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The Day of the Cockroach

Patrick — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 04:25:18 +0000

September 11, 2026

MY MOST VIVID MEMORY of September 11th, 2001, is my memory of a cockroach.

It was one of the biggest roaches I’ve ever seen — copper-colored and bullet-shaped, the length of my little finger — and it came crawling across the platform of the Government Center subway station at 7:00 a.m., as I stood there waiting for the train that would take me to Logan Airport. It scampered, stopped, then zigged and zagged, in that deliberate yet utterly directionless way of insects, its footsteps so heavy I swear that I could hear them, click-click-click on the greasy concrete.

It portended everything, this giant subway cockroach. Or it portended nothing. And as it came closer I drew my foot back — my right foot, I remember with absolute clarity — and nudged it, gently, off the platform and down into the dark and filthy space alongside the tracks, where it disappeared more or less instantly into the shadows and detritus.

This is how we remember things.

Once on the train, I would chat briefly with a United Airlines flight attendant, whose name I never got, and who maybe, possibly — I’ll never know for certain — was headed to work aboard the doomed United flight 175.

I was on my way to Orlando, where I’d be picking up a work assignment later that afternoon. My airplane would lift off only seconds after American’s flight 11, the first of the two jets to hit the twin towers. I had watched the silver Boeing back away from gate 25 at Logan’s terminal B and begin to taxi. United 175 would launch a few minutes later. My plane was in-between.

In an old briefcase here in this room, I still have my boarding pass from that morning. It shows me assigned to seat 11D, on the aisle, but there were empty seats and I slid over the window.

Elevens were wild that day. On the 11th day of the month, flight 11 would collide with the World Trade Center, two buildings that shaped an enormous “11” in the Manhattan sky. I looked down from row 11.

But there was nothing to see, yet. I recall an almost uncannily clear view of Manhattan, taking note, as I always do, of that graceful little bend that the island makes — the way it turns eastbound just below Midtown. There was no smoke, no fire. I was just a few minutes — a matter of seconds, maybe — too soon.

A short time later, about halfway to Florida, we started descending. Because of a “security issue,” our captain told us, we, along with many other airplanes, would be diverting immediately. Pilots are polished pros when it comes to dishing out euphemisms, and this little gem would be the most laughable understatement I’ve ever heard a comrade utter.

Our new destination was Charleston, South Carolina.

A bomb threat had been called in. That was my hunch. My worry wasn’t of war and smoldering devastation. My worry was being late for work. It wasn’t until I joined a crowd of passengers in Charleston, clustered around a TV in a concourse restaurant, that I learned what was going on.

And there I am. I’m watching the video of the second airplane, shot from the ground in a kind of twenty-first century Zapruder film. The picture swings left and picks up the United 767 moving swiftly. This is flight 175. The plane rocks, lifts its nose, and, like a charging, very angry bull making a run at a fear-frozen matador, drives itself into the very center of the south tower. The airplane vanishes. For a fraction of a second there is no falling debris, no smoke, no fire, no movement. Then, from within, you see the white-hot explosion and spewing expulsion of fire and matter.

And then, a bit later, the collapse. And this is the important part. Because to me, had the airplanes crashed, blown up, and reduced the upper halves of those buildings to burned-out hulks, the whole event would nonetheless have clung to the realm of believability. Had the towers not actually fallen, I suspect our September 11 hangover, which rages to this day, might not have been so prolonged. It was the collapse — the groaning implosions and the pyroclastic tornadoes whipping through the canyons of lower Manhattan — that catapulted the event from ordinary disaster to historical infamy.

As I stand awestruck in this shithole airport restaurant in South Carolina, the television shows the towers of the World Trade Center. They are not just afire, not just shedding debris and pouring out oil-black smoke. They are falling down. The sight of those ugly, magnificent towers, collapsing onto themselves, is the most sublimely terrifying thing I have ever seen.

Then I would go to a motel and spend the night. The next morning I’d rent a car and drive all the way home to Boston.

This is how we remember things.

And pilots, like fire fighters, police officers, and everyone else whose professions had been implicated, had no choice but to take things, well, personally. Four on-duty airline crews were victims, including eight pilots. John Ogonowski comes to mind, the good-guy captain of American 11. Of the thousands of people victimized that day, Captain Ogonowski was figuratively, if not literally, the first of them. He lived in my home state; his funeral made the front pages, where he was eulogized for his philanthropic work with local Cambodian immigrants.

Maybe it’s melodramatic to say I felt a bond or kinship with these eight men, but it’s something like that. What they went through, these eight colleagues on the very front edge of the attacks, the very men whose airplanes would be stolen and weaponized, is something I can’t fathom yet, at the same time, I can imagine and visualize all too chillingly.

And yes, in the ten-second bursts it took the towers to fall, I knew something about the business of flying planes would be different forever. I just wasn’t sure what it would be.

Fast-forward. It’s hyperbole to speak of the world having been “changed forever” that day. I’m conservative and skeptical when it comes to these things. History is bigger than us. Try to take the long view, even if, all these years on, the dominos haven’t stopped falling. Heck, tens of millions of people died in World War Two — tens of thousands at a time, as the incendiaries rained down over Europe and Japan. A hundred thousand bodies one night in Tokyo alone.

Sure, things are different now. Albeit for reasons we don’t always own up to. I have to say, I’m discouraged — or should that be encouraged? — because more than any “clash of civilizations,” the real and lasting legacy of Mohamed Atta and his henchmen has been something more mundane: tedium.

Think about it. The long lines, the searches and pat-downs, the litany of rules and protocols we’re forced to follow — all this meaningless pomp in the name of security. Of modern life’s many rituals, few are marinated in boredom as much as air travel. “Flying” is what we call it. How misleading. We don’t fly so much as we sit and stand around for interminable amounts of time.

And most distressing of all, we seem to be okay with this. There’s the real legacy of September 11th. The terrorists have won, goes the refrain, and perhaps that’s true. It isn’t quite what they hoped to win, but they’ve won it nevertheless.

The irony that nobody talks about is that the hijackers’ ability to pull off the 2001 attacks so spectacularly had almost nothing to do with airport security in the first damn place. And none of the measures we see on the concourse today would have kept them from succeeding. I’ve made this point many times, but never have I seen or heard it acknowledged elsewhere.

As conventional wisdom has it, the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto the airplanes. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold: diversions to Beirut or Havana, with hostage negotiations and standoffs.

The presence of boxcutters was merely incidental — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The men could have used knives fashioned from plastic, broken bottles wrapped with tape, or any of a thousand other improvised tools. The only weapon that mattered was the intangible one: the element of surprise. So long as they didn’t chicken out, they were all but guaranteed to succeed.

For a number of reasons, just the opposite is true today. The hijack paradigm was changed forever even before the first of the Twin Towers had dropped to the ground, when the passengers of United 93 realized what was happening and fought back. That element of surprise was no longer a useful device. Hijackers today would face not only an armored cockpit, but also a planeload of people convinced they’re about to die. It’s hard to imagine a terrorist, be it with a boxcutter or a bomb, making it two steps up the aisle without being pummeled. It’s equally hard to imagine that organized groups would be willing to expend valuable resources on a scheme with such a high likelihood of failure.

In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again. Guards paw through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors, screwdrivers. Meanwhile, even a child knows that a lethal implement can be crafted out of virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a shattered first class dinner plate.

And so on.

A September 11th post isn’t anything I’ve looked forward to, and I’m wary of the maudlin sentimentalizing and over-the-top coverage this anniversary brings each year. But something needs to be said, and so here it is. After all, nothing in my lifetime had a more profound effect on air travel than the events of that Tuesday morning twenty-three years ago.

At least until COVID-19 came along.

As the pandemic played out, it was interesting to notice the eerie parallels with September 11th and the ensuing “war on terror.”

Both crises were born of legitimately dangerous circumstances, but quickly became twisted by politics and hysteria. Curiously, this seems to have happened in opposite ways: After the 2001 attacks, it was mostly people on the right who bought into the hype and fear; who saw terrorists around every corner and were willing to sign off on things like the Patriot Act, TSA, the Iraq War, and so forth. Left-leaning people resisted. With COVID, it was left-leaning people who were more fearful and pessimistic, while those on the right advocate for a softer, more laissez-faire approach.

Why the difference? I suspect it’s because people who lean right are more naturally drawn to responses involving power and conflict; going after enemies, seeking revenge, etc. — all the things that came into play after September 11th. The pandemic, on the other hand, centered on concepts like compassion and “saving people.”

Both crises have mostly receded, thankfully. But one of the crucial takeaways, in both instances, was witnessing how, when people are afraid, they’ll quickly adapt to almost anything, including ways of life that are unproductive or harmful.

Just as the virus will stay with us, chronic and endemic, so will terrorism. There may have been, and may still be, a “war on terror,” but there will never be an end of terrorism.

How we live within this reality defines us for the long term. We can do so sensibly, or by waging a ruinously expensive, self-destructive battle with no conceivable end.

About the photos:

The picture at the top was taken by the author from the cockpit of a 19-seater in 1994.

The second picture is a watercolor rendition of the same, painted by Julianna Harhay, the daughter of Michael Harhay, a pilot for United Airlines. That is Michael’s arm in the first photo.

An earlier version of this essay appears in chapter six of COCKPIT CONFIDENTIAL.

Five Dead After 767 Crashes in Miami

Patrick — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:55:34 +0000

September 10, 2026. UPDATED.

Five people were killed this past Sunday when a Boeing 767 freighter crashed off the end of a runway in Miami, colliding with several vehicles and catching fire.

As more info comes to light, the more and more egregious things look. My cardinal rule is to avoid early speculation and conjecture, but this is shaping up to be a colossal screw-up on the part of the crew.

The bullet points:

1. The plane touched down at an unusually high speed and roughly halfway down the runway. Pilots are expected to abandon any landing should the targeted speed be exceeded by any significant amount. (Landing speeds vary with weight, flap setting, and weather.)

2. The pilots were still in the process of configuring the jet as it passed over the threshold. The flaps were in the process of extending. This is somewhat shocking. Standard protocol is to have the jet fully configured and stable no lower than a thousand feet above the ground. If it’s not, you break off the landing and go around.

3. Neither the plane’s thrust reversers nor its ground spoilers (panels that lift from the wing to help the jet decelerate), were activated after touchdown. Reverse thrust is controlled by whichever pilot is at the controls, while the spoilers deploy automatically after sensing proper weight-on-wheels and tire spin-up — in other words, when the plane “knows” it’s on the ground. The reason they didn’t deploy is probably because the jet never sensed a proper touchdown. In the videos, the left main landing gear can be seen still aloft as the jet speeds past. It was so fast it wanted to keep flying. The pilots could have manually activated the spoilers, but a last-second decision was made to apply go-around thrust instead.

4. In something of a panic move, the throttles were pushed fully forward. Was there enough runway left to become airborne again? Maybe, but the pilots decided otherwise and, after only a few seconds, power was again cut to idle. At which point they were out of options: there was neither room enough to stop nor to fly again.

What it all looks like, in summary, is a highly unstable approach that, for whatever reasons, the pilots chose to continue rather than abandon.

Video footage shows ominous-looking clouds and rainstorms off the approach end of the runway. Gusts and possible windshear may have been a factor. Yet even if this is the case, it wouldn’t excuse the pilots for attempting to land.

Unless there’s more to it. We know certain facts, but we don’t know the why of them. None of this is conclusive.

Much of the media, meanwhile, is describing the plane as an “Amazon” or “Prime Air” jet. Which it was and wasn’t.

Amazon does not own an airline or fly its own planes. It uses contractors, some of whom paint their jets in an Amazon “Prime Air” livery. (It’s an arrangement not unlike those between the major passenger carriers and their regional jet “Express” and “Connection” partners.) The 767 that crashed in Miami was flown on Amazon’s behalf by a company called 21 Air, which I’d never heard of until today.

Another company that relies on contractors is DHL, the global shipping giant. You’ll see jetliners in DHL’s distinctive red and yellow colors at airports all over the globe. These belong to a multitude of contractors; none are flown by DHL itself.

FedEx and UPS, on the other hand, own and operate their own airlines.

Related Story:
ODE TO THE 767

Photo courtesy of Unsplash

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Dlaczego nie Polska?

Patrick — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:11:35 +0000

August 26, 2026

Of late, U.S. airlines have embarked on a flurry of international expansion. United, in particular, has been throwing darts at the map, moving into markets (Split, Kaohsiung, Ulaanbataar) many Americans have never heard of.

Yet one destination continues to remain conspicuously absent: Poland.

No U.S. carrier flies to Poland. Nor has any American carrier served Poland since Delta flew to Warsaw in the early 1990s, after its takeover of Pan Am’s European network. The city was dropped shortly thereafter.

Why? This isn’t a trick question. I don’t know the answer. Surely it’s odd. Not only are there millions of Polish-Americans, but the largest community of them lives in and around Chicago, a major hub for both American Airlines and United. Polish carrier LOT, meanwhile, has flown to both O’Hare and JFK for decades. We compete with foreign carriers on hundreds of routes; why not this one?

Is it a political thing? Is there not enough premium fare traffic to warrant such a flight?

A LOT Boeing 787 at New York’s JFK Airport.

The latter would seem a likely reason, but many of the recently unveiled routes are to lower-yield leisure markets. Surely Warsaw, or a summer route to Krakow, could bring in as much revenue as Sardinia or Tenerife or Dubrovnik, one would think.

American Airlines did announce a Chicago-Warsaw flight just before COVID hit. The launch was put on hold, then the whole idea was scrapped.

The Israeli carrier El Al sometimes operates charters from JFK to the Polish city of Katowice. My guess is that these are remembrance tours of some kind, as the Auschwitz-Birkenau site is nearby to there.

While were at it, what other “missing routes” are you there? Can you name another city-pair that seemingly should have regular service, but for whatever reasons doesn’t?

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Round or Flat?

Patrick — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:05:50 +0000

August 6, 2026

I’m working a trip to Paris. I’m early for my sign-in, so I stake out a quiet spot at the bottom of the stairs, down at the connector to terminal C. I’m scrolling on my phone, setting up some things on my iPad.

A man approaches from the escalator. He’s looking right at me, and I can sense he’s about to say something. Probably he wants trading cards, or has some nerdy question about planes. I don’t mind this at all. I’m only killing time, and it makes me happy when people take interest in my job.

“Hi,” he says. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? Whenever I see a pilot, there’s a question I like to ask them.”

“Hey,” I respond. “No, not at all.”

But something is off. What does he mean by “there’s a question”? The phrasing, plus the oddly smug look on his face, are caution flags. This is going somewhere strange, I can tell.

“Round or flat?” he asks, folding his arms.

Oh. This. I look back at him but don’t say anything. I know exactly what he’s asking, but I’m too annoyed, too disappointed, to speak.

“Are you a round earth pilot, or a flat earth pilot?” He’s half-smiling, looking down his nose at me, like he’s got me in a bind.

“Come on, dude,” I finally say. “Seriously?”

For a moment he seems startled. I’m probably less polite than most of the pilots he’s ambushed with this nonsense. He’s used to hearing the likes of, “Well, sir, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but I have to argue that the planet is round.”

And while that’s certainly true, I don’t have patience for it. “I’m not answering the question,” I say to him. “It’s too silly.”

He bristles, moves his head around.

And how unexpected this is. The man is so nondescript, so normal looking. Aren’t flat-earthers supposed to be dressed like medieval priests, with a crazy gleam in their eye? Here’s a professional-looking 35 year-old with a neatly trimmed beard and luggage from Tumi. Is this what the Internet has done to us?

“What if I told you,” he goes on, “That fifty percent of the pilots I talk to say the earth is flat?”

I make an exasperated noise. “I’d say either you’re lying, or they’re messing with you.” (And if it’s the latter, I’d like to add but keep to myself, I don’t blame them.)

I’m tempted to run with this. “Actually it’s both,” I could tell him. “It’s round on the top and flat on the bottom. Like a gumdrop. You’ve never heard of Gumdrop Theory? The trash countries are all at the bottom, like Burundi and Canada.”

Or I could turn it into a gentlemanly discussion, where I invite him to sit, take out my charts, and brief him on the realities of latitude and longitude, great circle routes and such.

From there, once I’d convinced him of his folly, we could segue into a chat about map projections. One thing that has always irked me is the Mercator projection, with its massive distortions as you approach the poles. Kids grow up thinking Greenland is bigger than Africa, or that Alaska is the size of Western Europe. Point being: things aren’t always what they seem, or what conventional wisdom says they are. Common ground.

But I know there’s no point. No matter what I say, he won’t believe me. It’s no different with the chemtrail people, or the September 11th people. It’s like arguing religion. So I don’t try. Besides, why indulge what essentially is willful ignorance?

And with that he gives up. “Okay, he says “If that’s how you feel.” And he walks away.

Yes, that’s how I feel.

Why me? Why couldn’t this guy have just sauntered by and gotten himself lunch at Walhburger’s, instead of approaching me so that I can feel hopeless about the future of humanity? And this business about, “Are you a round earth pilot, or a flat earth pilot?” As if there are two camps. As if this is the kind of thing we debate all night flying across the Atlantic. As if his question isn’t, in fact, stupid.

And apparently it’s worse than I thought. A friend of mine, a pilot, told me that a man came up to him at a party and did the same thing. Another colleague said it happened to him in an airport restaurant. Suddenly it’s a trendy line of thinking. Which both surprises me and doesn’t.

“The Dark Ages,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut. “They haven’t ended yet.”

Artwork by Jack Niles and Gael Gaborel, courtesy of Unsplash.

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Travel Photos: The Textures Series

Patrick — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:00:14 +0000

THERE’S A PICTURE I always take. There’s a theme, a theme, that I’m drawn to. Usually it’s a wall or a door or other flat surface, the weatherbeaten elements of which are similar: sun-cracked paint, peeling artwork, crumbling plaster or fissured stucco.

I call these my “texture” pictures, though it’s not that simple. It’s a combination of things: textures, patterns, geometry, colors — with a certain something that pulls it all together. In other words, there needs to be aesthetic merit to the shot. As to which make the cut and which don’t, there’s no formal criteria. In the words of Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it.

They’re travel photos by default, and I’ll go ahead and label the locations. But contextually they don’t say much. Most of them could be anywhere. Most focus on a single surface, but a few, as you’ll see, such as number 20, are more complicated.

Click any photo for a full-screen view.

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR.

1. Blue window. Accra, Ghana.

2. Remnants. Kandy, Sri Lanka.

3. Shutters. St. Louis, Senegal.

4. Green door. Lisbon, Portugal.

5. Norwegian wood. Oslo, Norway.

6. Brown. Big Sur, California.

7. Splinter. Porter Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

8. Checkerboard. Kyoto, Japan.

9. Earth Tones. Dubrovnik, Croatia.

10. Wall and Shutters. Cairo, Egypt.

11. Brown. Accra, Ghana.

12. Stones and Moss. Boston Harbor.

13. Bud Light. Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge.

14. Vive al Paro. Santa Marta, Colombia.

15. Post no Bills. Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

16. Facades. Porto, Portugal.

17. Deicing Fluid. Boeing 757, New York City.

18. French Quarter 1. New Orleans. The wash of the colors make this photo appear blurry. It’s actually in normal focus.

19. French Quarter 2. New Orleans.

20. Lichen. Near Yerevan, Armenia.

21. Fertility Art. Near Paro, Bhutan.

22. Cotraco. Valetta, Malta.

23. Storefront, Ponta Delgada. Sao Miguel island, Azores.

24. Alewife 1: Blisters. Alewife T station, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

25. Alewife 2: Silver. Alewife T station, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

26. Corrugated Wall. Dakar, Senegal.

27. Boy and Doorway. Near Monrovia, Liberia. This is the only picture of the set featuring a person.

28. Granary Door. Noratus, Armenia.

29. Faucets and Feet. Kowloon, Hong Kong.

30. Moss Wall. Morrison Avenue, Somerville.

32. Padlocked Door. Union Square, Somerville.

31. Copper Blue. Riga, Latvia.

32. Doorway and Thatch. Ada, Ghana.

I don’t seek out these shots; if the right one appears, I take it. They more or less happen on their own.

If you’re wondering about enhancement, a few of the pictures have been cropped, and in some cases the shadows and saturation levels have been tinkered with. But only slightly, to replicate what I saw with the naked eye. “No overdubs or funny stuff,” to quote the liner notes from Zen Arcade.

My favorite of the series is number 26, showing the paint-dappled wall of a small shop near the U.S. embassy in Dakar. It was taken in August, 2021, as I was walking to a restaurant with two of my colleagues. The canvas, if you will, is the side of an old shipping container. I remember passing this spot, then backtracking to get the picture, telling my friends I’d catch up with them in a minute.

My second favorite is number 14, the shot of the myriad posters in Santa Marta, Colombia. Believe it or not this picture was taken at night, with a streetlight providing the illumination.

I’m also fond of number 25, showing the silver-painted concrete inside the Alewife subway station in Cambridge, as well as number 32, last picture in the set, of the doorway in Ada, a waterfront village in Ghana, about two hours east of Accra.

More of my travel photos can be viewed HERE.

My Instagram stream is HERE.

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Building 13

Patrick — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:52:08 +0000

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 modern build-up at Logan. A holdout from the ’50s or ’60s maybe? A sign said “Building 13.”

Something about it kept nagging me, until all at once I remembered.

I remembered walking below a Boeing 707, all in polished silver, running my hands along engines and landing gear. We sat in the cockpit too. Me and my father and my friend from school, Peter O’Leary. It was cloudy, drizzly. The year would’ve been 1977, I think. We were in sixth grade.

Building 13, I now recalled, had been the American Airlines cargo building. A 707 freighter would park behind it, just a few feet to the right of where I sat in my Airbus nearly fifty years later. My dad knew someone who worked inside and was able to set up a visit.

I forget who the worker was. It may have been a relative — a grand-uncle or some such whose name has escaped me. Whoever he was, he took us out to the apron and gave us run of that 707 for at least an hour.

Today a thrill like that would be documented by two dozen iPhone photos. But as so often is the case for those of us of a certain age, nothing of that day exists except my memory of it.

Back in the 1970s, most of the major airlines had cargo divisions with dedicated freighter fleets — cargo jets that hauled only pallets, not passengers. There, out on the back side of the airport, there was no sort of security clearance. You just walked out to the plane. Nobody batted an eye.

It’s funny how much of Logan has changed over the decades. Although it’s kept a degree of character, of local “feel” that most big airports lack, a lot of it is new, shiny, glass-and-steel generic. But tucked-away pockets remain just as they were when I was eleven years-old.

There’s talk of extending terminal E further to the west, which would put Building 13 in the target of a wrecking ball. Sooner rather than later, I’m sure, it will go the way of Minoru Yamasaki’s stately old Eastern terminal and all the old hangars that were knocked down.

I don’t know what it’s used for. American hasn’t flown freighters in eons. I could call Massport and ask. But I don’t want to. It really doesn’t matter. For me it will always be the AA cargo building, as it was that day in ’77, sitting in the cockpit with my father and my friend.

Photo by the author.

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Zen Arcade at 42

Patrick — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:01:50 +0000

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 ecosystem of the American hardcore punk scene. At heart, though, they were always something else. They fit in, you could say, without quite fitting in.

“Hüsker Dü seemingly defined the punk ethos,” wrote Terry Katzmann, one of the band’s longtime friends once put it, “without necessarily embracing or endorsing it.” Perfectly put.

The band could play louder and faster than anyone alive. When this got constraining, they’d bring in 60s-style pop hooks, psychedelia, heavy metal. Often at once, which to me is the kernel of what made them great. They were never powerful or something else. They were both, everything, all at the same time.

This blending of styles alienated many of the more orthodox fans within the punk scene. It also won the acclaim of many more, and it’s by no means a stretch to consider Hüsker Dü one of the most influential acts ever to emerge from the American underground.

Before its stormy demise in late 1987, the band would release six full-length albums, two EPs, and a catalog of singles and extras. But the pinnacle of all that output was Zen Arcade, first delivered to stores in July, 1984, by California-based SST records.

I remember the day I bought it. Newbury Comics — the one on Newbury Street — on a midweek afternoon, sunny and hot. I was eighteen years-old.

We knew there was an album coming coming out, but weren’t sure when, exactly, it would hit the racks. In these pre-Internet times, news of such things was always unclear and came sporadically, delivered by college radio or gleaned through your network of friends. Sometimes it was a paper flyer glued to a mailbox or tacked to a record shop bulletin board. Nobody was a bigger Hüsker Dü fan than I was, but this latest album, due in the stores at any moment — I didn’t even know the title.

Suddenly there it was, on a rack up front. It was called Zen Arcade, whatever the heck that meant. I picked it up and, hey, what’s this, it’s a double album! As a teenage punk rocker weaned on Black Flag and Minor Threat, with a rather one-dimensional appreciation for music, the very weight of the thing, together with the heady title and the washed-over, almost Impressionist cover art was intimidating. It seemed so arty and grown-up. It also made me curious. What was this strange record?

What it was, and what it remains almost forty years later, is the greatest indie-rock album of all time — if not, in my extraordinarily biased opinion, the greatest rock album, period.

“The most important and relevant double album to be released since the Beatles’ White Album,” bragged SST’s own press release. There was some confidence for you, to say the least, when you consider the world of underground music in 1984. This was not only an obscure band, but an entire musical domain that existed far below the mainstream waterline. Then as now, the idea of comparing a little-known indie band to the Beatles seemed at best pretentious and at worst totally absurd.

Was it?

Twenty-three songs is a lot of music, but this is one the rare two-record sets that isn’t bogged down by its own overreaching or conceit. The scourge of most double LPs, back when there was such a thing, is they went on for too long — padded with live cuts, covers, and extras (heck even London Calling has its throw-aways). There’s no filler in Zen Arcade. Each and every song, from the shortest (44 seconds) to the longest (14 minutes), belongs exactly in its place.

Yes, that includes “The Tooth Fairy and the Princess.” The longest-named song on the record is probably the most easily dismissed. But it’s a clever little tempest, littered with switchbacks and small melodic explosions.

The album is best savored not as a CD — and for heaven’s sake not as a download — but in the old, cardboard-and-vinyl package. That’s a quintessentially record-snobbish thing to say, but unavoidable in this case, where each of the four sides is a distinct chapter with its own temperature and architecture.

Greg Norton, Grant Hart, and Bob Mould, circa 1984.
Photo by Naomi Petersen.

Side one gets going without the slightest fuss, with the snap and kick of Bob Mould’s “Something I Learned Today,” eventually winding down with “Hare Krsna,” a booming, tambourine-backed instrumental (mostly).

The first time I heard “Hare Krsna,” sizzling over the stereo in a Boston area record shop not long after the album’s release, I remember the young clerk furrowing his brow, looking up toward the speakers and saying, “Somebody needs to write a dissertation about this song.” I couldn’t care less if they were plagiarizing a Bo Diddley riff; “Hare Krsna” is a mesmerizing, three-and-a-half minute cyclone of melodic chaos that still gives me the chills. Listen to Mould hitting the strings at time 0:44.

Side one alone is unforgettable. And there are three more to go. This is the ultimate workhorse album from the ultimate workhorse band, one so rich with sonic nooks and crannies that an in-depth listen leaves you not only battling tinnitus, but tired. So many changes from fast to slow, hard to soft, love to hate, all in perfect working sequence. And each side-break is a perfectly placed respite. I can’t think of a more brilliantly arranged opus than Zen Arcade. “The closest hardcore punk will ever get to an opera,” wrote David Fricke of Rolling Stone.

Indeed, this is a proverbial concept album — a musical story, in the spirit of the Who’s Tommy, allegedly describing the journey and tribulations of a young man. He leaves home, maybe joins a cult, maybe joins the Army…whatever. Alt-rock historians love reminding us about this, but you’re free to ignore it. Any lyrical backstory is incidental to the record’s impressiveness.

You’ll find a gamut of effects: acoustic guitar, chairs being thrown, waves breaking, whispers and chants. There’s even the breezy piano of “Monday Will Never be the Same.” (If Ken Burns ever directs a documentary about the history of alt-rock, the tinkling of “Monday” needs to be its backing theme.) Such eclectics are brave, maybe, for what was supposedly a punk album, but they never become maudlin or melodramatic. If you think today’s co-opted rockers are clever with the tempo card, shifting from tough to tender, check out Grant Hart’s “Never Talking to You Again,” a sing-along from side one done entirely in 12-string acoustic. “Heartfelt” is the word that jumps to mind, but it’s not the syrupy strum you’d hear nowadays. The song is biting and sharp — an attack. Ditto for “Standing By the Sea,” with Hart’s cathartic bellows set against bassist Greg Norton’s eerie thrum and the soothe of a crashing surf.

Back in ’84, the rock critic Robert Christgau chose Hart’s “Turn On the News,” from side four, as his “song of the year.” Christgau said many flattering things about Hüsker Dü, but that one was the gimmie pick, like saying the Concorde is your favorite airplane. It’s an easy song to like, but an even easier one to outgrow. If the album has a best song, it’s probably Bob Mould’s neo-pscychedelic “Chartered Trips,” the fourth cut off side one. (“Trips” is almost Mould’s single greatest work, topped only by his spectacular rendition of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” released as a single just prior to Zen Arcade.)

Runner-up would be Hart’s “Pink Turns to Blue,” from side three. Officially the credits for this one list both Mould and Hart, but really this is Grant’s piece. He took all the hook and melody of his earlier masterpiece, “It’s Not Funny Anymore,” and sandblasted it into a haunting anthem of love, drugs, and death. The song is simply gorgeous — and a little bit terrifying. Score it ahead of “Chartered Trips” if you want. I’m not going to argue.

September, 1984, in the dressing room at the Channel.
Boston Rock magazine.

“Pink Turns to Blue” follows “One Step at a Time,” a brief piano time-out that, as much as anything else, allows the listener to catch his or her breath. The pregnant pause between the last note of “One Step” and the opening chord of “Pink” is like those one or two seconds between a lightning bolt and a thunderclap, and is one of the record’s strongest moments. It reminds me of the similarly unforgettable transition into “Sweet Jane” on the Velvet Underground’s Loaded album.

Before going further, I’m aware how this favorite songs thing can turn tedious pretty quickly. Grant Hart himself once offered a disclaimer: “People will always embrace different songs for different reasons,” he told me. “A song that might seem terrible filler, serving only to move the story along, will be someone’s favorite on the album. Bob and I were both responsible for those kind of songs.” Of my beloved “Hare Krsna” Grant claims that he was merely “furthering the story without adding much musically.” Hart felt similarly about some of Mould’s thrashier and more “hardcore” material.

To his point, not all of the album is easy to like and, depending on your ear and level of patience, the value of certain songs might not reveal itself for some time. For me it was twenty years before the first four songs from side two (Mould at his most furious) finally clicked. They’d always been so noisy and formless. Suddenly they weren’t. This was partly a context thing, maybe: the album, like wine, getting better not despite its age, but because of it. It took the overall shittiness of music in the 21st century to underscore the greatness of cuts like “Pride” and “The Biggest Lie” — mere footnotes in 1984. They’re awesome songs, at once explosive and subtle, but buried amidst so many other and perhaps better choices, that even the band’s most devoted fans tend to skip them over.

Similarly it was decades before I learned to appreciate “Broken Home, Broken Heart,” the second song on the album, for the gem that it is, tucked anonymously between “Something I Learned Today” and Hart’s “Never Talking to You Again,” with Norton’s bass stealing the show. And that a supposed punk rock album could jump from the fury of “Broken Home” to the acoustic beauty of “Never Talking”, without so much as a flinch, was a watershed in American music.

Though not entirely a surprise. Even at breakneck velocity there always was something ineffably refined and just, well, different about Hüsker Dü. If pressed to explain, one might break out 1982’s Everything Falls Apart EP. Amidst side one’s hypsersonic avalanche is Hart’s cover of Donovan’s 1966 hit, “Sunshine Superman.” Playful, perhaps, on the face of it, until you hear how un-ironic the remake is, without a note’s worth of smirk or parody. This wasn’t a joke.

Later, on his solo tours, Bob Mould would often play acoustic versions of some of the hardest and fastest Hüsker Dü songs — cuts like “In a Free Land” or “Celebrated Summer” — and the results were startlingly pretty. That’s just not going to work if you’re Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys or Bad Brains. Or Nirvana. Run even the noisiest Hüsker song through a centrifuge and something elegant reveals itself.

Concert flyer, Boston, 1984. Author’s Collection.

With its blend of hippie love and hard rock thunder, Zen Arcade would, in a way, finish the job that the Velvet Underground and even the Beatles had tinkered with earlier. But while the blending of power/pop extremes was nothing new, the Hüskers pulled it off in a way that was never gimmicky (not until their lazy cover of “Love is All Around,” the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme, in 1986), and, most remarkably, did so on such terrain –- the American hardcore punk scene –- where nobody expected it or even believed it possible.

“A strenuous refutation of hardcore orthodoxy,” as Michael Azerrad puts it in his book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. “Zen Arcade was the final word on the [punk rock] genre, a scorching of musical earth. The album wasn’t only about Hüsker Dü coming of age — it was about an entire musical movement coming of age.”

Zen Arcade is the album Nirvana and its contemporaries only wish they could have made: intelligent, clamorous, and hashing out more torment and passion in four sides than all the grungers and headbangers since. All without a hint of heavy metal pretension: to think anyone could concoct a fourteen-minute bombast of guitar leads and layered distortion — “Reoccurring Dreams,” side four — and have it not come out self-indulgently.

All right, maybe it’s a little self-indulgent. But listen carefully enough and you’ll learn that “Dreams” can be parsed into six or seven subsections, each of them breaking through to the next, right in the nick of time. The song is long, but never wears out its welcome. It belongs there, in its entirety. An epic album deserves an epic close.

And when the 40-second whine at the end of “Dreams” is at last pinched off, the album burning to a close in a congealed, numbing squeal, the silence that follows is palpable, as dramatic as any of record’s loudest moments. Only then, as your senses regain their composure, is it apparent that your notions of punk rock are changed forever.

But not everybody, however — not even Grant Hart — has openly accepted such lavish praise. Chatting over email some years ago, Grant described Zen to me as “the album that fans tend to wear on their sleeves.” Did he mean people like me? Have I been too sentimentally fond of it for some reason?

“The impact of Zen Arcade on the Zeitgeist is hilarious to me,” Grant went on. “Hilarious in the almost alchemical-mechanical way it has been embraced by true music fans and hipster-flipsters alike. When somebody states that Zen is their favorite LP, I get the notion to ask why. As we move further from the time it was released, it seems I get more honest answers.”

My honest answer is that I like it the best because it sounds the best, and by the sum of its parts it is the best. And for the record, Zen Arcade is not my “favorite” Husker Dü LP. New Day Rising is my “favorite” Husker Dü LP. But that’s getting personal. When you look at it objectively, Zen is the better and more profound of the two.

Norton, Hart, Mould, circa 1983.
Photo by Daniel Corrigan.

Hüsker Dü were nothing if not prolific. A mere six months after Zen Arcade came New Day Rising, which woke the country from its winter freeze in January, 1985. These are two best albums of the 1980s, and they appeared within six months of each other!

Eight month’s after that came “Flip Your Wig,” the band’s last album before signing with a major label. Flip suffers from terrible production but is nonetheless memorable, highlighted by Hart’s pièce de résistance, “Keep Hanging On.” Prior to Zen, meanwhile, was Metal Circus, a brilliant seven-song EP from 1983. Together, these four records represent, easily, the most potent 1-2-3-4 punch in the annals of indie music. All released in the astonishing space of less than two years. That’s simply incredible.

In 1986 and 1987, having moved from SST to Warner Brothers, Hüsker Dü released two disappointing and anticlimactic albums,”Candy Apple Gray” and “Warehouse: Songs and Stories.” I’m unsure which of these two records annoys me more, but neither, really, has much place in this conversation. “Candy Apple Grey” does well at the start and finish — I’ve always loved the gothic guitar squall of the opener, “Crystal,” as well as the closer, “All This I’ve Done For You” — but the rest is flyover country, including Bob Mould’s abominable “Too Far Down,” which has to be the ugliest song he ever recorded.

With Warehouse, it’s as if they took Zen Arcade placed it on a table in front of them and said, “Okay how can we ruin this?” Like Zen Arcade, it’s a double LP. Unlike Zen Arcade, it’s bloated with filler. I’ll always love “Back From Somewhere” and “She’s a Woman (and Now He Is a Man),” but the plodding, uninspired likes of “Ice Cold Ice,” “You’re a Soldier,” and too many others, anchor this one at the bottom of the Hüsker canon.

Bob and Grant had their power struggles, but as a songwriting tandem their talents were wonderfully complementary — think Strummer and Jones, or McCartney and Lennon. This was much of what made the band so great. By the time “Warehouse” warbles to a close, clearly this synchronicity is unraveling. Hart, at least, holds his own on this record, while Mould’s songs are overextended and lazy. Depressing as it was, you could say that Hüsker Dü broke up exactly when it needed to.

Meanwhile, unless I’ve missed something, none of the big music magazines or websites gave Zen Arcade so much as a mention on its 20th, 15th, 30th or 40th birthdays. Some years ago Spin awarded it the number four spot on its ranking of the hundred best-ever “alternative” records, and Rolling Stone, in a manic best-of-the-80s list, once gave it lip service at number 33. But what since then? Instead we’ve have bands like Green Day winning Grammys.

For that matter, do younger music fans have any sense of what the 1980s truly were like? This was the richest and most innovative period in the whole history of independent music, but rarely is it acknowledged as such. As popular culture has it, serious rock music skipped the 80s entirely. When pundits do take the decade seriously, we tend to see the same names over and over. It’s both frustrating and unjustified that Hüsker Dü never developed the same posthumous cachet that others of their era did. Like the Replacements, for example, or Sonic Youth. Hüsker Dü could run circles around either of those two, but never became “cool” in quite the same way.

I suppose it’s due to an absence of what you might call sex appeal. To say that Hüsker Dü never cultivated any sort of image, in the usual manner of rock bands, is putting it mildly. For one, they never looked the part. These were big, sweaty, chain-smoking guys who, it often seemed, hadn’t shaved or showered in a while. Norton, trimmest and most dapper of the threesome, wore a handlebar mustache many years before such things were trendy among hipsters. It wasn’t cool; it was odd. And not until their eighth and final album did the band included a photo of itself on an album cover (the scratched-out images on Zen Arcade notwithstanding). It was a small, back-cover pic that almost feels like an afterthought, or something the record company made them do.

This modesty, for lack of a better description, was for some of us a part of what made Hüsker Dü so special. But it has hurt them, I think, in the long run. (As has the fact that only the band’s final two albums are available on iTunes. But that’s another story.)

The idea that the Replacements (much as I loved their debut album, which I consider the best garage-rock record of all time, and which includes a shout-out called “Somethin’to Dü”) were in any way a better or more influential band than Hüsker Dü is too absurd to entertain. Meanwhile the beatification of Sonic Youth, maybe the most overrated outfit of the last forty years, goes on and on. Not long ago Kim Gordon got a profile in the New Yorker. I’m still waiting for one of the writers there to devote a story to Bob Mould.

Or better yet, to Grant Hart. Twenty-five years, more or less, that’s how long it took me, to realize that it was Grant, not Bob, who was the more indispensable songwriter and who leaves the richer legacy. In the old days it was trendy to claim that Grant was the real genius behind Hüsker Dü. You’d be at a party and some asshole would say, “Those guys would be nothing without that drummer.” I’d always scoff that off. The mechanics of the band, for one, made it difficult to accept: Grant was the drummer, after all, and drummers are never the stars. Meanwhile there was Bob, right at the front of the stage with that iconic Flying-V. But those assholes were on to something.

That shouldn’t be an insult to Mould. Not any more than saying John Lennon was a better songwriter than Paul McCartney. Both were brilliant. But when I flip through the Hüsker canon, I can’t help giving Hart the edge. On New Day Rising, for instance, Mould gave us “I Apologize” and “Celebrated Summer.” But Hart gave us “Terms of Psychic Warfare” and “Books About UFOs,” two of the most electrifying songs of the 80s. “It’s Not Funny Anymore,” “Diane,” “Pink Turns to Blue,” the list goes on. Hart’s “She’s a Woman (And Now He is a Man”) from the often intolerable Warehouse album is, to me, a classic sleeper and the most under-appreciated Hüsker song of them all.

His solo work, too, was at least as robust as that of Mould. Songs like “The Main” and “The Last Days of Pompeii” are as good or better than anything Mould has given us post-Hüsker. But while Mould went on to some notoriety and commercial success, Hart labored in comparative obscurity. This was always irritating and unfair.

But Grant, maybe, was all right with this. “I have always based my movements on those of fugitives or criminals,” he once said to me. “The less attention you attract, the freer you remain! I wish to be an artist, not a celebrity.”

Hüsker Dü in 1986. Photo by Daniel Corrigan.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE (SECOND) GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME

POSTSCRIPT, ASTERISKS AND MISCELLANY…

Grant Hart died in September, 2017. A few years ago, filmmaker Gorman Bechard released a movie about him. “Every Everything” is 93 minutes of Grant — and only Grant — proving himself to be one of the more oddly captivating storytellers you’ll ever have the pleasure of listening to.

Bechard had previously interviewed Grant for “Color Me Obsessed,” his film about The Replacements, and was taken with him. “Grant is one of the most influential musicians ever,” said Bechard at the time. “Beyond that, he’s as smart and funny as anyone on the planet.”

You may not be familiar with Hart, but he was among the most important songwriters of our time, and “Every Everything” is a brave and absolutely necessary tribute to one of the unsung heroes of modern music. Click the picture for more info…

— The one song I would probably have pruned from Zen Arcade is “Dreams Reoccurring,” the noisy little instrumental from side one. You’ve got the fourteen-minute version later on; do we really need this miniature version too? And the fact that “Indecision Time” isn’t so great either… it creates kind of a dead spot on the first side. In its place I’d have put “Some Kind of Fun,” one of the outtakes.

— The greatest concert I ever attended was an impromptu Husker show at a place called Harvey Wheeler Hall, in Concord, Massachusetts, on December 30th, 1984. It was a last-minute gig arranged by David Savoy, a Concord native who also was the band’s manager at the time (and whose suicide a few years later was partly responsible for its breakup). There was no stage; the band set up on the floor of what, in my memory, was a simple classroom. There were fewer than a hundred people there, and we stood or sat cross-legged. The set ended when Grant cut his finger on a cracked drumstick during a cover of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.” My best friend at the time, Mark McKay (who later became the drummer for the post-hardcore band Slapshot), gave him a band-aid. When it was over we went backstage, as it were, and chatted a while with the band.

— A few years ago, Paul Hilcoff, the curator of the painfully exhaustive Hüsker Dü fan site, mailed me a compact disc recording of that entire concert. I had no idea there was one. What a startling feeling it is to discover, many years on, that a recording exists of one of your most cherished memories. Except, the CD still sits on my bookshelf, as yet unlistened-to. One of these days I’ll summon up the courage to actually play it. Listening to that recording, provided I’ve got the emotional muster, will be the closest I ever get to time travel.

— I once played Frisbee with Bob Mould. June 21, 1984, it was, prior to a show in Easthampton Massachusetts. There were four of us playing: me, Bob, a local Boston fanzine writer named Al Quint, and the aforementioned McKay.

— I once got to meet and shake hands with Bob Mould’s parents. It was that same summer of ’84, in Rhode Island. Mom and dad were touring the country, stopping in on the band’s performances. Bob himself introduced me to them.

— Greg Norton once sat patiently backstage while I peppered him with inane questions for a fanzine article I was writing.

— It was Grant, though, who was always the friendliest and most approachable of the three. I remember a night, between sets down at The Living Room in Providence, chatting with him in the parking lot. He was snacking on slices of cheese, when a stray dog came ambling over. Grant shared his cheese with the dog, holding up small bits of it, ever higher, making the dog jump for them.

— That was the same show in which Mould, rushing toward the stage for an encore, smashed his head against a ceiling rafter so hard that you could hear it from the parking lot. I have a feeling he remembers that.

GREATEST HITS, MOULD:

1. Eight Miles High (single)
2. Chartered Trips (Zen Arcade)
3. I Apologize (New Day Rising)
4. Gravity (Everything Falls Apart)
5. Crystal (Candy Apple Grey)
6. Real World (Metal Circus)
7. Makes No Sense at All (Flip Your Wig)
8. Celebrated Summer (New Day Rising)
9. Perfect Example (New Day Rising)
10. All This I’ve Done For You (Candy Apple Grey)

GREATEST HITS, HART:

1. Keep Hanging On (Flip Your Wig)
2. Terms of Psychic Warfare (New Day Rising)
3. Pink Turns to Blue (Zen Arcade)
4. Books About UFOs (New Day Rising)
5. It’s Not Funny Anymore (Metal Circus)
6. She’s a Woman [And Now he is a Man] (Warehouse: Songs and Stories)
7. Standing by the Sea (Zen Arcade)
8. Diane (Metal Circus)
9. The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill (New Day Rising)
10. Sunshine Superman (Everything Falls Apart)

Now if you’ve stayed with me this far, chances are you’re a pretty big Hüsker fan who won’t mind if I push things an obsessive step further. For you I present the following addendum. You’ve been warned:

I was looking at some photos of Hüsker Dü in their heyday, circa ’84 or ’85. These guys were, to put it one way, well-fed. Greg always kept himself trim and dapper, but Bob and Grant weren’t going hungry.

It’s only fair, then, that we should revisit the Hüsker discography, making note of various song titles as they should have appeared. That is, with a gastronomical theme…

There’s little on Land Speed Record or Everything Falls Apart to cook with, so let’s start with Metal Circus. Here, Bob sets the table with “MEAL WORLD,” then takes his place in the “LUNCHLINE.” Grant tells us “I’M NOT HUNGRY ANYMORE,” but later opts for some delicious “STEAK DIANE.”

Zen Arcade is a veritable buffet line of fatty faves: Bob cooks up some “CHARRED TIPS.” Later he orders some “PRIME” down at the “NEWEST EATERY.” He’s got a sweet tooth for “THE BIGGEST PIE.” Alas, it’s a “BROKEN COOKIE, BROKEN HEART.” Grant warns that he’s “NEVER COOKING FOR YOU AGAIN,” yet later we find him “STANDING BY THE STOVE,” dreaming of that moment when “BEEF TURNS TO STEW” (“…waiters placing, gently placing, napkins round her plate.”) This is a very long album, and indigestion sets in by the end of side four, closing with the epic, flatulent jam, “REOCCURRING BEANS.”

Prior to Zen Arcade, you might remember, came the Huskers’ famous 7-inch single — its cover of the Byrds’ — or is it Birds’ — classic, “EGGS PILED HIGH.”

On New Day Rising, Grant tells us about “THE GIRL WHO WORKS AT THE BAR & GRILL,” followed on side two by the sugary “BOOKS ABOUT OREOS.” Bob serves up a “CELEBRATED SUPPER.”

Flip Your Wig is, let’s just say, a little thin, though Grant gives us a cooking lesson with “FLEXIBLE FRYER.”

On Candy Apple Pie… er, Gray … again its Grant with the big appetite. His two meaty singles are, “DON’T WANT TO KNOW IF YOU’RE HUNGRY,” and “HUNGRY SOMEHOW.”

The band’s final course is the delectable double LP: Steakhouse: Songs and Stories. Bob sings of “THESE IMPORTED BEERS,” before going gourmet on the plaintive “BED OF SNAILS.” Alas, he has “NO (DINNER) RESERVATIONS.” Grant snacks on some “CHARITY, CHASTITY, PEANUTS AND COKE,” and reminds us that “YOU CAN COOK AT HOME.”

The post Zen Arcade at 42 appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

Project Sunrise

Patrick — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:25:49 +0000

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 culmination of a decades-long quest — of challenges so vast that Qantas even gave its quest a name: Project Sunrise. (Personally I would’ve gone with Project Horizon, but nobody asked.) After a series delays and setbacks, the airline now feels confident enough to give us a launch month: October 2027.

The route will be flown using a fleet of specially modified, ultra-long range (ULR) Airbus A350s, the first of which is undergoing a series of test flights as we speak.

The “Kangaroo route” as it was called as early as the 1930s, once took twelve days and required more than a dozen stops. By the 1960s, with the advent of jets like the 707, three or four stops was the norm. In the 1990s, with the introduction of the Boeing 747-400, a single stop became the standard. Even after all that progress, the idea of a nonstop still seemed a dream, well, too far.

The newest generation of aircraft, including the A350, changed that thinking, and here we are.

A New York-Sydney nonstop, slightly shorter in distance, is planned following launch of the London flights.

Qantas says fares will run about 20 percent higher than those charged for its current one-stops along the same routes, citing a “massive demand” for direct service.

Cabins will feature a premium-heavy configuration of only 238 seats. The lower density layout stands to reason. As I’ve pointed out before, the real challenges of long-haul flying are perhaps no longer technological so much as human. That is, how do you keep passengers comfortable, or even sane, on a journey stretching ten-thousand miles? We’re basically at the limits of what people can endure, at least in economy class.

So, what’s left?

Does the success of Project Sunrise end the range game? Is this aviation’s ultimate triumph over distance? After all, London to Sydney is about as far as it gets, and it’s hard to come up with another pair of cities that couldn’t be connected nonstop.

Looking at the map, however, we do see a last unconquered frontier: Asia to South America. No airline has ever flown a nonstop between these two continents, and the biggest reason is distance.

The mileage between Tokyo and Sao Paulo — arguably the most likely market — is actually longer than London-Sydney. As are routes like Beijing-Sao Paulo and Shanghai-Buenos Aires.

Tokyo-Lima, another potential pairing, is about equal to the mileage between New York and Singapore, which as of 2026 is the longest flight in the world. It’s doable, but not by much.

Could the A350 ULR, or Boeing’s newest 777, close those gaps? Possibly, but technical hurdles are only part of what makes a route viable. You need enough passenger demand, at particular fares, to warrant the expenses of running such a flight. Just because a plane can fly nonstop from Tokyo to Sao Paulo, or from Shanghai to Buenos Aires, doesn’t mean it’s a smart idea.

For now, unless the Chinese become too envious and rush into something, Qantas and Project Sunrise will hold the crown.

Photo by Sam Carter, courtesy of Unsplash.

The post Project Sunrise appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

The Lowdown

Patrick — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:47:19 +0000

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 dangerous, but in the process he sank lower than he meant to. At the last moments, the first officer seemed to realize things were askew, but felt there wasn’t time enough to call for a go-around.

You can READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.

June 3, 2026

You’ve all seen the video of that United 767 hitting the light pole, which in turn hit a delivery truck, as it landed in Newark back on May 3rd. The footage from inside the careening truck is startling.

How it happened, exactly, is still being investigated. But I’ve been asked to speculate, and so I will:

Runway 29 at Newark is short. Long enough, under most conditions, to accommodate a 767, but short enough to require extra concentration from the crew. The runway’s threshold is also unusually close to the highway, lessening the margin for error.

One way or another, flight 169 drifted below the descent path and impacted the utility standard at the edge of the highway.

It’s possible they were “ducking under,” as we call it. That is, in the final seconds of the landing, intentionally sneaking just a touch below the normal path — to take advantage of as much pavement as possible and avoid landing long. This is customarily done by visual reference, using a runway’s VASI or PAPI lights (depending which it has). Set just to the side of the runway, these project an alignment of colors (red, green, or white) that pilots use to determine if they’re high, low, or exactly on glide.

This technique, though well-known, isn’t always encouraged, and in some cases it’s prohibited by the airline. We always pull up the performance data prior to landing, which tells us how much runway is required. It accounts for wind, surface conditions, and so on. If you’ve crunched the numbers correctly, there shouldn’t be a need for improvising.

In its flight manuals, United had a short-runway policy that, while it didn’t encourage ducking under per se, it recommended that pilots adjust their touchdown aiming point to one closer to the threshold.

Even if they were ducking under, they still shouldn’t have hit the pole. Somehow they ended up lower than they intended.

Or, for whatever reasons, it was entirely inadvertent. Sometimes an approach gets unstable and you fall a bit low. This isn’t terribly uncommon. If you’re unable to correct in time, you’re supposed to break off the landing and go around.

There is no ILS approach to runway 29 — a system that sends out a vertical guidance signal, called a “glide slope,” that pilots track to the runway. Instead there are what we call “non-precision” and/or “visual” approaches. These come in different flavors, and while they’re routine, and still plenty precise, they’re more complicated. The descent path is handled differently, and slipping low is perhaps more likely than it would be with an ILS. And winds were gusty at the time, adding to the difficulty.

Were they ducking under? Did they sink too and neglect to go around? Did they even realize what was happening? Was there time?

I don’t know. Any of that is possible. Or something else.

These are just guesses and conjecture, and I’m not implying that anyone was negligent or reckless. Eventually we’ll have more info.

I landed on runway 29 many times, but it was years ago when I flew regional turboprops. What’s short for a 767 isn’t so short for a 19-seater.

Meanwhile, Instagram is full of reels showing purported “close calls” at the edge of 29, insinuating that the runway is unsafe and that planes are routinely almost crashing. These scary-seeming videos are mostly just tricks of angle and perspective. And as I noted earlier, the runway’s threshold is close to the highway, meaning that jets on a perfectly normal glide path can appear “low” when in fact they’re right where they should be.

The aircraft at Newark was a 767-400, largest variant of the 767 family. United and Delta are the only two carriers in the world that fly these models. United inherited its -400s from Continental Airlines when it merged with that carrier in 2010.

The -400 was a bespoke collaboration between Delta and Boeing. Delta wanted a widebody to replace its aging L-1011s, for use mainly in high-density domestic markets. Speaking of short runways, the -400 was once a regular visitor at La Guardia.

The jet was later shifted onto international routes. Flight 169 was coming from Venice.

ODE TO THE 767

Photos courtesy of Mark Rubenstein.

The post The Lowdown appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

Boston and Bermuda

Patrick — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:04:14 +0000

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, myself among them, a surprisingly large number of us had vacationed on Bermuda — that hook-shaped island in the Atlantic, about two hours flying time from Boston.

People assume Bermuda is a lot further south than it actually is. It sits roughly on the same latitude as Atlanta, and only 650 miles off the coast of the Carolinas. The island’s proximity, together with its mild weather, pink sand beaches and picturesque stucco cottages, drew tens of thousands of New Englanders every year.

The Caribbean was a much further away and a lot more expensive. Hawaii was out of the question. Florida was the obvious go-to, but Bermuda had an exotic-ness to it that Orlando or Tampa didn’t. It was a little bit of Europe — in an unintimidating, fussily British sort of way — without the long flight and pricey airfare.

All the local travel agencies hyped Bermuda, and the Sunday paper was full of easy and affordable package deals.

We signed on for one of those packages in the early spring of 1979, when I was in seventh grade. My parents, my sister, my grandmother and one of my uncles all made the trip. None of us had ever been outside the United States.

American Airlines flew a daily DC-10 on the route from Boston. Not to be outdone, Delta flew a similarly sized L-1011.

Our flight was on American. At the time, the airline’s DC-10s had a cockpit camera that allowed you to watch the pilots during takeoff and landing. Projected onto the bulkhead screens, the black-and-white visuals were blurry and unsteady, but for a 13 year-old airplane nerd like me, it was thrilling to watch. I remember the captain, who for sure is long dead by now, turning his head to the side and saying to us all, “Here’s a handsome profile shot for ya.”

I’m not sure what, in retrospect, is more remarkable, the cockpit camera (unthinkable today) or the fact that two different airlines were operating 260-seat widebodies on a two-hour hop.

It’s not like that anymore.

Over time, Bermuda lost its crown as New Englanders’ premier sun spot.

A couple of things happened. First, the cost of flying fell and the choice of destinations grew. The vacation market fragmented, with more carriers going to more and more places — at affordable fares.

Bermuda hotel prices, meanwhile, began to skyrocket, aiming for wealthier clientele rather than middle-class holidaymakers that had been its mainstay. Sure it’s a short flight, but for most people that no longer matters if accommodations cost a fortune. It became cheaper to go elsewhere, even if further away.

Those DC-10s and L-1011s gave way to narrowbody planes. Northwest Airlines ran a 727 for a while. Delta used a 767-200, then downsized to an Airbus A319 before suspending the route during COVID and never bringing it back. Today your options are JetBlue or a tiny upstart called BermudAir, both using small jets.

The cruise ships still make their runs, usually in the spring and fall, but otherwise the island’s regional allure is long gone.

Below, on the Bermuda airport apron, is our DC-10 as it prepared for departure back in ’79. In the photo up top you can see my mother (in pink), my sister (yellow), and my grandmother (gray), climbing the airstairs for the flight home.

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

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