An Airblue plane
From: Flickr / ati977

The crash of an Airblue Airbus A321 while attempting to land at the Pakistani capital city of Islamabad is the third accident in three months involving relatively new airlines.

The others were:

May 12: An Airbus A330 of Afriqiyah Airways inexplicably crashes in fine weather on its final approach to Tripoli International Airport, Libya. 103 passengers and crew die. (For some reason the Airbus was landing on a runway with the least advanced navigation aids.)

May 23: A Boeing 737 of Air India Express overshoots the runway at Mangalore, careens over a cliff and explodes. 158 passengers and crew die. (This hilltop runway is notorious for its trickiness.)

In this latest disaster 152 passengers and crew died. The crash has characteristics that used to be common to many crashes: Extremely poor visibility, caused by fog, on final approach; instructions from the air traffic controllers to abort an approach and make several circuits before attempting another, and then “loss of contact.”

This is the monsoon season in Pakistan. Pilots familiar with the approach to Islamabad say that the combination of bad visibility and mountainous terrain can be challenging. Nonetheless, fatal crashes in Pakistan air space are rare, and the pilot of the Airblue Airbus was highly experienced, logging more than 25,000 hours in 35 years.

Many Pakistani commercial pilots are recruited from the military, which insures a high level of proficiency, and also familiarity with the demands of the climate and landscape.

All of which makes this crash odd because it just should not have happened. Much of the effort over the past decades to make flying safer has been targeted at just those conditions. A combination of highly sophisticated instrumentation in the cockpits of modern jets and a matching sophistication in ground-based navigation aids has virtually eliminated the risk of what were called “controlled flight into terrain” accidents.

All three of the airplanes in these three crashes were state-of-the-art, delivered in the last decade. Mechanical or technical failure is highly unlikely. However, all these airlines are very young, with slender track records.

The Libyan-owned Afriqiyah Airways was founded in 2001; Air India Express, the budget offshoot of Air India, was founded in 2004, as was Airblue in Pakistan.

They are harbingers of a sea change in the airline industry. This has been a decade of explosive growth as the demand for cheap air travel has exploded across the globe. Entrepreneurs in those parts of the world where demand had for years well exceeded supply spotted that there was a striking new business model in commercial aviation - the budget airline.

Pioneered first by Southwest in the U.S., then accelerated in Europe by two runaway successes, Ryanair and Easyjet, the budget model has now caught on big time in Asia. Essential to that model are the two best-selling airplanes in the world: the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320.

At last week’s big international air show at Farnborough in England the plane makers were smacking their chops at the prospect of the sales in Asia, which Airbus and Boeing see as the world’s biggest airplane market. In the next 20 years, they say, that market alone could generate orders worth more than one trillion dollars.

Another number is striking: In 2001 budget carriers in Asia flew to 48 airports. In 2009 they served 576 airports.

This year’s run of crashes should sound a very clear warning that you can’t have this kind of growth without ensuring that the infrastructure essential to safety is in place - the most modern navigation aids on the ground, air traffic controllers trained to the highest standards, rigorous government oversight of the licensing of new airlines and the training of crews.

When it comes to the airlines themselves, there have been rising concerns about overworked and tired flight crews, a critical issue where the U.S. has itself been overly lax. If the profit-driven budget airline business has forced short cuts here at home, you can bet the same problem will show up around the world.

For travelers it has become increasingly difficult to make a judgment on the safety of an airline if it shows up in an itinerary for a connecting flight from a hub in a distant part of the world.

International regulators, particularly the International Civil Aviation Organization, need urgently to step in and press for far greater vigilance in the process of licensing and monitoring the wave of new carriers. We should remember when looking at those gleaming new jets sitting at the gate with their crowd-pleasing livery: It’s not just airplanes that have crashes, it’s airlines.

Artwork outside the Guggenheim by Louise Bourgeois
Photo: Flickr/LindaH

Spaniards are desperate for good news. The country’s economy is tanking, the construction business is a wreck, unemployment, particularly among the young, is soaring.

But it could be worse: Spain has just completed a remarkable run of triumphs in sports. Rafael Nadal won Wimbledon, again, reaffirming his domination of tennis. The Spanish soccer team, undaunted by thuggish behavior from the Dutch, won the World Cup with an exquisite last-minute goal. And now Alberto Contador has won the most grueling of bicycle races, the Tour de France, for the third time.

How can Spanish sportsmen (and women) can rise so nobly above the shambles around them?

The answer, I think, has a broader impact than just in the world of sport.

READ MORE >>

Is it the end of the black box?
From Flickr/ edvvc

Innovations in aviation are often driven by lessons learned in crashes: For example, in the cabin, seats that withstand high impact, and on the flight deck loud, aural warnings of impending collisions.

The loss of Air France Flight 447 over the south Atlantic last summer now seems like another force for change. It could mark the beginning of the end for the conventional black box flight recorder. Three very expensive searches of the deep ocean bed failed to find the wreckage of the Airbus A330-200 in which 228 people died.

This week at the aviation industry’s major international gathering, the Farnborough Air Show in England, one of the hottest ideas is a digital system to monitor all the critical systems during a flight and transmit data, live in real time, to a ground base.

Finally, the idea that the data critical to understanding what caused a crash should go down with the airplane, albeit in an impact-proof box, is being seen as obsolete.

The only clues to what might have happened to Flight 447 were bursts of data transmitted for the purpose of detecting maintenance problems that could be fixed when the plane arrived. As random and incomplete as these bursts were, they conveyed a picture of a comprehensive failure of the flight controls.

At Farnborough, the Virginia-based company Iridium, which operates a global satellite network used for the maintenance messages, is promoting a new automated flight recording system that could monitor the crucial details of an airplane’s systems and behavior and transmit them.

In fact, Iridium revealed that four planes have been flying trials with the system over the Atlantic. “The test team judged that the streamed data would have been sufficient for a successful investigation in the event of an accident,” said Dan Mercer, an Iridium executive.

At the moment, the new system would cost around $50,000 a plane to install, but in reality, if it were adopted, volume production would greatly reduce the price. (A black box costs between $10,000 and $20,000). Both European and international aviation authorities have task forces studying the technology.

The first priority should be to equip those airlines flying long distances over oceans beyond radar coverage: Flight 447 was missing for six hours before any air traffic controllers realized there was a problem.

Photos: Air New Zealand

If you want to see the future of airline travel, it’s a good rule to look at the airlines with some of the longest flights. When passengers are in a seat for up to sixteen hours they are apt to become either connoisseurs of cabin comforts - or temporarily crippled critics determined never to fly that way again.

Air New Zealand is a case in point. When it comes to international flights, almost everywhere is a long way from the land of the Kiwis. Los Angeles to Auckland is twelve hours, Hong Kong to Auckland is ten.

That’s why it’s significant that Air New Zealand is breaking out of the box when it comes to traditional cabin classes. They abandoned first class in 2005 and provide flat beds in business class on long-haul routes.

And at the end of this year, when the airline begins flying new Boeing 777s, there will be an interesting innovation in premium economy. The 777’s cabin was designed to accommodate nine-abreast seating in coach. Air New Zealand’s premium economy cabin will have only six seats in each row, in pairs, and each pair will be set at an angle, rather than facing straight-on, which gives a greater sense of separation and breaks the feeling of serried rows.

They have also introduced an enticing solution to the confinements of coach. Two passengers flying together can buy the third, middle seat in a row, for 50 per cent less than the usual fare.

The airline’s director of international operations, Ed Sims, told the magazine Aviation Week: “First class will be dead in two years.”

I doubt that. What will happen instead is that those airlines - like Lufthansa and British Airways - that seem still to believe in the plutocracy of flying will make the distinction between business and first much clearer than it now is, when both classes offer flat beds and the difference in the quality of the ride is measured mostly by the vintages of champagne served, which hardly justifies the price of first.

I was recently given a preview of the newest version of the Boeing 747, the 747-8 Intercontinental that Lufthansa will introduce next year. A mockup of the cabin accommodations, which Boeing has upgraded with the same styling and technologies that will debut on its 787 Dreamliner, had an upper deck with first class “suites” - including generous beds and hotel-standard amenities as well as a dedicated bar and lounge.

The urge to splurge on first has been driven, in part, by Emirates, which introduced far higher degrees of privacy and comfort on its Airbus A380 superjumbos. (However, its regional competitor Qatar Airways is going in the other direction, abandoning first and giving business a luxury makeover.)

None of the initiatives to transform cabin comforts come from American carriers. But European and Asian airlines, noting the recovery in demand for business class, are going to be engaging in a war of pampering that can only be good - for those ready to pay the price.

The ideas of Air New Zealand for upgrading both premium economy and coach also look like game changers. All this suggests a completely different idea of cabin comfort and value than that practiced on us in the U.S. market, where stinginess rules.


Thrilled with the new premium economy, two seatmates engage in a staring contest

Maybe, just maybe, slime can be turned into gold. Some time ago, I met a guy called Dave Daggett. He was very passionate, and had a PowerPoint show to explain why. Boeing had asked him to look at the candidates to replace kerosene in jet engines. It was part of the company’s effort to save the planet. Like a lot of other people, Boeing wanted to shake the oil habit and find an alternative that would be both far more efficient and at the same have far lower emissions.

After careful study, Daggett had fixed on one source: Algae, the green slime that can be found atop any city’s sewage treatment plant.

There were other candidates. The most publicized biofuel was ethanol, but that has a huge downside. It consumes a lot of energy in the growing of corn, and inflates food prices as the demand for corn soars. Others were jatropha weed and soybeans.

What excited Daggett-and me-was one of his favorite slides. It compared the area of land required to produce enough soybeans to provide the biofuel for the world’s airline fleet with the acreage (in the form of breeding lakes) to achieve the same quantity of fuel from algae. The first was as big as the whole of Europe, the second the size of Belgium.

Daggett had already deduced that fuel from algae would burn extremely efficiently under the conditions of a jet engine in flight-and that the CO2 emissions would be a staggering 80 per cent less. The idea seemed as close to alchemy as anyone could hope to get.

The problem with producing any biofuel, though, even if it seems perfect, is that you need to build a new production infrastructure from scratch, including the breeding lakes and, critically, the refineries. And the process of refining algae into jet fuel will be a highly-prized proprietary secret.

Even if the airline industry committed to developing algae as its first choice for a biofuel it would take at least twenty years before we were able to see it in universal use.

But you have to start somewhere.

And there’s just been a striking demonstration that algae could well be the juice of choice.

It hasn’t come from Boeing, but from their most serious competitor, EADS, the European corporate parent of Airbus.

For a couple of weeks, they have been successfully flying a small twin-engine plane in which one engine has been using algae-derived fuel . The engines are not jets, but diesels, but the result is immediately applicable to jets. (Other test flights staged by airlines have used biofuels mixed with normal jet fuel, this is the first test confident enough to use 100 per cent biofuel).

In fact, the algae-derived fuel is so efficient in the way it burns in the engine that the engine had to be de-tuned to prevent it from generating too much power.

The next move will be to get Airbus, Boeing and the aerospace industry to establish a common standard for algae-derived fuel and to press ahead with producing it. For the test flights now being carried out, 2,000 liters had to be produced in a pilot plant.

Algae is basically a primitive and prolific organism that, given the right conditions, works like a microscopic oil well, absorbing energy through light and storing it in the form of crude oil. Up to 50 to 60 percent of an algae plant’s weight is oil.

Looking at what’s happening now in the Gulf of Mexico, algae would seem really to be what the boast of "Beyond Petroleum" should have meant, not just the cynical hype of a company that represents the worst of the old way of gassing us up.

Related Reading
Clive Irving wrote about blended wings, biofuel and more in a November 2008 Condé Nast Traveler feature, "The Radical Future of Flying."

The idea of pieces of sculpture that can follow you around the world-as though from a dream repeated regardless of where you are-seems like a very post-modern concept, not the work of a woman in her nineties.

But Louise Bourgeois, who died in New York a week ago at the age of 98, achieved that effect with her giant spiders. Placed in landmark situations, these arachnids, 35-foot high, seemed to have been spawned from the old sci-fi classic, War of the Worlds, with their hard, wiry legs about to straddle and entrap pedestrians and their sac-like bodies poised above ready to ingest what gets trapped in the web.

As you can see from my photos below, they loomed up in my path outside the Tate Modern in London, where, with the trick of perspective, they were ready to chomp into St. Paul’s Cathedral, and in Bilbao, where their body armor seemed the equal of Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim, itself as much a work of sculpture as of architecture. Caught in the dark, glowering evening light of northern Spain, the spider and the museum appear like mother ship and predatory offspring.

I encountered them once more, in Rockefeller Plaza, New York, but there they were overpowered by the clustered granite skyscrapers and lost their menace, reduced by the scale of Manhattan to become no more bothersome than over-sized roaches.

The spiders also landed in Havana, St. Petersburg and Seoul, where they were photographed by many travelers, as well as the locals-and, no doubt, scared the little ones.

It wasn’t Bourgeois’s idea to scare anyone. She called them Maman, after her mother - “She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver…spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”

Louise Bourgeois, late bloomer, prolific and wonderful painter and sculptor, born 25 December 1911 in Paris, died 31 May, New York.

When the White House’s chief coordinator of intelligence, Dennis Blair, failed to either coordinate or to act as chief--or even, some said, to seem intelligent --he was fired two weeks ago. I felt sorry for him. This is a job nobody has been able to do, because it isn’t doable.

The occupant is supposed to be point man in supervising intelligence collected by 16 different government agencies. They include two outfits with enormous power who frequently snipe at each other and conduct vicious turf wars, the CIA and the FBI, as well as that Frankenstein of an agency, the Department of Homeland Security, whose head is expected at one and the same time to seem in control of the Gulf oil spill and the Times Square bombing attempt, not to mention her day job of watching over airport security.

What did for Dennis Blair was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Jockstrap Bomber and his attempt on Christmas Day to blow up Northwest Flight 253. Blair took the fall for the failure to red flag Abdulmutallab in spite of clear advance warnings that he posed a risk. It seemed to me, however, that a greater responsibility rested with Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, who took off on a six-day skiing vacation at Christmas in spite of clear indications that something nasty was in the works.

For that reason, back in January, I awarded Leiter the first Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready.

This was named for the hapless Lt. Kermit Tyler of the U.S. Army who, on December 7, 1941, received a phone call from radar operators warning that a large formation of airplanes seemed to be approaching Pearl Harbor and responded by saying “Forget it” and put down the phone

As it happened, Tyler died a week or so before I appropriated his name and his daughter wrote to say that my choice was “degrading and disrespectful.” Other relatives weighed in with the same complaint - “Kermit was a wonderful, funny, loyal, caring, humble man” and were clearly set on shaming me.

In this heated atmosphere the original purpose of the Kermit Tyler Award seemed to have been obscured by the passionate outpourings of familial distress.

This didn’t mean, alas, that the need for the award had diminished. There was, for example, the prolonged failure to appoint a new head to the TSA, our last line of defense at the airport, due to some bone-headed political obstructionism from the Republicans, forcing one qualified nominee to withdraw, until finally, two weeks ago, President Obama nominated FBI deputy director John Pistole for the post. That’s for a crucial job that’s been unfilled for 18 months.

Then there was the unedifying spectacle of the FBI and New York police department competing to own the successful arrest of the Times Square bomber by leaking highly sensitive intelligence to the media, thereby compromising the chance of identifying accomplices.

So I am happy to report that at least a few of my fan base have written to encourage me to persist with the Kermit Tyler Award.

One writes: “Family members may deny Kermit’s actions but military records show he disregarded the information provided to him.” Another, having watched the story of Pearl Harbor on the History Channel, says of Kermit: “The facts are clear, he made the decision to ignore the information and not to seek assistance before making such a crucial decision.”

And adds: “One would hope all of us would learn from past events so not to be bound to repeat them…this award has its place in reminding us we must learn from the past or ignorance will remain as rampant as it was the day the radar operator was told to ‘forget it’”.

Thus encouraged, I am now giving the next Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready to….

Watch this space.

Related Stories
Not long after introducing the Kermit Tyler award in January, Clive Alive found a winner, Michael "ski vacation" Leitner for the mess-up regarding the would-be jockstrap jihadist

The third search at the bottom of the south Atlantic for the wreckage and flight recorders from Air France Flight 447 has ended, just a week before the first anniversary of the crash.

The French air accident investigators, the BEA, now have to face a fateful decision: Is it worth mounting another search?

Given that some of the world’s best undersea resources have been deployed without success, there is a mounting feeling among aviation experts that time and money would be far better used to drill deeper and deeper into the three categories of evidence that have been available to the investigation: The parts of the Airbus A330 found floating on the ocean; autopsies on the bodies recovered; the content of the bursts of data transmitted from the plane before it disappeared.

There is also a remarkable amount of satellite imagery that reveals the storm formations over the south Atlantic on the night of the crash-significantly wild weather that caused the pilots of other planes on that route to divert around the most turbulent areas.

A look at the physical evidence provided by the wreckage can be salutary. The two BEA reports published so far show, for example, a toilet door that has been compacted from the bottom up, revealing that the Airbus hit the water with an enormous impact -not in a dive, but slightly nose-up in normal flying attitude.

From this, the investigators concluded that the plane had plunged from its cruise altitude of 35,000 feet basically intact, moving both forward and downward.

Once it hit the water, the vertical stabilizer sheared off and became the most recognizable surviving part of Flight 447, with its distinctive Air France livery, as it was hauled from the ocean.

The most crucial parts, however, containing the flight recorders, cockpit voice recorders, engines and flight management computers all sank in an area where the ocean floor is as much as 20,000 feet below.

Families of the victims will, understandably, hope that there will be at least one more search, simply in the hope of retrieving human remains as well as to find those crucial flight recorders. Air France and Airbus, who funded the latest search, will also be reluctant to give up when their reputations rest on finding the cause of the crash.

But we could, however, now be facing a challenge unique in modern aviation: To definitively explain, without definitive data from the black boxes, how such a sophisticated machine could vanish under circumstances-even including those violent storms-that by any measure should not have presented a hazard.

This does, I would argue, stress more than ever the need to equip all transoceanic jets with equipment that continually transmits the same data normally locked into those flight recorders-to transmit it via satellite to the airline’s home base where it would eliminate the need for such expensive and fruitless searches.

Related Reading
Clive has reported on the last minutes of Flight 447 (and its recovery missions) as well as recent Airbus alarms.  Last summer, Clive called for dumping outdated black box technology in favor of real-time data transmittal.

Heathrow
Photo: Amin Tabrizi / Flickr.com

Something extraordinary just happened. Without saying so in so many words, a government has decided to cap the growth of a major international aviation hub. The new coalition leaders of Britain have ended the plan to add a third runway at Heathrow and a second at Stansted. Expansion of Gatwick has also been abandoned-effectively, that means that three of the five airports serving London can handle no more flights than they do now at their peak months. (The other two, Luton and London City, have no plans to grow.)

In the short term the reasons for doing this are fiscal. But the constraints of Britain’s crippled economy give cover to a more revolutionary idea: That the time has come to challenge the assumption that airports will always need to get bigger in order to meet the future demand for air travel.

The aviation industry and Britain’s business leaders had for years argued that if London’s air traffic-both passengers and cargo-were curbed, the country’s economy would be damaged and that London’s position as a dominant world hub would be lost to the ambitions of other European airports-in particular, to Paris and Frankfurt.

The last British prime minister, Labour’s Gordon Brown, capitulated to that argument. But the two young men now running Britain, the Conservative David Cameron and his Liberal-Democrat partner Nick Clegg have-amazingly in view of the Conservatives’ links to big business-said enough is enough.

The problem is that all of the existing airports could expand only at the cost of devouring the communities around them. In the case of Heathrow it meant demolishing whole suburban neighborhoods; in the case of Stansted it meant eating into some of the most bucolic countryside in southern England.

For forty years or more, planners have been searching for a new “green field” site within reach of London where a sixth airport could be built. But southern England is full. If the balance is to be kept between preserving what’s left of unmolested rural areas and industrial development the first step would be to have no new runways.

Today, the Greens are celebrating an unexpected victory.

Tomorrow, though, the implications will sink in. Expedient though this political act was, its long-term policy reverberations are significant across the world. Like the U.K., the U.S. has a whole bunch of constraints on airport development: environmental, geographical, fiscal. The same is true in much of Europe. China, on the other hand, is on an airport-building binge, all across the vast country, and Asia is clearly the place where incessant growth of demand for air travel will pair with the political will to build new infrastructure.

What does the British move mean for travelers?  Heathrow regularly comes top in the list of airports people least enjoy. Now that its capacity is finite-ninety airlines fly through Heathrow and the number of daily flights is around 1,260-what needs to be done is to fix the terminals. Rebuilding and refreshing is going on, but at a slow pace. A lot more needs to be done to civilize the experience of both those passengers arriving and departing and those switching flights in London.

It will be interesting to see how international carriers respond to the runway freeze. One argument always made for Heathrow is its central place in time zones, between the Americas, Europe and Asia. But both Frankfurt and Paris have only an hour’s difference in their zones - and Britain is debating whether to lose its hour’s difference with the rest of western Europe. This could be the end of Heathrow’s long run as the European hub of choice for route planners.

Finally, though, environmentalists should take heart that at last somebody has drawn a line against unfettered expansion of airports. My crystal ball reveals that within ten to fifteen years airlines will be flying a new generation of airplanes that will be substantially greener: consuming up to thirty per cent less gas, cutting emissions by even more, and so quiet on takeoff and landing that you might think the engines have shut down. When this transformation meets similarly virtuous airport planning, flying won’t carry the social stigma it does now.

Related Stories
Pssst...don't tell anyone, but Clive Irving's would rather fly from London City Airport.  Back in November 2008, Clive Irving's visit to the above-mentioned crystal ball was particularly productive, resulting in a Condé Nast Traveler feature and video on "The Future of Flight."

Clive will take this island, thank you
Photo: William Abranowicz for Condé Nast Traveler

Caricatures of nations are often deeply embedded, but usually circulate in a discreet netherworld of bad jokes and old resentments. In Europe, the collapse of the Greek economy has changed that.

An ancient seismic rift has resurfaced, with a vengeance. It’s less anthropological than geographical: There are the Mediterranean Europeans, and then there are the rest.

Greece has become the poster child of Mediterranean laxity and Germany has become the most sanctimonious finger-wagging opponent of that laxity. The Greek situation is no joke, but it has revived the richest seams of comic material from the archives of European stereotypes.

So far, both extremes are playing their roles with gusto.

Greece may be the most delinquent state in the European Union, but it has company. Italy isn’t in danger of going bust, but just how it manages to have the semblance of running a disciplined economy while enjoying the world’s longest running beach party is a mystery. Spain has been crippled by a building bubble that was largely driven by the demand from northern Europeans for villas on the costas, so they can blame climate envy for their woes. Portugal is also a fiscal basket case but since it has an Atlantic and not Mediterranean climate it can at least avoid being lumped into the Club Med basket.

France is more complicated. Along with Germany, it has one of the two more robust economies in Europe. On the other hand, we all know how the work ethic evaporates on reaching France’s Mediterranean coast. In fact, I’ve always found that an incremental weakening of the will to work occurs once you get south of Lyon -  just at exactly that point where the cuisine changes from butter-based to one using olive oil.

Northern France, particularly the industrial belt around Lille and the old mining regions, is as distinct from southern France in its life style as Oslo is from Athens. The trick of pretending this is all one country, most effectively enforced by Napoleon, remains the major challenge facing any French president. Right now, since a Frenchman runs the European Central Bank and president Sarkozy is as stern in his lectures to Greece as Germany’s Angela Merkel, northern France is the face we are expected to believe in.

You can understand why northern Europeans, on discovering that Greeks can retire at the age of 53 with a comfortable pension, are less than enthusiastic about bailing them out. But this tension is not confined to basic economics.

Who has not wondered, as they laze on a diving platform off Portofino, savored an aperitif before dinner at Cap d’Antibes, or gazed for the first time on the caldera at Santorini, how it is that certain tribes had the intelligence long ago, on arriving at the Mediterranean, not to venture further north?

For there is, I am convinced, an instinct hard-wired into all of us not born on that vast, elaborately contoured and coddling sea, Mare Nostrum, Our Sea, that we got the short straw when it comes to the quality of life.  That is why such unseemly zeal is visible as the Greeks are told that they are going to have to suffer years of austerity as payback to their northern bankers. The rest of us are steaming mad not just at the decadence but at the amphitheatre in which it has been enjoyed.

There is, however, one thing the Greeks might do that could help. It was first suggested by a German politician in the heat of resentment, and the more I think about it the better it seems. They could sell their islands.

Or, at least, lease them on 100-year deals. Greece has no oil, but the islands could be a gusher. About 14 million people a year take their vacations in Greece, many of them on those idyllic islands. Right now this business is worth around 9.5 billion euros a year. But suppose you take the most popular and profitable islands and lease them to accomplished hotel and resort operators (many of whom already operating there repatriate their profits to distant tax havens) and price leases on an escalating scale according to the number of visitors, wouldn’t that 9.5 billion euros suddenly look paltry?

I was about to email this plan to Angela Gerekou, the Greek tourism minister. Alas, she was fired this week by prime minister Papandreou. Apparently her husband, a nightclub singer, owed 5.5m euros in unpaid taxes, putting him in a ubiquitous group of wealthy Greeks who have been cheating on their taxes for generations.

Ms Gerekou, a comely lass who once posed topless for a magazine, was about to launch an international ad campaign titled “You and Greece” which - I was about to propose to her - could be renamed “You Can Buy Greece.”  But there was, I discovered, another downside to offering ideas to the Greek National Tourist Office. They already owe 80m in unpaid bills on previous campaigns.

Anyway, guys, this idea is yours, gratis. I would just like a little island of my own, some time when nobody is looking.

Related Reading (aka a Guide to the Good Life)
Great Beaches of the World: Italy (Condé Nast Traveler)
Kayaking Italy's Amalfi Coast (Condé Nast Traveler)
The Great Greek Island Finder (Condé Nast Traveler)
Portugal's Simple Pleasures (Condé Nast Traveler)