Letters to the Editor
ncarey
Published Letters: 161 Editor's Choice: 30
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Enough Airbus Snarking
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The A380 is big. I agree this isn't as big of an accomplishment as 1970, but can you blame a company for using an effective market angle to sell their product? You think it's ugly, we get it. So what. It's a plane. Its goal in design is to maximize its square footage while minimizing its weight. It's not a work of art.
Personally, I don't find the humpback on the 747 aesthetically appealing. And I'm fairly convinced that your appreciation of it is due to your endless favour of things that you liked when you were young at the expense of hating anything new.
Anyway, onwards ho.
The flying public demands the lowest prices. They, including me, will shop around endlessly to shave another $5 off their ticket. You get what you pay for...this means that airlines are forced to cut their fixed costs to the bone. I'm all for optional revenue streams, since then I can pick and choose which ones have value to me, and pay less for my ticket than someone who feels they need a glass of wine and a restaurant quality meal to make the trip go by.
Could the US airlines do a better job? Maybe. I haven't flown one in years. But my experience is that almost anywhere you fly, people hate their domestic airlines. Most people I know resent flying Air Canada. I recently stumbled on an article about how Qantas had been rated 3rd best in the world. What do you get? Hundreds of Australian commenters complaining about how terrible Qantas is. Most Brits hate Easyjet, but will fly with them anyway because...you guessed it...they're cheap.
People like to whine. Provide air service is a complicated affair, and having to keep costs under extraordinarily tight control doesn't help. So air service, with few exceptions - notably airlines that almost exclusively fly high profit long haul routes - sucks. But if I started an airline offering great service, great experience, and no extra fees, but costing 30% more for the ticket, I would have zero customers.
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Meh
[Read the article: The oil price puzzle]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I always felt that what we were seeing was a bubble built on top of an upward trend.
And while it's supply/demand that is determining the prices currently, new projects are simply more expensive to bring online. Here in Alberta, many large projects that were started in a $25 climate now require $50 oil to break even, because of high labour cost inflation, change in currency valuation, etc. Some projects that are starting now have even higher break even points. I imagine similar problems have cropped up in other oil producing countries.
Oil's coming down right now, but we're still in territory that would have been thought outrageous just a couple years ago. The difference now is that there's a point at which people will simply close off the taps and wait for the price to improve, and that floor is a lot higher than it used to be.
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You post an informative article, and then screw it up
[Read the article: Busting the electric car myth]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]with a bullshit sentence like this:
So, yes, electric and plug-in hybrid cars are a better way to go than gas guzzlers, and remain our best transportation bet in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on oil.
Remove the word "transportation" and replace it with "automotive" and you have a winner. Always remember...no matter how great its fuel efficiency, any car, not matter how it's powered, is never going to be the best transportation bet for anything.
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Maybe its the role
[Read the article: Blockbuster blackface]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Don't you think that Robert Downey Jr might be able to get away with the black makeup precisely because that's the role. He's not playing a black man. He's playing a white man playing a black man, and his job is to make fun of ridiculously self-absorbed actors...not black people.
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Werent people saying
[Read the article: Should Obama have picked Hillary?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That picking a woman who wasn't Clinton would be worse for Obama than picking a man. Just last week? I seem to remember something about it...the commentary seemed to be that that would just be pandering.
Now, I don't think that Clinton on the ticket would have been good for Obama. I just don't think they could have gotten along, and I think that Clinton hate would have turned off many swing voters. So, while I like Janet Napolitano, and don't know much at all about Kathleen Sibelius, the strategy hounds seemed to be recommending against that. Now McCain picks a woman (someone who was on the radar, just not expected, back when people were poo-pooing the idea of a non-Clinton woman on the ticket) and the strategists are changing their tune.
Blah. This is what turns people off politics.
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Another dull and irritating article
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Stick to aviation.
You should know by know that aesthetics are subjective. While I do fall into the camp of "who cares what it looks like" (perhaps it's my engineering background...function is most important), at the same time, I see nothing wrong with most of your photos (though some don't work), and actually find the Air India look quite attractive.
Likewise, I find the hunchback 747 to be less attractive than the plain but functional A380.
So maybe stop spending your time harping on aesthetics and acting like what you don't like is what everyone shouldn't like, and get back to writing about aviation, a topic on which you're actually able to write informative and entertaining articles.