A striking coincidence

September 15, 2010 - 6:45 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Israeliness, Life 

Haaretz visits the airport

One of the things I’ve never quite gotten used to in the 16 years I’ve lived in Israel is strikes. When I was growing up in the U.S., work stoppages were a relatively rare occurrence. My father worked for the San Francisco Examiner for 35 years; when the newspaper struck in the late 1960s, it was a major trauma for the entire Bay Area.

In Israel, however, strikes are as common as shwarma in the summer. The latest: the airport. Workers shut down Ben Gurion International on Monday to protest an improper use of pension funds. During that time, planes already en-route were allowed to land, but flights couldn’t take off and baggage wasn’t offloaded.

While the airport strike was resolved later the same day, it stirred memories of a previous airport strike in 1998. I was the CEO of an Internet startup at the time and I had to be in California for an important presentation in front of 1,000 people. The airport had already been closed for several days and I was at my wit’s end.

I thought of driving to Jordan and flying out of Amman, but the borders were sealed there too. Then, suddenly, one airline – El Al – was allowed to fly out one plane – remarkably, the very one I was on!

I arrived early to a nearly deserted airport. A few of us straggled in line while the El Al counter crew begrudgingly shuffled in. I made it to the conference on schedule and by the time I had to return, the strike had ended. I was even upgraded to business class (ah, those were the days).

The airport workers tend to strike every year or two, and in bad years, once every several months. In most cases I side with the workers – messing with pensions is not cool – but the inconvenience and stress seems unfathomable to me in a 21st Century western country. Can’t they just work it out – maybe a friendly negotiating session in Sharm El-Sheikh. I hear Hillary Clinton is in town.

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Technology for the Birds

January 16, 2009 - 2:00 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business, Environment, General, Israeliness, Technology, Travel 

It almost sounds like a joke – something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, maybe. But “bird strikes” are apparently a serious problem for pilots and planes. That’s, apparently, what happened to a U.S. Airways jet that was forced to land in the Hudson River after taking off New York’s LaGuardia Airport minutes before. Nobody was hurt – amazingly – but in the battle between birds and pilots, humans haven’t always fared so well against avians. Luckily, Israel is on the case, working on ways to keep birds and planes away from each other!

According to experts, bird strikes – where a bird gets sucked into a jet’s engine, discombobulating the avionics (check out the photo of what an engine hit by birds looks like) – is not all that rare, and has plagued planes and even rockets. While not common in civilian aviation, bird strikes appear to be a near-plague for military flyers, according to this website which lists dozens of crashes, ejections, and even deaths of pilots due to bird strikes (at least two Israeli pilot deaths are listed). jt8d_engine_after_bird_strike

Because Israel is on the main north-south migratory route for birds, the IDF has been very concerned with bird strikes. According to the “Bird Strike Committee Proceedings” for 2002,

the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has focused attention in bird strike prevention on collisions between aircraft and migrating birds during low-level flight operations. Only in the last 2 years has the IAF begun to tackle the problem of reducing bird-aircraft collisions at or near airfields. A dramatic shift in thinking has led the IAF to initiate complete wildlife control programs at its airbases, featuring the employment of border collies and wildlife control officers to help eliminate the risk of wildlife collisions within the control zone (CTR) of each airfield.

As a crucial component of this program, the IAF has initiated major changes in habitat management at airfields, eliminating agricultural initiatives and undergoing large-scale modifications in airfield maintenance practices. Additionally, the IAF has altered flight and ground operations where possible to attenuate the risk imposed by birds and has coordinated efforts within various departments at each airbase to address bird strike control issues. Awareness and the resolve to eliminate wildlife hazards at its airfields are key features to the IAF’s new directive on bird strike prevention. Though still in its infancy, the IAF’s new wildlife control program has already shown dramatic improvements in the reduction of bird strike hazards at airbases.

My friends at the Fisher Institute in Herzliya have been on this problem as well, and have developed some new technology to ensure that both planes and birds can share the skies, that I hope to be able to report more about soon.

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Disgruntled at Duty-Free

July 30, 2008 - 5:18 PM by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Business, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness 

My husband had just gotten off the plane from a two-week work trip in the States, and before I could bundle him into the car at the airport and whisk him back home — I was waiting outside while he was gathering his baggage and duty-free treats — he suddenly stopped answering his cellphone — horrors! — and all I could think of was, ‘Has he been stopped by Customs?’

Duty_Free_shop_-_Ben_Gurion_Airport.jpg

Of course, he had. After some 20 years of living in Israel, and making the Israel-U.S. trip many a time, with more than a few electronic treats in his bags, Daniel made the cardinal error of buying a new microwave in duty-free and bringing back a few birthday presents — all electronic — in his bags. But it was the big DeLonghi box sitting on his cart that alerted the bored customs crew, who immediately set their sights on him and demanded that he open all bags. There, to their delight, were three unopened boxes, including two cameras and an iHome, all birthday presents for family members back here.

After paying 850 shekels in fines and VAT, Daniel was set free, albeit disgruntled, and made his way over to our car. Now, of course, we also had to pay NIS 20 for parking, since we’d overstayed our 20-minute free parking. On the way home, we engaged in a step-by-step dismantling of the scenario, from the decision to buy a microwave in duty-free (where you don’t have to pay the 15.5% VAT that is paid on most consumer items in Israel), to not doing a better job of hiding the cameras in the suitcase.

It’s a funny thing, though; it’s not that duty-free shopping is such a bargain. It’s simply very easy to spend the time before boarding buying some things that you’ve needed to get, and then leaving it at the airport to bring home at the end of a trip. An Israeli innovation, you could say. But there are the downsides; whether it’s when the appliance arrives broken and you have to deal with the company’s less than satisfying customer service, or when you buy several bottles of whisky duty-free, only to find out that you’re only allowed to bring in one liter of liquor or two liters of wine. (That happened to friends of ours who were stocking up on whisky before their daughter’s wedding.)

So, did it pay to buy the electronics in the States, smuggle them home and then pay a fine? Well, yes. It’s still cheaper over there, and the range of choices are much wider. It would have been much more frustrating if they’d succeeded in making Daniel pay a fine on his two-year-old laptop that was also in his bag, and which, they pointed out, doesn’t have a Hebrew keyboard, which could mean that it was also bought in the States. But they let him slide on that one, and in fact, after a whispered consultation, decided to lower his total bill from NIS 1150 to NIS 850. And so, in the end, another bargain at the airport.

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