Cyreenik Says
This 27 Mar 15 WSJ editorial, Germanwings 9525 and the Future of Flight Safety We are further along in planning for the autonomous car than the autonomous airliner., by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., talks about how slow changes to the US air traffic control system have been.
From the article, "Which highlights one way the technology has failed to advance as it should have. You can use your smartphone to program your DVR or control a flying drone bought from Amazon. Not part of the “Internet of things,” though, is the most automated workplace in the world, the cockpit of a modern airliner. We are further along in planning for the autonomous car than for the autonomous airliner.
...If implemented, free flight wouldn’t just save incalculable quantities of fuel and passenger aggravation. The networking technology required to make it work would have lent itself naturally and almost inevitably to computerized aircraft controllable from the ground. There likely would have been no 9/11. There would have been no Helios 522, which ran out of fuel and crashed in 2005 when its crew was incapacitated. There would have been no MH 370, no Germanwings 9525."
I ask: Why is the whole system of air transport progressing so slowly?
I answer: Air travel suffers from a potent mix of Fear of Flying and The Curse of Being Important.
Most people are fascinated by the concept of personally flying, but in two ways -- some love the concept, some are deeply frightened by it. In the good old days, before the mid-1960's, when getting from Point A to Point B by flying was optional, those who feared flying didn't matter much to the aviation industry. Those people were not customers, those fascinated with flying were customers.
But as commercial flying took the country by storm, the fearful people became important because there was a lot more social pressure to fly -- it was no longer optional. As passenger railroad service collapsed (and Amtrack emerged from the ashes) even more of these fearful people could no longer take the train, they had to learn to be brave and take the plane.
So many people having to face this fear regularly helped fire The Curse of Being Important -- too many people were too interested in how the air travel industry should work. It became a classic "Too many cooks spoil the broth"-case.
The result of this combination of The Fear and The Curse has been slow progress in improving how air travel is conducted. And the problem is self-reinforcing. Dealing with the TSA reminds us at every flight that we need to be scared. To feel how different it could be: Compare walking into an airport to get on an airline flight to walking into a hotel to get a room. And compare how different hotels are in the 2010's from what they were like in the 1960's.
Yet another reinforcer of this potent anti-progress mix is the media circus which performs whenever there is a spectacular airline accident. Compare the coverage the media gives to a bus accident to that it gives an airplane accident. The media lavishes a lot of loving attention on crashed airplanes.
My recommendation: If we want to see more progress in air travel we must first do our best to recognize the instinctive fear that surrounds it, and then help people who have it learn to face it using non-intrusive methods, we must not practice enflaming it with our media and airport rituals. Some better methods include:
o making news reports of aircraft accidents more ho-hum
o making TSA monitoring practices invisible to airport users
o replacing the intrusive TSA screening ritual with other kinds of optional rituals, so that those who want to engage in fear-reducing rituals still can. Some examples of replacement rituals include: an in-terminal chapel, a room for watching safety videos, and kiosks for purchasing flight insurance. These are all optional, non-intrusive rituals. In the same vein, the safety rituals performed while the plane is taxing should be ended as well. These can be optionally watched in the terminal before the flight begins.
When the fear is faced quietly, and The Curse is lessened, then we will see a whole lot more progress in air travel -- air traffic control will change, airports will change, airplanes will change, and lots of behind the scenes air travel activities will change. One of the best parts is that many of the forms the progress takes will be innovative and delightfully surprising.
Update: And The Blundering following the Panic begins. This 28 Mar 15 Xinhua article, Following German airlines, more European airways adopt two-person cockpit rule after Germanwings crash, describes what seems to be a straightforward response to the cause of this accident.
From the article, "As German airlines have decided to introduce new cockpit rules after the Germanwings plane crash, more European airlines followed suit to enhance safety of their flights."
If this was such a good idea, why wasn't it in place years ago? I don't know what they will be, but this rule will cause more problems and expense than it solves. It is a blunder response. It reminds me of the response to the Tylenol poisoning scare of 1982, since which Americans have had to put up with all kinds of hard-to-remove bottle sealers on all kinds of food products. Such a pain! Such a waste! I get to mumble it again, "I remember the good old days..."
This 14 Mar 15 Economist article, Lessons from Ferguson Step one is to stop using cops as tax collectors, describes how the criminal justice system in many US locales has evolved into a profit center.
From the article, "In Ferguson the acquisitive approach to justice was taken even further. The police department was set aggressive targets each year to increase revenues from fines. The DoJ unearthed an e-mail exchange between the police chief and the city manager from March 2011 that gives a flavour of how this worked. The chief boasted that his department “beat our next biggest month in the last four years by over $17,000”, to which the city manager responded: “Wonderful!” The court which processed these fines got through 1,500 offences in a typical two- or three-hour session. A municipal court in St Louis County, which contains Ferguson, brings in an average of $711,506 in revenue from fines and fees each year and costs $223,149 to operate, according to Better Together, a Missouri campaign group. “Not surprisingly,” it concludes, “many in the community view the courts as revenue centres.”"
Ouch! This is bad on many levels. It is yet another reason why we need to have our communities get more live-and-let-live tolerant so we send fewer people through the criminal justice system.
A new thought that came to mind as I was reading this article is that this is yet another form of regressive taxation. The people being arrested are mostly poor, so it is mostly poor who are paying for these criminal justice activities. And, even worse, if the poor can't pay for what is happening as the system grinds them up, they get fined, and they have to pay even more!
In sum, on many levels the current criminal justice system doesn't make sense. Too much instinctive thinking has been applied here for too many decades. We need to reverse this, apply a whole lot of analytical thinking, and use what comes from the analytical thinking insights to institute major reforms in this area.
In spite of all the beheadings and other spectacular violence, ISIS is still around? And popular?
Wow! Who would have predicted that two years ago? ...other than ISIS enthusiasts, that is.
This 21 Mar 15 Economist article, The caliphate cracks Though Islamic State is still spreading terror, its weaknesses are becoming apparent, talks about the current state of ISIS. It points out that ISIS is not likely to disappear soon.
From the article, "Hardest of all is the insoluble problem of Syria. Even if Mosul can be retaken, IS or something like it will survive, certainly for as long as it enjoys an unchallenged haven in Syria. For the time being, nobody is even thinking of trying to eject IS from the Syrian city of Raqqa: not the regime in Damascus, which wants to prove that the only alternative to IS is Bashar Assad; not the Kurds, who will not fight far beyond their enclaves; not Jabhat al-Nusra, the most effective rebel force, which remains a franchise of al-Qaeda; and not the rebels being trained by America, who are too few to make a difference."
The big picture of what the ISIS phenomenon means is that the Middle East regions between Turkey, Egypt and Iran (and others nearby) have still not figured out how they should be governed. The pundits and historians who write about the Modern Middle East complain about how bad imperialism was. But in retrospect, the Ottoman (pre-World War One) and the English/French (inter-World Wars) versions of governing seemed to have produced more stability than the nationalist versions that have been tried post-World War II.
And now ISIS is popping up, a way of governing that is as capricious and violent as civil war, and yet it seems to be more popular with many people than the nationalist governing versions it has replaced.
We live in strange times, indeed. This question of the best way to govern in these trouble regions remains unanswered.
In converse to the Middle East tangle of ruling problems we have Lee Kuan Yew, the man who ran Singapore from 1959 through 1990. (He is in the news now because he died last week.) This man clearly did this ruling thing right. As this 27 Mar 15 WSJ article describes, Lee Kuan Yew, the Man Who Remade Asia He preached ‘Asian values’ and turned a tiny, poor city-state into an astonishing economic success. Is Lee’s ‘Singapore model’ the future of Asia? by Orville Schell, in one generation he catapulted Singapore from sleepy third world into bustling first world.
From the article, "When I arrived in Singapore one sultry summer evening in 1962 as a 22-year-old student, the Union Jack still fluttered over the British colony. Coolies unloaded wooden boats on the docks, per capita income was languishing under $500 and the young independence leader Lee Kuan Yew was still in his 30s. It was a far cry from today’s well-ordered cityscape of manicured parks, gleaming office towers, high-rise apartment blocks filled with middle-class families and glittering malls swarming with wealthy consumers.
...Modern Singapore boasts the world’s second-busiest port, its most celebrated airline and an airport that hosts 15 million visitors a year. With an annual average growth rate of almost 7% since 1976, it now has a per capita income of well over $50,000, making it the wealthiest country in Asia. And it has the second most entrepreneurs per capita in the world, trailing only the U.S."
By almost every measure, this has been a ruling success. This man created a pragmatic Big Vision, adapted it well to changing times and circumstances, and got the community to buy into it enthusiastically. Success, success, success.
-- The End --