Stormy Weather

I was reading an article today about the difficulties faced by travelers during the recent snowstorms in the NE US and it occurred to me that the success the airlines have had in recent years with what appears from the outside observer to be extreme efficiencies in how they schedule flights, how many flights, what times, how to get occupancy loads over 80% consistently etc. is also responsible for some of the extreme difficulties faced by travelers who had 2-3 day delays in their schedules.

It seems that the entire industry from the FAA with it's often outdated technology barely able to keep up with the growth in traffic to the airports themselves having to completely reconfigure (many of them after substantial investment with an entirely different type of travel experience in mind) the terminals after 9/11 and are just barely able to service passengers in secure areas. Airports have lagged in investment in additional gates and are basically functioning on the edge of capacity. Then there is the airlines who have invested in reservation and scheduling systems that allow the most efficient booking of passengers using the same "just in time" philosophy exercised in the manufacturing industry where they are able to tweak the number and frequency of flights to match the demand of passengers to fascinating accuracy. I personally have not been on so many flights that were at least 85% full then in the last few years. It is a far cry from the days when scheduled flights would be 30% full and airlines would occasionally "break" a plane so they could combine the passengers from an earlier flight that was dismally empty with one that was at a later time.

So with all players in air travel operating at capacity / maximum efficiency we are faced with the reality that any "breaks" in the chain can and will cause total "production" to stop very quickly. Weather has that ability and over time, the passenger experience has degraded ever more as the industry constantly squeezes out "costs" of production.

Of course this reality came to a head back in the spring of 2010 when the Senate finally passed some legislation to address the treatment of passengers by the industry in cases when planes are stuck on the tarmac for hours (which makes absolutely no sense to me why this even happens). From this article the outline of the bill is:

-Require airlines to provide passengers with food, potable water, comfortable cabin temperature and ventilation, and adequate restrooms while a plane is delayed on the ground.
-Require airlines to offer passengers the option of safely deplaning once they have sat on the ground for three hours after the plane door has closed. This option would be provided every three hours the plane continues to sit on the ground.
-Require airports and airlines to develop contingency plans for delayed flights to be reviewed and approved by Department of Transportation. The bill also allows the DOT to fine air carriers and airports that do not submit or fail to comply with contingency plans.
-Direct the DOT to create a consumer complaint hotline so that passengers can alert the agency about delays.

What is amazing and telling of our impotent leaders in Washington is how simple this bill is, but to get such a simple (basically worthless when you consider it does absolutely nothing to alleviate the problem in the first place) bill passed it took THREE YEARS!! Yea, three years to pass a few lines saying people flying on planes had to be treated like human beings, but only if they are stuck on a plane.

In the case of a weather related airport shutdown, it is OK that people have to wait 2 1/2 hours for some lousy fried chicken and ration simple supplies like toilet paper while their baggage sits on a stranded plane. Oh, but to create any type of infrastructure and or rules to deal with human beings when they are stranded at an airport for whatever reason would be to create inefficiencies in the "system" and add cost to everyone involved so NEVER expect that to happen. The lobbing will be so intense against it our impotent, bought off government will never go in the direction of protecting it's citizens over the corporate sugar daddies. Expect to be treated evermore like industrial cattle in an ever efficient cog to get you where you are going at as little expense as possible and the highest profit as possible regardless of the impact on your humanity in the mean time.

Helmut Schmidt

From an excerpt at interview at Marketwatch.com

Schmidt: One of the weakest points in the global economy is that there is no control of the behavior of financial managers. You can divide mankind into three categories. In the first category are normal people like you and me. We may have once stolen an apple from a neighbor’s trees when we were boys, or we may have taken a bar of chocolate from a supermarket without paying for it. But otherwise we are dependable, normal human beings. Then secondly you have a small category of people with a criminal character. And thirdly you have investment bankers. That includes all the dealers and the deal makers. They all sail under different names, but they’re all the same.

I love this interview. After saying there is no leader in Europe strong enough to counter American influence he commits a sleight on America by saying:

...But I would say that, in general, Europe lacks leaders. It lacks people in high positions in the national states or in the European institutions with sufficient overview of domestic and international questions and sufficient power of judgment. There are a few exceptions such as [Prime Minister Jean-Claude] Juncker of Luxembourg, but Luxembourg is a bit too small to play a substantial role...

...If there was a president in Washington and he wanted to drop the atomic bomb on Tehran, the Europeans would be strong enough to say: “We are not part of it.” Right now, no one is strong enough in Europe to be in that position...

You get it? "If there was a president..." Yea you get it, he puts Obama in the same category with other European leaders, leaders without full understanding of the emergence of global money folks, "investment bankers", if you will. I prefer to call them parasites, unregulated, global parasites. He is more gentle with his language.

Gotta love this stuff.