Just Cruises Plus

Cuba’s Classic Cars

The Trump administration has (suddenly) ended the cruise lines’ already limited access to Cuban ports.  We think it was outrageous and irresponsible that the Trump administration implemented this policy with no advance warning.

We took advantage of the limited window of opportunity to visit Cuba.  We found the people to be very friendly toward us and there were hints of a nascent capitalism.  There were non-state owned restaurants that served wonderful food.  We rode in a 1956 Crown Victoria taxi owned by the driver.  These are the folks who will be most hurt by the travel ban. More about our visit to Cuba.

We feel very sorry for the people currently on ships that were scheduled to visit this island museum where cars from the 50s comprise about 1/4 of all cars in Cuba.  We also recognize that there are many disappointed people booked on future cruises to Cuba who will miss this unique opportunity, at least for the foreseeable future.

How the Different Cruise Lines are Handling the Change in Policy

*Sailings on or before 9-2-19.  Sailings after 9-2-19 will automatically be canceled and deposits refunded.  Customers affected may book a future NCL cruise with a %20 discount.

When we board an airplane, we all hope that we have a “Sully” Sullivan at the controls.  Unfortunately, Sully has few equals.  At age 12, he was accepted into Mensa, and later graduated from the Air force Academy as the top pilot.  As a well-rounded young man in high school, he was first flutist in the school orchestra.

On our next flight, we could have a pilot who stayed up late watching a movie and was forth tubist.  Hopefully, he isn’t suffering from a hangover.  It happens.  With a good but imperfect pilot, we want to fly on a plane as perfect as man can make.  The Boeing MAX 8 could be that plane but currently falls far short of that lofty goal and upgraded software is not the answer.

According to data gathered by Airsafe.com, the 737 MAX is more than 25 times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than the plane that is was designed to replace, the older versions of the 737.  The MAX’s main competition, the Airbus 319neo, 320neo and 321neo, has had no fatal crashes.  Why has the MAX been such a failure?  Read the article below and you might come to the view that Boeing’s management decided that money trumps safety.

Several weeks ago, we said that we would never fly on a MAX 8 unless major structural changes were made and that it is our opinion that software changes are not the answer to a basic design problem.

A few weeks ago, we posited that we would never again fly on a Boeing MAX 8 or 9 aircraft unless structural changes were made to the plane before bringing it back into service.

It appears that Boeing Aircraft Company, in cahoots with the FAA, is going to rope-a-dope us with the quick and dirty software solution to fix their flawed MAX 8 plane and will not make the required structural changes.  Software will not fix a basic design defect.

The following is an excerpt from an article by Matthew Yglesias of Vox News.

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Boeing’s effort to get the 737 Max approved to fly again, explained

A bigger problem than a software update.

By Matthew Yglesias  Apr 5, 2019, 10:30am EDT

On Thursday, Boeing for the first time officially took responsibility for the two crashes of 737 Max jets that got the planes grounded by regulators.

Claiming responsibility was part of an attempt to get the planes approved to fly again. Boeing was trying to say that it now understands why the planes crashes — flawed software — and has a plan in place to replace it with new software that will eliminate the problem and persuade regulators to get the planes off the ground. But then Friday morning, the company announced that it had found a second, unrelated software flaw that it also needs to fix and will somewhat delay the process of getting the planes cleared to fly again.

All of which, of course, raises the question of why such flawed systems were allowed to fly in the first place.

And that story begins nine years ago when Boeing was faced with a major threat to its bottom line, spurring the airline to rush a series of kludges through the certification process — with an underresourced Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seemingly all too eager to help an American company threatened by a foreign competitor, rather than to ask tough questions about the project.

The specifics of what happened in the regulatory system are still emerging (and despite executives’ assurances, we don’t even really know what happened on the flights yet). But the big picture is coming into view: A major employer faced a major financial threat, and short-term politics and greed won out over the integrity of the regulatory system. It’s a scandal.

The 737 versus 320 rivalry, explained

There are lots of different passenger airplanes on the market, but just two very similar narrow-body planes dominate domestic (or intra-European) travel. One is the European company Airbus’s 320 family,  with models called A318, A319, A320, or A321 depending on how long the plane is. These four variants, by design, have identical flight decks, so pilots can be trained to fly them interchangeably.

The 320 family competes with a group of planes that Boeing calls the 737 — there’s a 737-600, a 737-700, a 737-800, and a 737-900 — with higher numbers indicating larger planes. Some of them are also extended-range models that have an ER appended to the name, and, as you would probably guess, they have longer ranges.

Importantly, even though there are many different flavors of 737, they are all in some sense the same plane, just as all the 320 family planes are the same plane. Southwest Airlines, for example, simplifies its overall operations by exclusively flying different 737 variants.

Both the 737 and the 320 come in lots of different flavors, so airlines have plenty of options in terms of what kind of aircraft should fly exactly which route. But because there are only two players in this market, and because their offerings are so fundamentally similar, the competition for this slice of the plane market is both intense and weirdly limited. If one company were to gain a clear technical advantage over the other, it would be a minor catastrophe for the losing company.

And that’s what Boeing thought it was facing.

The A320neo was trouble for Boeing

Jet fuel is a major cost for airlines. With labor costs largely driven by collective bargaining agreements and regulations that require minimum ratios of flight attendants per passenger, fuel is the cost center airlines have the most capacity to do something about. Consequently, improving fuel efficiency has emerged as one of the major bases of competition between airline manufacturers.

If you roll back to 2010, it began to look like Boeing had a real problem in this regard.

Airbus was coming out with an updated version of the A320 family that it called the A320neo, with “neo” meaning “new engine option.” The new engines were going to be more fuel-efficient, with a larger diameter than previous A320 engines, that could nonetheless be mounted on what was basically the same airframe. This was a nontrivial engineering undertaking both in designing the new engines and in figuring out how to make them work with the old airframe, but even though it cost a bunch of money, it basically worked. And it raised the question of whether Boeing would respond.

Initial word was that it wouldn’t. As CBS Moneywatch’s Brett Snyder wrote in December 2010, the basic problem was that you couldn’t slap the new generation of more efficient, larger-diameter engines onto the 737.

One of the issues for Boeing is that it takes more work to put new engines on the 737 than on the A320. The 737 is lower to the ground than the A320, and the new engines have a larger diameter.  So while both manufacturers would have to do work, the Boeing guys would have more work to do to jack the airplane up. That will cost more while reducing commonality with the current fleet. As we know from last week, reduced commonality means higher costs for the airlines as well.

Under the circumstances, Boeing’s best option was to just take the hit for a few years and accept that it was going to have to start selling 737s at a discount price while it designed a whole new airplane. That would, of course, be time-consuming and expensive, and during the interim, it would probably lose a bunch of narrow-body sales to Airbus.

The original version of the 737 first flew in 1967, and a decades-old decision about how much height to leave between the wing and the runway left them boxed out of 21st-century engine technology — and there was simply nothing to be done about it.

Unless there was.

Boeing decided to put on the too-big engines anyway

As late as February 2011, Boeing chair and CEO James McNerney was sticking to the plan to design a totally new aircraft.

“We’re not done evaluating this whole situation yet,” he said on an analyst call, “but our current bias is to move to a newer airplane, an all-new airplane, at the end of the decade, beginning of the next decade. It’s our judgment that our customers will wait for us.”

But in August 2011, Boeing announced that it had lined up orders for 496 re-engined Boeing 767 aircraft from five airlines.

It’s not entirely clear what happened, but, reading between the lines, it seems that in talking to its customers Boeing reached the conclusion that airlines would not wait for them. Some critical mass of carriers (American Airlines seems to have been particularly influential) was credible enough in its threat to switch to Airbus equipment that Boeing decided it needed to offer 737 buyers a Boeing solution sooner rather than later.

Committing to putting a new engine that didn’t fit on the plane was the corporate version of the Fyre Festival’s “let’s just do it and be legends, man” moment, and it unsurprisingly wound up leading to a slew of engineering and regulatory problems.

New engines on an old plane

As the industry trade publication Leeham News and Analysis explained earlier in March, Boeing engineers had been working on the concept that became the 737 Max even back when the company’s plan was still not to build it.

In a March 2011 interview with Aircraft Technology, Mike Bair, then the head of 737 product development, said that reengineering was possible.

“There’s been fairly extensive engineering work on it,” he said. “We figured out a way to get a big enough engine under the wing.”

The problem is that an airplane is a big, complicated network of interconnected parts. To get the engine under the 737 wing, engineers had to mount the engine nacelle higher and more forward on the plane. But moving the engine nacelle (and a related change to the nose of the plane) changed the aerodynamics of the plane, such that the plane did not handle properly at a high angle of attack. That, in turn, led to the creation of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). It fixed the angle-of-attack problem in most situations, but it created new problems in other situations when it made it difficult for pilots to directly control the plane without being overridden by the MCAS.

On Wednesday, Boeing rolled out a software patch that it says corrects the problem, and it hopes to persuade the FAA to agree.

But note that the underlying problem isn’t really software; it’s with the effort to use software to get around a whole host of other problems.

Recall, after all, that the whole point of the 737 Max project was to be able to say that the new plane was the same as the old plane. From an engineering perspective, the preferred solution was to actually build a new plane. But for business reasons, Boeing didn’t want a “new plane” that would require a lengthy certification process and extensive (and expensive) new pilot training for its customers. The demand was for a plane that was simultaneously new and not new.

But because the new engines wouldn’t fit under the old wings, the new plane wound up having different aerodynamic properties than the old plane. And because the aerodynamics were different, the flight control systems were also different. But treating the whole thing as a fundamentally different plane would have undermined the whole point. So the FAA and Boeing agreed to sort of fudge it.

The new planes are pretty different

As far as we can tell, the 737 Max is a perfectly airworthy plane in the sense that error-free piloting allows it to be operated safely.

But pilots of planes that didn’t crash kept noticing the same basic pattern of behavior that is suspected to have been behind the two crashes, according to a Dallas Morning News review of voluntary aircraft incident reports to a NASA database:

The disclosures found by the News reference problems with an autopilot system, and they all occurred during the ascent after takeoff. Many mentioned the plane suddenly nosing down. While records show these flights occurred in October and November, the airlines the pilots were flying for is redacted from the database.

These pilots all safely disabled the MCAS and kept their planes in the air. But one of the pilots reported to the database that it was “unconscionable that a manufacturer, the FAA, and the airlines would have pilots flying an airplane without adequately training, or even providing available resources and sufficient documentation to understand the highly complex systems that differentiate this aircraft from prior models.”

The training piece is important because a key selling feature of the 737 Max was the idea that since it wasn’t really a new plane, pilots didn’t really need to be retrained for the new equipment. As the New York Times reported, “For many new airplane models, pilots train for hours on giant, multimillion-dollar machines, on-the-ground versions of cockpits that mimic the flying experience and teach them new features” while the experienced 737 Max pilots were allowed light refresher courses that you could do on an iPad.

That let Boeing get the planes into customers’ hands quickly and cheaply, but evidently at the cost of increasing the possibility of pilots not really knowing how to handle the planes, with dire consequences for everyone involved.

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What do you think?  Is Boeing guilty of criminal negligence or good bottom-line business practices?

The 737 MAX 8 is a new plane and it should not be crashing.  Why has it crashed twice in the last 6 months?

The 737 MAX, due to the placement of its engines, has a tendency to raise its nose.  This requires adjustments to control surfaces to bring the plane to level flight.  No other plane, including earlier 737s, has this tendency.  Software won’t change this.

Boeing is between a rock and a hard place.  They have to decide whether to do the right thing and make major structural changes which will cost a great deal of money and put them at a disadvantage to competitor, Airbus, but will fix the problem.  Alternately, they can try to rope-a-dope the world into believing that software changes and more pilot training will fix the problem.   If they do this, you will have to decide whether to fly on the second most dangerous commercial jet ever built by a North American or European country.  I definitely won’t fly on it.

The Jones Act has been in the news because of the hurricanes and the need to get supplies into hurricane ravaged US territories.  It was enacted in 1920 and was designed to protect the American Merchant Marine which would be needed in time of war.  Its basic tenant is that in order to carry goods or passengers between US ports, a ship must have the hull of the ship built in the US and at least 75% of its crew must be US citizens.  During the ongoing emergency at St Thomas, St Johns and Puerto Rico, there are too few US flagged ships available to move supplies to these territories.  Therefore the Jones Act was temporarily suspended.

How does the Jones Act affect the cruise industry and its customers?

There are a number of cruise lines whose ships ply US rivers who meet the Jones Act requirements.  The most well known is the American Queen.

However, most of the large cruise ships were built in Europe and are flagged in small countries that have low tax rates.  They cannot carry passengers between US ports without stopping at a foreign port.  There is one large cruise ship that meets the Jones act provisions.  It is NCL’s Pride of America. Its hull was built in the U.S. It’s flagged in the US and carries an American crew.   It’s based in Hawaii has weekly cruises in the Hawaiian Islands.

It is the only large cruise ship that can do this itinerary and therefore it is no competition.  NCL has the only 7 day cruise in the Hawaiian Islands.

How does the lack of competition affect price?

We compared a Balcony stateroom on a 7 day cruise around Hawaii with an NCL 7 day cruise to the Western Caribbean on the Norwegian Getaway.  Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Carnival, Princess and others provide stiff competition on this itinerary.

The lowest priced balcony on the March 3^rd 2018 sailing of the Pride of America from Honolulu is $2599 per person while the lowest priced balcony on the March 4^th Norwegian Getaway is $1179, less than half the price of the Pride of America.

Itineraries are also affected by the Jones Act.  For example, for a round trip Alaska cruise from Seattle, one of the ports must be in Canada.

You can go to Hawaii on a cruise line other than Norwegian Cruise Line.  However, the ship will stop in Ensenada or Vancouver on its way to or from the West Coast of the United States and it will be an 11 or 12 night cruise with a lot of days at sea..

Are there benefits to the Jones Act?

Yes, crews receive higher wages and working conditions are better and safer.  Also, there are stricter environmental requirements for US flagged ships.

When NCL initiated Hawaii cruises on the Pride of America, they hired young Americans as waiters and room stewards and guess what happened?  Passengers complained bitterly about the quality of service.  It seems that the young Americans pictured themselves as laying out on deck during the day and partying at night with a smidgen of work here and there.

NCL had to build a facility in Maryland to train American staff in the art of service.  They are now able to weed out the party people before they board the Pride and service is now very good.

Viking River Cruises announced that New Orleans will be the home to 6 new Viking ships.  The first one is to arrive in 2017 and will sail to destinations like Memphis, St. Paul and St. Louis.  Viking’s move is expected to be a boon to the New Orleans’s tourism industry, with increased traffic to hotels and restaurants.

Because of Viking’s popularity in the European river cruising market, its move to the United States is likely to spark new interest in Mississippi itineraries in general.  The cruise line plans announcements on its Mississippi itineraries and ship design later this year. The boats which will be built in the U.S. are expected to be similar to the contemporary ships Viking uses on European rivers.

Interested in a Mississippi River cruise sooner than 2017?

The American Queen Steamboat Company operates the only true overnight steamboat on the Mississippi. The food is truly gourmet and the vessel, although a steamboat, has every modern amenity.

Although not a true steamboat, American Cruise Line’s new paddle wheeler, the America Eagle, will debut on the Mississippi April 11^th.

Why a river cruise?

River cruising in general has exploded in popularity in recent years, offering a more intimate way to experience cruising than the mega-ships that carry thousands of people and are loaded with attractions such as rides and Broadway shows.  Some travelers say riverboats are a welcome throwback to an earlier era of cruising.

River cruising is also more destination-oriented, with boats navigating narrow waterways to port cities that massive ships could never reach.

Majesty of the Seas

The Majesty of the Seas is the last of its class in the Royal Caribbean fleet.  She will be heading to Europe in April of 2016 to sail for Pullmantour Cruise Line, a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean International.  When she was built, she and her sisters, at 75,000 tons, were the biggest cruise ships in the world.  Twenty-two years later, she is dwarfed by the likes of the Oasis and Allure of the Seas at 220,000 tons.

She has been relegated to the short cruise market with 3 and 4 night cruises from Miami.  We sailed on her about 10 years ago and recall her wonderful crew and small (cozy) staterooms.  In Florida for the winter?  Why not take advantage of super low last minute rates?

Good news!  Now that Chilean citizens no longer need a visa to enter the US, Chile no longer requires Americans to pay a $160 reciprocity fee to get into the country.  When entering Chile (by cruise, vehicle or plane), at customs, you’ll need to fill out a Tourist Card that allows visitors to stay for up to 90 days and will allow multiple entries. You’ll need to show this Tourist Card to Customs when leaving the country as well, so be sure you don’t lose it!

As of now, a $160 reciprocity fee (paid in advance) is still required to enter Argentina and a Visa is still required for entry to Brazil.

Click here for country-specific entry requirements for US Citizens.

Quantum of the Seas

We were shocked and disappointed when we heard that the Quantum of the Seas would be moving to China after its first inaugural season sailing from Bayonne.  The ship will move to Shanghai in May of 2015.  If you want to sail on the Quantum out of Bayonne, N.J., you must book a cruise that departs between November 18^th 2014 and April 24^th 2015.

The Quantum will be replaced in Bayonne with the Liberty of the Seas for the 2015 summer season.  As much as we love the Freedom class of ships, it’s hard to go back to an older class after experiencing the newest and most innovative ship from a local port.  We question whether the Liberty will succeed in Bayonne unless it is priced aggressively which, so far, it is not.

Royal Caribbean’s turn to the East is certainly based on research which evidently showed that China’s odd combination of communism and capitalism is creating a booming middle class ready to fill their newest ship.  With a population 4 times the size of the U.S., Royal Caribbean may be onto something by heading to Shanghai.

Royal Caribbean is Throwing Us a Bone

They will move the follow-on ship to the Quantum class, the Anthem of the Seas, to Bayonne for the winter 2015 season.  Beyond that, there is uncertainty.

A significant proportion of our clientele hate the hassle and expense of flying and would prefer to leave from a “local” port.  Philadelphia is out as an embarkation port.  It was tried in the past and discontinued.  We heard rumblings that the unions in Philadelphia were harder to work with than those in Bayonne and NYC and/or that the casinos could not be opened while the ships sailed in the Delaware Bay.  Since Philly is out, our local ports are Baltimore, Bayonne (Cape Liberty) or NYC (Manhattan and Brooklyn).

Distance is an Issue

Bermuda is the ideal port for local departures since it is located directly east from North Carolina and therefore is much closer than islands like St Thomas and St Martin which are far south and east of Florida.  Five, six and seven day Bermuda cruises are easily done from local ports.  The Bahamas can also be reached on 7 day cruises since these islands are quite close to Florida.  If you’re looking for an island like St Thomas, you’ll need more days from a local port.  Islands further south, like Barbados and Aruba, require even more time.

If you’re highly flexible with your dates and you have a generous budget, you can do pretty much what you want.  However, if you are limited to a week cruise, compromises are required.  You may need to fly in order to get the islands you want or you will need to accept Bermuda or the Bahamas as your destination.  By the way, we love Bermuda.

For as long as we can remember, Turkey has required a visa. Currently, you purchase the visa upon arrival at the airport for $20.  Effective April 10, 2014, travelers will need to obtain a visa prior to arriving in Turkey by accessing Turkey’s new e-Visa Application System.

For those folks who do not use computers or who need assistance with the process, call Just Cruises Plus and we will help you to obtain your Turkish visa.

Is a separate e-Visa needed for each traveler?

Yes, each traveler must obtain a separate e-Visa, including infants and kids. (Even though kids/infants are included in their parent’s passports)

What information will you need to complete the e-Visa application?

A minimum 6-month-valid passport, flight (or any other possible means of transportation) reservation and a credit card (Mastercard or Visa).

Do I need an e-Visa if I am on a cruise ship?

If you are flying into or out of Turkey as part of your cruise, then you need e-Visa.

If Turkey is on your itinerary (but not at the start/end point), you do not need an e-Visa because the cruise ship will be given permission by local authorities for you to enter Turkey.

Click here for more e-Visa information and to apply for your e-Visa.

Did you miss the article on our visit to the spectacular Turkish city of Istanbul?  Click here to read.

The Super bowl may be compromised due to the virus that sickened upwards of 600 passengers on the January 21st cruise of the Explorer of the Seas.  That was the opinion of a female passenger expressed in an interview aired by CBS.  The evidence was the fact that the ship docks within a few miles of the stadium.  Obviously the woman’s logic was bizarre at best.   Of course, the news media was on hand like vultures when the ship docked in Bayonne 2 days earlier than scheduled and they eagerly interviewed passengers who sought their moment of fame on the nightly news.  “Cruise from Hell” and “Nightmare cruise” are some of the terms used by news people who have no interest in the truth.

Here’s the real scoop from a passenger who was there.  The illness hit the ship early and hard.  The medical staff was clearly overwhelmed.  Dozens were lined up at the ship’s infirmary and were not seen for hours.  Others elected not to report their illness and to self medicate (Imodium).  People confined to their rooms needed room service but the room service staff was besieged with orders and, despite adding staff, could not keep up with the demand.  These are the people who were understandably very unhappy.

However, the majority of passengers did not become ill and life aboard was relatively normal although ports were missed and a few shows cancelled.  We were one of the lucky ones who did not experience illness.  We can say absolutely that the public rooms including bathrooms were kept spotless by a hard working crew.

For those who became ill, their misery lasted from 1 to 3 days.  Nausea and diarrhea were the main symptoms and those who reported their illness were quarantined for a day after their symptoms subsided.  Most of those who experienced illness had a good time once they became well, thanks to a dedicated crew and officers.  By the end of the cruise, the situation was well in hand. Very few new cases were being reported.

The captain held a meeting with the passengers and was quite up front about the problems encountered by the velocity of the spread of the illness.  He indicated that medical staff as well as Center for Disease Control (CDC) personnel had boarded the ship in San Juan and St Thomas.

The home office of Royal Caribbean did not cover themselves in glory.  They initially offered a less than WOW compensation to passengers which did not even cover the lost days.  A huge number of passengers expressed their strong displeasure at the offer.  Evidently, the captain conveyed the passenger’s unhappiness to the home office because they came back with an offer that was fair and generally accepted.

What did I learn from the experience?  Bring Imodium on a winter cruise and touch as few things as possible.

How should the cruise lines respond to these outbreaks?

Although the Norwalk Virus* is by no means limited to cruise ships (anyone who has lived at a university can attest to this), the cruise lines, in a coordinated and expedited effort, need to collaborate with the CDC to help determine how the illness is spread.

Next, the cruise lines should have a clear advertised policy on what happens when a passenger shows up at the pier for their cruise with an illness.  Currently they ask passengers to fill out a questionnaire about their current health.  I would suggest that most folks would lie rather than be denied boarding.

A plan needs to be developed in those extremely rare instances where illness strikes hundreds of people.  This should include having workers with other jobs be trained to recognize the Norwalk virus and deliver Imodium to the rooms of sick people.

Finally, the cruises lines should offer appropriate compensation when an outbreak occurs that has a significant effect on both sick and well passengers.  Cheapskate offers only alienate people.

What should you know?

The Norwalk virus is a winter malady.  If you are worried, cruise during the other three seasons.

Serious long term illness or death from the Norwalk is exceedingly rare.

Purell is useless against the virus.

Washing hands often will help stop the spread of the virus.

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*Norwalk virus was originally named after Norwalk, Ohio, where an outbreak of acute viral gastroenteritis occurred among children at Bronson Elementary School in November 1968.