Joe Sharkey At Large

Wednesday’s stranded-passengers debacle wasn’t confined to JetBlue planes with passengers aboard stranded near gates at Kennedy International Airport. As I said before, I went to the invaluable www.flightstats.com Web site at 6 p.m. Wednesday and counted about 1,500 flight cancellations among major airlines at New York airports, at Philadelphia, Boston, Washington and in Chicago, where O’Hare was discombobulated by the Northeast mess. Even today, passengers are still stranded at JFK and other airports (though in the terminals, not confined to planes) as JetBlue and other airlines struggle to get their airplanes — and crews — back into normal rotations.

So I think we’ll be hearing horror stories about this fiasco for some time, as the stories filter out into the major media.

Take Joe Scarborough, of MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” for example. Anyway, here’s what he had to say about being stranded Wednesday on a Delta plane parked at LaGuardia:

“You know what? I can relate after spending almost nine hours in seat 41E. Yes, that‘s a center seat, where I was stuck between a man, a woman and a dog. For nine hours, I sat in very close proximity to that dog and some very agitated dog owners. Our pilot did a great job of keeping everybody calm and kept telling us we were lucky to be on the plane since this would be the only flight out of LaGuardia that day.

We actually believed him for the first four hours. After the fifth hour, we were told there was a break in the weather. Scattered applause was followed with 30 minutes of de-icing, which was followed by another announcement saying the temperature had dropped so low that we were going to be stuck for another few hours.

We got the go ahead after hour seven—again, seven hours straight on that plane—only to be told in hour eight that an engine valve was frozen and we‘d be towed back to the gate. And 4:30 PM, nine hours after most of us had boarded and most of us stayed on that plane, the plane we‘d stayed on all that time—well, it got canceled. We filed off.

My producers called Delta and got this response. “Delta‘s commitment is to maintain safety as our number one priority, keep customers informed about conditions impacting their travel and make every effort to keep them comfortable. We certainly regret the inconvenience to our customers caused by yesterday‘s delays.”

Hey, listen, stuff happens, and I try to be very Zen about the whole episode. But I‘ve yet to get an apology from Delta, and instead, I‘m getting spin from a company that‘s refusing to take responsibility for one bad decision after another, decisions that left men, women, and yes, dogs stuck on a plane for nine hours. I‘m waiting for that apology and my own free round-trip tickets, or I may just find me another airline.”

(My question to MSNBC’s travel department: Why the hell did you have Mr. Scarborough, a TV star, a veteran and presumably productive business traveler, and a former Congressman, wedged in a rear-of-the-plane middle seat– back by the lavs — stuck between a two passengers and an apparently cranky dog (and what sensible dog wouldn’t be cranky) for all those hours?

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Yesterday, JetBlue Airways, which has spent years burnishing an enviable reputation for customer service and smart-thinking, shot itself in both feet during an icy snowstorm in the Northeast.

You remember the Dec. 29 debacle in Texas, when thunderstorms caused American Airlines to divert 121 flights from Dallas to various airports in the region, and to hold them on the ramps for long periods of time?

Initially, the media reported reported on just ONE American Airlines flight that sat on a ramp for nearly nine hours. (And fellow travel writers, please stop calling it a “tarmac.” Tarmac is, like macadam, concrete or asphalt, a road-building material, and not a synonym for ramp or taxiway).

Then after I made some inquiries, it turned out that at least three American flights sat on ramps for over eight hours, at Austin and San Antonio. Now I’ve learned that another one sat for over eight hours in Tulsa. Who knows how many others were involved, with bewildered passengers stranded on packed planes with only the food they could scrounge from each others’ carry-ons, subject to foul air and uncertainty, unable to use on-board toilets because of disgusting conditions.

To their credit, American told me that, while they thought the Dec. 29 problem was extremely isolated and the result of extremely unusual weather, there was no excuse for holding passengers on planes, unable to get to gates, for more than four hours. American said it had re-instituted procedures requiring operations to start paying close attention to planes held for three hours, and to absolutely get them back to a gate by hour four.

(By the way, I am amused at how the current news reports on the JFK incident fail to mention the Dec. 29 incidents — as if there were not a context to this all. Having long ago replaced curiosity with piety and agitation as driving impulses, much of the media seem to treat every day (or hour) as entirely unconnected to previous days (or hours). But I digress …)

Underlying these airport incidents are some basic facts. The domestic air-travel network — handling record numbers of passengers now with 25 percent fewer airline employees and fewer full-size planes than 2000, and dealing with an overburdened, underfunded air-traffic control system to boot — has no slack. I was not the only one who predicted that what happened in Texas on Dec. 29 would happen again soon elsewhere.

And so we had a more widespread repeat yesterday. While the local media were dispatching reporters out to cover stories about snow and fender-benders, the regional air-traffic system was collapsing. By 6 p.m. yesterday, I counted more than 1,500 flight cancellations — not delays, but outright, this-plane-ain’t-moving cancellations — at airports in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and — thanks to the horrible backups in the Northeast — Chicago.

JetBlue wasn’t the only airline with huge numbers of cancellations. But JetBlue at Kennedy was especially affected. (And attention travel reporters who call the airlines and get inaccurate information on stories like this: Flightstats.com provides accurate, real-time information on every flight at every airport in the country. You could look it up).

Anyway, the point here isn’t to rant about a system without any slack, in an industry where customer-service is no longer held as a real value.

It’s to remark on the way JetBlue, the airline with perhaps the classiest brand reputation in the country among economy-class travelers, dropped the ball. How many JetBlue employees worked so hard over so many years to build that brand!

Hey JetBlue: You are BASED at Kennedy International Airport! American Airlines at least had the excuse that its overpaid top executives were not actually on the scene at Austin and San Antonio and elsewhere as the planes sat and sat. JetBlue executives could literally look out the window and see that major trouble was brewing. They didn’t even need their DirectTV.

Yes, I know JetBlue has now apologized and said there was no excuse for keeping people detained on airplanes for up to 10 hours. The company also said upfront that it would issue refunds and a free roundtrip ticket to those who sat on parked planes for over three hours.

But lemme ask ya: Didn’t you learn anything from Dec. 29? Didn’t ya hear about it? Why did you strand people out there for up to 10 hours without doing something on the spot about getting them into the terminal? Who was in charge of that?

The Dec. 29 mess motivated a bunch of furious passengers to begin strong lobbying for Congress to pass a Passengers’ Bill of Rights. A similar push failed after a similar mess in Detroit in 1999 involving stranded Northwest Airlines flights. That failed, I think, because the proposed legislation started to look like a co-op sales contract after all the various pressure groups put their two cents in, and started demanding that the law address things like seat width and, one might guess, the quality of toilet paper, and perhaps a petition to have Mumia Abu-Jamal released from prison.

As currently drawn up, the Passengers Bill of Rights is deliberately to the point. It would address very specific things: When you have to let passengers off a plane. How you have to make sure there’s enough food and potable water (and folks, no one I know thinks that stuff in the lavatory faucets ought to be actually drunk). Emergency procedures for the young, the old and the disabled. Period. The draft is posted at the Web site strandedpassengers.blogspot.com And I sincerely hope they don’t keep adding new provisions to it.

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Brazil’s air-traffic system is facing chaos again as tourists pour in for the annual Carnaval holiday.

You’ll recall that Brazil’s military-controlled air-traffic controllers virtually shut down Brazilian air traffic for long periods in October through December — partly to protest bad pay and having to work with obsolete technology and too few employees, and more pointedly, to send a warning to Brazilian authorities not to blame controllers for Brazil’s notoriously unstable air-traffic control system, which was responsible for the Sept. 29 mid-air disaster that killed 154 people on a Brazilian commercial 737 that collided with an American business jet.

From today’s Folha, the big Sao Paulo newspaper: (Please to excuse the shaky of translation)

“Controllers threaten to stop during Carnaval … [Controllers] will decide today if they will engage in a sit-down strike during the prolonged Carnaval holiday weekend. Despite the suspicion that it is a bluff to pressure the government, spokesmen for the category affirmed that “patience has run out”.

Controllers met yesterday to evaluate their capacity to mobilize at least 70% of the workers at Cindacta-1 [the major air-traffic control center in Brasilia, the capital], according to what the Folha learned. The idea is to provoke defections from the teams. Thus, for safety, it would be necessary to restrict takeoffs and landings.

Cindacta 1 (Integrated Center for Air Defense and Air Traffic Control), in Brasilia, controls the traffic to the states of São Paulo, Rio, Minas Gerais, Federal District, Goiás, part of Mato Grosso and part of Mato Grosso do Sul. It manages about 70% of the country’s flights. …

According to the president of the civilian controllers’ union, Jorge Botelho, the government knows that “there is a real risk of the category stopping work”. He represent the minority civilian portion of the controllers but has been conducting negotiations, because military personnel cannot engage in union activity. [My note: Most Brazilian air traffic controllers are in the military].

“The Presidential Palace is informed of the real risk that the controllers will cross their arms over Carnaval, despite any threat of punishment. The response so far has been silence”, Botelho said. …

Yesterday, minister Dilma Roussef met for nearly four hours with authorities in the sector to evaluate the precautions and contingency plans to avoid a new aerial chaos during Carnaval. …”

MY NOTE: Ever-faithful Folha then assures readers that the doddering Defense Minister, Wonderful Waldir Pires, who has stood by his delusional fantasy that the Sept. 29 collision was caused by the American pilots doing trick maneuvers in the brand-new Legacy 600 over the Amazon, “affirmed that the government has taken all possible precautions to avoid a new chaos at Carnaval and said that the largest worry is rain.”

Thus Wonderful Waldir has established an alibi in advance, if protesting controllers take the system down. It’s raining in Rio! Folha quotes him: “Our expectation is that we will have the whole population coming and going in peace at Carnaval. We’re worried about the rainy season, which, because of the network itself, can cause delays.”

You can’t, as they say, make this stuff up.
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TAKE 2, from the Rio police blotter as noted today by Brazzil.com:

“One day after a clash between the Rio de Janeiro police and drug gangs, which left six dead in a city’s shantytown and on the eve of Carnaval, which starts this Friday night, February 16, the vice president of one of Rio’s most famous Escolas de Samba (Samba Clubs) was executed.

Guaracy Paes Falcão, 42, vice president of Acadêmicos do Salgueiro and his wife, Simone Moujarkian, 35, one of the stars of samba school, were shot 20 times in front of the Guanabara supermarket, in the north side neighborhood of Andaraí, just half a mile from the Salgueiro club, soon after leaving an event there, today before dawn.

A rehearsal for the Carnaval parade scheduled for tomorrow night at Salgueiro has been cancelled. …

Police say they still have no idea who committed the crime. But they suspect that the death may have been caused by a dispute over slot machine locations.

Falcão is sometimes called the card game king in Rio. He used to live in São Paulo and only moved to Rio de Janeiro about two years ago, after his cousin, Waldemir Paes Garcia, was also executed.”

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Finally, this, from the U.S. State Department report today on crime in general in Brazil:

CRIME: Crime throughout Brazil has reached very high levels. The Brazilian police and the Brazilian press report that the rate of crime continues to rise, especially in the major urban centers – though it is also spreading in rural areas. Brazil’s murder rate is several times higher than that of the U.S. Rates for other crimes are similarly high. The majority of crimes are not solved. There were several reported rapes against American citizens in 2006.

Street crime remains a problem for visitors and local residents alike, especially in the evenings and late at night. Foreign tourists are often targets of crime and Americans are not exempt. This targeting occurs in all tourist areas but is especially problematic in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador.

Caution is advised with regard to nighttime travel through more rural areas and satellite cities due to reported incidents of roadside robberies that randomly target passing vehicles. Robbery and “quicknapping” outside of banks and ATM machines are common. In a “quicknapping,” criminals abduct victims for a short time in order to receive a quick payoff from the family, business or the victim’s ATM card. Some victims have been beaten and/or raped.

The incidence of crime against tourists is greater in areas surrounding beaches, hotels, discotheques, bars, nightclubs, and other similar establishments that cater to visitors. This type of crime is especially prevalent during Carnaval (Brazilian Mardi Gras) …

At airports, hotel lobbies, bus stations and other public places, incidents of pick pocketing, theft of hand carried luggage, and laptop computers are common. Travelers should “dress down” when outside and avoid carrying valuables or wearing jewelry or expensive watches. “Good Samaritan” scams are common. If a tourist looks lost or seems to be having trouble communicating, a seemingly innocent bystander offering help may victimize them. Care should be taken at and around banks and internationally connected automatic teller machines that take U.S. credit or debit cards. … Carjacking is on the increase in Sao Paulo, Recife and other cities.

Travelers using personal ATMs or credit cards sometimes receive billing statements with non-authorized charges after returning from a visit to Brazil. The Embassy and Consulates have received numerous reports from both official Americans and tourists who have had their cards cloned or duplicated without their knowledge. Those using such payment methods should carefully monitor their banking online for the duration of their visit. …

RIO DE JANEIRO: The city continues to experience a high incidence of crime. Tourists are particularly vulnerable to street thefts and robberies on and in areas adjacent to major tourist attractions and the main beaches in the city. Walking on the beaches is very dangerous at night. During the day, travelers are advised not to take possessions of value to the beach. Incidents affecting tourists in 2006 included the robbery of cars and a tourist bus going into the city from the airport and the murder of a Portuguese tourist at 8:30 a.m. on Copacabana beach. Drug gangs are often responsible for destruction of property and other violence, such as the burning of public buses at the end of 2005 caused the deaths of some passengers . … While most police officials are honest, in 2006, there were several cases of corrupt police officials extorting money from American tourists. …

SAO PAULO: While similar incidents may occur elsewhere, all areas of Sao Paulo have a high rate of armed robbery of pedestrians at stoplights. There is a particularly high incidence of robberies and pick pocketing in the Praca da Se section of Sao Paulo and in the eastern part of the city. As is true of “red light districts” in other cities, the areas of Sao Paulo on Rua Augusta north of Avenida Paulista and the Estacao de Luz metro area are especially dangerous. There are regular reports of young women slipping knockout drops in men’s drinks and robbing them of all their belongings while they are unconscious. Armed holdups of pedestrians and motorists by young men on motorcycles (“motoboys”) are an increasingly common occurrence in some parts of Sao Paulo. Victims who resist risk being shot. The number one item of choice by robbers in Sao Paulo, especially with regards to business travelers, is laptop computers. Recent efforts of incarcerated drug lords to exert their power outside of their jail cells have resulted in sporadic disruptions in the city, violence directed at the authorities, bus burnings and vandalism at ATM machines. These occurrences have not resulted in any injuries to U.S. citizens. Visitors and residents should respect police roadblocks and be aware that some municipal services may be disrupted.

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All right, enough of this dawdling. Back to work. The statement below, issued by the International Air Line Pilots Association, indicates that Brazil has not succeeded in sweeping under the carpet the air-traffic-control disgrace that caused the Sept. 29 mid-air collision that killed 154 in the Amazon.

Among other things, this very strong statement warns international pilots of the potential perils caused by “a lack of proper government oversight and control of the ATC system.” It also warns of poor radar coverage in some areas, and air traffic controllers who are inexperienced, unsupervised and lack the ability to speak more than a few phrases of English, which is the worldwide language of aviation.
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“ALPA Cautions Pilots on ATC Operations in Brazilian Airspace

On January 29, the Association issued ALPA Safety Alert 2007-01 to caution pilots about certain aspects of operating in Brazilian airspace. The September 2006 midair collision that occurred over Brazil has highlighted several issues associated with operations in that airspace that may have significant implications for the safety of flight.

ALPA believes that all pilots should maintain a high level of situational awareness while operating into or within the Brazilian Flight Identification Regions (FIRs). Of particular concern are both the procedural and technical ATC methods used in Brazilian airspace and its FIR boundary areas, compared to what pilots may be used to in other parts of the world.

ALPA therefore recommends that pilots

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operating in and around Brazilian airspace ensure they are aware of all operational guidance published by their company and review company training materials if any have been provided.
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always strictly adhere to ICAO standard phraseology for all communications and do not assume that the controller is fully aware of any changes that have been made to the flight plan.
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consider using all available exterior aircraft lighting whenever changing altitudes.
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who are familiar with operations in and around Brazil share that knowledge with their MEC Central Air Safety Committee and with ALPA’s Engineering and Air Safety Department so that subsequent follow-up bulletins can be provided to ALPA members.
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operating in this airspace, as is the case in all operations, work closely with their company safety and operations departments to ensure that all flight crews have the most comprehensive information available regarding the potential hazards of operating in this area.

While the ALPA bulletin focuses on issues related to the pilot/controller interface, pilots should note that the underlying deficiencies are caused by lack of proper governmental oversight and control of the ATC system. This is a separate issue that ALPA, in conjunction with IFALPA and other international agencies and entities, is working to correct.

Without commenting on the ongoing accident investigation regarding the recent midair collision, and based solely on reports from pilots who are experienced in operating in this environment, ALPA wishes to ensure that flight crews are aware of the following issues that may present operational challenges in Brazilian airspace:

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Although use of ATC surveillance radar is now widespread in Brazilian airspace, controllers’ experience operating in a full radar environment is still developing. This may lead to subtle changes in procedures that reflect many years of using nonradar procedures.
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Controller experience is not always taken into account in scheduling ATC facility assignments for controllers. This situation could result in inexperienced controllers operating in a challenging environment with little or no supervision.
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Flight plan changes, including inflight changes from original preflight flight plan, are not always properly transmitted through the entire ATC system. This can result in different ATC sectors having parts of two flight plans (original and revised). Therefore, if a change has been made to the original flight plan, the flight crew should make sure that a clearance for “flight planned route” has been clarified and specific routing details confirmed with each sector.
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As in many areas where English is not the controllers’ primary language, controllers may speak limited English. Pilots must also be aware that some controllers may sound proficient in the use of English as a result of these controllers either speaking with a familiar accent or because of their excellent pronunciation of certain words. In this situation, the actual proficiency of the controller’s English skills could be masked, and this could exacerbate confusion generated by any flight plan changes. Therefore, strict adherence to ICAO standard phraseology is highly recommended.
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Pilots accustomed to more-efficient ATC systems in other operating areas may not realize the need to clarify instructions, avoid assumptions, or rely on the communications and situational awareness between pilots and controllers that may otherwise prevent errors. Similarly, a controller may not challenge pilots who inadvertently request an incorrect or inappropriate altitude, routing, etc.
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Brazil has no national or airport standards for engine-out departure procedures in terminal areas; thus each operator may have different procedures. Therefore, controllers may not know what procedure pilots are following in the event of an engine failure. Under these circumstances, high cockpit workload and language proficiency issues can add to the difficulty in effectively communicating the intended flight path to ATC.

One of the consequences of today’s highly accurate navigation systems is that their precision can result in aircraft being on the same route with little or no lateral deviation. While the strategic lateral offset procedure (SLOP) that is in use in other areas of the world does not yet exist in South America, some member associations are actively debating the benefits of this concept and may soon put forth positions encouraging the use of this procedure. In the meantime, if individual flight crews choose to fly any deviations from a published airway, they should advise each ATC sector of their intentions.”

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