump dot com from fol­low­ing XML 2005 Aggreg­at­or links). I have a bet­ter story than mere knit­ting needles or even nee­dle­work needles, since all of those have really blunt ends.

When the TSA dir­ect­ives first came out after Septem­ber 11, ban­ning knit­ting needles, I, along with a lot of oth­er people, was struck by the arbit­rar­i­ness of the bans. No knives, but forks were still allowed, and so were glasses made of glass. Per­son­ally I’d rather have someone come at me with a blunt knife that’s not cap­able of cut­ting any­thing than a broken glass. So I read the list of banned items and noticed that crochet hooks wer­en’t on the list. Giv­en that in terms of crafts I bounce between knit­ting, nee­dle­work, crochet, and lots of oth­ers, I have a good sup­ply of crochet hooks. I picked one out to take on my next set of flights. Not just any crochet hook though, one of my fine 1.25 mm crochet hooks that at the time I was using for filet crochet. So this is a hook, with what can only be described as a barb on one end, with a total dia­met­er of 1.25 mm (I have smal­ler, but had two of the 1.25 mm hooks so could eas­ily risk los­ing one).

The first secur­ity per­son checked the hook, looked wor­ried, asked her super­visor, the super­visor said “crochet hooks are allowed”. And that was it. On board I went, with my filet crochet and my crochet hook. These days knit­ting needles are expressly allowed, as are crochet hooks (although the TSA calls them “crochet needles”) so I will still be able to carry around my filet crochet hooks and scare unsus­pect­ing knit­ting needle phobics (yes, there is such a thing as a needle pho­bia; most people who suf­fer from it have pho­bi­as about vac­cin­a­tion and blood test-type needles, not knit­ting needles, although the pho­bia is appar­ently bad enough in some people to be set off by any needle-type object). 

So if you see someone with what looks like a viciously thin, barbed object and thin yarn, just remem­ber the TSA per­mits it. Mind you, read­ing that list does raise oth­er ques­tions, such as “if you can­’t smoke on board, why do you need a cigar cut­ter?” and “why are toy trans­former robots expressly per­mit­ted but not oth­er toys?” but that’s just me being picky.

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