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AirlineSafety.Com is
dedicated to
the subject of airline safety and seeks to provide a free-market forum
for the discussion of policies and issues which are germane to airline
safety.
 The
Editor believes there are too many hidden political axes grinding in
much of the media today on the subject of airline safety. Every writer
has his bias, but few are willing to state up front what that bias is.
It is very important for the reader to understand the bias of the
writer. Policy recommendations are too often governed by such bias
instead of being governed by rational conclusions flowing from a
dispassionate analysis of all available facts.
Therefore, the
Editor of this web
site states up front that his bias is oriented along free-market lines.
He believes in free and open discussion on the issues and that
Government regulation and coercion usually makes things worse, not
better. The long history of incompetence and bureaucratic bungling of
the FAA, in regards to its supposed mission to guarantee our safety, is
an ongoing case in point.
With that
free-market bias in
mind, the reader can more accurately judge whether Editorials on this
page tend to make conclusions which are in rational harmony with the
facts, or if they only flow from that bias, regardless of the facts.
Quotations, relating to the subject
of international terrorism, which quite obviously, is directly related to
the subject of Airline Safety.
If America is ever to
triumph in its war against Islamic terrorism, we must get past
the idea that we are its root cause. Specifically, we must get past the
idea that a suicide bomber is just a peace-loving Muslim who, if we
hadn’t set him off, would be growing figs and building sandcastles.
Strapping explosives to your torso, marching yourself into a crowded
marketplace and blowing yourself up in order to slaughter as many
civilians, including women and children, as you can is a profoundly
demented act, an act which undoes a dozen or so millennia in the moral
evolution of the human species.
Such an act is not triggered
by America’s sociopolitical landscape or by its foreign policy. Rather,
it is nurtured by an intellectually degenerate culture, sponsored by
sleazy kleptocratic regimes and authorized by a once-honorable religious
tradition perverted to serve the pipedreams of an apocalyptic death cult.
It’s Muslim civilization,
not America, that must change in order for Islamic terrorism to cease.
Mark
Goldblatt
More Quotations
The Legacy Airlines
have lost $33 Billon,
since the beginning of 2001
The Summer From Hell, reveals how
Frederick Dubinsky was
directly responsible for the beginning of the end, at United
Airlines.
Of all the 25,000 canceled flights, of all
the customers stranded by United Airlines' summer of delays and
disservice three years ago, Gerry Nendick remembers the weeping woman
trying to make a funeral.
The passenger's sister had died in a traffic accident. She was
desperate to get to the service in Pennsylvania. But her United flight
out of O'Hare International Airport had been delayed once--a mechanical
problem, the pilot had said. Now it looked like the replacement plane
might be canceled too.
Tears streamed down the woman's face as she appealed to Nendick, a
United customer service rep who had spent two decades trying to solve
passengers' problems.
Hoping to plead the woman's case, Nendick poked her head into the
cockpit. The captain turned around and asked, "Who's going to kiss me
first? This flight is canceled."
Fixing the smug pilot with a glare, she sputtered, "You go out and tell
the woman who is going to miss her sister's funeral how happy you are."
Dubinsky promised hard-nosed tactics. Goodwin recalls that Dubinsky in
one meeting repeated his oft-stated philosophy of negotiations. "We
don't want to kill the golden goose,'' he said. "We just want to choke
it by the neck until it gives us every last egg." With United "awash in
cash," in Dubinsky's words, he figured the goose had plenty of eggs to
spare.
If the pilots,
flight attendants, mechanics and other employees at United want to know
why they may lose part or all of their pensions, medical care, and even
their jobs, then read that Chicago Tribune article, and the other linked
articles in that series on the decline of UAL.
Frederick Dubinsky was the top culprit. He and his fellow
ALPA union bosses are the reason why so many of United's loyal
customers began abandoning that airline in droves, never to return. Of
course, the greedy and gullible pilots, who followed him like
mesmerized acolytes, deserve some blame too. They should have realized
that the Hall/Dubinsky plan was
sheer economic idiocy. But, even if they were unable to
comprehend the basic fundamentals of economic reality, they should have
displayed some realization of how incredibly immoral their tactics and demands
really were.
As long as anyone
is willing to accept the idea that
wealth and abundance can be produced, just by union "solidarity" forcing the employer to
capitulate to every irrational demand of the union bosses----without
any regard to the realities in the Free Market Place----then union jobs
will continue to go the way of the Dodo Bird. Loyalty to one's
peer group is a poor substitute for understanding the basic laws and
fundamental facts of economics.
October 09, 2005: "Over the past 10 years airfares have fallen across the board while wages in the industry have continued to rise, in part because of workers' ability to bring an airline to a halt."
That says it all, in a nutshell, as to why Legacy Airlines are fast going
down that bone yard road leading to the dinosaur tar pits. To
survive in this highly competitive world, British Airways unions
will have to bite the bullet and stop resisting attempts to increase the
productivity of all airline employees.
The new CEO, Willie Walsh, was surrounded on all sides by powerful unions,
when he saved "Aer Lingus, the Irish state-owned airline, by cutting fares, overheads and jobs."
And, he managed to do that while convincing the Aer Lingus workforce to
support his decisions. It now remains to be seen if the unions at BA
will be as rational as those at Aer Lingus. I am not holding my
breath, but I would love to have my skepticism proved unjustified.
If they support the proven Walsh strategies, the airline will return to
profitability and jobs will be preserved and even expanded in the long
run. It only requires that union bosses quit trying to stir up
rank-n-file hate, by constantly demonizing management.
April, 2005: Growth has accelerated rapidly over the past five years,
at Non-Union
Skywest Airlines. "In 2000, SkyWest operated just 16 CRJs, according to Raymond James & Assoc. At the end of 2004, it was up to 137 CRJs (125 CRJ200s and 12 CRJ700s), including 28 added last year of which 24 were new and four were purchased from Independence Air. It will take a further 20 CRJ700s this year, a move that will require hiring 200 more pilots. Sixty-nine Brasilia turboprops round out the fleet."
The carrier also enjoys "the strongest balance sheet in the Regional airline industry," according to RJ&A. Its long-term debt to capitalization ratio was 61% at Sept. 30, 2004, compared to an industry average of 92% among its peers. Long-term debt totaled $463.2 million at year end and it was sitting on a cash hoard of $550 million.
September 07, 2005: Jetblue
traffic rose by 29.8 percent in August. RPMs (revenue passenger miles)
rose to 1.98 billion, compared to 1.5 billion in August of 2004. Capacity
rose 28.7 percent to 2.21 billion Asks (available seat miles) from 1.71
billion. Load factor, was up too: 90.1 %, compared to 89.3
%, in August, 2004. For the first 8 months of this year, JB's
traffic has grown by 30.8 %, to 13.52 billion RPMs. Capacity rose 25.1 percent to 15.39
Asks. Load factor, to 87.9 % from 84.1 %. This all provides a
stark contrast to what is going on at the Legacy Airlines, which
still have so many union millstones 
hanging about their
necks.
Please note: Jetblue
is a non-union airline.
See The
Amazing Jet Blue.
Since the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act (ADA) was
passed, prices for airline travel have declined considerably. What
was formerly a highly regulated oligopoly, operated primarily for the
benefit of Legacy Airline Unions, turned into a highly competitive
Free-Market boom, which now operates for the benefit of consumers who
prefer to travel by air. A much larger segment of the traveling public,
can now afford to fly, thanks to the politicians in Washington who
finally did something right, when they passed that historic
ADA.
Customers no longer have to pay the high prices formerly
charged by the Legacy Airlines, and their high-commissioned travel
agents. The ADA led to new low cost airlines starting up, to many
new routes and a lot more new airplanes, pilots and mechanics --- all
while prices for the passenger tickets continued to decline. Passengers
can now find the most competitive fares through free market companies that continually
comb through the latest fares offered by multiple
airlines to destinations, worldwide. The choices in air fares
continue to expand, while prices remain highly competitive. All while the safety
of airline travel continues to improve year-by-year, in the first-world
areas of the globe -- not withstanding the gloom-n-doom predictions of
anti-Deregulation aviation authors, such as John
J. Nance. The stats from the NTSB
prove how wrong "experts" like Nance really were, when they
railed against the ADA, allegedly because (they predicted) airline safety
would be compromised. But, Nance and others like him were dead
wrong. All the long-term airline safety stats since the ADA was
passed, prove them wrong, time and again.
History has long since revealed that the regulation of the
airlines by the CAB, had nothing at all to do with safety. But, it
had everything to do with enabling airline labor unions to gouge the hell
out of the traveling public, as long as that political
regulation lasted. Prior to the ADA, airline unions were able to do to the
traveling public, what so many Public Employee Unions are now doing to
American taxpayers: Charging more and more, for less and less.
Airline
regulation is a conspiracy in which the government holds the passenger
down while management and unions pick his pockets.
Quoted
in The Airline Pilot magazine (monthly ALPA union
propaganda organ), November, 1987, page 5.
Click Here
for More Aviation News
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The
Ditching of Pan Am Flight 6: How the superb skill and
judgment of Captain Ogg, saved all on board.
Kamikaze Airline
Unions: Dropping bombs on their own ships.
The
Irrelevancy of ALPA in the 21st Century: Guest
Editorial by Captain Brian Wilson
Helios 737 Crash in Greece:
Additional discussion on that crash, by
one of our military readers.
A
Dead Goose Can't Tell the Difference: How the
arrogance and greed of ALPA Union Boss Rick Dubinsky, destroyed jobs
and pensions at United Airlines.
The Alleged FAA Safety
Factor: Are we really safer, because of the existence of that Incompetent Bureaucracy?
The
Chuck Sisto Affair: Defending dangerous pilots.
JetBlue
emergency landing: LAX 050921. Captain Scott Burke
saves the day.
B-777 loses
vital air data information in Australia: What happened
and why?
The 737
Crash in Greece: Demonstrates the importance of Supplemental
Oxygen Regulations, and why all pilots should comply with them at
all times.
Captain
Tom Bunn: He provides therapy for Fearful Flyers, to alleviate
their anxiety----or does he?
What the Media Should
Know about Accident Reporting: Best to avoid
speculation
Are Cell Phones a
Threat to Airliner Navigation? Can they cause planes to
crash?
Crew
Psychology: Cockpit Vs Cabin Crews. The need for Integrated CRM
training.
Pilots
and Memories: A fallible
human system.
Why
Routine Flights End in Disaster.
Barriers
to Effective Cockpit Communication.
Monovision
Contact Lens and the Crash of Delta 554
Human
Error Vs Terrorism.
CRM:
The Instructor's View.
Runway
Incursions: Where are We?
The Crash of AMR
587: Accident
or Terrorism?
Terror in
The Skies: The Kamikaze Attacks
Upon the United States. What our
response should be to unmitigated evil.
The New MD-10
model: Should pilots be dual
qualified with
the MD-11?
Pilot
Fatigue: How it affects performance
and
safety.
More on Fear of
Flying:
How one reader conquered that demon.
Rushing to
Die: The Crash of Singapore Airlines 006:
How could the captain have made such an egregious error?
Fear
of Flying: Is it rational? Is
there help?
737 Rudder Design:
What is the status of the
re-design and fix?
Heart over Mind: The Death of
JFK, Jr. The pilot’s task, no less than everyone
else’s, is to grasp reality, not to invent it...
Why Do Airlines Use
"Recirculated" Air? Will it make me
sick?
Deregulation
& The 1983
Continental Strike: Was
Airline Safety Harmed by Deregulation?
Alaska
Air 261 crash: What is a stabilizer? Are
there previous
crashes caused
by stabilizer malfunctions?
The
Government Spiral: All too many
people, who otherwise understand the virtues of a free market, become
committed socialists when they reserve an airline seat.
How
Safe is the MD-11? Read
its accident, incident and AD history.
Passenger
Initiated Evacuations: Should passengers wait for crew instructions after an
emergency landing?
Swissair
Flight 111: How dangerous are
in-flight fires? How often do they happen?
Extortion
Assumptions of
the AMR Pilots. They
could care less how they injure their customers.
Airline Deregulation: How ax-grinding authors like John
Nance and others distort the facts of history.
Unheeded Warning: The
problem with inflight-icing on some turboprop
airliners, which have inadequate design.
Flight Simulators: What effect
do they have on commercial aviation?
Union
Protection and Airline
Safety: How ALPA
contracts have provided a negative incentive for airline safety.
Inherent
Biases & Unions: Is there any
valid data to show a
correlation between airline safety and union membership?
CRM: The
Missing Link:
Should the decisions
of an airline captain ever be overruled by the F/O?
ATC
Cover-Up: Why is it not a crime for
FAA personnel to block a safety investigation that would reveal their
own wrong
doing?
Schuller
Power: Rev. Robert Schuller's
alleged assault on a
United Airlines flight
attendant, has highlighted a growing problem in the airline industry.
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