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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
From flightless birds to the poetry of salt packets, it's the yin and yang of airline karma.
Aug 5, 2005 | First we thank Rui Martins, corresponding from Lisbon, who explains the apparent disorientation over at Portugal's Air Luxor. "The name is not a reference to Egypt at all," Martins says, "but to the Portuguese word 'luxo,' meaning luxury."
That's fairly sensible, though Martins also points out the similarity between "Luxor" and the Portuguese word "lixo," meaning garbage.
Next, reader Jason Langlois chimes in with a semi-plausible theory to explain the curiously named Air Atlanta, the Icelandic operator with a fleet of Boeing 747s.
"In Greek myth," he tells us, "Atlanta was an incredibly fast woman who won every race she ran. She refused to marry anyone unless he could beat her in a foot race. Milanion courted Atlanta and appealed to Aphrodite for help. He was given three golden apples. During the race, he dropped the apples to distract Atlanta. When she stopped to pick them up, he was able to win the race and marry her.
Well, maybe, but why an Icelandic airline would dip that far into Hellenic fable is difficult to fathom. [UPDATE: Except, as a multitude of readers informed me immediately, her name wasn't Atlanta, it was Atalanta, a word of unrelated etymology that means "balanced" in Greek.] If it's any lesson, the Greek flag carrier avoids this messy game altogether, going with the more purely historical Olympic Airlines. Meanwhile, purposely or not, Air Atlanta allows this debate to fester by refusing to return calls or e-mails.
My enthusiasm for "Air Valkyrie" as a more suitable option was quickly doused. The job of the mythological Valkyrie, a reader reminds us, was the transportation of dead warriors to Valhalla. Probably not the image an airline would be shooting for. (It made better sense as the nickname for a prototype supersonic bomber, the XB-70, built for the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s.)
Not that certain airlines haven't, by design, gone with incongruous names in the past. The one I liked best was Kiwi International, shared for a time by two carriers on opposite ends of the world. The first Kiwi, started in 1992 by a band of ex-Eastern pilots, operated 727s out of Newark to leisure markets in Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. No strangers to failure, Kiwi's founders tempered their upstart optimism with an ironic twist, calling their airline after a bird that can't fly. Then about two years later, in New Zealand, a different Kiwi International launched services between Auckland and Australia.
The latter Kiwi was, if nothing else, more geographically correct, its flightless namesake an indigenous icon of that country, but in both cases the name had a nice ring and a clever mocking-of-fate quality. Alas, neither entity was successful for very long. You could say they asked for it.
Over in Russia, the daringly christened Kras Air continues on, having successfully dodged infamy since it commenced flying in 1993. One of the many so-called babyflots to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet megacarrier, Kras operates a mixed fleet of 40 or so Boeings, Tupolevs and Ilyushins. Officially, Kras Air is short for "Krasnoyarskie Avialinii," but that won't ward off the cackling should it suffer a tragedy.
If you haven't enough nerve to give your airline a sufficiently burlesque name, not to worry, as disgruntled employees and annoyed passengers will cook one up for you. As everybody knows, it's not Northwest, it's "Northworst." America West is better known to thousands as "America Worst," and US Airways has become "US Scareways." Air Chance, Aeroflop, and so on. Some are clever; most are dumb. Delta happens to be an acronym for "Doesn't Ever Leave the Airport," while the legendary BOAC was short for "Better on a Camel."
"Don't forget Pan American World Airways," adds Tom Bunn, retired captain from that fabled carrier and today the president of a fear-of-flying consultation service. "Or as we employees coined it, Pandemonium World Airways."
Call them what you may, airlines have a way of breeding their own bad karma, and Bunn recalls a particularly macabre example at the old TWA:
"At Trans World's terminal in New York," he remembers, "the recorded voice making the arrival and departure announcements was that of a flight attendant who'd been killed in a crash. Yet her voice carried on. Those who knew her found it eerie to hear their late friend's voice booming over the speakers as they walked through the terminal."
(A grave error, if you will, on TWA's part, but am I the only one who considers the prerecorded voice of a dead person less creepy than the existing cacophony of security announcements and warnings about the destruction of unattended luggage?)
