The beatings will continue. Taking the long way home. TSA buying CT scanners?

For the week of March 28, 2022:

This week I leave again for Miami, Florida, for the GHI Americas conference. My company has several people there we're going to be meeting as well as meeting with several of the media vendors in Ground Service Equipment.

That should be interesting - traveling for business on Spring Break?

They should perhaps have Spring Break for business. I'd be down...

The Beatings Shall Continue!

Captain! Hand me my "beat unruly passengers" stick, please!

The outgoing FAA Director, Steve Dickson, said last Friday that the FAA will continue its "zero tolerance" policy of punishing "unruly" passengers.

“We have seen over the last year a significant decline in these incidents but they continue to occur at too high of a rate,” Dickson said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We will be keeping the zero-tolerance policy in place.”

According to the FAA, 961 people were reported as "unruly passengers" through March 21, 2022. For those of you who aren't idiot savants at math, that's roughly 12 people a day. That said, I think there's a fair amount of "uppity" passengers who don't ultimately wind up being reported.

On my last flight from Orlando two weeks ago, the Captain came out while the plane was loading (it loaded from the second door so people went left or right depending on class seating), and he said that in part the reason why the flight was "late" was that there were "several special people" on the last flight that wound up having to be led off the plane by the police upon landing. The Captain said this to us apparently having heard the tale from the previous flight team.

Pretty much every flight I've been on, there's always some guy, who isn't wearing the mask, or having their nose out, or has their head firmly up their ass acting like a self-entitled idiot not understanding the basic "unchecked power" a flight attendant has to put you in prison.

Cornered by the flight attendants, the perfidious sod is suddenly an expert on both epidemiology and the rule of law when the flight team attempts to address it. In all the cases I've observed, the "uppity passenger" narrowly misses becoming an "unruly passenger" and backs down when most of us start staring at the guy (and it usually is a guy in my experience.)

So I suspect the total number of people who are just a "pain in the ass" on flights is 30X whatever the numbers are being reported. Nearly half of the flight attendants I have talked to have told me that they were involved in an incident on a plane they felt could have gotten "violent" and a few of them I know were on planes where passengers had to be subdued.

Crazy.

At the present rate, the number of unruly passengers will roughly equal last year (5,981) given the trend line is almost identical.

The FAA rolled out the?“zero tolerance” policy?in January 2021 to curb in-flight disputes. The FAA referred?80 unruly airplane?passengers to the FBI to be reviewed for criminal prosecution between January 2021 and February 16, 2022.

As part of efforts to ensure safety on board, Delta Air Lines CEO Edward Bastian sent a letter to the Justice Department in January, asking to put unruly travelers on a national?“no-fly” list?to prohibit them from commercial airplanes.

About 70% of these "unruly passenger" incidents "start" with a mask. Thus, the common refrain is - get rid of masks - everyone will be chill.

I sincerely doubt it.

Flight attendants may need to start training like Homer for "Whacking Day":

Took the Long Way Home

Airlines are adding up to 40% extra flight time and thousands in extra costs to fly around closed Russian & Ukrainian airspace.

Suddenly, we all realize geometry and that the "map" that ?Gerardus Mercator?developed in 1569 is absolutely BONKERS. Getting from here to there is hardly as simple as most people think.

For all you "flat earthers" out there... as I always say "good luck with the math." If the earth was indeed flat - aviation navigation would be considerably easier. But of course, it's actually a sphere, so we wind up having to use things like Mercator maps because we can't wrap our noodles around what a spherical map would look like (well it's a globe - but I mean most people can't see that in their heads.)

By the way - seriously - go on Google and look at a Mercator "projection" some time to understand how absolutely bonkers the whole idea is. Greenland looks like it's the size of Africa. That is absolutely NONSENSE. Africa is GI FREAKING NORMOUS compared to Greenland. Africa has like 50 countries in it. Greenland is roughly the size of the Democratic Republic of Congo - which is a HUGE country. By comparison, you could fit the entirety of the British Isles into Tanzania.

Africa is ginormous. But I digress.

So anyways - maps - yes, we live on a ball. As a consequence, the "fastest way to get there" is typically going in a "curved line" between two points. The problem for many European routes to the east - those routes would fly over Russia.

Now they're flying over the north pole or flying around Russia or other closed airspaces. Finland flag carrier Finnair, in particular, is being "severely affected" (according to experts) by Russian airspace closures.

Sam Chui had this graphic from Flight24 I thought was helpful:

So lots of polar bears looking up going "What the hell?" as planes fly overhead like 300X more than they used to.

So that made me go "Biscuits and Gravy!" Why don't we fly over the South Pole and just avoid all the Russians altogether?

(You know - penguins live in the South Pole and the globe is basically well - a globe - so there's more than one way between two points if you're going to go over a "pole".)

KOWALSKI! Oddly enough - there's a video about that Skipper:

So the bottom line is - Russia being well - Comrade Soviet - is really screwing up traffic primarily between the EU and Asia.

Flights, for example, from London to Asia now fly much further south to avoid Russian airspace. Polar flights from the U.S. to Asia can no longer use Russia as alternate airports. Should an emergency such as?engine failure?occur, no Russian airport can be a diversion airport (but probably really need to be in bad straights to even think about it anyways given the plane would be undoubtedly impounded and the citizens likely arrested.)

KOWALSKI! Options!

Skipper - time to make your own options.

FREE CT SCANS! Now at your neighborhood TSA!

The TSA is experimenting with CT scans (yes, the same thing they use on people) to potentially use the technology to make it easier to detect dangerous items at the airport without everyone having to take out laptops, strip naked, etc.

The new full-size Computed Tomography (CT) x-ray systems in question create 3D images of carry-on items, detecting weapons, explosives, and other prohibited items more accurately than current scanners—similar to what hospitals use to look at patients’ internal organs. The new technology will hopefully allow passengers to keep liquids and laptops in their luggage, speeding up the oftentimes sluggish security lines.

TSA will order 469 base and 469 full-size CT x-ray systems, the latter of which feature fully automated screening lanes and automated bin return. All in all, the new scanners will cost about $781.2 million.

While the scanners are currently in the ordering stage, the agency hopes to start installing and deploying them in U.S. airports this summer.

We'll see. I'll continue to have TSA PreCheck and Clear.

For me... Sebastian Maniscalco nails it:

And now... this...

So if you haven't figured out by now, I watch a fair amount of video (in addition to reading about four books a week - so maybe my idiocy and intellect balance out.)

I thought I'd start sharing some great channels on YouTube for people to follow. The first is Wendover Productions:

The second is CGP Grey. He's made as far as I'm concerned some of the best videos on all of YouTube.

Enjoy!

About "The View from 30,000 Feet":

"The View from 30,000 Feet" is a weekly newsletter distributed on LinkedIn that covers news stories we think you might have missed about aviation, aerospace, and travel. It is produced by?The Aviation Agency, an advertising agency that focuses exclusively on aviation, aerospace, and defense clients.

The views expressed in the newsletter are those of the Executive Editor (Bryan Del Monte) and are based on reports found across the Internet and from sources we think are reliable. If you have an idea or a contribution, feel free to write to?[email protected]. If you're a media source and you'd like our thoughts for a story,?reach out.