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At the airport, Morris checked with other airlines and was told they had not added weight limits for wheelchairs.

Morris filed a complaint with American Airlines and quickly got back a written response: "The wheelchair could not be loaded on the aircraft due to the weight limitations and the passenger could not leave the wheelchair behind, so he was denied boarding for the flight."

Morris says he could not find the policy on American's website but a representative he spoke to on the phone said the new weight limit began in June.

In 2018, the federal government started requiring an airline to report every time it damaged or lost a wheelchair. It turned out that was happening about 25 to 30 times a day — at least, before air travel fell during the coronavirus.

To Morris, that didn't make sense.

The aircraft hasn't changed. The only thing that has changed is that the airline has made a decision to exclude me."

The weight of a power wheelchair varies and is determined by components including batteries, motors, seating and systems that allow a wheelchair to tilt — which helps someone who can't move avoid painful skin ulcers — and other components.

A federal law, the Air Carrier Access Act, says an airline cannot refuse to take a passenger on the basis of his disability.

Kenneth Shiotani, an attorney with the National Disability Rights Network, looked through the Department of Transportation's regulations around that act and said he believes a weight limit on wheelchairs violates the act.

An airline can limit a wheelchair, based on size, if it doesn't fit through a plane's cargo doors. Morris lists those cargo door sizes on his website, Wheelchair Travel, so travelers can know in advance whether they need to modify a chair or use a different one before a flight. He knew, for instance, that the door on the Canadair Regional Jet model he was flying has a cargo door 33 inches high, large enough to take his wheelchair.

That travel is often essential, says Lee Page of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. "He needs to get there for job opportunities, or get there because of family emergency or get there because he's got a health appointment," Page says. "And in some cases, the only way to get to that destination might be that flight."

After NPR asked American Airlines about the limit, the airline's spokesperson said the restriction would remain in place. But she said the airline had offered Morris an "apology" and an accommodation: Next time, American said it would take the batteries off his wheelchair. That might get the chair under the 300-pound weight limit.

On Wednesday, Morris got to fly again.

U.S. airlines are set to receive $25 billion in grants to cover payrolls over the next six months

Before the global crisis, U.S. airlines were transporting a record 2.5 million passengers a day. Now planes are only 10% to 20% full and new bookings are showing 80% to 90% declines in traffic even after dramatic cuts in capacity, industry lobby Airlines for America said.

Airlines say the situation is dramatically different from just four weeks ago and getting worse each day with no end in sight. All are planning continued capacity reductions into the summer.

The industry directly supports 750,000 jobs and has argued that it must have the financial ability to jump-start operations once demand starts to return.

The leaders of American Airlines Group Inc, which has the largest workforce of any U.S. carrier, said late Thursday that they had not decided to apply for federal funds, noting that the terms were still unclear.

Still, Mnuchin insisted on Friday that taxpayers would be compensated. “I’ve been very clear this is not an airline bailout,” he told Fox Business Network.

So how big a deal is this? Huge, say industry insiders -- big enough to have already shaken the aviation map of Europe, and big enough to have knock-on effects beyond the continent -- particularly if the situation escalates further.

If it did, passengers could see their flight times increased, a rise in fares across the networks, and even long-haul, nonstop flights needing to make refueling stops along the way.

"Now that they're not flying over its airspace, that's good -- governments have acted swiftly to restore confidence -- but I think it'll throw up questions for consumers over who they're flying with, which points they're flying between and how they're flying between them. If you were flying from Athens to Lithuania, or in the region around Russia, you might think twice.

The events, described by some governments as a state-sponsored hijacking, have "inevitably redrawn the aviation map of Europe," says one airline industry insider, who wanted to remain anonymous due to the risk of being identified. (

But the issues don't just end there, they say. "The problem you have is the challenge around where you draw the new map -- that whole region has restrictions."There are already restrictions flying over Ukraine"

"So Belarus had seen a huge increase in traffic because people were going around Ukraine."

"Airlines will either have to go very far north into the polar region, or to go down to the Gulf States -- but then most European carriers would avoid flying over Iraq and Iran. So, they'd probably go over Egypt, Saudi Arabia and across India.

"There's a big lump of airspace which is strategically important to airlines and is now being denied them -- and there'll be a knock-on effect on flight times, cost, and environmental impact."

Everyone in the industry agrees that if diversions become a long-term thing, it'll be a headache.

As well as the increased fuel burn and longer flight times, he says, any unplanned stops can send crews over their allotted hours. "They might need to be swapped out, with a new crew being flown in. There are significant consequences to this sort of disruption," he says.

The rules and regulations around airline safety are "absolutely sacrosanct," he says -- and have been enshrined in international law since 1944, in the Chicago Convention, which established freedom of the skies after the Second World War.

"This is the first time that a mechanism designed to ensure the safety and security of air travel has allegedly been used for political ends, and what's also worrying is that the political response to that has also been to use another mechanism designed to ensure flight security for political ends.

If you start playing politics with flight safety, you're setting out on a slippery slope, he argues.

"This symbolizes something really big -- since the Chicago Convention, freedom of the skies has been laid out. It's supposed to be universally accepted that airlines have a right to overfly a foreign country without being forced to land," they say.

"Clearly that has been violated. What Belarus is said to have done is really horrible -- and if it turns out to be a precedent, it's even worse. It's a terrible signifier of what could happen."

In short?"Everyone is worried about what this incident means for the future."

The deal is United’s latest attempt to position itself as a risk taker shaking up an industry that is just getting back on its feet after a devastating pandemic. The airline announced a $20 million investment in an electric air taxi start-up, Archer, in February, and it is working on a “steady drumbeat” of more such bets, said Michael Leskinen, who heads corporate development at United.

What is not clear is whether Boom has solved the problems that forced British Airways and Air France to stop using the Concorde on trans-Atlantic flights — high costs, safety concerns and flagging demand.

Boom, which is working with Rolls-Royce, the British jet engine maker, said its plane would be more efficient than the Concorde; United estimates it will be 75 percent more efficient.

Mr. Scholl said the engines on Boom’s planes would rely entirely on sustainable aviation fuel, which can be made from waste, plants and other organic matter. Experts say such fuel could reduce emissions, but its supply is limited, it is expensive and its use does not eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

But corporate and international travel is expected to rebound slowly from the pandemic, and some experts say it might not recover fully for years because companies have realized that they can be effective without as many in-person meetings.

So far, the biggest shift has been in green-conscious Sweden, where airline executives blame increased train travel — up one-third this summer compared with a year ago — for a drop in air passenger traffic.

The newly coined concept of flygskam, or “flight shame,” has turned some Swedes bashful about their globe-trotting. A guerrilla campaign used Instagram to tally the planet-busting travels of top Swedish celebrities.

Hilm, 31, a health-care consultant who was on his way to hike across Austria for eight days, said he tried to live an environmentally responsible life. “I don’t drive a car. I eat mostly vegetarian. I live in an apartment, not a big house.”

He was stunned when he assessed the impact of his flights. “I did one of those calculators you can do online,” he said, “and 80 percent of my emissions were from travel.

“I don’t want to say I’ll never fly again, but I do want to be conscious about the decisions I make,”

What was it worth? Measuring carbon dioxide emissions from travel can be an inexact science. One popular online calculator suggested that Hilm’s trip would have led to about 577 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions if he had flown, compared with 118 pounds by rail, a savings of 80 percent.

In the first six months of 2019, air passenger traffic was down 3.8 percent in Sweden compared with the previous year. Climate concerns are among several reasons for the downtur

Across Europe, air travel still ticked up — by 4.4 percent — in the first quarter of 2019

for young, green Europeans, saying no to flying is becoming a thing.

The shift has been inspired in part by Greta Thunberg

Thunberg has not been on a plane since 2015. This week, she said she would soon travel to the United States — by sailboat.

called Tagsemester, or Train Vacatio

The aviation sector generates about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — meaning it’s only a small fraction of the problem

Jet fuel is currently untaxed in the E.U., unlike in the United States. France this month announced it would introduce an eco-tax on flights originating at French airports, with the money to be reinvested in rail networks and other environmentally friendly transport. Several other European countries have imposed or increased flight taxes. The Dutch government is lobbying for an E.U.-wide tax on aviation.

SAS, the largest airline in Scandinavia, is ending in-flight duty-free sales and asking passengers to pre-book meals so planes can be lighter and more fuel-efficient. Pilots have been urged to taxi on the ground with only one engine switched on.

He said the airline was pushing to expand its use of renewable fuels as quickly as possible.

Climate change experts caution that meaningful shifts will need to happen on a structural level that goes beyond any individual’s private actions. 

“In terms of personal climate activism broadly, whether you’re talking about aviation, reducing the amount of meat you eat, consumption choices, the answer is always: It is important, but it is insufficient,” said Greg Carlock, a manager at the World Resources Institute, a Washington think tank.

“Planes just don’t blow up in mid air,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at Teal Group, an aviation consulting firm. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Iranian news organizations tied to the government referred to technical problems with the plane, but they did not elaborate or cite evidence.

An airliner should be able to fly even if one engine fails. An “uncontained” engine failure, in which parts of the engine disintegrate, can spray shrapnel that damages and even destroys the plane, but such events are rare.

After the crash, Ukraine’s embassy in Iran initially issued a statement ruling out terrorism or a rocket attack as a cause of the crash. But the statement was later removed from the embassy’s website and replaced by one saying it was too early to draw any conclusions.

After an accident, the “black boxes” are often sent to the plane’s maker for analysis, but Iran would not send the flight data recorders to Boeing, an American company, Mr. Abedzadeh said in an interview with Mehr. “We will not give the black box to the manufacturer and the Americans,” Mehr quoted him as saying.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he had ordered the prosecutor general to open a criminal investigation into the crash and that the country’s entire civil aviation fleet would be checked.

On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration barred American airliners from flying over Iran, citing a risk that commercial planes would be mistaken for military aircraft. Several non-American carriers rerouted flights on Wednesday to avoid Iraq and Iran, according to Flightradar24.

The airline said it was canceling flights to Tehran indefinitely and promised a full investigation into the causes of the crash, involving officials from Ukraine, Iran and Boeing.

The airline began in the 1990s as newly independent Ukraine’s state flag carrier but was subsequently privatized. Its website calls the business a “public private entity.”

But because U.S. passenger airlines had stopped all flights by March 12, they have been unable to resume flights to China.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has barred Chinese passenger carriers from flying into America starting June 16 as it pressures Beijing to let U.S. airlines to resume flights to the country.

The CAAC also said all airlines will be allowed to increase the number of international flights involving China to two per week if no incoming passengers on their flights test positive for COVID-19 for 3 consecutive weeks.

Firewalls around the engines, nitrogen pumps in fuel tanks that help prevent immediate burning, and fire-resistant materials on seats and flooring most likely helped to keep the rising flames at bay, said Sonya A. Brown, a senior lecturer in aerospace design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

“Really, the Japan Airlines crew in this case performed extremely well,” Dr. Brown said. The fact that passengers did not stop to retrieve carry-on luggage or otherwise slow down the exit was “really critical,” she added.

Tadayuki Tsutsumi, an official at Japan Airlines, said the most important component of crew performance during an emergency was “panic control” and determining which exit doors were safe to use.

Former flight attendants described the rigorous training and drills that crew members undergo to prepare for emergencies. “When training for evacuation procedures, we repeatedly used smoke/fire simulation to make sure we could be mentally ready when situations like those occurred in reality,” Yoko Chang, a former cabin attendant and an instructor of aspiring crew members, wrote in an Instagram message.

Ms. Chang, who did not work for JAL, added that airlines require cabin crew members to pass evacuation exams every six months.

“This is an important day for our customers, our people and our financial stakeholders. This agreement allows us to take the final steps in creating the new American Airline

On Thursday, the Belarusian government ordered the number of staff at the U.S. Embassy in Minsk to be reduced effective June 13.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said it was cutting an unspecified number of both "diplomatic and administrative-technical" staff at the embassy. The agency also announced that Belarus would restrict visa procedures and revoke permission for USAID to work in the country.

The moves come after the Biden administration reimplemented full sanctions against nine state-owned enterprises in Belarus, effective Thursday.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price blamed Belarus for the poor state of relations, saying it's due to the "relentless and intensifying repression against" Belarusian citizens, culminating in the arrest of Protasevich.

For two days this week, airline traffic between Russia and Germany was suspended. Germany halted landings of Russian airlines in the country because Russia didn't allow arrivals of Lufthansa flights into its airports.

Shoggoths are fictional creatures, introduced by the science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft in his 1936 novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Lovecraft’s telling, Shoggoths were massive, blob-like monsters made out of iridescent black goo, covered in tentacles and eyes.

In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses, and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model.

Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F. are better behaved than models without it. But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath.

@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

@TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable.

“I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

when Bing’s chatbot became unhinged and tried to break up my marriage, an A.I. researcher I know congratulated me on “glimpsing the Shoggoth.” A fellow A.I. journalist joked that when it came to fine-tuning Bing, Microsoft had forgotten to put on its smiley-face mask.

If it’s an A.I. safety researcher talking about the Shoggoth, maybe that person is passionate about preventing A.I. systems from displaying their true, Shoggoth-like nature.

In any case, the Shoggoth is a potent metaphor that encapsulates one of the most bizarre facts about the A.I. world, which is that many of the people working on this technology are somewhat mystified by their own creations. They don’t fully understand the inner workings of A.I. language models, how they acquire new capabilities or why they behave unpredictably at times. They aren’t totally sure if A.I. is going to be net-good or net-bad for the world.

That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

A great many people are dismissive of suggestions that any of these systems are “really” thinking, because they’re “just” doing something banal (like making statistical predictions about the next word in a sentence). What they fail to appreciate is that there is every reason to suspect that human cognition is “just” doing those exact same things. It matters not that birds flap their wings but airliners don’t. Both fly. And these machines think. And, just as airliners fly faster and higher and farther than birds while carrying far more weight, these machines are already outthinking the majority of humans at the majority of tasks. Further, that machines aren’t perfect thinkers is about as relevant as the fact that air travel isn’t instantaneous. Now consider: we’re well past the Wright flyer level of thinking machine, past the early biplanes, somewhere about the first commercial airline level. Not quite the DC-10, I think. Can you imagine what the AI equivalent of a 777 will be like? Fasten your seatbelts.

@BLA. You are incorrect. Everything has nature. Its nature is manifested in making humans react. Sure, no humans, no nature, but here we are. The writer and various sources are not attributing nature to AI so much as admitting that they don’t know what this nature might be, and there are reasons to be scared of it. More concerning to me is the idea that this field is resorting to geek culture reference points to explain and comprehend itself. It’s not so much the algorithm has no soul, but that the souls of the humans making it possible are stupendously and tragically underdeveloped.

@thomas h. You make my point perfectly. You’re observing that the way a plane flies — by using a turbine to generate thrust from combusting kerosene, for example — is nothing like the way that a bird flies, which is by using the energy from eating plant seeds to contract the muscles in its wings to make them flap. You are absolutely correct in that observation, but it’s also almost utterly irrelevant. And it ignores that, to a first approximation, there’s no difference in the physics you would use to describe a hawk riding a thermal and an airliner gliding (essentially) unpowered in its final descent to the runway. Further, you do yourself a grave disservice in being dismissive of the abilities of thinking machines, in exactly the same way that early skeptics have been dismissive of every new technology in all of human history. Writing would make people dumb; automobiles lacked the intelligence of horses; no computer could possibly beat a chess grandmaster because it can’t comprehend strategy; and on and on and on. Humans aren’t nearly as special as we fool ourselves into believing. If you want to have any hope of acting responsibly in the age of intelligent machines, you’ll have to accept that, like it or not, and whether or not it fits with your preconceived notions of what thinking is and how it is or should be done … machines can and do think, many of them better than you in a great many ways. b&

When even tech companies are saying AI is moving too fast, and the articles land on page 1 of the NYT (there's an old reference), I think the greedy will not think twice about exploiting this technology, with no ethical considerations, at all.

@nome sane? The problem is it isn't data as we understand it. We know what the datasets are -- they were used to train the AI's. But once trained, the AI is thinking for itself, with results that have surprised everybody.

The unique feature of a shoggoth is it can become whatever is needed for a particular job. There's no actual shape so it's not a bad metaphor, if an imperfect image. Shoghoths also turned upon and destroyed their creators, so the cautionary metaphor is in there, too. A shame more Asimov wasn't baked into AI. But then the conflict about how to handle AI in relation to people was key to those stories, too.

On Thursday, rescuers said they had found engine components, part of a wing and other “important debris” as they searched the mountainside in a rural part of the Guangxi region for a fourth day.

Mr. Zhang, who was born in 1963, was one of China’s most experienced pilots,

A day earlier, the workers had found a black box, believed to be the cockpit voice recorder, which could provide investigators with crucial details. Officials said it was damaged but that its memory unit was relatively intact. The plane’s second black box, which records flight data, has yet to be recovered.

At the main crash site, a state broadcaster showed the workers digging with shovels around a large piece of wreckage that the reporter described as a wing, which bore part of the China Eastern logo and was perched on a steep, barren slope fringed by dense thickets of now-flattened bamboo. Heavy rains had left the roads slick and inundated the earth with muddy pools.

Their past performance was “very good,” Sun Shiying, the chairman of China Eastern Airlines’ Yunnan branch, said on Wednesday. When reached by phone, an airline representative declined to answer further questions about the crew.

Over his career as a commercial pilot with China Yunnan, which later merged with China Eastern, Mr. Zhang flew four different models of aircraft and accumulated 31,769 hours of flight experience.

The airline commonly paired young pilots with older pilots, and Mr. Zhang had mentored more than 100, CAAC News said. Mr. Yang was one of them.

Experts said that investigating the crash, which involved a sudden dive from cruising altitude in good weather, would require a close look at both the aircraft and the pilots, including the possibility that the plane was deliberately brought down. But they stressed that the cause was far from determined.

“Certainly an intentional downing is always a part of any investigation, and especially with this particular flight profile,” said Hassan Shahidi, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization created after World War II to promote aviation safety. But he cautioned that it was “premature to jump onto any possibilities.”

“If the captain were intending to commit suicide, they’d have to overcome the other flight crew members,” Mr. Marks said.

Explosives experts said it was feasible the device shown in the photo could bring down a plane, depending on where it was located and the density of explosives in the soft drink can. The most vulnerable locations include the fuel line, the cockpit or anywhere close to the fuselage skin.

Experts added that the photo could also provide a key clue in tracking Islamic State as the detonator pictured was a commercial one, which could be traced back to its manufacturer.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday the U.S. government was not in a position to confirm "the veracity" of the magazine's claim.

activity is likely the reason," he said, referring to the crash.

"We do believe that terrorist

also published a photo of what it said were passports belonging to dead Russians "obtained by the mujahideen". It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the published photos.The group, which has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq, said it had exploited a loophole at Sharm al-Sheikh airport, where the plane originated, in order to smuggle a bomb on board.

The airport is widely used by budget and charter airlines to fly tourists to the nearby resorts on the Sinai coast.

said it had initially planned to bring down a plane belonging to a country participating in the U.S.-led coalition bombing it in Syria and Iraq, but it changed course after Moscow started its own air strikes campaign in Syria.

Islamic State's Egyptian branch, Sinai Province, claimed responsibility for the attack the day it happened but Egyptian officials were quick to dismiss talk of a bomb as premature.

The 24 at the Transportation Department lag behind only the 31 at HHS and 47 in the executive office of the president.

The swamp has overflowed, with lobbyists employed by Trump quintupling over two years. Boeing, American Airlines and 31 other corporate entities landed at least five former lobbyists apiece. Public Citizen reported that, five months into the administration, nearly 70 percent of top nominees had corporate ties.

In addition, the billions of dollars that corporate executives invest in lobbying and campaign contributions have generated healthy returns: a corporate tax cut, an assault on regulations and unrelenting efforts to shrink enforcement. The president, who previously attempted to privatize 30,000 FAA jobs, again proposed slashing the FAA in his budget this week.

Corporate victories keep coming. The Los Angeles Times just obtained emails showing that EPA officials moved to block NASA from monitoring pollution levels. Politico recently obtained data that showed that the Interior Department gave oil drillers nearly 1,700 waivers of safety rules implemented after BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has documented more than 70 “attacks on science,” many benefiting corporations: censoring scientific language, suppressing studies, weakening advisory panels and such. The group suspects “inappropriate corporate influence” in rolling back fuel efficiency, chemical and methane standards, repealing the Clean Power Plan, suppressing known health risks, expanding oil and gas leasing and bailing out the coal industry, among others.

“The provisions we were focused on simply would hold the airlines to what they already said they’re going to do,” Petsonk said. “People do not want to solve one crisis by making another crisis worse.” The 2008 auto industry bailout, in comparison, led to stricter rules for pollution from vehicle tailpipes.

“Was this a missed opportunity for climate? I think the answer to that is no,” Segal said. “This stimulus package was primarily about getting money into the hands of individual households and workers and in some service sectors that were particularly hurt.”

Democrats negotiated multiple measures meant to prevent abuse of the $500bn available in lending, including an oversight board, a special inspector general and provisions aimed at limiting Donald Trump’s businesses from benefiting – an issue that has already come under scrutiny.

“It’s great that [Trump’s son-in-law ] Jared Kushner isn’t going to get a subsidised line of credit. It’s much more worrying in human terms that Chevron, Exxon and every other polluter you can imagine is eligible to be propped up in terms of the stimulus package.”

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) projects that the US wind industry could lose 35,000 jobs and $35bn in investment. Those losses could lead to lease payment and tax revenue reductions for local and state governments. No tax credit extensions have been granted for the solar and wind industries, meaning they may lose access to credits if they miss deadlines.

In one climate win for Democrats, the bill does not include a discussed $3bn to buy oil to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to lift global oil prices.

He frequently spreads, at best, misinformation and, at worst, lies. But the Guardian is working tirelessly to filter out misinformation and separate fact from fiction.

The need for a robust, independent press has never been greater, and with your support we can continue to provide fact-based reporting that offers public scrutiny and gives people the tools to make decisions about their lives, health and security. You’ve read more than 11 articles in the last four months.

The plan is for individuals to get up to $1,200 and married couples to get up to $2,400, including $500 for each child. The size of a check would diminish gradually for those whose income is above $75,000, while individuals earning more than $99,000 and couples earning more than $198,000 will not be getting any checks. The checks will be based on a household or individual’s 2018 tax return unless they filed their 2019 tax return, in which case it will be based of their 2019 return.

Democrats and even some Republicans are adamant that corporations are given fair assistance that will not end up in the pockets of wealthy shareholders or corporate executives.

Companies who receive government assistance will also see restrictions on stock buybacks, which is when a company buys shares of its own stock to increase the value of its shares, ultimately helping their wealthy stockholders and corporate executives. Commercial airlines have been known for buying back their own shares.

The deal extends unemployment insurance by 13 weeks and covers self-employed and furloughed workers, offering workers $600 a week for those additional four months in addition to what a state will provide through their own program.

The bill will relieve burden on the healthcare sector by including a “Marshall Plan” that will give $130bn in grants and assistance to hospitals. The bill also boosts Medicare payments for hospitals treating patients with Covid-19.

What is most galling about this economy is that we are supposed to proffer compliance and complicity as companies profit amorally off of us. Facebook unveils supposedly robust privacy protections on the same day it launches a service to connect you with your “secret crush.”

You’re supposed to pay whatever rent landlords want, whatever bills hospitals charge, whatever price surge the car-share makes up.

From Apple to John Deere, digital-rights-management technology has made us “tenants on our own devices.” The terms of service turn us into the servants. And what recourse do we have? We ask to speak with the manager, vent to Yelp, endure the hold muzak and hack our way to rival bargains. But let’s be honest: We don’t have power.

“How can you treat us like this? Do you think that this is normal?” Hundreds in the line broke into applause. At no point in those 12 hours did a United employee walk up and down the line to see how we were doing, offer blankets or water, or get our customer service session started early, the way they do in long lines at, say, Starbucks.

“What you need to do,” Benilda said, “is buy a new ticket. Because now you’ll just be on standby for the next flight and the next. That could last for days.”

For those of us living hand-to-mouth — which is to say, most of us — it takes years of nothing going wrong to earn your way out of poverty. I had gone wrong: I had slept, awaking back at square one

Maybe a few of us were in dire straits because we were confused or uninformed or lazy or irresponsible, a common argument about why people remain poor. But not all of us. Besides, personal fortitude is no match for structural inequalities.

Fifty-three hours after arriving at the airport in Newark, I landed in San Francisco; I’d scored a standby seat. My trip took almost triple the time it would have in 1933, when the transcontinental Boeing 247 debuted. Driving across the country would have been nine hours faster.

What is strangest and saddest about the broad brokenness of America is that, actually, this is the way it works. Have-not consumers pay to be complicit in our own fleecing. That is the toxic marrow in America’s bones. More than a century after conquering the onetime impossibility of flight, we have yet to master the long-time impossibility of fairness.

the fact that airplanes help spread disease across geographies does not mean that you are necessarily at risk during flight.

If planes made you sick, we would expect to see millions of people sick every year attributable to flights. We haven’t seen it because it’s just not happening.

Consider one study that examined a passenger with tuberculosis on an airplane. It found that the median risk of infection to the other 169 passengers on the airplane was between 1 in 10,000 to 1 in a million.

Wearing a mask, as some airlines now require, reduced the incidence of infection another 10-fold.

The required aircraft systems do a really good job of controlling airborne bacteria and viruses.

To get technical, airplanes deliver 10 to 12 air changes per hour. In a hospital isolation room, the minimum target is six air changes per hour for existing facilities and 12 air changes per hour for new.

Airplanes also use the same air filter — a HEPA filter — recommended by the CDC for isolation rooms with recirculated air. Such filters capture 99.97 percent of airborne particles.

What’s more, airplanes are essentially designed to isolate airflow. Even if someone coughs on your flight without a mask, it is likely those virus particles will travel one or two rows,

To guard against transmission via large droplets and contaminated surfaces, we do need to take some additional steps. Wearing a mask on planes should be mandated, and wiping down tables and arm rests with a disinfectant provides an additional layer of defense.

you are more at risk of getting sick when traveling, but it’s not the airplane that’s making you sick.

Every time you fly, you may also take a cab, bus or subway; stand in long lines in the airport; eat unhealthy foods; sit for extended durations; spend time in spaces with hundreds or thousands of other travelers; stay at a hotel or friend’s home; arrive in a different climate and change time zones, disrupting your sleep. All of these factors are known to affect your immune system.

In 2013, I was one of the lead authors of a report for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies on infectious disease mitigation in airports and airplanes. Let me distill some of the recommendations from that report

For starters, airports should mandate mask wearing; increase ventilation rates; make bathrooms touchless; consider deploying upper-room germicidal UV fixtures in areas with high-occupant density; institute temperature screening; deploy hand-sanitizer stations; and, once passengers arrive at their gates, require that they stay in their designated area except for bathroom usage.

Airlines should ensure gate-based ventilation is operating during boarding and disembarkation; carefully choreograph the loading of airplanes; mandate mask use; and provide meals and bottled water during boarding and discontinue in-flight meal and drink service.

Individuals have an important role to play, too. First, stay home and do not travel if sick. Comply with rules for mask wearing; wash hands before and after each step at the airport; keep the personal overhead ventilation on and pointed down; and maintain physical distancing to the extent possible.

Mostly, animal transport efforts are focused on bringing Puerto Rico shelter animals to mainland cities where they can be adopted. The Humane Society of the United States, in some cases working with volunteer pilots from the nonprofit Wings of Rescue, has evacuated more than 1,500 cats and dogs, as well as a few pigs.