telescreen.org

I see that Pet Airways is now taking reservations for flying your pet around the country. They've also changed a couple things on their website since my last post about them:

• Their route map now spells "Los Angeles" correctly;
• they now say their fleet will consist entirely of Beechcraft 1900 aircraft, and not the formerly-claimed fleet of Boeing 727s, Convair 580s and 5800s, and Dassault Falcon 20s. Also absent from their fleet information page is the company's statement that it would operate flights under Part 121 and Part 135 of the Federal Air Regulations. The FAA's website still shows no operating certificate for Pet Airways, nor does it show one for Panther Air Cargo, Pet Airways' presumptive parent company or partner;
• They also no longer mention that they have a fleet of 20 planes. I wonder how many they do have -- they currently are taking reservations for East-to-West flights on Tuesdays and West-to-East flights on Thursdays, so they could be operating as few as one aircraft;
• They've removed Dan Wiesel's and Alysa Binder's last names from the photo caption on this page.

I also found this story and this one, which say that Pet Airways is contracting with "Suburban Airlines" and "Suburban Air Flight, Inc.", respectively. Google searches for "Suburban Air Flight" turn up nothing, and searches for "Suburban Airlines" pretty much bring you information about the former Allegheny Airlines subsidiary of the same name. (I also don't see an FAA certificate for Suburban,  either.)

Interestingly enough, I wonder if this news story's reporting came from my previous post. It doesn't credit me with anything, but it was published two days later, and has some details that I hadn't seen reported about Pet Airways anywhere until I published my post.

(Oh, and of course the Hotelicopter was an April Fool.)

UPDATE: I heard from Steve Huettel, the writer of the St. Petersburg Times story. He used some of my research as a jumping-off point, but had also been working some other angles of the story before I published. He's a good egg.

I also think it's very interesting that the Pet Airways site has been intermittently available since they said they were taking reservations. Apparently there's been a lot of buzz online -- but what I thought was interesting also was that when the site is up, the reservations page says they're overwhelmed and are only taking reservations by e-mail. (And when the site is down, they're apologizing "for the incontinence." Shouldn't they leave that to the pets?)

ANOTHER UPDATE: "Incontinence" now changed to "inconvenience." That was fast.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: It looks like their partner is Suburban Air Freight, not "Suburban Airlines" or "Suburban Air Flight." And they have an operating certificate -- not sure why it didn't come up at the FAA's site. They have Beech 1900s, too...so the pets may ride in something similar to this. 

I'm not thrilled that Pet Airways essentially accused me of spreading "false rumors" about them; as I noted, I explicitly said that I don't think it's a hoax. I'm also glad they finally answered my questions, however grudgingly.

The other day, I saw a post on the Wall Street Journal's (fantastic, by the way)  "Middle Seat" air-travel blog about Pet Airways, a startup pet-only airline poised to launch this spring or summer. The Journal's source was apparently TechCrunch, where Michael Arrington had blogged about Pet Airways the day before.

Both TechCrunch and Middle Seat seemed to take Pet Airway's website -- the only source of information about the company -- at face value, repeating its information on inflight conditions for pets, the fleet, and the carrier's plans for initial service and future expansion.

Something felt "off" to me, though. Perhaps I'm just a cynical bastard -- toiling in the plastic-lined trenches of TV news can certainly do that to one -- but the idea of a pet airline seemed just a bit too fantastical and hinky. And, as my friend Amy noted, April 1 isn't far off. My curiosity was piqued. Hoax? Or nutty startup idea? (And I'm not judging startup ideas based on nuttiness: 140-character communication? Location-based cellphone games? Internet classified ads for free? Pet supplies sold by a literal sock puppet? Okay, scratch that last one.) I had a few minutes, so I decided to look into it a little.

Googling "Pet Airways" produced lots of PR-type stories written about the service and pointing back to its website. I couldn't find any stories from third parties that added any more information than was contained on the Pet Airways site. I also found this thread on Airliners.net, where aviation geeks discussed the venture's plausibility.

The Pet Airways idea felt like a hoax -- what a strange idea! -- but their site seemed surprisingly elaborate for a simple put-on. What I don't know about web design is, well, pretty much everything, but this looked like an expensive website that took a little bit of time to put together. I started compiling a mental list of pros and cons. The website had a fair amount of information on it, but it lacked any real specifics. No information, for instance, on who the management team is, who'd be operating the flights, the schedules, et cetera. I looked up the WHOIS record for the petairways.com domain name, and found that it was registered by proxy with Network Solutions Private Registration, which cloaks the registrant's identity. This was a mark in the mental "hoax" column, as was the fact that the site's route map misspells "Los Angeles." The "Our Story" page on their site lists the founders as "Dan and Alysa", but no last name or other management-team information is given.

The site's page about their aircraft fleet  mentions that their "planes are operated under part 121 and part 135 of the FAA regulations." All air carriers require FAA certification in order to operate; Part 121 of the Federal Aviation Regulations governs the rules for scheduled air carriers, and Part 135 covers commuter and on-demand operations. So I decided to look for Pet Airways' operating certificate. Fortunately, the FAA makes that easy with a handy online form. (For example, here's Delta's certificate, which covers things like their fleet and other names that they do business under.) I couldn't find any listings for Pet Airways. This made it look even more like a hoax -- what sort of crazy (ahem) fly-by-night operation would go into business as an airline without getting the proper federal paperwork in order? Seems like a recipe, as one Airliners.net commenter noted, for the FAA and DOT showing up demanding an explanation.

The site's fleet page also said that "our air operations group consists of a 20 plane fleet of Falcon 20, Convair 580 and 5800 and B- 727-100 aircraft." This seemed odd to me as well. How many startup airlines have a 20-plane fleet? You certainly don't need to have a ton of planes to serve lots of destinations; for instance, Air Tahiti Nui serves six cities on four continents with a fleet of five A340s, while Air Seychelles serves eleven destinations in Europe, Asia, and Africa with four 767s. Does Pet Airways really need 20 aircraft to serve five cities? Even if they intend to expand drastically?

It also seemed strange to me that Pet Airways is proposing to start up with the Falcon 20, the Convair 580/5800, and the Boeing 727. That's three different aircraft types , which seems like it'd be expensive to operate. Southwest Airlines famously flies only Boeing 737s, which saves them lots of money because they can standardize things like pilot and mechanic training, stocking spare parts, operational procedures and the like. Why would Pet Airways want to start by flying a small jet, a large jet, and a turboprop? This was getting curiouser and curiouser.

As I was hunting for information, I was describing my search on Twitter and updating Twitter with what I found. Pet Airways noticed, replying "you can speculate that Pet Airways is a hoax all u want, but just wait and all your answers will all come in due time" and adding "if u would like more info follow us & all ur questions will be answered in the coming months as we will announce everything here." So someone was watching, they wouldn't tell me anything. (When Middle Seat asked them for more information, they didn't have anything to say then, either.) So Pet Airways knows that people are trying to find out more about them, but they're not talking. Now it was seeming less and less like a hoax -- or rather, making the case that if it was a hoax, it was certainly an incredibly elaborate one that someone went to an awful lot of trouble to put together -- but everything I found out sparked more questions. I asked Pet Airways why they were being so cryptic, and got the very similar response "I apologize for having to be so cryptic but when the time is right you will have all your answers, just be patient."

Pet Airways isn't taking reservations yet, but they do have a telephone number and a mailing address in Delray Beach, Florida. I Googled the mailing address, and it appears to be a UPS store in a shopping center -- one that offers mailboxes. A service I hadn't heard of called CorporationWiki popped up as one of the Google results, and offers a list of companies and people who use that address. Zeroing in on the box number ("Suite C2-264") used by Pet Airways showed that the box was shared by a company called Panther Air Cargo and by a person named Daniel Wiesel. Now we were getting somewhere.

Googling "Panther Air Cargo" led me to their much more bare-bones site, which describes them as "a specialty cargo carrier transporting unique products for a select client base", adding that their specialty "is in moving items that do not fit the usual parameters for the "big carriers, and/or require that extra special handling by experts in moving." Sounds like transporting pets cross-country, doesn't it? So is Pet Airways just a d/b/a for Panther Air Cargo? It was hard to tell. For one thing, Panther Air Cargo's fleet consists of Fairchild Metro III turboprops, not the Falcons, Convairs and Boeings listed on the Pet Airways site. Interestingly, Panther's list of locations includes terminals in every city slated for Pet Airways service. Also interestingly, I couldn't find an operating certificate for Panther either.

Incidentally, Panther Air Cargo's domain name is also registered by proxy through Network Solutions Private Registrations...and more interestingly, within 24 hours of my Twittering about Panther Air Cargo, the domain name pantheraircargo.com was redirected to the Pet Airways site. (Links here are to their hosting provider's account -- those might go away or be redirected as well, so I apologize in advance for any linkrot that may happen after I post this.)

I don't know much about the world of air cargo, but I thought it was interesting that Panther's site didn't list a phone number, just an e-mail address for "Dan." I'd be willing to wager that Daniel Wiesel of the P.O. box, Dan of "Dan & Alysa", the Pet Airways founders, and Dan of Panther Air Cargo are all the same person. (I then noticed that the Pet Airways "Endorsements" page listed Dan Wiesel and Alysa Binder as the co-founders of Pet Airways. Missed that the first time around.) So I then Googled the couple, and found that they operate a recruiting company, and put their Delray Beach home on the market in September. That home, incidentally, is less than a tenth of a mile from the UPS Store where their P.O. box is. Convenient, right?

So, the upshot: I don't think it's a hoax -- it's run by identifiable people, even if they took some steps (such as the domain registrations) to hide their personal information. It seems too elaborate to be a hoax, but to this untrained eye some of their business decisions seem odd or unusually secretive. I wish them the best, though -- in this economy, anyone trying to make money in the aviation business is definitely gutsy. I hope Pet Airways makes it. It's definitely an interesting idea to leverage an air-cargo business to appeal to a niche market of affluent consumers.

By the by, I'm posting all this in exhaustive detail here not to talk about Pet Airways specifically. What I found amazing was that I could become curious about something and uncover all of this information -- including bios of the principals involved and Street View pictures of their (possibly-former) house -- with about half an hour's worth of Web searching from my chair. It was enormously fun to to find this problem and try to figure out the answers. I wish my job included more of this kind of research...but I think it might be less fun if it's about things that I'm not personally curious about.

(oh, and the Hotelicopter? Gotta be a hoax.)

I apparently picked up a virus somehow, or someone cracked my Gmail account -- at any rate, some asshole sent spam to every single one of my Gmail contacts. 

Of course, you have my utmost apologies if any got on you. I've changed my password and am working to eradicate whatever the problem is.

(Oh, and whoever owns ele-vip.com can go fuck themselves.)

Soon-To-Be Picnic Area, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

I have another piece for NewYorkology up -- a couple weeks ago, I got a tour of Governors Island and heard about GIPEC's plans for the redevelopment and activities this summer. (More pictures here.)

UPDATE: And the Governors Island Blog covered it, too!

For the record, I don't buy into all the talk of a pitched debate between "MSM" and the "citizen journalists", between old-school and new-school media, or especially between "bloggers" and "journalists." It's a canard, or at the very least a false dichotomy:  if you do journalism, you're a journalist. Whether you do it with a video camera, a tape recorder, a text editor hooked up to a newspaper or a wire service, a radio microphone, with WordPress, by wetly mimeographed paper, whatever -- you're a journalist. (Which gives rise to the oft-asked question: Can you be both a journalist and a blogger? Of course you can, and to try to define that truth out of existence means you're putting an inappropriately narrow spin on what both "journalist" and "blogger" mean.)

Why does this have my spleen up?  Well, I have another blog that focuses on cocktails, and so I try to keep up with what's going on in the (ahem) spirits world. After some Twitter contacts had pointed me there, I ran across a post on Lush Life saying that LeNell's, the best liquor store in New York, had closed and that LeNell herself was moving to London.

This was a shock; I knew that LeNell Smothers, the store's proprietor (and a Southern gal with a salty mien and encyclopedic knowledge of booze, so of course she's dear to my heart) had been having real-estate issues, but I'd heard nothing about the store closing.  But there it was in Lush Life: "LeNell's is officially closed."

Sounds pretty definitive, no?  The author of that post didn't provide any corroborating links, except to the LeNell's site, which was -- and is -- still up, with no sign that anything had changed. So I called the store's phone number, and got a voice mail saying that things were up in the air a bit, and that the store would have irregular hours for the next few days. This didn't sound like "officially closed" to me.

What gave? I dropped LeNell a line -- she's not hard to track down -- and she basically told me that the store hasn't closed, and that she's not moving to London.  She amplified this the next day in a comment on Eater:

I ain't closed just yet. Amazing how things get reported without real accuracy.

I was hoping to make a public announcement later this week, but this kind of nonsense has forced me to come out and talk.

My legal agreement extending my time at current location comes to an end at the end of February. I have not yet set the final "grand finale" date. I have leases under legal review and hope to have an answer on a potential new location by the end of this week. I was hoping to announce all of this together, but the rumor mill has spun out of control.

Then, I noticed that Lush Life responded after a fashion, backpedaling from its formerly definitive statement and quoting LeNell's comment on Eater.  No apology, no correction, not even an acknowledgement that they were wrong. Apparently "officially" -- as in "LeNell's is officially closed" -- doesn't mean the same thing over there.

See, this is the kind of thing that gives bloggers a bad name, and further enables the supercilious sneers of media traditionalists.  If your only source was "the grapevine" and "rumor has it" and "we overheard," why not, y'know, CONTACT the subject of your story? Is it too fuddy-duddy, too old-school stick-in-the-mud to make sure that what you're publishing (and not incidentally, throwing your credibility behind) has a passing acquaintance with actual events? Kinda makes the whole concept of breaking news a bit hollow, doesn't it, when you don't bother to do any checking? That's not journalism -- it's stenography.

And then, when you're shown up by the subject of your big story, it seems strange to say that you "might have let the cat out of the bag." Looks more like the cat was never in the bag. And there wasn't even a cat in the first place. And quite possibly no bag.

Lots of stuff TK, including a lengthy wrap-up of the inauguration and a piece for NewYorkology, but let me tell you about what has caught my eye lately on the Interwebs:

• Photographer David Bergman's 1,474 megapixel Gigapan image of the inauguration.  (I was just to his left, behind the AP guy with the white lens at the extreme left of his shot...and you can kind of see Bergman setting up his shot in my less-technically-accomplished panorama);
• An interesting detective story about a family recipe: Melt-in-the-Mouth Cookies, A Brief History;
• Errol Morris interviews three top wire-service photo editors on the imagery of the Bush Administration.  Utterly riveting discussion here;
• The first transcontinental jet trip was fifty years ago yesterday. The flying cocktail party's guests included Susan Hayward, Jack Kent Cooke, and a tipsy Carl Sandburg;
• David Bordwell's essay on "bugs" -- those little ID graphics in the corner of the TV channel -- and their little-known, fascinating real-life equivalent back in the silent-movie days; and
• Roger Ebert's gorgeous encomium to Steak 'n' Shake. Takhomasak!

I thought this gallery of pictures of the inauguration's dress rehearsal was fascinating.

This slideshow of Presidential inaguration Bibles was neat as well.

I'm very much looking forward to going to DC to cover the inauguration next week.  Hopefully I can see something cool too.

hullaballoo 1 page 32, originally uploaded by goopymart.

My pal Goopymart, who is awesome, has a new book out. You should check it out and pick one up.

On my way into work this afternoon, I was sitting on an N train when I heard the following announcement over the PA:

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is a message from New York City Transit. For your security, flash photography, digital photography, and video photography are prohibited aboard trains. Thank you."

(I believe the wording is verbatim, but I'm not certain; I was furiously taking notes.)  This was an announcement by the conductor, and not an automated pre-recorded announcement, by the way.

If "digital photography" (film's okay?) is prohibited, this is an unannounced policy change on behalf of New York City Transit.  Section 1050.9(c) of the system's official rules explicitly permit photography:

Photography, filming or video recording in any facility or conveyance is permitted except that ancillary equipment such as lights, reflectors or tripods may not be used. Members of the press holding valid identification issued by the New York City Police Department are hereby authorized to use necessary ancillary equipment. All photographic activity must be conducted in accordance with the provisions of this Part.

(The proposed subway photography ban was dropped in 2005, though apparently the police sporadically "enforce" it, and they've questioned me twice at subway stations.)

I've sent an e-mail to the MTA, and they say they'll respond within 15 business days.  It'd be nice to know if they've quietly banned photography aboard subway trains.  It'd be even nicer to have their employees not announcing nonexistent rules.

UPDATE:  That was fast.  I just got a response from the MTA:

We truly appreciate your interest in New York City Transit. Recreational use of cameras in public areas, such as station platforms, mezzanines, and on trains, is allowed within the New York City Transit system. However, the use of ancillary equipment such as lights, reflectors or tripods is prohibited. Professional photography requests, on the other hand, must be arranged through the Film & Special Events Unit in our Public Affairs Division. We expect that NYPD officers will continue to use their discretion in dealing with photography, filming or video recording within the system.

We have forwarded your e-mail to supervision in our Department of Subways for their review. They will take the opportunity to remind all conductors that recreational photography is no longer prohibited in the subway.

We hope this information is helpful.

So: Good for them. Hopefully they'll follow through and the message will get through to the conductors, police, and everyone else who interprets photography as a nebulous threat.

BREAKING: Greasy grimy gopher guts are still at large, authorities say.