CURRENT ISSUE | SUBSCRIBE | ADVERTISE | WRITE TO US | CORNELL AUTHORS | PAST ISSUES

Final Descent? | AIRLINE BANKRUPTCY THREATENS TO FURTHER ISOLATE ITHACA

WITH HIGH PRICES AND LIMited flight options, air travel to and from Ithaca has been less than ideal for years. The situation went from bad to worse in mid-September, when US Airways--Ithaca-Tompkins Regional Airport's only carrier--entered Chapter 11 protection for the second time in twenty-five months. The news came on the heels of an August announcement that the airline plans to dismantle its Pittsburgh hub and drop four daily flights to Ithaca. Faced with more than $8.7 billion in debts, management acknowledged that such efforts might not be enough to turn the airline around. And whether or not US Airways actually goes under, the possibility that Ithaca travelers will be grounded looms large, since the carrier announced that one of its first cost-cutting moves may be to eliminate routes to some of the thirty-four communities that rely solely on the airline.

The decision would be a blow to Cornell, especially as it devotes increasing energy and resources to creating international programs and maximizing integration between the Ithaca campus and the Medical College in Manhattan. "It's a big and complicated problem," says associate vice president for campus and business services Richard McDaniel, MBA '78, a member of the county-appointed Air Service Task Force, a team of University administrators, airport officials, and community leaders created in 1997 to ensure that competitively priced air service remains in Ithaca. The group has had their work cut out for them since 2000, when Continental, US Airways' sole local competitor, closed its Ithaca operations.

"The urgency of the whole situation has increased," says vice president for administration Hal Craft '60, PhD '70, another task force member. The group is now pushing hard to recruit another airline, which could help to lower fares and distribute airport fees--and be there should US Airways depart. Losing air service "would not be a fatal blow [to Cornell]," Craft adds, "but it certainly would compromise collaboration" between the campuses and heighten the challenge of attracting recruiters to Ithaca.

Like many other small community airports, Ithaca's was designed for the hub-and-spoke system, which provided frequent service to numerous destinations and small markets. That system has slowly eroded with the rise of low-cost carriers that use a more economical point-to-point system or lower-cost hubs. The post-September 11 drop in air travel and high fuel and labor costs have further compounded major carriers' financial woes and forced them to cut expenses.

"The airline industry is sharpening its pencils, and we stick out like a sore thumb," says airport manager Robert Nicholas. Ithaca travelers still have two destinations available--Philadelphia and New York's LaGuardia--and to compensate for the lost Pittsburgh option, US Airways added three more Philadelphia flights, leaving the airport with eleven daily flights, down from twelve.

Until 1994, the Ithaca airport was an "awful cinderblock structure," says Nicholas, the airport manager since 1989. At 8,000 square feet, "it was so rinky-dink that we couldn't get more than one aircraft-full of people in the departure lounge." Air travel peaked in 1991 with 114,154 boardings and was strong throughout the Nineties, with as many as five carriers serving the airport. In 1994, a 33,000-square-foot $11 million terminal opened to rave reviews: lines are virtually nonexistent, short-term parking is free, and security checks are quick.

The downturn began in 2000, the same year Continental pulled out of Ithaca and competition from low-cost carriers, including JetBlue and Southwest in Syracuse, began to take effect, says Nicholas. Their flights to New York can cost just $100, while US Airways often charges twice as much, with ticket prices frequently climbing as high as $550. By 2003, boardings had fallen by more than 30 percent, to 68,000.

Barbara Silverman, a master's degree candidate in city and regional planning from Nyack, New York, usually gets home the way many students from the Northeast do: she drives. Intercity buses, which typically charge students $60 one way, are also popular. And when friends and family visit Silverman, they tend to avoid flying into Ithaca. "The fiscally conscious all, without fail, choose Syracuse," she says.

Still, 73 percent of faculty and staff who book flights through the Cornell Travel Office--for University business-- use the Ithaca airport, says office manager Anne Keefer.

Many local travelers develop a calculus of sorts to evaluate the merits of ticket price, drive time, and convenience. If a ticket from Syracuse is only $100 cheaper, human development PhD candidate Yarden Kedar books his flight from Ithaca. Last year he twice flew from Ithaca to California on family trips because he found affordable tickets.While it's usually "much cheaper to fly out of Syracuse," he says, "it's not very convenient, since it takes around seventy-five minutes to get there in good weather, and if you need to [travel] for a few weeks, parking can be costly." Ithaca, he says, "is much more convenient . . . small and friendly."

Hedging against a possible loss of air service, this fall the University decided to test a new luxury bus service between the Ithaca and New York City campuses. At $149 round trip, the bus is outfitted with large "business class" seats, desks, and outlets for laptop computers. David Lieb '89, communications manager for Transportation and Mail Services, insists it isn't meant to undermine the airport but to create "another option."

McDaniel declined to say whether Cornell would subsidize air service if US Airways goes under. But, he says, "we are thinking entrepreneurially." Both he and Craft voice a measure of optimism about the likelihood of continuing air service in Ithaca. But take it from an expert, eightysix- year-old Alfred Kahn, a professor emeritus of economics. As Civil Aeronautics Board chairman during the Carter Administration, he introduced airline deregulation. Now he often catches Jet- Blue flights to New York from Syracuse, though he uses the Ithaca airport, too. "There's clearly a market in Ithaca for air travel," he says. "It's just a matter of whether a carrier can figure out a way to keep the prices low."

-- Tamar Morade

Vox Populi | CBS POLLSTER TRACKS ELECTION RESULTS

THE POWER TO CHOOSE THE President of the United States may lie in the hands of millions of ballot-casting Americans, but on election night--on CBS News, at least-- it's Kathleen Frankovic who doles out the electoral college votes.

The longtime head of polling for CBS, Frankovic '68 is in charge of the news organization's Decision Desk. As her team tallies the votes and crunches numbers from exit polls, it's up to her to make the final decision on whether to paint each state blue or red. "There's so much adrenaline that goes with any election night work," Frankovic says. "There's so much happening-- the excitement, all these splitsecond decisions that have to get made."

Frankovic's office, in the CBS headquarters on the far west side of Manhattan, is decorated with political cartoons and an original copy of that most infamous case of bad polling data: the November 3, 1948, Chicago Daily Tribune headline proclaiming DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. Fiftytwo years after the paper was printed, Frankovic was involved in another great election snafu, when she and her colleagues declared Al Gore the winner in Florida. They soon realized that the announcement had been premature; it was up to her and the president of the news division to break the bad news to anchorman Dan Rather. "CBS was the first to take it back," she says. "As soon as you knew it was wrong, you couldn't pussyfoot around it and hope it would look better."

In addition to her election-cycle duties, Frankovic oversees the CBS-New York Times Poll, conducted several times a month on topics ranging from the war in Iraq to the value of organic foods. The interviews of about 1,000 randomly selected people are conducted in a phone center on the fifth floor of the CBS tower, by a trained staff that includes students, retirees, and out-of-work actors. "If you're trying to measure public opinion," she says, "it's absolutely critical that every respondent get pretty much the same stimulus, that they be asked the exact same question in the exact same way, without any kind of inflection that suggests what the right answer is."

Only about 35 percent of the numbers dialed result in a completed interview. One reason for the low response rate: telemarketers, whom Frankovic calls "one of the biggest obstacles to good public opinion research." She welcomes the National Do Not Call Registry--which doesn't apply to legitimate news-gathering organizations-- because it reduces the number of annoyance calls. "People don't distinguish between the telemarketing call and the survey call," she says.

During Frankovic's tenure at CBS, the country has seen a polling explosion; today, networks compile statistics online and regurgitate them in real time, on topics from the Scott Peterson trial to the latest outcast on "Survivor." She traces the phenomenon both to technological advances and to audience fixation on Nineties newsmakers like Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson, and Monica Lewinsky. "It doesn't just happen in news organizations," says Frankovic, current president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research. "Faculty members realized that there was this device that could be used for teaching, analysis, and research. So all of a sudden you see colleges and local newspapers coming up with opinion polls. It's not easy to do right, but it's easy to do."

Frankovic's office in the CBS tower is a world away from her upbringing in working-class New Jersey. She was raised in a two-family house occupied by her parents, grandparents, and an aunt and uncle; they spoke Slovak at home. Her father, a laborer, never went to high school, while her mother earned a GED and became a school secretary. Frankovic attended Catholic school, coming to Cornell in 1963 as part of the first co-ed Telluride Association Summer Program. She majored in government, sang with the Cornell Savoyards, and covered squash and tennis for the Daily Sun--because back then, she says, no women were allowed in Ivy League pressboxes.

After graduation, she earned a PhD in political science from Rutgers, working on the presidential campaign of Edmund Muskie, JD '39, and writing a dissertation on the impact of religion on political participation. In 1977, when she was teaching at the University of Vermont, she was tapped to work in the elections unit of the newly formed CBS-New York Times Poll, the first such collaboration between a network and the print media. "It's hugely important for both the government and the citizenry to be able to understand where they are and what they think," she says,"and not be told what public opinion is."

Frankovic and her husband, mystery author and journalist Hal Glatzer, live part of the year in San Francisco and the rest in a converted piano factory in Manhattan's newly fashionable Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Her favorite poll question, asked in the early 1980s: "Is Elvis Presley still alive?" At one time, she says, the number of "yes" responses hovered around 7 or 8 percent, then dropped."My favorite finding was that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to think that Elvis might be alive," she says. "Particularly men."

-- Beth Saulnier

Captive Audience | KAFKA GOES TO PRISON

Incoming freshmen weren't the only ones who started the school year discussing Franz Kafka's The Trial. The University's fourth annual New Student Reading Project boasted participation from the City of Ithaca, more than 20,000 alumni, and a new demographic--a half-dozen maximum security inmates in English professor Pete Wetherbee's weekly literature class at the Auburn Correctional Facility, an hour from campus. When the Chronicle of Higher Education inquired, Wetherbee put the genesis of the reading this way: "Somebody who probably didn't have a very good knowledge of the book and had no knowledge at all of what goes on at Auburn . . . said to somebody else, ‘Wouldn't it be a cute idea to have real prisoners read this book?'" The professor calls the Kafka discussion a "completely self-contained exercise" in a semester devoted to contemporary politics, with readings about the political economy and Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?

Yet elements of The Trial struck a chord. "In a way," says Wetherbee, "the prisoners have a better sense of the surreal aspect of the way the justice system is represented in the book." One of the men, an older inmate sentenced for life, spends his free time writing letters and appeals, mailing them to lawyers and court officials. "Once the letters disappear from the prison," says the professor, "they're in this very unreal space--like what Joseph K. keeps hearing about the judges whom he never sees. Once you get caught in the system, you might as well be Joseph K."

And even though The Trial's legal limbo might have felt familiar, Wetherbee says his students weren't as enthusiastic about the book's hapless protagonist. "At the same time the guys wanted to identify with Joseph K., they resented the fact that he was so passive and seemed incapable of looking inside himself and finding some inner stability. They couldn't really relate to that middle-class conformist anxiety."

Fry Boy | MEAD TURNS VEGGIE OIL INTO AUTO FUEL

THIS SUMMER, WHILE UNLEADED gas prices hovered at $2 a gallon in central New York, Seth Mead kept his Ford F250 pickup and Volkswagen Passat running for just $.75 a gallon. Instead of using petroleum products, the twenty-eight-year-old earth science teacher relies on vegetable oil discarded by local restaurants to fuel his fleet. "Even if it smells like fries or chicken," says Mead '00, MAT '01, "it's still better than diesel. The emissions are a lot cleaner."

A native Ithacan, Mead encountered his first veggie-oil-powered car soon after graduation, in the form of a friend's early Eighties VW Rabbit diesel. "It was so simple, I thought there was no reason why I couldn't do it," says the former natural resources major. Since he was in the market for a new truck anyway, Mead narrowed his search to diesels and picked up a copy of biodiesel advocate Joshua Tickell's From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank. "Biodiesel is different from what we do. They take vegetable oil and chemically alter it, making it much more like regular diesel fuel," says Mead, who ultimately decided to go with a conversion system marketed by Massachusetts-based Greasecar. "What we have is just plain vegetable oil in a car that has a second fuel system."

That means Mead's vehicles can run on either conventional, petro-based diesel or vegetable oil, filtered to remove food chunks that might gum up an engine. It also means that while his fuel is free, the engine has been altered in a way that many manufacturers consider a violation of a new vehicle's warranty. A Y-shaped connector links the engine to both diesel and veggie fuel tanks, and a switch in the passenger compartment makes selecting between the two simple. Since fryer grease solidifies during cooler months, Mead starts and ends each drive with diesel to clear out the engine. Fuel lines running to and from the veggie oil reservoir--a fifteen-gallon canister installed in the well intended for a spare wheel--are bundled with lines carrying hot engine coolant, to maintain the oil at ideal temperature and viscosity. Mileage is similar with both fuels, and even during the warmest part of the year in Ithaca, the oil can last up to six months before it turns rancid.

Installing the auxiliary system in his truck took weeks, but once he'd finished, Mead created a website (liquidsolar.org) and posted the URL on his trunk lid so fellow drivers could learn more. "I didn't want people pulling me over to get information," he says. "Then all of a sudden everyone wanted help doing it or doing some part of it. Based on their enthusiasm, I decided to incorporate." Since then, Liquid Solar has become an authorized Greasecar installer, converting about two dozen vehicles and establishing a local distribution system for filtered oil ($1 per gallon, delivered in thirty-gallon barrels). Mead says conversions usually take about two days and cost $500 to $600. Recent customers include a North Carolina-based veterinarian's traveling clinic and a handful of Cornell students and researchers.

Liquid Solar has also made its way into the classroom. "Most people think of earth science as rocks and weather," says Mead. "The bigger picture I try to give is that the whole system of the world is just a big cycle. I talk about this as an example of how we can take part in that cycle."

In 2003,Mead connected with Rachel Davidson, a neighbor who teaches CEE 492: Engineers for a Sustainable World. Since then, Davidson's students have tackled fuel availability and filtering systems. "From an educational perspective, it offers challenges the students don't face if they're just doing a made-up homework assignment," says the professor. "It's everything from the difficulties of managing a project and communicating with different interests to the social, political, and economic issues that affect a topic." The first fall, Davidson's students tried to convince Ithaca City School District and Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit administrators to convert their fleets to veggie oil. "The students realized it wasn't a technical challenge," says Davidson, "but it was the regulatory and political issues that were difficult.When they convert a bus or car, the warranty is often no longer effective. The school system wasn't willing to give that up. It's the things that have nothing to do with technical aspects that can kill a project."

This fall, while classmates collaborated with a Honduran organization that builds water supplies and designed solar ovens for a women's group in Ecuador, James Smithmeyer '05 and his team have been devising new filtering systems. Last fall, Smithmeyer surveyed restaurants to determine how much oil would be available for local pickup as part of the course. The same semester,Onimisi Ojeba, a master's in engineering student, designed a circuit that optimizes switching between diesel and veggie oil. Last spring, there were two teams on the project."Half of us worked on technology for filtering, and the other half worked on infrastructure, economics, and logistics of collection and distribution," says Smithmeyer, who focused on the business side. "We looked at how we could collect it, whether to work with a gas station, how to sell it."

Such questions top the list of considerations to be addressed as Liquid Solar grows. "The real conundrum of it is not only do we have to build demand for the service but we also have to build infrastructure," says Mead, who hired a business manager and plans to phase out of the firm's day-to-day operations. "I want to make a big enough splash that companies like Volkswagen and Toyota will take an interest. I'd be perfectly happy to be put out of business by them if it meant the technology were more accessible."

-- Sharon Tregaskis

Return to top of page