The Mysterious Case of the Knee Defender

Ok, I’m biting.
Now Consumer Reports has weighed in on its Web site with a Knee Defender piece, and this is after many media reports on an incident at 35,000 feet. Attention includes the New York Times, that stiff and credible publication; unlike other reports, the NYT and CR pieces have something substantial to say. Well, I do too.
 
At first, responsibility for this incident and others like it was dumped on passengers. When I saw that angle being reported, I ended up screaming to the television “It’s no mystery who’s at fault here, dummy. It’s not the passengers; it is the airlines.” It’s my guess that I wasn’t alone. I’ll bet many, many passengers were thinking, if not screaming, the same thing. Isn’t it just like so many big businesses and corporations shouting, “Oh, no. It’s not us. It’s Halliburton,” or “Oh, no, we’re not the same company now. Those faulty cars were back then, not now.” “Oh, not on our airline; we have Economy Plus.”
 
It may have been the Associated Press who first put it out there. The Guardian picked it up with these headlines: “Plane diverted as passengers fight over seat reclining”. Then the story of the incident went viral. Whose curiosity could resist? One tall passenger put the knee defender on the tray he ate on to prevent the passenger in the seat in front of him from reclining. That passenger was so infuriated, she threw her cold water on him. Fight on. Then the United plane made an unscheduled stop to dump them both off the plane. Then it went on its merry way. I wonder what descending and taking off costs in fuel and whatever else.
 
Frankly, I don’t know why the rest of the passengers didn’t rise up in a revolt.
 
I’m biting because my passengership makes me an expert on this subject. On August 1 my granddaughter and I boarded Delta’s flight 130, a non-stop ten-hour trip to Munich. We would arrive the next morning (because of the time difference) about 8 a.m., tired, lagged, and fuzzy-brained from no sleep. On the 11^th, we had to repeat the trip backwards on Delta’s flight 131 to Atlanta. Then I drove us home, with no sleep.
 
It wasn’t so much that it was grueling. It’s the fact that it was NASTY. Plain nasty.
 
Which Customers First?
Fourth (I’m going in reverse order), I paid extra for Delta’s version of Economy Plus, seats located behind first class, an area where the airplane hasn’t yet started getting narrow – more room, more comfy, more perks. Are you kidding, Delta? When we got on and found our seats I looked back at “regular” economy and I knew: I had wasted that money. Perks? Have you lost your mind, Delta? We weren’t offered anything, not even water, while I watched some fawning steward offering all the, what, maybe 10, First Class passengers champagne and what could have been chocolate truffles.
 
Don’t waste your money.
 
Third, coming back I asked one of the stewardettes in charge of snapping the blue netting together on the boundary of First Class and Economy Plus if my granddaughter, age 7, could use the bathroom between our Economy Plus and First Class. The hag said, No, I’m sorry.”
 
Then Joanna Leigh spilled about half of her orange juice the stewardettes brought with the one-inch square, tiny bag of pretzels. Juice was dripping off the tray. I was frantically looking for something to sop it up with. I even grabbed napkins off other passengers’ trays. I realize now a fight could have ensued. The stewardette in charge of rolling that blasted cart down the almost too narrow aisle came by. I said, “Please, I need some paper towels or napkins.”
 
The hag handed me two, count ‘em two, cocktail napkins. I was flabbergasted.
 
Then came dinner, the “food,” and that’s a real knee-slapper. I wondered if the airlines pay an employee to stop at Walmart or Target to pick up the Fisher Price “food” they serve the passengers. I remember giving some like it to Joanna Leigh when she got her kitchen set for Christmas.
Second, and this one really should be First, the bathrooms. For a 10-hour flight with 250-plus passengers, you essentially have four little cubbies when you subtract the two for all those ten First Class passengers. If they catch the hoi polloi using those, they might disembark them along with any fighters. Those bathrooms were worse than any port-o-potty at the State Fair. Don’t bring your own spray bottle of Clorox or the hidden Air Marshalls would rise up and deplane you.
 
The bathrooms on a long flight are a health hazard. Plain and simple.
First Class Dumps
 
Finally, number ONE, the seats, which is where the primary fault lies. Or sits.
 
Imagine a profile of a seat in the famed “upright and locked” position – with no lumbar support – up to the pillowed “head rest.” Now imagine the poor passenger sitting in it, arched forward all the way up to the “head rest,” which tilts your head down toward your chest, which means that you are sitting in a crescent-moon arched position. That’s against the laws of physics, except for the Dream Works logo of a kid sitting on a moon sliver with his fishing pole hanging into the stars. You need lumbar support and a pillowed area to support not your head, but your neck. Then your head can rest slightly back. Passengers would sleep instead of fight. Like this:
 
I

 
I use this chair at my desk in my study. Look, lumbar support, padded neck support that lets you tilt your head back a bit, and a tilt function for the chair. I think Sealy makes it, and I got it at Sam’s Club. So, duh, what would it take to convert it to an airline chair? As far as I’m concerned, this chair redesign and attention to the bathrooms are high priority. Mystery solved.
 
I almost forgot -- the baggage. The airlines have you cornered here. Luggage sets come with a monster bag, a “carry-on,” a tote, and sometimes one other. To keep the Monster bag under 50 pounds, you’d have to pack nothing but cotton balls. So you pay. And if your “carry on” is too big to fit in a measuring bag the airlines use, then you have to leave boarding and re-go to the checked bags line. And miss your flight, so that the airlines can assign your seats to someone else who will pay, thereby double-dipping. So you pay.
 
Delta should be ashamed of breaking the first rule of business: Successful companies put customer satisfaction first. There’s competition out there, Delta; American companies turn on customer service. I’ll end this rant with Consumer Reports angle: “The airlines are largely to blame precisely because they’re shoehorning more people into tighter and tighter spaces, says a travel industry expert and Consumer Reports consultant, William McGee.”
 
And, “most U.S. airlines have decided to reduce ‘seat pitch’—the distance between rows—in economy/coach sections. In many cases, the existing knee room is inadequate for some passengers, McGhee says, even with seats fully upright. ‘The last I checked, the seat pitch on Spirit Airlines was 28 inches, which is simply cruel’, he said.”
Joanna Leigh and I had a memorable and astonishing trip, Delta notwithseating. Next time I’ll look at Lufthansa or maybe Singapore airlines. It flies east via Europe to go to the Far East.
 
More on our wonderful trip in future posts.

Technorati Tags: Spittin' Grits,Delta Airlines,Knee Defender

Flying Eastward into the Past: Ridanna, Italy

 
 
 
In a recent phone conversation, a friend pinned me down. “Now, why are you making this trip, what will be your takeaway? Since Joanna Leigh is only seven, what do you want or expect her to get from it?” she asked.”
A few years after my father died in 1995 and I had brought home a lot of his possessions to store, I decided to take on the project of looking deeper into his World War II event. I wasn’t sure why.
 
I started by pulling out the three 55- or 60- year-old scrapbooks (now they are more like 70 years old) my mother had put together beginning with dad’s enlistment after Pearl Harbor, getting his wings, his Missing in Action status, his return, and our lives living in Munich from 1948-51 where dad was assigned as part of the Allied Occupational Forces. I was in the first, second, and third grades there.
 
I slipped the second one out of the plastic wrapping; it covered his War experience as a P-51 Mustang pilot flying out of Italy into Bavaria ( see below). I opened it and realized the pages were terribly fragile, crumbling into sand as I turned them. There were letters, telegrams, notices of his MIA status, pieces of his parachute, Nazi money, all kinds of things, but one news article cut from an unidentified paper caught my eye. It was dated February 22, 1945, the day dad had to bail out of his damaged P-51 over the Alps.

 
Here’s what the article said:
“9,000 Planes Pound Nazi Rail Lines Greatest Air Fleet of War Deals Kayo Blow ---- Results Good: Aerial Offensive Against Reich in Final Phase LONDON, Feb. 22 – (UP)
The greatest air fleet of the war – an estimated 9,000 bombers and fighters – dealt a knockout blow today to the entire rail transportation system of western Germany, blasting every primary and secondary rail line in that section of the Reich and paralyzing enemy communications.”
It went on to say that with the 2,000 additional air planes of the Red Army, the total would be more like 11,000 Allied planes in action over Germany that day.
“Every type of plane at the disposal of the Allied air chiefs was thrown into combat,” it went on. And it was the “best flying weather since Summer [1944].”
After that 1944 summer came the infamous winter of the Battle of the Bulge, weather that continued over Europe until spring 1945, including that fateful day dad took off in his P-51.
“Italy-based heavy bombers dropped the largest tonnage of bombs ever carried in one operation by the 15^th Air Force planes. Fighters and bombers together flew more than 1,000 sorties to attack communications along the Brenner Pass, in northeast Italy and northern Yugoslavia,” it continued. Then quoting returning airmen, it said, “. . . ‘and Berlin is completely cut off from northwestern, eastern and southwestern Germany’.”
The War would come to an end sooner than expected, and part of the reason must have been this day. I wanted to know more of what the day meant. Dad was taken into custody by the Nazis after his descent from “Sugar Mountain,” according to his sketchy retelling, into a small Italian village in the mountain’s valley. According to dad, four men “nursed him back to health.”
 
Suddenly I realized that the date he went down was a week after the horrendous and infamous Allied bombing of Dresden and Leipzig.
 
Something about the date and the following week – it had meaning, but what?
 
Life Changes
Then circumstances grabbed my life, including the birth of my granddaughter we are raising, and I dropped the project. Until September 2012, that is.
 
The telltale “ping” alerted me to an e-mail coming into my virtual mailbox on Sept. 1, 2012. It was in the preview pane, and it came from someone with a strange name. Maybe Domanig Roland or Roland Domanig. Naturally I thought it was spam or a hoax. I lifted my finger to delete it. Something stopped me; I just closed the preview screen of it and went on to something else. Yet something must have been tickling my brain; I let it sit there for a week as I dealt with stuff all around it.
 
Days later I looked at it in the preview pane; yes, the “something” was the subject line and the stranger’s e-mail address. When I first looked at it, I had skimmed the subject line and I saw “Lt. Col. John T. Cravey,” but it wasn’t those words. Instead, it was “Lt. John Cravey.” Dad was a lieutenant 70 years ago. Then I saw “Tirol” in the sender’s address. I finally spotted another clue -- “USAAF,” the War acronym for what became the USAF (United States Air Force) after World War II. Dad had gone down in the Tyrolean Alps on the border between Austria and Italy. So, I took the risk; I opened it.
 
It read, in sort of halting English, “Madame, if you get this, please send note. I am researching WWII fates.”
 
Hmmm. A language problem. And his name was Roland Domanig. I bit. I answered, asking for some proof of ID, a bit insulting, I think. Thankfully he sent another e-mail. In that one he said, “We have visited your father’s crashite.”
 
With the e-mail came a weird picture of some barren-looking mountain landscape, a turquoise blue glacier lake, and a black dot in the middle of the photo (shown at the top). It hit me. He meant “crash site.”
 
Not only have we never known where dad’s P-51 crashed, truthfully, I’m not sure it ever mattered much. He came home. As kids, my brother and sister and I knew about dad’s World War II adventure, but to us that’s what it was, an adventure. He never told us anything different. The story we knew was like reading a good comic book and we liked to tell it to other kids: “My dad’s a Super Hero and flies cool planes. He bombed the bad guys and shot stuff up until they fired flak into the air from a cannon or something and it hit his plane. He had to bail out onto a mountain and get down it. Some men helped him, but the bad Nazis captured him and he went to a prisoner of war camp. Then the Americans won and he left the prison; he was a hero. He got on a boat to get home.”
 
Dad didn’t know the location either, as far as we knew. Dad’s flight leader, Capt. Roger Zierenberg (who later received the Silver Star and was eventually promoted to full Colonel), said in a letter to mom dated May 1, 1945, that the plane went down “about 25 miles southeast of Innsbruck, Austria.” That’s all. He did say that dad was the best wingman he ever flew with. That letter did not reach mom until dad had already returned in June, so she had no answers about his fate until she got a telegram from him on about June 1, 1945, saying he was on his way to Atlanta. She was battling a badly abscessed tooth, but she took off as fast as she could, swollen face and all.
 
Roland Domanig said there were more photos.
 
In the flood of e-mails that followed, he sent photos of the long debris field with pieces mixed in with gravel, ice, and dirt. I would learn much later why there were no large pieces or the engine or propeller. Among the small pieces was the P-51’s production plate. It’s about the size of a good hardback novel lying on its side. If you find the production plate, you can track down the plane and its airman. There’s no figuring out the odds against ever finding the crash site, let alone the production plate when so much of the crash had been hauled off. I believe that warming in the Alps uncovered pieces lying deep in the glacier ice and snow in 1945.
 
Then he told me about Anton, his friend and fellow crash site “archaeologist” who lives in the Ridanna Valley (called Ridnauntal in German) and who led Roland to the crash site. I would learn later of the incredible role his father and older brother played in dad’s story.
 
So, Joanna Leigh and I will board a plane August 1 for a direct flight to Munich. We will stay several days. Then we’ll take the train from the Munich train station, which is said to be gorgeous, to Innsbruck, where I will finally meet Roland Domanig in person; I will rent a car, and Roland will lead us over the Brenner Pass into Italy to the Ridanna Valley, where we will meet Anton Volgger, put our eyes on Zuckerhutl, the mountain, and stay in the hotel (greatly transformed) where mom and dad stayed (when we were stationed in Munich) when they went back to the valley to revisit the site of dad’s unimaginable survival.
 
What will my takeaway be? I don’t know, but the thought gives me butterflies. I’m feeling low-level anxiety. I know that Roland and Anton have given us a rare gift: Truth. He has offered us a real story of the real person, not an Action Hero, his moment in real history, his odds-crushing survival, and the reality of the awful nature of War. It was not the John Wayne and Hogan’s Heroes version that we were fed for decades.
 
Here’s what I believe Joanna Leigh will get from it: I was her age when we were stationed in Munich. My memories are spotty, childish, and now dim. I remember the Fasching Parade against a backdrop of bombed out buildings and piles of rubble. I remember several iconic pieces of the undamaged city scape: the Frauenkirche, the Glockenspiel, and what I’ve always called the Angel of Peace. I remember the cold water of the Isar River.
 
Her memories may be as fuzzy. But one takeaway will serve her, and my other granddaughter, in a remarkable way: They will be alive to celebrate the 100^th Anniversary of the end of World War II and will hold hands with that past to make the celebration come alive for them. Their great-grandfather, Grand John, was there and played his heroic part to end that gruesome war.
 
Special Note: We will stay in the Sonklarhof located in the valley (http://www.sonklarhof.it/en/). It has a long history and is a modern winter ski resort and a summer wellness spa. Germans, Italians, and other Europeans often vacation there.
On the history page, the second photo in the slideshow is a shot of the old dining room. Here is the photo dad shot in 1950:

 
Notice the large oil, shot perhaps because it is of the Mountain. I will find out; I will also keep my fingers crossed that the hotel still has it somewhere.
 
 
When dad and mom returned to the Valley in 1950, they drove in our Woodie, which the military has shipped to Munich, as Germany had very few goods of any kind. Anton was a boy, maybe about ten, and has a distinct memory of the legendary airman returning in a mythic car. Here it is:
 

Technorati Tags: Ridanna Italy,Ridnaun,southern Tyrol,Sonklarhof,Woodie,P-51,production plate,World War II,Allied Occupational Forces

Flash Post

Right this minute I think I could KILL for some aspirin. That’s ASPIRIN. Generic. Bayer. Ralph Lauren. I don’t care whose name is on it. Don Corleone.

I’m having a pain block for my chronic back stuff Tuesday, so I can take Joanna Leigh to Germany, Austria, Italy in less than three weeks with some peace of mind. (To see a bit about that trip, go here; I hope to post more about the trip soon.) The instructions were, “Quit taking your anti-inflammatory meds, including aspirin, Celebrex, all the other NSAIDs, because they are blood thinners.”

So I quit taking the meds Friday. Yesterday was ok, but today is awful. The doctor’s going to ask me where it hurts, and I’m going to say, “How much time do you have?”

I want three aspirin right now more than I want the Peach Cobbler I made with Chilton Co., Alabama, peaches – the best in the world.

These   +                these   =          

                                            This Beauty

But I want three aspirin more than I want cobbler. In rattling off the instructions, the nurse also said, “Oh, but don’t worry. You can still take your hydrocodone.”

Oh, whoopee. I don’t’ want hydrocodone. I want anti-inflammatory medicine for the fourth item on the list of my back issues: arthritis in my spine. Not in my hands or feet or anywhere else; just in my spine. Is that a good or bad thing? I have no idea and I don’t care. I just want my aspirin. Wwwhhhhhaaaaaaa!!!!!!!

Thanks for listening.

Technorati Tags: aspirin,peach cobbler,peaches,Chilton Co. peaches