When the Flight Goes Wrong, Data is All That Matters

 

Since 2017 I have flown overseas every year to every continent except Australia: almost 20 trips total. I have flown many airlines. In addition to the trans-Atlantic flights, I have flown short, regional trips within the Americas, Europe and Asia.  

My main criteria for picking flights is price.  But after I get a list of cheap fares, I eliminate the airlines that have a weak or non-existent back office.  In the 1990s when e-commerce was new, many companies had a "sneaker net."  They had several systems that were not integrated and had to pass paper or messages between ticketing, scheduling, etc. 

This is how to pick an airline.

I have heard people complain that airlines are annoying when they send regular texts reminding you about seat choice or luggage limits or baggage rules. But those same people are ready to sing Hallelujah! when their flight is delayed, changed or cancelled and they get instant notification with options for rescheduling.  

For me, United Airlines is the best in this regard. I have flown American and Delta and they also have excellent apps and notifications. When a United flight got cancelled, my phone lit up with options. I flew TAP, the Portuguese national airlines,  for the last time last fall when I had a flight cancelled.  The long story about dealing with an airline that has a sneaker net is here. 

Since I travel with no checked luggage, I can check in on line for  most flights and walk straight to security. I also have TSA PreCheck and Global Entry, so there is no security reason to keep me from automated check in even for overseas flights.  With United, I have checked in on line for flights in the US, Brazil and Europe. 

I recently flew Norse Atlantic airlines. They have no app; their website seems to  allow check in, but then tells me I can't check in on line; they are not integrated with TSA Pre; they have no automated check in at major airports in America or Europe, so travelers like me with no checked luggage stand for an hour in line with people who have five suitcases on baggage carts.

On a recent Norse flight, I got in contact with a customer service rep on email. I told her how long I had been waiting, that I got to the airport three hours early and I did not want to miss my flight. She suggested going ahead of others in the line.  I told her I would not do that and suggested they send more people to check in to take care of customers. She could do nothing because they did not have the systems in place. 

All Americans saw what happens to an airline with outdated computer systems in the 21st century when a huge winter storm cancelled thousands of flights.  All airlines had some flights cancelled. Southwest had half the cancellations of all the airlines combined. Every Wednesday morning I have breakfast with a retired air traffic controller. He knew the Southwest disaster was data management.

I worked for two multi-national companies in the 1990s that switched from paper to fully integrated electronic systems. The switch was long, painful and expensive, but the difference was profound for customers and managers. From manufacturing to delivery there was real time information for every step.  

For all the traveling I do, I do not find travel easy even when everything goes well.  So while price is my main criteria for picking a flight, I will not fly with an airline that has a lame app and any problems with data management. 

I recently flew with Spirit Airlines. I loved it for the old-fashioned reasons of nice people, on-time performance and easy boarding. But if anything had gone wrong, they had an app that would have me on my way as soon as possible.  And all for $74 round-trip. 

 

 

Gordon Moore: The Chemist at the Center of the High Tech Revolution Dies at 94.

 

In 1965 when I was twelve years old, I learned basic electronics from a 600-page book published by the Amateur Radio Relay League--the ham radio operators.  The big book taught me both vacuum tube circuits and transistor circuits. Integrated circuits were not part of my basic course.  

Transistors were invented in 1948. The integrated circuit--transistors and diodes on a single silicon chip--was patented in 1959.  In 1964, the number of components on a single chip had risen to 120. The following year, while I pondered the mysteries of triode and pentode tubes along with NPN and PNP transistors, Gordon Moore published the bold prediction that the number of components on a microchip would double roughly every 18 months: Moore's Law. 

He was largely correct. I could not even count the quibbles about Moore's Law, but a single microchip can currently include billions of components.  Starting at 120 per chip in 1965, billions is a lot of doubling. 

In 1968, Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Intel Corporation. He was very much a part of making his own law come true decade after decade.  

I met Moore briefly in 2004 and again in 2005. I worked for the Science History Institute, which at the time was very much a museum and library of the history of Chemistry.  Moore was there because he was trained as a chemist and saw the high tech revolution very much as a chemical revolution.  

In 2005, Moore held the conference celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Moore's Law at the Science History Institute. Most of the speakers flew in from the other coast to Philadelphia.  Moore wanted the celebration to be connected to chemistry.  

But Moore's 2004 visit to the Institute is a story I have told and retold. At the time our library wanted to acquire the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library: 6,000 rare science books dating back almost to the invention of printing held privately by Neville. The founder and President of the Institute, Arnold Thackray, asked Moore to donate the money to acquire the books.  Because there was a competitive bid and not much time to close the deal, Moore wrote a personal check for $10 million in Thackray's office.

Not many people could write a check for $10 million, but Moore could and did and we got the collection.

During the 2005 Moore's Law Conference, Moore spoke about the early days of the high tech revolution and how microchips were everywhere in just 40 years.  His remarks gave credit to many people and was full of thanks for great colleagues.  

Flying Spirit was Delightful: Nothing like their emails

 

Last month I flew Spirit Airlines for the second time ever, and the first time in a decade. Like most cut-rate airlines they charge for everything. Their emails warned me that if my bag was an inch larger than their maximum size in any dimension they would charge a big fee. 

Every seat, even a middle seat cost extra. All food and drinks cost extra. Everything cost extra. And the tone, especially about the bags, is confrontational compared with the big airlines.  

And yet. 

The full flight to Indianapolis had few open seats. The flight attendant, Lee, in the center of the plane said the empty exit row seats would be open when they shut the cabin doors.  So I did not have to sit in my assigned window seat. I sat in an exit row.

During the flight I got up to stretch and talked to Lee again. We had talked earlier about meditation and exercise, she said one of the flight attendants was an avid bicyclist. So I went to the galley and talked to Joseph. Yes, he was a cyclist. For fifteen years before he retired in 2015, he was a professional Ironman Triathlon competitor. 

That is an avid cyclist.The kind that can swim 2.4 miles in open water then ride 112 miles in 4.5 hours--his average time. And then run a marathon in under 3 hours. He said the bike was his worst event. Wow!

On the way back the plane was empty. The flight attendants let us move within the zone we were assigned a seat. So again, I was in an aisle and again hand a pleasant uneventful flight. 

The round trip air fare was $74, so I had a good reason to fly Spirit. But the flight itself was really good--so much better than I would have predicted from the emails. 

 

Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum

Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum has a collection of dozens of winning cars and a selection of second place cars.  I walked around the museum looking at the cars and remembering the races.  In the 80s and 90s I watched all of the races. When split between Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) and Indy happened in the mid 1990s, I became less interested and watched only the highlights.  Some of the best drivers and teams stayed away from Indy for several years. It was a sad time for the race.

The series and the race were great from the 1960s when I could see only highlights, but read about the races in Car and Driver magazine. After the Offenhausers dominated in the post-war era, the 1960s saw great innovation and change beginning with Jim Clark's win in a rear-engine Lotus-Ford.  After Clark's win, rear-engine quickly became the only winning design.  

Aerodynamics and wings were the center of innovation in the 1970s.  Great drivers crossed back and forth from Indy to Formula 1 to sports cars and stock cars.  Jim Clark was the Formula 1 World Champion in 1963 and 1965 and won Indy in 1965. 

Jim Clark's Lotus Ford

Mario Andretti is a winner across every kind of motor sports. He won Indy in 1969, the NASCAR Daytona 500 in 1967, the Formula 1 World Championship in 1978 and won the 12 Hours of Sebring sports car race three times, along with many other titles and championships.

Mario Andretti's Brawner-Hawk Indy Car

Al Unser Sr. won Indy four times. 

He won in this car in 1978, the third of four wins.

The Unser family has nine Indy 500 wins among three drivers between 1968 and 1994.  Al Unser Sr. has four wins: 1970, 71, 78 and 87.  Older brother Bobby has three in 1968, 75 and 81.  Al Unser Jr. has two wins in 1992 and 94.  With all those wins over nearly three decades, none of the Unsers has a second place finish at Indy. Al Unser Jr. won by 0.043 seconds in 1992 for the closest finish in Indy 500 history.  

Bobby Rahal won the Indy 500 in 1986

Bobby Rahal won both the Indy 500 and his first of three CART championships in 1986. He made a dramatic pass with two laps to go in the Indy 500 and was the first driver to complete the 500 miles in under three hours: an average of 134mph including pit stops.  

1960 Winner Jim Rathman's Offenhauser-powered Indy Car

In the 1950s and the early 60s, Offenhauser-powered, front-engined cars dominated the Indy 500. Jim Clark's 1965 win in a rear-engined Lotus caused a complete changed in the winning formula and the "Offy" engines were gone. As a kid, I built several plastic models of the Offenhauser Indy racer. 

A.J. Foyt won the 1977 Indy 500--his record-setting fourth win

The first driver to win the Indy 500 four times is also among the best drivers in American history. A.J. "Super Tex" Foyt is the only driver to win Indy, the Daytona 500, the 24-hour races at LeMans and Daytona and the 12 hours of Sebring. 

1993 CART Champion Nigel Mansell at Indy, bad luck ended his chance to win

Heartbreak is part of the world of racing. Over the 100-plus years of the Indy 500 just as many drivers have finished second as finished first and all of those drivers, in racing parlance, are the "first loser." Tragedy has haunted the race in both injuries and death. 

A sad moment for me was the otherwise magical year of 1993 when my  favorite Formula 1 driver--1992 Formula 1 World Champion Nigel Mansell--went across the Atlantic in 1993 and took the CART Championship as a "rookie" driver. He had four wins, but a freak accident caused by a real rookie in the pit lane took the possibility of Indy victory away from Mansell.

Heartbreak is part of Indy and I was heartbroken watching that race.  In 2000 I named my youngest son Nigel. I am that kind of fan. 

Friend Gets Top Job: He Now Knows He Is An HMFIC

 

Mike McCoy, Interim Editor-in-Chief

Chemical and Engineering News

Today I ran into a friend I have known and worked with since the 1990s at a conference in Indianapolis.  As we talked I found out he had recently been named Editor-in-Chief of Chemical and Engineering News magazine.  In his self-effacing way he told me that his promotion was because so many other high-level editors left recently. But he is and always has been a leader able to manage and get great results from a staff of creative people--one of the more difficult management gigs there is.

I first met Mike when he was named the managing editor of Chemical Market Reporter in the late 1990s. That magazine was, at the time, one of five global weekly chemical news magazines. It began as the Oil, Paint & Drug Reporter in the 1870s. Mike managed 20 columnists who covered various markets when many chemical companies still had offices in or around New York City.  

Mike was young and his staff was younger, mostly recent grads of journalism school. They wanted a journalism job in New York. Many of them worked for a year, wrote 50 columns and moved on the other magazines in the chemical news area or business press.  Mike and I talked about staff turn over and management. Half the staff went to new jobs in an average year, but Mike could remain calm dealing with constantly hiring and anticipating the loss of his best writers. His magazine had the lowest pay in the chemical industry, so he knew he was training writers for better-paying jobs.

Years later he moved to C&EN managing the business office located then in New Jersey, now in NYC.  He managed a very stable staff of writers there for more than a decade. Now he has the top job in the Washington-based magazine, at least for a while.  

Mike and his staff gave me a going away party when I went to Iraq 2009. I brought Army field rations so some of the food could be real Army cuisine.  

Since I have known Mike for so long and only in leadership jobs, I was surprised that I told him only today with this new job that he is an HMFIC (Head MF In Charge, the Army generic term for anyone in charge at any level.)

Congratulations Mike--Interim Editor-in-Chief and lifelong HMFIC.

A Visit to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library

In the middle of Indianapolis is a lovely little museum devoted to the life and works of a brilliant and crazy author of more than a dozen novels and a dozen more works of non-fiction, plays and short-story collections: The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.

Among the displays in the museum is a shelf of books with Vonnegut novels published in many, many languages around the globe.  With novels set all over the world including a million years in the future (Galapagos), Vonnegut is very much a man from Indiana. He loved Indiana and expressed that love all of his long life. 

And this darkly funny man could also include his Indiana roots in messages from a coming Armageddon.

The third floor of the museum is devoted to Vonnegut's most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five.

This strange novel is in part the story of Vonnegut's survival of one of the terrible fire bombings during World War II. He was a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse in Dresden which is how he survived a five-day raid in which 150,000 people died. 

Vonnegut was captured in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge.

Later in life his face became well-known as one of America's great artists.

For me, Vonnegut is one of the great examples of people who transformed the pain of war into art.  

At the end of his life he admired Jesus deeply and openly at the same time he was a noted atheist. He said that being kind was the greatest thing a person could do with their lives.  

Contradiction?  Life has a lot of contradictions. I am so glad Kurt Vonnegut shared his contradictions with the world. 

  

Big Conspiracy Theories in a Small Town

 

I was in Myerstown, Pennsylvania, today. A small town north of Lancaster. I wanted coffee and saw there were three coffee shops near the center of town. I went to Café 58 which my son Nigel suggested by looking at Google maps. 

Within a few minutes the name would change in my mind to Café [Area] 51. It was raining when I walked to the cafe. A sticker on the door said Veteran Owned business. In mid-state Pennsylvania, that was most likely to mean an Iraq/Afghanistan veteran who thinks Fox News is too liberal. 

Inside, the cafe was dark paneled, dimly lit and there was only one customer.  The owner was in his 50s. His customer at the bar was in his early 60s. I waited while they watched a video together. From several feet away, I could only tell that the video had a talking dog and a lot of yelling. 

After they watched the video, they took turns bemoaning the need for more laughter in the world; the owner turned toward me asked what I would like. I said a latte to go. He asked what flavor I wanted. I said none. He said, “Well, you want a cappuccino. A latte with no flavor is a cappuccino. I make such a good cappuccino you’ll think you are in Italy.” He said this with the air of a man of vast experience talking to a rube.

For a moment I thought about saying I spent a week in Rome last summer, so I can make the comparison, but decided against speaking. The owner and the customer started talking about someone famous they both knew. I did not catch the name, but it was a conservative activist. Then they said something about 9-11 conspiracies.  

They were laughing. But it turns out they were not laughing at 9-11 conspiracies. I should have taken my better-than-Italy-cappuccino and left, but I said, "A lot of people believe 9-11 conspiracies."

Then I told them about seeing a report on CNN on the 5th anniversary of 9-11 that said 28% of Americans believe 9-11 was an inside job. After seeing the report, I went to a local coffee shop, repeated what I heard on TV and the owner of the shop said, “Yes. It was an inside job.” 

The customer at the bar now turned on his bar stool and was facing me, feet on the floor, leaning forward. Intent. The owner said that the corner of College and Main where his shop is located is a wormhole to alternate dimensions. Going along with the joke, but knowing this was going somewhere weird, I said one of my sons lives down the street and that’s why he moved here. 

Then the owner asked me if I remembered seeing Donald Rumsfeld on the TV the night before 9-11 saying 63 trillion dollars was missing from the U.S. treasury. Then he said that on 9-11 Building 7 collapsed just like the twin towers, but no airplane crashed into it. Building 7 was where all the records were stored of the missing 63 trillion dollars. (In 2019, the entire GDP of the US was 21 trillion dollars; 63 trillion is pretty much the GDP of the whole world.) 

After that, I found myself edging backward toward the door. The owner continued saying that the reason for 9-11 was to put the Patriot Act into law and take away our rights. He said 3,000 civilians being killed was a small price for that. After all, 50,000 soldiers died in the Vietnam War to expand government control over its citizens. 

I left at that point. I sipped the cappuccino. It wasn’t very good. I decided if I finished it, I would come under some kind of mind control, so I threw it away and went to one of the other coffee shops in Myerstown. 

----

At some point in the conversation, I don’t remember at what point, the owner interjected that the Pentagon is five-sided and that makes it a pentagram. He said it with the intensity of someone who has the Truth.