Understand and agree.
The intercom system gets messy in even A320/737-sized airplanes where it’s sorta a hybrid between a telephone system where one extension can call another, and a big party line where everyone can talk at once. Add in that the “ringing” is subtle, the pilots have at least 2, often 3, other channels of audio coming into their ears, and you have a human-machine system prone to operational failure even if the machinery part is operating exactly to spec.
Interesting short articles on the rise and fall of Pan Am, and the abortive US answer to Concorde:
I remember reading a book about that some time ago. Juan Trippe was quite the aviation pioneer but it sounds like he made some serious missteps as the airline grew. Also, although the article mentions the crash over Lockerbie, Scotland in which a terrorist bomb brought down a Pan Am 747, there were other accidents with fatalities including the one in Tenerife which was, and I believe remains, the worst aviation accident in history. In fact, in the modern jet age alone, starting with an accident in 1963 and until the airline’s eventual demise, Pan Am experienced around 18 major accidents with fatalities, most of which were not the airline’s fault, but I had the impression they were getting a less than desirable reputation as a result.
Pan Am was mostly killed off as a result of how deregulation played out. They were, by regulation, a purely overseas carrier with substantially no domestic presence at all.
Then domestic US was deregulated and exploded in volume. Everybody else was growing and making money like mad. They had no idea what to do. Sorta like Kodak and digital, they knew they had to do something, but everything they tried was too dumb, too little, and much too late.
Then Open Skies over the Atlantic hit and suddenly their monopoly refuge was opened to all the other hungry US carriers used to expanding into every nook and cranny of the marketplace. They were a skinny kid having just received the kickoff as the entire front line of an NFL team ran them over to grab the ball.
TWA was another overseas-heavy carrier in the regulated era. Northwest Orient was the third. Both these carriers had reasonable domestic presence but the regulated international was their bread and butter. When domestic deregulation hit, they too were slow to recognize the new world they were in.
The details of their subsequent trajectories are different, but broadly speaking they were never able to compete effectively in the post-deregulated world and were eventually bought by more successful competitors.
I’m still sad about this, though much more decades ago. I was an employee a bit over 5 years, though on the government contract side. We still got the same flight benefits, and them being primarily an international carrier made it difficult to get a free flight to somewhere you could actually afford to stay a few days (at least as a 20-something).
Question which is then begged: is it no longer possible for an American-based airline to be profitable purely from international routes?
I don’t think there’s ever been an attempt since the 1930s to create such a thing.
My gut is “No it isn’t.” For a lot of reasons, many of which are regulatory. It would be very difficult as a start-up in today’s crowded world to obtain slots and authorities to operate between e.g. two major gateway cities in two countries. If you did, how would you differentiate your product from everyone else’s. When they can ticket you from damn near anywhere in either country, and you can only sell tickets between your gateway cities.
Here is a post I made in this thread some time ago featuring an ad that Pan Am ran sometime around the mid-60s showing with unbridled optimism what the future of air travel would look like by 1969. It featured the 747, the Concorde, and the Boeing 2707 SST – all of which Pan Am promised to be the first airline to fly.
Both of the SSTs seemed to make sense to an airline with primarily long-distance international routes, at least in theory. Alas, it was not to be. The Concorde turned out to be an impractical vanity project, and the Boeing of course was never built. The only one of the three they actually flew was the 747. The childlike optimism of that ad makes me sad, especially since commercial air travel overall has more or less gone to shit, with long waits, long lines, and obnoxious passengers. I remember the days of my youth, and even decades later, when it was just delightful.
If they raised fares to 10x current levels to be the same as q960s fares, decent bet air travel would once again be low in crowding and high in service.
I highly recommend watching the 3 part documentary called “Crossing the Pacific”.
Pan Am IS the creation of modern commercial aviation. and that’s an understatement of fact.
It starts with Juan Trippe watching Wilbur Wright fly around the Statue of Liberty in 1909. As an adult his first Air Mail flight was Oct 19 1927 to Cuba and that was going to fail until he hunted down a private float plane pilot who would do it. The pilot’s name was Cy Caldwell and he unknowingly saved Juan’s mail contract and the future Pan Am.
Juan then started to pair routes with available planes to grow the business. That quickly led him to Igor Sikorsky who he commissioned to build ever larger amphibious planes starting with the S-38 to the S-42
This process started before radio navigation existed. Pan Am hired radio pioneer Hugo Leuteritz brought over from RCA.
The South American routes were scouted out by Charles Lindbergh. His wife helped as a crucial crew member of this endeavor.
In order to get across the Pacific, Tripp needed a plane that would make it, navigation to guide him, and places along the route to land. He literally took Wake Island’s lagoon and blasted a landing zone out of the coral and then built an airport and radio navigation system.
A fighter jet and a helicopter based off the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz both crashed into the South China Sea within 30 minutes of each other, the Navy’s Pacific Fleet said.
The three crew members of the MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter were rescued on Sunday afternoon, and the two aviators in the F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet ejected and were recovered safely, and all five “are safe and in stable condition,” the fleet said in a statement.
The causes of the two crashes were under investigation, the statement said.
President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Tokyo on Monday, said the incidents could have been caused by “bad fuel.” He ruled out foul play and said there was “nothing to hide.”
Do Sea Hawks and F/A-18s use the same fuel?
All modern US military aircraft use the same fuel. Jet fuel.
Thanks. Based on the source, I had to ask.
Probably a decent bet fuel had exactly zero to do with either of these events. But we’ll see.
All the current news articles (1000 ET on 10/27) amount to what you cite: two crashes and the moron in chief throwing out off the cuff stupidity.
Do we know if the pilots were clean-shaven?
DId the Orange Idiot explain why only those two aircraft were affected by “bad fuel” and no others? I’m surprised he didn’t suggest “probably carburetor problems”.
Well, the bad fuel got in there & it would carb but it wouldn’t buretor. Geez, tell me you didn’t know that already. 
Well that blows…Delta flight attendant suffers from
premature evacuation in a six-figure $ error.
Oops.
The bottom half of that article reads like AI slop. Basically correct, but cluelessly so. Plus odd grammar.
Slide pops are one of those “no excuses for absent-minded behavior” events. Kinda like an inadvertent discharge from somebody who carries a gun for a living. When you’re dealing with something that bites back hard, keep your mind on the task at hand. Which also means not moving your hands faster than your brain can think.
But surely there was a placard?!?
It’s kind of a running joke how much of my job amounts to making sure there’s signage to tell occupants what to do (or what not to do!) and yet we all know that no one reads them.