January 2009 Archives

Somebody has noticed that all is not well in the world of airlines, and has deduced that good management practises might help. They've written a book about it.

Is it just me, or is there is an insidious implication here that most airlines are badly managed?

The main theme, I gather from the blurb, is that adversarial relationships between employers and employees are bad, motivation and cooperation are good. Wow! what a surprise.

The book's details are here:

Up in the Air:  How Airlines Can Improve Performance by Engaging their Employees by G. Bamber, J. Hoffer Gittell, T. Kochan & A. von Nordenflycht

Southwest, as ever, is the golden boy (CEO Gary Kelly below),

and Ryanair the rogue (tyrant boss Michael O'Leary below):

But hey, wait a minute, don't they both still make money?

I'm not persisting with sarcasm because it's not appropriate. Industrial relations in most of the US carriers are a disaster, and elsewhere in the world they could be much better than they are.

Flight agrees it would not be difficult for airline management to get more from its employees than it does by ensuring they are fully engaged and totally motivated. It's the theme on which we base our Crew Management Conference each year.

But there is something charmingly innocent about the obviousness of this book's subject. Good management = good results. It's so easy. Why don't they do it?

Why does this innocent, optimistic belief that airlines could do better put me in mind of Robert Browning's Pippa's Song?

The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world.

Optimism. It may be out of fashion just now, but it's still available. Just do it.

This week's Comment page in Flight International - When water is the best option - muses on whether the US National Transportation Safety Board's inquiry into the Hudson River ditching could provide simulator manufacturers with enough hard information to enable them to simulate ditchings for pilot training purposes.

If that were possible, it might add to pilots' options - and their chances of success - if they are faced with a forced landing. In a significant proportion of emergencies that begin over land, the safest available forced landing might best be made on a body of water, whether a lake, reservoir, river, marsh or coastal water. That would be true if the available dry terrain is mountainous, or urban, or obstacle-strewn.

I am looking forward to the wisdom the NTSB will gain from the 20-20 hindsight that its investigation will provide, because it will eventually convert this knowledge into recommendations in its report.

Here is one of the NTSB answers I look forward to: since the crew decided very quickly to go for the Hudson option, will the agency suggest that the priority action for the pilot not flying (in this case the copilot, once the captain had elected to take control) should have been the ditching drill, rather than trying to relight an engine that circumstances suggest had been comprehensively smashed by birds?

Any NTSB recommendation to that effect would not be a criticism of this crew. It would be intended as a suggestion for the future. At present, pilots are not given any practise in carrying out pre-ditching drills, so the routine is not programmed into any airline flightcrew's thinking or natural reaction. Any crew, like the US Airways A320 one, that has only 3min between total power loss and setting down on water, could do with having such a drill as part of its inventory of instant choices.

The principal reason crews are not drilled in preparation for ditching is that there is insufficient data to simulate it reliably. Imagine what might become possible if the NTSB were able to derive sufficient information from this investigation to make ditching preparation drills worthwhile.

Whatever you think about this issue and my thoughts on it - or any other ops-related issues - debate them with me in real time when I spend two hours on-line on Wednesday 28 January.

Yesterday I boarded an EasyJet flight out of Cologne for London Gatwick. We pushed back 17min early and arrived 40min early. Pushback as early as that is a record for me.

I was left to reflect on how this was achievable. Clearly the airline had all its operational ducks in a row, but the final decider of when the doors may be closed is the time of the last passengers' arrival before the gate is closed.

Is it, perhaps, true that the scheduled low cost carriers achieve better arrival and departure times than their full service counterparts (which they do) because passengers, when they travel with the likes of EZY or Ryanair, behave less like prima donnas than they do with the full-service carriers? Maybe they are more likely to turn up in plenty of time. They certainly board fast with no fuss.

Is that the secret?

Oh yes, and the Gatwick gate was ready for us despite the very early arrival, unlike Heathrow gates that are frequently not ready for on-time flights. 

Ditching is always a high risk option, but this US Airways A320 crew made the right decision under the prevailing circumstances.

They then showed the world how ditching should really be done.

They reminded us that this exercise can be completely survivable, given piloting skill and the right weather and visibility conditions.

Pilots are informed how ditching should be done, but practically nobody actually trains for it, even in a simulator.

The reason why training is not offered is rather obscure, but it's probably a combination of two facts: it hardly ever happens nowadays - especially to jets - and the probability of passenger and crew survival is - subliminally - considered low, so it's not reckoned to be worth it.

Propeller-driven aeroplanes normally have a better chance of ditching successfully simply because they can touch down more slowly on the water.

But there has been one almost completely successful jet airliner ditching in the last ten years:

That was a Garuda Boeing 737-300 that suffered engine flame-out in a rainstorm in November 2002 and ditched on a river near Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Only one person died in that event.

There have also been two successful business-jet ditchings in the last decade, both in North America.