So there, Peppy. Pedantry: winning!

It’s not that simple, of course, and there’s loads of blame to go around; Learmount has been particularly good about this, noting that the pilots either didn’t understand, didn’t believe, or didn’t act on the information the flight data computers were feeding them. There are any number of reasons why. I am aware that the pitot probes were iced, and that the airspeed was unreliable, but one would think — hope! — that pilots could look at the other instruments and figure out what was going on, or at least figure out what the safest course of action was. That they couldn’t does not reflect well upon them or their training.

It’s difficult to see how the A330′s flight control systems made things safer. I was particularly struck by the part about how the left sidestick has no information on what the right sidestick is doing, and the motions required to fly with a sidestick aren’t nearly as dramatic as those needed to fly with a yoke or a center-mounted stick. (The article goes into some detail on this point; my executive summary is that if this had been almost any other airplane, someone would have looked at the PF’s controls and said, “Put the fucking nose down,” probably within about 10 seconds of evaluating the flight situation. Obviously, that didn’t happen.) Then again, given the confusion about normal and alternate law in Airbus land, and the uncertainty about what flight mode the aircraft was in, maybe this doesn’t matter — believing that normal law flight protection would keep the airplane above the stall, maybe other peoples’ actions wouldn’t have been much different. I don’t know.

I read the PM report shortly before I encountered this video:

… which I encourage you to watch in its entirety. Pilots will find it fascinating; anyone curious about human factors and automation will find it of value, too. But pay attention to the date on this video — it’s well into its awkward teenage years now, and everything is still true, and the accident record continues to bear this out. For reasons that are difficult to understand, pilots continue to fly perfectly serviceable airplanes into the ground under conditions where the autoflight systems have disengaged, and people die. I don’t know what we’re planning to do about this.

This change has meant that a lot of people are modifying their travel plans a bit — I’m certainly looking a lot harder at our travel plans for next year in an attempt to beat the surcharges on Thai, ANA, Asiana, and a few other carriers not called Lufthansa (where it is too late). Even among those who aren’t planning to travel, though, there’s a lot of anger. And there usually is a lot of anger around this time of year: status benefits change, upgrades are reduced, and it seems like everyone else has it just a bit better in a different airline’s program than you do in yours.

Over on FlyerTalk, a member posted a manifesto for those angry at this kind of stuff:

Every year, or several times per year, people seem to worry about switching programs, or where to go, or if to stay, and it all gets very intense.

This is an alternative set of ideas for those who get very anxious about airlines and the programs they offer.

1. Most important of all: marketing is a powerful tool that airlines have used very effectively over many decades. While it is impossible to completely escape its effects, the most relaxing thing you can do is to realize that your airline-related hysteria is primarily caused by the aura that the airlines still manage to have – notwithstanding the fact there is nothing at all special about them.
2. Never depend on an airline to do anything properly, such as get you anywhere when you need to be there, or get any of your stuff anywhere at all.
3. Do you get so anxious about every industry you deal with? Grocery stores? Banks? If you did, I’m surprised you aren’t in the hospital. See #1.
4. Airlines offer programs involving points, upgrades, and the like, entirely for their own benefit, without regard to what you might get out of it. They are not rewards for your loyalty in any way, shape, or form.
5. It is the ultimate goal of all airlines to make you think you are receiving benefits when in fact you are not.
6. The superiority of one airline’s program over another is always temporary.
7. You are not important to the airline, no matter how much you think you might be.
8. The following cannot all exist simultaneously, even for any subset of customers:
   • A generous upgrade scheme
   • A generous award flight availability scheme
   • A generous points earning structure
   • A quality product
9. The best you can hope for with airline programs is a sort of arbitrage situation, in which your above average knowledge allows you to get an above average amount of benefits. The airline will always attempt to reduce your ability to benefit in this manner.
10. The airline sets the rules. The airline can change the rules whenever it wants, without notice, and should always expect it to do so to its own benefit. Always consider your “assets” (points, upgrade credits) to be worthless, so that when they become worthless you will have lost nothing.
11. Have no expectations and you will never be disappointed.

I find this surprisingly refreshing. I loves me my status as much as the next person with “AC*E” printed on their boarding pass, and I’m tickled pink I requalified much earlier this year than in the past (no 40-minute trip to Los Angeles or one-way home from Vancouver for me!), but I think zorn makes a lot of sense with zir list, and I’ll endeavor to keep it in the back of my mind when I inevitably start screaming once the Air Canada program for 2012 is announced.

zorn’s point 9, however, has a shocking amount of truth to it, and gets to the heart of what I think drives a lot of FFs: We love the game. We love the system. It reminds me of nothing so much as being a phone phreak — it’s not exactly the places the system takes us, though that matters a great deal, but rather the idea of possessing a body of knowledge about a fairly opaque world that most people don’t care about, and where the details of that world are derived through experimentation and community knowledge sharing. It isn’t about trying to defraud the airlines (or the phone company, for that matter) — it’s about trying to understand something, and I occasionally think my ultimate dream job would be in network or operations management for a major international airline.

I can’t think of any reason why otherwise sane people would spend hours combing through the fare databases looking for mistakes, why our idea of a good time is reading the entire contract of carriage, or why we can describe, in some detail, the route structure of an entire airline alliance. It’s the only way I can explain having an entire list of upgrade and mileage-earning fare buckets at the tip of my tongue, or why I know what the spot price of a ticket to Toronto is on any given day. Much in the same way that a phreak could talk your ear off about MF signalling or the differences between N2 and T-carrier, I can spend hours about the intricacies of clearing a waitlist or how to work the system to your benefit during IRROPs (and why you should always, but always, take a bump if one is offered). This is interesting stuff, but it’s the sort of thing no normal human really needs to know. I know it’s trite to say there are two kinds of people in the world — there always are, but this time it’s true: you either care about this kind of stuff, or you’re not. Chances are if you’re fascinated with the minutia of running an airline you’ve been similarly obsessed about other opaque systems in your life. If not, well, too bad.

As for why the airlines inspire this level of devotion, it’s not complicated. zorn talked about that too. It’s marketing. This is from Delta, about a half-dozen years back:

I loved this ad when it came out, because it captured something fundamental about the experience of travel that’s difficult to put into words, and it manages to illustrate the passion that good travel can inspire. My new hands-down favorite, though, and the one that made me cry like a small child when I saw it for the first time earlier today, is the contemporary British Airways advert:

I know zorn is right: the airlines are no different from any other business I deal with on a daily basis. But they are the vehicle through which many of our dreams about travel, adventure, change, and possibility (and here you’ll have to excuse the expression) find flight. Airline marketing works because they are selling a product that most of us would buy anyway, simply because of what the product represents. Beer advertising makes it look as though you’ll meet lots of attractive women if you drink their product; that doesn’t actually happen. But get on an airplane and you really do end up somewhere else, even if “somewhere else” happens to be Pittsburgh. That’s awfully powerful.

Patrick Smith says that he became a pilot because, as a child, what fascinated him were the route maps in the back of the in-flight magazines, and the possibilities they represented. I was like that, too. Heck, I still am. It is just marketing, a bit of captive advertising, to let you know what the airline could do, if you gave it enough of your time and money, and with that potential comes a thousands dreams of far-away cities, strange lands, and new experiences. You either get this or you don’t, and you can be rational about your engagement with an airline or you can’t.

I’m trying to be rational about my relationship with Air Canada and the Star Alliance. But I’m not sure that it’s possible. Like I said, there are two kinds of people.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/11/for-love-of-the-game/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/misogynists-in-the-frequent-flyer-lounge/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/misogynists-in-the-frequent-flyer-lounge/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:33:23 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=914 Continue reading →]]> While I’m on the subject of Air Canada flight attendants, I’m absolutely horrified at the blatant level of misogyny coming from posters on FlyerTalk. In almost every discussion about North American airlines and the in-flight service standards, someone will make a comment that “the crews are old.” This is really a shorthanded way to say “the crews are ugly,” but a more honest statement would be “the chicks aren’t hot.”

It gets worse when the comparison comes in between North American carriers and Asian-based carriers. Because we all know that “Asian chick” = “teh hotness,” and so NA-based carriers should immediately run to Thailand and scoop up the hot chicks to work their cabins, as well as institute mandatory retirement clauses at age 30. And, hey, Asians have better work ethic than Americans or Canadians, and they’ll work for less money, and maybe they won’t know about unions, and we can have a great airline for less with hot chicks serving us drinks.

Hoo boy. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to pick apart exactly how many problems there are in that position. Is it the misogyny? Is it the objectification? Is it the idea of outsourcing? Is it the notion of subservience of Asian women to white men? Oh, the thrills! (I’m not going to provide links to each one of those statements, but trust me, they’re in that forum in the threads dealing with the FA strike. Search at the risk of your soul.)

Ignore the disrespect of the cabin crews and their professional responsibilities. The level of objectification here is just staggering, and anyone who makes a statement like this:

Just wish SQ flew into YYZ so at least I will have smiling dolls onboard.

and thinks that it is (a) a positive comment about Singapore Airlines and their cabin crews and (b) a disparaging comment about Air Canada’s cabin crews and (c) is OK in 2011 is a piece of shit. (I’m posting this rebuttal here, and not over on FlyerTalk, because I’m not sure I can abide by the Terms of Service on that bboard and it isn’t fair to make the moderators delete a lengthy post from me that includes multiple uses of the word “fuck” and its derivatives.) The cabin crew is there for your safety. They are not there to serve you drinks, or for you to look at and think naughty thoughts. If those things happen, fine. But that’s not the primary focus of their role, and if you’re going to switch airlines because you think 110-pound Singapore Girls are better to look at, you’re a fucking asshole. Oh, you’re entitled to hold that opinion, and you’re entitled to make that choice, but you’re still a fucking asshole.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/misogynists-in-the-frequent-flyer-lounge/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/on-the-littler-guys/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/on-the-littler-guys/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:06:52 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=906 Continue reading →]]> You might have noticed recently there are a bunch of protests erupting all over the place. The arguments of the protestors are, to be sure, unfocused and confusing. I have some level of sympathy for these guys as a group, but that’s not really what I’ve been thinking about recently. Instead, I’ve been thinking about the people who are on the other side.

(Warning: Long, unfocused rant.)

The way the world works, in the broad strokes, there are people who’ve got power, and there are people who don’t. The former are vastly outnumbered by the latter, but the former exert an outsized amount of control over the lives of the latter. This is fundamentally what Occupy Wall Street in its various incarnations is really about; income inequality is just one facet of this power dynamic. There is a perception, and there’s quite a bit of validity to it, that the powerful don’t care about the powerless, and that things are getting way out of control in western society — that the majority, the people who don’t have the money and who don’t have the power, are stuck where they are with little hope for change or progress in the future. You have to have been living under a rock this past decade to not notice this. And in all probability, you are on the powerless end of things. You might not, personally, feel particularly powerless or vulnerable, but that’s circumstantial, not structural. You feel that way primarily because in your life, nobody has tried to exert that level of control over you.

This isn’t wholly dissimilar to a particularly cynical view of personal freedom and individual rights — the idea (or fact, if you like) that your freedom exists in the space between what the powerful could do to you, and the odds they’re not likely to care. The further out on the margins you are, the more worried you have to be under this system; the opposite is true, too, and it’s what leads the comfortably mainstream citizens of a theoretically free nation to wonder, aloud, why the innocent would ever have anything to fear from the police. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what an innocent person might have to hide from the authorities, this is you.

I don’t understand what it is that drives a person to knowingly and willingly side with the powerful against the interests of the powerless. I get why Jamie Dimon and Michael Bloomberg have problems with the Occupy Wall Street protestors. It isn’t difficult to imagine why the media hegemons feel compelled to dismiss the protestors as bongo-drum carrying idiots — Zuccotti Park is a direct rebuke to the world JPMorgan and Bloomberg and News Corp. have created, and the protests are a threat. The world is OK as long as nobody looks at it too carefully, and I think the real worry amongst the hedge fund set is that people are starting to look a bit more closely at the way things are set up. It’s less clear to me why random citizens and members of the public would be inclined to oppose the protests, or what a random person would have invested in the aforementioned powerful-created world. You do not, by and large, derive any real benefit from this world, and even if you’re not suffering any specific harm from it, you’re only a few steps away from being squashed like a bug.

Which brings me to Air Canada. As you’ve probably seen, the airline is having a bit of an argument with its flight attendants. This is yet another in a series of labor disputes between Air Canada and its employee groups, and once again I’ve been watching it play out with a sick feeling in my stomach. The problem is that unions are involved, and unions seem to be this fundamentally unhinging subject in contemporary society — people love to hate on them, and they have become convenient scapegoats for all the ills in the world today. (The budgeting problems of most jurisdictions are due to… those overpaid school teachers. Right.) To be clear, I’m not a strongly pro-union person. I’m less than wholly comfortable with a lot of the ideas that underlie trade unionism, and I’m really uneasy with the way in which the more vocal trade unionists enjoy stifling dissent within their ranks. But at the same time, I recognize — now, more than ever before — that unions today are maybe the only institutions that are focused primarily on the powerless, and the only outfits these days that are giving voice to those who would otherwise be at the mercy of the powerful.

Every time the subject of unions in air travel comes up, there are inevitably people out there who venomously denounce their very existence and blame the unions for every last bit of woe and misery involved in travel — from indifferent service to rudeness to the fact you have to pay $25 to check a bag. The argument usually goes something like this: if the unions didn’t protect their inept members, the airline could fire anyone they wanted and we’d have great service. This isn’t even remotely true, but it’s beside the point, and it really doesn’t have anything to do with the issue at hand. The single biggest cost at an airline is fuel. Period, full stop. Salaries — the structure of which, in aviation, is so bizarrely complex it makes my head hurt — are a tiny portion of the operating costs of an airplane. And, unfortunately, it’s all your fault. Yes, you. You demand to be flown from Vancouver to Calgary for $129. I can promise you it doesn’t cost $129 to operate that flight — it costs a lot more. So other people pay more than you do. But under the existing fare structure, it’s entirely possible to be sending planes out fully loaded with passengers, and yet still lose money on the operation.

Sure, WestJet turns a profit, and WestJet doesn’t have unionized employees. But that’s not why WestJet makes money. WestJet has a very different business model from Air Canada (as legacy carriers typically have different models from low-cost carriers) — fleet commonality is one thing; not having to serve as wide a range of international destinations is another; not trying to connect every single point in the country with every other is a third. (Seriously, try getting from Victoria to, say, Hawaii on WJA. Unless you fly on a day where they’re operating that one flight a week, get ready to fly YYJ-YYC-YVR-HNL at a minimum. You could, of course, drive to Vancouver and leave on a non-stop from there, but that introduces its own problems and issues.) Mapleflot is also burdened with the responsibility of sustaining routes operated by its subsidiaries in the deep dark past, and if left to its own devices would probably be quite happy to abandon a lot of thin, low-density routes that on the whole likely cost it money.

If you ran WestJet the way Air Canada is run, serving its destinations on its timetable with its equipment, you’d probably discover that WestJet isn’t profitable either.

Firing the rude employees isn’t going to fix this. It’s true that cutbacks across the board have resulted in less service overall, but you’ll notice the number of cabin crew never really changes — and that’s because the number of crew is determined by federal regulation, and isn’t discretionary. Rest assured that if the airlines could get away with it, they’d replace the FAs with vending machines in a heartbeat and save even more money. But they can’t, so someone has to ride around in the metal tube all day and pour you a can of Coke, and the airline is going to do everything in its power to make sure they pay that person as little as humanly possible. And that person is, quite rightly, going to get a bit upset by that.

On a larger scale, I’m confused about why anyone would have an issue with unions, or with unionized employees trying to get wage and benefit increases. This is a capitalist society (or a reasonable facsimile of one, anyway). Isn’t the whole idea to get the best deal for yourself possible? Collective bargaining is just that — bargaining. Both sides have a position, and they argue about it until someone gives in. Lather, rinse, repeat. I do not grasp why the protections afforded by trade unions are so offensive to so many people: do you like living under the threat of immediate dismissal? Do you like having only the power to quit if you’re unhappy at work? Do you think your employer shouldn’t take an interest in your well-being after your term of employment? Maybe it’s those fat pensions. I know! It’s crazy to think that someone who spent a career, I dunno, lifting heavy people off the floor, staying up nights, and getting thrown up on should be able to retire comfortably without having to worry about how they’re going to manage the wheelchair ramp up to their front door (thanks very much, occupationally herniated disk).

I’d like to say that it’s jealousy driving these issues, but it isn’t. It’s an actual dislike for the fact that people can band together to try and extract concessions from the wealthy. And make no mistake, though Air Canada is perpetually broke, they are still wealthy, and they’re still a damn sight more powerful than 6,500 unionized flight attendants. I tend to think that in any relationship, when there’s tension, independent observers should probably side with the people who have less power — or, at the very least, give them the benefit of the doubt and view all claims made by the powerful skeptically. This isn’t a political position so much as it is a humanitarian one, and it’s something I try to remember in my day-to-day life. (Note this applies regardless of the relative position of both parties to you. In the NBA lockout, for instance, I’m on the players’ side — for the simple reason that, although many players are ridiculously rich, the owners are ridiculously rich and complaining about those goddamn players stealing all the money. Yeeeeah.)

Ultimately, the message of the anti-unionists seems to come down to this: “Be thankful you have a job. Shut up and don’t complain. If you’re unhappy, quit. Or we’ll fire you.” This isn’t that different from the position of a lot of employers today, who have the unfortunate habit of looking at their employees solely as payroll numbers. I cannot fathom why anyone would feel the need to flack for employers on the basis of this kind of thinking — and, let’s be clear, that’s what the anti-union sentiment really comes down to. It’s an implicit decision to cast your lot in with the very powerful and the very rich. And I really don’t get it, because unless you too are an employer, a government, or a major corporation, guess what? You aren’t part of that club. You can act like it, but you aren’t actually. In reality, you’re just like the rest of us — the only difference is that your situation is a bit more benign, right now, than ours is.

As the saying goes, “Just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they’re on your side.” You might like the banks and the rich and the powerful an awful lot. You might wish them well. You might think they deserve all their success, and more, but they don’t feel that way about you, and if it’s convenient for them, they’ll quite happily kick you to the curb. And then, because this is the world we live in, you’ll whine piously about how unfair it all is. And I won’t care, because poetic justice is the best kind of justice in the world.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/on-the-littler-guys/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/learn-something-every-day/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/learn-something-every-day/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 21:24:37 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=888 Continue reading →]]> At the bottom of the Nav Canada NOTAM query page is a box with red text that I’ve been curious about for as long as I can remember:

Note: Under certain conditions being familiar with this section only, before commencing a flight, doesn’t meet CAR 602.71 and AIM-RAC 3.3 requirements. Please review all NOTAM files above for complete information.

I have read through 602.71 and RAC3.3. They offer no clues as to what the “certain conditions” might be, so I’ve always just ignored that phraseology and pulled all the applicable NOTAM files, slowly picking and choosing my way between stuff I care about and stuff I don’t. But I remain curious about that language: this is aviation. Nothing is a part of any process Just Because. There had to be a reason.

The answer, it turns out, is available right here. And it’s my own damn fault for not reading the manual in the first place, because the explanation is actually quite obvious when you stop and think about it. The fact that I had never actually encountered the described phenomenon is a function more of luck, or circumstance.

Interesting, eh?

• Don’t Come to the Dark Side: Acquisition Lessons from a Galaxy Far Far Away
• Fighting a Nuclear Armed Regional Opponent: Is Victory Possible?
• A Smoking, Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours: Documents on American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954-1955
• (for that matter, if you have even a passing interest in nuclear war issues, and you can’t find something interesting in this library, you’re either much smarter than I am or more boring)
• CARS 725, but specifically 725.124 for reasons that aren’t really worth getting into right now. But if you’re looking at the coming Air Canada flight attendant strike with any kind of dread (because, say, you’ve got five segments on Air Canada over the next two weeks), you might want to look carefully at the language in 705.109 and the minimum numbers in 705.104.

]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/currently-reading/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/pirep-telex-stratus-30xt-headset/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/pirep-telex-stratus-30xt-headset/#comments Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:08:22 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=815 Continue reading →]]> Back in the spring, I bought a Telex Stratus 30XT aviation headset from these guys. Not because they’d been offering the world’s greatest price or anything, but because they had the best shipping plan I could find (to Hawaii). Owing to scheduling issues, it has only been in the past couple of weeks that I’ve actually manged to fly with it very much, and I can now report back on what it’s like. I offer this PIREP mostly because when I was shopping for the thing, I found very little by way of reviews to work off of — people seem to like talking about the Stratus 50D or the Bose X, or the Lightspeed Zulus; the mid-tier headsets seem to be neglected.

So: the headset. It is very comfortable — much more comfortable than the David Clarks I used to fly with, and more comfortable to my head than the Bose X that everyone else seems to like, though I admit I don`t have a lot of time with a Bose on my head. The clamping pressure is adjustable through a couple of cams on each earcup, and the seals are sufficiently padded to spread the pressure out over your skull. It can get hot: while doing crosswind landing practice in the middle of the summer, it was awfully sweaty under the headset. But the overlarge earcups make it tolerable.

Noise isolation is excellent. I’ve managed to forget to turn the noise cancelling on a couple of times now and it wasn’t until I was in the climb that I noticed the plane was a lot louder than normal. This is actually a good thing, in that you don’t have to carry a charging cable and/or spare batteries if you’re willing to “tolerate” some time in the air with “only” 26dB of noise reduction. You probably learned to fly with less noise reduction, so I can’t think this is going to be a deal-breaker for anyone. Turn the ANC on and discover that it is, in fact, a lot quieter in the cabin. I don’t have numbers readily to hand, but it’s more than quiet enough to help combat some of the fatigue.

The sound quality is excellent. I’ve piped my iPod directly into the headset and it sounds as good as my Audio-Technica headphones. Yeah, I know it’s an iPod, but it’s good enough. Whatever readability problems I’ve had so far have been aircraft-specific; in our fleet there are a few planes that have wonky intercoms or balky radios built by people wielding rocks, but with a good avionics panel it sounds great. With bad avionics it sounds OK (the plane I’m thinking about in particular is damn near intolerable with passive David Clarks).

The phone adapter works. I know because I’ve been using it as my hands-free device at home (yes, I am a loser, there’s no need to send e-mail on this) when waiting on hold with call centers and such. I have not been able to get it to work with my iPhone, because the iPhone uses a 3.5mm TRS connector and the Stratus takes a 2.5mm. I need a wiring diagram to get the appropriate cable (though I think a straight four-ring 2.5 to 3.5 would do the trick), and I’ve been too lazy to do that so far, though I probably should since it’s cheaper than buying a handheld radio and the light gun is hard to see at CYYJ.

The microphone’s windscreen stays on. The boom stays where you put it. It does an acceptable job at dealing with the wind noise when the eyeball vents are open and blasting straight at you (an issue when flying in the middle of summer). Sound quality (for other people) is great; people say I sound perfectly normal, and I guess that’s a good thing.

So there you have it: $500-ish for a reasonably good-quality noise cancelling headset. Not as flashy as a Bose, but also not as expensive. Recommended.

Edit: As I was shutting down from today’s adventures in the air I was reminded of the one minor nit I have with this headset — Telex ships a set of Energizer rechargeable batteries in the box. These are shit batteries, especially if you’re not flying every day; the self-discharge rate is atrocious (like, they last about two weeks flying 4-ish hours in that interval). I’m probably going to replace them with NiMH Eneloops, but I’m not sure how the charging circuitry will hold up. Anyway, just be aware this is a bit of a problem if you don’t feel like plugging your headset in every couple of weeks.