Still no serious coverage of pirate radio

November 29, 2017 in Broadcasting, Geography, infrastructure, Journalism, new york, News, radio | Permalink

Here’s what I wrote about pirate radio in New York, back in 2013 . I hoped to bait major media attention with that. Got zip.

Then I wrote this in 2015 (when I also took the screen shot, above, of a local pirate’s ID on my kitchen radio). I got a couple people interested, including one college student, but we couldn’t coordinate our schedules and the moments were lost.

Now comes news of pirate radio crackdowns by the FCC*, yet little of that news concerns the demand these stations supply. The default story is about FCC vs. Pirates, not how pirates address the inadequacies of FCC-licensed broadcast radio. (One good exception: this story in the Miami Herald about an FCC-fined pirate that programs for a population licensed radio doesn’t serve.)

To sample the situation, drive your car up Broadway north of 181st Street in Manhattan (above which the city gets very hilly, and there is maximal signal shadowing by big apartment buildings), or into the middle of the Bronx (same kind of setting), on any weekend evening. Then hit SCAN on your radio. Betcha a third of the stations you’ll hear are pirates, and the announcers will be speaking Spanish or Caribbean English. Some stations will have ads. Even if you only hear three or four signals (I’m on the wrong coast for checking on this), you’re tapping into something real happening which—far as I know—continues to attract approximately zero interest among popular media. (Could be it’s a thing on Twitter, but I don’t know.)

But there is a story here, about a marketplace of the literal sort. As I say in both those posts (at the top two links above), I wish I knew Spanish. For a reporter who does, there’s some great meat to chew on here. And it’s not just about the FCC playing a game of whack-a-mole. It’s about what licensed broadcasting alone can’t or won’t do.

Low power FM transmitters are cheap, by the way. The good ones are in low four figures. (One example.) The okay ones are in the two- and three-figure range. (Examples on Amazon and eBay.)

By the way, anything more than a small fraction of one watt is almost certainly in violation of Part 15 of the FCC rules, and therefore illegal. But hey, there’s a market for these things, so they sell.

By the way, is anyone visiting the topic of what will happen if Cumulus and/or iHeart can’t pay their debts? If either or both go down, a huge percentage of over-the-air radio in the U.S. goes with them.

The easy thing to blame is bad corporate decisions of one kind or another. The harder one is considering what the digital world is doing to undermine and replace the analog one.

If you’re wondering about why pirate radio is so big in New York yet relatively nowhere in Los Angeles (the next-largest broadcast market), here’s the main reason: New York FM stations are weak. The biggest sharing a master antenna atop the Empire State Building are only 6000 watts, at about 1300 feet up above the center of a metro with lots signal shadows and reflections caused by high-rise buildings, some taller than the Empire State Building.

In nearby New Jersey and the outer boroughs, you can put out a 10 or a 50 watt signal from a whip antenna on top of a house or a high-rise, on a channel right next to a licensed one, and cover a zip code or two with little trouble.

It’s hard to do that in most of Los Angeles, where stations radiate from mile-high Mt. Wilson at powers up to 110000 watts, and strong signals pack the dial from one end to the other. There are similar situations in Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Denver and San Francisco (though there are a few more terrain shadows for pirates to operate in). In flat places without thick clusters of high-rises in their outlying areas—Miami, New Orleans, Memphis, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit—there are few places for pirates to hide among the buildings. In those places it’s relatively easy for the FCC to locate and smack down a pirate, especially if the pirates operate in a wide open way (as was the Miami example).

Still, I think pirate radio won’t go away, for the simple reason that it’s too easy to operate a station, and too few existing stations serving small community interests.

A miracle of flight

November 11, 2017 in Aviation, Awesome, Travel | 4 comments

That was the view to the south from 31,000 feet above the center of Greenland a few hours ago: a late afternoon aurora over a blue dusk. According to my little hand-held GPS, we were around here: “11/10/17, 11:48:32 AM” “2.4 mi” “0:00:16” “538 mph” “30072 ft” “283° true” “N70° 56′ 10.4″ W38° 52′ 59.1″”. That’s about four degrees north of the arctic circle.

The flight was Air New Zealand 1, a Boeing 777 now on its way to Auckland from Los Angeles, where I got off before driving home to Santa Barbara, where I am now, absolutely fucking amazed that we take this time- and space-saving grace of civilized life—flying—so fully for granted. (I know this isn’t a good time to source Louis C.K., but his take on how “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy” contains simply the best take on commercial flying ever uttered by anybody.)

Here’s another amazing thing: we were also inside the auroral oval, which at the moment maps like this—

Normally on transatlantic flights between Europe and the U.S., one looks north at the aurora, but in this case I was looking south, because we veered north to avoid headwinds on the direct route, which would have taken us over the southern end of Greenland, right under that aurora. The whole flight was close to 12 hours, went in a large crescent loop, and at the end had us coming down at Los Angeles along the Pacific Coast, roughly from the direction of Seattle:

(The map is via FlightAware. Details from that same page: Actual: 5,859 mi; Planned: 5,821 mi; Direct: 5,449 mi. In other words, we flew 410 extra miles to avoid the headwinds. Here is the route in aviation code: YNY KS21G KS81E KS72E 4108N/12141W HYP AVE.)

Get this: I knew that would roughly be our path just by first looking at Windy.com, which shows winds at all elevations a plane might fly. (That link is to Windy’s current air flow map between London and Los Angeles at 34,000 feet.)

Even after flying millions of miles as a passenger, my mind is never less blown by what one can see out the window of a plane.

 

 

Jack Ucciferri for 4th District

November 4, 2017 in infrastructure, Internet, Santa Barbara | Permalink

Santa Barbara is one of the world’s great sea coast towns. It’s also in a good position to be one of the world’s great Internet coast towns too.

Luckily, Santa Barbara is advantaged by its location not just on the ocean, but on some of the thickest Internet trunk lines (called “backbones”) in the world. These run through town beside the railroad and Highway 101. Some are owned by the state college and university system. Others are privately owned. In fact Level(3), now part of CenturyLink, has long had a tap on that trunk, and a large data center, in the heart of the Funk Zone. Here it is:

Last I checked, Level(3) was in the business of wholesaling access to its backbone. So was the UC system.

Yet Santa Barbara is still disadvantaged by depending on a single “high speed” Internet service provider: Cox Communications, which is also the town’s incumbent cable TV company. Like most cable companies, Cox is widely disliked by its customers. It has also recently imposed caps on data use.

Cox’s only competitor is Frontier Communications, which provides Internet access over old phone lines previously run by Verizon and GTE. Cable connections provide higher bandwidth than phone lines, but both are limited to fractions of the capacity provided by fiber optic cables. While it’s possible for cable companies to upgrade service to what’s called DOCSIS 3.1, there has been little in the history of Santa Barbara’s dealings with Cox to suggest that Cox will grace the city with its best possible service. (In fact Cox’s only hint toward fiber is in nearby Goleta, not in Santa Barbara.)

About a decade ago, when I was involved in a grass roots effort to get the city to start providing Internet service on its own over fiber optic connections, Cox told us that Santa Barbara was last in line for upgrading the company’s facilities. Other cities were bigger and more important to Cox, which is based in Atlanta.

Back then we lacked a champion for the Internet cause on the Santa Barbara City Council. The mayor liked the idea, and so did a couple of Council members, but the attitude was, “We’ll wait until Palo Alto does something like this and then copy that.” So the effort died.

But we have a champion now, running for City Council in the 6th District, which covers much of downtown: Jack Ucciferri. A story by Gwendolyn Wu in The Independent yesterday begins, “As District 6 City Council candidate Jack Ucciferri went door-to-door to campaign, he found that many Santa Barbara residents had one thing in common: a mutual disdain for the Cox Communications internet monopoly. ‘Every person I talk to agrees with me,’ Ucciferri said.” Specifically, “Ucciferri is dreaming of a fiber optic plan for Santa Barbara. Down south, the cities of Santa Monica and Oxnard already have or are preparing plans for fiber optic cable networks.”

One of the biggest issues for Santa Barbara is the decline of business downtown, especially along State Street, the city’s heart, where the most common sign on storefronts is “For Lease.” Jack’s district contains more of State Street than any other. I can think of nothing that will help State Street—and Santa Barbara—more than to have world-class Internet access and speeds, which would be a huge attraction for many businesses large and small.

So I urge readers in Jack’s district to give him the votes he needs to champion the cause of making Santa Barbara a leader in the digital world, rather than yet another cable backwater, which it will surely remain if he loses.

[Later…] Jack lost on Tuesday, but came in second of three candidates. The winner was the long-standing incumbent, Gregg Hart. (Here’s Noozhawk’s coverage.) I don’t see this as a loss for Jack or his cause. Conversations leading up to the election (including one with a candidate wh won in another district) have led me to believe the time is right to at least fiber up Santa Barbara’s troubled downtown, where The Retail Apocalypse is well underway.

 

 

Revolutions take time

October 29, 2017 in Geology, Law, Life, Personal, Politics, problems, Technology, war | 3 comments

The original version of this ran as a comment under Francine Hardaway‘s Medium post titled Have we progressed at all in the last fifty years?

My short answer is “Yes, but not much, and not evenly.” This is my longer answer.

In your case and mine, it has taken the better part of a century to see how some revolutions take generations to play out. Not only won’t we live to see essential revolutions complete; our children and grandchildren may not either.

Take a topic not on your list: racial equality—or moving past race altogether as a Big Issue. To begin to achieve racial equality in the U.S., we fought the Civil War. The result was various degrees of liberation for the people who had been slaves or already freed in Union states; but apartheid of both the de jure and de facto kind persisted. Jim Crow laws and practices emerged, and in still live on in culture if not in law.

The civil rights movement in the Fifties and Sixties caused positive social, political and other changes. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 especially helped. But the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 put civil rights almost back where it was before its revolution started. I participated in civil rights activism in Greensboro, North Carolina at the time of both assassinations, and I can’t overstate how deep and defeating our despair felt after both events. And that feeling proved correct.

Small incremental improvements followed over the decades since, but no leaps forward like we had before those murders. (Even the election of Barack Obama failed to change a terribly durable status quo. Backlash against that election is at least partly responsible for Trump and the Republican Congress.)

We are still stuck with inequality for races, religions and so much else. Will we ever get over that? I think we will, inevitably; but only if our species survives.

One collateral victim of those assassinations in the Sixties was the near-end of non-violence as a strategy toward change. Martin Luther King Jr. used it very effectively, and kept the flame alive and well-proven until violence took him out. Martyred though he was, it was not to the cause of nonviolence or pacifism, both of which have been back-burnered for fifty years. We (in the largest sense that includes future generations) may never find out if non-violence can ever succeed—because violence is apparently too deeply ingrained as a human trait.

Back to tech.

I too was, and remain, a cyber-utopian. Or at least a cyber-optimist. But that’s because I see cyber—the digitization and networking of the world—as a fait accompli that offers at least as many opportunities for progress as it does for problems. As Clay Shirky says, a sure sign of a good technology is that one can easily imagine bad uses of it.

What I’m not writing at the moment are my thoughts about why some of those advantaged by power, even in small ways, abuse it so easily. I’m not writing it because I know whatever I say will be praised by some, rebuked by others, and either way will be reduced to simplicities that dismiss whatever subtle and complex points I am trying to make, or questions I am trying to ask. (Because my mind is neither sufficiently informed nor made up.) I also know that, within minutes for most of my piece’s readers, the points it makes will be gone like snow on the water, for such is the nature of writing on the vast sea of almost-nothing that “social” media comprises. And, as of today, all other media repose in the social ones.

Some perspective:

Compared to that, and its effects on the planet, all other concerns shrink to insignificance.

But, as The Onion said a few weeks after 9/11, A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.

Stupid bullshit is what the meteor of humanity hitting the planet cares most about. Always has. Wars have been fought over far less.

The only fully consequential question is how we end the Anthropocene. Or how it ends without us.

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Dear DSCC: unsubscribe means unsubscribe

October 29, 2017 in Politics, VRM | 4 comments

I have unsubscribed from the DSCC mailing list, which I never joined, multiple times. Here’s a screen shot of my last unsubscribe session, dated 21 October:

That’s the third screen, after others that mute the unsubscribe option. At this point, “Take a break” is their euphemism for what I really want, which is a divorce. Here’s the confirmation:

And here is the confirming email:

I have earlier ones from June, July and August.

But the DSCC emails keep coming. Here’s just the top of the latest:

So here’s a question for the DSCC, or anyone else who knows: Is this deliberate on the DSCC’s part?

I do believe one should never ascribe to __________ what can also be ascribed to incompetence.

But this is a long time for any incompetence to persist. At a certain point this kind of shit gets hard to read as anything other than intentional. That point was passed two unsubscribes ago.

Whatever the reasons, it’s a great way to piss off voters.

I just completed my fifth known unsubscribe attempt. In the text box under “Please tell us why you are unsubscribing (optional), I just wrote,

See what I wrote here http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2017/10/29/… and tweeted here: https://twitter.com/dsearls/status/92468… This will be my 5th unsubscribe attempt. I have no faith it will work any better than the last four, which all failed.

I have no faith this will work. Please prove me wrong, DSCC.

By the way, I’ve long been a political independent, and have found my ass on political sucker lists from both major parties. The difference with the DSCC is that unsubscribe fails with them. Always.

[Later…] Since some have suggested that I only unsubscribed from one mailing, here’s a screenshot I left out of the post:

By the way, it doesn’t say what “ONTRAPORT” is, and the domain is http://demolinks.us/, which goes to an unready wordpress site by the ONTRAPORT name. Strange.

[Later again…]

I got another DSCC email…

…and decided to go through the unsubscribe routine again, because well, hell, why not.

As you see, the choice to unsubscribe is muted:

Then, instead of unsubscribing me when I hit “No, continue unsubscribing,” it gives me this:

Besides suggesting that the reader’s clear intention to unsubscribe actually means “Receive fewer emails,” they make the option to continue unsubscribing barely visible. But I hit it, and got this:

Hitting the red box then got me this:

No confirming email came this time.

I haven’t received another DSCC email yet, but it’s only been a few hours. I have no faith that they won’t keep mailing me shit.

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Ya(cht) gotta love the Web

October 28, 2017 in Geography, Santa Barbara | 2 comments

A giant yacht was anchored just outside the harbor in Santa Barbara for much of this past week:

Among its impressive features (though not especially visible in this, my shitty photo) is the helicopter on one of the aft decks.

I wanted to know exactly what this thing was, so I watched local media for clues, which did not forthcome.

But it didn’t matter, because we have the Web. And search engines. So I did an image search for super yacht helicopter pad and found an exact image match with this Robb Report on the Pegasus VIII, which is a charter vessel for hire at many links. Says this one,

The 255.91ft /78m Custom motor yacht ‘Pegasus VIII’ was built in 2003 by Royal Denship and last refitted in 2011. This luxury vessel’s sophisticated exterior design and engineering are the work of Espen Oeino. Previously named Pegasus V her luxurious interior is designed by Zuretti and her exterior styling is by Espen Oeino.

ACCOMMODATION

Pegasus VIII’s interior layout sleeps up to 12 guests in 6 rooms, including a master suite, 2 VIP staterooms, 2 double cabins and 1 twin cabin. She is also capable of carrying up to 24 crew onboard to ensure a relaxed luxury yacht experience. Timeless styling, beautiful furnishings and sumptuous seating feature throughout to create an elegant and comfortable atmosphere.

Pegasus VIII’s impressive leisure and entertainment facilities make her the ideal charter yacht for socialising and entertaining with family and friends.

PERFORMANCE

She is built with Steel hull and Aluminium / GRP superstructure. This custom displacement w/ bulbous bow yacht is equipped with an ultra-modern stabilization system which reduces roll motion effect and results in a smoother more enjoyable cruising experience. She features ‘at anchor stabilisers’ which work at zero speed to increase onboard comfort at anchor and on rough waters. With a cruising speed of 13 knots, a maximum speed of 145 knots† and a range of 7,000nm from her 435,700litre fuel tanks, she is the perfect combination of performance and luxury.

INTERIOR DESIGN

The Party deck features a Salon with a raised dancing area and a Jacuzzi on the exterior deck.

AMENITIES

At anchor Stabilizers , Gym, Jacuzzi (on deck), Helicopter Landing Pad, Swimming Pool, Movie Theatre, Beach Club, Childrens Playroom, Dance Floor, Swimming Platform, Air Conditioning, Dip Pool, Underwater Lights, Massage Room, Piano, Air Conditioning, Stabilizers at Anchor, WiFi connection on board, Deck Jacuzzi, Gym/exercise equipment

SPECIAL FEATURES

Drydock for custom tender which can be flooded when tender is out to form a 12m swimming pool with underwater lighting and steps.

Nice to know a little of what’s up for the .0001% of us.

† I believe there is a missing decimal here. The world’s fastest yacht clocks in at 70 knots.

Tab closings

October 26, 2017 in Journalism | 1 comment

These are all the non-advertising-related items I just moved out of this post here on doc.blog.

This Wired piece on podcasting’s history fails to mention either Dave Winer or RSS. Huge oversights, those. Without mentioning the Wired piece, Dave offers many corrections.

Mount Hope Cemetery in Lander, Wyoming: the final resting place of many memorable characters in Ethel Waxham Love’s Lady’s Choice, which I am reading and re-reading right now. Such an amazing character. I visited her family’s abandoned ranch house (“one hundred miles from water, women and wood,” her son David said) this summer, for The Eclipse.

Radio ratings in Canadian cities. Which I want so I can complete this post about sports radio. I expected that post to be hugely provocative ad popular, by the way. The opposite was true. Still, I want to finish it.

Aeon: your brain is not a computer. No surprise there, but very much counter to the prevailing bullshit.

The RSA, where I’ve applied for a fellowship. We’ll see how it goes. I’m excited about the possibilities.

NiemanLab: Civil, the blockchain-based journalism marketplace, is building its first batch of publications…One of the most confusing efforts to fund journalism in recent memory is inching closer to reality.

Niche Publishers: DCN Research Report | January 2017— How to Create Sustainable Business Models in a Digital Marketplace. All good advice, but very hard to do with a small staff and little initial revenue flow.

Mastercard Simplifies Managing Your Digital Footprint with Launch of Consumer Control—New solution will help the 60 percent of people who say they don’t know where their card credentials are stored. Fine, but its just one credit card and its API. Real control will be something you own and control, and has scale across all your cards and services. Change your address, for example, one time for all of them.

Boston is the Top Radio Market for Sports

October 24, 2017 in Boston, Broadcasting, Business | 1 comment

So I did some research, and Boston wins, big:

Boston 11.0
Philadelphia 8.7
Minneapolis-St.Paul 6.9
Detroit 6.4
Middlesex-Somerset-Union, NJ 6.4
Oklahoma City 6.2
Baltimore 6.1
Nashville 5.9
New York 5.8
Pittsburgh 5.8
Kansas City 5.8
Dallas-Fort Worth 5.7
Nassau-Suffolk, NY 5.5
Chicago 5.4
San Francisco 5.4
Columbus 5.4
Atlanta 4.9
Denver 4.7
Washington DC 4.3
Buffalo 4.2
Seattle 4.0
Portland 4.0
San Jose 4.0
Cleveland 3.9
Raleigh-Durham 3.9
Indianapolis 3.8
St. Louis 3.5
Green Bay 3.5
Houston-Galveston 3.4
Phoenix 3.2
Sacramento 3.1
Memphis 2.8
Los Angeles 2.5
Tampa-St.Petersburg 2.3
San Diego 2.2
Miami 1.9
Cincinatti 1.7
Las Vegas 1.6
Orlando 1.4
Milwaukee-Racine 1.3
Charlotte 1.2
Salt Lake City 0.9
San Antonio 0.7
West Palm Beach 0.5
Riverside-San Bernardino 0.4
Jacksonville 0.4
New Orleans 0.0

 

In case it’s not obvious, this is one nice piece of hard evidence that Boston is the country’s #1 sports town.

Qualifiers…

My source is Radio-Online‘s Nielsen Radio Ratings, current as of today. The big markets all last reported on September 29, and they are posted monthly. Some of the mid-markets reported on dates in October. All of the bigs and the mids report monthly. The small markets, such as Green Bay, report quarterly. While Green Bay was last updated on August 2, the last quarter listed is Spring of this year. I also include side-markets, such as those flanking New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I list all the U.S. radio markets with a major league baseball, football, basketball or hockey team there or nearby. I just found ratings for Canadian stations, but those will take more work, because the formats aren’t listed. Maybe I’ll save those for Winter, when hockey is at high ebb. (I just checked Toronto, where the two AM sport stations total a 3.7, which would put Toronto in the middle of the pack here.)

If readers want me to, I’ll put up the spreadsheet I used. In fact it would be way cool if somebody else took this over.

The main thing I’m doing here is bragging on Boston.

Other things worth sharing:

  • With the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins, whaddaya expect?
  • Radio-Locator lists five local and nearby sports stations in New Orleans—more than in any other market—and the ratings total zero. (One it calls talk, but it’s sports.) The reason, I’m sure, is that all the sports stations there are small.
  • Signal size matters. Boston’s and Philadelphia’s top sports stations are full-size FMs. Chicago’s, New York’s and San Francisco’s top sports stations are the biggest AMs in the market, covering huge territories; and New York’s is also on a full-size FM. Los Angeles’ sports stations aren’t the biggest AM stations in town, and there are no sports FM stations. Washington’s only sports station is an FM on the edge of the market a directional signal, mostly aimed away from the District (as they call it there). Minneapolis’ top sports station is a big FM, and the #2 is a landmark AM station. Charlotte’s biggest sports station is an AM that’s weak at night. Green Bay, Milwaukee, Raleigh-Durham, Las Vegas, San Antonio and Indianapolis also suffer from relatively small sports stations.
  • Streams show up in many of the ratings. Some streams are also on FM translators (which in some cases cover their metros well).
  • The fireworks photo above is in this set I shot on this past 4th of July, over the Charles River.

So congrats to WEEI and 98.5 The Sports Hub. Well done.

Data is the New Love

September 27, 2017 in adtech, advertising, data, Ideas, Internet, language, marketing, personal data, Technology | Permalink

dat is the new love

Personal data, that is.

Because it’s good to give away—but only if you mean it.

And it’s bad to take it, even it seems to be there for the taking.

I bring this up because a quarter million pages (so far) on the Web say “data is the new oil.”

That’s because a massive personal data extraction industry has grown up around the simple fact that our data is there for the taking. Or so it seems. To them. And their apologists.

As a result, we’re at a stage of wanton data extraction that looks kind of like the oil industry did in 1920 or so:

It’s a good metaphor, but for a horrible business. It’s a business we need to reform, replace, or both. What we need most are new industries that grow around who and what we are as individual human beings—and as a society that values what makes us human.

Our data is us. Each of us. It is our life online. Yes, we shed some data in the course of our activities there, kind of like we shed dandruff and odors. But that’s no excuse for the extractors to frack our lives and take what they want, just because it’s there, and they can.

Now think about what love is, and how it works. How we give it freely, and how worthwhile it is when others accept it. How taking it without asking is simply wrong. How it’s better to earn it than to demand it. How it grows when it’s given. How we grow when we give it as well.

True, all metaphors are wrong, but that’s how metaphors work. Time is not money. Life is not travel. A country is not a family. But all those things are like those other things, so we think and talk about each of them in terms of those others. (By saving, wasting and investing time; by arriving, departing, and moving through life; by serving our motherlands, and honoring our founding fathers.)

Oil made sense as a metaphor when data was so easy to take, and the resistance wasn’t there.

But now the resistance is there. More than half a billion people block ads online, most of which are aimed by extracted personal data. Laws like the GDPR have appeared, with heavy fines for taking personal data without clear permission.

I could go on, but I also need to go to bed. I just wanted to get this down while it was in the front of my mind, where it arrived while discussing how shitty and awful “data is the new oil” was when it first showed up in 2006, and how sadly popular it has become since then:

It’s time for a new metaphor that expresses what our personal data really is to us, and how much more it’s worth to everybody else if we keep, give and accept it on the model of love.

You’re welcome.

 

A dark review for United’s Boeing 787

September 16, 2017 in Aviation, Technology, Travel | 5 comments

I have been wanting to fly on the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” ever since I missed a chance to go on an inaugural junket aboard one before Boeing began delivery to the airlines. And I finally got my chance, three days ago, aboard United Flight 935 from London to Los Angeles.

Some background before I visit that experience: United is my default airline by virtue of having flown 1.5 million miles with them, which has earned me some status. Specifically, I get on shorter lines, don’t get charged for bags, and have some choice about where I sit, which defaults to Economy Plus: the section of Economy that features a bit more leg room and is typically located is behind business/first, now called Polaris.

I should add that I actually like United, and have had few of the bad experiences people tend to associate with big old airlines. I’ve also had plenty of good ones. And not all the news about United is bad. For example, wider economy seats are coming in refurbed 767s.

So. How about the 787?

It’s a nice plane in many ways, which Boeing explains here. Maybe the best in the air today.

But, hate to say, my experience with it was less than ideal.

The first problem is that, according to SeatGuru, the whole Economy Plus section is over the wing on both the airline’s configurations: 787/8 and 787/9. This means there is little or no view of the ground out the window. That view is one of the main attractions of window seats and why I love flying. See all these photos were taken out the windows of planes? Nearly all the planes I shot those from were United’s, and I have kindly tagged them #United as well. (See http://bit.ly/UnitedAerial.)

To be fair, all of United’s widebody planes (747,767, 777, 787) put most of Economy Plus over the wing. But in the first three cases a row or two is in front of the wing or behind it. Not, alas, on the new 787s.

So I booked a seat in the economy section. Fortunately, I don’t have long femurs, so leg room usually isn’t an issue for me. In fact, I like sitting in the back of plane, farther the better. That way as little of the wing as possible intrudes on the view. And the legroom actually wasn’t bad on this plane anyway, so that was a plus.

The seat I chose was 37L, a window seat in a row that gave me 3 seats to myself, because the flight turned out to be less than full. This is another reason to book seats in the back. They’re the least likely seats to be filled on a less-than-full flight. (But be sure to check with SeatGuru, which warns window-sitters away from rows that have missing windows. Most planes do have some of those.)

My second problem turned out to be one of the 787’s biggest selling points: electronically dimmable windows:

It’s a clever system that eliminates the window shade, an ancient feature that actually gives the individual a simple manual control over the view, and of light coming in.

My problem wasn’t with the windows themselves, which are relatively large (but seemingly with more view added toward the sky than the ground). My problem was with a loss of individual control, and an apparent preference by the crew for the equivalent of no windows at all.

So, for example, on this flight the crew turned all the windows dark just before the fjords and glaciers of Greenland’s coast came into view. They announced that this was so people could sleep or watch their screens without glare. But this flight wasn’t a red-eye. The plane left at roughly 2pm from London and arrived in Los Angeles at around 5pm, with daylight all the way. Yes, it would be the middle of the night (UK time) on arrival, but that was another six hours in the future, and the scene was amazing:

So I turned my window up to clear (which happens so slowly you wonder if it’s working at first), and a flight attendant came over. Here’s the dialog, as best I recall it:

“Sir, you need to darken your window.”

“I got a window seat so I could see outside.”

“But other people are trying to sleep or watch their screens.”

“I’ll darken it later. Right now I want to see Greenland. Have you seen this? It’s spectacular.”

“Please be aware of the other passengers, sir.”

In fact I was.

There were two empty seats next to me. The window seat wasn’t occupied in the row in front of me. (An older woman seemed to be sleeping in the middle seat.) And the only other passenger in sight was a guy reading a book in an otherwise empty middle row across the aisle from me. I was also talking geography with the people behind me, who were watching Greenland scroll by through my aft window (their row, 38, had no window) saying “Holy shit! Look at that! Look at THAT!” over and over. And with good reason. A United pilot once announced to a plane I was on that Greenland is the most spectacular thing one can see from a passenger jet.

So I really didn’t need to dim my window for others. But I felt like I was getting busted for some infraction of flight etiquette that made no sense, given that the 787, more than other planes was supposed to be about the joy of flying. (Louis CK enlarges on this kind of aviation irony with his “Everything is a amazing and nobody’s happy” bit. If you’re in a hurry, start about 2 minutes in.)

My final problem was also with the windows: they block GPS signals, I suppose as a secondary effect of the dimmable feature. This meant I couldn’t record the trip on my little Garmin pocket GPS I’ve been using for many years to keep track of where I’ve been, and to geo-locate photos later.

So I’ll go out of my way to avoid United’s 787s from now on. They’re great planes, but not for me.

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