Joe Sharkey At Large

OK, if war is the most extreme form of business travel, riding the Space Shuttle is the most absurd.

I mean, come on! Ridiculing the Space Shuttle is way too easy.

N.A.S.A. admits astronauts were drunk at takeoff. (Let’s leave aside the argument that intoxication is the only reasonable explanation for getting onto one of those death traps in the first place).

As regards the Space Shuttle and its levitating lean-to, the Space Station: Many experts feel they are made-for-TV boondoggles that have diverted a staggering sum of taxpayer money away from serious scientific pursuits of mysteries of the universe (and from other more pressing needs as well).

Let’s see now. You basically strap a bunch of humans into a big tin can and strap a bunch of glorified firecrackers onto it and, blast off!

Now where have we seen that done before? (Oh, above. Vehicle courtesy of the Acme Company’s Rocket Sled division).

Here’s a party stumper: Ask people how high the Space Station actually is. Waaaaay out there in Outer Space, right?

Nah — that pile of junk is actually barely in orbit, at about 210 miles in altitude (or the distance between New York and Boston). It requires regular goosing just to keep it from falling.

Here, from Wikipedia, is the argument against spending one more dime on this.

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It’s been the summer from hell in air travel. Delays are at record levels, and so are flight cancellations. People are still routinely being stranded on parked planes for three and more hours – sometimes as long as 12.

You’re read all about that already.

You’ve read here about Kate Hanni, a San Francisco area real estate agent, who quit her job in January to work full-time as a grassroots organizer for federal legislation to deal with the disgraceful way airlines have treated stranded passengers. (See my July 12 post on her headlined “Tarmac Madness.”) The Web sites for the stranded passengers group, by the way, are www.flyersrights.com and http://strandedpassengers.blogspot.com/

Airline pilots famously chafe at the idea of any more regulation in an industry – and a profession – they feel is already over-regulated. But I’m hearing from pilots all the time who say something has to be done about the increasing and severe problems of planes sitting on ramps for many hours with passengers trapped aboard, unable to take off or return to the gate.

How about hearing from a veteran airline pilot? I recently spoke to retired airline pilot Vance Atkinson, 64, of Dallas. Airline pilots are required by law to retire at the too-young age of 60. Mr. Atkinson now flies corporate jets – and as such is a frequent airline customer as he gets from one job to the next. He was recently stranded for hours on a parked plane.

Here are some excerpts from a long interview I had with him recently:

–“During any seven days I might get on seven or eight different airlines, so I get really good exposure to this crap” (on airlines).

–“The airlines have no capacity. They are stretched to the limit. Years ago, when airlines were flying only 40-60 percent full, they also had a lot of excess capacity, both in pilots in reserve and in aircraft, and they could respond to the problems. In a weather situation there’s nothing that’s going to help you out immediately, but the recovery went a lot quicker then, before you had planes booked to the max.”

–“Now, reserve crews are down to the minimum. The airlines don’t have any spare airplanes sitting around anymore. They’re all being used. In order to overcome problems like delays and cancellations, they have to have spare equipment — and they don’t. They don’t want to give the public any kind of backup whatsoever.”

–“I think management has cut down on just about everything they can. Now they’re making money, but management is taking that money itself, not sharing it with the employees, and employees are furious.”

–“I think the feds are going to have to mandate that they (airlines) have an extra amount of capacity and equipment and whatever. The airlines are just going to scream bloody murder at that and say, you can’t run our business.”

— “The passengers rights proposal? The airlines will resist that completely. They’ll say, well we are going to make some changes so this won’t happen again. But they don’t want [to be required to let people off after a specific time sitting on a parked plane.] “They’re going to weasel out again and look at the situation and see what they can get away with.”

–“In order to get back to a more reliable system it’s going to cost more money, meaning higher ticket prices. But the government could mandate 10 percent extra capacity, and say there are lots of ways you airlines can figure this out, but you are going to have to supply that. If they all raise their prices the same amount it won’t make any difference and the system will be able to recover from this mess.”

–Q: Isn’t the captain the sole authority on the plane, who can say we need to get these people off? “He is. The problem is the company will beat him up or pressure him [if letting passengers off adds to a delay or forces a cancellation]. “Of course, if he declares an emergency he can do anything he wants, go to the gate, call out the marshals, get everybody off this plane. But then he going to be called into one of the chief pilots offices and he going to get hammered and possibly disciplined. If you’ve got quite a few years in your career to go, nobody wants to get into that position. As you get closer to retirement it still a big deal [facing the wrath of the chief pilot, who is a management enforcer] — but its not near as big as if you are only halfway through your career.”

–“The other thing you have to keep in mind is there is money involved from the crew’s point of view too. When you push back from the gate, the money-meter starts [for the crew], and if you sit out on the tarmac, that meter is going and the crew is getting paid. A captain typically makes $200 to $400 an hour whether he’s flying or sitting on the tarmac, so if you have to sit there eight or 10 hours, that can be $3,000-$4,000. So for some of these guys, there is a motivation for going along with management anyway in these cases.”

–“There’s real concern that passengers might get to the boiling point and start opening the emergency exits.”

–“If the government mandates a capacity increase or whatever [to deal with stranded passengers], you have to consider another problem: what you going to do about the gates. The gates are often full. There are often other airlines’ gates available, but the they’re going to charge you to use their gates which, of course, the airlines don’t like, and people don’t want to give up their competitors to a customer going through their facility. So they’ll continue to be held hostage on parked planes unless a remedy is mandated by the government.”

— “And then the question is, who’s going to pay for this? The airlines lobbyists will be in Congress saying, this is going to cost us $100 million! This is an industry just back from the brink of bankruptcy, and they’re barely making a profit.”

–Mr. Atkinson predicted that pilots unions are going to become more militant as airlines remain profitable, particularly. The anger is palpable, he said, over airline managements recently awarding themselves bonuses and stock options, while pilots, flight attendants and other employees gave back substantial amount of salary and benefits to keep the airlines running in the leanest years. “There is going to be disruption. It starts with [unionized pilots] doing everything by the book and doing it slowly, and then it escalates.”

–Without some degree of federal intervention to deal with the continuing problem of stranded passengers, Mr. Atkinson said, the airlines are “going to continue to weasel around everything they can. You’ll keep hearing it from the managers: “Hey, we’re going to lose $280,000 on this flight if we don’t keep these people in the plane” [on the assumption that it will eventually take off]. Sitting on the tarmac for them is very safe.”

–“I hope we can get out of the mess, but there going to be a lot of screaming and kicking and hollering from the airlines. They’re going to want to do their own fixes, with a lot of ‘maybes’ and ‘shalls’ They need some hard fast rules. Congress needs to say, hey, three hours and you go back to the gate and give the customer the option of getting off the plane and re-booking, or not coming back.” Inherent in this, he added, is the possibility that a customer who elects to get off the plane may well be stranded at an airport until another seat becomes available. And this can sometimes mean a day or two later. That accounts for the call for mandating increased capacity.

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The Morning News:

This has nothing to do with travel, although I guess you could consider war to be an extreme form of business travel.

It looks like the New Republic magazine has another stink bomb on its hands. The magazine published three separate accounts by an American soldier in Iraq, writing under a pseudonym, describing truly awful atrocities committed by fellow-soldiers (parading around with disinterred skulls, group-taunting a woman disfigured by a bomb, et cetera)

I’ve been to a war, and I know that atrocities occur. But frankly, when I read the New Republic’s soldier-correspondent’s accounts, my trusty old city-editor bullshit-detector went off.

Just doesn’t smell right. Furthermore, some of this soldier’s accounts mentioning matters that can readily be checked — the mechanical specifics of trucks and weapons, for example –are already being belly-laughed away by fellow soldiers.

My guess: Another pipe-job. Right now, the New Republic editors, in their defensive crouch, are claiming that it’s “conservative bloggers” who are out to get them.

Say what?

I recall the reaction I had years ago when I read Stephen Glass’s obviously made-up stories in the New Republic, especially the one about the brilliant computer hacker (”I want a Miata!”) who supposedly was able to make bizarre demands of, and otherwise bully, awestruck software and other tech executives. I wasn’t three paragraphs into that turkey before I decided it had been fabricated.

Oh, and I should mention that if you look up the granddaddy of all piped stories — “Jimmy’s World,” by Janet Cooke, published in the Washington Post in 1980 and a recipient of a Pulitzer Prize that was subsequently withdrawn — you will probably see by the end of the first 500 words that the whole story is so unlikely-sounding that it appears at face value to have been cooked, so to speak.

Reading it years later (see for yourself), I couldn’t believe any editor would have put it in the paper.

And yes, of course, there was that odious twerp, Jayson Blair, who bamboozled editors at the New York Times into publishing fairly innocuous stories — most cribbed from others’ reporting — from places that Jayson never visited, despite expense accounts asserting otherwise. Blair was a common plagiarist, a pickpocket, but not a fabulist, in that he didn’t really have the ability to entirely make up a really major big fat whopper.

A pretty good movie was made of the Stephen Glass incident, assuming you accept the movie’s position that the New Republic was a vitally important publication, rather than a marginal magazine of limited circulation, mostly in Washington and New York.

Now comes the New Republic’s breathless GI Joe with his journalistic IED.

Serious questions are being raised about the accounts of this guy, who wrote under the name Scott Thomas, and whose real name is Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp. That’s “Pvt.” as in not even “Pfc”, by the way. You’d think it might have seemed to a competent editor that, for a buck private, this Beauchamp fellow really managed to get around.

Now the New Republic has published online the sort of pious statement that almost invariably precedes the “Oh shit, are we frigging sorry we published this, please forgive us!” correction. (Scroll down the online New Republic feature called “The Plank” to the post dated July 26 and titled “A Statement from Scott Thomas Beauchamp”)

“Thus far we’ve found nothing to disprove the facts in the article,” the editors say. I say always watch out for anyone who begins a sentence with the words “Thus far…”

And then comes the kicker. In his own statement, Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp wails that “it is maddening, to say the least, to see the plausibility of events that I witnessed questioned.” (Italics mine)

He pleads “plausibility.” He doesn’t actually state that the stories are true, or deny that they were invented. He says they were plausible.

Whoop-whoop! Stink bomb alert!

Quick, call the development people. I see a movie.

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Here’s the first look at the livery of Singapore Airlines’ new A380 aircraft as it leaves an Airbus finishing plant in Hamburg bound for final interior work in Toulouse, France.

Singapore Airlines, which has 49 A380s on order, will be the first carrier to fly the vaunted super-jumbo plane, which is certified to hold 853 in a single coach-class configuration.

But the international carriers who have ordered the plane so far have all said they will fly it in three-class configurations with about 500 passengers. While cabin design and configuration are being kept secret till launch, a Singapore spokesman tells me that the Singapore A380s will hold fewer than 480 seats.

Singapore’s first commercial passenger flight, from Singapore to Sydney, is scheduled for late October, assuming everything remains on schedule. (The A380, of course, has long been beset with delays).

–end

Correction: As a reader points out, Singapore has ordered 19 A380s, not 49. Emirates is the top A380 buyer, with 47 orders.

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Please see my Brazil blog.

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We’ve all been paying a lot of attention to cancellations and delays in this summer of crisis in air travel. With good reason.

But lost in the chaos has been the issue of maintenance on aircraft. Pilots tell me they’re concerned about deferred maintenance, not to mention layoffs and outsourcing in maintenance. Some pilots tell me they’re very uncomfortable with the number of routine maintenance red flags they’re taking off with. Taking off with a few red flags (something is flagged to be fixed, but it in and of itself isn’t a critical safety issue) is normal — but the sheer accumulation of them has some veteran pilots worried.

Around 1.40 a.m. Friday, American Airlines Flight 955, reporting hydraulic failure on its starboard side, made an emergency landing in Norfolk while en route to Buenos Aires from New York. The 767, with 236 passengers and crew aboard, landed safely.

I heard from someone on the flight who said passengers were put up in hotels, but no one had access to their checked bags because Norfolk couldn’t offload 767 cargo.

Continuing onward the next day after a refueling stop in Miami, the plane was re-directed through Brazilian air space in the aftermath of the radar breakdown over the Amazon, but finally did make it to Argentina.

Keep your eye on maintenance problems. My guess is we’re going to be hearing a lot more about them.

–ends

Or make that, “Allege what?”

Headline of the day, from the Web site of the Air Transport Association, the domestic airlines’ trade group in Washington:

“Airlines Profitable Despite Alleged Decline in Customer Service”

The summary says:

“Investors in U.S. airlines are smiling about industry profit reports, even as passengers complain of what they say is declining customer service. A spokesman for the Air Transport Association says many of the delay problems travelers experience are out of the airlines’ control. “The reality is the (air traffic control) system can’t handle the volume” of air traffic, he said.

Whatever. But words do matter, even in the screwy airline industry. Someone needs to have a talk with whoever stuck that word “alleged” in there to modify “decline in customer service” and then compounded the knucklehead offense by stating that “passengers complain of what they say is declining customer service.” [My italics].

What is this, Albania in 1972? Turkmenistan today?

I mean, I know there are real problems with air traffic control, but give us a friggin’ break here: Does the Air Transport Association really think that the “decline in customer service” is an allegation, perhaps a figment of our wild imaginations, rather than a fact?

–end