mweiss said:
So obviously it's not working, if the goal is to prevent this.
[post="259095"][/post]
"...
if the goal is to prevent this".
But the goal of the system is no longer to
prevent but to
justify the conventional wisdom eroding the margins of safety, that's what I mean when I say it's being bent.
For those who are trying to prevent this and are forced to work within the system as it is, rather than deal with it as theory, the fact that you're not impressed with their efforts is immaterial.
Another was the recognition that the system was too fragile at the time.
The system is inherently fragile, and has become more so since deregulation, not less.
It does insofar as the efforts haven't prevented the acceleration. Perhaps not a direct correlation, but it's a good metric for evaluating the success of effort.
Economic factors beyond the control of anyone involved in the effort to prevent the erosion of aviation safety have led to the acceleration, so it's not really a good metric for evaluating the success of that effort.
Those who do, consider the dollars to be worth more than the risk. At least those people did so with reasonable information at hand. I'm inclined to let informed people take those risks without comment. It's when the information isn't available at all that I begin to have greater concern.
Since I've explained several of the reasons why the information isn't being provided, and the public has done little to demand the information themselves, one must wonder whether they really want it in the first place. Perhaps they prefer the illusion of safety to the reality that what they're doing is inherently unsafe and is only becoming more so.
You're not liable if you do something in violation of the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. That liability stops at the top.
That's why Ken Lay is living in a tarpaper shack while he awaits an extended sentence in a maximum security prison. Liability and accountability stop BEFORE the top.
As a shareholder, you have no obligations at all.
Nor control, only risk. Even that is much less than there used to be; the concept of limited liability has removed the really serious threats to the shareholders.
Outsourcing, however, is not criminal action.
An airline cannot outsource the responsibility for making sure that their aircraft are maintained in accordance with FAA regulations, anything short of that is a criminal action. A crime of omission is still a crime.
The interesting juxtaposition between you and those at the top is what you lose and when. You can lose your career if people die, but not if the business dies. Those at the top can lose their careers if the business dies, but not if people die (unless it's through criminal action).
In the airline industry that makes you an EXPERIENCED executive and ensures you a better position elsewhere. Having a 'golden parachute' in place certainly mitigates the risk of making bad decisions.
If the business dies I lose my job and my seniority, which is the same as losing my career. I start over, if I'm lucky enough to get another job in the field, at the bottom, without the benefit of any 'golden parachute'. How many airline executives has this happened to?
This is the tension to which I've been referring.
It's an illusion and they know it.
Ethically, I want to say that all lives are priceless. Realistically, I recognize that we'd have to grind most of what we do to a screeching halt if we must spend an infinite amount of money to save every life.
But that's not the choice we face, is it? For decades the trend for maintenance related fatalities was
down, now it's
up. Realizing that absolute safety is effectively impossible, we concentrate during the best of times on simply providing as much safety as we can. At the worst of times, like now, we're simply trying to arrest that trend.
Similarly, drawing upon a much earlier theme, would we be better off trading 150 lives on an airplane for 1,500 lives elsewhere, if we were presented with such a choice?
Again, that's not the choice we face. Even if it were, and we take all the money from aviation maintenance and put it into auto maintenance, few lives will be saved because few lives are lost due to bad auto maintenance. It's much harder to pull over at 35,000 feet and call AAA.
Not all methods cost millions, but if a union or two wish to go down that path, taking up a collection might be the way to go. It couldn't do any worse than the existing methods.
I think that, like most Americans, you overestimate the wealth and power of unions. I think you also overestimate how much would be obtained by taking up a collection.
In cases where a union has been proven to have damaged an airline's business through an action such as the AA pilots alleged 'sick out', the union has been held liable for the entire loss. The judgement against the AA pilots was in the neighborhood of $60 million, and effectively bankrupted the union.
If the method you propose effectively destroys one of the last groups willing to address the problem, and leaves the employees without independent representation, I would have to say that would be worse than the existing methods.
It applies to the airline because the market segment who values airline safety over money is significantly larger than the market that values automobile safety over style.
But still not a significant enough portion of the market to cause the airlines to change their course, to date.
How much more would quality maintenance cost?
Less than $.05 to CASM, as that is the advantage most airlines expect to realize through outsourcing.
Such as libel? Only if you speak falsehoods.
Falsehood is in the eye of the beholder. If an airline can convince a court that the union's allegations are false, by deploying the usual 'experts' and spokespersons, do you not think they would go for the maximum amount they could get?
Even when unions have engaged in simple informational picketing, the airlines have had private detectives present with video cameras so their lawyers can see if any of the statements could be considered disparaging to their particular airline, allowing legal action against the unions.
This is what is happening in the case of AMFA 33 President Ted Ludwig in MSP, who brought his concerns to his elected representatives in the MN legislature. NWA, ignoring the question of the validity of his statements, which were backed by physical evidence, is attempting to discharge him for making disparaging comments against his employer and has threatened civil action against him and his union. In the unlikely event that this fails, they will probably discharge him for theft of company property - the metal shards that were his physical evidence.
One need only look to the many employees discharged, and often sued, by their employers for making what the employer considered disparaging statements about that company on the internet. Rarely does the question of the truth of those statements get addressed, rather the question becomes the neo-feudal expectation of fealty on the part of the employer. Unlike the concept of fealty as applied in the actual feudal system, neo-feudal fealty is a one-way affair.
Doesn't make it likely to happen again, either.
My sense is that people are ready for this message. They want to know if "US Scare" is an appropriate moniker. If it is, it's not going to mean that they will refuse to fly someone else. We're past that stage in the industry, by about 30 years.
If you find someone with the ability, resources and willingness to do this, please let me know. Until then, I'm still trying to keep them safe one airplane at a time, like most other airline mechanics. But there are a lot fewer of us than there used to be, so please hurry.
That's the entire point of differentiation-based marketing. And, yet, the legacy carriers have been really horrid at doing it. It's another thing that has to change.
"We ARE them" isn't working? I'm shocked...
I would prefer to have seen the airlines focus on the things they did right, like maintenance, to establish the difference between themselves and the LCCs, but that didn't happen. Now, with the current trend of taking money away from maintenance, I think they'd prefer the public not think about it at all.
I never said that nothing is being done. I said that what's being done isn't significantly changing the outcome.
The only way to be certain of that would be to take away the effort entirely and see what effect that had.
Sadly, that's exactly what is happening as many of the really qualified people in the industry, tired of the struggle, leave for other endeavors. The best aircraft mechanic I know, someone that I know has kept people alive by his skill, is now fixing mail sorting machines for the postal service. That those who replace them will achieve the same level of skill, and involvement, is unlikely in the current environment.
Many of those who remain, having seen the passengers repeatedly vote with their wallets regardless of safety concerns, prefer to wait for the maintenance equivalent of 9/11 to bring the issue to the forefront. Unlike them, I'm unwilling to sit by and let that happen.
If you had the legal freedom to engage in an industry-wide wildcat strike, and engaged in one, you'd lose all credibility with those whom you are trying to educate. Such actions sound like job-protection acts, not education acts. You'd lose their attention before you started to speak.
I think that, if it were legal, a three day shutdown of the US air transportation industry would bring the issue to the public attention and perhaps help dispel the fiction that all is well. Since we, who actually work on the airplanes, have no credibility
now when we speak on this issue, what would we have lost?
Since we, either as individuals or as unions, apparently don't have the freedom to even speak of specific incidents at specific carriers publicly, and are dismissed as pursuing some unrelated union agenda when we speak of general concepts, I'd be interested to hear what you would have us do instead.
