Never Land A Plane Upside Down

For nearly a decade now I’ve had a little intermittent side gig writing about the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”), an independent Federal agency responsible for air traffic control and safety inspection of passenger airplanes, among other things. They happen to be based not far from me, in Loudoun County, VA. My first big piece was here, thanks to my friends as the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Since then an organization representing small business airlines and independent pilots has been fighting privatization attempts, and they have paid me to write about it from time to time. You will not be surprised to learn that most of the big airlines favor privatization, with the exception of Delta, the latter for reasons that need not concern us.

I hadn’t done anything on this in a while because I didn’t need the money and I had nothing new to say. Needless to say, I fully believe everything I have said against it.

Privatization was a sub-field of mine for my entire career. It started with this, one of my underground classics. Another milestone was this book. There have been a few other things, but those are the highlights. Now with planes crashing all around us, it seems like time to break another lance.

It would be hackwork to blame our new president for the crashes, the same sort of demagogy the MAGAs engage in routinely. A good example of the latter relevant to the current situation is this statement, full of flaming lies. If I was responsible for that kind of work for the Democrats, I wouldn’t restrain myself. As Jerry Garcia said in one of my favorite quotes, “We were always ready to sell out, but nobody was buying.” Here on this blog we can afford to be objective, because nobody is paying me to be otherwise.

Still the facts are we have now had four plane crashes since the Mango Mussolini took office. There are mass layoffs in progress at the FAA. Trump’s mini-me Elon Musk (or is it the reverse?) has massive conflicts of interest on all sides, including with the FAA. There was actually a push for privatization during the first Trump Administration. It came to nothing, like all the rest of his “Infrastructure Week” nonsense. I was following it then.

As I say in what follows, the problem with shedding skilled, experienced employees is that they are not easily replaced. The result is understaffing and lapses in operations. What proves to be efficient in this regard is having excess staffing. You need a reserve of qualified personnel so that someone can step in when there are shortfalls in staff levels. Mistakes are more costly than if a private company is short a truck or delays a delivery. A wonderful book by the great Michael Lewis vividly describes the importance of regulation originating in the national government, a chronicle that should gladden the hearts of government bureaucrats everywhere.

What follows is a draft of my own new statement, soon to be found in random newspapers all over the country.

Everybody has heard, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The new approach in the Federal government has become, “We’ll fix it whether it’s broke or not.” A recurring target of this philosophy is the Federal Aviation Administration (‘FAA’), which runs air traffic control (ATC). Once again, interested parties are talking about privatizing it. This is an old story, though a potential for new corruption looms with the interventions of zillionaire Elon Musk, whose companies have contracts with the FAA.

The obvious spur to this talk was the tragic airplane crash of January 29, the first in fourteen years. So what had changed? Without evidence, President Trump quickly cranked up a press conference to blame the crash on “DEI” (stands for “diversity, equity, inclusion”) policies, really a code word for minority hires. Vice President Vance chimed in, again without evidence, to claim that staffing shortages at the FAA are due to white male job applicants being rejected for their race.

The idea of DEI is to integrate marginalized groups into the workforce, providing them with the dignity of formal employment and relieving public spending of welfare-type support. A person afflicted with Downs Syndrome might be employed to deliver interoffice mail or wax floors, but we can be confident they are not being used as air traffic controllers. DEI does not entail hiring outside of merit or qualifications. It has been turned into an ugly, modernized version of the old, debunked complaints about affirmative action, implying black people are being given preference for jobs for which they are not qualified.

The standard procedure for wrecking public agencies is to deny them resources, then exploit deficiencies in service to call for abolition. The new code words to amplify the condemnation are “DEI” and “woke.” In the case of the FAA, the austerity measures retard technological modernization. This is an old story throughout the Federal government, supposedly motivated by an interest in deficit reduction.

A story going around is the government’s dependence on the ancient COBOL computer code, including at the Internal Revenue Service. Experts in this code are aged, retired, or dead. Musk’s junior coders at the Social Security Administration, due to their lack of expertise in COBOL, thought the SSA was paying benefits to millions of 150-year-olds. It ain’t so.

Denial of resources to modernize can easily end up costing more money than it saves. Elon Musk’s hackers noodling with the government’s computer systems could end up torpedoing your Social Security check or tax refund. Meanwhile, if you try to call the Internal Revenue Service or the Social Security Administration, you are confronted with unhelpful automated phone answering systems, again thanks to the mania for reducing the “head count” of public employment, something a president began boasting about, beginning with the Clinton Administration and Al Gore’s farkakte “reinventing government” rubbish.

The concerns about staffing shortages are not well-served by the second Trump Administration’s jihad against Federal employees, featuring mass emails offering buy-outs and closing up workplaces.

The long-standing rage for privatization of air traffic control around the world provides examples of its shortcomings. Right next door in Canada, the privatization of its ATC has not prevented it from suffering staffing shortages.

As the Vancouver Sun reported, “Vancouver International Airport has been hit with delays on at least a half-dozen days in the past year because of a shortage of air traffic controllers.” Macleans Magazine explained how abrupt changes in hiring disrupt the flow of trained pilots, aviation inspectors, and air traffic controllers needed for a growing customer base. Trained personnel take time and resources to develop. They are not susceptible to the sort of just-in-time inventory adjustments favored by corporations.

Another nation having problems with its privatized ATC is Great Britain. The Financial Times reported that 700,000 passengers experienced disruptions of their travel plans, thanks for inadequate management, technology, and once again, staffing shortages.

Budget concerns are especially off-kilter when it comes to Federal spending. Growth of the Federal budget is not due to the pay of civil servants. The Federal government employs about as many today as it did in the 1960s, even though its workload is far greater.

U.S. air travel boasts a creditable safety record. ATC technology is in the process of upgrade, a process that will only be disrupted by privatization or the ideological appointment of inexperienced, unqualified leaders at the top. The recent accident, by the way, was due to the wandering of a military helicopter into Washington’s airspace, one that is extremely crowded thanks to the demands of politicians for convenient schedules for their flights home, presumably to rail about excessive Federal spending.