RIFLE RANGE BOY

Pan Am (TV Series, S1, E1-14, 2011-12) Come Fly With Me: The Story of Pan Am (2011, BBC Documentary) There used to be a time when air travel was a novelty. People used to get all dressed up to the nines to start their journey. Nobody was stopped for being underdressed, as getting on a plane carried some dignity. Boarding a plane was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Only the deep-pocketed could travel, and the airlines made sure their clients were pampered to the brim. The idea of having dinner in one place and breakfast in another time zone fascinated many a young aspirant that the fast, furious and restless applied for jobs to serve their clientele. In the service business, aesthetics and physical attributes were essential in selecting stewards and stewardesses. This, of course, was before the time body-shaming and diversity was even a term. Even though ferrying rich guys from points A to B is basically what a paid chauffeur would do, being a pilot brought so much dignity. Parents soo...

It was a necessary trip, not a pleasure cruise. It needed to be done.  Just as the restrictions that kept us within our borders were eased, I made a dash for it. I thought everyone would be excited to fly free as a bird all over again - the passengers would be thrilled to meet with their loved ones overseas, and the flight crew with the licence to serve in the airspace, ecstatic to scale the skies. How wrong I was!  The powers that be probably decided to take an excellent last squeeze on travellers one more time, one for the road, before the scare of Covid dwindled away. Out of the blue (not mentioned in any pre-travel requisites), recipients of Sinovac vaccines needed to provide a negative report of their nasal swab for virus detection (PCR-Ag). New directives, it seems. When travellers expressed their dissatisfaction, the staff reassured them that they just happened to have a state-of-the-art laboratory at the airport, by the way, and results could be obtained within two hou...

Manifest (Seasons 1-3; 2018 - 2021) What happens when a flight disappears from the radar one day and lands at its destination some five and a half years later? A whole lot of questions naturally crops up. Tonnes of conspiracy theories spring from nothing, and the governmental agencies will jump into action trying to put a plausible validation to the whole speculation. The most unsettling part of the entire fiasco would be the relatives, who, after months if not years of trying to get over the presumed death of their loved one and putting their past behind. Imagine trying to place them back in their new lives! The puzzling (maybe not if one understands time travel) is that the plane passengers did not age a day older, even five years later, further complicating the hullabaloo. One twin was stuck as a preteen in this miniseries, while the other blossomed into the hormone-raged teenager. On a happy note, the preteen was sick with cancer when he started, but afterwards, he had five yea...

Tun M tried it once, and now in his second lease of life, he is at it again - wanting to change our mindset to be tuned to the frequency of the Japanese. Their zest for improvement and perfection cannonballed them up from a nation devastated by the pulverising effects of a mushroom cloud to morph into the second biggest economy in thirty short years. Somehow, we are deeply immersed and soaked in our mediocrity and lulled with self-glorification that even if we look at the Land of Rising Sun with awe, we remain faithfully as the Land of Twilight. For it is at the twilight of times, do we all become lethargic. Gandhi, among the many things that he admired about the Europeans, includes cleanliness and punctuality. He went as far as to say that stickling to time made them able to rules countries timezones away (paraphrasing). One of the virtues that skyrocketed the Japanese to great heights in discipline and keeping time. Go to any railway station and one can understand. A minute in the...

The tagline 'Now everyone can fly' must be the most overused, ridiculed and abused business tagline ever in Malaysia. Now only every Tom, Dick and Harry can fly, and Jane and Mary be stewardesses; the news on a podcast recently convinced me that even any Ahmad, Ah Chong and Samy can fly a plane! You see, there was an analysis of the ill-fated Air France 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. As we all know, it went down, and it took 2 years for its wreckage and flight decoder to be found and analysed. My untrained aeronautically challenged mind interpreted the simplistic turns of events as such... The plane, an Airbus, was cruising on autopilot at 37,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. It was manned by 2 co-pilots after the captain retired to take a nap as the going was easy. There was a minor storm, noting alarming, but it caused a little frosting over one of the wings. That is when all hell broke loose. Airbus has an automatic system called 'fly-by-wire'. It is suppose...

The question is whether an occurrence can solely be put on one event is questionable. It appears that our national pastime is playing the blame game and to shame the alleged perpetrator(s) in the hope that if someone can be pinpointed to have caused the gaffe, we can put closure to a catastrophe. And they hope to prevent the shortcomings in future. It all sounds noble but unfortunately life is not so simple. Not every bad incident has a simple etiology. Most often than not it is multi factorial. Like in Murphy's Law, when something is doomed to go wrong, it will go wrong. Airline industry have considered a 'no blame' policy but to identify the precipitating events and to take a collective approach to improve safety. On the other hand, is a leader culpable to take the brickbats if his subordinates faltered? Should he be made to answer or just take the easy way of saying, "it wasn't me. It is not easy to control so many people's actions, you know!"? ...

Wanting to stay away from hassle and bustle of modern living, I managed to escape for a short getaway! As it was a last minute after thought, I had to settle for a regular ticket from a regular airline as all the tickets from the no-frill ones were either taken up or the their websites were too darn user un-friendly! Guess everyone wanted to fly away to greener pastures just because everyone can fly. As it had been a mighty long time since I flew in a national airline, it was an eye opener on what most people have been missing. Somehow, from the time of its inception, a journey on a plane has been associated with bourgeois living. People got dressed to the nines. Fair maiden fall all over and bend over backwards to serve the passengers. Servings on flight had to be first class and exquisite and comfort is of paramount importance. All that changed with young punks who came out thinking out of the box and forever changed the experience amongst the clouds. "We make it cheap for ...

You cannot fault me for thinking that when I am air bound, I am just a particle in the sky away the scrutiny of eyes of people who were supposed to be on a lookout for my welfare. From a person whose knowledge of projectile does not go beyond the problems I have solved in Mechanical Mathematics and understanding projectile vomiting, I cannot be faulted to think that if anything were to go wrong in stratosphere, I would be literally on a free fall. Nobody would know where I am and where to look for me. It is not paranoia or some kind of phobia of flying that drove me to think so. 10  months ago, our plane went missing and till date no one has a clue where it went, where to look for it and what came out the billions spent looking for it. And more recently, another one went missing. They had all the communication records and flight path at their disposal and yet 2 weeks into its disappearance, they are unable to put a closure to the mishap. So, when you are up there, you are re...