Gang Bangers for Jesus as Inflight Entertainment

On a recent Southwest flight from Seattle to Sacramento, this fellow decided that he needed a little extra attention by being belligerent, profane, threatening, and generally unpleasant.

What is amazing is that this behavior started before takeoff:

The brouhaha began nearly the moment the suspect, identified in the documents as Lemar Sheron Rogers, boarded the plane Tuesday morning in Seattle and claimed he had a first-class ticket. He didn't. Nor did any of the 43 passengers. Attendants had to tell Rogers that the Sacramento-bound flight had no first-class seating. And they asked him three times to stow his luggage, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S District court in Portland. "I do what I want," Rogers replied, the documents show.

And continued in flight:

Rogers started shouting at flight attendants that he had an emergency, telling one he wanted three glasses of wine, the records show. When the attendant said he could only have one glass at a time, the man's behavior escalated. "Get the (expletive) out of my face," he sneered. Then he said, "Jesus loves you," according to documents. Soon, the suspect was swearing at passengers, flashing gang signs and demanding to speak with the pilot, the documents say. A flight attendant became so frightened that she asked another passenger to help her restrain Rogers if he became violent, according to court records. Another attendant boiled a pot of water to use against the suspect if he tried to approach the flight deck, the records show.

The aircraft eventually diverted into Portland where the gentleman was taken into custody and charged with "interfering with flight crew". And of course he has already claimed that he was singled out for poor treatment because of his race. While it appears as if multiple federal felony counts could have been charged, only one relatively minor charge was made. The outcome of this one will be interesting.

Dealing with disruptive passengers is a minefield that most pilots would rather avoid but sometimes can't. In the days since 9/11 we've all been told that if we "See something, say something" in a Stasi-like command that seems unworthy of a supposedly free people. And calling out "suspicious" behavior, whatever that means, can get one sued, especially if the person being called out is a member of a protected class.

There might have been a time in the past when using an appeal to authority by having a pilot go back to the cabin to settle a matter might have been useful. Pilots are now under strict orders to never leave the cockpit, especially when there's a disruption as it might be a ruse to get the cockpit door open.

Even before departure a pilot venturing back to quell a disturbance can just as easily inflame emotions as to ease them. The pilot represents an authority figure and the customer's complaint with a ticket agent or other problem might well get unloaded onto an unsuspecting pilot who is in no way able to address the underlying issue. Plus, if someone is going to take a swing, it'll likely be at the pilot.

So in general it always seems best to leave sticky customer service issues to the professionals...flight attendants or customer service reps if still at the gate.

But on occasion the pilot's hand may be forced. There are a number of triggers which cannot be overlooked by aircrew. The most common one is alcohol. Guidelines from the FAA state that a passenger is unsuitable for boarding if they "appear to be intoxicated".

This throws a fairly wide net as it seems most airline passengers today are in some state of impairment. Obviously, having had a few cocktails while waiting for a delayed flight won't matter, but what will is if some other behavior coupled with the smell of booze brings undue attention from the crew or airport staff. Another rule of thumb is that any problem on the ground will likely be worse in the air where the flight attendants have fewer resources dealing with belligerence.

What the crew will be trying to do is to determine if there will be trouble later on such as happened on this flight. Even though Mr. Rogers may be facing federal charges, the crew of that aircraft could well come under scrutiny from the feds if they choose to pursue the issue.

Testimony will be taken from the TSA agents at the security checkpoint, the ticket agents, boarding agents, other passengers and crew members as to Mr. Rogers' apparent intoxication. If it is found that the gentleman was exhibiting signs of intoxication before departure, the crew could be potentially sanctioned by the FAA for allowing the customer onto the aircraft.

We as pilots occasionally play a little cat and mouse game with our ground agents. An agent may come on and say something like "we have a gentleman who's had a few cocktails and made a scene, but we've talked to him and think he's OK now". Being in the customer service business we all want to accommodate our customers and there was a time when that customer would be allowed to travel, but that is much less likely to happen today. At least on my airplane. There's very little upside and quite a bit of downside in this situation for the crew, especially in today's retributive atmosphere of very aggressive federal regulation.

My only other personal trigger is if I or my crew are cursed at. There are no specific guidelines for this but the logic behind it is if so little respect is shown to the crew on the ground, even less will be shown in the air where a problem might arise.

Luckily I've only had one incidence of this in 20 plus years of flying. On this particular incident a customer got crosswise with a flight attendant during boarding. This particular flight attendant, a very special snowflake and a generally worthless employee, was a fully empowered union member and refused to do an iota more effort than was required. Apparently a female customer who couldn't reach the overhead bin to stow her bag asked the flight attendant (who's a big guy) for assistance which was summarily refused.

Another male customer assisted the woman and apparently made a comment to the flight attendant which immediately put our snowflake into shriek mode, calling for the male passenger to be removed. I became aware of the kerfuffle as everyone was noisily proceeding forward when at that point the customer let loose a tirade of profanity. Until that moment, I would have been prepared to override the snowflake and let the customer travel but he tied my hands. Don't cuss at the crew!

An unfortunate byproduct of our hyper sensitized society is that everyone is on edge when getting on an airplane. Given a little bit of power, flight attendants become miniature commissars threatening to toss anyone off the flight who might look at them askance. In an equal but opposite reaction, customers who perceive the slightest disrespect, are just as quick to pull whichever grievance card they may happen to carry and cry about some dreadful -ism which is being unfairly applied.

It is of little wonder that the short-haul market for flying, which competes directly with the automobile, is collapsing.

Single pilot?

The text is hard to read but it displays a list of jobs and the probability that there will be losses in those fields due to automation.

This is taken from and in depth study from Oxford entitled the Future of Employment.

FWIW, aviation is showing a 55% probability of job loss from automation. This will occur due to automated "telepresence" systems reducing demand and eventually one person cockpits.

Automation is going to transform our economy in an even greater way than ever before...and the rewards will go to knowledge workers who can't easily be replaced by machines...plus the technicians who fix the machines. (Trades anyone?)

Calls for minimum wage hikes will only accelerate this trend.

Here's more:

Commercial real estate and retail may not be great buys...

ALPA and the Pilot Shortage

The Airline Pilots Association, a union representing the pilots of most of the largest airlines save Southwest, recently weighed in with a press release on the pilot shortage. ALPA was commenting specifically on a recent GAO report concerning pilot staffing. 

Unsurprisingly, ALPA's take is that there are plenty of pilots available but the problem is one of low wages:

To put it very simply, currently there is no shortage of qualified pilots. There is, however, a shortage of qualified pilots willing to fly for substandard wages and inadequate benefits. 

In a sense they're right but they are cleverly sidestepping the issue. The people who write these releases at ALPA are not stupid people but they are counting that their readers are. At least as far as Economics 101 is concerned. Specifically, the coming pilot shortage, while somewhat demographically driven, has been exacerbated and its arrival has been accelerated by recently adopted policies which ALPA itself championed in Congress. Returning to the scene of the crime, ALPA lamely cries no one here but us chickens!

ALPA was instrumental in getting the new minimum hours and rest rules recently enacted which are being credited with making the pilot shortage worse. ALPA of course denies this:

Although some within the airline industry blame the legislation and resulting FAA airline pilot
qualifications and training rules for a pilot shortage, the airline industry actually helped craft those rules and supported their passage. We believe that they did so, just as ALPA did, because of a genuine concern for aviation safety. Several accidents over a number of years, arguably the most troubling and recent of which was the Colgan Airways accident in Buffalo, NY in 2009, caused a justifiable groundswell of support for the new and safer increase in the minimum qualifications for pilots to be hired at our airlines, the scope of which goes well beyond the number of hours that a first officer must have in order to enter the Part 121 industry.

Sorry. This is just laughable. As we've pointed out before,  neither of the so-called fixes recently enacted by Congress in response to the Colgan 3407 accident which are currently upending the industry and worsening the pilot shortage, would have changed anything. Both of the pilots on that flight had the minimum number of hours and required rest under the new rules. What ALPA is now doing is using a crisis they helped manufacture to call for higher wages.

The American commercial transport system has been and continues to be simply the safest in the world. This latest round of rulemaking just makes it more expensive and less economically viable.

The joke however, is on ALPA. Wages will of course rise either with or without ALPA's agitation. This is simple supply and demand Econ 101. What may also likely happen is that some of the entry level jobs which are where the pilot shortage is manifesting itself will simply disappear. If operating margins for mainline airlines are thin, the margins at the commuter or regional airlines are even thinner. These airlines will simply reduce or cease operations to their least profitable locations resulting in fewer jobs. It's amazing how this capitalism thing works.

ALPA next makes an emotional appeal to fairness:

There is a quantifiable shortage of pay and benefits for pilots in the regional airline industry, not a shortage of pilots who are capable and certified to fly the airlines’ equipment. According to ALPA’s figures, which vary from GAO’s just slightly, the average starting salary for new first officers in the regional airline industry is only $22,400, which compares very poorly with the starting salaries of other fields for which university aviation program graduates are qualified to enter, which include: test engineer ($52,500); operations manager ($55,000); and, second lieutenant in the Air Force, the entry level for most military pilots ($53,616 in salary and allowances). It is worth noting that the average starting salary for elementary school teachers ($35,529)—which is widely believed to be an underpaid profession—is substantially more than that of regional airline first officers. 

Well they are a union we suppose, and appealing to emotion does pay dividends (See Party, Democrat) with the low information products of most American public schools. But that still doesn't make it anywhere near a valid argument. The reason a first time new-hire pilot would agree to a job paying just $22K is because he wants to. For a new-hire regional pilot, his compensation is not just money: it's also flight hours.

Back to Econ 101 (sigh).

Unlike all the other professions listed which have higher starting salaries, the airline piloting profession can top out at pay of over $200k with a three day work week. It's a nice gig even though it will probably take about thirty years with a major airline to get there. And to get a job at a major airline you need flight hours. Lots of them. The only place to get them is either by working for a regional airline or in the military. The regional airlines know that most of the pilots working there are simply gaining flight time so they can move on to a major airline. For this reason they pay low wages. They don't have to pay higher wages to attract pilots, so they don't. The rest of the compensation is flight hours.

This is analogous to the reason medical residents or partner track lawyers endure harsh hours for low pay. It's a condition of entry into a well paying career field. You'll also notice that very few former military pilots are flying for the regional airlines. That's because they already have the requisite number of hours to apply for a major airline job.

Now if you look at starting salaries of most major airlines, you'll find numbers in the $40-50K range. United Airlines just recently nearly doubled their starting salary. Why? Because they know there will be a great demand for qualified pilots coming out of the regionals as replacements for retiring baby boomers. See, this whole economics thing really does work!

So what is the real reason for the pilot shortage? We believe there's a multiplicity of reasons:

• For starters, it is really expensive to learn how to fly. At perhaps $60K just to get the basic ratings for a job, the new government requirements may just be the additional straw to break the camel's back. 
• There are also opportunity costs. If someone is contemplating spending that kind of money on school, many other careers promise a faster payback. It takes a really long time to reach the top rungs of a flying career where the money is. 
• Along the way there is no shortage of career disruption. We know plenty of pilots with closets full of uniforms from bankrupt carriers where they were laid off. 9/11 put many thousands of pilots on the street for literally years.
• Demographics. A huge bulge in the manpower snake, the Viet Nam era baby boomers, are getting ready to retire in huge numbers. They will need to be replaced.
• Overseas airlines. Most countries do not have a robust general aviation sector, regional airlines or military "farm leagues" to draw on for pilots as does the US. This is especially true of places like China and India who must use expat Americans to staff their cockpits. This demand is growing fast.
• The military is doing a much better job hanging onto its pilots. The Air Force Academy can't even fill all it's available pilot training slots partly due to a required 10 year commitment for training.
• Finally, there's no guarantee the payback will be there after a career spent chasing the gold ring. The piloting career is changing and is at risk to have it's very nature changed by automation.

That said, if you've got the scratch, and the fortitude, now is a really good time to get into the career field.

Some Background

There was certainly a time in this country when labor unions served a valuable and needed service, that of labor advocate. Workplaces were often dangerous and unhealthy places and should a worker become injured on the job, he would be summarily fired with no recourse or income. Unions provided support for injured or disabled workers and advocated to make workplaces safer, in addition to their traditional role of agitating for higher wages through strikes and collective bargaining.

The reason that private sector labor unions are in decline is not because these needs have diminished, it is because these functions of unions have been largely supplanted by government. Workplace safety, disability insurance, healthcare, pensions, and job discrimination are all functions now handled by the government through a myriad of agencies such as OSHA, NLRB and PBGC to name just three. This loss of writ has left unions with their remaining function of negotiating wages through collective bargaining.

Large monolithic manufacturers were ideal for union organization as only several contracts across a few corporations could set a standard wage which would cover many thousands of workers. Workers in smaller but similar corporations could use the higher wages of the larger corporations to agitate for "industry standard" wages or threaten walkouts.

This worked well in the post-war era as there was essentially no competition for American manufacturing. As offshoring and foreign competition increased however, inefficiencies caused by union forced work rules and overreach took their toll. Many old line businesses found themselves fighting for survival with nimbler overseas or upstart non-union competitors.

Even as workplaces became ever safer, unions recognized that invoking safety was still a very useful tactic for improving work conditions. This continues today. While care must be taken to not throw out the baby of real safety improvement with the bathwater of agitation for easier work rules, this latest round of ALPA inspired rule-making does little for actual safety while further handicapping an already low margin business.

And we say this as a union pilot who operates under this system.

Progress...of a Sort

The FAA, if not the rest of the airline industry, is grudgingly coming to the conclusion that having pilots just sitting in a cockpit watching a machine do the flying is not the best possible deployment of automation technology. Humans have many strengths, but being a monitor of automated machines is not one of them. Humans, when not directly engaged in a task will quickly become disengaged and complacent, even when their own welfare or lives are on the line.

In the news today, the FAA has announced that it will be seeking to mandate changes to some of Boeing's 737 model aircraft in the wake of a 2009 (better late than never?) crash of a Turkish Airlines 737. From the WSJ (subscription needed):

Such problems with low airspeed—often prompted by confusion about the status of automated throttles—have been identified as major factors in some of the most infamous airliner crashes in recent years. They include last summer's crash of an Asiana Airlines  Boeing 777 into a sea wall while trying to land at San Francisco International Airport. The pilots failed to notice their approach speed dropping.

The FAA acknowledges that should the automation fail, the aircraft is likely at risk:

In its proposal, the FAA said "loss of automatic speed control" can result "in loss of control of the airplane." The agency is proposing a three-year compliance deadline, once the directive becomes final. 

We are not familiar with the exact details of the proposed fix, but it likely has to pertain to the radio altimeter which erroneously indicated a landing altitude while the aircraft was still on approach. The erroneous indication caused the autothrottle system to pull the throttles to idle in anticipation of landing but the crew did not adequately respond nor disengage the system. The airspeed subsequently decayed and efforts to add power came too late to prevent a stall and short landing.

The important point here is that the crew eventually recognized the failure but not in enough time to save the approach (or their lives). This crew was flying a fully automatic approach into very low visibility conditions and most likely were concentrating on reaching the decision altitude where they would have to choose to either land or go around. Believing that the auto throttles "had their back" concerning airspeed control, they dropped the airspeed out of their crosscheck.

This is the pernicious nature of automation. It is designed to be "automatic", meaning little or no human input is needed. And as it rarely if ever fails, humans being human, will come to rely on it. Yet should it fail, the humans ultimately in charge are not well suited to instantly take over in a critical phase of flight to recover the aircraft as happened here. As former flight instructors, we always found it easier to fly an approach ourselves than to monitor one flown by a student and to then take and recover the aircraft should the student go off course. Automation is like the perfect student except it gives no warning of failure. At least students were known to be consistently weak or good.

So while the FAA and industry are recognizing that there are significant drawbacks in over-reliance on automation, this mandate from the FAA serves to in effect fix a potential automation defect, not a reassessment of the underlying philosophy. We expect that the next decade will consist of a type of "whack-a-mole" wherein defects in automation will make themselves apparent through various incidents and accidents, and efforts will continue to build a better mousetrap. At some point automatic flight systems will become robust enough to obviate the "stick and rudder" skill set in the people who will man tomorrow's cockpits, but we have a way to go yet.

Why Is That Baby Crying?

One of the hazards of modern air travel is the infant. Along with the toddler, the infant presents a very real and present danger to one's survival on a modern airliner. Being anywhere within audible distance of either of these two noise emitters can turn any normally tedious exercise in being crammed into a 28 inch pitch coach seat into a Chinese water torture-like experience. Luckily, there are measures that can be taken to mitigate this common assault on your sanity.

Flying first class is a proven strategy to avoid very young flyers but this has its own drawback of being a little spendy. And of course there can be upscale flyers who might bring junior along with them to also fly in first class defeating the technique entirely. In fact since the well heeled typically don't discipline their children at all, a toddler in first class will be particularly insufferable. As little Jared kicks your $1500 seat for hours on end you might hear mom say "stop kicking that nice man's seat" perhaps once during the flight. And if kicking your seat occupies Jared's attention so mommy can enjoy her cabernet, well then that's it. And don't even think about asking a flight attendant to intervene as they'd rather break up a wild dingo fight than counsel a mother on child rearing techniques.

Another good toddler or infant mitigation strategy is the use of noise cancelling headphones. Modern headphones are quite good at removing almost all ambient cabin sound to include screaming infants. This is especially true if one is also listening to an iPod recording of death metal or klezmer music. Just remember to carry enough batteries with you to keep your electronic defenses powered up for the duration of the flight. The noise cancelling headset will not help though in the case of toddler seat kick or that of an infant offering you a taste of a soggy animal cracker over her mother's shoulder. For that you need to practice a pre-emptive strategy of defensive seat selection.

For many airlines, seat selection is made when booking the flight on the internet. If the flight isn't very full and you have the available seating chart, selecting a seat in front of a vacant row might mean you won't have anyone directly behind you though honestly, airlines are so full these days that this isn't very realistic. In this case, one must be proactive and immediately request to be reseated should a toddler wind up behind you. Claiming something like a needed proximity to the lav due to irritable bowel syndrome could be a viable game plan. Flight attendants generally recoil at any possibility of bodily fluid release so that helps.

If you find yourself flying on an airline that doesn't assign seats such as Southwest (our favorite airline), be sure to choose a row of seats either very near the front or the overwing where children are prohibited if any are available. Family boarding is generally after the first group and travelling families will be looking for an unoccupied row. At that stage of boarding, this will be just behind the over wing exit. Avoid this area. If you must sit in this area, choose a row which already has someone in the row just behind. It also helps to choose a row with at least one other person already seated thereby foreclosing the possibility of a single mom with infant joining you.

Should the worst happen and a toddler takes up residence behind you, do not panic. Without making eye contact with the family, simply get up and move to a different seat expeditiously. You need not even move your bag from the overhead if you've placed it there. Move aft and grab a middle seat if you must knowing that a middle seat sans kicking will always trump screaming and/or kicking or projectile animal crackers.

Oh by the way, the reason babies tend to cry on descent? They can't clear their ears as the cabin pressure increases from about 8000 ft pressure altitude while at cruise down to airport elevation. Air is trying to enter into their inner ears and sinuses but can't easily do so without help. This causes pain, but the crying actually helps their ears clear. The reason it mostly happens on descent and not during climb is because air escapes easily from ears and sinuses on climb with little help needed. It's the same reason flying with a cold may hurt. Now you know.

Lastly, if you happen to be the person travelling with an infant or toddler we have but one word of advice: Benadryl. They sleep and are clear. Win-win.

Happy Travels!

New York State of Mind

Sunday Morning, Portland, Maine

With love from Maine

The Chicago Way

The city of Chicago as you may know has two major airports served by commercial carriers, O'Hare and Midway. Midway, the older and smaller of the two serves regional and  national destinations and is dominated by Southwest while O'Hare is a hub for American and United and serves both national and international destinations with regional feeders. At about 20 miles apart, the two airports are very close from an air traffic point of view and present special challenges for the volume of traffic each airport handles. This job falls to the FAA's organizational level of approach control (tracon) for the Chicago area known simply to pilots as "Chicago Approach". There's a story here involving the death of a six year old boy, but first some background.

The FAA organizationally divides their controllers into three general categories of tower controllers, approach/departure controllers and regional controllers or "Air route traffic control centers". On a routine flight, an aircraft would get taxi and takeoff instructions from tower controllers, local departure routing from the departure control (who are the same people as approach control) and after climb to altitude, routing from the regional center. So say on a flight from St. Louis to Midway an airliner would start by talking to St. Louis Lambert ground and tower controllers. After takeoff, the aircraft would talk to St. Louis departure control for the climb to altitude and then be handed off to Kansas City Center for enroute control.

The aircraft would be handed off to Chicago Center when crossing the boundary into Chicago's airspace who would issue initial descent clearance. As the aircraft descended below the center's airspace, it would be handed off to Chicago Approach who would vector it for an approach at which time it would be switched to Midway tower who would issue landing clearance followed by Midway ground control who would issue taxi instructions to the gate.

The system works, albeit inefficiently, is safe, and has been in use now for about 50 years. That's right, 50 years. The current air traffic control system in the United States is essentially the same one that was used to guide TWA and Pan Am 707s back in the 60s. Oh sure there have been some upgrades and technology improvements in things like communications and radar, but the operational concept of an air traffic controller with a radar individually controlling airliners through radio calls is the same as it ever was since the dawn of the modern air transport era. In fact, my description of a routine flight above could've been lifted directly out of one of those old Time-Life technology books that used to sit on my parent's bookshelf as I was growing up back in the '60s.

A Brief History of ATC Update Efforts

The history of the US government's attempts to update the ATC system is long and expensive, running into tens of billions of dollars over the past few decades with little to show. Starting in the 1980s the FAA implemented a plan called the Advanced Automation System which was projected to cost $2.5 billion but ended up years delayed and costing $7.6 billion even after parts of the program were abandoned. The FAA blamed the shortcomings on federal personnel and procurement constraints. While there have been efforts to reform the bureaucracy to make the FAA into a performance based organization they have met with limited success. These have included reforms such as having air traffic services overseen by a board of directors and managed by a chief operating officer.

In 2000 Congress passed the Aviation Investment and Reform Act for the 21st Century (AIR-21) to facilitate some of the recommended changes and still the bureaucracy managed to stifle reform in a classic turf battle over the responsibilities of the FAA administrator and the proposed air traffic COO according to a GAO report. The picture that continually emerges is that the FAA is a stubbornly recalcitrant bureaucracy resistant to performance enhancing change and the air traffic control system reflects this reality.

In 2003 as a result of some of these criticisms and cost overruns, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Vision 100 - Century of Aviation Reauthorization Act. This law established the Joint Planning and Development Office whose mission it is to manage the design and implementation of what is now known as the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). Coordinating between a half dozen federal agencies such as the DOT, FAA, DOD, Homeland Security, Nasa, and private industry, NextGen is the government's latest (and final?) drive to hopefully achieve the elusive update of the National Airspace System.

Fast forward 10 years and some tens of billions of dollars later, and we are on the cusp of a new era of aircraft control. Utilizing updated technologies such as GPS navigation, advanced computer processing power, and communications, the hope for the NextGen system is to finally revolutionize air traffic control into a highly automated control system for commercial air travel. The benefits to such a system are manifest. They include substantial fuel savings with a concurrent reduction in emissions, significant improvement in the utilization of current airspace resulting in fewer delays and increased airspace capacity, along with the use of advanced computational tools for efficient weather avoidance and traffic conflict resolution. All of these goals are considered to be necessities as traffic projections show the current system to be at capacity.

One of the ways that the NextGen airspace system more efficiently uses airspace is to fit more airplanes onto more closely spaced routes. This is accomplished using highly accurate, GPS guided, automatically flown routes. This system of automated flying, known as required navigational performance or RNP, puts airplanes on precise pre-determined routes from departure through approach and not only prescribes their horizontal position but vertical as well. When we talk about precise aircraft positioning, RNP compliant aircraft are required to keep their horizontal position accuracy to within 0.1 nautical mile minimum and vertical position accuracy under 100 feet. Most aircraft do much better than that. Once placed on track, airplanes will fly a precise path through the air needing very little outside attention.

Oh, and one other result of the automation of aircraft routing through RNP: fewer controllers.

Enter Labor

The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) was formed in January 1968 and it took only two short years before they orchestrated their first of many job actions by staging a sick out over wage and benefit issues. Patco is most famous though for their run in with the newly elected President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In August of that year after failing to reach an agreement with the FAA, 12,300 Patco controllers went on strike grounding much of the nation's air traffic. Reagan responded by firing all the striking controllers after a 48hr warning. Patco disbanded and the FAA's controllers were without union representation until 1987 when a new union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) was formed.

With average compensation of controllers on the order of $150k, more than many of the pilots flying the planes they control, the FAA has more than ample incentive to reduce their labor costs through the use of automation. Even though controllers hired in the wake of the Patco strike are reaching retirement age, controllers still on the job are apparently not thrilled about automation reducing their ranks. This is simple human nature. People naturally place value on what they do for a living and being replaced by a machine does little to enhance that value.

A Tragedy

The night of December 8, 2005 was a snowy one in Chicago. A winter storm was moving through the area and Midway airport was experiencing low visibilities and heavy snow. The wind was blowing from the southeast which would normally mean that aircraft would be landing on the southeast facing runway to land into the wind. On this night however, Midway bound aircraft were landing to the northwest on runway 31C with a tailwind. There was a good reason for this on this particular evening and that was that the visibility was not good enough for the approach to the southeast runway while it was good enough to land to the northwest with a tailwind.

Tragically on this night, a Southwest 737, Flight 1248, failed to stop on the pavement and crashed through the airport perimeter fence into the intersection of W. 55th St and S. Central Avenue hitting the car in which Joshua Wood, 6, was riding killing him. It is the only fatality ever to be attributed to Southwest Airlines in it's entire history. The NTSB, in their investigation noted among other things that if not for the tailwind, the aircraft could've stopped within the confines of the runway, snow notwithstanding.

Tailwind landings, though not optimal, are not inherently dangerous unless other factors come into play such as runway length or slippery pavement. One reason pilots prefer to land into a headwind is that a headwind approach reduces the speed that the aircraft is travelling over the ground while a tailwind increases it. And as the amount of kinetic energy varies with the square of the velocity of a moving object (KE=1/2MV2), a little tailwind means a lot more energy must be dissipated on the runway by the brakes and reversers. The snowy short runway. Midway's main runway is only about 6500 feet long - relatively short for airliners - and Midway did not have a proper "overrun" or pavement extending past the runway due to the age of the airport allowing it to be grandfathered past safety regulations requiring such pavement extensions.

But, there was another reason that played into why Midway was landing to the northwest that snowy night. It was this: they almost always landed to the northwest. Unless the tailwind increased to more than 10 kts which is the allowed limit, Midway favored runway 31C, the northwest facing runway. The reason for this? O'Hare. O'Hare is a mere 20 miles northwest of Midway which is nearly next door as far as airliners are concerned. Flying an instrument approach into Midway would put them right into the O'Hare departure corridor. For airliners to fly an instrument approach to Midway's runway 13C, they must impede on O'Hare's airspace which of course greatly complicated the controller's jobs. Or at any rate they used to.

Any instrument approach is simply a way to get an airplane through the clouds to land on a runway. Since the early days of aviation, the only available way to do this was with radio waves. Airplanes tune into a directional radio beacon and follow it to the runway. The problem with radio waves is they don't bend. Any approach which followed a radio beacon was by definition a straight-in approach. RNP has changed all that.

Part of the brilliance of NextGen and RNP is that aircraft no longer depend on ground-based aids to navigation, i.e radio beacons. GPS and onboard equipment provide the navigational information used to direct modern airliners. Once freed from the tyranny of the radio beam, and given automation tools and autopilots which can fly a precise route, approach designers were free to construct what has long been an elusive goal: the curved approach. What this meant is that two close airports were no longer stepping on each other's toes. No longer would airspace issues determine traffic patterns over safety concerns such as tailwind landings. At least that's the dream. Now the reality.

The Chicago Way

Southwest in 2011 became one of the first airlines to install the equipment to become fully RNP compliant. This effort consisted of millions of dollars of advanced equipment to be installed in aircraft and millions more dollars in training costs for its pilots. The FAA for its part was to design and certify the many RNP compliant approaches and then allow the RNP aircraft to utilize them to their mutual benefit. But a funny thing happened along the way to the future of aviation: nothing.

After a brief period where Southwest required its pilots to log RNP approaches for initial qualification they found that controllers simply didn't want to offer those approaches on the grounds that it was difficult to sequence RNP aircraft in with non-RNP aircraft. And rather than giving the RNP compliant aircraft priority, they simply got in line with everyone else, like they always had. This has been a common complaint among airlines which have upgraded to RNP..

And nine years after the crash of Southwest 1248, Midway got it's first RNP arrival and an RNP approach to runway 22 which previously had no approach but relied on pilots executing a visual circling maneuver to land when the winds dictated. But this is Chicago. Change happens when the shop steward says it is going to happen apparently.

Having recently flown the new arrivals, we can attest to this new reality. While flying into Philadelphia or perhaps LAX might entail one instruction from the controller to fly the entire procedure with no further input, the Chicago controllers we've encountered are happily oblivious to all this spending as much time micro-managing aircraft as they've ever done. It's as if nothing has changed at all. And this was born out recently by a conversation with a Chicago ATC manager who relayed that the issue is the perceived threat to jobs by the very controllers who are entrusted to implement the future.

So the next time you find yourself on a ground delay while waiting to take off to Chicago, remember, it's the Chicago Way.

Middle Class Decline - Airline Edition

There has been much talk of the decline of the middle class during the so-called recovery. Anyone who cares to look can find a fusillade of statistics backing up the assertion that the middle class in America is slowly being bled to death. In things like retail sales or the employment rate the story told is one of the middle class slowly but inexorably hollowing out.  To be sure, the demise of the middle class is not due solely to the recession, but is also due in part to the dismantling of the American manufacturing base which has been happening for decades. Add in a government piling on with a war on wealth creation and the results are inevitable.

As the middle class sees its economic prospects dim, the great engine of consumption which was powered by the middle class, purchasing everything from automobiles to clothes to TVs is beginning to sputter. Retailers that serve the middle class such as JC Penney and Sears are seeing sales lag as median incomes decline. While Walmart has been warning on earnings, the Washington Post reports that America's second largest employer is now a temp agency. Recently as well, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that the Affordable Care Act will result in the destruction of nearly 2.5 million jobs. Clearly, things are not well. Now this decline may be manifesting itself in another middle class consumer item: air travel.

Prior to the deregulation of air travel in 1978, flying was a luxury reserved for the well to do. Flights were expensive and flying was considered a province of the elite. That all changed with the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 signed into law by Jimmy Carter on October 24 of that year. As the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) sunsetted, air travel became inexpensive and democratized. For the first time ever, middle class families and businessmen could afford to fly. With the collapse of oil prices in the early 80s, and the entrance of low cost carriers like Southwest, air travel exploded.

From 1980 to 2000, US commercial passenger airline enplanements more than doubled from about 310 million to over 710 million. Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines once commented that their main competitor was not another airline but rather the automobile. Southwest was drawing passengers out of their cars and into airplanes for short haul trips of several hundred miles. The middle class was now free to "move about the country" as a Southwest ad tagline put it. Flying to another city for a day to see a football game, once an activity reserved for rich playboys, was now within reach of the guys working in the mailroom and taking the family by air to grandma's for the holidays was becoming routine.

Something, though has been happening to the leisure air travel market. Southwest, our favorite airline, has been abandoning it's core competency of high frequency short haul markets. The old saying goes "dance with the one that brung you" but the one that brought short haul flying (the public) has apparently left the building. Southwest has acknowledged a dramatic drop off of domestic short haul traffic, and has responded with the abandonment of many short haul city pairs which were formerly profitable. Markets such as Pittsburgh-Philly, Indy-Chicago, Spokane-Seattle, and Reno-Oakland which have been the bread and butter of Southwest's short haul presence have been terminated leaving travelers the option of driving or staying home.

The reasons for this traffic collapse are varied. They are probably a combination of the hassle and time factor due to the TSA, and cost. While fuel has become more expensive for both automobiles and airlines, adding in the additional factor of a body cavity search by the dedicated and fully pensioned goons staffing the TSA checkpoints probably tips the scale in favor of driving four hours vice waiting at an airport for three hours for a one hour flight. Other factors which may be hurting short haul flying might be the increased fidelity of teleconferencing and as mentioned above, in an economy losing it's middle class, there are just fewer people with disposable income. The rich will continue to fly but there aren't that many of them.

The factor though that may most impact short haul flying is that it has been relatively cheap. Therefore, the persons most likely to fly to a nearby city might be either an employee of a small business, or a leisure traveler on a weekend trip. Both of these types of customers will be quite price sensitive. Make their journey just a little more expensive or time consuming and they will forgo the pain of flying for a Skype session or for watching the game on TV.

Southwest Adjusts

As most of the growth in air travel in the past few decades has been due to those of more modest means taking to the air, the new reality will hit airlines especially hard. Fuel prices are not likely to decline much below the current price of $100 per barrel and other costs are unlikely to moderate as government piles on regulatory requirements while labor demands an increasing share of revenue. Southwest, acting like a team without a conference, has been forced from their traditional pocket of short haul flying and is scrambling for the sideline of international flying while hoping to not run out the clock. Time will tell whether they can pull it off.

After the third of the mega-mergers has resulted in three gargantuan American airlines with globe-spanning networks and equally gargantuan loyalty programs, Southwest is again the runt of the litter. Too big to run under the radar as a nimble low cost carrier (LCC) as their costs approach and even exceed those of the new triumvirate, yet not large enough to challenge the giants in terms of network reach or loyalty rewards, they have their work cut out for them. Add in some labor unrest with six open labor contracts and operational miscues leading to abysmal on-time performance, and CEO Gary Kelly may need some real magic to pull a rabbit out of this dingy hat.

Don't count them out just yet though. With the Dallas Love Field restrictive Wright Amendment expiring this year allowing more flights out of Texas from Love, Southwest will be a formidable pain in American's side as Love Field is much closer to downtown Dallas. Likewise, Southwest's acquisition of 54 slots at Reagan National (DCA) as a result of a required divestiture from the American USAir merger will provide a huge presence in downtown Washington. Add in additional slots at New York's LaGuardia (LGA) and Southwest has it's foot firmly in the door of two very profitable markets. Southwest's opening foray into international waters this summer may help to offset their retreat from their humble origins as a three city intra-state carrier.

It's Here!

We've commented on the coming pilot shortage before as it has been said to be imminent for perhaps a decade now. Always there has been some event to forestall its arrival, but like the long awaited and feared radioactive flotsam from the Japanese tsunami, it seems to be finally washing up on our shores. An article in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription needed) details United Airline's decision to drastically reduce the size of their Cleveland hub. Make a note that the proposed cuts are to commuter aircraft, the small 50 seat jets flying to regional destinations. Mainline flying with narrow-body Boeings and Airbuses will be unchanged (for now).

A new federal rule that requires new pilots to have 1,500 hours of flight experience, instead of 250 hours, has caused a shortfall in regional pilot ranks. This is causing a creeping pilot shortage among big airlines, which routinely recruit new aviators from regional carriers. 

"Although this is an industry issue, it directly affects us and requires us to reduce our regional-partner flying, as several of our regional partners are beginning to have difficulty flying their schedules due to reduced new-pilot availability," the CEO said in the memo.

So apparently they can't fill their schedule partly due to not being able to find enough pilots to hire with the requisite hours. One must read between the lines because what the CEO really meant to say is that they can't find enough $18,000/yr pilots who are willing to spend perhaps $60k to get the ratings and experience for that $18k starting salary. Perhaps after a while there might be found pilots at higher wages. But that's the rub, isn't it? (By the way, the military is doing a better job of hanging onto their pilots so that source is drying up.)

At the higher wages necessary to attract pilots, the economics of flying commuter aircraft may not work. Buying a ticket on a commuter aircraft is already crazy expensive and is likely to get more so. At some point customers will simply drive. Other likely trends will be to see an acceleration of the grounding of the now uneconomic 50 seaters in favor of larger 90 or 130 seat aircraft. The problem with larger aircraft is some markets just don't have the demand to fill a 130 seat aircraft nor the pricing power to support a 50 seat aircraft. These destinations, save for the government's Essential Air Service subsidy program will lose commercial air service.

We've mentioned before that the cause of all this mischief was the rule change resulting from laws passed in the wake of the Colgan crash of several years ago. Even though both pilots in that accident had well above the newly established minimums, Congress had to show that they were doing something to fix an air transportation system that is already the safest in the world. Forcing people into their cars where they are orders of magnitude more likely to be killed or injured in auto wrecks seems just like the perfect fix. Economics is (apparently) hard.