Clive Alive

Goodbye Carnaby Street, Hello Brick Lane

2010-03-01T15:46:17Z

Nostalgia for a time and a place can sometimes end up being very disappointing. My latest experience of this was provided by walking down a street in London’s Soho district. Celebrational banners arched above, and many union jacks hung limp in the chilly drizzle. Carnaby Street was marking its 50th anniversary as the epicenter of the phase of British cultural history known as Swinging London.

For a brief while in the early 1960s this short street, with adjoining alleys, became a 24-hour carnival of youthful rebellion, expressed in radical fashions—male and female—music, and a hallucinogenic club scene.

There was a dizzy, infectious energy at large in London then. An astonishing creative insurrection was taking place. In the worlds of music, theater, literature, advertising, journalism, television, movies, art and design, a generational demolition crew changed forever the idea that Britain was a class-ridden, hidebound and culturally reactionary society, not to mention sexually repressed.

Because it was smack in the middle of London and had a cocky, in-your-face freshness to it, Carnaby Street became a favorite first stop for visitors who wished to find out if it really was true that the Brits were suddenly letting it all hang out.
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The April 15, 1966 issue of Time magazine had a cover story that dubbed London "The Swinging City" featuring a garish assembly of Carnaby-style frolics, but by then, as is so often the case when a trend becomes a brand, the street party was really over, and with it the “mod” look for men with its tight three-button jackets and drainpipe pants and florid shirts. (The most famous outcropping of this style was the collarless suit worn by the Beatles when they made Love Me Do in the fall of 1962—they were designed by a Soho tailor called Douglas Billings, with assistance from Paul McCartney, who met his wife, Linda Eastman, several years later in a club a block away from Carnaby Street.) The cultural change was, however, permanent and profound. Clearly, British pop music was suddenly a world force, and has remained so. More significantly, the idea that popular culture was somehow inferior to, and a disdained relative of, the traditional cultures was also buried. This generational revolution was mutually reinforcing—nobody running or policing any creative activity could afford to miss the bandwagon. Official censorship was abandoned; homosexuality was legalized; libertines were celebrated and the French felt really inferior in bed.

One surprising (and under-appreciated) agent of this huge broadening of public taste was a deeply bureaucratic and hitherto uptight institution called the BBC. Eventually, from music to drama, from journalism to movies, it was the BBC that sought out and promoted some of the finest talents. This odd, publicly-funded and inimitably British body, often attacked by its more philistine rivals in the media world (usually led by that great leveler, Rupert Murdoch) has turned out to be the real beneficiary and legatee of the so-called “Swinging” years.

In 1997 the estate of which Carnaby Street is the center was sold for 90 million pounds. Since then the new owners have attempted to remove the more tacky remnants that were living off the reputation of the original 1960s entrepreneurs. I took my walk on the first day of the much-hyped 50th anniversary and although the place was noticeably more decorous than it had been at its cheapest phase, it had no vestige of the wild street energy that I could remember from the early 1960s. (But then nor do I, who once sported floral shirts and Nehru jackets!)

For a similar phenomenon in contemporary London you have to go a few miles east, to the multi-ethnic neighborhoods of Spitalfields and Brick Lane.

Mixed in with the Bangladeshi restaurants (great curry) and a mosque (where there was once a synagogue) are some of London’s most innovative design studios, art galleries and fashion-leading boutiques. In this most cosmopolitan of cities, it’s the collusion of ideas from both exotic and native sources that, once more, enlivens the scene with great originality and surprise.

Michelangelo Up Close and Personal

2010-02-24T18:00:13Z

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) The Dream, c. 1533
Photo: The Courtauld Gallery, London

You couldn’t get any closer to Michelangelo. There is nothing between you and the drawings, each little larger than a magazine page. It must be extremely rare to be able to see such masterpieces so intimately—as though you own them yourself and have hung them in a small, bare room so that nothing distracts from them. Except that nobody could own them, no matter how wealthy.

This is the setting for Michelangelo’s Dream, an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London. It centers on one drawing in black chalk by Michelangelo, made around 1533 (the year is not certain). Trying to describe it is like trying to arrest a cloud in the sky to explain its composition and destiny. Michelangelo won’t oblige: Everything in the frame seems evanescent as though one puff of breath might disperse it.

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The whole thing is weightless. Although the anchoring central figure is anatomically exact and seemingly at the peak of fitness he is, at the same time, as insubstantial as a feather. You feel that Michelangelo caught all these figures between appearing and disappearing, at the one moment of gravity before levitation. Hence the title, given to the drawing later, of Michelangelo’s Dream.

The drawing has an erotic history. It was made by Michaelangelo when he was in his late 50s. He had just encountered a young nobleman of great beauty, Tommaso de Cavalieri, then in his teens. It was love at first sight. Michaelangelo gave the dream drawing, and others called the “presentation” drawings to Tommaso and they were so stunning that other noble families of Rome, as well as a cardinal and the pope, came to view them. It was a key moment in renaissance art. Until then, drawings had been most commonly used as preparation for frescoes or paintings, monumental works. Now they were becoming accepted as masterpieces in their own right—and in their own intimate dimension.

At the Courtauld there are just thirteen drawings in all, eleven on the walls and two on a central pedestal, as well as letters and poems forming the correspondence between Michelangelo and de Cavalieri. There is no suggestion that the master’s passion was reciprocated and, eventually, the nobleman married, had children and appeared at Michelangelo’s deathbed among all those who had experienced the genius of his work at first hand.

The gallery has put together this narrative, pairing the central image with the presentation drawings, with the help of other sources. The fact that it is so small and displayed so simply and that you can spend as long as you choose with your nose almost pressed to the glass creates a transcendent viewing experience. I was transfixed by another of the drawings, of Phaeton’s fall from his coach in which the horses, all mighty steeds, tumble upside down through the air like hastily discarded clothes.

The book published with the show is, inevitably, bulky with learned discourses on the provenance of the drawings and the meaning of the images but you don’t need that kind of trumpet pinned to your own forehead. Just let the drawings lead you into their own elusive dimension, like a dream, and wonder at the fragile sublimity of it all.

The Courtauld is itself one of London’s little jewels, (part of a complex called Somerset House grouped around a blissful piazza) and its permanent collection of impressionists and post-impressionists is exhibited in the same, homey-feeling rooms—one of the key pieces is Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere in which the soulful stare of the barmaid is reflected in a mirror that also glimpses the reverie of fin de siècle Paris—absinthe made the heart grow fonder.

Michelangelo’s Dream runs until May 16. Visit courtauld.ac.uk for details where you can also watch two videos explaining the history and background of the exhibits. Admission:

Adult: £5.00, concessions: £4.00
Free admission: Mondays 10 am to 2 pm, except public holidays
Free at all times for under 18s, full-time UK students and unwaged

Beware a Frenchman on a Bicycle Selling Wine

2010-02-18T19:44:32Z

Here in London, wine buffs are toasting the exposure of the great French pinot noir scam. From January 2006 until March 2008, 13.5m liters of wine were shipped from producers in southwest France to E&J Gallo in the U.S. and sold under the Red Bicyclette label as pinot noir.

The demand for pinot noir had suddenly spiked as a result of the movie Sideways, in which this particular grape had been treated like the Holy Grail, largely to the detriment of merlot. Imagine the embarrassment when it turned out that Red Bicyclette was composed either of the scorned merlot or shiraz, with nary a droplet of pinot noir.

This week a French court delivered heavy fines to the fraudsters, ranging from the head of Ducasse wine merchants to eight co-operatives who produced the wine.

The forensic story that unfolded reminded me of the running joke about Tuscan olive oil: If Tuscany really produced all the olive oil sold with its name as the provenance, the entire province would be covered in olive orchards, leaving no room for the cities of Florence and Siena. In this case, French sleuths figured out that the volume of pinot noir headed for the Red Bicyclette bottlings was many times the actual amount, limited by regulation, produced in the Languedoc region to the southeast of Toulouse.
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Second, Brits are constantly complaining that if you buy wine in France anywhere outside Paris, it’s often impossible to find anything of quality that isn’t French. In many restaurants and bars, as I can attest, the attitude suggests that nothing respectable is ever produced beyond French borders.

So the Red Bicyclette experience seems to prove what the Brits have been saying for years: label integrity in France is highly suspect. Partly to keep out the highly competitive wines from Italy and Spain, French producers swamp their own markets with dubious plonk and some of it is, I would bet, not as advertised.

Third, anybody who takes a sip of a wine purporting to be pinot noir that is, in fact, either merlot or shiraz has no palate experience to bring to the table. The difference in the grapes is so vast. Pinot noir does come in varying styles from the pale and simple to the beguilingly dark and complex, and a lot of it is sold too young for it to honor the potential, but merlot or shiraz it ain’t. (Merlot never deserved the bad rap of Sideways, anyway. To be sure, it’s a tricky grape to grow and handle, and does produce a lot of mediocre wine, but at its best it’s supple and inimitable.)

Personally, I’m not celebrating the debacle of Red Bicyclette—although I am amazed that Gallo was so easily conned—because the two dominant wine regions of southwest France, Languedoc and Roussillon, now produce many wines the equals of far snootier vineyards in Burgundy and Bordeaux.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first time a leading Californian wine maker has been burned in the Languedoc. Some years ago, Robert and Tim Mondavi, recognizing the potential of undeveloped land, attempted to buy a piece of it. At the mere mention of American interlopers, the locals rose up, led by some communist politicians, and in the end the Mondavis retired, much wiser about how irrationally xenophobic the French can be, and how short their memory is of who liberated them in 1944.

One reason the Mondavis wanted vineyards in the Languedoc was the stature of a relative newcomer to the region, Mas de Daumas Gassac. The reds from this producer have been real bargains for twenty years. The 2005 vintage, in particular, is outstanding and you can find it at around 25 bucks a bottle from several merchants, including empirewine.com.

My final caution: Never drink wine with daft names, otherwise you can be taken for a ride.

Jet Lag? Just Lie Back and Enjoy it!

2010-02-16T17:39:25Z

Photo: olaerik / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I am surrounded by colleagues who are taking part in an experiment to determine if jet lag can be tamed. They have formed an ad hoc test group to try out various drug cocktails and regimes. Some of them are flying through as many time zones as one trip can accommodate. Body clocks, real clocks, circadian rhythms, night and day, every conceivable challenge is being endured in the interests of research.

For as long as this magazine has existed, jet lag has been a constant topic, ranging from claims to have a cure to the kind of empirical reporting now under way in the hope of finding, if not a cure, at least some relief.

And long before the magazine existed, I have steadfastly resisted all the nostrums. Even though one of my oldest friends was involved in developing the use of melatonin as a jet lag treatment—and as a globe-girdling doctor in high demand he was his own guinea pig—I swallowed neither the argument nor the pill. Never.

At one point in my career I had to commute weekly between London and New York, often to be found wherever there were three empty seats in the back covered in a blanket and snoozing happily.

My inspiration for handling this experience was a colleague who flew even more frequently than I did. His advice was not medical, but simple: “I tell my body what time it is, and it believes me.”
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I cannot match that kind of self-induced body and mind control, but I have always found that when traveling with others who have dosed, napped and generally followed medical recommendations. I have noticed that it is they who seem to replicate the survivors of a train wreck on arrival whereas I can breeze through the airport all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

After one flight from London to Sydney, I was whipped directly from the plane to a sports stadium, where I had to interview, on camera, some terrifyingly muscular heroes of the violent sport known as Australian football. I did it without blinking, while others who had flown with me and dosed on melatonin seemed still to be circling above in a holding pattern.

Only once has my composure been intimidated by a fellow traveler. Early one morning, arriving at Malpensa, the woeful international airport serving Milan, I had just reached the tarmac from the rear stairs of the plane when I was hailed by someone descending from the front.

It turned out to be the then publisher of Vogue, the illustrious bible of high fashion and a fellow Condé Nast publication. He was headed for Milan's fashion week, and I was headed for the hills of Piedmont and the bounty of its vineyards and pig farms.

At this hour, a little after sunrise, surrounded by a typical Piedmontese fog that, even in spring, can chill you to the quick, the publisher was so polished, so impeccably suited, so spotless in grooming, so uncreased in every sense, and so gung-ho, he sucked the smugness right out of me. I felt like a refugee from a frat party.

“How do you do it?” I asked him, lamely.

“Do what?”

“Look like that at this time of the morning?”

He seemed finally to have taken in my back-of-the-plane patina.

“I tell my body what time it is and it believes me” he said.

Kermit Tyler - Requiem for Pearl Harbor's Fall Guy

2010-02-09T15:47:27Z

History has a way of not going quietly. When I looked for a suitable name to attach to my award for dilatory performance from our intelligence agencies, I chose Kermit Tyler’s, that of the young army officer who was on duty near Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. Famously, he received a call from the operators of a radar station saying that something large was approaching Hawaii and told them to “Forget it.” The something large was the first wave of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.''

It turns out that Tyler died within a week of my announcement of the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready. He was 98 years old.

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In my defense I have to point out that I was careful in my explanation of Tyler’s place in history to say that he had a bum rap--that there were many other examples of dereliction that left America so unprepared to meet the sneak attack from the Japanese that Sunday morning.

That, however, was not enough to lessen the impact of my choice on Tyler’s family and friends.

So here is a bit more background that I hope puts his actions in a broader perspective.
I first came across an account of Tyler’s role, some years ago, in the Hawaii Army Museum in Honolulu. (This is a museum that every visitor to Hawaii should visit. Apart from other virtues, it conveys a sense of the hardships suffered by the people of Hawaii during the war, a story too seldom told.)

After that, I checked out the story of the radar station and its almost accidental interception of the approaching Japanese bombers in other sources. Sure enough, Tyler’s role featured in all of them.

What was more startling, though, was the way in which the picture of Pearl Harbor’s defenses being unprepared for war fed into a burgeoning industry of conspiracy theories. All these theories, no matter how preposterous they were, led to one prevailing belief, that President Roosevelt, abetted by others in his Administration, had deliberately ignored numerous clues and warnings that Pearl Harbor would be attacked before any formal declaration of war by Japan.

Why would that be?

Because FDR, by then under the intoxicating (literally) spell of Winston Churchill, a frequent whiskey-imbibing guest at the White House, had been persuaded that only the entry of the United States into the war could ensure the defeat of the Axis powers--Japan, Germany and Italy. Britain stood alone as an outpost of liberty in Europe, but was perilously exposed. Should Britain go down, fascists would rule the world and America, in the end, would have to play along.

In one popular scenario supporting the idea of Roosevelt binning inconvenient truths, the United States had cracked the Japanese codes and had, via an intelligence gathering outfit in San Francisco, learned of a massive naval armada sailing in the Pacific that could have only one target: Pearl Harbor. Although the Japanese fleet had maintained radio silence to avoid detection, the San Francisco intercepts had, it was said, correctly detected its departure and purpose. (This issue of code-breaking becomes doubly conspiratorial because the British had, in fact, cracked crucial German codes but didn’t want to take any action, including warning America, if it carried the risk of the Germans realizing that their codes were useless.)

Other intelligence from Switzerland, where both spies and diplomats were tracking Japan’s increasingly belligerent games with U.S. diplomats, suggested that the Japanese diplomats in Washington were - acting in bad faith - deliberately stalling until the bombs fell on an unprepared American fleet in the harbor. And that FDR had been suckered by this tactic.

On a more immediate and concrete military issue, there were reports that U.S. warships patrolling the ocean immediately beyond Pearl Harbor had detected - and sunk - one or several miniature submarines sent by Japan to penetrate the harbor and torpedo some of the battleships at anchor there. (In fact, new research proves that at least one of these miniature subs did actually make it into the harbor and was sunk there.)

The truth is inconvenient to the heroics of Michael Bay’s 2001 epic movie, Pearl Harbor, which suggests that if the flyboys had been able to respond to the radar warning that Kermit Tyler dismissed they could have been airborne in sufficient numbers to decimate the attackers. In fact, such was the status of the air defenses on December 7 that it would have taken as long as two hours to have got all the U.S. fighters into the air. (They were all parked in long lines together, and therefore far easier to destroy, rather than being dispersed as they should have been over several airfields and in small batches, the device that had helped to save the R.A.F. in the Battle of Britain a year earlier.)

The scapegoat essential to the myths of both Pearl Harbor and Tora Tora Tora, a better and older movie (1970) telling the story from the Japanese viewpoint, is the radar episode. And so at the center of this myth stands the hapless Kermit Tyler, who has been used not just as the fall guy but as the dominant metaphor, to embody in one person and bite-sized image the idea of a defeat snatched from what might have been the jaws of a victory -- a successful defense of Pearl Harbor.

Unfortunately myths of this popularity are almost impossible to kill. They possess the universal appeal of utter simplicity. Far simpler than what was actually responsible for the Pearl Harbor debacle, a pervasive complacency and sense of security in the top brass, even though war was by then inevitable. Add to this all the deceptions and conflicting motives of the key players and you begin to see the scale of the plot that Kermit Tyler found himself trapped in and was traduced by.

And the scary bit? That today’s war games are just as real, just as complex and just as likely to produce scapegoats as those of December, 1941.

Related Stories on CliveAliveTruth.Travel
The Bomber Who Got Through
Announcing the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready

Plan B, the Jockstrap Bomber’s Victory

2010-02-03T16:26:02Z

Clockwise from top left: A Jan. 10 Berlin protest against body scanners; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (AP); a released TSA image of a body scan; acting TSA administrator Gale Rossides; a TSA agent in action

Did Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Jockstrap Bomber, really fail? In his principal objective, to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, he surely did fail. But if you were his Al Qaeda controller, that disappointment would be tempered by some clear gains.

Terrorists make a close study of everything that follows an attack, whether it works or not. Given the gravity of the security crisis facing America, this is a time of surprising transparency in our anti-terrorism agencies. For example, every day brings new details about the de-briefing of Abdulmutallab as the Administration defends its decision to try him in a Federal court.

The motive is obviously to demonstrate that FBI interrogations are far more effective than waterboarding.

The latest picture of these de-briefings includes the influence of Abdulmutallab’s parents, who were flown here from Nigeria. One leaked detail is particularly striking: Abdulmutallab regarded himself as a suicide bomber - he wanted nothing short of blowing himself up, along with the airplane. The fact that he did not has apparently left him feeling ashamed.

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For Al Qaeda’s handlers, this would be Plan B.

Not only can they rejoice in the economic cost inflicted by Operation Jockstrap, they have been treated to a valuable series of stories about how slack our counter-intelligence services are, how sluggish is their monitoring of passenger lists because the government has archaic computer systems, and they must be really pleased with the politicians who continue to fail to appoint a professional to run the Transportation Safety Authority. (What is it that these pols still don’t get about terrorism?)

Beyond these clear and revealed weaknesses, however, are others that the terrorists will be able to monitor. Indeed, you could say that they long ago wrote the script that our security chiefs now perform on a daily basis. First, the knee-jerk response. Next the concentration of resources to stop the last attempt, not the next. To which add the new dividend which is all the public hand-wringing that shows how dumb we can be.

Yesterday a collection of the nation’s intelligence chiefs testified in Washington that they more or less expect another Al Qaeda attack any moment. That gets them off the hook of looking complacent but it doesn’t suggest their mastery in the art of out-guessing our enemies.

The latest flavor in the academy of counter-intelligence thinkers is the unidentified sleeper - somebody who, unlike loners dispatched after training like the Jockstrap Bomber, has been successfully based here for years and has kept off the surveillance lists. At the same time, they would be scouting for targets and preparing to exploit a weak point that the reactive guardians of our safety have neglected.

The really tough question here is, are Al Qaeda still obsessed with another big hit involving aviation, or was the Christmas Day attack really a very clever diversion, to have us galloping off again in the direction they want us to, while they are aiming at something completely different?

My guess would be that aviation remains the target capable of delivering the most spectacular results required to feed Al Qaeda’s need for mass coverage in the 24-hour global news cycle. People who have looked at our aviation security over the years still point to serious shortcomings - airport perimeters, for one, where missile attacks could be staged, as well as bombs in checked baggage and cargo.

Let’s hope that Plan B doesn’t turn into Plan A next time.

Related Stories on Truth.Travel
Where is the TSA Chief?
Announcing the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready
Who Really Picked Seat 19A?
Fearing the Fear Related to the Dec. 25 Terrorist Attempt
What About the Baggage Below?
New TSA rules: Déjà Vu All Over Again

The Bomber Who Got Through: Mea Culpa But We’re Still Working On It

2010-01-20T19:10:35Z

The nation’s top counterterrorism chiefs admitted today what we already knew: They had plenty of clues about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallah’s long-hatched plan to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day but didn’t add them up.

Michael Leiter, the Director of the National Terrorism Center (pictured at left), testified to Congress that “Abdulmutallah should not have stepped on that plane. The counterterrorism system failed and I told the president we are determined to do better.”

He had company. This mea culpa, presented to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, was also signed by Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence. Blair conceded that he failed to assign sufficient numbers of intelligence analysts to piece together the different tips that had come in-including the warning from Abdullmutallah’s own father delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and an intercept from terrorists in the Yemen that included the jockstrap bomber’s first name.

I would hope that the president is more than disappointed with these guys. He should be hopping mad. Because, as it turns out, he called a meeting just before Christmas to review intelligence suggesting that an attack was impending.

So the situation in the White House was not unlike that in August 2001, that summer of blissful inattention, when Condoleezza Rice saw an intelligence report that Osama Bin Laden intended to attack the United States but did nothing about it. Except that this time the president, given what is called “the chatter” picked up by our intelligence watchdogs, did want something done about it-heightened vigilance.

Instead, the newly penitent Leiter went on a skiing vacation.

It’s worth calling attention to something that Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a press conference at the Pentagon last week. This event was, understandably, greatly overshadowed by the earthquake in Haiti.

Gates was talking about the case of Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the army psychiatrist who killed thirteen people at Ford Hood army base in Texas. In this instance there was a protracted failure to pick up many warning signs that Hassan was unstable and had probably been recruited by the same people in Yemen who found and dispatched Abdulmutallah.

This is what Gates said: “In this area, as in so many others, this department is burdened by 20th century processes and attitudes, mostly rooted in the cold war. Our counterintelligence procedures are mostly designed to combat an external threat such as a foreign intelligence service.” (Italics mine).

This is a truly alarming glimpse into the heart of the apparatus that’s supposed to ensure our security. I have great respect for Secretary Gates-he’s got a job that carries enormous responsibility, he’s shown a robust resistance to politicizing that post, and he’s often refreshingly candid. So we should take good note, and do something that the counterterrorism establishment says it failed to do, and connect the dots-connect Gates’s picture of seriously out-dated systems with today’s confession to Congress of missing all the clues to the Christmas Day plot.

We don’t just have a bureaucratic problem-though that is big enough, with counterterrorism responsibilities dispersed through many fiefdoms. We have an obviously obsolete technology trying to match the most dangerous low-tech operators in the world. That’s a fascinating if worrying tension and one quite new to warfare. In order to be on top of our game we need the most nimble and deep-searching surveillance technology, good enough to arrest the progress of a guy who lines his underpants with explosive-or, who arms his rectum. Remember, they began with box cutters and worked backwards from there. Who really understands this?

And do these touching public confessions of failure make us feel more confident of the people making them? Not in my case. Today the clueless Michael Leiter did more to earn my new Kermit Tyler award than he did by enjoying his Christmas vacation.

Related Stories on Truth.Travel
Announcing the Kermit Tyler Award for America the Unready
Who Really Picked Seat 19A?
Fearing the Fear Related to the Dec. 25 Terrorist Attempt
What About the Baggage Below?
New TSA rules: Déjà Vu All Over Again

The Last People Out Alive

2010-01-15T14:26:34Z

Photos: Staff Sergeant Preston Chasteen / DefenseImagery.mil; Logan Abassi / UN Photo

The night after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City in April, 1995, Bob Burton, a volunteer firefighter, went into a dangerous part of the collapsed building known by then as The Pit and heard an isolated cry for help. He found a young woman buried and asked what her name was. “Brandi” she said. She was fifteen. “I was lying sandwiched between rebar and concrete,” Burton recalled, “and, looking up for the first time, I noticed huge chunks of concrete dangling from the rebar. I thought, this is not a safe situation.” With help from others, Burton freed Brandi Liggons from The Pit. She was the last person to come out of the building alive - some 15 hours after the blast.

I arrived in Oklahoma City a day after that scene. Burton was one of hundreds of rescue workers interviewed for a book that I edited (In Their Name, Random House, 1995) on what was, back then, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Talking to the rescue crews and survivors gave me a quick and concentrated education on the skills needed to find and save people trapped in collapsed buildings.

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It was Ray Downey who impressed on me that after a building collapses you have a very limited time to get the people and equipment in place to give yourself a chance of bringing out people alive. (An architect was pulled alive out of a building in Port au Prince after falling three floors into a void, something Downey called “taking the slide.”) This is why, looking at the catastrophe in Haiti, I see the Alfred R. Murrah building multiplied thousands of times and realize how appallingly inadequate the resources are for rescue.

It was my frustration at seeing this that made me so critical of the way the resources of the U.S. were deployed in the first 36 hours in Haiti. Last night, in an interview on the PBS Newshour, President Clinton said that it was clear that nobody was yet in charge of the rescue effort. As the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, President Clinton knows the Haitian tragedy with intimate pain. His U.N. staff itself has suffered grievous losses.

What was needed in the first days was an improvised and opportunistic first response to get the heavy lifting machinery, search and rescue crews and medical supplies on the ground. This was the largest triage field the world has ever known since the plague.

What we saw instead was a classic military plan-to assess from the air and from the ground what the impact was, what the logistical challenges would be, and what resources could be marshaled for the task. I have been called to task by a reader for not understanding that “Logistical triage is comparable to medical triage. It has to take place first if you want to be successful.”

I do understand this. But under these circumstance I have a real problem with that classic military habit of mind. As the 19th century chief of staff of the Prussian Army, Helmuth von Moltke, warned: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” In this case what nobody in Washington seems to have grasped is that no plan will survive first contact with a disaster of this scale. Sometimes you can have too much planning and too little action. That is what happened. We have lost the moment when “reading the wreck” could have had its maximum opportunity.

No point in lamenting that any more. Search and rescue teams from Virginia and California (the same places that sent teams to Oklahoma City) did get in, as did others from Europe, Asia and the Americas. Now the chokepoint is, predictably, the airfield at Port au Prince, which lost its air traffic control equipment. It’s now under the control of the U.S. military, using portable ATC facilities. But the problem is not just getting planes in and out, there are limited parking spaces on the tarmac and, with the power out, meager resources for unloading and fueling.

And here is a poignant detail: NPR reported this morning that one aid group has been flying from Florida into Port au Prince for days using a DC-3, a World War II vintage transport-an airplane capable of landing on grass if the earth beneath is firm and dry and of parking there if necessary. Which reminds me of one of the true wonders of American military logistics, the Berlin airlift carried out between June 1948 and May 1949 that saved the city when the Russians blockaded the road and rail connections, trying to starve the population. Haiti, which today truly resembles hell on earth, will need that kind of vision, courage and skill to get through.

Complete Haiti Coverage on Truth.Travel

Haiti Earthquake Coverage on Truth.Travel
Helping Haiti
Where are the Americans?
My Hope for Haiti
Help Population Services International Help Haiti

Where are the Americans?

2010-01-14T15:47:35Z

President Obama understood the urgency. Announcing the relief effort aimed at the earthquake in Haiti he said yesterday that the first 36 hours were the most critical. As anyone watching the harrowing scenes unfolding street by street, block by block, building by building can see, people are tearing away at debris with their bare hands trying to reach others trapped under layers of concrete. And the thousands lucky enough to crawl out or otherwise escape often have severe internal injuries, invisible as they lie on the streets. Haiti is like one huge triage scene with nobody co-ordinating the medical priorities, knowing and seizing the opportunity to save lives according to need - or the search and rescue operations. The humanitarian work being done so far is improvised and being carried out by whomever has the means to do it.

So where are the Americans?

A few civilian units equipped with dogs and specialized equipment have reached the devastation. All day yesterday the Pentagon flew over the area “making assessments.” These overflights were coordinated with a handful of military units also making “assessments” on the ground, directed by an officer who luckily happened already to be in Haiti.

(Ok...one handful of Americans--special operations no less--did make an early impact.)

Meanwhile, this morning, one large Chinese transport plane landed at Port Au Prince with 100 specially trained people ready to go into action, and three French transports also landed. Another piece of luck-the main runway is usable, although the control tower has been destroyed and normal air traffic control is impossible until emergency equipment can replace the tower.

The Pentagon’s strategy, as outlined yesterday, made the point that until the scale of the disaster can be properly “assessed” it will be impossible to effectively assign the right forces with the right skills-all very sensible, if you are following a management by committee playbook but not if you are dealing with the imperatives of a huge natural disaster.

The clock is ticking.

Anybody watching CNN for half an hour can make an assessment. The result: Get there as fast as you can because the President had it right. The time to save lives is running out, fast. Every minute counts.

Sounding like the familiar Washington buck-passing game, a Pentagon spokesman said that the effort was being coordinated by USAID, which is part of the State Department-in other words, over to you, Hillary. The Secretary of State canceled her Asian trip. She understands. And her husband, President Clinton, has been making frequent appeals-his role is personal and knowledgeable. But they don’t control the boots and the airplanes.

Normally international relief efforts involve negotiating with the stricken state's government, military and social services heads. Haiti has virtually no functioning government and very few resources. So there were no political or diplomatic restraints to immediate action. In fact, what seems absent from the approach adopted by Pentagon planners is not how to provide command and control once their whole operation has emerged (I'm sure they have that well rehearsed), but an effective first response capacity. The Air Force's C17 heavy lifters are the only way to get the kind of cranes and lifting gear into place quickly that Haiti urgently needs if those still trapped but alive have any hope of being saved.

Never have we needed boots on the ground faster. The hospital ship and aircraft carrier steaming to Haiti won’t be there in time to really make a difference in this fast dwindling window of opportunity.

The Pentagon has already failed the President. And the people of Haiti.

Complete Haiti Coverage on Truth.Travel

Announcing the Kermit Tyler Award for America The Unready

2010-01-13T15:19:15Z

When all the metaphors (not joining the dots, stove-piping data) have been exhausted in describing the failure to provide advance warning of the Christmas Day bomber we need to forget the technology and, instead, renew our study of one thing, the human mind. Agencies may be equipped with data digestive tracts that can process the equivalent of the contents of the entire Library of Congress in a few seconds but all this is useless if no mortal is engaged to spot what nuggets among the torrent are significant.

The President spoke of systemic failure. But systems are managed by people. And in the hope of instilling an uncommon sense of accountability, I have decided to institute an award, given to an individual who, responsible for keeping the nation safe, spectacularly drops the ball. This award is named for Lt. Kermit Tyler of the U.S. Army.

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They called it in. Lt Tyler picked up the phone, listened to their report and said “Forget it.”

The radar had picked up the first of the two waves of Japanese bombers that would virtually wipe out the naval force at anchor in Pearl Harbor.

It has to be said that poor old Kermit has had a bum rap. It was only his second day on the job. There had been a lot of false alarms from inexperienced radar operators. None of the people involved in this early warning system had really been properly trained and most of them thought radar was an annoying box of tricks. And even had Tyler called his superior officers to suggest an impending attack they would probably have told him to get lost-there were plenty of examples, that Sunday morning, of the top brass enjoying the brain rest of the unguarded living in Nirvana.

Nonetheless, the hapless Tyler now lives in history as the guy who said “Forget it” when the Japanese were coming over the horizon and America was rudely introduced to the Second World War.

There are several things that make this tale pertinent. The first is that in order to be alert to a threat you really have to believe that there is one. The second one is that if you find yourself the guy who has the actionable information you need a command structure that will actually take action, once given the stuff. But the third factor is psychological and cultural: When are we most likely to be inattentive, to have our guard down?

The Japanese deliberately timed their attack for early Sunday morning because they knew that this would be, by custom, when many on the military bases would be stood-down, heading for church or otherwise relaxing. In 1939, Hitler timed his attack on Poland because the Nazis, who were oddly in awe of the English upper classes and their recreational tastes, thought that Britain’s ruling caste, political and military, would be shooting grouse on the Scottish moors and, therefore, that they would be slow to react-Britain had said that it would regard an attack on Poland as reason to go to war against Germany.

If Al Qaeda knew anything, it was that a similar state of unreadiness would be found in the United States on the night before Christmas, when Abdulmutallab was due to board his flight for Detroit in Amsterdam. Even though a successful attack on Christmas Day would have been portrayed as a victory against the Christian “crusaders” the timing was as much one of military opportunity as of symbolism. The whole country was either exhausted from shopping, enjoying a trance of Dickensian reverie, or just asleep.

And the terrorists were right.

We know now that Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, had taken off for a six-day skiing vacation-and was, incredibly, still on the slopes days after the attempted attack. We don’t yet know what the manning levels were at key places in the monitoring of incoming flight passenger lists - for example, at the National Targeting Center whose job is to screen those lists. (Apparently Abdulmutallab’s name raised a red flag after his flight was in the air, and he was marked down for an interview on landing, which hints, to say the least, at holiday-level understaffing.)

I would not be at all surprised if a Pearl Harbor laxity had not reduced both the number of people on duty throughout all the agencies that now process intelligence and their alertness as the juices of a promised Christmas banquet shaped their mood. Al Qaeda know our habits, it’s high time we learned theirs.

So it is because he symbolizes so perfectly this mindset that I now give the first Kermit Tyler Award for America The Unready to Michael Leiter, to be shared with his boss, John Brennan, the White House security chief, who saw nothing amiss in Leiter’s relaxed performance.

The trophy does not actually yet exist, but what I have in mind is a brass bust of Tyler wearing a blindfold, with the legend engraved on a plate beneath: “Forget it.”

Footnote: Radar was developed by the British in the 1930s and a case can be made that it virtually saved western civilization. In 1940 Britain was the last, offshore outpost of freedom in Europe. That summer, a handful of RAF fighter pilots so decimated Hitler’s bombers that he called off his invasion of the United Kingdom. The RAF had designed and rehearsed an amazingly sophisticated radar-led early warning system that - in the very marginal Battle of Britain - tipped the balance in favor of the outnumbered defenders, and the British held out until Pearl Harbor guaranteed their survival by delivering their mightiest ally. After Pearl Harbor British technicians were dispatched to the U.S. to explain how to use radar effectively.

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Who Really Picked Seat 19A?

2010-01-06T19:40:32Z

Image: Apologies to SeatGuru.com

If the so-called Jockstrap Bomber had detonated his device, would it have brought down the airplane? Among the many unanswered questions about the plan followed by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab are several involving his position in seat 19A, a window seat in the left side of the cabin. Two questions, particularly: Did he get to choose that seat and, if so, why?

If you wanted to bring down the Airbus A330 with a compact explosive device, like the one embedded in Abdulmutallab’s underpants, you would try to hit the most vulnerable part of the airplane. Al Qaeda’s technical planners have proved themselves experts in the detail of aviation operations. Their training of the 9/11 hijackers was just enough to equip them with the skills to fly an airliner precisely into targeted buildings. They would surely have studied the architecture of the Airbus to decide where a bomb would be most effective. And as an engineering student, Abdulmutallab would have been a quick study.
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Detonating the device from that seat would appear to be a three-way bet. It was next to a window and would blow a hole in the airplane’s skin; it would, at the same time, ignite a fire and, if the blast did penetrate the fuel tank then the airplane would explode into a ball of fire.

But it’s not so simple. That center fuel tank is part of what is called the wing box, a structure that anchors the wings to the fuselage and absorbs the greatest stresses of flight. For this reason, it is one of the strongest parts of the airplane. Also, Northwest Flight 253 was in the last phase of a long trans-oceanic flight and the main fuel tank would have been by then very light in fuel. It’s true that even a small amount of fuel would still have been enough to ensure the success of the bomber’s mission, but only if that tough wing box had been penetrated.

The first wave of the blast, blowing a hole in the skin of the fuselage, would trigger what is called an explosive decompression. The cabin air is kept at a pressure equivalent to a height of around 8,000 feet. The higher the flight is, the greater the difference between the pressure outside as the density of the air thins out and the stable pressure inside. It’s this differential that, literally, sucks air out of the cabin in an explosive decompression. But - once again - since the Northwest Airbus was already well into its descent, about half an hour to touchdown, when the attempt to detonate the bomb was made, the pressure differential would have been far less than if it happened at cruise altitude, 36,000 feet.

There are two past events that give some indication that Flight 253 could have survived the bomb. In 1988 a Boeing 737 of Aloha Airlines was cruising at 24,000 feet and approaching Honolulu. Suddenly a huge part of the cabin’s roof ripped away, exposing passengers to sudden decompression. Amazingly, the pilot was able to land. Sixty-one of the 90 passengers aboard were injured, most of them superficially, but one flight attendant was sucked out and fell to her death. (The 737 was old and undetected corrosion had fatally weakened the fuselage.)

Perhaps more analogous, there is the case of TWA Flight 840 that was flying from Rome to Cairo in 1986 when a bomb went off in the cabin-planted under seat 10F, probably inside a life jacket. The blast blew a hole six feet by three feet in the skin of the cabin just ahead of the wings on the right side. The airplane was passing over Greece at the time. Four passengers seated closest to the gaping hole were sucked out, but the rest of the 118 passengers and crew survived. (Nobody has ever been convicted of the bombing but the prime suspect was the Abu Nidal terrorist organization.)

The TWA airplane was a Boeing 727 and, although larger than the Aloha 737, shared exactly the same fuselage. This was an old design, dating from the first generation of Boeing jets introduced in the late 1950s. If those airplanes proved as rugged as they did, then the Northwest Airbus, far more modern and sophisticated in its structure, should have had an even better chance of holding together.

If Abdulmutallab had been instructed to find a window seat in a row over the wings, when and how did he achieve this? He paid in cash, which means that it was not the kind of online booking where you can pre-select a seat. Also, he had to make sure of getting this seat on the second leg of the flight from Nigeria, the Amsterdam to Detroit leg. Getting to the bottom of his ticketing and seat selection is vital to understanding just how deliberately and skillfully planned this trip was.

There has been speculation about why, having gone into a toilet to rig his weapon, Abdulmutallab did not remain there, where he could not have been as easily detected and subdued by passengers and cabin crew. Toilets are fitted with smoke alarms, but by the time they were triggered it would have been too late. The fact that he didn’t take this course of action, when it was so easy to do, suggests that his planners knew that the toilets were in a far less attractive (to them) part of the airplane. Instead of a fuel tank underneath, there was a cargo hold. A blast in that location would have, at the very least, caused some kind of explosive decompression, but this would not necessarily have been disastrous.

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Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself

2010-01-04T16:38:34Z

Source: Transportation Security Administration

We are afflicted by two kinds of terrorism: The actual attacks, and the fear of attacks. Attacks on the United States itself have been severely curtailed. But the fear of attacks is far more devastating and enduring in its effects. Al Qaeda long ago understood the power of mass psychology and has used it expertly. As a result, the real scale of their threat has been multiplied many times in the American public’s post-9/11 mindset.

The economic cost of this has been incalculable. We have invested in huge new federal bureaucracies. We have dedicated cost-is-no-object resources to the intelligence gathering agencies. And the burden now carried by the travel industry, including the reinforcement of airports, the security surcharges made by airlines and the repeated blows to the prospects of the hotel industry all add up to many billions annually.

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Looked at in purely military terms, the targeting of airliners doesn’t make a lot of sense if what you really want to achieve is to paralyze a country and spread panic. Blowing up a nuclear power plant, sabotaging the master controls of the national power grid or a skilled cyber attack on our communications networks would present real threats to public order and confidence.

The 9/11 plan to use airliners as bombs to strike national icons in New York and Washington did show a far larger ambition than just taking out the airliners. Since then, however, it seems that Al Qaeda has realized what a force-multiplier it would be to bring down just one jet--particularly if it happened on Christmas Day. They watch our dependence on flying, see the vulnerabilities and keep on trying: Mixing two seemingly harmless liquids to make a bomb; converting a sneaker into a grenade; arming a jockstrap. The technology is widely touted on the Internet, and all it takes is one carefully indoctrinated and trained recruit to carry out the operation.

But what is it that really makes us more jumpy these days--the fear of one of these attackers succeeding, or the spectacle of federal agencies once more failing to connect the intelligence tips and the endless confusions of airport security and the rules about when we can and cannot use a toilet on the airplane?

Let’s try to get this in perspective. There is a little-known but crucial government agency called the National Targeting Center, based in a Washington suburb. Each day it alone is responsible for looking at the passenger lists of every flight originating abroad that’s headed for the U.S. None of these flights can leave the gate until the passenger list has been cleared by the NTC within two hours of departure time. When you buy a seat on those flights you submit what is called your API - advance passenger information. If my own experience is anything to go by, this is constantly scrutinized because each time I make a reservation I have either to confirm that there has been no change in my status or revise the details.

In a hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security that went largely unnoticed on December 9, last year, a statement by the NTC revealed that on any one day the Center identified 178 (strangely exact number, right?) “targets of interest” on the passenger lists they screened, and “initiated and completed research on approximately 328 individuals.”

This is where the rubber really hits the road. If the rest of the intelligence system works, and this means especially the efficacy of the watch and no-fly lists, it’s the NTC (which from sheer guesswork I would say probably doesn’t have more than 100 screeners) that is the last line of defense, where the red flag goes up and the ominous passenger is intercepted. Of course, my caveat is huge. But at least the diagram is exact-instead of hundreds of thousands of turf-conscious bureaucrats creating organized chaos, here is one coherently designed gate to do the job that can’t be done with pat-downs or even full body screening.

And, by the way, when it comes to that full body screening. If anyone remains so convinced of the uniqueness of their own private parts that they would rather not have them innocuously scanned at an airport they should just stay home. The rest of us want to keep flying.

Related:
On the Fly's Barbara Peterson goes undercover as a TSA screener
The TSA's new guidelines for international flights to the U.S.

The Airline Safety Debate: What About the Baggage Below?

2009-12-29T17:01:24Z

Photo: bunchofpants/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In The Daily Beast Clive Irving, the senior consulting editor here at Condé Nast Traveler, says Obama's renewed focus on searching passengers after Flight 253 leaves larger security flaws lurking. Read below for his thoughts on inadequate bag screenings and the bureaucratic nightmare of the TSA.

Forgive me, but presidential orders to review airport security are a day or two late and more than a dollar short. They are valid as far as they go, but as is usual in these knee-jerk responses, they address what has already happened, not what might happen.

On Saturday, a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Detroit was diverted to Iceland so that a bag could be unloaded—the bag had been put aboard without its owner. This occurred as the seriousness of the terrorist attack on Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit began to be fully understood. Why the Lufthansa flight was allowed to take off with an unattached bag is a puzzle. It’s not supposed to happen. Later, German sources said that the bag, like all others loaded, had been scanned by X-Ray.

This seemingly harmless skirmish does, however, remind us of something not being discussed in the typically reactive debate going on about airline safety: the security of the other half of the airplane that we don’t sit in, the baggage holds below.

After the 9/11 attacks, with the woeful state of U.S. airport security exposed, one of the key tasks of the new Transportation Safety Administration was to implement measures as fast as possible to screen all checked bags. This was tough for at least two reasons—the time it took to commission new electronic scanning systems and the shortage of space in terminals that weren't designed to accommodate those systems. That is why for years scanners have been freestanding and fully visible in many airport concourses.

These steps, improvised under pressure, are supposed to ensure that every bag loaded on an airplane in the U.S. has been properly screened. But as airports complied, that first generation of scanners was not sophisticated enough to match the sophistication of the threat—the shrinking size of bombs, their composition, and new ways of concealing them.

Also, at times of high passenger volume, the system could not cope—bags piled up and were subject to what the TSA euphemistically called “alternative screening procedures.”

In a 2006 report highly critical of the TSA, the General Accounting Office said these measures involved “tradeoffs in security effectiveness.” In fact, the agency did not even know how many bags had been diverted to the “alternative” methods.

By then, the technology used to screen bags in the U.S. was already lagging behind the systems being installed in other parts of the world, notably at Heathrow in London. As in the U.S., the British security planners faced the problem of adapting terminals where the architecture had never anticipated the need for elaborate new pathways that collected, sorted, and directed bags through scanners that could “read” the contents and identify a threat. Nonetheless, within a few years after 9/11, Heathrow and other British airports were state-of-the-art.

British Airways, presented with the luxury of completing a new terminal for all of its Heathrow flights, was able to custom-design its Terminal 5 with the latest inline baggage screening (in other words, a seamless flow). Today that system includes a capability called Advanced Threat Identification—the scanners can identify explosives and liquids and take multiple views of baggage at normal processing speeds.

]]> Last October, eight years after 9/11, the TSA grandly announced that $13.6 million would be spent to upgrade Terminal 1 at Chicago O’Hare International, including an inline system “to detect possible explosives and other threats.” The agency has also announced similar plans for 16 other U.S. airports, including the world’s busiest, Atlanta Hartsfield, as well as Orlando, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. This upgrade program will cost $600 million. Some $20 million of this will go to introducing a Reduced Size Explosive Detection System similar to that already in use at Heathrow.

Of course, by announcing its list of airports in need of new equipment to keep up with bomb-making technology, the TSA was also revealing to the world how vulnerable these airports remain to bombs in the baggage.

In large airports with multiple terminals, the quality of screening varies greatly according to the age of the buildings. At JFK, for example, the newest terminal, used by JetBlue, had the TSA involved in its planning from the ground up, and the scanning is as sophisticated as it is invisible. Likewise, the new American Airlines terminal at JFK has eight inline scanners that can handle 3,200 bags an hour. (In the old AA terminals, you could see the bulky old-gen scanners sitting in the arrivals halls.) In older terminals without purpose-designed space, machines go where they can be squeezed in and the flows are far from seamless.

When we spend more than $2 billion a month on a war directed against terrorism with all the precision of a shotgun fired out of a window at midnight, you could argue that the sums required to secure what is in reality the nation’s clearly identifiable last line of defense against airline terrorism are paltry. It is only fair to admit that the TSA has to deal with two frequently wayward bodies—the United States Congress for its funding and myriad city agencies involved in managing airports. Even then, insiders say that the agency has often spent more of its energy on bureaucratic empire building than in taking decisive action.

We have just had another wake-up call that finds us grievously wanting and exposes how tardy and lax are the protectors of the flying public.

More from Clive Irving on The Daily Beast:

The Good Plane Crash: What went right on American Airlines Flight 331
The Year of Flying Dangerously: Clive's review of the year's crashes
An Airplane's Gift to Terrorists: In-flight satellite maps

What Went Wrong in The Chunnel?

2009-12-21T16:16:38Z

Anyone there?
Photo: bpmm/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Even veteran railway experts are baffled by the failure of four Eurostar trains that ground to a standstill in the middle of the Channel Tunnel this weekend, causing misery to thousands of travelers. “It’s all a bit of a mystery” Nigel Harris, managing editor of Rail magazine told The Guardian newspaper. “The fact that the problem affected London-bound trains rather than ones leaving St. Pancras [for the Continent] may have been due to those heading away from London getting less cold.”

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Even then, these trains have been running in all extremes of weather for years, so the conclusion must be two-fold: That they had never encountered these exact circumstance before -and that the engineers had better have a fix. There are no Eurostar services between the Continent and London today. So far, a staggering 55,000 tickets have been canceled.

Apart from the technical failure, the performance of Eurostar staff on the stalled trains was, from all accounts, abysmal. It’s bad enough finding yourself stuck in one of the world’s longest tunnels but much worse when nobody explains a) what is going on and, b) what you should do. It was cold, toilets broke down, and passengers were left to find their own way to the escape tunnels that run parallel with the train tunnels. Had this been a serious emergency, like a fire, it could have been a catastrophe.

And so a truly transforming piece of European travel infrastructure is looking bad at one of the peak seasons of the year. Coming on the heels of an attempt by flight attendants to paralyze British Airways for the twelve days of Christmas, fortunately thwarted by a court judgment, and the airline chaos caused here at home by the blizzard on the eastern seaboard, it seems that the Grinch is still out there and having a ball.

Flight 447: Investigators Hint But Don’t Conclude

2009-12-17T16:32:25Z

French air accident investigators today gave an update on their progress-or lack of it-into the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the Atlantic on June 1. They say: “…on the basis of available information, it is still not possible to understand the causes and circumstances of the accident.”

Nonetheless there are some significant clues buried in the opacity of the report. They relate to the prime suspect in the case, faulty readings from the Airbus A330’s speed gauges, the effect of those readings on the computers that were flying the airplane, and the influence of the storm system through which Flight 447 was passing at its cruise altitude of 36,000 feet.

]]> 53 instances in which flight crews have faced control problems directly caused by flaws in the three exterior gauges, called pitot tubes, which tell the computers the speed the airplane is flying at-a measure crucial to all the behavior of all the control systems in flight.

These included what the investigators say were “13 significant events involving 5 airlines operating A330/A340 airplanes.” And they add “Around forty other reported events could not be analyzed completely due to missing data.”

From these incidents it became obvious that there were common features:

They happened in weather conditions that were highly unstable
The autopilot-which together with the computerized flight management system was actually flying the airplanes at the time-disengaged in all cases
The faulty speed readings lasted for more than three minutes
Changes in the airplanes’ altitude during these events did not exceed a thousand feet. “The airplane always remained within its flight envelope” says the report.

I find this less than calming.

In other words, both the Airbus A330, as involved in this disaster, and the A340, which shares the same computerized flight controls, are prone to unpredictable failures of these automated systems triggered by faulty speed readings but…here’s the astonishing conclusion…these are not considered exceptional enough to require special action, which would be either a warning to flight crews of what procedures to follow if this happens or, more extreme, a grounding of the airplanes until a fix is found.

This is akin to a car manufacturer saying that there have been more than fifty instances of a model becoming uncontrollable but not to worry, we’re working on it and when we understand what is going on we’ll fix it.

Things are plainly different for airplane manufacturers and accident investigators.

Two other details jump out from this new report. The first is that the effects of the kind of turbulent storm that straddled the flight path of Flight 447 have not been replicated when the speed gauges are passed by certification-in the words of the report, these tests “do not cover all the situations that modern long-range airplanes can encounter…the composition of the cloud mass is not taken into account precisely.” And second, there are clues from the autopsies carried out on bodies recovered from the Atlantic that the Airbus had fallen from 35,000 very rapidly but had not broken up before hitting the water. “The majority of injuries was,” says the report, “compatible with a violent shock upwards from below.”

Given what can be divined from these new inferences and the characteristic evasions of the investigators, I think I can sense where this is going. On more than fifty occasions flight crews faced with circumstances similar to those confronted on the flight deck of Flight 447 managed to re-boot their systems and carry on. The pilots of 447 did not. The weather itself was not unusual on that route. QED, they must have been overpowered by the speed of the events and thus were in some way inattentive and to blame.

If this is what the combination of the air crash investigators, Air France and Airbus are thinking should be the conclusion, I don’t buy it.

BLACK BOX CHANGES
In the meantime, at least the French investigators have turned their attention to another serious problem exposed by this disaster - that in circumstances like this when it is impossible to retrieve the “black box” flight recorders there should be an alternative way of getting significant data for investigators.

Back in the summer I recommended this. The black box idea dates back to the 1960s, way before the digital age. It was based on the principle that no matter how severe the impact of a crash the flight data recorder (which is not black and is not a box but about the shape and size of a carry-on duffle) should be able to survive it. In other words, to use a nautical term, the data goes down with the ship but can remain intact.

These days you can get data out of an airplane in real time. In fact, the only really salient data retrieved from Flight 447 came from 24 fault messages transmitted from the A330 via satellite to the Air France base in Paris. These were fortuitously part of a system designed to speed maintenance when an airplane arrives at its destination. Indeed, today’s report makes it clear that it was possible for the A330 to send these data bursts to the satellite right up until it hit the ocean.

The problem is that the data needed for maintenance needs to be supplemented by a constant, real-time stream that describes the behavior of every key function of flight. Thus the French investigators now recommend that study should urgently begin into “the possibility of making it mandatory for airplanes…to regularly transmit basic flight parameters (for example position, altitude, speed, heading)."

There are a few technical questions about the bandwidth this would need. But when you consider just how much digital entertainment is playing in the cabin of any modern airplane as it crosses the oceans, adding bandwidth for this purpose is a no-brainer.

Related stories
Timeline: The Long Night of Air France Flight 447
Another Airbus Alarm