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jonathaniketem · 5 years

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Coming to Terms

I was the last to introduce myself at my table, comprising four desks facing each other. World cultures—my very first class as a middle schooler. I couldn’t have been more excited. Our teacher sat in the front of the room just surveying her surroundings; her pearly, white smile was about as bright as the hot Texas sun. I still remember Ms. Juarez getting up herself, flattening out the creases from her outfit like she usually does once she got up and and introduction herself. Right after she spoke a few words and while the crowd gasped in excitement, I stared at my table, aghast. “You guys will make a presentation about your own culture by the end of the year, it only seems fair as this is a world cultures class,” she smiled as she always did while stating something that felt similar to a death sentence. How was I to complete something I had so much trouble accepting?

Now let’s turn back in time—back to when I was nine years old meeting some of my closest friends for the first time. I came across a group of kids my age range playing soccer right in front of my house on the street. I was too shy to come out and just ask if they would let me play with them; with the knowledge I’ve amassed now I know children are much easier to congregate with peers than adults who may be a bit pretentious to ever allow anyone foreign join their clique. I only walked away from the screen gate concealing my gazing presence for a bottle of water when I heard a thump against the familiar sound of something hitting the plastic exterior of a car. I ran outside yelling at those rowdy individuals who dared to hit my father’s sedan. They did what kids knew best and ran for their lives, and as a kid myself, I ran after them. We ran and ran until the sun went down only for all of us to collapse from exhaustion. We laughed about how stupid this all was while apologizing for hitting my dad’s car. My summer as a nine year old then on was me going out and having fun with the new kids I met. I started to grow bonds with them and create memories hoping nothing would throw a wrench into the fun I was having. Sadly it’s always those who try to escape bad luck who end up chasing its tail. One day all my new friends came to our friend Tobias’s home for a game day. The environment was much different than it was in my house: R&B music playing in the house, friends of Tobias’s dad in the backyard having a barbecue, and a marathon playing of a show I had never heard of before called Martin. I must have been very tense as Tobias noticed and tried to calm my nerves, and if Tobias noticed my other friends did too. They must’ve realized I wasn’t feeling like my regular self, all from being in a different setting. “Hey why do you look like you’re out of place? You’re Black too, aren’t you?” The question I always felt uneasy about. I stood there and stared at everyone unable to say a thing for awhile. To this day my present self could never understand why I agreed that I was such instead of the truth, but the lie was played and it had to be kept up or my image would’ve been ruined.

I am an African American, an American citizen who just so happens to have African roots. This is what I have finally accepted myself to be ethnically. Though it was never easy for me to accept as a youth. I have parents from the Eastern horn of Africa, born and raised in the country Eritrea. They sadly had to leave their homes to escape the war for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia, later meeting each other in Houston. They were proud of their Eritrean ethnicity, yet they gave birth to and raised a son who was ashamed of who he was. I was surrounded by people who identified as what the average person would imagine to be the Black American. I was constantly seeing myself as fitting into this group without also being apart of my own group. I didn’t have the knowledge to be able to be apart of both the African American community while also being proud of my roots as an Eritrean youth. I saw it as wanting to be able to accommodate myself into this community I was around so long that being a bit different would only make me feel segregated deep within, so my only solution was to lie about who I was. I’ve been questioned continuously as I differed visually from the peers I so wanted to be apart of, the loose curly hair, my bulging eyes, and complexion that made it seem I was from the Middle East. Because other people have continuously made assumptions about my race, I have found myself frequently discouraged. Discouraged to the point that lies flowed smoothly out my mouth like water surging from a faucet. Embarrassment followed me no matter who asked the question I dreaded: “Hey what are you? Are you Black?”, and no matter how many times I was asked my lies never failed to put me at ease.

A thing about lies I’ve come to realize—they may start out as little white lies, but the constant repetition of a lie breathes life into the lie. The lie starts to become its own entity, an entity I despised but kept molding with the eccentric tales I formed that would’ve put a seasoned politician in awe of what the mind of a youth could conjure in fabrication. My lies started with only a few peers; later, newer mouths would ask the same questions with familiar ones standing close by; my lies couldn't change there or I would be a liar. The lies began to form an identity—latching on to my person like the backpack I so proudly carried through the hallways of the school I spread my lies, instead the lies were a burden to my conscience. The typical person would try to fix something weighing heavily on their mind, but the lies were an addiction that sadly started to rope in others that weren’t supposed to be involved. Since my sister, two years my junior, started to attend my school I’d tell her to start lying about our identities. She could never figure out why it was such a big deal to me, but I started at her just as drug addicts stare at their loved ones asking for a bit of cash to get high one last time. Looking back it was quite repulsive doing something so crude to the innocent minded. I was her source of wisdom as her older sibling, yet I tried to bring her into the darkness I created out of disregard for myself trying to fit in with the groups of people I just happened to want to be a part of. Another thing about lies that I often hear and can confirm for myself are that they most likely will always catch up with their creators no matter how hard they try. As children get to meet others outside their family, they start to bringing them into the homes they were raised in and subsequently meet the ones who did the raising. For the liar I had become I could not believe I made the simple mistake of leaving my parents alone with friends to talk—the same parents who love to represent and share their information about their homeland. To hear one of the many customers you’ve sold your lies to ask what an Eritrea is feels probably about as painful as getting shot in the heart. I was truly grateful the attention span of my peers was about as long as a toddler’s who still hadn’t formed object permanence yet. There needed to be a remedy for the troubles I was causing myself, some soul searching before I was completely branded as a liar and someone who couldn’t come to terms with who they were. Surprisingly, all it took was a summer trip and a bit of contemplation about life to get myself on the right track.

Summer before the start of the nerve-wracking middle school experience, a family trip was presented to the June-born siblings as a gift. I didn’t know how to feel about going to Eritrea to see and experience the environments my parents grew up in. The trip was for the entirety of the summer, coming back only two days before the school year was about to start. We would be taking the German airlines Lufthansa stopping in Frankfurt, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey for gas and once again taking off until we landed in the capital of Eritrea: Asmara. Summer is the perfect opportunity for friends to make a few more memories before they went to different schools and possibly losing contact with each other. It hurt my child heart to know that I couldn’t go out and have fun, but instead I had to go to the place I tried my best to hide the existence of. The constant questions of why I wouldn’t be home got my creative process running, my solution being that I told everyone we would be visiting family in Europe. My lie wasn’t completely far-fetched though; my mother and father both had brothers located in Sweden and Norway, so coming up with this I felt proud of what I conjured up. The trip there wasn’t an easy journey: our first flight cancellation due to the 2011 eruption of the Nabro volcano, TSA possibly giving White House security a run for their money, and the long flight hours accompanied by the sounds of my sister heaving up her airline meals every moment of turbulence. I couldn’t have been happier once I had both feet on the motionless earth. Finally stepping out of the airport, I stood by the entrance waiting on my mother to get her bearings. Hand stretched out tugging at my luggage, I watched in awe at the deep lavender masterpiece in the sky the sun had left once it set ready to rise once again from where I came from. “Not bad,” I thought quietly to myself, “I guess I’m home.”

Asmara is the capital of Eritrea as well as my parent’s birth place. There are many ethnic groups living in Eritrea; my family is a part of the largest group in Eritrea called Tigrayan due to the language we speak: Tigrinya. Because of my delayed learning of English and natural tendency for Tigrinya as a child, my father decided to withhold my learning of the letters my parents grew up with called Ge'ez. They decided the 26 letter alphabet worshiped by this new country they settled in was much more important than millennia of history and culture. Though I regret their decision now I never cared much for it back then, especially during our trip when I had two translators by my side. The air there was very cool, which never made much sense to me until my parents explained how we were many feet above sea level, basically living on top of a mountain. Walking to our grandmother’s house from when the taxi dropped us off, we were headed to where would be staying for the entirety of our trip. I saw that everyone was walking, reminding me much of the climate of New York from various videos and photos I have seen. People walked and talked mostly in Tigrinya and to my surprise English as well. Asmara is much more advanced when it came to popular culture and what was big in societal trends as the capital of this country compared to the more rural cities my great grandparents and so on came from. My father thought it would be best to walk the rest of the way while my mother took the taxi back to her childhood home preparing for our arrival. We walked the streets taking detours walking past the many food stalls and shops out in the open, like shopping at a bazaar. The stained homes and buildings from the sun and style to the colorful, but bleached architecture made it feel like I was vacationing in one of the South American countries. I couldn’t believe what beauty Africa had housed.

Living in Asmara for just less than three months I started to see what it felt like being more than just American. It wasn’t as big of a difference as I thought, especially not from the rumors about Africa that I heard back in America. Of Course as popular as Asmara was, it couldn’t be used as a standard when comparing all of Africa, as if comparing a mansion to low-income housing provided by the government for struggling individuals. Things like famine, poverty, and horrible living conditions existed, but I was living as lavish as I could in my grandmother’s home. I was woken up to this sad reality when we traveled to my great grandparents village of Maiha, which also served as my grandfather’s burial place. My grandfather died before I could ever meet him two years from when we left to come to Asmara—another reason that warranted this trip. The trip there was suffocating; the advent of the air conditioner seemed to not have reached east of Africa just yet as the bus ride there was unpleasant. The whole ride we were leaving the cool mountains and entering sea level, and humidity was coming at full force that summer. At our stop we walked to Maiha, my mother’s family village where she hugged, kissed, and introduced us to our family. Maiha was a desert from what I perceived it as, almost no vegetation anywhere with everyone’s skin clinging tightly to bone where muscle should’ve been missing. I couldn’t fathom how people could be living here, but these were also my roots. We walked to an area that presented itself as a miniature version of a cemetery I remember once seeing as I joked around with my siblings, holding our breaths until my father drove past it. My father pointed out my late grandfather with his image on a tombstone, I quickly noticed the resemblance he had with my cousin that was back in Asmara. My mother and her sisters circled around his final resting place as their sounds of sorrow hit my eardrums, their wails had hints of grief and sorrow I couldn’t help but feel regrettably sad my mother felt this way. Something in that moment made me think life was fleeting, it wasn’t very normal for a child so young to be thinking about such things. Our journey back to Asmara was filled with reminiscent stories of young girls and their time with their father. A grandfather who would spoiled his grandson every minute he spent with him would’ve been joyful to experience, but loved ones are taken before these moments can even be recorded. I learned that my grandfather had an avid love for language, housing the ability for speaking many languages during his life. It was something about that fact that resonated within me even though at the time it seemed to be just one of the many accomplishments he had under his belt. Once we made it back I remember sighing loudly that we were back home, which made me question my word use at the moment. I was finally comfortable enough to call the place my mother grew up in home, and I wasn’t at all ashamed by it. This new found respect I had garnished upon myself seemed to keep me on a high. In the coming weeks of traveling around the country and enjoying the cuisine, to my surprise was a lot of pasta and pizza, only added to my enjoyment for my summer. I later learned there was more Italian influence in Eritrea than I knew back from when Italy used to control this little country. From words such as eyeglasses and car borrowed from Italian to the architecture and food, Eritreans used their suppressors identity and incorporated it into their own. The love for the language and learning more words in Tigrinya took new heights when I decided it was time I learned the alphabet from my uncle who was a school teacher. It was no easy feat, but the dedication I had for this task was marvelous and quite miraculous looking back. By my age at the time, my brain had most likely already made its last connections with neurons in the language department, cutting its ties with neurons that most likely would’ve made learning these symbols a lot faster. Though with my effort, my plastic brain must have given me a chance to redeem myself from my ignorance as before I knew it I could read small segments from the local newspaper like an infant reading the big text from a picture book. The applause I received from family members in the room during my recital was very heartening and exciting as I showed off my new trick unbeknownst to my audience.

Before I knew it my first year as a middle schooler was only a few days, just under two weeks. The sorrowful goodbyes and hugs hurt my little heart. I made ties and bonds with people I never knew existed until three months ago and I never wanted to leave. The environment there was very free and fun and I couldn’t fathom coming back to America. The smiles I once had plastered on my face now masterfully painted to express an aghast look. If someone said this was the same happy little boy enjoying his life in eastern Africa, they would’ve been taken as a joke. Ms. Juarez’s words still rang in my ears and my trip playing in my head over and over. Before I knew it the bell rang signaling us to our next class before I could over think how I felt my life was over. The whole school day consisted of trying to distract my foreboding thoughts with the workload I was piling up on my first day, yet I still couldn’t get world cultures to stop taking over my thoughts. This kept on up until I finally made it home after a tiring day of school. I had to come up with something soon as I laid in my best going through every decision I could’ve made about a school project possibly changing my outlook on many things. My thoughts raced back and forth when I suddenly remembered all the fun I had during our trip and remembering the times I struggled learning a new alphabet for the sake of trying to please family who passed on before I even got to meet him. Though I broke my promise of continuously practicing my Ge’ez I couldn’t help but smile at myself struggling to get better at something I had put my mind to. This trip couldn’t have been scheduled at a better time, a time when something as important as a cultural showcase was announced just after my return. I was finally more accepting of something I despised for so long even though I wasn’t going to change over night I was taking the necessary steps and that's reason enough. I hopped off my bed and ran downstairs to my father reading his newspaper at the dining table as usual. I remember him looking up waiting for me to tell him whatever it was I had to tell him, but nothing wanted to come out. I couldn’t just close up now after I finally told myself it was time for a change. I started to hate myself even more for making such a topic embarrassing for myself in the first place when I should’ve embraced it like other Eritreans I knew. This was my time to finally leave my cocoon of hate and emerge as not a full fledged Eritrean just yet, but however far baby steps would take me for the meantime. I took a breath in and out and before I knew out came the words “dad I need help with a project at school.”

The lights were off and seats were rearranged so that everyone was facing the front of the room. The student right before me alphabetically decided to make a powerpoint slide about what being Mexican American meant to him. I wasn’t listening closely, only paying attention in little bits before I would stare out the window watching the trees waving hello in the wind. Time kept ticking and I knew soon the 10-minute interval for our presentation would start over again for the next student. My heart ticked in rhythm with the second hand on my watch and I realized my heart seemed to go faster and faster, a heart attack was all I could think of which only sped up my heart beat and didn’t make the situation any better. As I took deep breaths to calm myself I heard the class start to clap, my time was up. I wasn’t going to let 10 minutes ruin my life, this was going to be nothing but a simple speech to a bunch of people I met during my sixth grade year. I got up with the most confidence I had in awhile once I heard my name, tri-fold board in my right hand, a garment worn by women from Eritrea and Ethiopia in my left hand, and a traditional drum given to me by my late grandmother on my father’s side slung across my shoulder. I stood in front of my audience with my presentation set up, like I was at a science fair nervous to explain my booth. I took a deep breath, yet this time it wasn’t going to be used to spew lies any longer. I was standing my ground against all my demons ready to release myself all by giving a presentation. To many it may have looked like a child talking to his school friends about how he grew up, but to me it was a life changing moment. In that moment as if all at once my lies seemed to disappear into thin air relieving the stress I made for myself all those years; I was finally ready. “Hello my name is Jonathan,” I smiled a nervous, toothy grin, “and this is my presentation on what it means to be Eritrean.”

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Afterword

My thoughts were built selfishly upon self-love that was never present. I owned information that many peers I share my skin color with would never get to know. I couldn’t accept something that many could try to search for after it was stolen from them centuries ago, but I was ignorant to that fact. I was ignorant to the culture I was blessed to have information about and in my selfishness pretend to have no such knowledge. I am thankful for this gift many of my brothers and sister will never get to know: another language, another culture, another home. I care for my roots ever greater now since I’ve learned the significance of where I came from. I am African American with known roots from Africa. I am able to speak my African tongue. I am proud to say my heritage lies in another continent. I am me.

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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How Darlene Love Brings the Holiday Spirit and Soul to The Christmas Chronicles 2

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Spoiler Alert: Santa Claus blows a mean sax.

The high point of Netflix’s The Christmas Chronicles 2 comes at its least festive moment. The young and grieving teen Kate Pierce (Darby Camp) is mistaken for a runaway and taken away by airport authorities–while being lost in time–all the flights on Logan International Airport’s big board turn from hour-long delays to outright cancellations, and joy in that small part of Boston drops to 7 percent. People are all up in each other’s grills, nerves are frayed, and complimentary hotel stays are not going to cut it. They are not a merry bunch. If ever there was a time for a holiday miracle, this would be it. Only now, when things are at their darkest, does a flustered ticket agent named Grace (Darlene Love) reach for the public address microphone–and deliver “The Spirit of Christmas.”

Darlene Love may have the grace to carry a sleighful of holiday cheer but, as the song says, “You can’t change the world alone, sometimes you need a little help.” The rock and roll icon who has become an evergreen voice of Christmas decades ago pages Santa Claus (Kurt Russell), who is on hand to offer his full support. Too jolly to provide merely a baritone backup, Santa pulls an alto sax out of his bag for a spirited solo.

Darlene didn’t just bring the spirit of Christmas. She brought the soul, the Disciples of Soul to be specific. In fact, the new gospel-infused holiday tune was written by Steven Van Zandt, and backing was done by his long-time band, along with two members of one of his other groups, Bruce Springsteen’s E. Street Band.

Van Zandt and his Disciples of Soul backed Love when he produced and wrote songs for her 2015 album, Introducing Darlene Love. The title was ironic, as Love had been in the business long enough to be an institution. She didn’t only have her own hits with her group The Blossoms, they sang back-up vocals on iconic rock and roll classics like the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” as well as songs by Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, the Righteous Brothers, Dionne Warwick, and Luther Vandross.

Van Zandt is also a very versatile support player. He had Tony Soprano’s back when he played consigliere Silvio Dante on The Sopranos, and he backed Russell when the actor belted out “Santa Claus Is Back in Town” in the original 2018 Christmas Chronicles. Both holiday films were directed by Chris Columbus, who directed Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), which also just so happened to feature Love singing a Van Zandt number, “All Alone on Christmas.” That tune has since become a Christmas standard of its own, even appearing unironically in another Christmas movie classic, Love Actually.

But then you’re never alone on Christmas if you have Love, and she’s been a voice of the holiday since 1963 when she sang “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Written by Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, and co-credited to Phil Spector, the song was part of the compilation album, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector. It was released as a holiday single on the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and didn’t make the charts. Spector released it again for the 1964 holiday season, but the tune again didn’t make it down many more chimneys.

Love had a string of hits during the 1960s, including “He’s a Rebel,” “The Boy I’m Gonna Marry,” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love.” But the song “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” recorded in a decorated studio even though it was 100 degrees outside, only played a muted part in any Christmas playlists.

That all changed when David Letterman christened Love as the “Christmas Queen.” In 1986 Love played herself in the off-Broadway jukebox musical Leader of the Pack. Paul Shaffer, who was the musical director of NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman, played Spector. The night after Letterman saw the show, he brought joy to the Worldwide Pants production audience, announcing he’d just seen a show with the greatest Christmas song he’d ever heard.

Backed by The World’s Most Dangerous Band, Love performed “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on Letterman’s show every December from 1986 to 2014. She only missed one year, 2007. When Letterman left networks in 2015, Love took the tradition to ABC’s The View where she continues to pour on the cheer.

The song topped Rolling Stone’s 2010 list of “The Greatest Rock and Roll Christmas Songs.” Since 2016, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” has been on the Billboard Holiday Airplay chart every year. It hit No. 29 the first week of January in 2020. You can hear it in Goodfellas, right after Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Burke tells his crew not to spend their Lufthansa Heist money in one place.

A veteran live performer, Love also takes “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on the road. Every year from the middle of November until early January, the singer performs “Love for the Holidays” shows across North America and Europe. This year, Love will stream her “Love for the Holidays” spectacular. Filmed in November at New York City’s Sony Hall, the concert will be available online via ShowClix on Dec. 5 at 8pm. The proceeds will be gifted to theaters and arts institutions which have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic across the country.

The Christmas Chronicles 2 is available on Netflix.

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currinsaviation · 4 years

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A History Of America’s Failed Airlines

71Simple Flyingby Andrew Curran / 8d

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When people think of American’s failed airlines, they tend to focus on the big names – TWA, Pan Am, Eastern, and Continental. But there are hundreds of American airlines out there that have failed. We can’t cover them all, but in this article, we look at five American airlines and why they failed. Some you would have heard of, others, maybe not.

America has a long history of failed airlines. Photo: Aero Icarus via Flickr

Bricks in the mail and $60 tickets

One of the pioneers of commercial aviation in America was Florida Airways. It buzzed around the southeast of the United States in the 1920s. Its first paying passenger service was in 1926 when Florida Airways flew from Tampa to Jacksonville via Miami. A ticket on that flight cost $60. Nearly one hundred years later, you can probably find a Frontier flight for less.

Of course, $60 was an enormous amount of money in 1926. Florida Airways flew just 939 passengers in its first year of flights, using two Stout 2-ATs. The airline tried to underwrite its operations flying freight and mail. They picked up an airmail contract from the US Government, flying mail between Miami and Atlanta.

A Stout 2-AT, the type used by Florida Airways. Photo: National Photo Company Collection via Wikimedia Commons

The story goes that Florida Airways beefed-up its government payments by parceling up bricks and mailing them back and forth. But even those dodgy dealings weren’t enough to save Florida Airways. By 1927, the airline was insolvent. The two aircraft were sold to a company called Stout Air Services, which eventually became United Airlines.

The ill-fated CIA owned and operated airline

One well known and well-named failed airline was Air America. It was a passenger and cargo airline owned and operated by the CIA. The airline ran between 1946 and 1976 with the slogan “Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, Professionally.” Although the airline purportedly operated as a passenger airline, its core business was running freight, personnel, and interference to countries the CIA had interests in.

That meant Air America’s very mixed fleet of mostly turboprop aircraft spent a lot of time in southeast and north Asia. Air America’s planes loitered around Vietnam, Laos, China, Cambodia, Taiwan, Burma, and Japan. It was Air America’s involvement in the disastrous Vietnam War and rumored involvement in drug running into Laos that was its undoing.

An Air America C-46 evacuating people from Da Nang. Photo: Manhhai via Flickr

The Civil Aviation Board canceled the airline’s operating license in 1974, and the business ceased two years later. Most of Air America’s assets went to Evergreen International Airlines.

Ten years later, Total Air bought the Air America name and launched Lockheed L-1011 Tristar flights between Baltimore, Detroit, London, Los Angeles, and Honolulu. These services were relatively shortlived, and the airline name hasn’t been used since.

New Iberia’s Gulf Air Transport

Readers with long memories may recall Gulf Air Transport. It was a charter airline that operated from 1979 to 1990 out of New Iberia, Louisiana. Ultimately, the airline went bankrupt, but in those eleven years, Gulf Air accumulated a mixed fleet of 20 plus aircraft, including a dozen Boeing 727s.

Gulf Air Transport got its start in 1979 by buying Music City’s FAA operating certificate and their sole aircraft, a Convair 340. The fledgling airline initially focused on supporting the gas and oil industry. Eventually, as the airline added aircraft and operations expanded, Gulf Air started flying resource and gambling charters out to California.

A Gulf Air Transport DC 8-63 operating as TransOcean Airways in 1988. Photo: Pedro Aragao via Wikimedia Commons

In 1984, Gulf Air picked up its first jet from Pan Am. That allowed the airline to upscale its ambitions significantly. It began flying college and sports charters and developed a handy niche operating gambling junkets.

By the mid-1980s, Gulf Air Transport was flying internationally, including to Europe. It changed its name to TransOcean Airways to avoid confusion with Bahrain’s Gulf Air. But this expansion, along with problematic new DC-8 jetliners and a general economic downturn in the mid-1980s saw the airline hit financial turbulence.

Gulf Air Transport / TransOcean Airways entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1989 and ceased operations the following year.

This airline was a building block of the modern Delta Air Lines

Another airline that had a good run was Northeast Airlines. The Boston based airline flew between 1931 and 1972. Northeast began as a contract carrier for Pan Am, flying between Boston and Bangor via Portland. Initially, the small airline was called Boston Maine Airways. But it changed its name to Northeast Airlines in 1940 when WWII increased its financial fortunes, and the airline worked flying troops across the Atlantic for the US Army.

After the war, Northeast steadily moved into passenger operations and was an early mover into jet aircraft, flying a Boeing 707-331 between New York and Miami in 1959. In 1962, Howard Hughes got control of the airline, albeit only temporarily. Throughout the 1960s, Northeast aggressively expanded both its fleet and its destinations, flying as far afield as Canada, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the US West Coast.

Northeast Airlines. Photo: Ken Fielding via Wikimedia Commons

But these weren’t prosperous times for Northeast Airlines. By the 1970s, the airline was in play and became entangled in the grand American cycle of airline mergers, takeovers, and consolidations. Northwest Airlines initially courted the airline but terminated its negotiations in 1971. A year later, Delta Air Lines came calling. In August 1972, Northeast Airlines was merged with Delta. It spelled the end of the Northeast Airlines brand.

The colossus of the skies that went broke

While this article has deliberately looked at some of the lesser-known airlines, it would be remiss not to include some of the big names in American flying. There were few bigger than Pan American World Airways, also known as Pan Am.

Pan Am flew between 1927 and 1991 and was one of the world’s great airlines. In the same way that BA represents Britain and Lufthansa symbolizes Germany, Pan Am took America to the world and brought the world to America.

Like Florida Airways, Pan Am started flying mail and passengers around Florida. Unlike Florida Airways, Pan Am thrived. By WWII, Pan Am was operating Sikorsky S-38 flying boats, better known as the Clippers. These planes crossed both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Pan American World Airways Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper, circa 1939. Photo: Harris & Ewing via Wikimedia Commons

Pan Am had many firsts. The airline was the first to operate regular flights across the Atlantic, the first to run around the world flights, and was the launch customer for both the Boeing 707 and 747.

The airline took about 40 years to peak and around 20 years to decline. The 1973 oil crisis hit Pan Am hard, and a variety of ill-fated strategic decisions and competitive pressures saw the once-mighty airline begin to struggle.

In 1991, Pan Am went bankrupt, and a colossus of aviation flew its last flight from Barbados to Miami on December 4, 1991.

America was a nursery for commercial aviation. With experimentation comes failure. While few countries have as many failed airlines as America, few countries have contributed so much to aviation and had such success. Contemporary carriers like United and Delta are built on the back of many of these failed airlines. That’s something to keep in mind next time you fly.

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bigyack-com · 5 years

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SARS Stung the Global Economy. The Coronavirus Is a Greater Menace.

In 2002, when a lethal, pneumonialike virus known as SARS emerged in China, the country’s factories were mostly churning out low-cost goods like T-shirts and sneakers for customers around the world.Seventeen years later, another deadly virus is spreading rapidly through the world’s most populous country. But China has evolved into a principal element of the global economy, making the epidemic a substantially more potent threat to fortunes.International companies that rely on Chinese factories to make their products and depend on Chinese consumers for sales are already warning of costly problems.Apple, Starbucks and Ikea have temporarily closed stores in China. Shopping malls are deserted, threatening sales of Nike sneakers, Under Armour clothing and McDonald’s hamburgers. Factories making cars for General Motors and Toyota are delaying production as they wait for workers to return from the Lunar New Year holiday, which has been extended by the government to halt the spread of the virus. International airlines, including American, Delta, United, Lufthansa and British Airways, have canceled flights to China.China’s economic growth is expected to slip this year to 5.6 percent, down from 6.1 percent last year, according to a conservative forecast from Oxford Economics that is based on the impact of the virus so far. That would, in turn, reduce global economic growth for the year by 0.2 percent, to an annual rate of 2.3 percent — the slowest pace since the global financial crisis a decade ago.Returning from a long holiday for the first time since the coronavirus’ threat became clear, Chinese investors sent shares in China down about 9 percent on Monday morning. Stock markets around the world have plunged in recent days as the sense takes hold that a public health crisis could morph into an economic shock.In a sign of deepening concern, China’s leaders on Sunday outlined plans to inject fresh credit into the economy. That will include a net $22 billion to shore up money markets as well as looser borrowing terms for Chinese companies.Though China’s factories still produce a mind-bending array of relatively simple, low-value products like clothing and plastic goods, they have long since achieved dominance in more advanced and lucrative pursuits like smartphones, computers and auto parts. The country has evolved into an essential part of the global supply chain, producing components needed by factories from Mexico to Malaysia.China has also risen into an enormous consumer market, a nation of 1.4 billion people with a growing appetite for electronic gadgets, fashion apparel and trips to Disneyland.The trade war waged by the Trump administration has prompted a partial decoupling of the United States and China, the two largest economies on earth. Multinational companies that have used factories in China to make their wares have sought to avoid American tariffs by shifting production to other countries — especially Vietnam. The coronavirus might accelerate that trend, at least for a time, should global companies find themselves locked out of China.The outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, a city that is home to 11 million people, prompted the Chinese government to effectively quarantine the metropolis and much of surrounding Hubei province, barring people from moving around.Until now, the impact on factories was limited by the fact that the outbreak was unfolding during the Lunar New Year, the most important holiday of the year. Many businesses are closed during the holiday, while hundreds of millions of migrant workers return home to their families in the countryside.In a bid to keep people home and halt the spread of the virus, the government extended the holiday through Sunday, adding three days. But the fear of the virus is so widespread and intense that many workers are likely to remain away from factory towns this week.A frightening epidemic coinciding with a major holiday will almost certainly spell a substantial loss of sales for China’s tourism and hospitality industries. Hotels and restaurants that would normally be full of revelry are empty. Concerts and sporting events have been canceled. IMAX, the large screen film company based in Toronto, has postponed the release of five films it had intended to showcase in China during the holiday.Even as the holiday officially ends, business is unlikely to return to normal. Many major industrial areas — including Shanghai, Suzhou and Guangdong province — have lengthened the holiday by at least another week, preventing workers from returning.With flights to China limited and emergency public health restrictions in place, the Chinese operations of multinational companies are likely to be constrained. Major banks, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, are directing that employees who have visited mainland China stay home for two weeks.General Motors last year sold more cars in China than in the United States. Its Chinese factories will be closed for at least another week at the request of the government. Ford Motor has told managers in China to work from home while its factories remain idled, said a company spokesman.All of this could play havoc with businesses that depend on China for components, from auto factories in the American Midwest and Mexico to apparel plants in Bangladesh and Turkey.If customers cannot buy what they need from China, Chinese factories could, in turn, slash orders for imported machinery, components and raw material — computer chips from Taiwan and South Korea, copper from Chile and Canada, factory equipment from Germany and Italy.“This could potentially disrupt global supply chains,” said Rohini Malkani, an economist at DBRS Morningstar, a global credit rating business. “It’s too early to say how long it is going to last.”Similar worries accompanied the outbreak of SARS in 2002 and 2003, when the virus emerged in the southern province of Guangdong before spreading across China and around the world, killing nearly 800 people in at least 17 countries.China had just joined the World Trade Organization, gaining access to markets around the globe. It was harnessing its seemingly limitless supply of low-wage workers to produce cheap consumer goods. Its economy centered on exports. Its consumer market remained in its infancy.In the years since, China’s annual economic output has multiplied more than eightfold, to nearly $14 trillion from $1.7 trillion, according to the World Bank. Its share of global trade has more than doubled, to 12.8 percent last year from 5.3 percent in 2003, according to Oxford Economics.Its economic output per person has multiplied to roughly $9,000 last year from about $1,500 in 2003, giving households additional cash for an enormous range of consumer goods.“China today accounts for about one-third of global economic growth, a larger share of global growth than from the U.S., Europe and Japan combined,” Andy Rothman, an economist at Matthews Asia, an investment fund manager, noted during recent testimony before a congressional panel.The American semiconductor industry is particularly entrenched in China, which is both a major manufacturing hub and a market for its products. Intel’s customers in China accounted for about $20 billion in revenue in 2019, or 28 percent of its total for the year.Qualcomm, the dominant maker of chips for mobile phones, is even more dependent on China, drawing 47 percent of its annual revenue — or nearly $12 billion — from sales in the country.No one knows how long the coronavirus outbreak will last, how far it will spread, or how many lives it will claim. It is impossible to calculate the extent to which it will disrupt China’s economy. But China’s formidable stature in the world economy means that the impact of the current outbreak is likely to substantially exceed that of SARS.“The knock-on effects for the global economy are going to be much larger than they were,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.For manufacturers, the timing of the outbreak may limit the damage. They just completed the fourth quarter, when production increases to meet demand for the winter holidays. The end of January is typically slow.But the effects of the virus on supply chains, which have grown notoriously complex, are difficult to anticipate. A single part of an advanced product like a smart TV may be made of dozens of smaller components, with each of these assembled from other pieces. Companies themselves often do not know the suppliers that are three and four rungs down the chain.“If you run out of widgets that are essential to production processes and all those widgets come from China, then it may well be that your production lines go to a halt,” said Ben May, global economist at Oxford Economics in London. “These problems are likely to be popping up all over the world.”This became a problem in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which devastated manufacturers. Many companies assumed they were buying parts from a diverse range of suppliers, protecting them from shortages, only to realize that critical components were produced by single plants.If that plays out in China, the consequences are likely to be great.“We’re talking about a potentially vast swath of a country that the whole world depends on as a manufacturing workshop,” said Susan Helper, an economist at Case Western Reserve University and the former chief economist at the Commerce Department. “The effects will be unexpected.”Apple assembles most of its products in China. The company has severely restricted travel in China for its employees, its chief executive officer, Timothy D. Cook, said on an earnings call on Tuesday.Apple disclosed much wider volatility in its potential revenues for the current quarter in the face of uncertainties around factory production and sales of its products.Those uncertainties deepened on Saturday. Apple, which derives about one-sixth of its sales from China, announced that it would close its 42 stores in the country.Walmart buys vast volumes of its products from Chinese factories while operating 430 stores in the country, including in areas shut down by quarantine. The company has reduced hours at some stores, a Walmart spokeswoman said.“We may still be in the early stages,” of the coronavirus crisis, Judith McKenna, who runs Walmart’s International business, wrote in an internal memo on Friday.China is the world’s largest manufacturer of toys. At the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany, many Chinese suppliers expressed confidence that their factories would soon reopen, said Rick Woldenberg, chief executive of Learning Resources, a family-owned manufacturer of educational products and toys in Illinois.“But no one’s quite sure how much of this information can be relied upon,” Mr. Woldenberg said.Because of the trade war, the toy industry was effectively prepared for a moment in which its access to Chinese suppliers was imperiled, Mr. Woldenberg said. In December, when the Trump administration was threatening to impose an additional 15 percent tariff on Chinese imports, many toy companies sped up their orders to beat the deadline. Some shifted production to Thailand and Vietnam to avoid the tariffs altogether.Toymakers will soon need to rebuild inventory. “If this goes on for four more months, we are talking about a big problem,” said Jim Silver, chief executive of TTPM.com, a consumer research site.After SARS, China suffered several months of economic contraction and then rebounded dramatically. That might happen this time, too. The only certainty is this: Whatever happens in China will be felt widely.“Clearly China has become a much more dominant player in the world economy,” said Mr. May of Oxford Economics. “It’s just so much more involved in the global supply chain. Over the last decade, it has been the spender of last resort for the global economy.”Reporting was contributed by Jack Nicas, Patricia Cohen, Emily Flitter, Ian Austen, Don Clark, Michael Corkery, Julie Creswell, Neal E. Boudette and Gregory Schmidt. Read the full article

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deniscollins · 4 years

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France Tries Limiting Joblessness to Confront Coronavirus Recession

France is rapidly emerging as a test case of whether a country can hasten the recovery from a recession by protecting businesses from going under in the first place, and avoiding mass joblessness. France and some western European nations have passed legislation funding paid furloughs rather than the U.S. approach of providing some economic relief to employees after they have been dismissed or furloughed without pay. In France, the government is spending 45 billion euros ($50 billion) to pay businesses not to lay off workers. Over 337,000 businesses have already put 3.6 million employees on paid furlough to be reimbursed by the state. Should the U.S. adopt the French model and fund paid furloughs: (1) yes, (2) no? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

When France started shutting down a few weeks ago as the coronavirus marched relentlessly into the country, Dominique Paul feared disaster. His family’s white-glove catering company, Groupe Butard, halted operations, putting 190 jobs at risk.

Edward Arkwright, the director general of Aéroports de Paris, the Paris airport operator, weighed how to preserve over 140,000 jobs when a freeze on most global airline traffic caused activity to nose-dive 90 percent in a few head-spinning days.

The future of both businesses, and hundreds of thousands more around France, spiraled into uncertainty. Instead of sinking, though, they are being thrown lifelines as the French government deploys a targeted plan aimed at sheltering companies and keeping every worker possible employed.

“We’re using the government’s whole toolbox to get through this crisis,” Mr. Paul said, eyeing the company’s empty Armenonville Pavillon on the edge of Paris, where just weeks ago chefs and waiters served delicacies like scallop carpaccio for glittering events. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to keep up.”

As the coronavirus wallops the world’s economies, France is rapidly emerging as a test case of whether a country can hasten the recovery from a recession by protecting businesses from going under in the first place, and avoiding mass joblessness.

In the United States, the coronavirus has already provoked millions of layoffs. While the $2 trillion rescue package signed by President Trump sends extensive relief to American workers and businesses, France and other European Union countries are deploying a more encompassing state-led approach in the event that the epidemic takes months, rather than weeks, to contain.

“There’s a very different strategy in Europe than in the United States about how to manage this recession,” said Patrick Artus, chief economist of Paris-based Natixis Bank. “The idea is to have no layoffs or company closures, so that when the coronavirus is finally under control the economy can start right back up.”

France is hoping to learn a lesson from the 2008 financial crisis, when it didn’t take aggressive steps to support workers and businesses. Unemployment soon jumped to around 10 percent and stayed high for half a decade. By contrast, the rise in joblessness in Germany — which kept companies from collapsing by subsidizing furloughs in a system known as Kurzarbeitergeld, or short-time work — lasted less than a year before falling steadily.

“France has decided it’s not going to make the same mistake with the coronavirus,” said Simon Tilford, director of the Forum New Economy, a research institution in Berlin. “That approach is going to be much less devastating.”

Austria, Denmark and other northern countries have similar policies, and Britain announced last week that it would do the same. And on Wednesday, the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said governments would join to support short-time work so that “more people will keep their job” during the current crisis.

In France, the government is spending 45 billion euros ($50 billion) to pay businesses not to lay off workers. Deadlines for taxes and loan payments are delayed. Another €300 billion in state-guaranteed loans are being extended to any struggling company that needs them.

Over 337,000 businesses have already put 3.6 million employees on paid furlough to be reimbursed by the state, the Labor Ministry said Wednesday. Officials expect the numbers to more than double as it receives “several thousand requests per minute.”

The plan isn’t without risks. European leaders are wary of relaunching the economy before the epidemic is proved to be under control. The tsunami of fiscal support by France and its neighbors — over €2 trillion in spending and loan guarantees combined — can be sustained only a few months, economists say.

The risk extends to the businesses as well, which must continue to pay one-fifth of the salaries of employees who aren’t working. If the economy doesn’t rebound by autumn, companies say, they may yet be forced to revert to layoffs.

Mr. Paul of Groupe Butard is betting things won’t get that bad, despite fearing the worst when orders were canceled en masse in early March. Events organized by corporate giants like Schneider Electric and the French Federation of Rugby were called off, shrinking his expected monthly revenue of €4 million to €500,000 and leaving Dominique Julo, the company’s events director, with little to plan for.

Since then, Mr. Paul has used all the financial backstops made available by the French government, even delays of payments for electricity bills and rent on Groupe Butard’s offices and its hulking food preparation facilities outside Paris.

The state will pay him 80 percent of his employees’ salaries to keep them on payroll. Although Mr. Paul is still waiting for the money, because of a backlog in the 10-day reimbursement period promised by the government, the combined financial relief means the company “will be ready to rebound once the crisis is over,” he said.

Use of Germany’s paid furlough program is also soaring. Nearly 500,000 firms filed for support in March, the government said Tuesday, up from fewer than 2,000 in February. Among them are Daimler, Volkswagen, Lufthansa and the company that manages Frankfurt Airport, where air traffic has plunged 90 percent.

A similar collapse in activity forced Mr. Arkwright, the director general of Aéroports de Paris, to put 80 percent of the 6,000 administrative employees and 135,000 baggage handlers, security agents and other workers on paid furlough after Orly Airport and all but two terminals at Charles de Gaulle Airport, the second-busiest in Europe, closed.

He faced extraordinary circumstances as losses ballooned to an estimated €1.3 billion. Adding to the chaos, the chief executive of Aéroports de Paris, Augustin de Romanet, tested positive for the virus, leaving Mr. Arkwright to manage on an emergency basis as two-thirds of the airport company’s board also self-quarantined. All the executives emerged in good health.

Aéroports de Paris, which is half owned by the state and is slated for privatization this year, is saving €25 million a month from government subsidies for paid furloughs, Mr. Arkwright said. The state has asked the company not to pay out an annual dividend.

“The advantage of this approach is that we can start up again literally from one day to the next,” Mr. Arkwright said. “I can call you and say, ‘Come in tomorrow.’ But if you go into unemployment, it’s not sure you’d be called in for a job. And we would lose people with valuable skills.”

Allowing unemployment to balloon would also cost European governments huge sums, because of the generous benefits offered to fired workers. In Germany, for instance, someone who is let go after 12 months can still receive 60 percent of his or her salary for the next nine; in France, unemployment benefits last up to two years.

“Laying people off actually costs more,” Mr. Arkwright said.

And people who can keep their jobs “are less unhappy and shocked than people who have been fired,” said Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank in London. “They are less likely to dramatically cut their consumption. That limits the overall economic damage.”

In that sense, Mr. Schmieding added, governments paying companies to keep people furloughed “achieve a bigger impact for less money than supporting people who have lost their jobs.” The United States, which will now extend jobless benefits and make one-time cash payments to support workers, is effectively “paying the price for its inadequate welfare net,” he said.

Mr. Paul of Groupe Butard said the French government’s protectionist playbook could sometimes be stifling for business. But safeguarding the economy and helping companies avoid throwing workers into unemployment would leave French society better off than others once the coronavirus epidemic was contained, he said.

“The French system can be cumbersome,” he said. “But it is incredibly effective in times like these.”

#France #Coronavirus

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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There Is No Sustainable Way to Fly

Last month, just weeks after climate activist Greta Thunberg was named Time’s Person of the Year, JetBlue announced that it would go carbon neutral on all its domestic flights by the end of the summer, becoming the first major airline in the world to make such a commitment. News coverage of the announcement highlighted the airline’s intention to “use an alternative fuel source for flights leaving from San Francisco” along with “direct flight paths, new planes and other technologies.”

In other words, the company was hoping to innovate its way out of the aviation industry’s massive impact on the environment.

But a closer look revealed that there was no magic bullet behind this seemingly bold initiative. The fine print of JetBlue’s press release reveals that the airline doesn’t plan to reach this ambitious goal by decreasing the amount of carbon its planes spew into the air, but by making up for that carbon somewhere else. The airline will reach net zero emissions by funding “offsets,” or projects such as wind turbines and tree plantings that decrease global emissions overall.

Fly a plane here, plant a tree there—that’s the plan, for the most part.

JetBlue isn’t alone in offering such carbon offsets as an antidote to customer anxieties about air travel, and neither is it the only airline seeking to develop green aviation technology such as biofuels and electric jet engines; just last week the British aviation industry announced a similar plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. These policies promise to help the aviation industry go green without having to cancel a single flight, but the solutions they offer are too little and too late. The only sustainable way to fly, it turns out, is to fly less.

“The problem we face with air travel is that at present there aren’t good low-carbon alternatives,” said Peter Miller, a regional director at the National Resources Defense Council who focuses on clean energy advocacy. “There are a lot of technologies that are on the drawing board or just getting off the drawing board, but they’re not here yet, so the question is what we should do in the interim.”

On a global scale, cars are a far larger contributor to climate change than planes: air travel still only accounts for around 10 percent of global emissions from transportation, compared to 60 percent from automobiles. As a result, the gradual increase in electric vehicle ownership and gasoline fuel economy could help put a big dent in carbon emissions over the next few decades.

But our climate challenge isn’t as simple as carbon quantity: these statistics disguise the uniquely devastating short-term impact that air travel has on the atmosphere. Jet engines emit not only carbon dioxide but also sulphates, nitrous gases, and icy vapor streams called contrails, all of which trap heat in the atmosphere. Furthermore, they emit these greenhouse gases directly into the atmosphere at high altitudes, which research suggests could contribute to a disproportionate amount of short-term warming.

Recent climate forecasts say we must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half over the next ten years in order to stave off global catastrophe, but the aviation industry has thus far been moving in the opposite direction. One recent estimate found that emissions from air travel had risen more than 1.5 times faster than previously predicted, and the fuel inefficiency of American carriers was partially to blame. Worse still, the number of annual airline passengers is currently projected to double by 2037, which means that any path toward a livable future will have to involve finding a sustainable way to fly. But the solutions that major airlines like JetBlue have embraced thus far are nowhere near guaranteed to counteract the damage that commercial aviation is doing to the planet.

Take offsetts, for instance. Even before JetBlue pledged to go carbon-neutral by funding such carbon-reducing projects, airlines including United and Delta already gave customers the option to purchase offset credits for their flight, paying a little extra to assuage their flying guilt.

These measures might sound like climate-forward action on the airlines’ part, but in many places such offsets will soon become far more common. Next year will begin the first phase of the United Nation’s aviation emissions plan, CORSIA, which requires airlines in signatory countries to commit to keeping their emissions at 2020 levels by purchasing offsets or using sustainable fuels. The plan will remain voluntary until 2027.

But Jessica Green, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies climate governance, said there’s no way to know for sure how much an offset is actually helping stop climate change, especially when an airline like JetBlue doesn’t reveal what kind of offsets it buys.

“Offsets vary a lot in quality,” Green said, “and a lot of times they’re purchased through aggregators of credits, which makes it harder to know where the project actually came from or what it’s actually doing. When you click the button it’s like, ‘oh, this is two tons of carbon,’ and you have no idea whether it was a wind farm in Malawi or methane capture in Brazil.”

A recent ProPublica investigation into reforestation projects in South America, for instance, found that the projects were completed behind schedule and delivered far less than their expected carbon benefit.

“It’s not de facto problematic, but given that we know there’s a lot of iffy projects out there, the less transparency we have about where these offsets come from, the less of a service it does,” Green said. “It also creates this mentality that you can just click a button and then you’ve been absolved of your sins.”

Sustainable fuels like the ones JetBlue will use in San Francisco are a similarly insufficient solution. The airline plans to adopt Neste biofuels, made from recycled organic material, which emit up to 80 percent less carbon than traditional fuel. Multiple European airlines including Germany’s Lufthansa have already tested these fuels on short-haul flights over the past few years, and major carriers like United are also planning to buy millions of barrels of waste-produced biofuel, and the U.S. Department of Energy is funding experiments in producing cheap fuel from fats and greases. But Miller says the infrastructure to make these fuels affordable on a large scale does not exist yet, and could take decades to develop.

“The U.S. airline industry is taking clear actions to grow more sustainable while also continuing to serve the needs of our customers,” said Carter Yang, spokesperson for Airlines for America, the lobbying group representing the country’s biggest airlines. “We’re continuously investing in more fuel-efficient planes, developing sustainable aviation fuel and implementing more efficient procedures in the air and on the ground,” Yang added, would help U.S. airlines meet CORSIA’s targets.

It’s equally unclear how much electric airplanes could do to mitigate the adverse impact of the aviation industry. Right now, the most advanced electric batteries from companies like Rolls Royce, Pipistrel, and startup ZER0 (dubbed the “Tesla of the skies”) can’t power flights of longer than a few hundred miles, and it’s unlikely that they ever will—an average jet engine is more than fifty times as powerful as the best lithium-ion battery, and the battery is much more expensive.

If the cost of such batteries ever comes down, electric planes might be able to replace many short-term flights. Norway, for instance, has pledged to take all its domestic flights electric by 2040. But passengers might traverse such short distances just as easily on transportation methods like trains and buses, which are cheaper, better-tested, and also environmentally friendly. There’s also the matter of where the electricity for these batteries comes from: if you juice them with electricity that comes from burning coal, you aren’t helping.

The best way to reduce air travel emissions in the immediate future, then, might be for people to simply fly less. Achieving that on a large scale might sound impossible—we can’t just demand that millions of people cancel their vacations—but it looks a bit easier once you realize that airline passengers are a far smaller group than car owners or users of electricity. Despite the rapid recent expansion of the aviation industry in China and Southeast Asia, some estimates suggest that more than 80 percent of the world’s population has never boarded a plane. Furthermore, a small group of frequent fliers generates a disproportionate share of emissions: the 12 percent of Americans who took six or more flights in 2017 were responsible for at least two-thirds of air travel emissions in that year, probably even more.

“JetBlue’s commitment to reduce their emissions is valuable,” Miller said, “and we have to support the decisions of companies to do more than they’re required to do. But it’s not a substitute for societal action, or national action, or international action to achieve emissions reductions.” Motherboard reached out to JetBlue and the other airlines mentioned in this story, but they did not respond to requests for comment.

In the absence of revolutionary technology that will drastically reduce the environmental impact of commercial flights, the best way for policymakers to make flying sustainable may be to discourage this frequent flying, especially when the trips are for business meetings and academic conferences that might just as easily be accomplished with a Skype call. Green said governments could accomplish this by subsidizing train travel instead of new airports, or by instituting what she calls a “runway tax”—charging consumers or airlines themselves an extra few hundred dollars to take off or land at an airport. Such taxes are always easier for corporations to absorb than individual consumers, but as Thunberg herself has pointed out, the international community has all but refused to touch the aviation industry—the Paris climate agreement, for instance, featured not a single binding resolution regarding air travel.

In the absence of any such regulation, Green said, the major airlines are still seeking to position themselves as climate-conscious, but on their terms.

“I think the airline industry, especially with this normative shift about flight-shaming, sees the writing on the wall,” she said. “I think they view initiatives like this as kind of a preemptive way to buy themselves some more time.”

There Is No Sustainable Way to Fly syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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SARS Stung the Global Economy. The Coronavirus Is a Greater Menace.

In the nearly 20 years since SARS, China’s importance in the global economy has grown exponentially.

By Peter S. Goodman | Published Feb. 3, 2020 Updated 6:01 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted February 3, 2020 |

Seventeen years later, another deadly virus is spreading rapidly through the world’s most populous country. But China has evolved into a principal element of the global economy, making the epidemic a substantially more potent threat to fortunes.

International companies that rely on Chinese factories to make their products and depend on Chinese consumers for sales are already warning of costly problems.

Apple, Starbucks and Ikea have temporarily closed stores in China. Shopping malls are deserted, threatening sales of Nike sneakers, Under Armour clothing and McDonald’s hamburgers. Factories making cars for General Motors and Toyota are delaying production as they wait for workers to return from the Lunar New Year holiday, which has been extended by the government to halt the spread of the virus. International airlines, including American, Delta, United, Lufthansa and British Airways, have canceled flights to China.

China’s economic growth is expected to slip this year to 5.6 percent, down from 6.1 percent last year, according to a conservative forecast from Oxford Economics that is based on the impact of the virus so far. That would, in turn, reduce global economic growth for the year by 0.2 percent, to an annual rate of 2.3 percent — the slowest pace since the global financial crisis a decade ago.

Returning from a long holiday for the first time since the coronavirus’ threat became clear, Chinese investors sent shares in China down about 9 percent on Monday morning. Stock markets around the world have plunged in recent days as the sense takes hold that a public health crisis could morph into an economic shock.

In a sign of deepening concern, China’s leaders on Sunday outlined plans to inject fresh credit into the economy. That will include a net $22 billion to shore up money markets as well as looser borrowing terms for Chinese companies.

Though China’s factories still produce a mind-bending array of relatively simple, low-value products like clothing and plastic goods, they have long since achieved dominance in more advanced and lucrative pursuits like smartphones, computers and auto parts. The country has evolved into an essential part of the global supply chain, producing components needed by factories from Mexico to Malaysia.

China has also risen into an enormous consumer market, a nation of 1.4 billion people with a growing appetite for electronic gadgets, fashion apparel and trips to Disneyland.

The trade war waged by the Trump administration has prompted a partial decoupling of the United States and China, the two largest economies on earth. Multinational companies that have used factories in China to make their wares have sought to avoid American tariffs by shifting production to other countries — especially Vietnam. The coronavirus might accelerate that trend, at least for a time, should global companies find themselves locked out of China.

The outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, a city that is home to 11 million people, prompted the Chinese government to effectively quarantine the metropolis and much of surrounding Hubei province, barring people from moving around.

Until now, the impact on factories was limited by the fact that the outbreak was unfolding during the Lunar New Year, the most important holiday of the year. Many businesses are closed during the holiday, while hundreds of millions of migrant workers return home to their families in the countryside.

In a bid to keep people home and halt the spread of the virus, the government extended the holiday through Sunday, adding three days. But the fear of the virus is so widespread and intense that many workers are likely to remain away from factory towns this week.

A frightening epidemic coinciding with a major holiday will almost certainly spell a substantial loss of sales for China’s tourism and hospitality industries. Hotels and restaurants that would normally be full of revelry are empty. Concerts and sporting events have been canceled. IMAX, the large screen film company based in Toronto, has postponed the release of five films it had intended to showcase in China during the holiday.

Even as the holiday officially ends, business is unlikely to return to normal. Many major industrial areas — including Shanghai, Suzhou and Guangdong province — have lengthened the holiday by at least another week, preventing workers from returning.

With flights to China limited and emergency public health restrictions in place, the Chinese operations of multinational companies are likely to be constrained. Major banks, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, are directing that employees who have visited mainland China stay home for two weeks.

General Motors last year sold more cars in China than in the United States. Its Chinese factories will be closed for at least another week at the request of the government. Ford Motor has told managers in China to work from home while its factories remain idled, said a company spokesman.

All of this could play havoc with businesses that depend on China for components, from auto factories in the American Midwest and Mexico to apparel plants in Bangladesh and Turkey.

If customers cannot buy what they need from China, Chinese factories could, in turn, slash orders for imported machinery, components and raw material — computer chips from Taiwan and South Korea, copper from Chile and Canada, factory equipment from Germany and Italy.

“This could potentially disrupt global supply chains,” said Rohini Malkani, an economist at DBRS Morningstar, a global credit rating business. “It’s too early to say how long it is going to last.”

Similar worries accompanied the outbreak of SARS in 2002 and 2003, when the virus emerged in the southern province of Guangdong before spreading across China and around the world, killing nearly 800 people in at least 17 countries.

China had just joined the World Trade Organization, gaining access to markets around the globe. It was harnessing its seemingly limitless supply of low-wage workers to produce cheap consumer goods. Its economy centered on exports. Its consumer market remained in its infancy.

In the years since, China’s annual economic output has multiplied more than eightfold, to nearly $14 trillion from $1.7 trillion, according to the World Bank. Its share of global trade has more than doubled, to 12.8 percent last year from 5.3 percent in 2003, according to Oxford Economics.

Its economic output per person has multiplied to roughly $9,000 last year from about $1,500 in 2003, giving households additional cash for an enormous range of consumer goods.

“China today accounts for about one-third of global economic growth, a larger share of global growth than from the U.S., Europe and Japan combined,” Andy Rothman, an economist at Matthews Asia, an investment fund manager, noted during recent testimony before a congressional panel.

The American semiconductor industry is particularly entrenched in China, which is both a major manufacturing hub and a market for its products. Intel’s customers in China accounted for about $20 billion in revenue in 2019, or 28 percent of its total for the year.

Qualcomm, the dominant maker of chips for mobile phones, is even more dependent on China, drawing 47 percent of its annual revenue — or nearly $12 billion — from sales in the country.

No one knows how long the coronavirus outbreak will last, how far it will spread, or how many lives it will claim. It is impossible to calculate the extent to which it will disrupt China’s economy. But China’s formidable stature in the world economy means that the impact of the current outbreak is likely to substantially exceed that of SARS.

“The knock-on effects for the global economy are going to be much larger than they were,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

For manufacturers, the timing of the outbreak may limit the damage. They just completed the fourth quarter, when production increases to meet demand for the winter holidays. The end of January is typically slow.

But the effects of the virus on supply chains, which have grown notoriously complex, are difficult to anticipate. A single part of an advanced product like a smart TV may be made of dozens of smaller components, with each of these assembled from other pieces. Companies themselves often do not know the suppliers that are three and four rungs down the chain.

“If you run out of widgets that are essential to production processes and all those widgets come from China, then it may well be that your production lines go to a halt,” said Ben May, global economist at Oxford Economics in London. “These problems are likely to be popping up all over the world.”

This became a problem in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which devastated manufacturers. Many companies assumed they were buying parts from a diverse range of suppliers, protecting them from shortages, only to realize that critical components were produced by single plants.

If that plays out in China, the consequences are likely to be great.

“We’re talking about a potentially vast swath of a country that the whole world depends on as a manufacturing workshop,” said Susan Helper, an economist at Case Western Reserve University and the former chief economist at the Commerce Department. “The effects will be unexpected.”

Apple assembles most of its products in China. The company has severely restricted travel in China for its employees, its chief executive officer, Timothy D. Cook, said on an earnings call on Tuesday.

Apple disclosed much wider volatility in its potential revenues for the current quarter in the face of uncertainties around factory production and sales of its products.

Those uncertainties deepened on Saturday. Apple, which derives about one-sixth of its sales from China, announced that it would close its 42 stores in the country.

Walmart buys vast volumes of its products from Chinese factories while operating 430 stores in the country, including in areas shut down by quarantine. The company has reduced hours at some stores, a Walmart spokeswoman said.

“We may still be in the early stages,” of the coronavirus crisis, Judith McKenna, who runs Walmart’s International business, wrote in an internal memo on Friday.

China is the world’s largest manufacturer of toys. At the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany, many Chinese suppliers expressed confidence that their factories would soon reopen, said Rick Woldenberg, chief executive of Learning Resources, a family-owned manufacturer of educational products and toys in Illinois.

“But no one’s quite sure how much of this information can be relied upon,” Mr. Woldenberg said.

Because of the trade war, the toy industry was effectively prepared for a moment in which its access to Chinese suppliers was imperiled, Mr. Woldenberg said. In December, when the Trump administration was threatening to impose an additional 15 percent tariff on Chinese imports, many toy companies sped up their orders to beat the deadline. Some shifted production to Thailand and Vietnam to avoid the tariffs altogether.

Toymakers will soon need to rebuild inventory. “If this goes on for four more months, we are talking about a big problem,” said Jim Silver, chief executive of TTPM.com, a consumer research site.

After SARS, China suffered several months of economic contraction and then rebounded dramatically. That might happen this time, too. The only certainty is this: Whatever happens in China will be felt widely.

“Clearly China has become a much more dominant player in the world economy,” said Mr. May of Oxford Economics. “It’s just so much more involved in the global supply chain. Over the last decade, it has been the spender of last resort for the global economy.”

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Reporting was contributed by Jack Nicas, Patricia Cohen, Emily Flitter, Ian Austen, Don Clark, Michael Corkery, Julie Creswell, Neal E. Boudette and Gregory Schmidt.

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Virus threatens U.S. companies’ supply of Chinese-made parts and materials

By David J. Lynch | Published February 02 at 6:49 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 3, 2020 ¦

The battle to contain the Chinese coronavirus threatens to cut off U.S. companies from parts and materials they need to produce iPhones, automobiles and appliances and drugs to treat medical conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, high blood pressure and malaria.

Some of the United States’ best-known manufacturers such as General Electric, Caterpillar and the Big Three automakers, along with many smaller American businesses, depend on what is made in Chinese factories.

Now, they confront life without those items. Major airlines in the United States and Europe are halting their cargo and passenger flights to China for up to two months. Recent visitors to the country are barred from entering the United States.

After four decades of growing integration with the rest of the world, China almost overnight has become an economic island. Its temporary isolation — no one knows for how long — will hurt companies that depend upon Chinese inputs as well as those that sell to Chinese customers.

Consumer electronics makers are among the most vulnerable, because many game consoles, smartphones and tablets are made in China. On Saturday, Apple announced that it had closed all of its corporate offices and retail stores in China — where it booked $44 billion in sales last year — until Feb. 9 because of the virus.

“The concern is not the zombie apocalypse with people dying in the streets. The concern is that a huge chunk of the global economy gets put out of commission as people wait it out,” said Patrick Chovanec, managing director at Silvercrest Asset Management in New York.

White House advisers so far have played down the disease’s effects, with President Trump’s top economic aide, Larry Kudlow, saying last week that he expects the virus to have “no material impact” on the U.S. economy.

Most Wall Street economists, likewise, say the economic damage will be limited. Economists at JPMorgan Chase Bank on Friday cut their first-quarter global growth estimate by 0.3 percentage points to 2.3 percent. But they predicted a swift rebound that would return China and the global economy to their pre-crisis trends by midyear.

The sanguine forecasts are based in part on a disease outbreak from 2003: The Chinese economy recovered quickly after severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), another fatal flulike infection, temporarily emptied offices and factories.

But there is no guarantee that the coronavirus will trace a similar path. Already, there are indications that while the new virus is less lethal than SARS, it spreads more easily.

China’s $14 trillion economy also is four times as large as it was 17 years ago and far more globalized. About 150 million Chinese business executives and tourists took an international flight in 2018, the most recent data available, more than seven times the 2003 figure, according to JPMorgan. Globally, the number of shipping containers moving among the world’s ports has almost tripled, according to the United Nations.

In Youngstown, Ohio, Phantom Fireworks worries that a prolonged hiatus at its Chinese supplier may prevent it from importing sufficient inventory for the Independence Day celebration.

Though its vendor in Liuyang, about 200 miles from Wuhan, is scheduled to reopen on Feb. 10, Phantom executives say the shutdown will probably last at least an additional week and perhaps several more. Chinese officials also closed the southern port of Beihai late last week, severing a key export link. Few alternative producers exist outside China.

“We’re in a very precarious situation, no question about it,” said Alan Zoldan, the company’s executive vice president. “I’m not very confident at all. It’s pretty unprecedented territory.”

Precautions that the Chinese and American governments are taking to stop the spread of the coronavirus, justified on grounds of medical necessity, are raising the potential economic toll. An official quarantine will keep factories across much of China, closed since Jan. 24 for the Lunar New Year holiday, shut for at least one more week, maybe longer.

Three major U.S. airlines — United, American and Delta — suspended flights to China until the end of March. American grounded its planes immediately, one day after its flight attendants union sued the company, arguing that the virus made such trips unsafe. United and Delta will stop flying at the end of the week.

That means trans-Pacific airfreight shipments will be limited for at least two months even if Chinese factories return to normal operations before then. (FedEx says that for now it is continuing its flights.) Some U.S. companies are drafting contingency plans for supply disruptions that linger into April or May, according to Craig Allen, president of the U.S.-China Business Council.

China is the largest export destination for 33 countries and the top source of imported goods for 65, including the United States, according to a 2019 McKinsey Global Institute study.

The accumulating uncertainty is unnerving investors. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 600 points, or 2.1 percent, on Friday.

The U.S. dependence on China was on display two years ago when American companies first sought to dissuade the Trump administration from imposing tariffs on Chinese goods.

Among those lobbying for relief was GE, which relies on its Chinese factories for parts to produce CT scanners, ultrasound and X-ray machines, oil field pumps, valves and motors, and aircraft engine components.

“There are certain inputs that cannot be readily sourced outside China,” Del Renigar, a top official in GE’s Washington office, wrote to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Finding a replacement for Chinese suppliers would not be easy. Dayco, a maker of engine parts and drive systems in Troy, Mich., said it would need two years to qualify new U.S. suppliers and to secure the needed approvals from its customers to use them.

Prinston Pharmaceuticals of Cranbury, N.J., depends on Chinese ingredients to make medications to treat high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s and depression. Novus Pharmaceuticals said its Chinese plant was the only source approved by the Food and Drug Administration for coartem tablets, a treatment for malaria.

Electronic component maker AVX of Fountain Inn, S.C., produces ceramic capacitors at its plants in Tianjin and Shenzhen, which its industrial customers in the United States use in automobiles, microwave ovens, washing machines, radios and television sets.

The impact of an interruption in Chinese supplies will depend on the duration of any cutoff, which is unknowable, and the size of current inventories, which companies generally do not disclose.

The number of people with the coronavirus has soared above 14,000, and more than 300 Chinese citizens have died. In response, Trump on Friday declared a public health emergency and barred foreign nationals who had been to China in the past 14 days from entering the United States. American citizens returning from the country will be subject to health screening and up to 14 days in quarantine.

The president’s decision came one day after the State Department warned U.S. citizens against all travel to China and the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency.

China, which in recent years accounted for about one-third of global growth, is now radiating economic weakness. The immediate impact of the health crisis will slow its domestic economy. First-quarter growth will dip to an annual rate of 5.2 percent, down from 6 percent in the final three months of last year, the most abrupt slowdown in nearly 10 years, according to PNC Bank.

“It’ll bounce back when it’s over,” said Allen, the U.S.-China Business Council president. “But we don’t know when it will be over.”

Chinese consumers sheltering in their homes rather than engaging in traditional holiday activities will spend less, while factory closures affecting millions of workers threaten parts shortages for American electronics or auto plants, economists said.

In one sign that the virus will have enduring effects across the world’s second-largest economy, the Ladies Professional Golf Association late last week canceled the March 5-8 Blue Bay golf tournament on Hainan Island. That’s about 1,000 miles from Wuhan, where the virus originated.

More than 50 million Chinese residents remain under a lockdown. The government already extended the Lunar New Year holiday to Monday. Factories in Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak, have been ordered closed through Feb. 13. Other provinces plan to restart production on Feb. 10.

“We believe there will be a disturbance at least until the end of February and possibly into mid-March,” said Sebastien Breteau, chief executive of QIMA, a supply-chain consultancy. “We are not very optimistic.”

More than 450 U.S. importers use suppliers in Hubei province, according to London-based Panjiva. Electronics manufacturers rely on Chinese suppliers for up to 50 percent of their components, while automakers get 15 percent from China, according to Chris Rogers, a Panjiva supply-chain specialist.

Some U.S. and global manufacturers will face higher costs even after their Chinese suppliers resume normal operations. Airline cutbacks will mean less space available for the industrial shipments — known as “belly cargo” — that travel in the hold of commercial jetliners.

“The scale of the airline cutbacks really caught my attention,” said Phil Levy, chief economist for freight forwarder Flexport. “This is a big network. You carve China out of it and it’s going to affect goods to Europe and goods to the U.S.”

As health officials fight the virus, the earliest and most severe economic consequences will be felt by China’s Asian neighbors. Countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines are tied into production networks centered on Chinese manufacturers and also have benefited from the past decade’s boom in Chinese tourism.

Aftershocks also are certain to be felt by major commodity-producing nations, such as Australia, which supplies China with much of its iron ore. The Baltic Dry Index, a gauge of bulk shipping costs, fell Friday for the 10th consecutive session and is now down 49 percent this year.

Of the advanced economies, nearby Japan and export-dependent Germany will feel the greatest chill.

Conventional economic forecasting is ill-equipped to calculate the impact of such an unpredictable health emergency, said Torsten Slok, chief economist for Deutsche Bank Securities. His baseline model for the U.S. economy relies on 200 equations.

“I just don’t know which equation I should be putting this in,” he said. “I just don’t have a good framework for assessing the risk.”

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