Category: travel

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Short Bus

Last week, I had a little ramble about Boeing’s manufacturing issues with the 787 Dreamliner. This week, it’s Airbus’ turn to get raked over the coals, as its gigantor-plane, the A380, is going to have shipping delays because of wiring problems.

Airbus’ stock got hammered for this, and now there are some questions about stock sales by executives and their families, according to this WSJ (registration required) piece:

One key question surrounds large stock sales by [co-CEO of Airbus’ parent company] Mr. Forgeard, three of his children and other top EADS managers in mid-March. “We were not aware, not the shareholders, not the directors” of the A380’s problems at that point, Mr. Forgeard said. He said the troubles with the A380 surfaced in April, and that in late May they still seemed surmountable. EADS stock plummeted 26% Wednesday after the announcements of the delay and a profit warning. The stock price rose by Friday to €20.50 ($25.85). It remained well below prices in March, when Mr. Forgeard exercised €2.5 million worth of options at €32.01, and three of his children each sold €1.4 million worth of shares at the time at €32.82, according to the French stock-market regulator AMF. Board members Francois Auque and Jean-Paul Gut also sold shares.

The BusinessWeek piece on Airbus discusses more of the problems with the A380, which seems to me like the giant-SUV of airplanes. It’s funny that the European company comes up with that model as its big splash, while the U.S. company comes up with the smaller, lightweight, fuel-conscious 787.

I find the workings of various industries fascinating, but the airplane and airline businesses are particularly interesting to me. The battle between Boeing and Airbus helps me think about the role government subsidies and the WTO; changes in materials, manufacturing and design paradigms; economy-of-scale strategies for travel routes, and why the hub-and-spoke model collapsed; and how emerging markets are shaping policy (have any of you guys flown on Singapore Airlines or Emirates?).

(Update: More on the story — and how it affects airlines — at the NYTimes.)

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Big Sleazy

Going into this weekend, I wasn’t sure if the re-election of Ray Nagin as mayor of New Orleans would be tantamount to Marion Barry’s re-election in Washington, DC after being caught smoking crack cocaine.

Then the city’s member of the House of Representatives got caught on video taking $100,000 in cash to facilitate bribing Nigerian officials for an internet venture (evidently not this one), and I thought, “Well, at least Nagin’s not part of the political establishment.”

Will Collier at Vodkapundit has a good take on the need to revamp politics in New Orleans and Louisiana:

Louisianans in general and New Orleanians in particular made too many bad choices for too long. They acquiesced to governmental corruption and incompetence with a shrug and the inevitable, “that’s just Louisiana.” They allowed an unfettered criminal class to fester and thrive, until it literally took over the city. They put too much trust in luck and “the great elsewhere,” as local author Chris Rose puts it, to bail them out when things were at their worst.

And so they lived and died with those choices.

Now it’s time for them to choose again.

Read the whole shebang.

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Athens, Jerusalem and Gillette

I’m here in the Real O.C.! I haven’t seen Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows anywhere, nor Kristin Cavallari’s roots, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

During the flight, I watched No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about William Gibson. I’m ruminating on that one, and might write a lengthy, rambling take on it next weekend. Harass me about it, so I can formulate some more.

Also, I read a pair of short columns that I think you might like, and that seem somehow intertwined. I haven’t gone to Arts & Letters much lately; not sure why. But Amy hit it this weekend and came across both of these pieces, so all credit goes to the official VM wife.

The first is a review of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, which explores Bloom’s visions and revisions on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments:

Bloom interprets the trinity as an essentially polytheistic “structure of anxiety” in which God the Father—whom Bloom finds “lacking in personality”—is a mere shade of Yahweh. Yahweh, “the West’s major literary, spiritual, and ideological character,” has not, according to Bloom, “survived in Christianity.” In J’s portrait—the earliest biblical layer—Yahweh is “anxious, pugnacious, aggressive, ambivalent,” not to mention all too often absent. But unlike Jesus Christ and God the Father, he is emphatically not a theological God. Indeed, Bloom asserts that “no God has been more human.”

The other piece is about wet shaving, Homer, and the possibility of redemption. I can’t begin to do it justice.

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The Passed Over & the Elite

Greeted Passover on a flight home from Chicago. I haven’t held or been to a seder in a few years. The last one was the time I ended up meeting the Zionist Conspiracy To Get Me Married To A Nice Jewish Girl. It’s nice to see that the Jewish lobby isn’t as effective as Drs. Mearshimer and Walt think it is.

But I made it in safe and sound, with a little in-flight bumpiness and traffic delay. Just about finished Geek Love, which I’m enjoying a bunch. I sorta disagree with Dunn’s use of an X-Men-like character in the midst of an otherwise believable world of a really demented sideshow freak family.

The BIO conference went well; I had some good interviews and got a lot of good anecdotes & bits of intel about various aspects of the industry. I also got to meet several people with whom I’ve been in work-e-mail contact for years. That usually helps facilitate the working relationship, except when one of the two parties doesn’t remember having met the other face-to-face at a previous conference.

Anyway, the conference was described to me as “a singles club for CEOs and VCs,” and it’s true that a lot of the conversation was about funding, in-licensing developmental products (as in, a big company looking to buy the rights to a smaller company’s drug that’s currently in clinical trials). The conference is also filled with regional economic development councils for various states or countries (like that Malaysia group I mentioned a while back). They work hard to get companies to choose their regions for R&D or manufacturing facilities, and I like hearing them explain their virtues. The Maine pavilion had a slogan on one of its displays that read (paraphrasing): “Bangor: more metropolitan than you think!”

Well, duh.

Anyway, one of the funnier moments of the last day occurred as we were getting ready to board the plane back to Newark. It was one of the first Continental flights after show’s end, and the gate area was filled. The clerk called for all Elite Access passengers to board. None of us stepped back to make room. Turns out, when you have a conference that’s as money-centric as BIO, with so many attendees who constantly travel, everyone has Elite status.

Except my associate editor, who felt that her non-Elite status was a badge of honor.