The Places You Won't Go

Conditions: Cold, Hard.

The Shit That Shouldn't Happen

This week we've seen the rise and fall of the sleeping air traffic controller scandal, where a number of airports across America have reported that landing planes have been cut off from ground control due to ground control being asleep.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport will get a second nighttime air-traffic controller after two flights had to land unaided, possibly because the lone person on duty was asleep. That controller was suspended.

“It is not acceptable to have just one controller in the tower managing air traffic in this critical air space,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
[...]

The National Transportation Safety Board began an examination after pilots on two flights were unable to contact air-traffic control at the hub airport outside Washington, forcing them to land unassisted, Peter Knudson, a spokesman, said in an interview yesterday. The board doesn’t yet know why contact couldn’t be made, and it is looking at the possibility that the sole controller on duty was asleep, he said.

The AMR Corp. (AMR) American Airlines and United Continental Holdings Inc. (UAL) United planes involved landed safely around midnight on March 22, Knudson said.

The American pilots aborted a first landing attempt when no one in the tower responded to calls, and landed the second time without assistance, Knudson said. The United pilots regarded the airport the same as others that don’t have controllers in early morning hours, and landed on the first attempt, he said.

The planes were in contact with controllers at a regional center in Virginia, he said.

- bloomberg.com/news/

Here's what I don't get: I don't get how this could have been allowed to happen in the first place. How could organizations running airports have allowed a situation where just one person is in the tower through the night and is therefore solely responsible for landing places? And it's only now that we're all getting on our high horses about people falling asleep and planes landing themselves? I feel sorry for the controllers, obviously being forced past their limit and eventually breaking under the strain. I've watched the Discovery Channel, and I know that in any air investigation when that happens, you have to go back to all the times in the past when the problem could have been identified and fixed, and was not.



Film Review: Limitless

Before it even starts, this film has a strike against it. It's one of these films that starts out with the ending, then cycles back to the start, which means we then have to spend the next hour and a half waiting to get back to the point we started from. I hate this technique, and what's more it indicates a lack of confidence in the story: the director is bribing you to stick around till the end by giving a quick taste of it at the start. And frankly, I think they were right to lack confidence in the story. Limitless tells the tale of a shiftless loser who stumbles onto an illegal wonder drug that makes him super smart and focused like a laser. The problem is that he only has a limited amount of pills, and it becomes apparent that if you stop taking the pills you die, and if you take too many, you start skipping forward in time. So to start with the loser, played well by Bradley Cooper, uses it to write his book, and clean up his life. But the lesson of this film, the one effectively written across the top of the screen, is that enough is not enough.

So Bradley comes up with a plan. It's a brilliant plan, except we don't get told what the plan is. The plan requires money, so Bradley naturally becomes a wall street genius, which brings him to the attention of the sharks. Both the ones who wear suits, and the ones who don't. Russian mobsters are now after him, because they know about the pills. And Wall Street goons are after him, because they know about the pills. In fact the further along we go, the more it becomes apparent that a lot of successful focused people know about the pills. Including Robert Deniro, who plays a Gordon Gecko type tycoon who's meant to be part mentor, part competition to Bradley. It seems obvious to me, and everyone else in the theater, that the fact that the pills can kill you make them not good. And the fact that there's a limited supply is not good. There's a very real possibility that Bradley killed a girl one night after taking one pill too many, and that too is not good. But instead of trying to solve any of these problems, the director essentially gives up.

After slowly and carefully spending nearly two hours backing his lead character into a corner, or more accurately pushing him up onto a ledge, he then provides one of the quickest and laziest reversals I've ever seen. And the film literally ends with Bradley not having learned a damn thing. In fact, this film is a heartfelt endorsement of the drug mentality. That all that matters is getting what you can, and that salvation lies in some wicked combination of chemicals. As long as you have money, smarts and deep blue eyes, you can have anything. This is a terrible movie. It's truly awful, with no redeeming factors at all, and near the end of the film I found myself actively rooting for some Russian thug to blow the hero's brains out. Why not, this guy does literally nothing at all that's worthy of any kind of redemption or success of any kind. Because it's not about worth, it's about luck, and ruthlessness. One pill out of five.


- Peace out