Ahead of the Crowd

If you’re like me, you strive for a low profile while traveling. You want to avoid the watchful eyes of every nosy Tom, Dick, and Harriet as you fly the Gulfstream to London to visit the tailor. Alas, there is precious little privacy left. Once your inquisitive comrades know the tail number of your personal aircraft, your life is an open book. They can track your jet’s every move on FlightAware. (Photo credit: albspotter.)

But money can still buy happiness. By filling out a simple form and paying a mere $720 annual fee to FlightAware, you can conceal your plane’s whereabouts from the prying eyes of the site’s users. How nice of FlightAware to provide this helpful service. They didn’t invent the hush money business model, but they’ve certainly done a great job translating it to Web 2.0.

I wonder how long it will take government to catch on to this. After all, you can look up on the local property tax site the value of my neighbor’s house and even the size of her swimming pool. The tax man could easily whip up a form that would shake me down for a pretty penny to remove data about my house from the tax site. Ain’t Web 2.0 grand?

In today’s Wall Street Journal, a front page piece tells amazing stories of Alaska Airlines pilots flying up north. In beat-up Boeing 737-200s affectionately called “mud hens,” they flew into the world’s toughest airports. What got my attention was this snippet:

Capt. Malcolm af Uhr, 45, co-piloted a flight headed for Juneau in a snow storm. He and his pilot aborted four attempts to land because they couldn’t see the runway at the critical moment. After refueling back in Sitka, 95 miles away, they returned to Juneau and tried to land five more times without success. As local fliers dozed or read the paper, a passenger from California stood and demanded, “What’s wrong with you people?” The plane finally landed on the 10th try.

I have to admire that kind of patience, persistence, and derring-do. Seldom have I experienced similar effort in the computer industry. Capt. af Uhr’s everyday heroism makes me feel jealous of his passion.