Gulliver

CHRIS CHRISTIE, New Jersey's new-ish Republican governor, drew national attention last month for cancelling the partially federally funded ARC (Access to the Region's Core) tunnel project. The tunnel, which would have run under the Hudson river to Manhattan, would have eased train congestion in the current, century-old Hudson rail tunnel. Now the Garden State will lose the billions of dollars in federal money that were committed to the project; they'll be reallocated elsewhere.

But Mr Christie isn't the only GOP chief executive cancelling federally funded high-speed rail projects. Last month, the New York Times' Michael Cooper pointed out that a number of Republican gubernatorial candidates were running against high-speed rail projects. Most of those candidates won. Scott Walker, the new governor in Wisconsin, John Kasich, the new governor in Ohio, and Rick Scott, the new governor in Florida, all criticised federally funded rail projects in their states. "Passenger rail is not in Ohio’s future," Mr Kasich told reporters shortly after winning Tuesday's election. "That train is dead." Mr Walker has also promised to fulfil his campaign pledge to kill the proposed rail project in his state.

What is bad news for train supporters in Wisconsin, Ohio and New Jersey could be good news for commuters in California and the North-east. The $810m from Wisconsin, $400m from Ohio, and $3 billion from New Jersey will come back to Washington and be awarded to other states instead. California was one state where the anti-train candidate, Republican Meg Whitman, didn't win. Some of the money could end up there, to help launch the Golden State's Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail dream.

John Mica, a Republican from Florida who will run the House transportation committee starting in January, thinks that the North-east corridor is the best target for high-speed rail money. Newly elected (or re-elected) Democratic governors in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Maryland would presumably be happy to take the money. It will be interesting to see whether the Obama administration can convince the lame-duck Democratic Congress to reassign the money—or whether the GOP-run House will try to cancel the spending entirely next year.

ECONOMIST readers are less than thrilled with the state of airport security. With one day to go before our "Economist Asks" online debate closes, around three-quarters of respondents agree that security procedures are too stringent.

alisdairhw pretty much sums up the majority position when he writes:

This is a familiar theme, that if you want to prevent attacks, you need carefully acquired intelligence rather than confiscated nail scissors and shampoo. Indeed, security experts have long pointed out that the weak spots in aviation security are not the checks on passengers but the inadequate checks of cargo and the people who have airside access. The bombs discovered in the holds of two cargo planes earlier this week validate the first of these worries.

Attendant Lord does make a counter argument, that you can't claim security is too stringent when it has helped keep the skies safe since 9/11:

But, as smbanta points out, that success cannot necessarily be put down to checks of passengers:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't the attempted attacks after 9/11 been foiled after the terrorist got through security? The underpants bomber and the shoe bomber were both stopped on the plane, not exactly a win for the TSA.

The other main bugbears to emerge from comments are the unnecessary theatricality of airport security, and the lack of a coherent approach from one airport to the next, and even within a particular airport. Rasmine explains the frustrations:

Liquids are placed in plastic bags everywhere, but the laptop policy differs—in our out of the bag? Does the external hard drive count as a laptop or should it stay in the bag? How about the watch, belt, shoes? Is that a baggy sweater or a tight jacket? On or off? Why did I make the machine go beep in Amsterdam but not in Copenhagen, while wearing the same stuff? And how many times have I realised mid-flight that actually I have a tube of toothpaste at the bottom of the bag, or a screwdriver, craft knife that went undeclared and undetected?'

Having spent years adding to the security theatre, governments are finally starting to question the approach. But don't expect change any time soon. It's a brave politician who demands the repeal of checks that were designed, whether we like them or not, to make us safer.

Update, November 7th: our online poll has now closed, with 72% of voters agreeing that airport security is already too tight. If governments really do think all these ostentatious measures are necessary, they have done a poor job of convincing travellers.

GULLIVER has long believed that a hotel bar should be a place where guests can head for a drink, a snack, a read, and perhaps some conversation with a stranger—rather than somewhere for non-guests to guzzle over-priced cocktails. In what can only be a direct result of this massive campaign, Holiday Inn has announced plans to turn its bars into "social hubs". The chain has realised that its guests do not want to spend all evening alone with their gadgets and in fact have social skills they are happy to use. As the Wall Street Journal reports, in reference to a customer survey Holiday Inn completed a couple of years ago:

...the study found that frequent Holiday Inn guests—who are most often middle managers, route salespeople, entrepreneurs and government supervisors—want to be around other people rather than holed up in their rooms, Holiday Inn executives say.

"These are more extroverted, charismatic people who like people," says Kevin Kowalski, senior vice president of global brand management for Holiday Inn's U.K.-based parent, InterContinental Hotels, or IHG. "They're not going to hang out in their rooms and watch TV. They're just social animals."

So Holiday Inn plans to help them to be social. The new hub will bring together the bar, the lounge and the restaurant in one large friendly area. With mid-sized hotels increasingly unable to justify stand-alone restaurants, Holiday Inn has decided to make a virtue of the bar area and serve simple bar food for lunch and dinner, thus removing the need for a separate restaurant with separate staff. If I were spending 200 days a year on the road, I might think differently, but as an infrequent traveller who avoids hotel restaurants but enjoys hotel bars, this sounds sensible enough to me.

However, the image (below) Holiday Inn provides to give an idea of what such a hub could look like has all the charm of a motorway service station and I sincerely hope the end results are considerably different. What do you reckon?

EMIRATES, the state-owned airline of Dubai, has announced an impressive set of half-year results. Its profits increased from $205m in April-September 2009 to $925m this year (on revenues of $7.2 billion). And its latest passenger load factor of over 81% was a company record for the first half of the financial year. In particular, its premium-class load factor rose almost three percentage points: selling more high-margin tickets is one quick way to greater profitability.

The company's drive to expand is relentless. In 2010 alone it has already ordered 32 of Airbus's massive A380s as well as 30 Boeing 777s. Other airlines may accuse Emirates of flooding the market with over-capacity, but Emirates is unsurprisingly bullish about the future. "Investing in the future and adapting our operations when required is an integral part of our corporate strategy," says Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, the company's chief executive. "This flexibility affords us the option of increasing passenger and cargo services on high demand sectors. By following these positive spikes in regional economies we have been able to maximize the use of our fleet to further stimulate revenue."

The fear this instils in rivals is palpable. We’ve written recently about Canada's protectionist refusal to grant Emirates the landing rights it wanted in Toronto, and the likes of Lufthansa's Wolfgang Mayrhuber and British Airways' Willie Walsh have spoken about the impact Emirates, with its base on the pinch-point between Europe and Asia, is having on their business.

Of particular concern to somebody like Mr Walsh is Emirates' push into regional airports. The A380 service it now operates from Manchester airport allows many Britons living in the north of the country to travel to Asia with a single stop in Dubai. Why then would they choose to go via Heathrow, with BA, instead?

HERE'S a shocker: America's Transportation Security Agency is using the threat of up-close-and-personal pat downs to force passengers to go through the controversial new "backscatter" full body scanners that have already been installed at many US airports. The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, last seen sneaking his "Osama bin Laden, Hero of Islam" t-shirt and box cutters through airport security, has written an absolutely brilliant (and vulgar) story about his encounter with the TSA's new tactics. You really have to read the whole thing for yourself, but if you're not convinced to click through just yet, here's a choice excerpt:

"We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance," he explained. "Resistance?" I asked. "Your testicles," he explained. "That's funny," I said, "because 'The Resistance' is the actual name I've given to my testicles."

Here in Washington, that's what we call "too much information." But misery loves company, and now you, like I, know a bit too much about the contents of a prominent journalist's trousers. (A friend points out on Twitter that if Mr Goldberg is telling the truth, counterinsurgency expert Andrew Exum, a.k.a. "Abu Muqawama," is probably feeling fairly uncomfortable right about now.)*

Mr Goldberg is using his bawdy sense of humour to make three serious points. First, even though the new pat-downs are invasive (indeed, they border on groping), they're still not enough to stop a determined terrorist from smuggling weapons onto a plane. There's no cavity search involved, and Mr Goldberg knows from his days as an Israeli prison guard that prisoners are quite willing to hide things where even the boldest TSA officers won't look. Second, the "effectiveness of pat-downs doesn't matter very much," since the whole point seems to be encouraging passengers to avoid pat downs and go through the full-body scanners instead. I'll let him remind us of the third point:

By the time terrorist plotters make it to the airport, it is, generally speaking, too late to stop them. Plots must be broken up long before the plotters reach the target. If they are smart enough to make it to the airport without arrest, it is almost axiomatically true that they will be smart enough to figure out a way to bring weapons aboard a plane.

These are all good points. I'd also remind readers that you shouldn't let the invasiveness of a pat-down deter you from declining a full-body scan if you really don't want to go through the machine. If you're lucky, you'll get TSA officers who are just as friendly (and good-humoured) as the people Mr Goldberg encountered. If you're unlucky, well, your request could meet resistance.

*Folks who don't get the joke should brush up on their Arabic.

A PIECE in this week's Economist offers a positive take on the future of biofuels. Of particular interest to this blog is the potential for the adoption of such fuels in aircraft engines, due mainly to work on a new generation of biofuels made of hydrocarbons, rather than ethanol.

These will, they say, be “drop-in” fuels, any quantity of which can be put into the appropriate fuel tanks and pipelines with no fuss whatsoever. For that reason alone, they are worth more than ethanol. Appropriately designed drop-in fuels can substitute for diesel and aviation fuel, which ethanol cannot.

The article concludes that the widespread electrification of cars would spell disaster for the ethanol market, but drop-in fuels should continue to find plenty of buyers in civil aviation. Read it all.

IT'S good to see aviation-security issues getting the billing they deserve. “BA attacks US airport security demands” screams the headline of today’s Financial Times, in reference to criticism by Martin Broughton, British Airways’ chairman. Speaking at the Airport Operators Association conference yesterday, Mr Broughton lambasted America for requiring more stringent security checks of international US-bound flights than it does of domestic services.

He said that Britain's attitude should be, "We'll only do things which we consider to be essential and that you Americans also consider essential", and that there was "no need to kowtow to the Americans every time they wanted something done".

He also took aim at a couple of aspects of modern-day security theatre, saying passengers should not be required to remove their shoes when passing through security—a requirement introduced after Richard Reid attempted to blow up a plane in 2001 with explosives hidden in his footwear—and querying inconsistent approaches to laptop computers. "We all know there’s quite a number of elements in the security programme which are completely redundant," he commented, "and they should be sorted out."

That sounds sensible enough. And it's also eminently sensible of British Airways (at a time when it's still embroiled in a row with cabin staff) to reiterate its blamelessness vis-à-vis security procedures, while offering a view that chimes with those of its customers. In a recent survey cited in another FT article, 65% of passengers named security queues as their biggest airport irritation.

AS THE Tupolev flies from China into North Korean airspace, an announcement in muffled English invites passengers to look down at the Yalu river, which divides the two countries. North Korea's Air Koryo does not usually fly at night, otherwise the view could be spectacular: a blaze of urban light on the Chinese side, and darkness on North Korea's. In fact, Air Koryo hardly does any flying at all. So rare is the experience that one journalist takes a sick bag as a souvenir for a friend who collects such items. The airline used to venture as far as Moscow and eastern Europe. But these days its maximum range is China and eastern Russia. Air Koryo's scheduled flights have not suffered any fatal crashes, but that does not stop people worrying about a tiny carrier so isolated from scrutiny. Visitors to North Korea, if they have any choice, vie to get seats on Air China, the only other airline with services to Pyongyang.

The last time I took an Air Koryo flight was when leaving North Korea after a visit to Pyongyang to cover an historic concert there by the New York Philharmonic in February 2008. (Fifteen months after that rare effusion of goodwill between North Korea and America, North Korea detonated another nuclear device.) I noted then a palpable jitteriness among passengers on the ageing Ilyushin. This time, at least, it is a new Tu-204 100B, acquired only last year, and the weather is good.

At Pyongyang airport, ours is the only jet in action. A few others, all Air Koryo, are parked near the terminal. Its familiar portrait of North Korea's late leader Kim Il Sung, the eternal president, gazes down on an expanse of empty concrete. In the terminal, a customs inspector pays no attention to my laptop or camera. His only interest is in my mobile telephone, which like those of all other passengers is taken from me for the duration of my visit. The purpose of this, many believe, is to stop mobile phones with foreign SIM cards from finding their way into the hands of North Koreans who might use them in border areas to communicate with the outside world. Our SIM cards will not work on North Korea's own network, most of whose subscribers can only make calls within North Korea. Foreign visitors are allocated official guides, who will help make sure the phone is returned on our departure.

Rarely will the Western traveller have any choice of hotel. We are told on the way into Pyongyang that we are being billeted at the Koryo Hotel, which is a relief. At least it is not the Yanggakdo Hotel, where the New York Philharmonic was put up. The Yanggakdo is much loved by North Korean officials because it is on an islet in the Taedong river where foreigners can easily be kept under guard (and amuse themselves in a foreigners-only casino in the basement). The Koryo Hotel offers much readier access to Pyongyang proper.

Remarkably (and inexplicably) on this visit, no attempt is made to stop us leaving the hotel without our guides. This affords a rare opportunity to wander the streets unescorted. It takes several attempts to find a restaurant that will even take an unguided foreigner. Eventually one does, and it offers an excellent meal of kimchi with pork, rice and local Taedong Beer for €3 ($4.2) for two (foreigners not being allowed to use local currency, and euros being ideologically preferable to dollars). At least there are restaurants doing business. At the beginning of the year, amid the turmoil following North Korea's sudden revaluation of its currency, they closed for several weeks. Late at night, however, the city appears as empty and lifeless as I remember it on visits in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A strip of restaurants outside the hotel remains brightly lit, apparently just for show. Sidestreets are pitch dark. In the square in front of Pyongyang's railway station, close to the hotel, groups of children play cards as they wait for a train.

Back in the twin-towered Koryo Hotel, official guides, foreign journalists and a sprinkling of other guests invited in for the ruling party's 65th anniversary festivities provide a little custom, at its bars and restaurants. An employee says the 45th-floor revolving restaurant is closed. There is another on the other tower, but a "Lonely Planet" guidebook says this is always closed because it affords too good a view of a guarded compound where senior officials live.

At least the internet is available, for journalists. A room is set aside for our exclusive use, with a few dozen broadband lines to which we can attach our laptops for a hefty fee. Unlike in neighbouring China, where politically sensitive sites are blocked, the internet here appears completely open. Ordinary citizens, however, cannot get access to the internet so there is little chance of this having any adverse political impact. A young North Korean deployed to look after the internet room looks curiously over my shoulder as I browse The Economist's website. He seems surprised at seeing a photograph on it of North Korea's leaders attending a parade the previous day in Pyongyang. "So quick," he says.

Officials do not like to let foreign travellers linger longer than is necessary. Though some members of our group have week-long visas, we are politely escorted to the airport after four days. There is, however, a hiccup. A fellow journalist gets on the plane having neglected to retrieve her new iPhone. The plane door is re-opened. Three cars full of officials pull up. She hands over her receipt and, after a 20-minute wait, the phone is brought to her. Take-off slots are not at a premium in Pyongyang.

READER'S DIGEST has compiled a list of 50 "Secrets Your Pilot Won't Tell You." Here are a few of my favourites. First, the good news:

• "Some FAA rules don’t make sense to us either. Like the fact that when we’re at 39,000 feet going 400 miles an hour, in a plane that could hit turbulence at any minute, [flight attendants] can walk around and serve hot coffee and Chateaubriand. But when we’re on the ground on a flat piece of asphalt going five to ten miles an hour, they’ve got to be buckled in like they’re at NASCAR." -Jack Stephan, US Airways captain based in Annapolis, Maryland, who has been flying since 1984
• "Pilots find it perplexing that so many people are afraid of turbulence. It’s all but impossible for turbulence to cause a crash. We avoid turbulence not because we’re afraid the wing is going to fall off but because it’s annoying." -Patrick Smith, commercial pilot and author, askthepilot.com

Now, the bad:

• "There is no safest place to sit. In one accident, the people in the back are dead; in the next, it’s the people up front." -John Nance, aviation safety analyst and retired airline captain, Seattle
• "The truth is, we’re exhausted. Our work rules allow us to be on duty 16 hours without a break. That’s many more hours than a truck driver. And unlike a truck driver, who can pull over at the next rest stop, we can’t pull over at the next cloud." -Captain at a major airline

And now, the funny:

• "One time I rode in the jump seat of a 747 freighter, which carries cargo, not passengers. As soon as the doors closed, the first officer went in back and put on a bathrobe and slippers. No kidding. He said, 'I'll be damned if I’m going to wear a tie for a bunch of boxes.'" -Tech pilot at a regional airline, Texas
• What a pilot will never say: "Well, folks, the visibility out there is zero." What they’ll say instead: "There’s some fog in the Washington area."

There are a lot more of these over at the Reader's Digest site. They also have "13 Things Your Flight Attendant Won't Tell You." Check them both out—and if you have any more secrets of the skies, let us know in the comments.

(via the Consumerist)

A SHORT piece in this week's Economist looked at changes to revenue per available room in hotels around the world:

During the financial crisis, hotels fell on hard times as both business and holiday travel contracted. But in the first nine months of 2010 hoteliers had a much better time of things. Their revenue per available room increased, compared with the same period in 2009, in all but a handful of markets. In Asia, where the pace of growth has been blistering, hotels too are thriving. Revenues in Shanghai are up by more than 60%, helped by a 36% increase in occupancy rates. Northern European cities such as Berlin and London are part of the rising tide. But even places with weaker recoveries, such as Tokyo and Madrid, have enjoyed a slight rise in revenues. Although room rates there are stagnant, occupancy levels are rising.

THE Travel Gold Rush is a survey about future travel trends put together by Amadeus, a company that provides technology to the travel industry, and Oxford Economics, a forecasting consultancy. Among its main predictions is that both inbound and outbound Asian travel will continue to increase their market share in the next decade. So in 2020 Asia-bound travellers will account for over 24% of “global arrivals”—five percentage points more than in 2005. And the proportion of all trips abroad done by Asian travellers is due to rise from 22% to 27% over the same period.

No great surprises there. More interesting, I thought, was the reporting on airlines’ ancillary revenues. These are the optional costs for meals, priority boarding and the like, that are bringing in over $1 billion a year for some carriers. If maximised, these revenues could supposedly amount to 35% of an airline’s annual income. At the moment Allegiant is the carrier deriving the greatest proportion of revenue from ancillary items: 29%. Second-place Spirit manages almost 24%. One new way to increase ancillary revenues, the report suggests, is for airlines to think harder about working with third-party service-providers such as hotels, car-rental companies and insurers.

But the more general point is that in future carriers will need to find ways to offer customers a “broader travel experience”:

These involve thinking about travel as an end to end process (akin to how many passengers view it) and could include areas such as better management of the ground interface (seamless travel), paying more attention to passenger preferences (e.g. which airports are preferable from a passenger perspective) providing passenger support in trips to less familiar destinations, and much better integration of smartphones and other related technologies.

Do have a quick look at the report, but it you want something shorter, there’s a rather handsome accompanying infographic. This provides an at-a-glance indication of which parts of the world can expect to see increases in inbound and outbound travel, and in their share of visitors' and residents' travel spending.

EVER wondered about flapless aircraft? Of course you have. My colleague on the Babbage blog explains why aircraft without ailerons might be a good thing—and how they are being turned into reality.