Armed in Tucson

[Photo: A javelina]

TUCSON -- My favorite New York Times columnist is Tim Egan, and his column about guns and Tucson is the best I have read on that subject since that lunatic went on his shooting rampage Jan. 8.

The Egan column today, which is online, is headlined "Myth of the Hero Gunslinger." Egan describes himself as a third-generation Westerner who grew up among guns and "Second Amendment enthusiasts who wore camouflage nine months out of the year," as he writes, adding: "Generally, I don’t have a problem with any of that."

As an adoptive Westerner who has had a home in Tucson for more than five years and has lived here full time for over a year, I've been interested in the general media take on guns because it's axiomatic that many law-abiding citizens here are armed, even if they aren't packing -- that is, carrying a concealed weapon.

I was amused by the outside-media take on the Crossroads of the West Gun Show that was held on the county fairgrounds last weekend, a week after the shootings. I went to the gun show just to get a sense of it. Coming out, I was amazed by the number of out-of-town reporters (the TV types are the ones who you can identify, of course) who were so obviously looking for irony, and so clearly failing to get it.

That is, it was apparent to me that they were looking for wild-eyed gun nuts having themselves a wallow in the ammo a week after the massacre. A woman with a camera crew who said she was from ABC waylaid me on my way out. She was the only one there who looked wild-eyed, by the way.

"What'd you get?" she said, eyeing my plastic bag, which I could tell she assumed contained 31-shot magazines and maybe a new Glock.

I told her I was a reporter and moved along. Actually in the bag was a new $12 wallet, purchased from a guy inside who also sold ladies' purses designed to hold pistols. Oh, and also a $6 container of pepper-spray, bought on impulse and for the reason that my property in Tucson often plays unwilling host to a wandering herd of javelina.

Pepper spray, I had thought, would be a good backup to have in case one of the nasty, wild-pig-like javelinas charged me as I tried to shoo them off -- as has happened.

My wife did not agree. "Get that stuff out of the house. You'll blind somebody," she told me when I got back.

Actually, javelinas, though dangerous when in a panic, are stupid and very nearsighted. The one time a javelina charged me out back, just a month ago, he ran straight into a wood lawn chair and it knocked him over. Snorting, he cantered off in frightened bewilderment. Pepper spray would have been beside the point.

As to the matter of guns and potential assaults, people here are pretty sensible (aside from the violent paranoid schizophrenics, who everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a gun). I know that many of my neighbors out here in horse country on the East Side of town are armed.

Before we moved here full time in late 2009, I had been coming out to the house regularly from our home in New Jersey, sometimes for a month or more to work on a book. In my absence, one neighbor -- whose house we can barely see from ours -- kept an eye on our place.

I think I won his trust when I told him one night before leaving, "You see anything that needs shootin' over here, go ahead and shoot it."

That was a joke, which you could make before that awful shooting on Jan. 8.

And by the way, while many neighbors out this way seem to be armed, any one of them that I have ever had a conversation with about guns (I myself don't own one) has stressed 1. The absolute necessity of getting good gun-safety and gun-procedures training before you acquire a firearm and 2. The reality that any time you use or even display a gun in a situation you consider to be hostile or threatening, you will at least be having a subsequent conversation with a police officer or, worse, with a lawyer defending you in court.

Not long ago, we had a workman come in to refinish our polished concrete floors. The second day on the job he arrived four hours late. He looked pale and shaken. A legal Mexican immigrant who lives in the crime-troubled neighborhood of South Tucson, he explained that in the middle of the previous night, three armed intruders had broken into his house, evidently having mistaken the address for one occupied by drug dealers nearby. He, his wife and their two young children had been rousted out of bed and held at gunpoint for over an hour, while the intruders ransacked the house.

"Did you have a gun?" I asked him. No, he said. "If I had a gun, my wife and my children would now be dead, and me too," he said.

After the Tucson shooting, a lot of the usual national right-wing clowns bellowed and brayed about how the rampage could have been halted by a bystander with a gun.

Now, Tucson having a culture that is not all that far removed from the actual Old West, it was a given that a certain number of bystanders would be armed when Jared Loughner put a bullet in the head of Congresswoman Giffords, and then began picking off the other victims, one by one, rapid-fire, till 19 in all had been shot, six shot dead.

"When everyone is carrying a firearm, nobody is going to be a victim," said Arizona state representative Jack Harper," as quoted in the Egan column.

As anybody who has carried a gun in actively dangerous situation knows (and I carried one for a year in Vietnam), this is a foolish statement. Gunfire often breaks out without the slightest warning and in great, great fury and confusion. Bullets, as they say, fly.

Naturally, some law-abiding people at the scene of the shooting were carrying guns. Egan and others have pointed to one bystander, Joseph Zamudio, who was legally carrying a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. With his gun, he rushed toward the shooting commotion -- and almost shot an innocent man who he initially thought was the assailant.

Zamudio held his fire because people were yelling that he was about to shot the wrong man. The shooter himself was actually knocked down by a man using a folding chair as he tried to reload, and then pounced on and subdued by other citizens who wrestled the pistol and a spare magazine from him.

Anyway, let me give you my notes, my less-than-scintillating report on the gun show in Tucson last week that failed to deliver the delicious irony that some of the media I encountered there were so obviously expecting:

--About 1,500 people had entered by 10 a.m. (doors opened at 9). Crossroads of the West Gun show at sprawling Pima County fairgrounds in Southeast Tuscon. This is a traveling gun show.

--All was contained in a big exhibition hall, where vendors had set up many rows of tables, and crowds wandered by. All kinds of guns and ammo, including some automatic weapons - but also things like survival gear, knives, high-performance hunting gear like flashlights and binoculars and scopes, bulletproof vests, leather goods (including womens purses made to hold concealed weapons).

--Some people brought little kids, including some babies. Mostly men, but some women too.

--Typical Tucson: friendly, cordial atmosphere. No belligerence apparent anywhere, "please and thank you and excuse me" all around. Even the bumper stickers and other signs were low-key, mostly in support of gun rights, military, etc. NRA presence obvious of course.

--One guy was wearing a tee-shirt that said: "I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy."

--Quote: "People here are all pretty nice. There are very few buttheads," Tom Colaric, a dealer in leather products at a display table where I bought my $12 wallet.

--One woman had a big big display of very fine, expensive Czech crystal: expensive cut-glass wine and whiskey glasses and decanters, and even glass Christmas ornaments. Her name: Jarmila Kovary, of Phoenix. She said she does a good business at gun shows because "more women have been coming to these things and people here come with money to spend."

One guy walking by said, "Nice wine glasses." And a guy with an NRA hat who was standing nearby said, "--for target practice." Jarmila Kovary seemed horrified at that.

--Outside the entrance to the hall, where a long line of people had queued to buy tickets by 10 a.m., there was a plexiglass hopper with this sign on front: "Tragedy in Tucson Victims Fund" It had what I guessed was about $50 in it, in dollar bills and some fives.

A guy standing beside it had just purchased a revolver and was spinning the chamber appreciatively in the sunlight. Then he snapped it shut and dropped a dollar into the donation box.

As the man at the leather goods display said, "Very few buttheads."

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Crazy in Tucson

How inconvenient for the pious revisionists wagging their fingers and tongues at those who see an obvious link between violent political rhetoric and the attempted assassination last week of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. How inconvenient that Ms. Giffords herself drew that link between hate-agitation and potential violence.

All week, sentinels of Approved Wisdom have been at it, trying to crank the mighty narrative machine to the safe position that the Tucson shootings were solely the work of a lunatic, nothing more. After all, goes the claim, there is no direct evidence that this Jared Loughner, who everybody agrees is crazy, acted in any way that indicated political motivation.

Uh, except that with premeditation, he shot in the head a United States congresswoman who has long been the target of nasty, vile hate directed at her by national, and less often local, elements of this amorphous Tea Party movement.

But again, how inconvenient to this argument that Gabby Giffords, who happens to be my congresswoman, herself had expressed grave concern about the barely disguised violent threats being made against Democratic congressional candidates, not just herself but many others, during the last election campaign.

I'm referring partly to the infamous online political ads backed by the invincibly awful Sarah Palin, a woman who imbues the old-fashioned word "grifter" with new vitality. The most notorious of these ads appeared last March and depicted a map of the United States with bulls-eyes imposed over those congressional districts that the most rabid elements of the Tea Party had deemed, with Palin acquiescence, to be metaphorical targets. Accompanying this particular Palin abomination was her battle-cry "Reload!"

Now, no one has ever accused Gabby Giffords of being a sissy. No one has ever accused her of being a gun-hater, either.

In fact, Giffords owns and knows how to use a Glock semiautomatic pistol, just like the one Jared Loughner used on his Tucson rampage to shoot her in the head, kill six people and wound a dozen others. Giffords is a well-known supporter of gun-ownership rights. But she was also sufficiently motivated by the vile Palin ad, in an atmosphere of very nasty vitriol, to express her concern in an interview with MSNBC during the campaign.

The Palin ad, Giffords noted, put "the crosshairs of a gun-sight over our district." Those who do things like this, or who talk like the awful Sharron Angle, the Nevada senate candidate who referred merrily to seeking "Second Amendment remedies" when civil politics fail, "they've got to realize there's consequences to that action," Giffords said.

Yes, yes, there were. As we saw in Tucson.

Around the same time Gabby Giffords was discussing the gun-sights on her, someone shattered a window in her campaign headquarters in the dead of night.

It is of course clear to everyone that the young man who shot Gabby Giffords and those 18 other people in Tucson is crazy. The act was, by its very definition, crazy. I do not require the consensus of a blue-ribbon panel of learned psychiatrists to confirm for me that this Loughner is an obvious, violent paranoid schizophrenic. After all, we have been this way before.

Crazy people by definition do crazy things. But when a lunatic, acting out on a premeditated plan that is rational by definition, tries to assassinate a political candidate in an intense atmosphere of reckless political hate-rhetoric directed against that candidate -- that connection, to me, is not disputable.

Take Lee Harvey Oswald. To this day, there is no direct evidence that Oswald acted out politically when he decided to assassinate President Kennedy. Yet he did act (and conspiracy theorists aside, we know for a fact that Oswald had that rifle, that he took that rifle to the Texas Book Depository, that he hid on the 6th floor of that building, that he fired that rifle at the presidential motorcade passing below) in an atmosphere in Dallas of virulent, violent anti-Kennedy hatred. That hatred was assiduously fanned by right-wing nut jobs, the most prominent of whom was the crackpot oil billionaire H.L. Hunt. So nasty was the atmosphere in Dallas back then that Kennedy was warned, including by people like Adlai Stevenson, not to go there that day.

Yet he did, and he was shot to death.

When I heard of the shootings in Tuscon, I rushed over to the Giffords campaign office on the busy corner of Pima and Swan in central (not downtown) Tucson. This is the office where the window-smashing (or shooting, the police aren't sure) vandalism had occurred during the heat of the campaign last March.

Within an hour after the shootings, about 50 Giffords supporters, many of whom knew her personally and had volunteered in her campaigns, were gathered quietly on the corner in front of the office. Out back in the parking lot, some listened tearfully to conflicting reports blaring from NPR on a car radio about whether Giffords was dead or not.

During the campaign and even afterward, they told me, noisy political-opposition demonstrations were regular occurrences there on Saturdays. The Giffords district office is about a block south of the modest condominium complex where Giffords lives when she is in town, which was nearly every weekend. Typically, I was told, hundreds of Tea Party anti-Giffords demonstrators gathered on Saturdays on three of the four corners of the intersection of Pima and Swan, and a much smaller group of supporters usually gathered on the fourth corner.

This being Tucson, a city of enormous civility, the Tea Party demonstrations were usually lower-key than some Tea Party mob scenes elsewhere. But some ugly signs with clearly violent messages were often on display, and ugly chants were common. (Local Tea Party people, who also tend to be civil, lay this bad behavior to out-of-towners, incidentally, and I don't doubt them on that).

One recurring theme was the depiction of Giffords, an indomitably cheerful, pretty young woman who was widely liked in her district even by people who wouldn't vote for her, as a witch flying away on a broomstick. One sign that especially bothered the Giffords supporters showed a silhouette of a witch with the message: "Gabby: One Way Or Another, You're Gone."

This was the crazy atmosphere in which a crazy person began the descent that would lead him to act, with clear intent, to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords.

Surely, mental-health spending must be increased. But not so fast. Let's give that one some rational thought about just where that spending is going, because it sure as hell hasn't been going into protecting society from the likes of Loughner.

At the vigil outside the Giffords office on the day of the shooting I noticed one more thing. Within hours of the shooting, a small contingent of Red Cross mental-health crisis workers arrived. They were there, one of them told me, "to assist the emotionally wounded."

Now, I spoke with most of the people on the corner that Saturday and the next day as well, and while all of them were shocked and horrified and sad, none of them described themselves as being in need of mental-health intervention.

And there's a rub.

In 1994, a book of mine was published by St. Martin's Press, "Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy." The book has long been out of print.

Bedlam was written at a time when for-profit corporations had been rapaciously pillaging the mental-health insurance system, because a large amount of insurance money had become available for the treatment of "mental disorders," as defined by the growing psychiatric and addiction industries. Despite its myriad deficiencies, Bedlam did trenchantly describe how this system worked.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, hugely expensive state hospital mental asylums were closed, and their patients released onto the streets, in a phenomenon called deinstitutionalization.

In exchange for closing down the tax-draining state hospitals, the plan was that an efficient network of community mental-health centers (including crisis centers) would be developed all over the country to treat serious mental illness, rather than merely confining the seriously mentally ill to those dreadful state institutions.

Lots of insurance money poured into mental-health services, partly as a result of lobbying by various interest groups.

But the promise of community mental-health networks for the seriously ill was broken. Instead, the money was diverted into insurance coverage for a rapidly growing industry dominated by for-profit hospitals and paid-for psychiatrists who were hired to essentially bid-rig diagnoses. The purpose was to channel new patients into the system, where their insurance coverage could be profitably and thoroughly milked, even if it meant "diagnosis-flipping" -- that is, certifying a new diagnosis code when the insurance-reimbursement allocation for the old one ran out. Essential to that scheme was a vast increase in the number of behaviors that could be classified and coded, for insurance-reimbursement purposes, as mental illnesses.

Our mental-health system became fully medicalized. And one scandalous upshot of that phenomenon was that the really seriously mentally ill got left out of the equation. After all, treating the seriously crazy is frustrating and not profitable. Instead, starting in the 1970s, we started seeing people who really needed psychiatric intervention on the street, and we were conditioned to think of them instead as being among the "homeless."

The central fact about our mental-health system (and the caution to be exercised amid calls to fund more mental-health services) is this: It is not designed to treat serious mental illness in any serious manner.

Oh, how I wish I could ask Jared Loughner's mother and father: How did you try to get appropriate mental-health treatment for this sick boy (because I am pretty sure that you did)? What were you told when they turned you away? How deep was the frustration and misery suffered by you and the other families of seriously mentally ill people who have nowhere to turn?

There is no money to be made from the chronic paranoid schizophrenic, the violent psychotic. The truly crazy have no constituency besides their families, assuming they have families. While decent counseling is often available for those facing debilitating life crises (who have insurance, that is), most mental-health resources flow into treatment of what has long been known among honest psychiatrists and psychologists as the "worried well." As Willie Sutton said, that's where the money is.

I heard some woman on NPR last week whining about how she was seeking mental-health counseling because she was so emotionally distressed by the Tucson shootings -- which she had not even witnessed or been directly affected by. She was treated with gentle reverence on the radio. Yes, precious mental-health resources will flow her way.

Our mental-health system is broken. And it's a lot more systematically corrupt than our political system.

Serious, severe mental illness like that exhibited for a long time by Jared Loughner goes untreated, or more to the point unsupervised, because the system is designed mainly to make money.

We need to understand that better, in a society where even the crazy people are armed.

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Air Travel Advice in East: Stay Home

Another fine mess in the Northeast this morning as a snowstorm arrived.

The by-now-usual grim tales unfold, including very large numbers of cancellations. As of 9 a.m. EST, according to FlightStats.com:

At the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, 300 departures and 244 arrivals have been canceled so far. At La Guardia: 365 and 313. JFK: 325-255. Boston: 379-325. Philadelphia: 130-128. Reagan: 109-104. BWI: 57-55. Dulles: 46-52.

That adds up to about 5,400 canceled flights at those airports alone(some of the departures and arrivals are overlaps but not all that many in this geographical area.)

Meanwhile, Atlanta Hartsfield is still struggling after that city got whacked by ice and snow days ago, causing more than 5,000 flight cancellations: This morning at Atlanta, another 190 departures and 255 arrivals have been scrubbed. Chicago O'Hare and other major airports are also racking up big cancellation numbers.

And delays, forget about it. At Newark, the flights that remain scheduled are averaging 4 hour departure delays. At La Guardia, it's 3 hours and 45 minutes. Boston and JFK also are reporting delays in excess of 3 hours and 30 minutes.

Florida is the only state in the country that doesn't have any snow right now, the National Weather Service says. (Yeah, I know, you're thinking, What about Hawaii? But remember, there's snow on Mauna Kea as well as Mauna Loa.)

Alone in its snowless condition, Florida still feels the ripple effects, with all of the major airports reporting big delays. Orlando is also seeing flight cancellations: 43 departures and 61 arrivals canceled so far this morning in a ripple effect from the Northeast weather.

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Near Gridlock in Air Travel

[Map: Flightview.com]

This is what the airports looked like a little before midnight today. And it's going to be a lot worse tomorrow morning.

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Tarmac Delays in November: Zero. Again.

Again in November there were no tarmac delays of over three hours on domestic flights, the Transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports this morning.

In the chart above, you can see how these so-called tarmac strandings have dropped since April, when the Transportation Department imposed a policy that can fine airlines up to $27,500 per passenger for stranding planes on tarmacs.

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Airlines Preemptively Canceling Flights in New York Area

Under threat of snow, airlines are preemptively canceling flights at the three New York-area airports for both today and tomorrow.

To me, this looks like a test of the assertion that airlines would cancel a larger than normal number of flights with bad weather merely forecast, rather than raging, to underscore their opposition to the Transportation Department rule that imposes severe fines on carriers for stranding passengers on tarmacs for over three hours. The rule has effectively ended so-called tarmac strandings for domestic carriers (international carriers are not covered by the rule, and have been responsible for several egregiously lengthy strandings in recent snowstorms).

On the other hand, airlines do routinely cancel some flights preparation for seriously bad weather so that x-number of airplanes and crews are not frozen in place if bad weather does hit.

As of 9 a.m. EST today at the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, 216 flights have been canceled -- and 145 flights scheduled for tomorrow have also been scrubbed. At Kennedy, it's 101 today and 97 tomorrow. La Guardia: 172 today and 114 tomorrow.

Data as usual from FlightStats.com

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Nearly All Flights in Atlanta Canceled; Cancellations Also Mounting for Tuesday As Big Storm Heads Toward New York

[UPDATED]
Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport, the busiest airport in the country in terms of flights handled, is virtually shut today as ice and snow hit the city. As of 6 p.m. EST, 2,211 of today's 2,570 flights have been canceled.

And tomorrow is also grim: Already, about 900 departures and arrivals have been canceled at Atlanta.

Cancellations are also hitting other airports. At Charlotte, 527 flights had been scrubbed by late afternoon. (Data from FlightStats.com)

The storm is expected to hit the New York area starting early Tuesday night, with snow accumulations of 10 or more inches possible. Right now, the New York airports are operating with delays, partly as a result of the Atlanta mess, but only the hilariously named Newark Liberty International airport is reporting cancellations, in this case about 70.

AirTran canceled all of its Atlanta flights. The airlines canceling the most flights in Atlanta are Delta, Atlantic Southeast Airlines, which operates Delta Connection flights, and AirTran, which Southwest is in the process of acquiring.

Because of the large number of regional connecting flights it handles as a hub in the Southeast, Atlanta is the busiest airport in the country. (In fact, it's the busiest airport in the world in terms of the number of flights it handles).

In Atlanta, even MARTA has shut down, canceling all bus service today and maybe tomorrow too.

Meanwhile, the Loews hotel chain has said that it is offering a special rate of $139 a night at its new Loews Atlanta hotel through Wednesday. Passengers stranded in Atlanta might want to take note.

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Atlanta Cancellations As of 9 A.M: 2,550

There have been 2,550 flights canceled in Atlanta as of 9 a.m.
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[Newspapers used to pad out columns of type inside the paper that were a few lines short with trivial fillers of information. One I remember in particular from the defunct Philadelphia Bulletin when I worked there in the late 70s had the headline: No Blood in Ants over a story that consisted entirely of this sentence: Ants have no blood.
]
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Heads-Up: Cancellations Mount in Atlanta

Snowy weather equals massive flight cancellations these days, and Atlanta is racking them up: 350 today and, hang on, 1,650 flights canceled already for tomorrow.

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Democratic Congresswoman Shot in Tucson

Gabrielle Giffords, the liberal Democratic congresswoman from Tucson, has just been shot in Tucson. Details developing.

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Row 44 WiFi in Another Advance for Service on International Flights

The aggressively expanding inflight WiFi provider Row 44 said today that it received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to offer its satellite-based broadband service in flights over the Atlantic.

The FCC issued Row 44 a license for the T11N North Atlantic Oceanic Coverage satellite. This makes Row 44 the only provider allowed to operate and charge for inflight broadband connectivity on transatlantic flights.

In the U.S., Aircell's Gogo system -- which is based on land antennas and can't operate over oceans -- is the leading inflight Internet provider, with service operating on more than 1,044 mainline domestic planes of seven U.S. various airlines, Delta being the leading one, and on Air Canada.

Row 44 is now installing its system on Southwest's entire fleet of 737s, and has been in trials with other airlines.

The next expansion is international, obviously, though there is already robust competition from foreign companies on airplanes operating in Europe and elsewhere.

"This license creates complete seamlessness for Row 44’s broadband across the Atlantic," said Howard Lefkowitz, Row 44’s chief commercial officer. "Row 44 is now the only company in the world whose airline customers can charge for in-flight broadband on, say, a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York."

On Wednesday, Row 44, had said it received a so-called Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) from the European Aviation Safety Agency to install its system on commercial aircraft in Europe. The certificate cleared a big hurdle for the company in its plans to sell its service to European airlines.

Row 44 says it is authorized for operation in over 100 countries, on four continents. The company’s current network coverage includes service over the US, Mexico and Canada, with transatlantic coverage linking North America and Europe expected this year.

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A Hint of Snow, and Hundreds of Flights Canceled in New York

Hey, it's winter. It snows sometimes in New York, so let's not get all hysterical about it, airlines and government and, of course, media.

Anyway, it was snowing in New York -- the forecast was for maybe four inches, tops. [UPDATE -- Mid-afternoon, only a trace of snow had been seen in the Big Apple, and by the end of the day the total accumulation was less than 2 inches!]

Emergency! Emergency! As of mid-morning today, before a snowflake fell, airlines had preemptively canceled more than 400 flights at the three New York airports, with most of the cancellations (110 departures and 113 arrivals) at the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport. (The numbers come from FlightStats.com)

This will probably present a better opportunity than the Christmas blizzard to assess to what degree airlines are willy-nilly and preemptively canceling flights to head off the slightest possibility of being slapped with those new fines for excessive tarmac passenger tarmac strandings that the Transportation Department set last spring.

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Southwest Revamps Rapid Rewards: No Blackout Dates for Seat Awards; Points Awarded for All Spending; New Elite Level

Southwest Airlines is making big changes to its Rapid Rewards frequent-flier program in a bold move to further differentiate its product brand and to lure more business travelers away from other major airlines.

The new Web site with details of the program has just gone up (at 5.30 a.m. Eastern) at www.newrapidrewards.com. Also, the head of the program, Ryan Green, has a blog post on the announcement at www.blogsouthwest.com.

Starting March 1, under a new system in which points are assigned based on how much is spent, members will be able to redeem points for every seat, every day, on every flight, with no blackout dates or seat restrictions. Also, points won’t expire over a 24-month time period in which there has been any activity in the account.

Points will be awarded based on the fare. The same is true for redeeming points.

Southwest is also adding a new elite-status level to its program -- A-List Preferred. And all members will be able to purchase points, in blocks of 1,000.

Southwest, which kept the announcement very hush-hush until 5:30 a.m. Eastern time today, said that members with existing credits and awards in the current program will retain their value until they are used or expire. Members’ accounts will automatically be transferred to the new program on March 1. There is no need to re-enroll.


NEW PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS:

--No blackout dates.

--Every Southwest Airlines seat is a reward seat (no seat restrictions or capacity controls).

--Points don’t expire as long as members earn by flying or using a partner once every 24 months.

--Points are based on the purchased fare and fare product.

When the new program launches in March, members who have a Rapid Rewards credit card will also be able to redeem points for flights to more than 800 international destinations, plus hotels around the world.

This aspect of the program, however, is a lot less fluid, it seems to me. Southwest isn't actually partnering with international airlines. Instead, award tickets on international flights will be purchased by Southwest, essentially through a travel agency, at going rates, with points charged based on available fare.

Benefits for A-List Preferred, the new level of elite status open to A-List and Companion Pass members, include double points on fares purchased.

Southwest expects the program to generate "hundreds of millions in incremental revenue annually for Southwest, net of any associated program costs, to be fully realized over the next several years." Southwest said in an embargoed Webinar yesterday that it spent $100 million developing the new program.

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Today's Mean Chuckle: City Tourism Promo Parodies

[Photo: Duckboating in Boston, a.k.a. "Hub of the Universe"]

From the very interesting news and features Web site Good, some "hastily-made videos" in the growing genre of the "Cleveland" classic. New ones target the always self-referential Boston, St. Paul, Detroit, North Korea and elsewhere.

Interesting thing is they all actually look and sound like the real stuff churned out by dreadful PR agencies in various cities that don't actually get the joke.

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Row 44 Moves Closer to WiFi Installations on Planes in Europe

Row 44, the inflight WiFi company that's currently installing its system on Southwest Airlines' entire fleet, is moving closer to European operations.

Row 44, based in California, says it has received a so-called Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to install its satellite-based system on commercial aircraft in Europe.

“EASA approval marks another major milestone for Row 44, clearing the final hurdle for us to offer our in-flight broadband connectivity platform on another continent,” said Row 44 chief commercial officer Howard Lefkowitz. "Planes equipped with it will soon be flying all across Europe with a full menu of in-flight broadband services – internet, video, e-commerce, games and more. We will be pioneering a whole new flying experience for passengers throughout Europe," said Lefkowitz, who formerly was the president of Vegas.com, an big online concierge service in Las Vegas.

Row 44’s EASA STC covers Boeing 737-700, 800 and 900 series airframes.

Competitor Aircell, whose Gogo system has been favored by other U.S. airlines, depends on land-based antennas. Gogo is currently operating on 1,044 mainline airplanes flown by Delta, United, US Airways, Virgin America, American, Alaska, Air Canada and AirTran. While the Gogo system is available only on some aircraft of most of the airlines that have signed on, the entire Delta mainline fleet is equipped. And Delta said in November that it plans to expand Gogo to its fleet of 223 larger regional jets, the ones with two-class cabins. When that expansion is completed later this year, 80 percent of Delta's domestic fleet will have Gogo service.

Meanwhile, United Airlines is also rumored to be testing Row 44 on at least one of its 757s, concurrent with trial runs of the Gogo system on other planes in its fleet.

Last September, JetBlue and another satellite WiFi system provider, ViaSat, announced a preliminary agreement for ViaSat to install its system on JetBlue's fleet of about 160 planes by next year.
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Sabre vs. American Airlines As Fare-Channel Battle Intensifies

The fare-distribution brawl got hotter today as the global distribution system Sabre busted down American Airlines on its very important fare-distribution network.

Here's Bloomberg on the news.

American started the fight last month when, in an attempt to drive more bookings to its own Web site, it pulled fares from Orbitz.com. Then on New Year's Day, Expedia.com threw American off its site.

With Sabre's move, we'll see whether American blinks first in this fight. Sabre, not coincidentally, owns Travelocity.com, the third of the major online consumer booking sites.

American's move against outside distribution channels is seen as audacious by many in the travel-management business.

"American acts as if it's the country's biggest airline, when it's really number four and falling," said Kevin P. Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition.

He added, "American is making a reckless rodeo bet that it can rope its best customers like calves and then push and pull and kick them toward aa.com and Direct Connect. Online consumers may not even know American's flights are missing. The ones who will gain the most here are American's competitors United, Southwest and others."

Obviously, eliminating fare information from third-party sites makes it far more (corrected) difficult for customers to easily comparison-shop on fares. On the other hand, to the extent that it increases traffic on AA.com, American seems to think that it stands to gain somewhat.

The airline system, rapidly constricting and consolidating, is ripe for review under antitrust concerns, some people think. But with this new Congress, that doesn't seem to be much in the cards.

Sabre and American go way back, of course.

Meanwhile, travel groups are warning that the battle over the distribution systems could lead to bad news for business travelers.


"Today’s news from Sabre represents a serious escalation of the growing conflict around airline-mandated 'direct connects'," said Mike McCormick, executive director of the National Business Travel Association, referring to bookings made directly on an airline Web site. "Business travel buyers will ultimately foot the bill for marketplace fragmentation caused by airline initiatives that push the travel distribution marketplace in the wrong direction – away from transparency and competitiveness and toward confusion and higher costs.”

The business travel trade group said that bypassing outside distribution systems will result in a significant increase in travel costs, especially as travel management companies and agencies will need to build new systems to capture these so-called direct-connect fares on behalf of their business travel clients.

Also, the NBTA said, "Businesses that rely on clear and transparent fare information to negotiate for and maintain airline discount programs will find it far more difficult to track volume and enforce travel policies in a fragmented market."

###

More than 29,000 Flights Were Canceled in December

Airlines canceled 29,391 flights in December (3.54 percent of total flights scheduled), up sharply from 21,954 canceled flights (2.7 percent of total) in December 2009, according to Flightstats.com

Flightstats didn't break down cancellations by date in December, but the overall number, combined with other factors such as month-to-month weather comparisons, fits with data showing that about 10,000 flights were canceled at domestic airports during the five days starting on Christmas, when East Coast airports, especially those in the New York area, were hammered by a blizzard. The effects of the snowstorm, including those reflecting impossible airport conditions and those reflecting preemptive cancellations made by airlines to head off potential fines for tarmac strandings, rippled through the whole air-travel system.

On-time arrivals were at just 67.9 percent, meaning that almost a third of flights that fly arrived late -- and 11.43 percent of those arrived more than 44 minutes late, Flightstats said.

Of the top 10 North American airlines, JetBlue had by far the worst record on cancellations. In December, JetBlue scrubbed 8.16 percent of its scheduled flights.

###

Happy New Year! Fly Better in 2011

[Photo: Continental Airlines Business/First class service]

Here's what we all need to aspire to in 2011: Comfortable air travel!
###

Best Irony of the Year (So Far): Brazil Refuses to Extradite Terrorist Murderer to Italy

On his last day in office, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known here on previous occasions as Lucky Lula, said he would not extradite to Italy a terrorist murderer named Cesare Battisti, who was convicted in absentia of murdering four people in Italy in the 1970s. Here's a news clip from the Washington Post.

Italy, furious at Lula's action, recalled its ambassador to Brazil in protest.

Battisti has been a fugitive since 1981 when he escaped from an Italian jail. He turned up in Brazil in 2004. Barristi, who has requested political asylum in Brazil, was a member of the terrorist Armed Proletarians for Communism in Italy.

In Brazil there once was something of a tradition of people harboring international criminal fugitives, including the genocidal Nazi criminal Josef Mengele. Hundreds of Nazi war criminals fled to South America starting in 1945, not just to Brazil but to Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia and elsewhere. Brazil has tried to live down the reputation, with some success now that almost all of the Nazi fugitives are presumed dead.

I note this here by way of irony. For four years, some Brazilian authorities and some people in Brazil have been demanding the extradition to Brazil of two American aviators, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, who were pilots of an American business jet that was involved in a horrific mid-air collision at 37,000 feet over the central Amazon on Sept. 29, 2006. The seven people on the American plane survived (I was one of them), while the 154 on the Brazilian airliner that collided with it died in a horrible crash into the jungle.

The crash was accompanied by an atmosphere of xenophobia and hysterical anti-Americanism in Brazil, which coincided with a presidential election in which Lula managed to eek out a second term. (Hence the "Lucky".) The Brazilian authorities rushed to scapegoat the American pilots for the accident, which is where I got involved in a protracted long-distance tangle with Brazil.

In its detailed report on the accident, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (N.T.S.B.) concluded that (as I had argued) egregious systemic and operational errors by the military-run Brazilan air traffic control system were the probable cause of the disaster.

The N.T.S.B. (which participated in the investigation because a U.S.-owned plane was involved) concluded this (italics mine): "The evidence collected during this investigation strongly supports the conclusion that this accident was caused by N600XL [the U.S. business jet] and GLO1907 [the Brazilian 737 airliner] following ATC [air traffic control] clearances which directed them to operate in opposite directions on the same airway at the same altitude resulting in a midair collision.

"The loss of effective air traffic control was not the result of a single error, but of a combination of numerous individual and institutional ATC factors, which reflected systemic shortcomings in emphasis on positive air traffic control concepts."

However, that cut no ice with Brazilian prosecutors determined to blame the Americans. The two American pilots remain on criminal trial, in absentia, on those trumped-up charges in Brazil. Most Brazilians now realize that official butt-covering and media-fanned hysteria created great errors in the Brazilian reaction to the disaster -- not least of which was the unwise move to rush to criminalize an aviation accident.

The charges against the two Americans carry prison sentences, but under existing U.S.-Brazilian treaties and practices, they do not rise to the level requiring extradition to Brazil. However, some Brazilian officials and prosecutors have demanded that the Americans be extradited.

As I said, just noting the irony.

###

Airlines in Defensive Crouch Over Blizzard Flight Chaos

Airlines assumed their familiar defensive crouch over massive flight cancellations and excessive delays that still are buckling airports in New York.

Though part of the blame was aimed accurately at the severity of the blizzard and its high winds, not to mention the incompetence and outright laziness of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (which runs the airports), the airlines are now also in the public-opinion cross-hairs.

The reasons:

1. Failure to ensure even a modicum of customer service and responsiveness, as over 1 million passengers got stranded by cancellations, and even more by delays. There was an obvious initiative to preemptively cancel flights, even before the weather conditions deteriorated to the point where flying was impossible. Customers are livid about not being able to get through to airlines as the chaos built.

2. As airlines shank capacity and parked planes to shave operating costs in the last 18 months, and as airline mergers further constricted the system, there is no slack to handle even minor disruptions. Especially in a peak holiday travel season, all the planes were already full, so there was no way (especially because backup equipment and crews are pretty much a thing of the past) to handle the extra demand from passengers who were bumped off those 8,000-plus canceled flights.

Flights continue to be canceled today at the New York airports, though in far fewer numbers than recent days. Excessive delays (45 minutes and up) are also occurring. At the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, 121 flights have been scrubbed as of mid-morning. At Kennedy, the number is 142. At La Guardia, it's 51.

###

Nearly 1,500 Flights Canceled Today in New York, As Some Airlines Warn Passengers That Conditions in the Big Apple Still Blow

[UPDATED, 7 p.m. EST]
One might assume that long after the snowstorm has ended, the airlines at least would no longer be canceling flights in large numbers at the New York airports.

Ah, but one would assume wrongly.

This "one" -- that is, me, -- I assumed that all is vastly improved in New York, now that the frozen debris (which is how I now regard snow: debris) has all accumulated and is, presumably, under control. This is easy for me to assume, from my perch across the country in the sunny southern Arizona desert.

But no: Almost 1,500 flights were canceled today in New York, which remains pretty snowbound if not snowy. The frigid gusts of winds still blow, I am informed by my pal Joe Brancatelli in New York. "This was a classic blizzard, man, and it doesn't go away in a day and a half," he says. Public fury is rising in New York as many streets remain impassable, and reports come in about failures of city services like 911 systems. New York's sarcastic billionaire mayor isn't, evidently, helping matters much.

Major flight cancellations continue (along with severe delays). Across the river from Manhattan, at the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, so far today there were 718 departures and arrivals canceled as of 7 p.m. EST. At Kennedy, the number was 577 canceled flights for today. At La Guardia, it's 202. Also, they're even already canceling some flights for tomorrow at Newark, Kennedy and La Guardia. [Departures and arrivals count equally in these data because no flight that leaves any of the New York airports arrives at another New York airport]

As usual, the flight-operations data are from the absolutely invaluable FlightStats.com

The Web site of Continental Airlines right now sounds like this ain't no fooling around: The hilarious named Newark Liberty International Airport has "limited operations," the Continental notice said at 7 p.m. Of flights that were even departing, the average delay at 7 p.m. was 4 hours and 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, some dopes in the media are credulously reporting airline assurances that passengers stranded by the cancellations that started Saturday will be easily accommodated within days. Trust me, this is not so. There are x-number of seats and airplanes available, and especially in a holiday travel period, these were almost all already booked before the blizzard hit. Then a total of more than 8,000 flights got canceled nationwide, from Saturday through today.

Maybe grandma could fit 20 pounds of stuffing into a 15-pound turkey, but the physics doesn't work out that way in air travel.

But here is a good summary today of the airline capacity-and-demand equation from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog on NYTimes.com.

Meanwhile, do not -- repeat not -- use the totally worthless F.A.A. Web site link for flight delays and cancellations. It's utterly unreliable, although some of the national media (yeah, I'm talking to you, CNN) still bafflingly refer to it.

Incidentally, from this perch in the sunny Arizona desert, you know what I do not miss even a tiny little bit? Waking up early in the morning after a storm and hearing that horrifying scraape, scraape noise from some invincibly perky neighbor's snow-shovel.

###

Timing! Airlines Impose Across-the-Board Fare Hike

OK, now that the air-travel system looks like the Fall of Saigon, what do the airlines do? Yes, they impose an across-the-board baseline fare increase of $20 round-trip!

Timing!

This just in from the folks who run the invaluable Web site Farecompare.com, where Rick Seaney meticulously follows airline fare-change activity:

"In the midst of one of the worst travel disruptions of the year that saw thousands of passengers stranded at airports along the Eastern seaboard due to blizzard conditions, airfare prices are on the rise.

... United Airlines and Continental Airlines added a new $10 one-way "peak travel day" surcharge for the majority of their domestic routes ($20 roundtrip). These surcharges have been added to all future travel dates.

A couple of hours later, American Airlines launched a $20 roundtrip airfare hike for the bulk of its domestic route system, a hike that was soon matched by Delta Air Lines.

It's worth noting that these increases come on a day in which oil prices soared to a 26-month high, which impacts the airlines' jet fuel costs."

So far, says Farecompare's Graeme Wallace, filling in for the vacationing Seaney, Southwest has resisted joining-in in the fare hike.

With flight cancellations now exceeding 6,000 since Saturday, with New York airports barely struggling back to life as stranded passengers sleep on the floors, some geniuses at the airlines are obviously thinking: Hey, how many great chances like this do we get to totally alienate the public?

And oh, by the way, the airlines always say they are not acting in collusion on fixing prices when these fare increases get adopted all at the same time by supposedly competing carriers. No way! That would be, like, wrong -- right?

###

Flight Cancellations Mount, Big Mess Ahead

[Battlefield, Gone With the Wind. "Tomorrow is another day"?]

How many flights were canceled over the weekend and today?

The media are all over the board on this one, but there's a very easy place to do the math: FlightStats.com, which is always right on top of these things.

According to FlightStats data on individual airports, there were more than 2,500 departures canceled today at the New York airports, plus Philly, Boston, Atlanta, BWI, Reagan, Dulles, O'Hare and Detroit. I didn't do the math for other airports, but it's safe to say that hundreds of additional departure cancellations were logged. Let's call it an even 3,000 departures that were canceled.

I'm not including figures for arrival cancellations, because some of the departure cancellations at any given airport also can turn up as arrival cancellations at another. Some, but not even close to most. But anyway, in all yesterday, there were more than 2,200 arrivals canceled at those airports.

On Sunday, there were just over 1,900 departures scrubbed at the same airports, with almost the same number of canceled departures. And on Saturday, Atlanta had more than 1,000 departure and arrival cancellations.

Rough guess is well over 5,000 flights that were scheduled from Saturday to Monday did not leave. Nearly each one was booked at or close to capacity, as are most of the existing flights on the schedule for this week and into the busy travel weekend.

It all adds up to one big fat serious disruption for air travel in the coming week, because there is no slack in the system to accommodate passengers who got canceled out.

Today some airports, with stranded passengers and crews camped out in despair, look like the battlefield-aftermath scene in "Gone With the Wind."

Tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hare, I mean O'Hara, famously vowed, is another day. But frankly, Scarlett, it will just be another damn mess.

###

New York Airports Closed, Will Not Resume Flights Till Tonight

Kennedy, Newark and La Guardia airports are closed, and it isn't yet clear when flights will resume into and out of New York City and Newark. Airlines are guessing around 4 p.m. -- but that's a guess.

We haven't even begun to see the tales of woe that will be coming out of the air-travel system from the disruptions of the weekend, today and (undoubtedly) tomorrow. With flight cancellations exceeding 5,000 since Saturday, in a domestic system that has no slack built into schedules, it will take literally the rest of this year, at least, for air travel to get sorted out.

There were, for example, about 1,600 departures scheduled for today at Kennedy, Newark and La Guardia. (Plus more than 1,400 arrivals).

Most of those will be scrubbed from schedules, and displaced would-be passengers will have to scramble to find seats on other flights later in the week. This will occur as the final wave of 2010 holiday travel builds.

Meanwhile, I personally will lead a brigade of citizens with pitchforks to tar and feather the next reporter, photographer or editor who even thinks of commissioning a lighthearted ode, whether in words or pictures, by whatever media known or unknown, to a winter's day's snow.

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Big Air-Travel Mess Today, and a Bigger One Tomorrow; JFK and Newark Shut As Blizzard Causes Cancellations and Delays

Flight cancellations piled up as a blizzard moved along the eastern seaboard and into New York City this afternoon and tonight. Kennedy and Newark airports shut shortly after 8 p.m. EST tonight, with plans to reopen early tomorrow.

As expected, airlines canceled large numbers of flights at East Coast airports today, one day after more than 1,000 flights were canceled at Atlanta, merely on the possibility of a snowstorm.

As of 6 p.m. EST, nearly 3,000 arrivals and departures had been canceled at airports in the New York City and Washington areas, and in Philadelphia and Boston.

And airlines have begun preemptively canceling flights for Monday. At the three New York airports alone, nearly 700 departures and arrivals scheduled for tomorrow had already been scrubbed by 9 p.m. tonight.

On flights that remained scheduled today, some delays of well over three hours were being reported at airports.

Meanwhile, severe delays rippled through the air-traffic system far away from the storm, from Miami, where delays continued into the night, and Los Angeles, where things finally eased up early in the evening.

Overall, air travel today was, in short, a huge mess -- and it will be a huge mess (and possibly a worse one) tomorrow.

If you are flying, it is very important to check before leaving for the airport to ensure that your flight is even still on the board, let alone on time. Most affected airlines have put weather-related policies into effect, meaning that, assuming you're not already stuck in the mess, you can opt out -- cancel your plans and choose another travel date, within their guidelines, without paying the dread change-penalty fee.

Hey, it's the least airlines can do, considering that they've been whacking away at their operations, and obviously canceling many flights preemptively, for fear of having airplanes stuck on tarmacs and triggering big federal fines that took effect in April to discourage tarmac strandings.

From FlightStats.com, here as of 6 p.m. EST today are the major cancellations (of course, some will count twice, since a canceled departure at one airport can sometimes also be a canceled arrival at another on this list):

Reagan National -- Canceled: 148 departures, 132 arrivals -- of 759 total arrivals/departures scheduled.

Baltimore-Washington -- 146 departures and 161 arrivals (total 687 flights scheduled)

Dulles --69 departures, 62 arrivals (849 total)

Philadelphia -- 304 departures; 241 arrivals (of 1,265 flights scheduled)

Newark -- 292 departures, 349 arrivals (of 1,002 total)

JFK -- 282 departures, 296 arrivals (of 1,193 total)

La Guardia -- 256 departures, 283 arrivals (of 869 total)

Boston: 148 arrivals, 196 departures (857 total).

Meanwhile, these airports were reporting significant delays Sunday night: Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham and Detroit. Also, excessive delays are being reported at Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Tampa -- obviously as a result of the commotion rippling through the system from delays and cancellations (including those preemptive Atlanta ones) elsewhere.

And Palm Beach is also reporting excessive delays. That airport, by the way, handles a lot of private jets (NetJets accounted for most of the takeoffs and arrivals there today) -- and the swells were evidently trying to make it home before the blizzard.

This is a very big travel mess that won't go away for days.

Courage, as the man used to say.

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Half of Atlanta Flights Canceled Today; Cancellations May Spread to East Coast Airports As Snowstorm Looms

Well I guess we now have a clear answer on whether airlines will preemptively cancel large numbers of flights to avoid new penalties for stranding passengers on planes awaiting takeoff as the weather forecast turns bad.

You betcha they will. Look at what's happened in Atlanta.

At the Atlanta airport today, half of the 2,100 scheduled departures and arrivals have been canceled. Ignore current media reports saying that "hundreds" of flights have been canceled at Atlanta. The number is over 1,000.

And the weather isn't even expected to turn bad there till tonight. After sunset, it will be icy, but not very snowy, according to this update in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this morning: "Snow accumulations up to an inch may stick in Atlanta ..." [As of Saturday mid-afternoon, incidentally, the same Atlanta Journal-Constitution is evidently unaware of the rather alarming number of preemptive cancellations at the local airport, and instead dishes up a figure from yesterday. What, you want local reporting on a holiday?]

Incidentally, Delta Air Lines accounts for the vast majority of the cancellations today in Atlanta, its main hub. Delta itself scrubbed about 650 of its flights (including 328 of its 495 scheduled departures), and Atlantic Southeast Airlines, the regional carrier that operates most of the Delta Connection flights out of Atlanta, canceled 252 departures and arrivals. [My information comes from the always-invaluable Web site FlightStats.com.]

In April, new federal rules took effect to address the problem of airlines stranding passengers for long periods of time on idled planes on runways and aprons waiting to take off (or diverted from elsewhere) in bad weather. The rules set a fine of up to $27,500 per passenger for airlines that strand passengers without a very defensible reason for over three hours.

Problem solved. Tarmac delays exceeding three hours, which once numbered in the hundreds per month, have now just about disappeared. Problem introduced: Airlines have hair-triggers on the cancellation gun when even the threat of bad weather appears.

Meanwhile, a big storm is in fact looming for the East Coast. Some media weather reporters are dizzy with the usual hysteria, tossing out words like "monster storm" and "nightmare." (That's usin' them action words, AccuWeather!) But yep, it sure does look like it's gonna snow and blow on the eastern seaboard tomorrow. Here's a CNN report.

If you're flying, check ahead and be prepared for flight cancellations from Philly to Boston. Right now, flight cancellations are minimal at the airports on the Washington-to-Boston seaboard, but that could change in a hurry later today. We'll see if the Delta-Atlanta precedent is followed elsewhere.

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A Christmas Story From Arizona

I live in Tucson, in southern Arizona. Tucson is the anti-Phoenix in many ways -- not that there is anything especially bad about Phoenix except the state politicians and the developers. Tucson has its rapacious developers, but they don't always get their way. Tucson is good on things like water use (it isn't covered with golf courses and a lot of people resist the impulse to plaster the Sonoran desert with grass). Tucson keeps the streetlamps and other outdoor lights down low at night so you can see the stars in the sky.

Tucson still has an Old West feel to it, and retains the best of an old Mexican culture. Basically, people in Tucson are laid-back, friendly, overtly courteous. Men here hold doors in stores ... even for other men. Strangers speak nicely to one another. Except when the snowbirds arrive, drivers are kind. In general, it's the kind of culture where someone might shoot you, but only assuming you actually need shootin'; otherwise, people here generally give others a lot of slack and the benefit of the doubt. Civility is a civic virtue here.

That said, here's the story. Having grown up in a big city (Philadelphia) and having worked for 25 years in another (New York), I remain a little wary of lunatics you might encounter on the street. But you seldom see them in Tucson.

Yesterday, I drove to the library out here in my end of town by the Rincon Mountains. As I was turning off my ignition, I noticed striding across the parking lot a tall man wearing a flowing white gown that came down to his ankles, sandals, and a long white turban. He was carrying a big walking stick and (red-alert for lunatic-sightings), a shopping bag. He was walking with great purpose toward the library building.

This oughta be good, I thought. I waited till he passed before getting out of my car so I could keep my eye on him. I stayed about 30 feet behind him. As I said, you don't see a lot of street-nuts here, but street-nuts are usually harmless. This guy seemed a lot more focused in his stride than your typical street schizophrenic.

It was a warm day here in the desert, so the gown and turban seemed especially excessive. I'm not someone who over-reacts to perceived threats, but I do have an old street-reporter's cop-like sense of potential trouble. This character and his shopping bag seemed to warrant at least some observation.

He passed into the shaded plaza by the library, where there are two drop-bins to return library materials. I came up next to him and as I was sliding my books into the return chute I noticed that he was putting things that were not books into the adjacent bin.

So I turned and gave him a very good look-over that would be considered rude in most places. What he was sliding into the chute were childrens' DVDs. One, I saw, was "Shrek."

The man caught my eye, smiled, and said, "How are ya?"

"Good, how are you?" I replied. Oops, I could now see that he was a perfectly pleasant and decent fellow.

But why the get-up and the big walking stick? He obviously read my mind.

"Oh," he said, "I play one of the three kings every year at the Living Nativity Scene over at the Baptist church. It's my lunch hour and I thought I'd run over to the library and return my kids' movies."

Assumptions dashed, privately chastised, I wished the man a very Merry Christmas. And I say the same to you.

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Heathrow Operations Curtailed Into Wednesday; Backups and Delays Will Continue Through Christmas

There's mounting outrage in Britain over the way passengers have been treated while stranded at airports during the severe winter weather that has disrupted air travel in Western Europe. Heathrow Airport, with massive route connections that span the world, was basically shut all weekend and still has not been able to resume anything close to normal operations.

The media are starting to catch up with the story of the misery passengers are encountering and the anger that's building as airports like Heathrow struggle, evidently not very successfully, to accommodate stranded people. Here's a report in the Telegraph newspaper today in London.

And here's a timely and comprehensive report datelined Paris in the New York Times. Also, showing its growing online savvy, the Times has this Internet roundup of reports and videos being posted by air travelers.

The Guardian newspaper in London, meanwhile, is doing a great job live-blogging the crisis.

And here is the latest update from Heathrow as snow and freezing temperatures continue in Europe:

"We have agreed a reduced flying schedule until 0600 on Wednesday 22nd December. A maximum one-third of flights are likely to operate during this period, and passengers should anticipate further delays and cancellations in the following days and potentially beyond Christmas Day.

Passengers should not travel to Heathrow without a confirmed booking. If passengers can travel at another time then they should do so.

This limited schedule provides airlines and passengers with more clarity in order to plan which flights are taking off and which are canceled. We aim to provide passengers with better and more timely information. Airlines are currently updating which flights have been canceled and the flight information board below shows the latest available flight information. If the flight status shows 'contact airline', the flight will not be operating today. Passengers must not travel to the airport unless they have confirmed that their flight is leaving today – airline contact numbers are available here.

The government has decided to permit extra flights throughout the night at Heathrow. The northern runway at Heathrow is open and handling a limited number of arrivals and departures. Earlier in the day, we prioritized aircraft that had previously been diverted, in order to bring passengers to Heathrow and get airline crews and aircraft in the right place.

Heathrow Airport was closed over the weekend following a 5-inch snowfall in around one hour on Saturday. There have been subsequent swings in temperature, to the extent that ice built up around the aircraft parked on the ground. Heathrow is currently using every available member of staff and several hundred additional contractors have been brought in to clear the situation. BAA has also deployed additional staff ..."


Meanwhile, other major European airports are also being hard hit, with delays accumulating. Few have been as responsive as Heathrow in at least addressing the situation on their Web sites. In Paris, De Gaulle Airport (of course) is pretending that nothing amiss has occurred, with its Web page full of smiling faces. Frankfurt, at least, has a notice that the weather is causing delays, along with a real-time posting of arrivals and departures.
###

Latest From Heathrow As Europe Air Mess Continues

Heathrow expects to have limited service restored tomorrow. Other airports in Europe have been operating all weekend, but are also severely hampered by snow and ice that has created huge delays and a lot of cancellations.

Here is the latest notice from Heathrow as of Sunday evening:

"Heathrow Airport will be open and operating a limited schedule of arrivals and departures from 0600 on Monday morning, but we expect further cancellations and delays in the coming days, as airlines move diverted aircraft and crew back to their normal positions and we continue to manage the impacts of the poor weather over the weekend and in the days ahead.

Passengers should not come to the airport without a confirmed booking and, if in any doubt, must consult their airlines before traveling."

And here's a BBC report on airport conditions throughout the UK.

By the way, I'd try to link to useful reports on current air-travel conditions in the rest of Europe, but the U.S. media have become so malfeasant in covering this kind of news that nothing timely or useful is available that I can find online. (CNN chooses to cover the story as a Christmas feature on some guy in Europe who's struck and wishes to be home for the holidays.) Hey, editors: We don't need your stinkin' fables. We need accurate travel-weather information, in detail, by airport, by country. This stuff is getable.

Increasingly, frustrated by the infantile trivialization of the mainstream news, many of us rely on a kind of post-modern samizdat to get relevant news. Here in the Sonoran desert, where I spent the day at a rodeo in the sun, I heard from friends -- who do in fact have a world view, with a worldwide social network -- that Geneva is a mess; the Paris airports are open but flights are badly delayed; Frankfurt is struggling back. It would be nice if the media caught onto the story, too. I mean, the roping event in Casa Grande, Arizona, is where I got at least some timely news on European travel problems this afternoon.

[UPDATE: Oh, here's a somewhat more comprehensive Reuters report from the IHT Web site, though it was posted nine hours ago.]

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Snow and Ice Create Travel Chaos in Europe; Heathrow Shut Today to Arrivals

The air-train-road travel mess continues this weekend in Britain and the rest of western and northern Europe, which has been whacked by snow and freezing temperatures. Airports are a mess, and getting an alternate flight out this week is going to be a challenge if you've had a flight canceled.

Heathrow Airport, which was shut yesterday, said it will not accept arriving flights today. Backups are spreading throughout the air-travel system. There are reports that many aircraft are stranded on tarmacs at some regional airports.

Here's the report in the Guardian newspaper on conditions in Britain.

My Sunday newspapers seemed to be full of airy-fairy warmth-of-the-season holiday stories, limp features that have been sitting in some editor's drawer for months, and the usual incremental process news, and had nothing substantive on this remarkable crisis in Europe.

CNN did have a report, which began:

"On Saturday, frigid temperatures and extreme conditions pummeled Europe. From Northern Ireland to Bulgaria, blizzard conditions left airports with heavy delays or shut them entirely. Snow, ice and fog have caused travel chaos ahead of a busy holiday travel week. And severe weather could continue on Monday as another series of weather systems move in, said Met Office special forecaster Tony Burgess."

On Monday, more snow is expected in England, including some more possible accumulation in London. Below-normal temperatures are expected to continue in northern Europe.

Meanwhile, here is the statement in full from Heathrow:

"Heathrow Airport will not be accepting arrivals on Sunday, and will only manage a handful of departures as our airfield team continues to deal with the impacts of yesterday's bad weather.

No flights will operate from Terminals 1 or 4 and a limited number of departures will leave from Terminals 3 and 5. We are extremely sorry for the disruption this will cause to passengers and airlines and we stress that passengers must check with their airlines before traveling to the airport. We will provide regular updates and you can contact your airline here.

This morning, we listened carefully to the advice of our airside operations team and reluctantly judged that while Heathrow's northern runway remains clear, the change in temperature overnight led to a significant build up of ice on parking stands around the planes and this requires the airfield to remain closed until it is safe to move planes around.

We have 200 aircraft parking stands and have a team of several hundred people working to treat these airside areas and to keep passengers in the terminal as warm and as comfortable as possible while we do everything we can to get Heathrow moving.

We are removing 30 tons of snow from each stand, but the temperature remains firmly below zero and Heathrow's capacity is limited to the extent that all parking stands are occupied by aircraft, making the job of clearing and treating them more difficult.

Safety is our first priority and we hope this course of action will allow us to offer a fuller service to passengers and airlines using Heathrow tomorrow."

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The Pious of Penzance

Mile for mile, Britain probably has more truly crappy hotels with bad attitudes (outside of London) than any country in the developed world, but this one stands out for audacity. (And remember, there was a reason that Fawlty Towers was a TV hit).

A gay couple is suing a hotel near Penzance in Cornwall because said hotel, whose owners claim to be devout Christians, refused to allow them to stay.

One of the owners of the hotel, called the Chymorvah, a Mrs. Bull, said: "We accept that the Bible is the holy living word of God and we endeavor to follow that." Luckily, Mrs. Bull and the mister did not stone the sinners.

By the way, the reader-generated reviews of this joint on the always useful Tripadvisor.com site are telling.
"Sad, outdated, unfriendly," says the headline on one. Another complains about "the religious fanatics who run the place."

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International Growth Leads Air Travel Rebound; Load-Factors Were Highest Ever For September

Air travel has definitely rebounded as the economy improves. U.S. airlines carried 57.3 million domestic and international passengers in September, up 4.9 percent over Sept. 2009, according to the latest data from the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).

The September jump was the largest monthly year-over-year increase since September 2007. The September 2010 passenger total was also 5.7 percent above that of two years ago in September 2008 -- but still remained 3.2 percent below the pre-recession level of September 2007, the BTS said.

The breakdown: U.S. airlines carried 4.3 percent more domestic passengers in September 2010 than in September 2009. International passengers on U.S. carriers in September 2010 increased 9.4 percent. The September 2010 load factors, 81.0 percent systemwide (79.9 percent domestic and 83.5 percent international) were the highest recorded for any September.

The top airlines in terms of traffic were Delta, which carried more domestic and international passengers than any other U.S. airline. But Southwest Airlines carried the most domestic passengers.

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Choice Hotels to Offer Wall Street Journal

In another bit of bad news for USA Today, which was once ubiquitous outside hotel-room doorways, Choice Hotels says it's chosen the Wall Street Journal as the "preferred newspaper" to offer at its 3,700 properties in North America. Choice's brands include Clarion, Cambria Suites, Comfort, Quality Inn, MainStay Suites, and Sleep Inn.

According to a statement from Dow Jones, the Journal will be delivered free to Choice Hotels guests starting New Year's Day. There was no mention of the financial arrangements or any barter deals Dow Jones might have made with Choice to get the newspapers into that pipeline, but Dow Jones has been expanding distribution of the Journal at domestic hotels over the last two years.

For decades, USA Today has been the standard free newspaper at hotels. But slippage became apparent in April 2009, when Marriott decided to stop distributing USA Today (almost always offered for free) at 2,600 Marriott-brand hotels in North America. This came after Marriott's chairman, Bill Marriott, decided that way too many of the brightly colored newspapers were being left untouched outside room doors, littering the corridors.

USA Today's parent company, Gannett, responded by claiming that only a small percentage of its circulation would be affected, like 1 percent. The media of course swallowed that.

By the way, I have nothing against Gannett's golden child USA Today, though I do still feel a slight residual pain from way back, when I was the editor in charge of investigative reporting at what was at the time a very aggressive Gannett newspaper. Aggressive, that is, until the then-fledgling USA Today began draining resources from all of the local Gannett newspapers, which were ordered to pay up and shut up.

I presciently resigned from that job after one glorious year (a few days, in fact, after Gannett had swopped down one night and fired the executive editor and the publisher, for spending too much money covering news).

OK, so a little professional residual resentment about USA Today, though I will concede that the paper aggressively covers travel-industry and travel consumer news, as well as sports. Anyway, I've always had some knowledge and a lot of interest in what I regard as the wild circulation claims that have always been made by USA Today. For one thing, I know no one who actually buys the paper, which claims to have a circulation of about 1.9 million on the five days a week on which it is published. I have always got it for free, usually from a hotel.

The gaudy founder of USA Today is a media buccaneer named Al Neuharth, who molded the Gannett company into a model of cost-efficiency, while at the same time ruining the journalistic reputations of more than a few regionally important local newspapers that had the misfortune of being acquired by Gannett. Neuharth is also the godfather of the much-hyped "Newseum" in Washington, which is positioned as a museum of journalism but which actually strikes me as a very pretty, essentially vacuous space near the Capitol, one noticable function of which seems to be serving as a venue for fancy cocktail parties tossed by media panjandra who rent the joint for regular celebrations of one another.

Neuharth, by the way, was also the cunning genius who got the whole newspaper industry to go along with his scheme to allow newspapers that are not sold at or near the cover price to be counted as paid circulation. As a result, even newspapers whose circulation claims are bolstered by a vast number of so-called bulk-sales copies that are essentially given away free (or as part of promotional barter deals with hotels and airlines) can make inflated claims about their circulation, which claims are always swallowed whole by media writers. (In the case of the Journal, which also counts a lot of bulk sales but with nowhere the egregiousness of USA Today, the rules also allow paid online subscribers to be counted as circulation.)

Since the days of Hearst and Pulitzer's battles, there have been, of course, many creative ways to hype circulation claims, by the way. For example, my local newspaper in Tucson amazes me each morning by proclaiming, on the top of its front page, that it has "238,700 readers weekdays." It escapes my comprehension how that remarkably precise number is arrived at, especially since the newspaper actually sells a mere 70,000 or so copies a day, and does not, to my knowledge, have any free circulation in the few hotels in town. I suspect this weird kind of arithmetic is still another legacy of Al Neuharth.

But I digress. The interesting news, to repeat, is that Choice Hotels has affirmed a commitment to a print newspaper, and chosen the Wall Street Journal to do so.

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Tourist Alert NYC: King Tut Exhibit Ain't What You Probably Think It Is, for $27.50 a Ticket

The famed King Tut's tomb relics got a lot of exposure when they toured the world in 1972 through 1979 in an acclaimed museum exhibit called Treasures of Tutankhamun. More than 8 million visitors saw it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City alone from 1976 through 1979.

Heads-up for tourists coming to New York this holiday season. The King Tut exhibit that's now on display in Times Square (there's a clue for you right there) is a commercial show, heavy on reproductions and glitz and light on actual Tut artifacts, that's not at all what the museum exhibit was.

In fact, despite credulous media reviews, the show is generating some blow-back from disappointed people who pay $27.50 expecting to see a spectacular array of treasures from Tut's tomb, which was discovered in 1922.

As one unhappy visitor put it on Fodor's.com: "This exhibit is completely different from the original back in the 1970s. That one was magnificient, this one is made up of a bunch of essentially cast-offs and minor artifacts, few having anything to do with Tut. I was wondering if it was anything like the original. I saw it at the Met back then. It really was magnificent."

The exhibit has also generated a lot of publicity recently on Stephen Colbert's Colbert Nation show, in a joke segment called "Mysteries of the Unknown: Pursuit of the Pharaoh's Phallus," that's based on reports that Tut's penis disappeared from his mummified remains in recent years. Colbert visits the exhibit and interviews its director in a straight-faced manner that's very funny. That segment also makes it clear that the exhibit is commercial and the "mummy" on display is a replica. (The mummy was never a part of the museum exhibit.)

Anyway, as I said, heads-up. You may want to visit the show in New York, but you probably would like to know first actually what you'll be paying that $27.50 to see.

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Good News: Free Inflight WiFi for Holiday; Bad News: Service Sucks

As I reported here Nov. 8, Delta, Virgin America and AirTran are offering free in-flight WiFi on the Aircell Gogo system, in a promotion with Google Chrome that runs through Jan 2.

Oops, according to this piece in Gizmodo, adding a lot of extra passengers per flight onto the system seems to have exposed its bandwidth weaknesses.

Not a good marketing initiative, if you want to build a base of loyal customers. The jury is still out on whether this is a viable business, given chronically low "take rates" by passengers who have actually paid full price for the service on the various airlines that offer it.

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Airlines Slowly Adding Capacity; Wall Street Doesn't Like This

Airlines are slowly adding seat capacity. Delta, for example, said today that its systemwide capacity was up 7.5 percent in November compared with Nov. 2009. Traffic was also up 7.5 percent, Delta said.

That suggests that supply and demand, which airlines have massaged in the last year to a formula that enables them to be profitable, is still under control, even if supply is rising.

Wall Street, which understands nothing but the primal scream of fast money, does not approve. In the last month, on worries that airlines might be adding capacity to serve growing demand, Delta's stock has been driven down 4.72 percent.

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Storm Snarls Air Travel in Northeast

[Above: Airport delays as of just before 5 p.m. Eastern time, via FlightView.com]

Wind and rain are creating an air-travel mess in the Northeast this afternoon, especially in the New York area, where almost 1,000 departures and arrivals had been canceled by late afternoon at La Guardia, Newark and JFK, according to FlightStats.com

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'We're Going Through a Little Turbulence, Folks ... Yaiiii!'

Not to worry about who's in charge in the secured cockpit of the next Air India Express 737 flight you're on. Why, it's a 25-year-old, reportedly inadequately trained co-pilot, panicking the jet into a spectacular 7,000 foot dive while the passengers were eating their dinner and the pilot was outside the cockpit on a bathroom break, reports CNN, which adds:

"The aviation agency report [in India] concluded that the 25-year-old co-pilot had not been trained in the specific scenario the jet encountered and 'probably had no clue to tackle this kind of emergency.'"

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