Joe Sharkey At Large

From the Web site today of Verified Identity Pass, the company behind the Clear airport lanes:

“Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.”

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I have followed Clear with interest since it started up at Orlando International Airport in 2005 and gradually began expanding to other airports in the years afterward. By the time it ceased operations, it had those blue-hued lanes in about 20 airports.

Here’s my take on why Clear finally failed, after hanging on for long past the time when I thought it could stay in business.   It can be summed up in three letters: T-S-A.

1. Clear’s main premise — that its “cleared” members could breeze through special security lanes without having to remove shoes and coats — collapsed when the TSA, under its former director Kip Hawley, flatly refused to approve key Clear technology, primarily a GE-designed “shoe-scanner” that would have allowed shoes to remain on feet. Hawley told me repeatedly that the machine failed TSA tests. But it was also abundantly clear that Hawley wanted no part of private-enterprise technology, privately operated, as a component of airport security — despite pressure from Congress that the badly conceived “registered traveler” or “trusted traveler” program was to be a joint federal-private enterprise venture in security. Furthermore, in Congressional hearings on the botched “trusted traveler” program that Clear was an emblem of, Steven Brill, the media entrepreneur who founded the Clear company, simply pissed off Hawley with several unnecessarily harsh statements about the TSA. That was a serious mistake. Hawley never trusted Brill.

2. The TSA torpedoed another Clear premise, that its members — who were issued biometric ID cards encoded with their fingerprints and an iris scan — would get a special wave-through at TSA checkpoints. Stubbornly, and in my opinion strangely, the TSA insisted that Clear members produce the same standard ID (drivers license, etc.) as everyone else, biometric card be damned. I questioned the TSA on that because a biometric ID card, scanned through a reader, is almost infallible proof of identity, but Hawley was dug in against it, though he never admitted so. The final hurdle for the Clear ID cards was last year, when the TSA said it might consider accepting them as ID if Clear put the holder’s photo on them, which meant recalling existing cards (and hauling in members for new photos).

3. TSA vastly improved checkpoint efficiency under Hawley’s three-plus-year tenure, which ended in January. In most airports, long waits at security were no longer an issue. (In areas where airport waits could sometimes be unexpectedly long, like Orlando when hordes of tourists suddenly descended, Clear had strong membership). The Clear card’s value was unclear — except as a kind of “head of the line” pass that put you closer to the actual checkpoint, once you cleared Clear’s superfluous separate privately run checkpoint.

4. Clear claimed it had more than 250,000 members, but renewal rates were falling as companies cut back and amid questions about the card’s real value. It was charging $199 a year for a card, though there were corporate discounts. Nevertheless, Clear was a very expensive proposition to operate. Obviously, it finally ran out of dough, having been bled to death by a federal agency that — from the very beginning — wanted no part of Clear and had no trust in the security of a badly conceived “trusted traveler” program that Congress tried to ram down its throat.

5. Just in case the message was not clear to Clear, the TSA pointedly backed out of its very slight relationship with the program last year. From the beginning, Clear members had to be supposedly “cleared” with a “security check” by the TSA before their membership could be approved and their cars issued. That “security check” was nothing more than a simple TSA check of a prospective member’s name against the terrorist watch lists. Last year, Hawley removed the TSA from that step, saying that the agency would no longer provide Clear with any kind of federal sanction whatsoever as a security program.

Incidentally, I am astonished at the amount of money that Verified Identity Pass must have burned through on Clear, including on the GE technology that never got approved, and on payroll. In airport after airport, I would marvel at the mostly unused Clear booths, staffed all day by three or four Clear employees at the checkpoints, and one or two other employees at other Clear enrollment booths in the terminals.

The TSA won.

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Passenger revenue for U.S. airlines fell a stunning 26 percent in May, compared with May 2008, the Air Transport Association said today.

That’s the seventh consecutive months of year-on-year revenue declines.

The number of domestic and international passengers on U.S. airlines fell 9.5 percent, while the average price to fly one mile fell 17.6 percent — reflecting the failure (from the airlines’ perspective) of fare sales the airlines have been firing off all year.

The airlines (and the ATA, their trade group) have been blaming the swine flu scare for revenue falling off the cliff in May, but I’m not sure I buy that, not fully.

We’ll see how June works out. As I keep saying, the airlines are going to get smaller, and our options in air travel are going to shrink. Plus prices will rise, once the airlines start reducing more supply. Not a happy time ahead, not at all.

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Despite the ragged environment for premium-class transatlantic service, especially in the financial-services sector, British Airways is going ahead with plans to start twice-daily all-business-class service between London City Airport and JFK on Sept. 29. Tickets go on sale tomorrow.

[UPDATE: In response to a query, British Airways says the walk-up unrestricted fare is $12,290 "plus tax and charges." A B.A. spokeswoman adds, "There are also advance-purchase fares with semi-flexibility ranging from $5,000 to $10,446, all plus tax and charge." I myself would expect that B.A. will introduce some other promotional fares to prime that pump before Fall.]

British Airways will use specially configured Airbus A318s on the route, because an A318 is the largest aircraft that can be used on the runway at London City Airport, which is close to London’s financial centers in the City and in the nearby Docklands.

The A318s will have 32 seats that convert to lie-flat beds. The planes will offer the OnAir communications service that enables text and voice messaging via cellphones, laptops and other devices.

Because of weight restrictions at London City, the A318s on westbound flights will not be non-stops. They will need to take off with a light load of fuel and stop in Shannon, Ireland, to be fully fueled for the trip across the Atlantic. Passengers will be able to clear U.S. Customs and immigration during the time spent at Shannon, British Airways said.

The JFK-London City trip will be flown nonstop, with no need for refueling.

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[Photo: Capt. G. Bruce Hedlund]

G. Bruce Hedlund, a veteran captain for a major airline, writes a personal blog called “It’s Not Just You …” His blog has the same title as a book Bruce wrote, and that book has one of the best opening lines since “It was the best of times …”

Bruce’s book-opener: “It occurs to me that, more and more, I come across instances in my day-to-day life that just do not make any fucking sense.”

Like almost every pilot I know, Bruce is a character, an iconoclast and a bear when it comes to flight safety — yours and (as pilots will always point out), theirs too. And recently, Bruce has been on a personal campaign about what would seem to outsiders to be a fairly small issue of training:

On certain aircraft (I won’t name the model because that would make it easier to identify the airline, and pilots who go public on their own are not allowed by employment agreement to name the airlines they work for), the cockpit instrumentation layout has been redesigned and modernized. This redesign is being slowly rolled out through that fleet.

No big deal, really. A commercial airline pilot is always rigorously trained and re-trained, and in this case, pilots who fly this particular model of big airliner — Bruce among them — were given a short training session, essentially a video presentation and a subsequent quiz, to familiarize them with this new and improved cockpit instrument panel design that they eventually would be flying

Bruce watched the video and passed the quiz, which was duly noted in his training record, he said, as qualifying him on the new bells and whistles. However, he was glad to be informed that before actually flying a plane with the modernized cockpit configurations, he would have an opportunity to get real-time familiarization with the layout the next time he had to report for hands-on re-training in a flight simulator (twice a year, pilots get re-trained and tested under rigorous conditions in high-tech flight simulators.)

Flying a highly sophisticated simulator is just like flying a plane (except nobody can get hurt if somebody screws up). Typically, in re-training on a simulator, instructors re-evaluate a pilot’s basic skills but also throw every contingency possible at the pilot — instant emergencies of every kind, from stalls to bird strikes. Even though he was now familiar with the display and officially listed as being qualified to go, Bruce was determined not to fly a real plane with the new instrument panel and gauges until he had made a good dry-run in the simulator and felt comfortable with the changes.

Call it an excess of pilot caution, if you will. On the one hand, pilots are men and women with psychological profiles that begin with the words, “We can make it work.” But pilots also have a bedrock contract with themselves and with others in their airplanes and in the skies. If the captain of an airliner is not comfortable with conditions he or she encounters on entering the cockpit and preparing the aircraft for flight, that captain has the absolute right to decline to fly said aircraft.

This looks good on paper, of course. In reality, there is pressure not to rock the boat (or the plane). You’ve been officially certified to take ‘er up? Well then, take ‘er up! It’s all officially certified! Stop yer complaining! (Pilots famously complain about everything).

Only a relatively small number of his airlines’ aircraft of that model have the new configurations in the cockpit, as the roll-out continues. But as I said, Bruce walked into one — and walked out again.

His objections sound fairly basic to me. He told me, “The new display changes the way basic flight information (airspeed, altimeter, etc.) is presented and, hence, how you locate the information and then interpret it. Wouldn’t you like to think that I could immediately tell you my altitude and airspeed? And wouldn’t you like to think that I could set my appropriate airspeed and altitude ‘bugs’ correctly?” (By that, he meant, instantly and virtually by instinct, not through fumbling around for a few extra seconds with unfamiliar gauges).

To his surprise, he came to work one day recently for a cross-country flight and stepped into the cockpit of an airliner with the new instrument-panel set-up. That was not supposed to happen before he’d had a go at the simulator.

So he made the proper notification to his superiors and walked off the plane. Another pilot was found to sit in the left seat.

Anyway, there is something of a sub-rosa brouhaha going on over this, and to me it’s illustrative of the pressures both airlines and flight crews face in this environment where costs for everything are being cut and keeping the schedule moving are crucial.

“No brouhaha for me,” Bruce says flatly. “I ain’t going to fly it till I see it in the simulator or on the line with a check airman. That may cause some angst in the training department, but not in my world.”

His world, of course, is that person up front flying the airplane.

As a passenger, as someone who has implicit faith in the pilot flying your plane, “That’s how you want me to feel, right?” he said.

Right. In fact, damned straight.

Here’s a link to Bruce’s full blog. And here are some excerpts from his description of the situation:

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“…I am currently embroiled in a debate over “qualification” with my employer (a major US legacy airline). The airline has elected to modify the instrumentation of the aircraft I fly from old, “steam driven”, round gauges to a state of the art electronic display.

This new display provides me all of my basic flight information: airspeed, altimetry, rate of climb/descent, and the like. In my 24 years at this airline, I have never flown a similarly equipped aircraft. Nevertheless, last November, in my scheduled recurrent training session, I watched a short video on this new equipment and took a short quiz. At the conclusion of this quiz, the instructor told the entire class that we were now “qualified” to fly a jet with this new display. I took exception to this and immediately contacted the appropriate powers-that-be. “Don’t worry,” they said. “You’ll be down for a simulator before you’ll ever see it on the line.”

Unfortunately, that promise rang hollow. I have yet to return for my next recurrent training session and was presented with the new display just several weeks ago. Knowing full well the possible ramifications, I turned and walked off the aircraft. I advised the proper folks that I did not feel qualified to fly with such a novel and untried [cockpit display] presentation without first seeing it in a simulated environment. “Well, you’re qualified,” they said. Yes, by virtue of a check mark in a box I was, indeed, technically qualified. On a more pragmatic scale, though, I was anything but fully prepared to conduct a safe and uneventful flight.

We each must hold ourselves accountable when operating under the “qualifications” of any permit, license, or approving authority. Drunk driving or any other careless behavior predicated upon the theory of “it’ll be alright” is a dereliction of the responsibility accompanying the qualification. While my airline (and the FAA) consider me qualified to command an aircraft with a display format I have yet to actually touch, activate, and (yes) make a mistake, I beg to differ. The unwritten contract I have with my crew and my passengers expecting only the best from me holds far more import.”

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There is absolutely nothing new in this widely distributed news story today about airlines piling on fees. Old news, rehashed.

There are several things wrong with the story, including the assertion that airlines’ see fees as an alternative to raising fares.

To the contrary, airlines jump at any opportunity to boost fares, assuming they can get away with it. Just last week, the domestic industry, acting pretty much in tandem, managed to slip in an across-the-board $20 increase in base fares.

And while fare sales have proliferated (airlines are desperate for cash), fares on many routes between mid-sized cities where competition is not great are up 40 to 60 percent in the last year.

Yes, airlines charging extra for a checked bag (for non-elite-status coach passengers paying discount fares) is an annoyance and, for a family traveling on vacation, a burden. Yes, the fee-fling has gone so far that Ryanair, the cheapo carrier in Europe, is actually considering pay toilets. (This story, rehashing old news, dismisses that as a publicity stunt, but in fact Ryanair’s chief executive Michael O’Leary says he is serious about the pay toilets; is able to circumvent EU regulations about providing public toilets, citing the precedent of pay toilets in European train stations; and is in the market for a credit-card reader that will enable the scheme to work.)

But why am I supposed to be wailing about the fact that some airlines are charging an extra $20 extra for priority seating? That is not in the same price-gouging league as charging extra to check in at the airport. In fact, it’s a very good idea, from a consumer point of view.

The AP story mentions AirTran as charging $20 for an exit-row seat with extra legroom. But US Airways and other carriers also offer customers that option — which is in fact generally welcomed by people who fly. When I fly US Airways, for example, I jump at the opportunity to grab an aisle exit-row seat with the extra legroom, for $20. I consider it a bargain, given a low fare and given that I don’t have elite-status on US Air and so wouldn’t otherwise be able to grab that better seat.

And by the way, why do none of these rehashes ever mention that Continental Airlines, for one, still serves free meals in coach? Or that that $7 sandwich you can buy on some other airline is often a very good sandwich, way better than its free predecessor?

Extra fee-revenue, which ranges up to $1 billion a year for some carriers, has not been sufficient to dig domestic airlines out of the deep hole they’re in. Across the board, passenger revenues are down sharply as demand for flying declines in a very poor economy. Business travel — which airlines depend on for most of their revenue — is down, but companies are still sending businss travelers on the road. It’s just that those travelers are now acting like leisure travelers, waiting for fare sales, adjusting schedules to fly cheap, avoiding the front of the plane except as an upgrade option. It’s now common for a budget-conscious business traveler to shop around for a better deal at a nearby airport, calculating in the cost of a rental car or even, gasp, public transportation.

SO it’s time for some people writing about air travel to smarten up, to stop rehashing old news, and to begin looking in a grown-up way at basic economics. Oil is going up, industry revenues are down, demand stubbornly resists prodding even by deep fare sales. Unemployment or other economic problems have taken away air travel as an option for hundreds of thousands of people.

There is no way the domestic air travel system can continue to operate without significant change, and some of that change, alas, is going to have to come in customer expectations. Demand is down? Costs are up? Well, the reasonable economic response is that supply must be reduced.

Reality says a smaller air-travel system, with higher fares and far fewer choices, is in our future, and perhaps for a long time to come. This will not be a popular reality.

Rather than winging about someone paying $20 extra to grab an aisle-row seat, air-travel reporters need to start evaluating the economic and political options — and the national transportation-policy realities — as our air travel system, and our beloved national travel culture, shrinks.

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New Mexico is spending $198 million of taxpayer money (and counting) on a theme park stunt called “Spaceport America.” Gov. Bill Richardson, keeping what appears to be a straight face, broke ground today on the “spaceport,” which will provide Richard Branson’s new tourist venture, Virgin Galactic, with a facility to launch well-heeled space cadets into a suborbital ride off the back of an aircraft.

It’s $200,000 a ticket. Or $180,000 a ride on Discount Dimwit Days.

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I pay pretty close attention to aviation-safety matters, for obvious reasons.

Gotta say, I’m baffled by the breathless treatment in some media of a nothing story about a Continental Boeing 777 that landed in Newark after a transatlantic flight from Brussels, with two fully certified pilots in the cockpit.

Unfortunately, the captain had died of a heart attack in mid-flight. This is very sad, but it is not aviation-safety news — not with two other pilots on duty.

Overplaying this story does a disservice to passengers who might have legitimate concerns about aviation safety.

By the way, while working on a book, I had the great luck two weeks ago to be able to spend over three hours in a 777 flight simulator at British Airways headquarters at Heathrow. What an informative and exhilarating experience. More on that — and on how intensely big-airline pilots are trained and re-trained — in a column this weekend.

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We are indebted to the Wall Street Journal today for the amazing news that more corporate grandees from bailed-out companies have been swanning around in their executive jets on personal trips to resorts like the fabled Greenbrier in West Virginia. (Above).

Consider my jaw dropped. Again. I swear, these corporate pantloads seem determined to thumb their noses at the public, following in the path of the notorious three Detroit CEOs who sailed into Washington in their heavy-metal executive jets last Novmber to beg for and get taxpayer bailouts.

At the same time, the damage being done to a recently thriving and important U.S. industry, business aviation, has been staggering. Mostly because of a bad economy, but partly because of the wide net of public revulsion cast over the entire industry, there have been tens of thousands of manufacturing and service layoffs among makers and providers of business aircraft.

The Journal story is probably behind a pay wall, but see if this link works to provide some summary information.

The Journal reviewed corporate flight records from 14 federally aided banks from October through mid-March, and found widespread use of business jets flying top executives and their families to resort areas or to executives’ vacation homes, including places in Europe and the Caribbean.

One major example is Regions Financial, an Alabama financial institution that dispatched two corporate jets at the same time to a small airport in West Virginia that serves those arriving by private jet for the Greenbrier resort, where rooms now cost $389 to $650 a day. (They used to be higher, before the economic slump deepened). The bank’s chief executive and family members spent four nights there over Thanksgiving — twelve days after Regions Financial had received $3.5 billion in federal TARP bailout money.

Executives from some of the usual suspects, including Citigroup and Bank of America,
also are fingered by the Journal for using corporate jets for what appear to be personal larks after receiving bailouts from taxpayers.

Many corporations allow executives to use company jets for personal trips. Some of them absurdly cite “security” reasons, as several of the Detroit automakers did — as if these mostly unrecoginzable characters are somehow in grave danger.

To do this while taxpayers are seething over bailouts to irresponsibly managed corporations is the essence of arrogance. I simply can not understand why the business aviation industry has not denounced these abuses, rather than blaming the media for pointing them out. Marie Antoinette gets a bum rap historically, but even she knew enough to travel modestly back to Paris when the crowds stormed Versailles.

The Greenbrier Resort, by the way, entered bankruptcy this year under its owner, CSX Corp., the big freight railroad. The railroad then sold it to a private investor.

One of the attractions at the lush resort is a massive underground bunker complex that was built during the Cold War as a long-term shelter for Congress in the aftermath of a thermonuclear war. It is loosely alluded to at length in the closing scenes of the movie “Dr. Strangelove.”

Further comment on the bunker in this context is unnecessary.

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Cessna Aircraft is cutting another 1,300 jobs, following the 6,900 job cuts it announced last month, citing lower demand for new aircraft. Last year, Cessna employed over 15,000 people.

Cessna, based in Wichita, makes the popular Citation line of business jets and other general-aviation aircraft.

The depression — this is beyond a “slump,” folks — in the business-aviation market this year has been a stunning reversal of recent years of robust growth.

Obviously, corporate cutbacks in a poor economy are by far the main driving force. But I will say this again: A portion of the problem can be laid at the feet of those three auto-maker CEOS from Detroit who swanned into Washington in their heavy metal luxury jets late last year to beg for taxpayer bailouts.

The business-aviation industry simply failed to appreciate the public reaction — the “optics”, if you will — of that boneheaded stunt, which was a perfect example of how not to use a business jet. It occurred at a time when public sentiment was already boiling over outrages such as the $400,000 junket the insurance company AIG held at a luxury resort, a week after getting its own staggeringly big taxpayer bailout.

Instead of publicly denouncing the feckless Detroit grandees, the industry made a serious mistake by dropping into a defensive crouch and … blaming the media.

Lost in this reaction was the perfect opportunity for the industry to firmly and clearly state, without equivocation, that using private luxury jets to transport three corporate pantloads and their tin cups on trips to ask for bailouts, on a short route readily served by commercial airlines, was a clear example of how not to use a corporate jet.

Throw them in!

Instead, the National Business Aviation Association, which had firmly established the case for business aviation in recent years, watched an awful lot of good work go down the drain, as people simply were repelled by the CEOs’ excess and obvious sense of entitlement, and as that reaction came to envelop the entire concept of “business jet.”

Even Cessna dropped the ball, optics-wise, with a campaign it launched earlier this year that seemed to scoff at the perfectly reasonable public reaction against the Detroit grandees.

The campaign addressed corporate executives: “Timidity didn’t get you this far. Why put it in your business plan now? In today’s corporate world, pity the executive who blinks,” the ad says.

By the time the industry got around to clearly re-stating its case for the cost-effective use of business aircraft — and as I said, that case is a very good one — it was fighting a defensive action that it still fights today, against a now entrenched public perception and revulsion that can be laid directly to the Detroit fiasco.

On the other hand, some slightly less-dreadful news might be emerging for the industry, though it ain’t much. ARG-US, the company that monitors business-aircraft activity across the country says that operations increased 3.3 percent in May over April, although total business-aviation flight activity — measured by arrivals and departures — has declined 21.5 percent in the last 12 months.
Here are the percentage of flight declines by cabin category in May 2009 vs. May 2008: Turbo-props, down 10.1 percent; small-cabin jets, down 23.5 percent; mid-size jets, down 15.7 percent; large-cabin jets, down 10. percent.

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JAL, which issued a somewhat assertive statement earlier this week warning of strikes starting today by four of its unions, says never mind.

The airline says it “is pleased to announce that the planned strike action scheduled to start today … ” has been cancelled.

JAL added that “we sincerely apologize to customers who were inconvenienced by the uncertainty caused by the threatened strike action.” Very polite and all.

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