You don’t hate flying; you hate airporting

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When you fly, you have lots of time at the airport to reflect on the procedures to which you are subjected and the rules to which you are bound. And some of them seem baboozerific.

Andy Bumatai writes on Facebook: “I love that everyone in your group is allowed no more than 100ml of liquid because more would be dangerous. Evidently terrorists don’t have friends.”

Psst! Auntie! Take some of my sunblock. I have a weapon of skin protection!

If terrorists did have friends, what would their Super Bowl party be like? “Die, infidel Saints!”

Despite the fact that flights are crowded and service has deteriorated, it strikes me that what bugs me about flying is mostly what happens on the ground, including, sometimes for hours at a time, nothing.

It’s not the TSA people, either. While some mainland checkpoint personnel are brusque, most local security people are patient and amiable even when something on the belt has caught their eye.

My proof that TSA people aren’t to blame for airports having becomes such godawful places to be is that much of the pain doesn’t happen in the security lines. We saw this very clearly over the weekend when a blizzard in the Baltimore-Washington area screwed up flights from D.C. to shining SeaTac.

Two feet of snow can be an issue even in cities that are used to it. The Washington, D.C., area is most definitely not used to it. Washington Dulles airport, in the Virginia suburbs west of the capital, and BWI, two thirds of the way from D.C. to Baltimore, as well as Reagan National right on the Potomac, were mostly closed most of the weekend.

But thousands of flights were cancelled or delayed at airports that never saw a snowflake, thousands of passengers were stuck at Midwestern airports because after escaping the snow they missed their connections, and thousands more were made uncomfortable by every available seat being filled with the snow-fleeing people.

It doesn’t take a blizzard to do this. I’ll never forget a Hawaii vacation one summer in the 1990s when lightning on the runway prevented flights from taking off from Dulles, forcing a delay to the following day, which meant a missed connection, which meant waiting for hours at O’Hare to get a flight to San Francisco. The United customer service fellow at O’Hare was one of the single rudest people I have ever met, but fortunately I was later able to speak with someone who was as sweet-tempered as he was rude.

I got from Chicago to San Francisco too late to find anyone to provide a hotel voucher and spent the night at SFO, lying on a naugahyde chair, sweating against its surface but freezing topside, while the CNN Airport Channel blasted me from above. This was my only choice, waterboarding not having been invented at the time.

This was before 911. Most people have forgotten that before 911 there was a slowdown in business travel and before that, in 1999 and 2000, there was such overcrowding on flights and such angst about flight cancellations and delays that Congress held hearings about it. Members of Congress and their staffers are frequent fliers themselves and few things touch their hearts so much as the concerns of fliers.

The only solution I have is to arrive tired and sleep on the plane. Time spent unconscious doesn’t count. That’s my position and I’m sticking to it.

Feb

7

The Great Anchor Shift

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On Monday, just for grins, Keahi Tucker and Tannya Joaquin will anchor Hawaii News Now Sunrise, while Steve Uyehara and Grace Lee will anchor the evening newscasts where you usually see Keahi and Tannya.

Keahi really enjoys the occasional morning stint, though I suspect that a big factor in the fun quotient for him is knowing that he quickly returns to a shift that does not oblige him to get up at 2 a.m.

Tannya is fun to work with wherever she is scheduled but spent years co-anchoring with Kirk Matthews on Brand X (Tannya and I started on that show on the same day and had a blood pact to blame each other if the ratings went down) but after years of 2 a.m. starts I think she, too, is happy to be working afternoons.

Goodness knows what Steve and Grace will be like in the evening so you and I will just have to watch and see. It shouldn’t be altogether unfamiliar, inasmuch as Taizo Braden and I both work splits, which means we work live in the evenings as well as the mornings. Taizo returns to the studio while I do my evening reports from home while working on the next morning’s scripts.

Taizo’s father, visiting from Japan, told him, “You can handle it. You’re young.”

And then, after a pause: “How does Howard do it?”

Howard does it by sleeping in shifts, 9 p.m.-2 a.m. and noon-3 p.m., although this is an ideal schedule that I achieve perhaps once every three weeks.

For example, since I snore and it wakes up Bernadette from time to time, I sought an apppointment with an eye-ear-nose-throat-so-you-can-sleep doctor, and was told I would have to go to a sleep apnea class first in case I have it. The appointment is on the 16th – dead center in my afternoon sleep time.

Last night I dreamed I went to the class and got no help at all because the person handling it had never been trained to say anything to people who sleep in shifts but to stop doing it. I got up in a huff – I seem to be much angrier in my dreams than in real life – and stormed out.

I’ve always thought it’s easier to sleep in shifts on a regular basis than to get used to one sleep schedule and suddenly have to do another… like Keahi and Tannya will be doing Monday morning.

Feb

6

Bob Dye joins Frank Fasi and Cec Heftel

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This is going to unnerve everyone who made one of the cracks about deaths coming in threes, but novelist and historian Bob Dye died Friday at the age of 81.

Dye worked for both Fasi, who died Wednesday, and Heftel, who died Thursday.

Dye edited three volumes of “Hawaii Chronicles: Island History from the Pages of Honolulu Magazine,” and wrote “Humble Honest Men,” and “Merchant Prince of the Sandalwood Mountains.”

He did a workshop at the Honolulu Writers Conference in 2007.