Disgruntled Employee or real Whistle Blower, that is the question.
The tragic crash of a Serengeti hot air balloon last week raises some very old questions and puts into doubt the safety of hot air ballooning in Tanzania.
Two passengers were killed (an American and a Dane) and eight seriously injured after the smaller of two balloons lifted off at dawn a week ago Wednesday and then crashed in turbulent winds. The flight of the larger balloon was aborted by the pilot who felt the winds were too strong.
Although no official investigations have been completed, a simple review of the situation suggests neither balloon should have been allowed to fly.
Serengeti Balloon Safaris (SBS) has acknowledged that the winds were 30 mph as the smaller gondola attempted an emergency landing that went very wrong.
Two balloons are scheduled to lift off daily in the Serengeti, and this season ballooning just began in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park as well. But Tanzania’s total capacity pales in comparison to Kenya’s, where as many as 14 balloons fly daily in a single reserve, the Maasai Mara.
I’ve spoken to principles of balloon companies in both countries, and my gut feeling is that they do it much better in Kenya than Tanzania. This might be simply because the Kenyan industry is so much larger and has had a much longer experience. And extraordinary caution is required when asking someone in Kenyan tourism about Tanzanian tourism, and vice versa, as the rivalry is profound.
But off-the-record Kenyans generally express sympathy with a vengeful website launched by what is certainly a disgruntled former SBS employee, Nigel Pogmore. Kenyans insist that many of Pogmore’s accusations of SBS’s unsafe procedures would never be seen in Kenya.
Pogmore’s long list of what SBS does wrong is mostly ridiculous, as I an untrained pilot, dare to determine. But a few do standout:
Pogmore claims he was fired because he was a “whistle blower” after being appointed SBS’ Safety Officer and then in the course of that job uncovered all sorts of safety irregularities. SBS claims Pogmore was a disgruntled employee with a very short fuse and that his past employment history bears this out.
So I asked SBS Managing Director, Tony Pascoe, why he hired Pogmore in the first place. Pascoe has not answered despite several emails to him.
Pogmore claims SBS balloons fly virtually until they run out of fuel, and therefore violate an industry standard that there be 50% fuel reserves left at the end of a flight.
While this may, indeed, be the industry standard, this is one that many Kenyan companies don’t manage, either. (Although no Kenyan company claimed they would fly until they were out of fuel.) The balloon flights in East Africa are generally short by industry standards and over pretty uncluttered (no power lines) geography. Provided the winds aren’t unusual, they can usually expect to land anywhere along the expected flight path.
Pogmore severely criticized the procedure by which SBS fired up their balloons in the morning, claiming the method they used to raise the pressure in the gas tanks was unsafe and that passengers were boarded in unsafe ways.
He also specified faulty equipment on 5 of the 6 balloons owned by SBS. This included poor or faulty Emergency Rapid Deflation (ERD) capability, fuel gauges and incorrectly maintained fire extinguishers.
Most scathingly, Pogmore claims SBS essentially ignored required safety inspections, insisting that a normal inspection took 2-3 trained staff 4-5 hours, but that his experience proved there were some inspections completed in less than ten minutes.
SBS, of course, is defending itself against all these accusation at their new “answer” site, balloonsafety.info. The problem was that site is very similar to the problem with Pogmore’s site: there’s too much emotion and not enough facts.
I had a courteous phone call with a close relative of SBS Managing Director, Tony Pascoe, and a subsequent courteous email exchange with Tony.
Tony thanked me yesterday when I advised him I had reduced our conversations into a few simple questions I would appreciate him answering.
But when I sent those questions in writing, as agreed, they’ve gone unanswered. Pascoe has suddenly gone silent. A subsequent reminder email also went unanswered.
Please see below in comments. The CEO of SBS finally did answer some of these questions after this blog was posted.
This leads me to believe they have something to hide, or at least aren’t well enough prepared yet to answer some very serious accusations.
Should you take a hot air balloon ride on your safari?
My answer for the time being is, No, not if it’s in Tanzania.
To end terror we've got to deep-six these four guys.For travelers like us terrorism is nothing new. And it’s well past the time that we should lead our fellow Americans into a fuller understanding of what it means and how to minimize it.
If you can’t stand reading through the rest of my poorly constructed nonsense, just jump to the bottom of this for MY SOLUTION.
The penultimate word in the first paragraph is the key: Minimize. Terrorism will never, ever go away. It never has. Pagan potentates enslaved tasters to eat their food, first. Famine and pestilence were certain outcomes for any misbehaving early Christian. Spies stole children from critics of the gulag. Salman Rushdie, and many of his family and friends, have remained in hiding since the 1989 fatwa ordering his murder.
And leaping into the present, Ugandan citizens are so terrified of the proposed laws against homosexuality, that as many gays may be fleeing the country today as Asians who were ordered exiled by Idi Amin in the 1980s!
By the way, know a Mexican in Phoenix?
1. TERRORISM IS NOT NEW
The first and most important point. And it should not be as powerful news as it is, today that there’s terrorism.
Every time the nightly news headlines a terrorism warning, it’s presented as something remarkably unexpected. Every single night the news is filled with mayhem, war and killing, but a terrorism “threat” elicits greater shock.
Because the mayhem, war and killing was not about you. And because the threat is simply that, something that hasn’t yet occurred and so isn’t yet fully defined, so it might involve you. Suddenly, you’re in the news.
And when it doesn’t happen, or does and doesn’t happen to you, then you recycle your psyche to be just as shocked at the next news broadcast of potential terror featuring you. Americans are all hams and gluttons for punishment.
I hate to tell you, but terrorism is just as ordinary an occurrence as hurricanes, lightning strikes and your regular ole every-year airplane crash over Rochester. It’s a part and parcel of our lives.
2. TERRORISM IS NOT MORE POWERFUL TODAY
Don’t give me that baldersash that yes, there’s always been terrorism, but not with the power of airplanes or nuclear weapons.
How many died in the halocaust? How many ships were sunk by kamikazes? How many specific terrorism deaths in the Balkans, or during the many years of conflict in Northern Ireland? How many are still being raped and decapitated in Kivu, The Congo, or Somalia? How many airplanes or nukes would it take to reach this sum?
That is not to say that the methods of terrorism haven’t changed. As the world is more interconnected, all the good and evil within it move further and more quickly. Terrorism in our generation has adopted a travel component that it didn’t use to have it, and that’s the reason we as travelers are more attuned to it.
1985: the Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking
1985: hijacking of TWA in Cairo
1988: Pan Am disaster over Lockerbie
1996: Atlanta Olympic bombings
1998: American embassies bombed in Kenya and Tanzania
9 -11
2005: 7-7 city bombings in London subway
2008: Slaughter in Mumbai
All the above specifically and successfully targeted travelers on airplanes or tourist hotels, or used travelers to get to their target. There were scores of other unsuccessful attacks like the shoe- and underpants-bombers. That’s a generation and counting of terrorism redefined to some extent by travel.
3. MOST MUSLIM TERRORISTS ARE NOT IDEOLOGUES, JUST WELL PAID
This nonsense that Mideast suicide bombers are half wits who believe they are tending roses in heaven is more baldersash. It just drives me crazy. THEY GET REALLY WELL PAID!
They are completely unlike the long history of soldiers who went into battle for ideological and religious reasons expecting to die fighting.
The most recent ideological suicide soldier was the kamikaze. And the phenomenon did not begin until the loss of Iwa Jima, after which rational people, including well trained Japanese soldiers, knew there was no hope. Read this for a thoughtful explanation of soldier ideologues.
There have been thousands of reports like the ones above corroborating that today’s suicide bombers in the Mideast do it mostly for money, not mostly for their soul or honor, and yet leave it to Americans to twist this around. This fundamental mistake is something the rest of the world doesn’t make.
This account of suicide bombers as relates kamikazes is accurate, but totally inaccurate regarding current Muslim terrorists. It’s typical of the American Right’s, mostly religious, repositioning of facts. This casts a simple proposition, that Muslim suicide bombing can be valued in dollars, into the heavenly worlds of moral conflict making it much more difficult to deal with.
This is because the current conflicts in the Mideast are all economic ones, not ideological ones. Virtually all the major conflicts on earth have been economic and this is no different. The people with more power need oil currently lived on by people with less power.
This is a tough situation and I don’t mean to belittle it in any way. I don’t think it’s clear that we as the people with more power shouldn’t have equal or more rights to the oil than the people who live on top of it. But that’s a different problem, one with a different analysis.
By redefining an economic problem into an ideological or religious one, the arguments are driven less by facts and much more by emotion. And ultimately the only way to win an emotional argument is to be more fanatic.
Please watch this. It’s heart wrenching. Sunday’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” stripped our current conflict to its reframed religiosity. And it’s so clear there’s no resolution in sight. So long as religion dominates the perspective, this war will never end.
4. THE CERTAIN WAY TO LOSE THIS WAR IS TO INCREASE THE FIGHTING
“War Against Terrorism” is as inappropriate a phrase as the “War Against Drugs” or the “War Against the Lunacy of 13-year-old Boys.” The real war today is a “War Against People Who Live Over Oil They Won’t Give Us at a Fair Market Price.”
It has been the longest war in the history of the modern world. It began when Edwin Drake extracted the first black liquid from Pennsylvania in 1859. The war really heated up when most of the world’s known oil shifted out of Texas and Oklahoma to godknowswhere deserts in the Mideast only about 50 years ago.
It was sometimes a military fight, but mostly a cultural and diplomatic one. We violated all sorts of our own values in this campaign to annex land for ourselves and our European partners so we could have its oil. We bribed, applied our laws to theirs, fixed markets, we tried everything possible until finally, we had to shoot.
And during this lengthy fifty years or two generations, the poor souls living over there noticed how fancy the cars were that were using oil. Before iPhones that was a bit more difficult, but now you can send a picture of a Dodge Ram all over the world in seconds.
We got richer. They got poorer. We got richer because of their oil.
Doesn’t compute, does it?
What would you do, a young, yet vibrant desert youth whose abs haven’t been yet emaciated for lack of proper nutrition? You watched your grandfather and your father die loathsome deaths mostly from smoking Philips cigarettes. And then with your iPhone, you saw what’s under your home made Jenny the prettiest, richest homecoming queen in the world. How come you can’t wear a carnation?
Today’s terrorism is fire. It’s the fire in the soul of two generations of Mideasterners mostly being denied their rightful development.
Terrorism’s fire is fueled by desperation, wont, poverty. What else can you call a suicide bomber? Don’t fool yourself that they all think they’re going to paradise. This is a very attractive job.
Terrorism must be watered down, not fired up. Terrorism will decline only as the desperation in the world declines, and not a second before. Until then, it will increase, and for those of us fortunate enough to not be so desperate, it will be something effecting our lives …always.
JIM’s SOLUTION TO ENDING THE CONFLICT WITH RADICAL MUSLIMS
It’s kind of hard to do this, because the numbers just won’t stay still:
Anyway, let’s give it a try. During my final edit this morning, the number was One Trillion, eight-nine billion, seven hundred and twenty-four million, one hundred and sixty-five thousand, eight hundred and thirteen dollars.
It’s been three thousand, two hundred and eighty-five days since we invaded Aghanistan on October 7, 2001.
That means, roughly give or take a few cents, we’ve been spending
$331,727,295.50 per day.
Now the area of Iraq and Afghanistan is 426,034 sq. miles. So if we divided how much we’ve been spending per day, that means we’re spending $778.64 each day on every square mile of those two countries.
Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to reduce the $778.64 by about one four-thousandths of a penny, one four-hundred-thousandths of a dollar so that my wife’s favorite local state historical site, the Apple River Fort, can be kept open, which has faced possible closure for budgetary reasons.
That leaves $778.64 available each day for every square mile, which I would bundle up in cheerfully wrapped packages using Halliburton‘s Christmas Wrapping Division, and then drop from a helicopter. Over the course of a year, that’s roughly the salaries of ten suicide bombers in each square mile, or in total, way more than whatever total has ever been paid to all the suicide bombers in the history of mankind.
The weekend terrorist alerts issued for Europe are the most extensive and serious in history. What should we do? Personally, nothing.
The best intelligence suggests a coordinated terrorist attack is currently playing itself out, right now. The media is reporting that the plans include something akin to the 2008 Mumbai slaughter where pretty good suicide gunmen fanned out across a city center shooting madly, throwing incendiary bombs.
It’s a race between implementation and prevention. But it’s not easy anywhere in Europe, any more, to pack a weapon and go into a populated area. It’s not even easy to get a weapon, or ammunition… as it is in the U.S.
Alerting travelers and residents alike, there will be more eyes and ears to report unsavory activity. It will increase the chances that nothing will happen.
But shouldn’t I advise you to “just wait a while?” Let things cool down? Sure I could, and so could the terrorists wait a while. (Or following a dreaded success, they could claim another is imminent.)
Don’t exaggerate our own government’s announcement. It’s an alert, not a warning. Were it a warning, I might argue differently.
The risk of being hurt by terrorists in Europe, now, is worth the risk of any travel you have arranged. It’s time for the frequent reminder of the threats you and your children face crossing busy city streets, driving on an interstate, or injuring yourself while playing sports.
All of these are greater than you being hurt soon by terrorists in Europe. God forbid, even if it happens, as car wrecks happen every minute. There’s not the slightest indication, for example, that the target relates to travel or airports, any more than it does to pubs or hotels or hospitals or malls. All that we might surmise is that it is planned for areas with lots of people.
The counter I often hear is that crossing the street, driving, working out, are all essential to your daily lives, but that vacation travel isn’t.
We can just stay home, the argument goes. We don’t have to travel.
For those of us fortunate to have the means to travel, we probably also have nice homes and comfortable life styles that to many may now seem a safer alternative. Five hundred cable channels and sixty types of potatoes chips with three nearby pizza delivery services. And as soon as we nuke all the deer in our city parks, we won’t have to worry about tick fever, either.
It’s precisely because Americans have so insulated themselves from the outside world that we started the wars in my life time that I believe have led to the current level of terrorism. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner, and it’s a very tiny, self-contained corner.
About a third of all American travel is to Europe. Nearly a third of that is by Americans who will never travel anywhere else except on a cruise.
Please, enjoy Europe, now. A life in a box isn’t worth living.
Two newly discovered life forms: it's all a matter of perspective!Leucitic hippos, pinpoint frogs and the 18th species of elephant shrew crowd the stage as scientists celebrate the UN’s Year of Biodiversity in Nairobi this week and next.
As for any meeting, you’ve got to have that charismatic headliner, and this time it’s the still unnamed new species of elephant shrew found (right on queue) only last month in far northeastern Kenya.
There are about 7,000 new species discovered every year, although only 100 of those are vertebrates, and for sure, you can’t headline a conference with a grease eating microbe. Actually to be fair, most of the thousands are nicely sized plants, and most of the 100 vertebrates found are fish.
But Kenya’s new little discovery in the Boni-Dodori forest couldn’t have come at a better time, just as the conference began and just as governments and NGOs are reducing their funds for biodiversity research.
All elephant shrews are endemic to Africa, and the other 17 known to science are directly linked to elephants through DNA analysis, going way way back to before the woolly mammoth. In fact, the shrew is a much better remnant of the elephant’s common ancestor with it, than the elephant. Gigantism is an evolutionary trend that effects nearly all new species.
The shrew’s taxonomy is likely closer to the first known mammals about 240 million years ago than it is to the elephant we see today!
And that extraordinary span in time can give us a glimpse into evolutionary dynamics that, who knows, might give us a baseline to analyze the life we might find on distant Gliese 581g!
The shrew’s discovery is also important because it lives in a forest zone that is being rapidly reduced by development, and an area currently in war. The forest is on the border with Somalia.
It’s a weak argument to Kenyan military commanders that they ought to abandon fighting Al-Shabaab in order to save an elephant shrew. But it isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. Your doubtless reaction is to smile at presumed sarcasm. But ultimately, isn’t that what we’re fighting for on all sides? A better life?
And the more we know about “life” the better we can manage our portion of it.
Here are some of the most recent new nonplant, nonfish newly living creatures found on our wondrous planet that will be discussed at the conference.
Smallest Frog in the World
Discovered August 25, 2010 in a pitcher plant in Borneo.
Shown in top picture above.
