Web Exclusive

Is Wichita Obama's Post-Katrina New Orleans?

Immediately following Hurricane Katrina, President Bush took a lot of heat for his tepid response—both personally and nationally—to the disaster. His airborne photo-op observation of the site of the catastrophe struck many Americans as being an insensitive and wholly insufficient response to the disaster. Only many days later and after the criticism did he hit the ground in New Orleans (though once on the ground, his “Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job” remark proved another lowlight of the Katrina response).

            I know you can’t directly compare what is happening in the aviation industry to Hurricane Katrina’s ravaging of the United States Gulf Coast, a natural disaster as a result of which around 1,500 people died, and one that threw hundreds of thousands of lives into chaos. Many of those lives are still in disarray.

But over the past year the aviation industry in the United States has suffered a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions itself. As you know, the calamity is largely due to the world economic crisis that struck last year that crippled the commercial and private credit markets. The result of the collapse was the dumping of hundreds of late model business aircraft on an already saturated used market and the wholesale canceling of hundreds more bizjet orders, with order holders abandoning even large deposits to dump their spots.

But the industry suffered a double whammy when a number of politicians, including President Obama, piled on a staggering industry, portraying business aviation as an expensive and irresponsible perk.

The result of these twin attacks, one economic and one political, soon impacted the lives of tens of thousands of aircraft workers who build and support the airplanes that are at the heart of what we do. There are approximately 1.2 million of these skilled and valuable workers.

In Wichita alone, aerospace companies laid off 27,000 workers. And that’s not just a big number. It’s a big number of people. People with incomes, health benefits, with children in schools and with homes to maintain. And in Savannah and Little Rock and Phoenix and Duluth, the effect was the same. Lost jobs, lives thrown into disarray and no relief in sight.

The effects of such job losses on the economy are easy to compute—they total into the billions--but the personal costs, in terms of family life, opportunities for the children of those who lose their jobs and the loss of hope and optimism are not well known but are great.

True, there was no actual Hurricane that blew through Wichita, but the calamity there is very real and can be measured in the economic and emotional casualties on the ground there, and everywhere in the United States where aviation businesses let people go for lack of business.

And it’s time for President Obama to get on the ground in Wichita, to get his hands dirty and meet those people face to face who have lost their jobs and are in trouble today and who face an uncertain future.

It will take a lot of courage for President Obama to make that trip, because unlike his predecessor with Katrina, President Obama bears some personal responsibility for this catastrophe.

On the Mythical Pilot Shortage, Airline Pilots on Food Stamps, and Jumping to Conclusions about Buffalo

Last week's blog about the controversial crisis in pilot hiring and flight training elicited some of the most emotional, most strongly worded, and articulate responses to any piece I've written in my nearly-15 years at Flying. To refresh your memory, in my blog I recounted the ideas floated around the table at a conference held by Delta Connection Academy about what many attendees saw as a coming crisis in flight training. Many there blamed the crisis on the credit crunch for students looking for loans to foot the training bill. Every issue was on the table at the get together, from low starting salaries, to difficult working conditions for regional pilots to the advisability of even choosing airline flying as a career.

While responses to my piece ran the gamut, the lion's share of the opinion was that there is no crisis in flight training, because there's no shortage of pilots.

One commenter wrote, "The reason pilot wages are low is because of simple economics- PILOT SUPPLY FAR EXCEEDS DEMAND so employers can easily pay a low wage to fill their pilot employment needs. This supply and demand metric will continue to be out of our (i.e. pilot's) favor well into the foreseeable future."

Another commenter disagreed, "Do the flippin' math! There will be a pilot shortage in the next few years. The military guys are not going civilian anymore. Many of the older guys that were furloughed with families will not return to aviation. Student starts are near zero! CFI's are not earning hours. Where are we going to get the new crop of pilots from?"

But there was little disagreement that pay has to increase for starting pilots. My modest suggestion that there should be a starting minimum salary of $30,000 was widely criticized . . . for being too low. I agree and argue only that I was trying to be realistic. Will an industry, the Regional Airlines, whose members feel justified in paying pilots indefensible starting salaries, ever be willing to pay more?

And my suggestion that the airlines start footing the bill for training was dismissed by some, not as being bad policy but for being naive: "Sadly, the simple fact of the matter is that pay will never increase," one commenter wrote, "and the airlines will never take on the financial burden of training it's own as long as $99.00 coast to coast fares remain an American birth right. A monster the airlines themselves created."

One reader sent me a link to a piece in which the author met the pilots of an RJ he'd been flying on and learned that he had been on and off of food stamps while fully employed as an airline pilot. Both pilots had part time jobs, one as a substitute teacher. The quality of life/safety nexus is hard to ignore. And while no one brought up issues associated with new, poor pilots commuting long hours to their assigned base, at the conference it was a topic of great concern. 

A representative of the Regional Airline Association said that we should not jump to conclusions about the Buffalo crash of a Colgan Air RJ that left 49 dead. But reading the transcript of the cockpit voice recorders leaves one with an inescapable impression that the flight was conducted in a non-professional manner by pilots who admitted on tape their lack of appropriate experience and discussed their commuting woes.

And our readers agreed. One weighed in on that "The Colgan crash never would have happened if they used a furloughed United pilot as a F/O. But then no United F/O would be working for such low pay. Pay has everything to do with safety."

One poster pointed out a parallel: "Deregulation has historically created these types of issues. We saw it in the trucking industry as well. The carriers kept undercutting one another until the poor driver didn't stand a chance."

A father of a young man who has been a professional pilot for a few years weighed in young people becoming pilots. "For the young prospective pilots.....I hate to say it like this but hear it goes.....find another profession. most people do not have the money it takes to become marketable. The pay is too low to make up any ground. Don't waste your time.

Finally, one poster hit the nail on the head as to why there will always be prospects for that new-hire right seat job: "My passion for flying will not even come close to being consumed by this negative attitude! Of course education costs money and a Master's in Aeronautical Science and all the ratings do not come cheap. Flying as a profession is a very personal choice and I hold it very dear to my heart. I can't see my life without it. So whatever it takes..I'll be in the cockpit..."

A Crisis in Flight Training

I just spent a day at Delta Connection Academy (DCA) listening to industry experts discuss the state of airline flying and the industry training programs that feed the profession.

The big questions raised at the round-table conference centered around what DCA, which sponsored the event, said was a coming shortage of pilots. Many furloughed pilots have been out of the cockpit for more than five years, and many of those pilots say that they don’t plan on coming back to an airline job. On top of that, training providers across the industry say that business is off. Several said during the conference that nobody believes there will be enough new pilots to fill the seats on regional airliners even in a couple of years. 

The coming shortage--of pilots and students--is based on a number of factors, some of which are frightening to the training providers because there’s very little they can do about them.

Perhaps the biggest factor is the drying up of financing to prospective students. Many students who want to fly—and DCA says that it’s getting as many applications as ever—simply can’t get loans. DCA’s Jason Dauderman says that the company’s loan application acceptance rate is down to about 30 percent, and the amount of the loans that lenders approve has decreased, as well.

Part of why it’s harder for students to get loans is because of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that caused a worldwide recession. The same thing happened with student loans, as you might know, as the sub-prime market spread into the student loan market, with lenders okaying loans to inumerable students who had poor credit, poor academic records, and little prospects of paying off the loans. As a result, Sallie Mae, the private lending company, is writing off a billion dollars of bad student loans. Long story short, the crisis in student loans prompted many lenders to leave the student loan market altogether.    

While the biggest reason that many lenders have fled the aviation student loan market is related to the financial crisis, the recession has made it harder than ever for students to pay off their loans, which are typically between $100,000 and $200,000 per student, if the entire two-to-four-year education is financed. And there's little chance of those costs coming down. Flight instruction, as Dauderman pointed out, is an expensive proposition. We as pilots understand that all too well.

And when lenders look at the risk, they see some big question marks. Will the student actually be able to earn their ratings? Some do wash out. And if they're successful, will they be able to land a job and be able to pay off their loans? And  if they do wind up in the right seat of an airliner, will they be able to pay off those loans on the $18,000 annual salary they might earn for starters? Of course not.

And if Congress has its way, we might be looking at the need for first officers to have an ATP, a requirement that will add tens of thousands of dollars to these students' debt, making it more difficult for students to get loans and for school to attract young people to their programs. For the record, no one at the conference thought the right-seat ATP provision would improve safety.

Perhaps the most troubling question raised at the event was whether airline flying was a profession that any young person should pursue. One attendee, a bright young many who got his ratings at DCA and now flies left seat in an AirBus for JetBlue said that he loves his job and still backs the profession. But he admitted on numerous occasions that there were big factors--chiefly economic ones--that should give any prospective student pause.

Would I advise my kids to become airline pilots? As much as I love flying, in this day and age, it would be hard advice to give unless conditions changed substantially.

One thing has to happen. The airlines need to start paying starting pilots more money, a lot more money.  A starting salary of $30,000 would go a long way toward making the transition to professional life if not attractive, then at least survivable, though barely. Starting teachers in almost every state make more. And there’s no doubt that the airlines should start subsidizing training a great deal more than they already do. Today their subsidies consist largely of partnerships with training academies to give jobs to their graduating students, a good marketing approach but one that does nothing to help students cut their indebtedness. Why not have the airlines foot part of the training bill? It would be to everyone’s advantage, especially theirs. After all, they're the ones who need the pilots.

And it's not all the regional airlines' fault. The major airlines share much of the blame. After all, they're the ones who on a daily basis squeeze their regional partners to cut costs--especially labor costs--to the bone, and then some.

And schools need to start pre-qualifying students, helping to ensure that those who can get loans have what it takes to get their ratings.  That's a tough thing to do when times are hard. To be sure, some schools view a "qualified" student as one who can get a loan, as opposed to one who has the right stuff to fly an airliner. That kind of cynical view isn't fair to anybody.

Right now schools are doing a lot of selling from the point of view that pilots will need to make a sacrifice to get into the profession. (That's also talking point number one for the Regional Airline Association.) The truth is, that's the absolute truth. And it just might pay off for those pilots in the long run. I for one sure hope so,

But as it stands today, the sacrifice is just too much, far too much, to ask.

Is the VLJ dead? Better question: Is the VLJ even possible?

Aviation analyist Brian Foley has been getting a lot of ink these past few days--and here's some more--thanks to his pronouncement that the very light jet (VLJ) isn't just dead; it never came to pass. He points out that Cessna's rejection of the tag from day one in the Mustang's development was a sign that the folks in Kansas got it: the Mustang was an entry-level jet and not a VLJ at all. And the Mustang was priced sensibly to start with, at around $2.5 million. Embraer was even less interested in the VLJ tag for its Phenom 100, which pushes the arbitrary weight limit of 10,000 pounds given by some to the arguable category. I'm not against the VLJ name. I just think it means something different than the folks with Eclipse thought it did. There are already such things as light jets. The Cessna CJ1 and the Beech Premier I come to mind. I guess that they have to call jets that are lighter than those airplanes something. "Very light jet" makes sense to me. Foley, tongue in cheek, I presume, calls the Mustang and Phenom 100 "sub-compacts." Cute.

As compact as it is, the Mustang isn't what Vern Raburn had in mind when he launched the concept of the Eclipse--never mind the airplane; I'm simply talking about the idea. In his mind, a VLJ was a truly personal airplane, something that the same guy who flies a Baron would feel comfortable hopping into. And Raburn's concept airplane was something that could be purchased for around the same price as a Baron--let's say a cool mil'--and operated for around the same amount of dough. 

In theory, the $850,000 airplane with little engines that Raburn imagined but wasn't able to build might have been that much-hoped-for airplane, except it was impossible to build . . . physically or financially. It wasn't just Eclipse. The sub-million-dollar single-engine jets proposed by Cirrus and Diamond will cost around twice that imaginary amount and will hit owners' wallets a lot harder than the airplanes' designers had originally hoped. It's the nature of jets. Sorry.

The bottom line here is that I agree with Foley and then some. Not only is there no extant VLJ; there can't be one. It's an impossible dream. The Eclipse Experience proved that. Cirrus, Diamond and Piper (which, to its credit, never talked about the PiperJet being cheap) all know that by now. These new airplanes are simply single-engine entry-level jets. And their price tags will bear that out.

But they are not and will not be VLJs. They can't be. There's no such thing.

Robert Goyer

Airline Flying Versus Actual Life

Just last week I was heading down to Brazil for an Embraer press event, and the good news was, thanks to some quirk of fortune, Continental had oversold its coach class seats on my nine-hour overnight flight from Houston to Sao Paulo, Brazil, so I was upgraded to Business/First. I was and remain happy for the fact. It meant that I didn't have to try sleeping bolt upright while being lulled sweetly by my neighbor's elbow searching for a home between my fourth and fifth ribs. First class would be a life saver.

And it was. Up to a point, that is.

By the 17th time the flight attendant had come by to offer me some little luxury--a hot towel, a linen napkin, a little all-in-one travel packet courtesy of Continental--I'd gotten to the point where I felt as though I was a player in a little pageant designed to teach everyone, especially those plebes back in coach, just how wonderful a thing it was to simply pay three times your coach ticket value to be treated like a human being. The nice folks at Continental were going to drive home the point that we lucky few were exceedingly well taken care of regardless of how annoying it was to us. And believe me, it was plenty annoying.

I don't know about you, but I like to be left alone when I don't have any compelling needs, even when that risks sending the message to any prying coach-class eyes that I'm not at that very second being pampered into a coma.

The good news was, they eventually left me alone and let me go to sleep. And the even better news was, the big seats reclined quite nicely, and I was actually able to sleep for several hours. Don't get me wrong: it wasn't anything remotely resembling a bed, but it was sleep of a sort. And I sorely needed it, as when I arrived in Sao Paulo, I had to hit the ground running.  I had a full day after an airline night's sleep in first class. Not ideal, but doable.

As it turned out, on my Brazil trip I got the chance to sample three distinctly different modes of air travel: the aforementioned first class method; bizjet flying, and coach. They were, in fact, so different from each other that it seems an accident of fate that they're all referred to as "flying."

As everybody with a pulse and an internet connection knows, there's been a huge backlash among lawmakers and in the general media over the use of business jets for, er, well . . . conducting business. Frankly, the concept seems uncontroversial, kind of like using a car to drive or a fishing boat to fish. But much to my amazement, there remains a sense that airlines are a reasonable alternative to bizjet travel. They aren't.

My bizjet travel opportunity came the very afternoon that I arrived in Sao Paulo. After a harrowing hour-long ride in a limo (well, actually a Brazilian-made Chevy compact of some kind) from the big airport to Embraer's factory in San Jose' dos Campos, I settled into a series of great briefings on everything from Embraer's progress on its Phenom 300 light jet progress to its use of 3-D virtual reality to pre-test prototypes before they actually build them. My confession: my eyes closed briefly during the presentations. Not that they weren't interesting. Quite the opposite. It was just that I hadn't really slept normally, I hadn't showered, I'd changed into fresh clothes in the airport bathroom and been subjected to an hour of Sao Paulo's traffic.

Following a quick lunch, we shuttled out to the runway there at San Jose' and climbed into a company Legacy 600, the bizjet version of Embraer's uber popular ERJ 145 regional jet.

The hour-long trip felt as thought it took about ten minutes. I grabbed a captain's seat and simply rested. The flight attendant came by and offered me a drink and a Brazilian chocolate, but other than that pretty much left me alone. It was heavenly.  The alternative? Well, other than a five-hour drive, there was no alternative.

Embraer doesn't have a jet that will make the trip from my home base of Austin to Sao Paulo non-stop. For that, you'd need an ultra-long-range airplane from Gulfstream, Falcon, Bombardier or, dare I say it, a Boeing BBJ or Airbus ACJ, all of which cost north of $45 million, in some cases, well north. 

Are they worth it? 

You bet. Had I flown a G550 non-stop from Austin to
San Jose' (no need to stop in Sao Paulo), I'd have arrived fully rested, showered, well fed and ready to do business. And I could have been back in the USA the very next morning, again, ready to work. The savings in time spent on such a trip is measured in days not hours. 

This lesson was driven home to me on my return flight on Continental when I was not upgraded to first class. It was a brutal experience, for me and my 200 fellow steerage-class passengers, and by the time I made it home to Austin--following a four-hour layover in Houston, I was done. In fact, a day later, I'm still recovering. It was much worse than my first-class trip down to Brazil, which itself had been less than ideal.

The trip gave me new insights into just how valuable bizjets are to the people who fly on them. Are they a huge perk? Sure. But they're a perk that pays for itself in productivity, flexibility and time saved.

Pols and pundits might bash them, but believe me, you won't be seeing Nancy Pelosi settling in next to you in the middle seat of the coach section on your trip from D.C. to LA.

She'll be taking the company jet.

Pilots have needs; they'll tell you what they are.

Ever since I figured out that economics isn't really about money but, instead, about the way that people behave, based largely on incentives, I've started liking economics a lot more. The book Freakonomics opened my eyes to the really interesting kinds of things that economists do, like investigate the social and financial economy of inner city Chicago drug gangs, or look at the reasons couples stay married, or don't.

As I mentioned, much of the insight that economists gain on complicated questions is gotten by looking at what's in it for the people involved. And I think that pilots would be a fascinating case study. We do something really difficult, a little risky, breathtakingly expensive and poorly understood by our family and friends.

But apart from why we do it--I leave it to you to come up with your own answers on that count--I'm fascinated by the choices we make in our flying lives, the what we actually do. What airplane do we fly and/or buy? What kinds of trips do we take (if any)? Do we fly by ourselves or with the gang? Do we go IFR or VFR? Do we land at big airports or little? Some of these choices are clearly based on financial considerations. I would definitely be flying a PC-12 instead of a Cirrus if I had the resources to pull that off. Other questions, like single-versus-twin, are harder to crack. I know a lot of twin drivers like the added safety, a point that Richard Collins might contest, while others just like the additional useful load you get with most twins. In my book, the safety edge (if any) of a twin is not worth the extra money, while the useful load would be a big seller, if money were no option. (The PC-12 suffices on all three counts.)

Aviation marketers, who are supposed to be experts on why people want to buy things, or not, sometimes seem to me a little at sea about human incentives. Then again, they are in the business of selling the airplane or aviation product they have to sell, so maybe relentless persuasion is a tool that serves them better than understanding the potential client's needs. 

I'm really at a loss when it comes to products designed to solve what are perceived (by someone, I suppose) as needs that are not being met. Flying cars and, yes, flying motorcycles, are two such products that spring to mind.  I recently flew into Llano, Texas, with TCM's Keith Chatten in an SR22 (running on unleaded fuel, by the way), and while we were there, we though it might be nice to pop over to the best barbecue joint on the planet for lunch. We borrowed a car (free) from the FBO, drove to town, had a incredible lunch at Cooper's, and drove back. The flying car would have been better . . . exactly how?

On the other hand, XM weather is a product that satisfies a tremendous need, the need to know where the storms are so you can fly elsewhere! I shudder to think of how I approached IFR before XM, by relying on the good intentions of controllers along the way to steer me around the storms that I could not see. And I think of the Bose Headset X (comfy and quiet), the Garmin 696 (and 496 and so on), the Avidyne Entegra flat-panel avionics system in my Cirrus, PlaneSmart's shared ownership program, the CitationJet lineup, and so on and so on. The story behind all of these successes, and more, is that they satisfied a need and did it at a price that pilots were willing to spend to meet that need. 

So I'd advise designers, engineers and would be aviation entrepreneurs looking to provide pilots with something they don't know they need yet, to look and see just how pilots behave, what they complain about, and what kinds of proposed solutions they might be interested in to solve the problem they don't know they have yet. They'd find out two things: we pilots are a lot smarter than than we're given credit for, and the things you think we need are really just things you want to sell to us. We'll save our money, thank you very much, for those things we actually need (or at least want really bad).

Have I mentioned that PC-12?

An Aerobatics Crash . . . and thoughts about Missions, Hardware and Risk

The tragic death this weekend of former national unlimited aerobatics champion and International Aerobatic Club president Vicki Cruse hit the aerobatics community hard. Cruse was killed during a practice flight at the World Aerobatic Championships in England when her Zivko Edge 540 crashed.

Even for a segment of aviation, competition aerobatics, that lives within the penumbra of tragedy, Cruse's death hit hard, in part because she was meticulous about her preparation and she was at the top of her game, looking forward to a chance to realize her dream of winning a world aerobatics championship. The crash came out of nowhere and seemed to defy explanation. When such a tragedy strikes, it's natural to think, "It couldn't happen to me." But in this case, the opposite conclusion is the more natural one. It seemed as though it could have happened to any aerobatic pilot.

In terms of raw statistics, the accident was not a surprise. Like flying in general, aerobatics are inherently risky, only much more so. The margins of safety in aerobatic flight are slim, and the machines, and their pilots, are pushed to their limits on each and every flight. A friend who is an aerobatic pilot once told me that her RRolodex is sprinkled with the business cards of colleagues who are no longer with us. It's the cruel nature of the game.

What can we run-of-the-mill pilots take away from the tragedy?

For one thing, we can take some solace in the fact that what we do is a great deal less risky--I won't say "safer"--than what aerobatics pilots do. Your chances of dying in a Cessna 172 on a typical short transportation flight are very slim when compared to the risk of doing inverted flat spins at 1,000 feet agl. And to some degree, the more proficient a pilot you are and the safer you fly, the lower your risk.

But it's important, I think, to remember that our risk is closely tied not only to how we train and fly but to what we fly and for what missions. That same 172, with its one engine, one pilot and single-string systems, will never be as safe as a Cessna Citation with two of everything, especially since those things, like engines and pilots and so forth, are stronger and more reliable than the systems in the single.

And the missions are, likewise, different. There is in corporate and airline flying very little guesswork involved in how the flight will go. Occasionally there will be a deviation ten degrees right or left for weather, or in extreme cases, a diversion to a different landing field. But the rule in flying jets is predictability. When you know what you're going to be doing and how you're going to be doing it---because you've done it many times before--the chances of something going wrong are much, much lower.

In my flying that's not the case. When I head from Austin to Duluth in my PlaneSmart SR22, let's say, there are a great number of variables. I'm a single pilot, so there's no backup there. The SR22 has one engine. No backup there either. Weather affects a light single a great deal more than it does a twinjet, so there's increased risk there. And the fact that I've flown the route five times, instead of 50, makes it less predictable, meaning, again, more risk.

Vicki Cruse, like each and every one of her colleagues, knew that what she was doing was risky. But for her, the rewards outweighed--greatly outweighed--the risks.

And that's the same calculus we as pilots are all faced with. What we fly, on what missions and how we approach that flying all has to be calculated into our risk assessment. Thinking that somehow your high level of flying skill exempts you from risk is an adolescent attitude, or worse.

Minimizing those risks, by rejecting hazardous missions and by being honest with yourself about your limitations, and those of your airplane, are smart, realistic and the best way to tip the risk equation in your favor.