Patrick
We were parked at the gate in Boston, over at terminal E. I was in the cockpit, setting things up for departure, when I glanced to my right. Next to us was a nondescript building, a small rectangular structure of dirty yellow brick with blue trim, old and anachronistic-looking amidst all the...
Patrick
HüSKER Dü WERE A TRIO from Minneapolis. Guitarist Bob Mould and drummer Grant Hart sang and wrote the songs. Greg Norton played bass guitar and chipped in on vocals. A punk band, you would have to call them, as throughout the early and mid-1980s they toured and recorded primarily within the...
Patrick
June 19, 2026 This week, Qantas Airways announced it will begin its long-awaited London-Sydney nonstops late next year. With an expected time aloft of around 22 hours, this will be, by a wide margin, the longest flight in the world — indeed, the longest scheduled nonstop in history. This is the...
Patrick
UPDATE June 7, 2026 Only a day after sharing my hunches, below, about the plight of United flight 169 at Newark, the NTSB released its preliminary report. It appears the captain, who was at the controls, did “duck under,” employing the technique I describe below. This alone shouldn’t have been...
Patrick
May 23,2026 Of the other kids in school, my classmates and friends at Abraham Lincoln elementary in Revere, most had never been on an airplane. This was the late 70s, when the cost of tickets put air travel out of reach for much of middle class America. Of the kids who had been on planes,...
Patrick
Unexpected Pleasures at a Terminal Near You. With scattered exceptions, airports don’t have a whole lot going for them. They’re noisy, dirty, poorly laid out, and just generally hostile to passengers. As my regular readers are well aware, I’ve made this point in numerous prior posts — perhaps too...
Patrick
May 2, 2026 Early this morning, and not unexpectedly, the long-beleagured Spirit Airlines closed its doors, retiring to that big tarmac in the sky. The company had been in and out of bankruptcy, and never really regained their footing after the COVID pandemic. This leaves Frontier, or maybe...
Patrick
April 30, 2026 It’s 1990 and I’m in a yellow taxi. Manhattan at night. The car speeds and I turn. Behind us the lights of Park Avenue rush away in a narrowing, incandescent ribbon. In the receding distance is Grand Central Terminal, above which rises a monolithic skyscraper. There’s something...
Patrick
April 26, 2026 Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine. on the evening of April 26th, reactor four exploded, sending plumes of radiation across Europe in what is still, by far, history’s worst nuclear accident. Prevailing winds saved the capital,...
Patrick
April 13, 2026 I’m not sure how much of a bragging point it might be, but my knowledge of the world’s airlines is, I have to admit, fairly encyclopedic. Name an airline and chances are I can give you a brief synopsis of its routes, its history, and so forth. Inversely, pick any region of the...