Category: Travel

This will be almost three weeks…

I’m putting the finishing touches to the itinerary for another extended business trip at the end of this month. Here’s the [amended] sequence of flights: the airport codes you may not recognize are BLR (Bangalore), PNQ (Pune), PRG (Prague), and BJC (Broomfield, CO):
BOS-FRA-BLR; BLR-PNQ; PNQ-BLR-FRA-PRG; PRG-FRA-DEN; BJC-SJC; SJC-LAX; LAX-BOS
As you can see, I’m going to be spending quite a lot of time at the Red Carpet Club at Frankfurt….

For an aviation enthusiast like me, the new blog at Enplaned is essential reading. For a good example of the anonymous author’s work, check out today’s obituary for Independence Air, which has announced that it’s ceasing operations this Thursday. Twisting the knife:

In the event, Independence Air described a bone-headed catastrophic year-and-a-half arc through the airline business. This is, without question, one of the epic flameouts in the airline business. Nothing excuses taking this extraordinary risk, though Independence Air management has tried to pin the tail on fuel prices. At the end of the first quarter of 2004, ACA had over $350mm in cash. All gone now. The Independence Air press release manfully attempts to find some good in what’s happened, but to balance the enormity of the disaster, Independence Air would have had to have incidentally found a cure for cancer.

Elsewhere in the same blog there’s an intriguing look at the U.S.Airways/America West merger, and the enduring legacy of the three airlines (PSA, Allegheny, and Piedmont) that were brought together to create U.S.Air back in 1987. As someone who’s involved in merger and acquisition work at Sun, I suspect that there may be some lessons here.

I flew home from Denver yesterday evening, concluding my last bit of travel for 2005. (But don’t ask me about how 2006 is shaping up!) At the airport I ran into Balint Fleischer who used to be CTO of the Network Storage Group at Sun. He’s now working at Intel, and seems to be enjoying himself.
The flight was uneventful, but full; fortunately I’d burned some frequent flier miles to upgrade. We arrived at Boston 15 minutes early, but all the time saved (and more) was lost because the Ted Williams tunnel was partially closed. (More flooding? Accident? Maintenance? Who knows…) The limo driver got thoroughly frustrated trying to find the best way through the maze of downtown Boston streets, and he didn’t do a very good job of containing his frustrations. I was too tired to tell him, “Hey, if I wanted stress I could drive myself and park at the airport – I pay* you guys to reduce the stress of travel!” Oh, well.
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*Sun’s expense policy covers cab fare between my home and the airport when I’m on business travel. Back in the 1990s they’d spring for a limo, but times change. I’m not enthusiastic about Boston taxis (who is?), so I still get a limo , expense cab fare, and pay for the difference myself. Usually it’s well worth it.

It’s less than 36 hours since I got home from Los Angeles, and here I go again: off to Denver. After this trip, I should be home for quite a while – three or four weeks, perhaps….

My colleague Mani Chandrasekaran just posted a piece about the new Bangalore airport which is due to be completed in 2008. He began by saying “Most airports, in India, dont really compare to the modern airports around the world”, which reminded me that I had promised you a little rant about my experiences at Bangalore airport. So here it is.

If you remember, I was flying from Bangalore to Mumbai to connect with a flight to London. My Jet Airways flight from Bangalore was repeatedly delayed, and I wound up missing my connection. In these circumstances, when you’re stuck in the departure lounge waiting for a flight, most people need two things: refreshment and information.

1. Refreshments: none. Correction: one water fountain of dubious quality, and nothing else: no food, no beverages. No bottled water, no vending machines, no kiosk, no cafe. Zip.

2. Information: Here’s where it really gets absurd. Scattered around the lounge were half a dozen televisions. These were used for three purposes: to show advertisements, to display flight information, and to carry a live TV feed. There was no other source of flight information. It quickly became apparent that there was no particular sequence or tempo as to what was shown when. Unless you watched intently you were likely to miss the occasional brief flight status displays.

   But it gets worse. It just so happened that India was playing Sri Lanka at cricket that evening, and the match was very exciting. India was winning: many of the ~250 waiting travellers jostled for the best seats to watch the TV, and when their heroes like Tendulkar and Sehwag were facing the bowling you could forget about anything else. Whoever was controlling the system wasn’t going to bother with trivia like flight information (or even advertising). At one point there were 20 uninterrupted minutes of cricket….

I would have taken a few pictures of this place for you, but of course photography is absolutely forbidden at all Indian airports. In any case, the lesson is clear: if you’re going to fly out of Bangalore, make sure you have bottled water and snacks with you, and be prepared to grab a seat in front of the TV. And if anyone from the airport reads this, I’m sure you can afford a few extra monitors to dedicate to flight information. Because we’re not there to watch cricket, we’re bloody well there to fly!

(Thanks. I feel much better now.)

P.S. The December’05 issue of Airliner World (excellent magazine, lousy website) includes a piece on p.68 about the critical state of the commercial aviation infrastructure in India. Airport parking places, terminal facilities, ground services, air traffic control – in every area, demand is outstripping supply, exposing a serious lack of investment. And this also applies to aircrew: a conservative estimate is that India needs an extra 1,200 pilots.

Oh dear. I actually caught myself gazing at this with interest: “For $1500, you can buy this pair of used first-class plane-seats to use as a sofa in your living room.”

I just got home from Boston’s Logan airport after my flight from London. This morning my mother and I went in to Oxford to buy a few small items that, curiously, it is almost impossible to find in the USA:

• Soluble paracetamol (acetaminophen) and aspirin. Quicker acting than tablets or caplets, and much more convenient for those who have trouble swallowing tablets, or for oral pain. In the UK you can also get over-the-counter soluble paracetamol with codeine (500mg paracetamol with about 8-10mg. codeine), which would probably require a prescription in the US – if you could find it.

• Blu-Tack – a simple way of sticking papers, postcards, etc. to vertical surfaces. Comes in a slab; you tear off what you need and squash it into shape.

• Small cash-ruled notebooks – Merry uses them for various purposes, we always get them from W. H. Smiths.

• Wrights Coal Tar Soap. Sounds ghastly, doesn’t it? Actually it’s my favourite soap, and a British tradition for 145 years.

We also met my brother for coffee in Blackwell’s. It’s convenient to the Bodleian, where he works, but it has one unavoidable drawback: I cannot enter the shop without buying a book. Today I got away relatively cheaply, picking up philosophy books on Jerry Fodor, the Churchlands, and Indian philosophy.

As for the flight, I’d prefer to forget it. The seat recline mechanism was broken in our row (no, there wasn’t an emergency exit behind us), and when the three people in front of us all reclined their seats fully, we were trapped. I had the window seat, and the tall guy in the middle next to me had nowhere to put his legs. (I prefer the Airbus A330/A340 with 2-4-2 seating.) In spite of this, I actually got some sleep, using my iPod and Bose noise-cancelling headphones. The trick is to listen to music that is fairly repetitive but not too quiet: I used a playlist containing two albums by Ray Lynch followed by five or six CDs worth of No-Man. That worked.

And now I have to face my case full of dirty laundry. Perhaps tomorrow….

Due to lack of net-connectedness at my mother’s house, I haven’t been able to blog for a couple of days.

On Monday I visited Tarantella engineering in Leeds. I met with several senior staff, and we had a lively all-hands discussion based on my “Engineering@Sun” slides. A couple of the team were particularly interested in supercomputer topics, and so I gave a short presentation on the status of Sun’s DARPA-funded HPCS program. I got a taxi back to Leeds Station, and took the train back to Oxford. (Curiously, the Monday train was a 6-car unit, and was by no means full; on the other hand the “sardine-only” train on Sunday was only 4 cars long. I discussed this with the guard – or train manager, or whatever they call them these days – and apparently this is typical. Bizarre.)

The first day of November was sunny and mild: the forecasters are predicting a brutally-cold winter, but autumn is turning out to be unseasonably pleasant. It took me two hours to drive down to Woking to StorageTek UK for my second visit. This time I spent most of my time with the European field service management team and several engineering groups, including one that works on IBM mainframe software. (Yes, Sun now sells mainframe products! We should probably tone down our rhetoric about migrating mainframe users to Sun servers, just a bit….) The M25 was a bit kinder in the evening, and the return journey to Oxford was considerably quicker – in fact, I got back just before my mother. (She’d been giving a talk at a local group in Oxford.)

So we arrive at Wednesday, day 17 of the trip. There was a bit of a mix-up about the schedule: I think I must have told different people different times, and I got to the Sun campus at Guillemont Park (just off the M3) at 9:30, half an hour later than some had expected. Nevertheless, things went off pretty well. I had one 1-on-1 session, but the rest of the meetings were group discussions about Sun engineering practices and career paths. I wanted to explore the similarities – and differences – between the issues faced by companies that Sun had acquired and by those established Sun engineering groups that were remote from the traditional centre of power in Silicon Valley. As I anticipated, the SunUK team was not shy about sharing their opinions! It was a VERY useful session. Many thanks to Alec and Chris for setting things up.

Right now I’m sitting in GMP03, finishing up some email and blogging on my laptop. (I stole an Ethernet cable from a SunRay; hope that’s OK.) Tomorrow, Thursday, I plan to dash into Oxford for a little last-minute shopping, and then head down to Heathrow to get a BA flight to Boston. I should be landing at 9:35pm….

Despite my comments about the Air India flight, everything actually worked out pretty well. (Sorting out the expense report is going to be fun, though.) We landed on time; I picked up my rental car, scooted up to my mother’s house in Oxford, said hi, and went to sleep. About four hours later my brother woke me with the offer of beer, or Lucozade, or both(!); I chose Lucozade. I felt deceptively human, and took the four of us (my mother, my brother, and his wife) out to dinner at a new Italian restaurant. The presentation was awfully “chi-chi”, but the food was excellent.

This afternoon I set out on the next stage of my journey, by train from Oxford to Leeds. I hadn’t pre-booked this (which was a mistake), but I wasn’t worried: I walked up to the ticket machine and punched in “Leeds”, “Return”. And then I stopped, and I had a premonition… and without pausing to think about Sun’s travel policy, I chose “First Class”. (That’s £200 – twice as much as the regular fare.) Soon afterwards, the train arrived. It was full. Packed full. Standing room only. Hardly any room for additional standing passengers. (OK, not quite “Tokyo subway” packed, but close.) Except… there were three empty first class seats! Had I not chosen “First”, I would have found myself standing for over four and a half hours…. (Weekend journey times are longer, because of re-routing to avoid track maintenance work.)

So here I am at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds. It’s visually stunning, with really strong art deco themes throughout. I feel as though I’ve stepped onto the set of “Poirot”; I half-expect David Suchet to appear in a silk dressing-gown with a tisane! It’s a shame that I’ll only be here for one night.