denverpilot
Well-Known Member
Not buying it. I've worked for places that were grossly understaffed and if our leadership an us wanted to upgrade something we just effing upgraded it. We had to choose priorities and get it done. We also knew we had the option to sit on our hands and not do it and we'd go out of business. That's the difference between private sector and public. If the public sector guy or gal doesn't bust some butt once in a while, they don't get a pink slip. No intrinsic motivation.
That said "privatizing" government doesn't work either because the contractor knows they're not going to lose the contract once the government slow as molasses "process" driven by the same folks with no fire in their bellies and threat of empty pockets and no dinner in their bellies would take years to dump them.
FAA literally used our old junk product that should have been in a dumpster somewhere for over a decade longer than they should have and paid us four times as much as they should have because they couldn't manage doing a beta test with a backup system on site in case of problems. Literally.
That's how private companies who were unsure of the new product handled it. "We can take a ten minute outage to switch back to the old one if this new one doesn't work... hey look at that. The new one works, it's better in every possible way, has more features, and is all digital with no eeprom chips and floppy drives to load the system software or update it. Nice work vendor! Thanks!"
Government contracts are lucrative not just because of their size but also because the purchasers and people managing the tech use are literally, clueless, about how to manage technical change. They think mountains of paperwork stops outages. Backups and redundancy stop outages. Software ALWAYS sucks and always has. An A/B switched setup (especially automated) is a guaranteed "fix" for a bad upgrade.
Generally agreed but you can take that stress testing too far and take way too long doing it. The main contractor literally got out of the entire sector as a business unit during the timeframe our gear was in service. That's a long time.
The 2011 Appropriations bill specifically says, from Congress, that FAA must come up with incentives that give priority to ADS-B equipped aircraft. Not that FAA hasn't ignored Congress before, but many think FAA is driving that attitude and they're only part of it. Congress themselves wants FAA to give better service to equipped aircraft.
That would work as well as the idiots on VATSIM and similar pretending they're controllers. LOL.
Yup. It's literally law at this point. See above.
Gosh. Hiring the "Washington insider" who started the wine club and then got told to walk with his golden parachute, didn't work out for them? LOL.
They don't seem to want to fight the real fight. If you're headed for user fees then cancel the fuel taxes. That battle would put the airlines and the politicians at odds. It's the only strategy that does.
There's no point in being the Charge of the Light Brigade when you can just get the two larger armies to kill each other. AOPA needs to make the airlines look like a threat to the General Fund. It's their only chance of survival. "If you attack me, that guy over there is going to flank you and kill you. They already want you "privatized" away."
