bear11;
This industry has hearkened to the "snorting MBA" for far too long already.
Time was when real aviation people ran the airlines with a no-nonsense approach and a full comprehension of the business including the risks. Today's airline CEOs, COO's have no clue about what makes their business safe and what addresses the risks of aviation. As such they are not "leaders" in the traditional sense at all, but opportunists who know that the game regardless of one's business, is speculation on stock price, not running a bricks-and-mortar enterprise.
jurassicjockey's comments are accurate and prescient in this regard but any airline pilot who has been in the business for longer than, say, twenty years or so knows all of this to be true.
Your comment about the MBA snorting after hearing about pilot working conditions, (the first reason being the shift to short-term planning, mortgaging good safety programs and established practises which keep their investment safe until they can leave), is an accurate reflection of how this business is currently run. The shifts from a "manufacturing" mentality to a "speculative" mentality has taken about thirty years since a number of political and economic events took place in the early 70's, (dismantling of
Bretton-Woods by Nixon, repeal of
Glass-Steagall under Clinton to name two major changes). That shift reached the airlines much later simply because the business does not lend itself to speculative behaviours but smart CEOs have learned how to reap millions in stock options alone even from this business despite the tremendous and chronic challenges of making any profit at all in the airline business.
The "snorting MBA" and the greedy CEO who takes great advantage of a speculative vs manufacturing economy, are essentially though not wholly the reasons why the airline business and the increasing risks to flight safety are as they are today. They have taken advantage of the tremendous improvements in safety, without comprehending why this is so. Any incidents or untoward trends are "normalized" as "part of the business" instead of hearkened to. In fact, not paying attention to trends is part of the mentality simply because "safety isn't a profit center".
The "canary in the mine" for this industry is actually the regional carriers where the accident rate has already begun to define how the rest of the industry will unfold over the next two decades.
With an absentee regulator in Canada and the FAA caught with their regulatory oversight pants down and now desperately playing catch-up after being either absent or very cozy with the airlines under their own SMS initiatives, the trend will advance until the fatality rate begins to attract the attention of the insurers and perhaps airline passengers themselves.
The time these trends take to unfold and gather momentum and then become noticed is much longer than the flying public's or even the regulator's memory but flight safety people know the patterns and are discussing them just as they are being discussed here.
DingerX;
Can I just butt in and say that I'm sick of the argument that "Safety in back is the fault of the meat in back that wants to pay so little?" If nothing else changed but that the tickets cost ten times as much, we'd still have the same problem.
I never, ever think of my passengers as "the meat in the back" and have never liked the term "SLF" which I consider disrespectful to those who pay my salary and are the reason I still have a pension.
That said, if I may, you need to broaden your view of the industry so that the "pattern which connects" - that pattern being discussed here - may be observed.
Customers in all businesses will, because of the way our economy is philosophically conceived, try for "the cheapest prices possible". While such economic behaviour seems "natural", unthinking cheapness in some areas of the economy is expensive, not cheap.
Demanding cheap fares is fair game within the limited thinking which defines the present economic values we all hold but there are consequences to such thinking.
Every once in a while we run across a situation in which there is a perceived (and likely real) risk to our well-being and we ponder, "I hope they didn't give this job to the lowest bidder". Why do we think that? Because we know that competency and address do not come cheaply. Retaining experience has a price. So does retiring and otherwise ignoring experience.
There are indeed, well-paying airline pilot jobs but they are rarer and rarer. The Colgan accident's First Officer Shaw's salary was about US$16,000/year; She was living with her parents in Seattle, commuting to work across the country and flying sick that day because the airlines, (MBA thinking) increasingly dock pay for calling in sick.
Captain Sullenberger was right when he stated in his testimony before Congress,
I am worried that the airline piloting profession will not be able to continue to attract the best and the brightest. The current experience and skills of our country’s professional airline pilots come from investments made years ago when we were able to attract the ambitious, talented people who now frequently seek lucrative professional careers. That past investment was an indispensible element in our commercial aviation infrastructure, vital to safe air travel and our country’s economy and security. If we do not sufficiently value the airline piloting profession and future pilots are less experienced and less skilled, it logically follows that we will see negative consequences to the flying public – and to our country.
Captain Sullenberger's testimony is worth reading in full. The link to the pdf is
here.
The lo-cost mentality has two problems:
1. Aviation can't be done cheaply. At some point, the system will break and aviation will kill. The problem then becomes "what is acceptable?" To be very blunt but realistic for a moment, the response to that question is different for families of victims than it is for CEOs and senior executives of airlines. It should be the same answer, however.
2. Aviation can be done less expensively and safely but at some point which, due to the nature of the business cannot be pin-pointed or for the MBA's, "quantified" in terms they can understand, the
increase in risk to the operation curve will pass the
return on investment curve and there will be an accident.
The business has to make money, but not at all cost. If the business isn't viable in balancing costs and the price it charges for its products, perhaps the price is too low? Certainly, costs are down to the bone, certainly with airline employees and not just pilots, most of whom now have no pensions and must take a second job just to make ends meet.
At some point, the investment in cost-control behaviours which are designed to enhance the stock price for investors (who don't give a rat's behind about the airline business or even know anything about it) will reach down into salaries and benefits, treating employees like an ATM machine. Because airlines consistently sell their product, (time) for less than it costs them, cost savings have to come from somewhere. Fuel prices, capitalisation costs for equipment, even senior executive salaries and bonuses cannot be controlled so suppliers and employees become the "snorting" MBA's targets. Colgan is a prime example of this but no airline either in the US or Canada is any different today.
So please don't take the comments personally but as a sign (of which there is ample, if one has their eyes open), that all is NOT well within this industry and that passenger safety is, for the first time in about 50 years, at increasing risk.
The difficulty in getting those who manage but have no aviation knowledge in seeing these issues is, to put it bluntly, extreme, even when they are shown animations and flight data of near-accidents. It is as though they know but don't care because they know they're in a short-term game and know they won't be in line for blame - that's for the pilots. Hopefully, the Colgan accident will be the US's "Dryden" but I doubt it; we are about ready for another Dryden in Canada.
"Love of flying" will bring some good and talented candidates to the business. But the business as presently constituted, won't keep the best. The best know what they are worth and will leave before finishing a career at an airline. "Turnover", a term familiar to Walmart and MacDonalds, will become familiar to pilot hiring committees.
In fact, it is revealing that those who manage airlines today expect that the kind of stellar candidate one wishes to hire and fly one's aircraft safely, will at the same time be stupid enough to not see these corporate values and dynamics and still apply for the job.
It just doesn't work that way. Those now coming of age and growing into the work force already have seen and know very well how business has treated their parents. These young people are already wise enough to such tactics and are taking measures. I know many "airline families" whose children are not going into the business but seeking their futures elsewhere.
For what it's worth, I think it is time for airline passengers to perhaps examine these issues with a bit more attention. In my view, up until a few years ago, passengers quite rightly deserved to "sit back and relax". They still have very good reason to because the business is still vastly well-run. But the trends are responding to fundamental changes and are expressed here.
An administrator gets paid by cutting costs, regardless of the company's position. Two easy ways to cut costs are to cut salaries and to declare bankruptcy so that the pension fund might be raided.
Precisely. Except in Canada it is (so far) illegal to use pension funds for operations and do what the US has done to their pilots and other employees. Canada's economy has weathered the latest economic earthquake for good reasons but business leaders hate regulations...
"Cutting salaries" has it's own rewards, long discussed here and elsewhere. Like most planning strategies, such a solution is very short-term thinking.
Like any pilot who has put this kind of time in at an airline, I have seen these developments and changes in my industry first hand and quite frankly don't sleep well at night.
GXER;
It occurs to me that there are some striking parallels between the symptoms that are now seen as pre-cursors of the financial crisis and the indicators present in the passenger air transport industry:
I think you are absolutely correct in this. These are human dynamics at work here, not "aviation" dynamics. It is a management issue, a values issue, a priorities issue; It is NOT an aviation issue. Aviation just has that extra factor which makes it seem different - the capacity to kill innocent people through incompetence, incapacity, or negligence.
It is a complete mystery to me why airline managements cannot see this, or if they can, how they can sleep at night; we don't. I have shown near-accidents to the CEO of a major carrier and it never sunk in as to what was being viewed. It made the DFO's blood run cold, (though the effect only lasted a day or so), but not the CEOs; he had no clue. No CEO does.
PJ2