Aero-politics: November 2008 Archives

This may have been the last time that Bobby Sturgell was able to speak as the head of the FAA, acting or not. So it pays to listen very closely. Officially the Acting FAA administrator, and officially Robert A. Sturgell, he gave his farewell address the other day to Washington. In a pointed note, he urged the flying public, Members of Congress, and the industry to temper their expectations of airport and airline on-time performance, saying, "one of our toughest issues is managing expectations. Everybody has to have realistic expectations."
Sturgell told the Aero Club of Washington, "The actual number of operations an individual airport can sustain hour after hour has got to be the starting point in any discussion." And in New York, "you can't expect to see 120 operations per hour at JFK, even in perfect weather, and I think we all know the cap at LaGuardia is too high. You can only run so many planes on two individual, intersecting runways." (The FAA's cap on LaGuardia operations is 75 per hour by airlines, plus six-non airline flights, during peak hours.)

Okay, we were just about halfway serious the other day when we asked why the Tarmac Task Force hadn't been able to come up with any very strong recommendations other than urging the airlines to keep their stranded passengers updated about being stuck n the ground. Comes now The New York Times, easily the dominant voice in US newspapers. The Times, aka the Grey Lady, came out and opined that the Task Force panel was "stacked with airline and airport executives who treated the definition of lengthy delays as if it wrtee some conundrum of astrophysics." The editorial urged that the DOT take some action, unspecified, and added, "it certainly doesn't take an expert to realize that it is the passengers who pay to keep the airlines airborne." You can read their reasoning here.

It seems like yesterday, but it really is 15 years since the flight attendants at American Airlines hobbled their carrier with a strike that lasted five days. If you had to declare a victor in that confrontation, and you shouldn't have to, it probably would be the union: the carrier managed to sort of fly through at first, but the five days cost it about $190 million, leading to a $253 million loss in the 1993 fourth quarter. The union's president, Laura Glading, was on the APFA board during that strike. Now, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants has posted a little site that brings back fond memories of those glory days.

A rare grumbling is heard. Or seldom is heard a discouraging word at least at Southwest Airlines. But the airline's pilots union seems to have joined their cross-town counterparts at American Airlines in criticising their management. But there's a big difference: the Allied Pilots Association at American is making its very loud grumblings in any forum it can find. But over at Southwest, what dissatisfaction there is comes

within the family, as it were: on the corporate blog.The Southwest Airline Pilots Association and indeed other LUV employees have used the Nuts About Southwest blog to jump on the airline's plans for a code share with Mexico's Volaris. Says one, "As an employee, I'm disgusted with the continued outsourcing of our jobs. I guess the company loves us all, unless they can find someone to do the job that we could do for cheaper. This is just one step closer to 'Southwest the travel agent,' not 'Southwest AIRLINES.'"

Man, this woman is always angry. She's Kate Hanni, most vocal of the advocates of a passenger bill of rights. Hanni, of the Coalition for an Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, was the sole dissenting vote among 34 to the DOT's Tarmac Task Force, as the Department called the airport/airline/labor/passenger group that it set up to give guidance on dealing with extended delays during bad weather or mechanical failures.
In the end after lengthy meetings, the task force decide to push a voluntary plan that stresses frequent communications with passengers rather than such provisions as a mandatory return to the gate to allow passengers to deplane. The Task Force was created in December 2007 after such well-publicized events as a December 2006 eight-hour delay of an American Airlines plane at the Austin airport or the massive JetBlue 'meltdown' during a February 2007 ice storm at New York's JFK airport. Hanni, who happened to take part in the Austin disaster, promptly denounced the report as "an insult to airline passengers."

 

Well, it does look as if Barack Obama will squeak by and land in the White House...and when he does, airlines will see some changes. Ya know, more labor-friendly, and so on. The pilots know this because some of them have already sent a note to the president-elect saying that they really like him. But Left Field thinks that the place you'll see some real changes is at the airport and in fact at passport and customs lanes. And you'll see some changes in the way the US of A promotes itself abroad.
Obama, unlike his rival, Arizona Senator John McCain, strongly supported federal funding of travel promotion and told the US Conference of Mayors he supported the initiative. He has also spoken in favor of expanding the Visa Waiver program, which lets citizens of certain more developed countries enter the US without a formal visa. The program, which does require registration, applies in general to nations that give reciprocity to US citizens visiting there; it limits visits to 90 days. Although some visitors feel that the registration for the program is annoying if not onerous, it's better than nothing.