XingR In Flight» Curmudgeonry

It’s the Runways, Stupid

XingR — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:05:51 +0000

It’s been along time since I have been motivated to write here, but my blogging friend Don Brown along with my former brothers and sisters in arms at Air Mobility Command (I was there when it was MAC, hey I was even there when it was MATS) have prompted me to get into this Next Gen fray a little bit. Actually, the picture Don published a few days ago pretty much says it all.

For those new to the NextGen term, I’ll be posting a few things to help you understand it and help you make your own decisions here.

Let me give you just a snapshot view right now in order to get the stage set.

Everybody (except perhaps the airlines themselves .. more on that later) claims to hate airline delays, but for years the impression was, no one was doing anything about it.

So some ‘legends’ in their own mind in Washington (actually, if you peel away all the layers you are probably going to find some Beltway Bandit or another expects to reap big profits from this) has deiced that if they “change the face” of air transportation in this country we will magically remove |airline delays| from out vocabulary.

Let me give you just one example of how this is going to work. Let’s imagine for a moment there are just two airports in the US … LAX and JFK. Even though these are inconveniently located for some folks, they are certainly located ideally for many, and if they are the only choices, a lot of people are going to fly between them every day.

So the airlines are going to sell a lot of tickets, buy a lot of planes and schedule them at the most convenient times to travel between those two important airports.

Seems to be going in almost a straight line, doesn’t it? Even if you don’t now an airfoil from as fence post you are sure to figure that even if the airplanes all follow the shortest possible path between the airports, sooner or later they are going to bunch up waiting for takeoff or waiting to land.

Enter NextGen. By using GPS and other “magic” future technologies, NextGen is going to let those planes follow any route they chose so as to get to the other end of their flight faster.

Hmm, but won’t the pilots just all chose the shortest path? And isn’t the real problem the waiting time to take off and/or land, you ask?

Ah, clearly you have missed the point and failed to grasp the advanced technical superiority of the NextGen idea. Or else, NextGen supporters are blowing smoke up someone’s ass.

Tune in next time to help yourself decide which explanation is true.

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Thought for the Day

XingR — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:25:34 +0000

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.” — James Madison

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Living In Sin All Those Years — I Never Knew

XingR — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 16:03:22 +0000

Kay Bell, a fellow blogger who puts out a very worthwhile and readable resource on the real sin in our “Great Society”, taxes, posted an interesting entry on investing in vice, or companies whose goals were “non-socially acceptableâ€. Read it here

I started to post these words as a comment on Kay’s blog, but I think they’ll be better off here.

Very interesting rundown on the Vice Fund phenomenon, Kay. I had no idea these specialty folks were out there.

The line that gave me pause in the description, though, was the catalog of “vices”. Investing in companies in the defense or weapons industry is investing in “vice”, akin to investing in a tobacco company? Wow, I learn something every day.

As someone born at the very end of WWII who went to elementary school learning to “Duck and Cover” and who was working in military satellite operations in the days when the Berlin Wall finally came down, I find the lumping together of those disparate business opportunities strange indeed. I guess the knowledge that my 38 years on the government side of defense, much of it working with or supervising defense contractors was all socially unacceptable is illuminating.

I got a big chuckle the other day when the press suddenly remembered there was a North Korea and ran around “Chicken Littling” for a few days. They seemed to take a lot of comfort in reporting the PACOM had moved a guided missile destroyer to Japan. Of course if they knew that a “guided missile destroyer” doesn’t destroy guided missiles (it uses missiles as its main battery) they might not have been so comforted.

But then again, the Katie Courics and Wall Street analysts would never deign to learn about the seamy underside of society called “defense”, would they? Isn’t “defense” something like some of those deviant sexual practices you hear about on the ‘Net? I take shower after shower and I still feel dirty *sigh*

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