Joe Sharkey At Large

‘Coin operated toilets’ used to be just a joke we made about the proliferation of fees for every damn thing on an airplane.

Now, maybe not. Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary got the Brit newspapers all clucking when he proposed just that, charging one British pound coin ($1.43 at current exchange) to use the john on a plane.

My first hunch was that O’Leary was just off on another publicity stunt and would later grandly announce that Ryanair had listened to customers and decided not to have coil-operated toilets.

But then some Ryanair spokeswoman, possibly just a nitwit, told the Times of London that Ryanair had investigated the situation and found “that there is no legal requirement for an aircraft to have a toilet onboard, so if an airline does have a toilet they can charge to use it.”

Meanwhile, lookit this character on YouTube who has invented a coin-operated toilet paper dispenser, and touts it as another way to save the damn planet. Or another way to add a new fee to flying.

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A book deadline looms over me like some foul Dracula (hey, publishers actually expect you to deliver a manuscript after giving you dough in advance! What is this, paternalistic capitalism???)

Anyway, I won’t be posting for a couple of days. Unless, of course, another outrageous event gets me typing this (with weekly pay in the “high double digits,” as the great Calvin Trillin famously said of his remuneration at the Nation magazine), when I should be typing something else with better pay.

I will say this, having watched President Obama’s speech last night, and having written so early and so often about the public backlash over corporate excesses, including the manifest but occasional misuse of corporate jets (some of which backlash is misguided, since a good case can be made, and has been made often by me, for the sensible use of a company plane for bottom-line oriented business purposes).

The president only obliquely mentioned this last night, but he did say the words “corporate jets” in his gentle litany of abuses that cannot be tolerated any more, And I say this: Every time someone mentions corporate excess, a business jet loses its wings.
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…as Ron White says.

Another another bailed-out bank had a luxury hotel bash. Lookit, from TMZ.com

By the time these bank cretins are all rounded up, there won’t be a luxury hotel industry left in the country because even decent people traveling on their own dime will be afraid to be seen in one. (That’s already happening, as I have said.)

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The business aircraft industry is facing what can only be called a calamity. For months, I’ve been reporting on the sudden end of good times for a global industry (largely dominated by U.S. manufacturers and American technology) that only six months ago was projecting another record year and anticipating new orders totaling $300 billion in the next decade.

Here’s the latest bad news for the industry.

In January, according to Aviation Research Group/US, the number of flights by business jets and turboprops was off 42.5 percent from January 2008. The fractional market was hardest hit, with a 49.6 percent drop. Across the board, the declines by cabin type were: Large cabin jet (minus 38.7 percent); Mid-size jet (minus 45.7 percent); Small cabin jet (minus 47.3 percent); Turboprop (minus 37.4 percent).

Turboprops, by the way, are being more heavily marketed these days by manufacturers like Hawker Beechcraft because of fuel efficiency and because it looks far better to be seen flying a prop plane than a corporate jet, in terms of public perception, which is a huge factor in the distressed state of the business jet market.

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Reversing a much hated and widely ridiculed money-saving policy, US Airways will offer free soda, juice, tea, water and coffee in coach cabins again starting March 1.

(Booze still will cost $7.)

US Airways said the “beverage purchase program was introduced last year as part of US Airways’ new a la carte business model – where customers pay for what they choose to use.”

“`We are firmly committed to the a la carte model and believe it’s the right one for our business,” said the CEO, Doug Parker. “It is also a work in progress – US Airways was the only large network carrier to charge for drinks and that put us at a disadvantage.’”

By the way, I’m flying US Airways more often these days because I travel between Newark and Tucson frequently, and my usual airline, Continental, has really cut service in Tucson, and even made connections more difficult. My last trip out, I flew US Air nonstop to Phoenix and rented a car for the easy 100 mile drive on I-10 down the desert to Tucson.

US Air, like most airlines (Continental excepted) doesn’t provide free meals. But I did buy the Reuben sandwich they offered ($7, I think) and it was excellent. Deli quality. I also paid a small extra fee for priority boarding in an aisle seat toward the front on the A320, which is a more comfortable plane than those 737s Continental uses. If US Air can offer me priority boarding, decent food and my choice of coach seat for a few extra bucks, I’m beginning to lose faith in the value of my faithfully maintained elite status on Continental, which basically gets me priority boarding. On my last few attempts to book a trip on Continental, the only seats they had were middle seat. And I do not do middle seat. One of the skills a frequent business traveler should learn quickly is how to avoid the middle seat.

So that drive up the desert Interstate with the radio on doesn’t sound too onerous these days.

Oh, and note this from today’s blog essay by Mike Boyd, the consultant:

“If the airline industry wants to get through the next four years without being legislated into the second-coming of Aeroflot, it will need to re-think how it is perceived by the public at large. Right now, due to inept and sometimes biased media coverage, aided by what are in some cases poorly-conceived airline policies, Darth Vader would beat airlines in a popularity contest.”

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Get ready for more news like this:

Delta Air Lines, currently assimilating the operations of Northwest Airlines, which it acquired last year, said it’s giving buyouts to 2,100 workers who have applied, and may eliminate even more jobs. Last year, Delta cut 4,000 jobs. (It currently has 70,000 employees, including the Northwest work force).

As part of what it called a “massive downsizing” underway throughout the domestic airline industry, Delta indicated that it might also make further reductions in seat capacity. Last year, Delta reduced its capacity by 11 percent (with most of the cuts hitting domestic routes) and said in December that it planned a further 6-8 percent reduction this year. Today’s announcement indicates that the cuts might go even deeper.

Too many reporters chronically parrot the incremental palaver they get dropped into their tin cups from from their main sources, airline front offices. Here’s my prediction: By the end of this year, our domestic air-travel system will be 20 to 25 percent smaller that it was two years ago. That means fewer options, more connections to get there, fewer flights, higher fares, planes more packed full than ever, lousier customer service — and a big public outcry about the deterioration of our national air transportation system and the utter lack of preparation our government has demonstrated so far.

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The Wall Street Journal today says that investigators are looking at pilot error, not ice buildup, as the cause of last week’s crash near Buffalo of a Continental Airlines commuter plane operated by Pinnacle Airlines’ Colgan Air subsidiary.

On approach to the airport, the plane was evidently flying too slow and about to stall (which means, fall out of the sky because it has no lift). “The pilot pulled back sharply on the plane’s controls and added power, instead of following the proper procedure of pushing forward to lower the plane’s nose to regain speed,” the Journal said, quoting NTSB investigators. This ensured that the plane would in fact stall.

The NTSB is still investigating, and has not yet made an official determination of the cause or causes of the crash, which killed 50 people.

The pilot, Marvin Renslow, 47, had been flying the Dash 8 Q400 turboprop planes for only a few months. He made about $50,000 a year flying for Colgan. The co-pilot, Rebecca Lynne Shaw, 24, was also relatively inexperienced in the aircraft. Her salary was less than $30,000 a year.

Whatever the cause or causes of the crash, it is imperative that the media and the authorities look into who is actually flying these planes; how they are trained and paid; how their work schedule is set up (fatigue is a chronic complaint among regional airline flight crews); and the safety and maintenance records of these relatively unknown airlines that the well-known airlines use to fly their customers, who usually have no idea that they’re flying on an airplane operated by a subcontractor who may have a questionable record.

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I am a great believer in the value of “crowd sourcing,” which is a concept gaining acceptance among those journalists who understand that the hidebound old way of doing business (running to the same tired sources for an “on the one hand, on the other hand” pile of 1,500-word irrelevance) doesn’t work in a digital age.

Often, readers have more cogent things to say than the usual suspects we keep quoting. Often, they have more expertise. And the Internet gives us the ability to present an argument at length,

Anyway, Paul Ferber, a professor of political science at Rochester Institute of Technology, makes excellent points about the way major airlines have “outsourced” much of their flying to small regional and commuter airlines, some of which we board without having any idea of which corporate entity is actually flying the plane. He also has cogent things to say about the way the airlines have blithely cut service to many cities.

Here’s Professor Ferber’s e-mail:

“The tragic accident in Buffalo this past week should force us to reconsider the role of commuter airlines and prop planes in the commercial aviation picture. Have you noticed how fast Continental has danced away from this one? Sure, they stand by ready to assist Colgan Air in dealing with this accident, but they are also pretty fast to label this as an accident involving Colgan Air.

Perhaps they should be reminded of whose name was painted on the airplane.

As you may have guessed, I am no fan of commuter airlines, and almost never fly them, despite flying to the level of Silver Preferred on US Airways for every year since the late 1990′s. But I am constantly amazed at how the majority of the traveling public has allowed itself to be bamboozled by the major airlines into being outsourced to a product that is inferior in everything from overhead baggage compartments to the safety record. Plus, these outsourced flights are flown by airlines that, in most cases, we have never even heard of.

There is some limited truth in the argument that some travelers have no choice, as detailed in the article in Sunday’s Times. No choice that is, other than to fly or not fly. For some small places the only choice may be regional airlines or nothing. But not for places the size of Buffalo. The fact of the matter is that the major airlines would have no choice but to offer service with their aircraft and their employees if enough people refused to book these commuter flights. But people put low fares first, and sign up and line up for the puddle-jumpers.

I enjoy your column a great deal, and think it encourages people to give greater thought to various issues regarding commercial aviation. I hope that this accident prompts people to rethink their traveling priorities.

For me, I’ll just continue to restrict myself to the one (1) US Airways flight out of Rochester, the 8:25 a.m. to Charlotte. Yes, they’ve reduced us to the point where we don’t even have a single flight to Philadelphia, aside from those covered by the regionals. And when they get rid of the one flight to Charlotte, that will be the end of my days on US Airways.

United, AirTran, and JetBlue are realistic alternatives.”

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The FAA says the duty-time regulations discussed below are safe. Are they? This pilot, whose e-mail to me this afternoon describes the grinding routine, says “Hell no!” I’ve withheld his name till I hear from him again that it’s ok to use it.

His e-mail:

“ALPA has been beating this drum for years and finally making some minor
headway. I hate that 50 people had to die, but maybe this will be the kick in
the pants it takes for the FAA (or Congress) to pass some duty time regulations
that have a basis in medical science (as opposed to being pulled out of some
administrator’s ass 50 years ago, which is pretty much how we got where we are
today).

The compensatory rest regulation, for instance, was originally designed so that
pilots would be able to catch up the day after weather/mechanicals/etc. caused
them to dip under the nine-hour required rest period. Unfortunately, airline
pressure on the FAA managed to convince the FAA to issue an interpretation of
this rule that brought about our current scheduling nightmare — that pilots
could be SCHEDULED for less than required rest as long as compensatory rest was
built into the next day’s schedule. That’s in total contradiction to the
original intent of the rule and it’s dangerous, but every regional airline
(including mine, which I will not name) does it and there’s not a damn thing
any of us can do about it because the FAA says it’s OK.

I don’t know what things were like 50 years ago when all these regulations were
conceived, but the reality of modern airline life is something like this:

You get into the airport at, say, 2200. Your “off-duty” period officially
starts 15 minutes after the flight blocks in, so that’s 2215. In reality,
you’re lucky if you have all your stuff packed up, the postflight completed,
and are on your way to the hotel van at this point. By the time you actually
get to the hotel, it’s 2240, assuming the van was on time. I don’t know anyone
who can fall asleep the minute they walk into their hotel room, so let’s say
that at best, you’re asleep by 2315. You’ve already lost an hour of your “rest”
right there, and that’s a best-case scenario.

Now, your block-out time the next morning is 0800. The FAA says this meets the
requirement of nine hours off-duty (“rest”) time, since you go back on duty 45
minutes prior to departure time. Of course, the airline requires you to be AT
THE AIRPLANE at this point, so in order to be there on time, you had to leave
the hotel at 0630 (it’s a 20-minute drive and the hotel van only runs on the
hour and half-hour, so an 0700 van is too late). Most people I know take at
least half an hour to wake up and get ready in the mornings, which means you
couldn’t set your alarm for any later than 0600, which means you got less than
seven hours of sleep on a “nine-hour” overnight in this best-case scenario.

The really fun schedules are the ones where the airline gives you a
reduced-rest overnight (less than nine hours) on day 3 of a four-day trip and
then schedules you for eight hours of flying in five (or even seven!) legs on
day 4. Those schedules are also perfectly legal according to the FAA, but are
they safe? Hell. No.

The way to fix this is nothing short of a complete overhaul of duty time
regulations. I don’t have a problem with the scheduled flight time limitations
(eight hours of scheduled flying is tiring, yes, but it’s doable on plenty of
rest), but I definitely have a problem with the rest requirements. The
realities of hotels and transportation to and from the airplane are such that
any scheduled off-duty period of less than 10 hours is entirely too short
(you’d be lucky to get eight hours of good rest even then), and the 15-minute
“debrief time” after a flight is utterly preposterous. (To be fair to the FAA,
I believe that’s actually a contractual thing rather than part of the FARs; it
could be longer if our contract specified it to be.) Here’s what I would
propose as a starting point for new language in FAR 121.471(b) (which,
incidentally, also greatly simplifies figuring out rest requirements, which are
currently a NIGHTMARE to determine):

* Flight crews cannot be *scheduled* for less than 10 hours of off-duty time
during consecutive days of duty under any circumstances at all.
* Off-duty time, for the purposes of rest requirements, is defined as that time
the flight crew is at the rest location (hotel). It does not include time spent
en route to or from the rest location.

The first provision still allows the somewhat controversial continuous-duty
overnights (also called “stand-ups”, “high-speeds”, and “illegals” by various
pilot groups), while preventing airlines from scheduling back-to-back two-day
trips with very short rest in domicile between trips. It also eliminates the
concept of “reduced-rest” overnights entirely. Put simply, if a crew arrives
two hours late to their overnight, the crew gets 10 hours off duty, period. If
that means the flight the next morning goes out two hours late and people miss
their connections, tough cookies for the airline and the passengers. I’d rather
they miss a connection than end up a smoking hole in the ground, and I’m sure
they would, too, if you put it to them that way.

If we can’t have the second provision, the minimum off-duty time in the first
provision needs to be 11 hours to make up for it.”

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[UPDATE, 2 pm MT: According to the AP, the plane that crashed near Buffalo was inexplicably on autopilot at the time it went down. The AP attributes this to Steve Chealander of the NTSB. However, there is no direct quote from Chealander stating that the plane was on autopilot, just a paraphrase (though he does discuss autopilot operations in general in direct quotes). I am always wary of paraphrases on technical issues.

[Update 7 pm MT: As I suspected, the AP seems to have it wrong. Paraphrasing is often thin ice. The auto-pilot disengaged before the crash, is what the NTSB actually said.]

Anyway:

Here are some more things to consider after the horrible Buffalo crash:

1. Here’s an alert from the National Transportation Safety Board on the dangers of aircraft icing, from December. The NTSB is famously careful about maintaining its boundaries, but I’m saying here that a public rift is developing between the transportation safety board, which is respected by professional pilots, and the Federal Aviation Administration, which is not. In fact, the FAA is seen with good reason as a stooge of the airlines. (Remember, till it got nailed last year, the FAA referred to airlines as its “customers.”)

[For more evidence of a widening rift between the NTSB and the FAA, look at this report in today's Buffalo News. It quotes Jim Hall, the former chairman of the NTSB, accusing the FAA of "lax oversight" ... "in its failure to adequately address known safety risks related to icing."]

It’s important to note, though, that while icing is a known hazard, icing has not been determined to have caused the Buffalo crash, which is under investigation. And often, airplane crashes result from a chain of events.

2.Another issue that needs to be addressed more clearly: The first officer working for Colgan Air on the doomed Buffalo flight was 24 years old and made less than $30,000 a year. It’s widely known that regional airlines captains are expected to “train” co-pilots on the job. We need to know a whole lot more about that.

3. And a big issue bubbling just below the surface, which desperately needs attention, is regional-airline pilot fatigue. Again, it’s clear that the NTSB is sending signals that the FAA is not on the job:

Look at this NTSB accident report on a Pinnacle Airlines regional flight that ran off a runway in Michigan with 52 on board during in snowy conditions in 2007. “Poor decision-making likely reflected the effects of fatigue produced by a long, demanding duty day,” the report says. “Contributing to the accident,” the NTSB adds pointedly, were “the Federal Aviation Administration flight-and-duty-time regulations that permitted the pilots’ long, demanding day.”

By the way, Pinnacle Airlines owns Colgan Air, which operated the Continental Airlines regional Dash 8 Q400 turboprop aircraft that crashed.

And also by the way, if you’re a regional airline pilot and you have something you think needs to be said about fatigue, pop me an e-mail at joesharkey2@comcast.net

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