Joe Sharkey At Large

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff , undoubtedly impressed by the total confusion the Department of Transportation unleashed on the traveling public with its incomprehensible Dec. 28 directive on lithium batteries, has now got travelers in a befuddled uproar again.

[Hey! Wait a minute! Now that I look at that press release, I see that the "Dec. 28" directive on lithium batteries, linked to above, has actually been rewritten by DOT for a little more clarity, and sneakily back-dated to Dec. 28 -- so you won't have the original one to look at and see what a bunch of nimrods they were. Trust me, the version that actually appeared on the DOT web site on Dec. 28 and for about week thereafter was incomprehensible-on-a-stick. And I have copies.]

Anyway, you’ll have to sort this one out yourself. Bottom line: Nuttiness, but it ain’t gonna happen for a long time, if at all.

[Update Jan. 14: USA Today today has the most cogent story explaining this.]

There’s been negative Congressional reaction. In a letter of rebuke to Chertoff, Bennie G. Thompson, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, says that the license plan as outlined raises “more questions than answers.”

Me, I’m all worn out from trying to straighten out the rest of the media on lithium batteries, and besides, I was born after 1964 (which I recall, incidentally, as the last very good year before everything went straight to hell) — and for a change being an old fart has some benefit, that is, beyond wisdom tempered with the knowledge of what I went through over the years to acquire it.

My first question, of course, was what yours undoubtedly will be: Does this mean an extra trip to the dread Motor Vehicles Office? (My own plan is to move to Arizona before my current New Jersey license expires).

Once at the D.M.V., after the requisite four-hour wait, will a sullen Motor Vehicles employee staple a microchip into your skull?

I’m glad we have a place out in the desert. Easier to go off the grid.

[Update Jan. 13, Tucson, Arix. -- Lending more proof to the idea that readers of local newspapers have no hope of ever again being adequately informed by intelligent reporting and editing, the Arizona Daily Star, a Lee Enterprises newspaper in Tucson, leads its front page today with the following headline: " 'Real ID' needed to fly as early as May 11." And the lede paragraph says: "Arizona residents may find themselves unable to use their state driver's (sic) licenses to board airplanes as soon as May 11."]

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Above: Awaiting the Official Word while resisting the urge to speculate …

I know it’s only 10 days after New Years, but we already have a candidate for Airline Public Relations Bonehead Stunt of the Year: A flack at Air Canada, who declined to discuss whether serious injuries sustained by passengers on a flight from Victoria to Toronto today were caused by severe air turbulence even though that’s exactly what passengers said after the plane made an emergency landing in Calgary.

“It’s going to take a bit of time to determine exactly what happened, I would encourage people to refrain from speculation,” the airline PR man told CTV Newsnet.

Wot? He would encourage people to refrain from speculation, even as eyewitnesses saw dishes, trays and other passengers tumbling around and felt the plane rock and roll? Oh hell, let’s do go out on a limb here and speculate, because the subject is important if you fly.

It probably wasn’t a poltergeist. Nor was it likely a brawl among passengers who tossed things and each other around. And I’d rule out a close encounter with a joyriding U.F.O.

Here’s a case in which I think we can probably take the eyewitness accounts at face value.

The plane “went up and then sideways,” one passenger told the Calgary Herald, who added that a friend of hers was among the 10 people injured and later taken to hospitals in Calgary. “She flew up to the ceiling and right down.”

“Some of the armrests on the aisle seat sides were bent 60 degrees from people holding on — that’s how extreme it was,” another passenger on the flight was quoted as saying in the Toronto Star.

Yep, sounds like air turbulence, sure enough. I don’t think we need to await the NTSB report 18 months from now to figure this one out.

As I say, the year is young and I will be accepting nominations for new Airline PR Bonehead Stunts as time goes on.

Incidentally, those airline in-flight announcements that suggest you keep your seat belt fastened even when the seat-belt light is out are a guard against sudden air turbulence. They’re good advice, because you don’t always get a warning — and neither do the pilots.

Air turbulence is serious stuff.

Take it from me, you can be flying along peacefully, minding your own business, and all of sudden something utterly unexpected can happen to make you realize how mortally vulnerable you are in a metal tube hurtling through the skies six miles above the earth. This has a marvelous way of focusing the attention.

Since that unexpected trip into the Amazon I had 15 months ago, people have asked me if I’m more afraid of flying. Not really, I reply — but I am a hell of a lot more afraid of crashing.

Wear your seat-belts. The airlines don’t like to say this, but a seat-belt won’t do diddley for your longevity if the plane goes down. They’re mainly to protect you from getting hurt during air turbulence, and they work.
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Some swiftboat that was!

The ludicrous characters of the scarily named Revelation Press have just announced their much-hyped “swiftboating” of a presidential candidate.

It turns out they are going after Bishop Romney. Mormons, it seems, believe in strange concepts, like transubstantiation and virgin birth. No, wait. That’s the other ones. Mormons, it seems, want to set up a world-wide theocracy.(Given their druthers, that is)

Stop the presses!

So does Tom Cruise and that intense Korean preacher dude who takes out those full-page ads in the Times going on about Almighty God and angels in real small print.

My bet was that today’s swiftboating was going to have something to do with Rudy Giuliani and the new winter line of Ann Klein fashions. We never get to have any fun anymore.

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…to quote the immortal lament of the long-suffering General Halftrack in the “Beetle Bailey” comic strip.

Till yesterday, I was out in the Sonoran desert for another stretch, successfully ignoring the sorry media circus in Iowa — a state that wily native son Meredith Willson churlishly depicted in the great American musical “The Music Man” as being populated by people who were narrow-minded, quarrelsome, cheap, parochial, and easy to manipulate. He’d have thought the same of the traveling salesmen among the media — 2,500 of whom were accredited to cover the silly Iowa caucuses. This is the same news media that in general can’t find 24 inches of print space or two minutes of broadcast time to cover the world.

Anyway, I find that it’s way easier to ignore the clinical insanity of the presidential political process holed up in the desert — but then I had to come home, now contemplating the meaning of whateverinhellthisisallabout.

Not to mention this, and this.

Sweet sufferin’ Jayzus, is there any end to the insanity?

Oh, I almost forgot. The good news is that this a slow travel season, with the leisure-travelers in scant supply, and thus a very good time to use some of that play-money that is frequent flier miles. I flew Continental from Tucson to Newark in coach with a return to Tucson on Tuesday in first, all for a mere 35,000 miles.

As always, the advice here regarding miles is, if you got ‘em, spend ‘em. I’m headed back to the desert.

By the way, I know some people in southern Arizona whose opposition to the wall sealing off the border is based on the apprehension that if might prevent them from fleeing to Mexico, on horseback if necessary, till the presidential election blows over.

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As I have said here before, airlines have no one to blame but themselves for this.

The New York State Passengers’ Rights law took effect today, days after the first lawsuits were filed in the event that started it all last Dec. 29, when American Airlines stranded thousands of passengers on parked planes in the Texas region for 10 hours and more.

Strandings occurred regularly all through 2007. As the year wound down last week, I was still getting reports from and about passengers who were stuck — recently — on planes for interminable periods of time — including a woman with infant twins, and a woman in a wheelchair who was forgotten on a tarmac and sat there for hours calling for help.

More soon. Meanwhile, here’s a report on the initial litigation. The force behind this grassroots initiative is Kate Hanni’s Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights.

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