Airline Amnesia

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Biden/Harris Won!!!

A little after noon today—Saturday, November 7, 2020—the AP, the New York Times and “every major TV news network” called Nevada and Pennsylvania, and therefore the election, for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The race for the White House, although not every downballot race, is over! Our long national nightmare is over. Democracy, Reason and decency have triumphed, by a margin of over four million votes nationwide. Our modern mix of Commodus, Nero and Caligula may grumble, lie, sue and blaspheme, but he’s on the way out. Most of his erstwhile enablers know it and are heading for the exits. Let’s be clear-eyed in thanking those to whom we owe this victory and this huge relief. Women voters and Black voters saved our democracy. Stacey Abrams, in particular, may have helped flip Georgia, the state where the KKK used to gather at Stone Mountain, the center of regional resentment where Sherman once marched to the sea. A non-Southern Democrat may have won Georgia for the first time since JFK in 1960. (Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both Southerners, also won in between.) We might not know for weeks which way Georgia went; the margin is that close. But even if the Dem ticket lost by a tiny margin, Abrams will continue her relentless push toward majority rule. Quiet as an electric-powered bulldozer, she is as irresistible as history. The second biggest story of this day is her New South, which will soon deliver a whole new nation. Yes, there’s still a lot of work to do. This has been a grim and foreboding year. But the darkest hour is just before dawn, and the Sun is rising. It’s time to dance in the streets.

The principal post follows:

For a few days yet, we’ll all be biting our fingernails waiting for the vote counting to end. So it may be helpful to think about other important things. One of them is why the global airline industry is all but shut down.

The industry began just a few decades after the Wright Brothers proved the feasibility of controlled flight. Aircraft companies made planes that could carry passengers. Scheduled flights began. The federal government helped subsidize the budding industry by paying it to carry mail and packages for the Post Office.

But after a few well-publicized fatal crashes, the industry’s growth took a big hit. All but the bravest passengers feared to fly.

At that time, we were a different country. We believed in reality, science, engineering and cause and effect. We tried to solve problems in fact. We didn’t put so much money and effort into marketing, advertising, public relations and “making our own reality.” So instead of trying to distract the public’s attention from the very real fatal crashes, all of us—industry, government, engineers and planners—sat down to make air travel safer.

The result was massive and willing cooperation between industry and federal regulators. The airlines saw that they needed to make flight safer and that an independent federal regulatory agency would reassure the public.

Two federal regulatory bodies came to control the industry. The first was the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which still exists today. It controls all aspects of aircraft design, construction, certification, and maintenance. Its staff meticulously specifies and records the design, use, and history of every critical part of every airplane. As a result, the FAA knows more about the vital parts of an airplane and their history than the entire federal government knows about the people riding in it. The FAA also controls the education, training and certification of pilots.

The second federal regulator was economic. Now defunct, it was called the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). Its job was to insure that the airline companies that managed the planes were as safe and sound as the planes themselves. It controlled all aspects of the industry, including pricing, quality, and capacity. It set air fares, in advance, for all scheduled flights. In doing so, it made generous allowances for profit, so that no airline would be tempted to skimp on quality or safety.

For decades, this dual regulatory system worked beautifully. The industry grew explosively, and air travel became both safe and comfortable. Maybe prices were a little higher than they absolutely had to be for safety, but the public was happy and the accident rate was low. As everyone who once flew now knows, it was—before Covid-19—far safer to get on a plane than to drive your own car, let alone the same distance.

Then came Ronald Reagan and the first decade of deregulatory mania. Reagan and the economists who backed him decided that competition, not regulation, was the thing. They abolished the CAB in 1985 and let the industry set its own standards for pricing and comfort, through competition.

The FAA kept doing its job as an independent guardian of safety. But as time went on, it got captured by the industry it was supposed to regulate. More and more of its oversight was “delegated” to the very firms that the CAB’s abolition had cast on the tender mercies of no-holds-barred competition.

One result was the unnecessary crashes of two—count ‘em, two—737 Maxes, killing all on board, before the FAA started to do its job. The passengers and crews—all 346 of them—had died for deregulation. And foreign air regulators, not our own once-leading FAA, were the first to ban the defective plane from the skies.

Other results of this “new” regime are now clear. Air travel is now much cheaper than it used to be. But it’s also much less convenient and comfortable and less safe. Aircraft cabins are designed to pack as many passengers as possible into the smallest amount of space. Knees hit the back of the seat ahead, even for smaller people like me, let alone big people. Obese people, of whom we have many, drape their arms, and sometimes their fat, over the armrests in both directions. And toilets are so tiny that even a small, light person like me has trouble taking off his coat, let alone turning around.

Then came Covid-19, and the industry came apart. There was, and is, no authority setting the rules. The FAA won’t touch the pandemic. The TSA, a third agency tasked to stop in-flight terrorism, won’t even take temperatures, which anyway let 40% of carriers through. Every airline has its own rules, procedures and promotions, making things up as it goes along. Many flights advertise social distancing, but some planes end up nearly full nevertheless, because that’s how airlines make money. When private hands control safety, the all-American rule of “profit first” wins, and people get sick and die.

So hundreds of aircraft, each of which cost hundreds of millions to make, are now lined up in desert parking lots while the industry stagnates. I recently saw one of these big parking lots east of Tehachapi, CA, while driving from Santa Fe, NM, to Berkeley, CA. I would rather have flown, had it been safe.

Some of this havoc is the result of confusion and conflicting information—an inevitable consequence of dealing with a brand new pandemic. We’ve all had a steep learning curve to climb.

But over half a year has passed since the first lockdown. Scientists worldwide have been studying Covid-19 diligently in hospitals, on our streets and in the laboratory. We now know, for example, that active viruses on surfaces (so-called “fomites”) are a minor and perhaps even negligible source of contagion. By far the most dangerous source is getting close to an infected person, for more than a short time, without masks. The infectious viruses travel by air, in droplets and aerosols, and the fewer viruses you inhale with them, the less serious your disease.

So masks work. We know that now. Since we don’t have a vaccine or anything like a cure, they, passenger distancing, and mandatory pre-boarding testing are the only things that can make air travel reasonably safe from contagion.

Airlines can filter the cabin air all they like and obsessively sterilize every surface you might touch. But if the person sitting right next to you is wearing no mask, mostly taking it off, or consistently wearing it under the nostrils (as so many do), and if he or she is infected, you are likely to catch the bug. Then you may either get sick or, as a carrier without symptoms, get others sick. Temperature checks are next to useless as 40% of infected people, on average, have no symptoms, including elevated temperatures.

So making air travel as safe as it can be right now is relatively simple. Make every passenger wear a mask, and hand out N-95 masks (the best) at the entry to the boarding area. Require every passenger, before boarding, to have a certified testing agency transmit a negative result from a test taken within 24 hours earlier. Won’t these simple expedients be less expensive—and more reliable—than obsessively sterilizing surfaces and reconfiguring cabin air systems?

Sure, there are scofflaws. But an airline once injured a Korean-American doctor by dragging him forcibly off an aircraft just because it was overbooked and he didn’t leave after a computer “volunteered” him to give up his seat. Do that with mask scofflaws, in a few well-publicized cases, and noncompliance will disappear. Then prohibit eating or drinking on short flights, except maybe in lounge areas, and serve adjacent passengers consecutively on long ones, so at least one is always wearing a mask.

So why isn’t this happening? Beats me.

The best I can figure is that we’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid of personal “freedom,” consumer “choice,” and “competition,” in which airlines vie for customers by touting all sorts of things that won’t work, instead of the simplest and cheapest things we know work now.

If you have trouble remembering what works, just keep in mind that China, where the pandemic began, has now mostly beaten the bug. It has done so with simple blocking and tackling: testing, contact tracing, and quarantining and pedestrian traffic that looks like this.

So all it would take to begin to restore our airline industry is some leadership from the top. Whether or not the Dems take the Senate, Joe Biden can put the FAA on the job. His steady leadership, along with that of real experts like Anthony Fauci, can help cure the airlines’ regulation amnesia.

Intelligent regulation for safety rocketed the industry’s start. It can save the industry from Covid-19 today. Even if the experts require reduced-capacity flying, that will be better than the industry’s Covid free-fall to date. And any government subsidy needed to keep the industry alive (and its workers from destitution) would be much smaller with fuller flights of safer and more reassured passengers.

Endnote on Nasal Sprays and Seats: A genetically designed nasal spray has recently had some good results in preventing Covid-19 infection in ferrets. If it turns out to be safe and effective for humans, airlines could offer it to passengers before boarding, even for long international flights. (It’s supposed to work for 24 hours.)

But the nasal spray may take as long or longer to test thoroughly than a vaccine. In the meantime, masks, testing, contact tracing and quarantining are all we know works now. So we can have a well-regulated partial recovery of air travel, or we can endure more chaos and regulatory amnesia.

As for seating, I had interesting experience. About a dozen years ago, I had to take a short flight from Detroit to Akron, Ohio. The aircraft was a prop plane run by a minor airline and outmoded to boot. As I approached it, my heart sank. But as I got aboard, I saw its seats and perked up. All were as big as first-class seats today, and they were leather.

Regulation can’t and shouldn’t dictate the size and upholstery of seats, except for safety. But maybe a regulatory regime less focused on all-out, no-rules competition might encourage airlines to treat coach travelers less like cattle. At least we economy-class travelers can dream.

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