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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
What happened to the "u" in Qantas? Who came up with the immortal "British West Indian Airways West Indies Airways"? And other strange tales of airline names.
Oct 3, 2003 | What do SwissAir, Egyptair, and Delta Airlines have in common? For one, they're all spelled wrong.
While I risk dragging this week's column into a morass of pedantic minutiae, I'm compelled to clear up a few of aviation's more pervasive errors of usage and spelling. It's a problem made worse by the major media, which frequently jumbles up the names and designations of airlines, aircraft and airports.
It got so bad that I've refused to read any more post-crash articles or airline stories even in my favorite hometown paper, the Boston Globe, lest I find myself spitting out coffee and having to dash off yet another petulant correction. Half a dozen of my complaints to the ombudsman have already gone unanswered, and I imagine printouts of my e-mails hung on a bulletin board in a Globe office, Magic Markered with comments like "crank" and "get a life."
Which I should. But I still rarely make it through any aviation-related reportage, whether in print or on television, without gasping over one or two outright errors or misleading distortions, which finds me, again, at the iMac in a sputtering hunt for addresses. (After an Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris in the summer of 2000, I counted more than 10 mistakes in less than an hour of major network coverage.) Granted, the vernacular of this weird business is a tough one for the layperson to make sense of, with thousands of acronyms, terms and procedures practically begging to be misshapen into scary-sounding scenarios: "near-miss," "missed approach," "declared an emergency." But at least have the titles and formalities right.
Even Salon is out to get me. On Sept. 26 my column made mention of Syrianair, a Middle Eastern airline with a surprisingly good safety record. Salon's copy editors, however, ran the reference as "SyrianAir." I saw this and launched an immediate, highly indignant protest. They rolled their eyes and routed me to the airline's Web site, which sure enough speaks of ... SyrianAir.
That showed me.
Except, believe it or not, the Web site is wrong. A third-party job for English speakers outside the Middle East, the page appears to be up and running sans proofreading. If the French-to-English hilarity at Africa's STA is any indication (also linked to in the same article), we shouldn't be shocked by any Web-borne goof-ups emanating from Arabic.
Would Microsoft enjoy being MicroSoft or Micro Soft? OK, the airline of Syria is no supranational powerhouse of industry, but let's not perpetuate some underpaid Web host's carelessness. Besides, Syrianair is government owned, and we need that country's help in locating Saddam's cleverly hidden nuclear warheads and anthrax-packed Scuds.
We could, of course, bypass this whole confabulation by going with the airline's more formal name, which is Syrian Arab Airlines, even if nobody calls it that. For that matter, Syria itself is known officially as al-Jamhouriya al-Arabiya as-Suriya. Try putting that on the side of a plane.
If you find this discussion mindlessly trivial, by all means keep reading. Here's a list of the more annoying and recurring aero-errata I come across. Subtract five points for each you've been guilty of ...
-- Alas now defunct after 70 years, it was neither SwissAir nor Swiss Air. It was Swissair.
-- In the same spirit we find Icelandair, Finnair, and Luxair. Plus our friend Syrianair, even if Salon is loath to trust me.
-- On the contrary, Gamil al-Batouti was the suicidal first officer at the controls of EgyptAir Flight 990. That is alleged, but for now (and likely forever) unproven. What we know for certain, though, is he did not work for Egyptair or Egypt Air.
-- There is no Delta Airlines based in Atlanta, Ga. There is only Delta Air Lines. The legendary Eastern also shared this old-timey three-word style.
-- All right, but even I get confused by the Koreans. In the old days one flew to Seoul on KAL, as everyone called it. But did that stand for Korean Air Lines, or was it Korean Airlines? I've got photos of aircraft on which both are painted. No matter, in 2003 it's a short and simple Korean Air. That is, until you read the fine print and realize the corporate parent is something called Korean Air Lines Co., Ltd. So KAL remains KAL, doing business without the "L". Got it?
-- China Airlines is the national carrier of Taiwan, Republic of China (ROC). Air China is based in Beijing, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), sworn enemy and claimant of Taiwanese sovereignty. The names are not interchangeable, and China Airlines and Air China crews are known to engage in airport brawls and run one another off taxiways.
