Eff you SWA

November echo's next shift-
 

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If anyone here wants to know what beats modernization for direct, and I'm just speculating here, but a couple corporate pilots for a large burrito chain restaurant took a tour and possibly dropped large amounts of coupons for free burritos and tacos. Something resembling a tail number might have been written on them.
 
NovemberEcho said:
I'd prefer congress do their effing job. I'm not even against ATC reform. It's privatization I am against.
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They appear to. More money every year. Never seen any real cuts to pretty much anything ever.

What part of their "job" aren't they doing? Their entire job is to sit there and argue and pretend they're not going to spend, and then spend more than they collect anyway. That pattern hasn't changed in my lifetime.

mshunter said:
Modernization would happen much quicker if the FAA didn't have their budget held hostage every time a budget comes up for vote.
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Modernization has been happening throughout the system for a while now. If you tour many facilities they aren't staring at green CRT tubes anymore. And there's the system that is taking multiple inputs (radar both primary and secondary and even multiple secondary receive sites, ADS-B self position reports from the aircraft themselves, and other sources like the wide area multilateralization system deployed in the Aspen valley) and displaying them as a unified "picture" for the controller.

Quite a bit of the money needed to "modernize" stuff does get sucked away into the Never-Never land of "NexGen" however, which gets a new definition of what it is and what it's supposed to accomplish every time a company sees something they can label "NexGen" and sell to FAA by bribing a Congresscritter.

Congress likes "NexGen" because they can look like they're doing something about a problem NexGen can't solve. Airport size and location.

Did anyone catch the stuff on that website about how the group wants airlines to handle their own traffic avoidance by just looking at the screen and flying around it all "like a GPS in your car"? LOL.

I'm seeing images of NASCAR and a little paint rubbing on the way to the runway... "Oh... they touched a little there in turn four! Just a little good old fun here at the racetrack today, folks!"

I used to work for a place that sold stuff to FAA in telecom. We were a sub-contractor under their main contractor. FAA wouldn't touch our newest, best, gear with a ten-foot pole because it wasn't "certified". They ordered the ten year old product we only kept manufacturing for them and spare parts for another DoD buyer who'd had theirs since the beginning of the product line a decade earlier.

Nope. You could throw money all decade at FAA and they wouldn't buy the latest and greatest of anything unless it was the only thing available.

We even tried to tell them the old one was end of life. They asked "How much money to keep making it for us?" through their main contractor as a go-between. My employer quadrupled the price on the thing and offered to upgrade every one they had at essentially our cost to get them off of the ancient tech.

They sent a check for the higher price and kept buying the ancient one. For years.

They couldn't get the newer product through their own certification process in anything close to a reasonable timeframe -- the NEW product would have been EOLed by the time they did that. Nor could they redesign and have spares onsite if they didn't "trust" the new system -- which was installed and running MIILIONS of calls daily at every major telecom in the country by then.

We just shook our heads and pocketed the cash and I was assigned to fly around and teach the main contractor's engineering team of two, how to support the ancient junk FAA paid four times what they should have to buy.

Then I got paid really well to fly back out a couple of years later with a chip puller and floppy disks to show the main contractor how to upgrade the firmware and software in the things. That was well into the hard drive and Flash era on every other product and we had bought "last call" components from the electronics component manufacturers to have enough stock on discontinued components to do any board level repairs for the duration of the sub-contract.

So, yeah. I've seen what "Modernization" looks like in person. And it wasn't "modern". We couldn't even get parts for the stuff FAA bought when they bought it. We had to maintain our own stock in the corner of our manufacturing/assembly facility's clean room just to cover the contract requirements.

It was a happy day when all of that stuff in the FAA parts cabinets was hauled off to the electronics recycler. We got a lot of manufacturing space back and cabinet space for the growth we were experiencing at the time selling new stuff to the telecoms.

This is so far back, I'm happy to share. The main contractor was GTE and they're long dead as a real player in telecom.

If any of the controllers here ever used a color coded (that was also a requirement -- we called the DoD/FAA version of the software the "Fisher-Price" version -- private industry never seemed to have any trouble hitting the right buttons on the touch screen without color coding them in primary colors) touch screen based thing that would dial up all of the traffic supervisors in a region or area into a conference call with a single button press and no ringing or whatnot on internal FAA telecom circuits through your ancient Nortel phone system back then (ironic that FAA bought the leading Canadian PBX product everywhere instead of an AT&T/Lucent product) ... that was my baby for a number of years. At least from a field engineering and product support standpoint. The GTE guys did most of the heavy lifting and travel. I was just the expert who helped them keep that ancient thing alive.
 
denverpilot said:
They appear to. More money every year. Never seen any real cuts to pretty much anything ever.
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The biggest cause for delays in ATC modernization programs such as NextGen has been government shutdowns (or the threat of) and sequestration. It's almost impossible to plan or budget for a long term project when you're funding stream is constantly under threat. Additionally sequestration and shutdowns have caused hiring to slow or stop several times, including a full year of the Academy being closed in 2013 I think it was. With how long it takes for a trainee to become a fully certified controller, a year of no one in the pipeline has huge ramifications, especially with such a large percentage of the current workforce hitting retirement eligibility or the mandatory age.
 
AAPalmTree said:
@Baronman do you fly for a living? I would definitely fear the same accord for pilot employment and the face of union/jcba's and what we've worked for being changed so drastically. I don't see an issue with someone worrying about an important job getting disrupted.
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Exactly. It seems most of us our concerned that competition from flag of convenience carriers will bring an end to cushy airline pilot jobs. As for the whole modernization angle, @Baronman , you will be singing a different tune if autonomous or single-pilot airliners threaten your job.

Peraonally, I want as many people as possible to have cushy jobs. As an airline employee, my livelihood is dependent on a large segment of society having the disposable income to afford air travel, which is ultimately a luxury.
 
Yakob said:
Exactly. It seems most of us our concerned that competition from flag of convenience carriers will bring an end to cushy airline pilot jobs. As for the whole modernization angle, @Baronman , you will be singing a different tune if autonomous or single-pilot airliners threaten your job.

Peraonally, I want as many people as possible to have cushy jobs. As an airline employee, my livelihood is dependent on a large segment of society having the disposable income to afford air travel, which is ultimately a luxury.
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The problem is that many pilots see themselves as management not labor, and bite off on the whole "what's good for the company is good for me".

That's kinda true in some cases, but also assumes that whatever "good" the company does is good for the employees, which is most definitely not the case.

My old man (a business owner himself) clued me in: "if you wear a hat and/or a name tag, you're not management...they might call you that, but you're not in any way that matters".
 
Richman said:
The problem is that many pilots see themselves as management not labor, and bite off on the whole "what's good for the company is good for me".

That's kinda true in some cases, but also assumes that whatever "good" the company does is good for the employees, which is most definitely not the case.

My old man (a business owner himself) clued me in: "if you wear a hat and/or a name tag, you're not management...they might call you that, but you're not in any way that matters".
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A lot of non pilots in this industry have the same view. They see pilots almost as management. Fortunately at my shop the pilots treat us as equals (from my view from the ramp). And as a result are treated better than management.
 
The generation of pilots who think they're managers and like to give great stock tips is an endangered species. Pilots who came up in the 90s and later known damned well how far down the list of line items they are.
 
I can't speak for the places where ATC delays actually matter, but in a day and age where ADSB shows us down to the runway even in tonguin'mynutsack, AK the fact that all these airports are still one in-one out IFR is ridiculous. We could literally do better with no loss in safety self-separating via the MFD.
 
Roger Roger said:
I can't speak for the places where ATC delays actually matter, but in a day and age where ADSB shows us down to the runway even in tonguin'mynutsack, AK the fact that all these airports are still one in-one out IFR is ridiculous. We could literally do better with no loss in safety self-separating via the MFD.
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Well until all the planes are ADSB equipped that doesn't help.
 
NovemberEcho said:
Well until all the planes are ADSB equipped that doesn't help.
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Not with that attitude it doesn't. "Airtaxi 123, cleared for approach, maintain minimum 3 mile separation from Navajo ahead of you, bizjet 123 hold over sisters island until ADSB equipped"

It's not rocket surgery to let the better equipped aircraft use their full capabilities and keep everyone else out of the way. I mean that's a large part of what class B airspace does.
 
Roger Roger said:
Not with that attitude it doesn't. "Airtaxi 123, cleared for approach, maintain minimum 3 mile separation from Navajo ahead of you, bizjet 123 hold over sisters island until ADSB equipped"

It's not rocket surgery to let the better equipped aircraft use their full capabilities and keep everyone else out of the way. I mean that's a large part of what class B airspace does.
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That's not much different than a visual approach into an uncontrolled field where you have preceding traffic in sight. And it's also illegal currently. We have to protect for the first aircraft going missed. Much of the ATC restrictions are to protect for hypotheticals. 99/100 times it doesn't matter, but the 1 time is what made the rule get written.
 
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