Attention All Passengers (16 page)

On Not Passing the Baton

When I worked for Tower Air, we used to joke that someday the FAA would allow airlines to outsource dispatchers. Ha. And mechanics. Ha. And flight attendants. Ha! And pilots! Ha ha! To varying degrees, all that is occurring now.

What we didn't foresee is that massive layoffs and massive outsourcing would affect not only labor but customers as well. And it certainly affects the quality of the products. Without that mentor-protégé relationship, how will the next generation evolve? The piloting heroics displayed by Captain Al Haynes in Sioux City and Captain Chesley Sullenberger on the Hudson River were developed over long and meticulous career paths. As Haynes says of United Flight 232, “We had 103 years of experience [in the cockpit]. If we couldn't do it, then it couldn't be done.” He also notes advanced technologies present new problems: “Now I'm concerned about the effects of the [computerized] glass cockpits. Pilots are not learning to fly by the seat of their pants. So if something happens to the systems, they don't know what to do.”

David Bourne, director of the Airline Division for the Teamsters, concurs. He began as a regional carrier pilot himself, a twenty-three-year-old flying Beech 99s for Allegheny Airlines and making $12,000 a year—back when that was enough to live on. The minimum number of flight hours—a primary hiring qualification for commercial pilots—was much higher in past decades, and Bourne did everything including towing banners along beaches to accrue more cockpit time. He cites regional captains who have barely more hours than their first officers, and notes, “Now you have nobody to learn from. We've lost a lot of that. We don't have that osmosis.”

Perhaps the cruelest manifestation of this syndrome is the military's recruitment efforts, which promise bright futures in the civilian sector. For generations, young Americans have entered the service and been trained in high-tech aviation skills, knowing the risks and hardships were mitigated somewhat by the security of a bright airline career ahead. But as Bourne points out, returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are learning a bitter lesson: the best U.S. airline jobs are being offshored from the country they fought to defend.

6

When Your Airline Isn't Your Airline:

Regional Carriers Provide Lower Levels of Service and Safety

All airlines providing scheduled service in aircraft with 10 or more passenger seats operate under identical FAA regulatory requirements.

—Regional Airline Association

A
t one particularly contentious meeting of the DOT's Future of Aviation Advisory Committee in November 2010 I attempted to convince a room filled with airline industry executives and DOT officials that the widely accepted industry practice of outsourcing flying to regional airlines is, on its face, duplicitous.

My point was that most consumers have no idea that when they buy a ticket on Airline A, they are likely to be flying on Airline B. That term
codesharing
is most prevalent in the form of regional operations, which is a complex way of stating that the nation's largest airlines have elected to outsource and subcontract much—and sometimes even most—of their flying. At that meeting in Washington I argued that if we stopped one hundred passersby on street corners in any town in America, only a handful would understand the term
codesharing
. I argued that most passengers don't realize they are flying on regional airlines, despite the incredible fact that such flights now represent 53 percent of all airline departures in the United States every day. There simply isn't enough transparency in the system, because most consumers don't understand that a booking made through Continental or United will generate a ticket for a flight operated by Colgan Air.

Finally I decided to show and tell. I reached into my bag and confessed to stealing a safety-critical item off a commercial flight that morning: the “ditching card” containing the emergency evacuation instructions found in the seatback pocket. I explained how I had booked my flight on Delta.com; that my Visa card was debited by Delta; that Delta sent me email confirmations with my flight details; that the taxi dropped me off at the Delta terminal, where I checked in at the Delta counter under Delta signage, and spoke to an employee wearing a Delta uniform, and was issued a boarding card from a Delta kiosk; I double-checked my Delta departure on the flight information display screen, and proceeded to a Delta gate decked out in more Delta signage; I spoke to yet another employee wearing a Delta uniform and boarded through a Delta jet bridge; I stepped onto an aircraft painted in the colors and logo of Delta and passed a flight attendant dressed in Delta's corporate colors; finally I took my seat and retrieved the ditching card, which prominently displayed Delta's red-and-blue “widget” logo on the cover. On the back page, in considerably smaller font, were the words: “Operated by Atlantic Southeast Airlines.”

Some of my FAAC colleagues and the many DOT staffers in the room seemed a bit puzzled. After all, what passenger has never heard of Atlantic Southeast? Or Chautauqua and Mesaba and PSA and Air Wisconsin? And who has never heard of codesharing? And who doesn't know that the FAA polices, inspects, and fines airlines based on the companies holding the operating certificates, not the names painted on the airplanes? And who doesn't know that outsourced regional airlines in turn outsource aircraft maintenance and other key functions? Who doesn't understand how the airline industry works these days?

I begged to differ. Yes, there have been positive steps taken in recent years to educate consumers about codesharing and regional flying. But I argued that in far too many cases, passengers and their families become aware of such corporate partnerships only after a regional airline operating on behalf of a major airline is involved in a fatal crash.

Two Sets of Rules: Lower Standards = 50 Deaths

Unlike many next of kin on September 11, 2001, Beverly Eckert got to say goodbye. Sean Rooney was at work on the 105th floor in the South Tower of the World Trade Center that morning and both he and his wife—watching events unfold on television—knew he would not make it out alive, so they spoke to each other of love and loss right up until the moment the building collapsed. Almost immediately, Beverly threw herself into a new cause, advocating for enhanced cockpit security and closing other gaps exposed by the terrorist attacks. She became immersed in the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, which was influential in forming the 9/11 Commission. Seven and a half years later, on February 12, 2009, Beverly Eckert would also perish in the heat and light of burning jet fuel.

That evening Continental Connection Flight 3407 departed Newark in icing conditions for a fifty-three-minute flight to Buffalo, but crashed about five miles short of the Buffalo airport into a home in Clarence Center, New York. Beverly and the forty-eight others on board were killed, as was a resident of the house hit by the Bombardier DHC-8-400. Beverly was one of five children, and in the immediate aftermath of her death two of her sisters retired from their government jobs and emulated her by becoming activists—not for preventing another 9/11, but for enhancing the safety of U.S. regional airlines.

“We're not professional victims,” explains Karen Eckert. “We're advocates who want change.” She and her sister Susan Eckert Bourque have joined with others who lost loved ones on Flight 3407 in lobbying for stricter regulation of the airline industry's increasingly darker side: the regional aircraft operations that now make up 53 percent of all commercial airline departures in the United States. That's because those fifty people were killed not in a Continental Airlines crash, but rather in the crash of a flight operated by Colgan Air, a company many people had never heard of before 2009, including some of the passengers on the fatal flight.

Ultimately the National Transportation Safety Board stated: “The probable cause of this accident was the captain's inappropriate response to the activation of the stick shaker, which led to an aerodynamic stall from which the airplane did not recover.” In the immediate aftermath of the crash, the entire nation would learn quite a bit more about the cockpit crew of Flight 3407, about Colgan Air, and about the regional airline industry itself. The reports emerged in spurts, but eventually an image coalesced. The crew's fatigue and the long days they spent commuting; the napping in crew lounges and crash pads; the first officer's commute from her home in Seattle to her crew base in Newark before her flying day even began. Still more: the captain's record of four check flights failed by senior management and unsatisfactory proficiency checks. The cockpit voice recorder transcript indicating the first officer earned a gross salary of $15,800 in 2008 (necessitating that she moonlight at a coffee shop). The “unsterile cockpit” environment that included text messaging and personal conversations during critical phases of flight. Later, the NTSB would report that when hired by Colgan, the captain had accumulated just 618 total flight hours and the first officer 1,470 total flight hours.

“We are toying with disaster,” warns FAA whistle-blower Ed Jeszka, a former flight instructor. “I've never heard of a pilot not learning how to deal with a stall.” What's more, he points out that the regulations passed
after
the Buffalo crash would not have prevented that tragedy.

Throughout the industry, professionals were stunned. Why would an airline captain respond in the worst possible way to a stick shaker, a standard aeronautical device attached to an airplane's control yoke and designed to warn a pilot of an in-flight stall? But the shock soon spread beyond, to legislators and journalists and even passengers. Where were the industry's hiring standards for pilots with so little experience? Where was the training for icing conditions and stall recovery? Where was Colgan Air in all of this? Where was Continental? Where was the FAA? And not for nothing—could a commercial airline pilot in the United States in the twenty-first century truly be earning less than twenty grand a year?

The Eckerts are critical to my own understanding of what we as a nation will—or will not—learn from Flight 3407. We both have siblings working in government service, so I reached out to the Eckert sisters through this connection, not the advocacy group to which they are devoted. One holiday weekend I spent nearly four hours in Karen's dining room, and our meeting began with all three of us articulating the pain of losing a brother or sister. But no tears were shed.

We talked quite a bit about Beverly, and a strong image emerged. Clearly she was both passionate and compassionate, forceful when fighting for a cause, and tireless in her devotion. I asked Karen if Beverly was aware her final flight was operated by Colgan Air, and the response was a strong no. Because she lived in Connecticut and often visited family in Buffalo, Beverly was a frequent flyer who usually opted for nonstop JetBlue flights from JFK. But that evening she was using an expiring voucher on Continental; when her sister described the local weather as icy, Beverly replied, “Ice? Oh no!” Karen recalled, “I don't think Beverly realized she was not going to be on a jet. It probably gave her pause.”

Even after family members were notified of the crash, Susan remembers being told by a Continental employee to wait for a team from a company she had never heard of: Cougar? Culligan? Only then did most of the relatives learn that Flight 3407 was operated by Colgan Air, which the families came to refer to as “a farm team.” They felt the codesharing was a bait-and-switch.

They are not alone. In fact, it's a sentiment that has been repeated time and again during NTSB hearings. Meanwhile, the DOT and FAA repeatedly state there has not been a fatal “major” airline accident since 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in the Rockaway section of Queens, in New York City. But consider that since that time we have witnessed six fatal accidents of smaller carriers:

• 2003: Air Midwest Flight 5481 in Charlotte, North Carolina; 21 dead; operating as US Airways Express

• 2004: Pinnacle Airlines Flight 3701 in Jefferson City, Missouri; 2 dead; operating as Northwest Airlink

• 2004: Corporate Airlines Flight 5966 in Kirksville, Missouri; 13 dead; operating as AmericanConnection

• 2005: Flying Boat Inc. Flight 101 in Miami; 20 dead; operating as Chalk's Ocean Airways

• 2006: Comair Flight 5191 in Lexington, Kentucky; 49 dead; operating as Delta Connection

• 2009: Colgan Air Flight 3407 near Buffalo; 50 dead; operating as Continental Connection

It's important to note that from the FAA's standpoint, none of these six aircraft was operated by a “major” airline, a carrier defined by the DOT as posting annual revenues of $1 billion or more. However, five of these six crashes involved regional carriers operating on behalf of five different major airlines—US Airways, Northwest, American, Delta, and Continental. In each of these cases, passengers bought their tickets through the major carriers, not the regionals.

The day after I met the Eckerts my sister took me to a memorial plaque in Clarence Center, and then to the crash site itself. I was surprised to see that such a small plot of land on a quiet residential street actually entombed fifty people. After I returned home, Karen sent me an email saying: “The loss of these precious human beings is immeasurable, both to us—their families and loved ones—and to the lost potential of their lives to make a positive difference in our country and our world. These were not expendable people who had knowingly, willingly put themselves at risk. They had no way consented to boarding a plane with fatigued, poorly trained, poorly paid pilots who lacked a disciplined safety culture in the cockpit, on an airline whose name is not reflected in the name ‘Continental Flight 3407' or the Continental colors painted on the tail.”

The Minor Leagues: Major Airlines Outsource Flying

When I worked in the industry we used to call them puddle jumpers, weed whackers, even lawn mowers. Pan Am Express flew funny-looking ATR 42s that were widely referred to as enchiladas. The implication was these small, slow, noisy prop airplanes were second string—not as comfortable, not as fast, and statistically not even as safe. Today many of those turboprop aircraft have been supplanted by regional jets, commonly known as RJs; overall, regional aircraft have gotten larger in recent years. Turboprops now carry between 9 and 78 passengers, while regional jets are configured for 30 to 108 seats. But serious concerns about comfort, reliability, and even safety and security still remain.

The terms
regional
and
commuter
and
feeder
occasionally are used interchangeably within the industry, and now some within the industry are calling them
network extenders
. But by any name, their presence is growing: U.S. regionals carried 159 million passengers in 2010, almost double the 82 million passengers carried in 2000. And regionals provide the
only
scheduled airline service at some 484 airports nationwide.

A regional operation traditionally referred to a major hub-and-spoke airline that subcontracted to a smaller airline to provide “feeder service” by flying “thin” routes, usually to less populated or rural markets. But in recent years the routes have gotten thicker; in fact, at certain times of the day six out of seven flights between New York City and Washington, D.C. (not exactly Lubbock and Odessa) are now operated by regional aircraft. As major airlines focus on more profitable long-haul and international routes, they're outsourcing more and more domestic flying to regionals. As analyst Bob Mann puts it, “There's a lot of interest in flying people from Moline to Abu Dhabi. But there's no interest in flying them from Moline to Chicago.”

No doubt much of the confusion and misinformation over regional airlines stems from the difficulty in creating an up-to-date and accurate scorecard of who is flying for whom. The challenge is how best to illustrate the complex relationship between the nation's mainline airlines and the regional partners to whom they outsource so much flying. Excel chart? Venn diagram? Foldout schematic?