‘Hawk talk
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, January 29, 2006
Yeah, I know … Victor Balta’s the official Herald Super Bowl blogger http://www.heraldnet.com/blogsuperbowl/ but we’ve got breaking aerospace news — The Bus flies Boeing.
That’s right, this video from KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh http://www.kdka.com/ clearly shows that the Steelers boarded a Boeing-built 757-200 chartered from US Airways for the quick hop up to Detroit today. (Click on the blue arrow below the “KDKA video” display and scroll to the right to find the shots.)
This kind of kills my whole “How can the Steelers claim to be America’s gritty, blue-collar working-class team when they fly on planes built by those snooty, snail-cooking, Chablis-sipping, cheese-eating French guys from Airbus” rant, which was also going to harken back to the mighty ‘95 Mariners with their immortal slogan “Refuse Toulouse” and postulate about whether you can get supersized Freedom Fries from the US Airways flight attendants. And that’s too bad — it was gonna be a helluva rant.
No official response from Boeing on this yet, but the sharp-eyed FOB who provided the link draws a paycheck from the company and he noted that — compared to the Airbus-flying Carolina Panthers — the Steelers had made a “wise choice.”
The Seahawks’ plane — the 757 belonging to team owner Paul Allen — got a fair bit of ink today. Here’s what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had to say about it http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06030/646618.stm
Key Quote: “Air Allen sounds like the way to travel to Super Bowl XL. A television every four seats. Every seat a first-class, plush, wide chair. DVD players aplenty. Good eats. And a No. 12 on the side of the personal Seattle Seahawks carrier, representing the 12th Man fans …”
And Mike Sando had this in today’s News Tribune down in Tacoma http://www.thenewstribune.com/sports/seahawks/story/5492984p-4952616c.html.
Key Quote: “The plane … represents an upgrade over what defensive end Bryce Fisher came to expect when he played for the NFC West-rival St. Louis Rams … ‘This is the best I’ve ever traveled,’ Fisher said. ‘First of all, it’s a lot more spacious and a lot more comfortable. It’s not a situation where you have to pack in and feel like cattle on the plane. It’s a plane where you go on and you know it’s a business trip.’”
Personally, I’d think that if you were flying 300-pound men on cross-continental trips you’d WANT to put them into big first class seats, but that’s just me.
And it never hurts to point out the obvious. The high-flying ‘Hawks spend a lot more time in the air than any other NFL team. Seattle’s shortest road trip — to San Francisco — is still 800 miles.
Compare that to Pittsburgh’s longest flight to play a divisional rival, which is 280 miles to Cincinnati — roughly the distance from Seattle to Spokane. The flight to Detroit from Pittsburgh is barey 285 miles.
One more thing: As Victor noted, The Herald team had to fly Seattle to Dallas to get a transfer flight to Detroit on American. Talk about an argument for point-to-point, eh?
