Strange Things
Reading web sites like FARK or Dave Barry’s blog, you can always find a bunch of really bizarre stuff that’s happening around the world.
Like this story from Nottingham, England, where a mother wanted to arrange a surprising incident for her son on his 16th birthday. So she hired the services of a costumed messenger service to have a guy in a gorilla suit chase him around his drama classroom. The mother even came to school before the event, gave her son’s drama teacher a video camera and asked her to tape her son’s reactions. The twist? The service got the booking mixed up and sent a female stripper in a policewoman’s outfit instead. Believing that the mother knew what it was all about, the teacher videotaped as her student was led around the classroom on all fours by the stripper as she whipped him 16 times, once for each year. The teacher was so stunned that she didn’t stop it–not, at least, until the stripper got down to a bra and panties and asked the boy to rub cream on her ass.
Less funny but also on the topic of moms, boys, and sex, is a story about how a parent can get arrested and convicted of a crime… for telling her teenaged sons about sex. True, she went a bit farther than most parents do; she described some of her own sexual experiences, explained what oral sex was, and showed them a sex toy. For this, she was arrested for “exposing a child to harmful descriptions,” which can be punished with up to three years in prison. The charges were lowered to a misdemeanor “exposing a child to harmful material,” punished with one year of probation and counseling. But it begs the question, where is the line where the state can dictate to a parent what is healthy for a teenage boy to know and what is not?
Here’s a story of a 72-year-old woman who had to pay two tickets for parking in a handicapped zone. She is handicapped, but forgot her placard on those occasions. One would think that all she would have to do would be to show up in court, show her certification, and be excused. But she was told that to appeal the case, she’d have to pay a non-refundable fee more than the cost of the two tickets. Your bureaucracy at work.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, the state government has mandated a “moment of silence” to be observed in public schools. The stated rationale is that the moment of silence will “help teachers control the classroom, keep boisterous students calm and give students a chance to reflect before the school day.” Um, yeah, right. No chance that it is a thinly disguised public schoolroom prayer. Fortunately, at least one school is not having any of that, and is refusing to institute it.
And finally, here’s a story that maybe Paul can corroborate: some airlines are intentionally underfueling their planes so as to save cost on jet fuel. If you give a plane a full load of fuel when it does not need that much to get to its destination, it will use more fuel than is necessary because it has to schlep around the extra weight. Give the aircraft just enough to get where it’s going, and it will require less fuel overall. The problem? Some planes are given so little reserve fuel that they are arriving at their destinations with dry tanks–sometimes even declaring emergencies on arrival. They must land immediately or they will run out of fuel and crash. Lovely.
I’m afraid it’s true. Some guys had noticed it even prior to the news media picking up the story- in fact, that’s how they got the story in the first place… controllers gave it to the media.
The deal is this. There are three situations that an aircraft can be in when it comes to fuel status. First is normal; they’ve got enough reserves to go in, try to land at their original destination, and still have enough left over to deviate to their alternate airport. There’s additional requirements- they have to have a certain number of minutes’ worth of fuel- and it’s enough that they’ve got plenty.
The “normal” state also has an allowance for any deviations or holding they might encounter while enroute because of air traffic delays.
The first problem state is “minimum fuel”. The book says that a declaration of “minimum fuel” by a pilot doesn’t buy him/her any priority; it just means that they cannot take any “undue delay” from there on to their destination.
It’s essentially them saying “hey, we’re worried about it now”, but it doesn’t mean that they get any special handling… in theory. In practice, it DOES get them a little priority or “cuts” in line a bit in front of anyone else they might be tied (or close to tied) with where, under normal circumstances, they might well have gone behind.
Finally, there’s an emergency fuel status. Emergencies are just that- land ASAP and a critical situation.
The real problem here is that going “minimum fuel” has only POSITIVE benefits for airlines. They get the benefit of the doubt in any close situations along the way, but they don’t have to file any paperwork or answer for it. Plus, by getting the plane down to that amount of fuel, they save gas along the way because they’re not hauling as much weight.
(Keep in mind this is an industry where they figure that kind of thing very carefully, to the point where American Airlines saves 360 pounds per 767 (and corresponding amounts on other aircraft) which leads them to considerable fuel, and money, savings each year.)
What it really amounts to is this: In an FAA that wasn’t worried about “running like a business” (as it is under W Bush), a trend like this (increasing minimum fuel situations and emergencies) would be noted and something done about it.
Instead, in the Bush Administration, where NASA withholds reports that indicate unsafe situations in the aviation system because “it might erode public confidence and hurt the airline industry”, this kind of thing is ignored.
Personally, I haven’t noticed an increasing number of minimum fuel situations going on, but that’s probably because the flights going into the airports I work are typically either only delayed a bit, or not at all. Our flights head mostly into Portland, Oregon or Seattle, Washington, and at those airports we just don’t (yet) have daily delays of 20-40 minutes per flight.
We DO occasionally (spring and fall) get fog delays, but those are fairly predictable by the weather guessers so the airlines load enough fuel during those times.
Spoke too soon. The day after I left the above comment, we got slammed with crummy weather and a big storm through the Pacific NW… and I saw more planes declare minimum fuel in an hour than I’ve seen all year.
There’s no reason for it; the airlines should have known perfectly well that the area was going to get clobbered with weather and loaded enough fuel accordingly.