…but it’s Lion Air.
It’s always fun to be writing for a new place, and I’m delighted to have my first piece up at Foreign Policy. It’s on how Asian budget aviation, although important for transforming the economic prospects of remote locations, is very much a double-edged sword.
Particularly when it turns out that American kit you buy that because it’s supposed to be idiot-proof, uh, wasn’t.
Lion Air has been the poster child for this particular unfortunate chain of events. They’re definitely worse than some of the airlines active in the same space. Still, there’s a broader point about connections and requirement-dodging that you’d miss if you looked at them alone.
The piece also features the death of a US Senator, in a story that I was delighted to find out about while researching. Apparently the only way you can get the US Senate to take anything seriously is to kill one of them with it. NOTE: DO NOT DO THIS AS AN ADVOCACY METHOD
Image: China Airlines Boeing 737-800 fire, Okinawa, Japan, 2007. By Runner301 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
