Currently, the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating whether the crew responded inappropriately to a stall warning … as well as Colgan’s hiring and training practices. Among the issues is whether unauthorized chatter among pilots and fatigue played roles in the crash. Renslow’s copilot, Rebecca Shaw, flew from Seattle to Newark overnight, arriving the day of the accident and evidence suggests she wasn’t able to get much sleep that day.
The plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 crashed in Clarence Center, New York en route from Newark, New Jersey to Buffalo. All 49 people on the plane died, along with on person on the ground.
As part of our Gadling on the Road series, Kent Wien and his wife Linda are participating as Team Gadling in the first run of Competitours, an Amazing Race like competition taking place in three different countries in Europe. Follow along each day this week as Kent documents their progress.
Without much fanfare – well, without any fans and a modicum of fare paid – the 11 teams participating in the inaugural Competitours event have finally met in person at the Newark airport before getting on a Continental 767-200 for the flight to Frankfurt on Sunday night.
Early that morning the challenges and the cities were finally revealed for the competition that starts on Monday, with a rather significant surprise for my wife Linda. We would be traveling to Cologne, with tasks to be completed in Dusseldorf, Bonn, Duisburg and Koblenz.
Of all the places we could have flown to in Europe for this challenge, we ended up in the area where Linda grew up! In fact, she lived just an hour away from Cologne.
Now, you might think this would give us an advantage, but after reading the challenges Steve Belkin, the creator of Competitours and his staff have put together, we’re not so sure.
While we could have poured over the details and researched the challenges all day Sunday we decided instead to meet up with fellow Gadling bloggers Grant Martin, Tom Johansmeyer, Annie Scott and Jeremy Kressmann for brunch at the Manhattan restaurant called Public.
It took an hour to get a seat, but the conversation made up for the delay, even though we were missing out on some valuable Competitours preparation time. Fortunately, this didn’t keep us from enjoying the Sunday brunch.
We’re officially known as “Team Gadling” although we joke with each other that we’ve actually become “Team Crews Control” since we’re both airline crew members (in Linda’s case, a former flight attendant) and we’ve taken a somewhat relaxed attitude about the Competitours journey.
I’ll introduce you to the other teams as we get to know them this week. These frequent flyers come from all over the country, and even Canada to participate in a game that, so far, seems to be very well organized and designed.
After parting with half the Gadling staff at brunch, Linda and I stopped into Paragon Sports to pick up an Arc’Teryx sweater for her before making our way to the airport about 3 hours before our departure time. We used this time to pour over the details and research some of the clues in advance before we met the other teams.
Monday’s tasks will include a scavenger hunt in Cologne worth 10 points, a visit to a church in Dusseldorf where we’re required to video our comments on its most prominent architectural defect and come up with an alternate, and hopefully humorous, explanation.
Other cities such as Koblenz offer challenges such as a go-kart race, with the top 50% of the finishers receiving 15 points and the other participants earning 5 points and a walking tour of the city worth 10 points.
Many of the challenges have two point values like the go-kart challenge above. Judges will award the top 50% of those participating in the challenge the maximum points. Other challenges score a fixed amount of points if they’re accomplished correctly. In all, there are 14 challenges worth a total of 175 points on Monday alone.
Since this is a trial run of the game, changes are to be expected in it’s design. Sure enough, a few days ago we were informed that instead of having a limit of 5 challenges to choose among a list of 9 to 12, we would be allowed to accomplish as many events as possible, at least in the shortened first day.
That’s changed the game considerably, and for the better, I think, emulating the harried pace of the Amazing Race to some extent.
So from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday we will be working our way from task to task, filming the results to be uploaded to the web for judging each night before midnight. We’re required to time stamp our progress with a picture sent via cell phone either by text message or e-mail to the judges. We’re not allowed to post the video from the competition online, but we’ll do our best to film some of the places and challenges we come across.
I’m currently on the flight to Frankfurt as I write this. Everyone else is trying their best to get some sleep, since we’ll be afforded only an hour or two to rest in Cologne before getting started – time which will likely be put to research rather than sleep.
Since it’s nearly impossible for me to sleep on airplanes, I’ll be running around in a mental fog when we get there, I’m sure.
Rumors are spreading through the airplane that one of the team members left a bag in the President’s Lounge. Keep in mind, lounge access was easily obtained for many of these teams which are made up of some very seasoned frequent flyers courtesy of Flyertalk.com.
Linda and I considered working our way over to the Newark pilot operations of my airline, but the thought of sitting around listening to dot matrix printers spit out flight plans while crews came and went didn’t really compare well to the idea of access to a private airline lounge.
Two teams are made up of travelers who only met each other today. We struck up a conversation with Kevin who is on one of those teams and discovered that not only did he retire very early from his job to travel the world for the past 4 years, he has lived in Germany and France for some time, and is fluent in those languages. So we felt our local advantage slipping away rather quickly.
I’m not sure how successful we’ll be, considering that, in addition to uploading photos and video for the day’s challenges each evening and reviewing and researching the revealed challenges for the next day, I’ll be hacking away on my mac, trying to report daily on the week long competition.
Follow along on my twitter account while I solicit your help with some of the clues to the challenges, if you happen to be a twitter user at www.twitter.com/veryjr.
More than 900 flights have been canceled at New York area airports (JFK, Newark and LaGuardia). Hundreds more at Logan International Airport in Boston never left the ground, where the airport closed for more than half an hour to clear a runway. In Philadelphia, more than 40 people were stranded overnight.
Even the bus operators got into the delay and cancellation game. Greyhound and Peter Pan scrapped trips into and out of New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
So, get comfortable. It’s going to take a while to sort this mess out.
Imagine this scenario. You’re feeling aggravated because your flight has been delayed. Because of this delay, you’ve missed your connection on another flight. The hours have ticked by while you’re wondering when you might get to your destination.
Then you find out that the plane you would have been on if your flight had not been delayed had crashed into a house and everyone on board had died.
That’s the case of three people who would have been on Flight 3407 that crashed near Buffalo, New York if their flight out of New Orleans had not been delayed for five hours. The three–Dave Beckeny, Paul Dwaragowski and a business associate, were heading to Buffalo but missed the Newark connection. As one of them said, knowing what could have happened if they had been on time is “weird.”
Yesterday when Tom, and then I wrote about the crash, we didn’t know about these three until Heather sent this Nutty News post my way. Again, here is a reminder that so much about arriving or not arriving at destinations seems random. Still most of us get where we’re heading — never knowing what might have happened if we had walked out of the house ten minutes earlier or headed home sooner than expected. Regardless of whether a flight is delayed or leaves on time, enjoy where you are. That moment is yours.
The worst airport delays in the world, of course, are those that affect you. If I’m stranded at LaGuardia‘s Marine Air terminal for a short hop to Boston, I really don’t care what’s going on over at JFK, O’Hare or anywhere else. However, some airports are more likely to inspire your anger than others, so it’s a pretty good idea to know which are the worst.
If you are headed to India or Europe, it seems, you should build a bit of extra time into your travels. India takes the top (or, lowest?) spot for the second year in a row, according to MSNBC. Mumbai‘s Chhatrapati Shivaji International is the worst of the worst; only 50 percent of its flights hit the ground on time last year. In New Delhi, Indira Gandhi International Airport had only a 51 percent success rate. Fortunately, both are expanding, with the latter having opened a new airport in October. Bangalore, which ranked fourth, has added a new airport.
Flight congestion is the culprit in arrival delays. But, it isn’t impeding departures. In Bangalore, for example, 80 percent of departures were on time, but only 60 percent arrived on time.
You can get out; you just can’t get in.
India isn’t the only country with arrival delays. Airports with tough on-time arrival rates include:
Casablanca‘s Mohammed V International Airport: 54 percent
Orio al Serio Airport near Bergamo, Italy: 61 percent
London‘s Luton and Heathrow Airports: both 63 percent on time
And, in my neighborhood, it pays to bring a book with you to LaGuardia or Newark Liberty International. Both fail to impress, with on-time arrival rates of only 62 percent.
Now, if you’re looking for a bit of efficiency, try Japan or Korea. Every airport in each of these countries has an on-time arrival and departure percentage of at least 82 percent.