I've written previously about the cult of Ayn Rand, and I've also written about the Reason Foundation's NextGen marketing campaign to invest in new technolgies by moving ATC to a Corporate model.
I'd like to, if I may, take the time to connect the dots between Ayn Rand, her disciples, and the air traffic control system. And then I'd like to wrap it into a philosophical meta-question and ask: who do you trust more, Government or Corporations? (Or perhaps, who do you distrust least?)
The United States currently has the finest aviation system, and the finest air traffic control system, in the world. It routinely accomplishes tasks that other ATC systems cannot. It handles a volume that no other system can.
The primary challenge to the existing US air traffic system (the world's finest, I'll repeat) is Corporatisation, a ten-dollar-name for moving the ATC function out of government and handing it over to Corporations. The choice of words is always critical - are you pro-abortion or pro-choice - and so the industry chooses to use soft terms like "Privatise". I'm going to refer to it as Corporatise.
The aviation-industrial complex sees a high-value-added government activity that the industry would prefer to have as their own profit center. They see that there is profit to be made (money taken out of the population), and currently nobody is taking that profit. They want it.
The industry has rented a think-tank to generate a plausible rationale for their takeover. As this blog has discussed earlier, the role of a think-tank is to generate messages (propaganda) that move the Overton window, moving things that were once unthinkable into the range of the acceptable. Think tanks do this by planting marginally extreme messages that make the previously unthinkable seem reasonable by contrast.
The ATC industry's mouthpiece is the Reason Foundation and Robert Poole. Robert Poole is the poster child of Corporatization, and the industry funnels money into him so that he will do their work. The Reason Foundation and Poole are shills, advancing the industry's message under the guise of putting America back on track.
Ayn Rand was a Hollywood novelist who wrote epic fictions of heroic individuals, bodice-ripping romance, and a marriage-free, childless future driven by amoral, selfish self-interest. She was an illegal immigrant, an atheist, and perhaps the original Cougar. (NTTAWWT). Let me be clear that I have nothing against novelists, but I wouldn't use Richard Bach to develop an essential safety system, and I wouldn't use Ayn Rand's books either.
Within Rand's worldview, government should have very few functions (defend the borders); individuals should decide what's best for themselves. For instance, Rand felt that the government shouldn't staff police departments as it gave them a monopoly on the means of legal violence; she preferred to leave it to individuals to make their own arrangements (ie,militias). Also, Rand holds that government should not establish paper currency because it's an intrusion into the private arrangements of individuals. (I'd like to know how many Randians are eschewing their government-developed flu shots on principle.)
As Whittaker Chambers said, "Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word." Rand condemned so many bad things (Communism, Stalinism), you begin to think you agree with her. But when you look at what she advocates, there's often no common ground.
In this YouTube video developed by the Reason Foundation, Robert Poole explains how Ayn Rand's version of extremely limited government drives the "philosophical" justification for the Reason Foundation:
Robert Poole identifies Ayn Rand's work as the basis for the Reason Foundation's claim to legitimacy. The temptation is to regard that as a point that might be examined and discussed, and if the Reason Foundation were a true well of discourse that would be true. I believe, however, that the Reason Foundation is just a useful front, and that the sloppy Randian rhetoric provides a dense intellectual cover for their corporate takeover of an inherently government function.
I think we should keep Ayn Rand and Robert Poole out of our ATC facilities. (Hat tip to Don Brown for the video!)
I know that this August is a terrible time for delays and frustration, particularly in the New York City airports - EWR, LGA, JFK. I would like to summon the voice of Zero Mostel (or maybe Ed Koch) to intone, "So, you think this year is bad? Feh! Wait till you see next year!"
Kennedy Airport - I remember back when it was Idlewild - has four runways. Next spring, they're going to close the longest runway (the bayside runway, 13R-31L) for maintenance. That's March, April, May, June, July of 2010. August is going to look great at JFK next year after March through July.
One-third of all JFK operations happen on runway 13L-31R. JetBlue, who's business is based on their hub operation at Kennedy, is quite concerned.
Port Authority Director Chris Ward described the rehab as "open heart surgery" on an airport. Port Authority officals said the Federal Aviation Administration would "reschedule flights" so the other three runways could "absorb" the extra traffic. (That's an illusion if not an outright lie. They're just blame-framing. Let's be clear: the Port Authority is closing the runway. They're preparing to blame the FAA for the delays.)
As in all public works, the trade-off is a season of inconvenience for a decade of improved conditions. Next spring at Kennedy: FUBAR.
To me, this is an opportunity for evaluation. There are two schools of thought on what causes delays in general, and in NY's Big Three in particular. Perhaps this opportunity will serve to illuminate our minds.
The Robert Poole / Reason Foundation / military - industrial - complex says that delays are caused by an outdated, WW2-era air traffic control system. The Next-Gen vendors (who, remarkably, sell a solution) have repeatedly told Congre$$ that NextGen's advanced capabilities are essential to avoiding delays.
All the air traffic people I know say that delays are caused by airline schedules that exceed runway capacity.
This runway closure provides a comparative test-bed, a way to find out which theory is more valid. In Karl Popper's words, one or more of these theories is falsifiable. Our body of knowledge will be advanced by identifying which position is flawed. The test of a theory, you'll remember, is (1) is it falsifiable?, (2) does it explain what we observe?, and (3) does it help predict the future?
If Robert Poole and the NextGen Salesmen are right, they should be able to implement satellite-based procedures that avoid delays during the construction closure. No big deal.
If the runways-as-constraint contingent is right, the fact that runways are the limiting factor will be amply demonstrated when they close JFK's longest runway for months. Major delays.
I have a follow-up question: We know about this mishmash seven months before the event. Nobody will be surprised by it. If there are delays, caused by the airlines scheduling too many airplanes for a time when the airport's capacity is limited, will we call it an ATC Delay, or will we call it an Airline Scheduling Delay, or will we call it a Port Authority Delay? I'm just asking.
If anybody wishes to place a small, friendly wager on the outcome, leave me some contact info in the Comments section. After this paving job in Queens is done, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. (I'll note that Robert Poole is into privatizing bridges, too.)
Let’s review Robert Poole and Kathryn Wylde’s Cause. Perhaps later we’ll look at who profits from their rhetoric.
They champion a new air navigation system called NextGen. Using these technologies, pilots will be free to navigate dynamically. If you buy the hype, freed of a route structure that looks like the 1950's interstate highway system, pilots will be able to reroute themselves, and they'll separate themselves from other aircraft.
The problem with our archaic World War Two system, Poole pontificates, is that it makes airplanes line up for runways, airports, cities, and routes. If we’d use GPS (and other variations on the theme) to let pilots navigate direct, we’d save millions, and avoid the queuing that causes such onerous delays.
I generally write in a self-deprecating tone, but I know that in order to persuade I should present credentials and attempt to establish credibility (ethos). I’ve been a pilot and a controller. I understand and have used these technologies.
GPS and NextGen do present remarkable navigation capabilities. They allow individual planes to navigate direct, to develop creative routes around weather, and they would free airplanes from having to participate in a rigid system.
There is very little new under the sun. Philosophically, the problem is Immanuel Kant's Kant’s categorical imperative. In response to the question, Is it OK for me to do (yada yada)?, Kant would ask, Would it be OK for everybody to do it?
If there’s only one driver in town, can he drive wherever he wants? Sure. Drive one-way streets the wrong way, ignore stop signs and lights? Yes.
And in fact, if there’s only ten cars in the city, you can still mostly get away with that sort of chaos, although – eventually – someone’s going to get killed, and then you’ve probably only got eight cars.
It’s tremendous for one person. It's amazing in a limited situation. Kant would ask, Is it okay if everybody does it? And the answer is: No. It would be a disaster with 500 drivers and cars.
When you scale the city up to a thousand drivers, all of a sudden we don’t permit that sort of libertarian chaos. We have one-ways, two-ways, turn lanes, flyovers, HOV lanes, limited access highways, right on red – we get pretty gritty about the details. Overall it’s a mostly efficient, mostly safe system that permits unfettered access without pre-arrangement – you can drive to any address you want, whenever you want – and does it without direct user fees or reservations. Society manages the cost of the system, paid for by the common wealth through a variety of public taxes.
Ahhhh. I'm glad that's settled.
So I’m wrapping up this car analogy, I’m leaning back smugly, and Robert Poole might say: but wait, this is the informal fallacy of false analogy – cars and roads are only two-dimensional, and airplanes fly in a three-dimensional construct. There’s no reason to force them to go even-streets north, odd-streets-south; put them at different altitudes. Let them fly where they want! Embrace the flexibility inherent in the system!
And Robert Poole would be right. Aviation is three-D; in fact, if you’re good at it, it’s four-D, but that’s another topic. But there’s two times during each flight when airplanes are just like cars, when they’re two-dimensional just like cars, and that’s when they’re using runways (roads) to takeoff and land.
A funny thing about runways: they’re long, and they’re straight, and they’re not very adjustable. Planes have to “line up” on runways. You can’t move a runway (although aircraft carrier runways do move around pretty well). When planes line up with runways to land and to take off, they tend to fly over the same houses all the time, and NIMBY neighbors don’t like that.
You can run all the 3-D matrix airspace configurations you want, but the bottom line is that airplanes have to line up for a runway. With airliners, generally speaking we only want one airplane using a runway at a time – so each runway has a maximum capacity of x airplanes per hour. When the weather goes from CAVU to cloudy to nasty, a good runway's occupancy rate goes from 40 planes/hour, to 25 planes/hour, to 20 planes/hour.
Runways are the choke points that cause air traffic congestion in New York, Chicago, and LosAngeles. Planes have to line up on runways, they’re a fixed property with a limited capacity (that decreases in bad weather). You want a new technology that reduces delays? Build a better mousetrap – figure out a way to do without runways.
Runways and runway capacity are the keys to avoiding air traffic delays. NextGen does nothing to address runway acceptance rates.
Some Wonderful Things About NextGen
I don't want to give the impression that I'm anti-NextGen, that I'm a Luddite who misses the days of four-course radio ranges - which, by the way, was a navigation system based on Venn diagrams. So let me mention some wonderful things about NextGen.
NextGen is going to open up new remarkable capabilities for use in limited situations. It's going to be wonderful for the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, which is completely (and almost negligently) underserved by the present system.
NextGen is wonderful for "Midnight Rules". In the wee hours, when traffic is down to about 5% of peak times, you can run a lot of direct routes and approve things you'd never do on a dayshift. In fact, UPS and FedEx use a lot of cool techniques that are available right now, today on the midnight shifts. The problem is: you could never use these schemes on the day shift.
Here's a slightly dramatic example of NextGen saving lives:
EastBumfuStan is located 150 miles from the Metropolis mega-trauma center. It's snowing heavy. Out on the interstate, one car spins into another, there's a chain reaction in the low visibility, there's a twenty-car pileup. There's three severely injured people. Local volunteer firefighters have made it to the scene. Ambulences are on their way from 40 miles away; they're travelling in heavy snow, and the local hospital is not up to treating those people and saving their lives.
Back in 2009, those people would die. But it's 2015. Over at Stat MedEvac, a dispatcher double-clicks on the area map, and sees the local high school football field, the tall AM radio antenna a mile away, and the power lines running east-west. He designs an instrument approach and departure procedure so a helicopter can land at the high school, even in these snowy conditions. He thinks he's done, so he submits it to a validation program that checks his work. The software points out that he failed to consider a hill in the local terrain. He adjusts the approach course, the validator confirms the procedure, and he datalinks the details to the helo crew that's already in the air.
The crew lands, picks up two patients, and takes off for Metropolis. Another helicopter lands five minutes later and picks up the other critical patient. They all live. They'd have died in 2009.
NextGen can do that. For instrument flights at low altitude, in areas without ground-based navigation aids, NextGen is going to be remarkable.
Let me point out something about my two examples: they're both about helicopters. Helicopter aviation, specifically the Medevac and Gulf communities, is completely underserved in the current system. You should care about this, because when there's a terrible accident, it's a helicopter that means life or death.
The other side of the coin is: in both of these examples, the helicopters benefit because they don't need runways. Neither of these examples apply for fixed-wing (ie, normal) (sorry) aircraft that need runways.
NextGen would be a remarkable supplemental system. If you overlaid NextGen on top of today's system, there'd be an awful lot of small benefits realized.
Here's the primary issue: NextGen is so expensive, the industry and the salesmen can only cost-justify it by presenting it as a complete replacement for the current system. In other words, if you shut off all the radars and all the navigation beacons, and save all the money from maintaining them, only then might NextGen be justifiable. Trouble is: NextGen is not an acceptable stand-alone system.
In a June 14, 2009 story in the Dallas Morning News, aviation consultant Michael Boyd expressed his doubts.
Not only is the program management lacking, he said, but the technology of managing the air space may not be up to task. "I have no confidence this is going to work," Boyd said. "The public is simply being bamboozled... ...about how this is working."
There’s a few other details about NextGen.
NextGen offers a remarkable capability for navigation. That new capability doesn't scale well; you can let 5% of today's volume use it, and you can use it tactically when situations permit, but you can't use it as the sole basis for 5000 airplanes at a time.
NextGen cheerleaders say that more accurate navigation (that's true) will permit aircraft to fly closer together on final approach (that's false). Separation on final is driven by wake turbulence, not navigation ambiguity.
Way back in the days of Najeeb Halaby, there were conflicts between civilian and military expectations. The system is obligated to provide "primary radar" coverage. NextGen advocates want to shut that off in order to cost-justify NextGen.
There is no complete, published technical specification for NextGen systems. No defined deliverables. It's vaporware. It's a vendor's fantasy.
NextGen would not have tracked any of the 9-11 hijacked aircraft.
If an aircraft doesn't want to be tracked, NextGen can't track it.
If an aircraft has a total electrical failure (like say, AirFrance447, the Airbus off Brazil), NextGen can't track it.
NextGen depends on a military system. The military has the right to turn it off.
It depends on a satellite system that’s subject to solar interference.
We’re behind on maintaining the satellite array.
By the way, the Chinese have figured out how to disable satellites. It doesn't seem prudent to put all our eggs in that basket.
The vision of NextGen does some really impressive things. It would be a great supplemental system, but it's not sufficient as a stand-alone system. It does not provide sufficient stand-alone tracking capability. It can't support the volume of traffic at intermediate altitudes. It's tremendously expensive. Although the vendors want to sell it, it's not an acceptable "equal or better" replacement for the existing aviation system.
Robert Poole is a rhetorician for the Reason Foundation, a think tank lovedsupported paid for by the Reagan-Bush-Red-State side of the aisle. (Their Clinton-Obama opposite is the Center for American Progress.) Robert Poole's expertise is in surface transportation issues. He has been making bold claims about reinventing Air Traffic Control. He makes arguments that anybody with a bit of ATC experience will recognize as flights of fantasy.
Mr. Poole has seemed (to me) to be a harmless shill for the aviation-military-industrial complex, the people who build airplanes and satellites and rockets. He's sort of the Baghdad Bob of Boeing ATC. He pitches new technologies that will replace the (nominally) aging, creaking air traffic control system and set the planes and passengers free of the backwards, outdated technology that’s been holding us all back.
Robert Poole is an idiot if he thinks that this new package, marketed as - wait for it, wait for it - NextGen is going to deliver the promised benefits. However, I think he’s quite smart, and I think he's an artful mover of the Overton Window. Throughout the Bush years, Poole’s been giving speeches and white papers that advocate for Star Wars satellite-based navigation systems, new computers, and privatizing ATC. He asks, Why is the government in charge of air traffic control? Don’t they screw up everything?
Let’s put private industry (Enron, GM) in charge. First, let's buy a bunch of technology from vendors and contractors. We'll get it all working later. Readers may remember the rhetoric: Government is the problem (see YouTube below), and Starve the Beast (more), etc.
Robert Poole is a useful tool for the airline industry, the avionics industry looking to diversify beyond the military, and the Beltway Bandits that profit from a sliver of everything that happens in DC. Curiously, all the Bush Administration honchos that embraced Poole's proposals are now out of government service - and they've all gone to work for the industry that wants to sell the equipment that Poole is pushing.
I have seen Poole’s work, and I have ignored it because nobody with an operational background could possibly entertain his notions. In June, he wrote about how NextGen would solve New York City's airport delays.
On Monday I saw the results of Robert Poole’s advocacy: on the Huffington Post, Kathryn Wilde blogged about how Robert Poole’s NextGen would solve all the problems of the New York City Airports – and if only we’d prioritize the investment in our future, we’d see the benefit in about twelve years.
And then Wednesday, I saw an article in New York Future Initiative echoing Kathryn Wilde's uninformed speculation. It seems to me like the NextGen marketing program is hitting full stride.
Who is Kathryn Wylde?
Ms. Wylde is not an pilot, not a controller, and not a transportation expert. She is President & CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City. She's also President & CEO of the New York City Investment Fund, the Partnership’s $120 million civic investment fund. Prior to joining the Partnership, Wylde was the Urban Affairs Officer at Anchor Savings Bank (1979-81) and spent 11 years (1968-79) in various positions at Lutheran Medical Center.
She's a cheerleader of the Chamber of Commerce and certain financial interests. She’s a finance type, a fund developer, a schmoozer and hob-nobber who plays with other people’s money. There's nothing wrong with that. However, let's be clear: She is not an aviation expert (but she plays one on the web).
When you go to their website, check the button on the left margin, "GROUNDED: the high cost of Air Traffic Congestion". I like the alliteration that has ATC standing for Congestion; nice touch.
Somehow, this civic financial doyenne is advising the nation on the air traffic control system, and how if we’d only buy the NextGen and the BlackBoxGizmo, all the problems would go away. She has no idea what she’s talking about. Two days later, an article in NYfi was furthering the NextGen message, quoting Kathryn Wylde as an expert.
I ignored Robert Poole because no person who understood the operational issues would believe that he offered a solution for anything other than the industry’s cashflow problem. When I saw that the campaign had moved the discussion and the Overton window enough so that Chamber of Commerce types were confidently spouting his marketing shtick, I felt compelled to object.
I think I have found out what happened to the people who were promising an AeroCar in every carport and a JetPack for every Boy Scout in the 1950's - they're all out selling NextGen ATC now.
The United States currently has the finest aviation system, and the finest air traffic control system, in the world. It routinely accomplishes tasks that other ATC systems cannot. It handles a volume that no other system can.
Within Rand's worldview, government should have very few functions (defend the borders); individuals should decide what's best for themselves. For instance, Rand felt that the government shouldn't staff police departments as it gave them a monopoly on the means of legal violence; she preferred to leave it to individuals to make their own arrangements (ie,militias). Also, Rand holds that government should not establish paper currency because it's an intrusion into the private arrangements of individuals. (I'd like to know how many Randians are eschewing their government-developed flu shots on principle.) 
Kennedy Airport - I remember back when it was Idlewild - has four runways. Next spring, they're going to 
NextGen would be a remarkable supplemental system. If you overlaid NextGen on top of today's system, there'd be an awful lot of small benefits realized.
Robert Poole is an idiot if he thinks that this new package, marketed as - wait for it, wait for it - 
Ms. Wylde is not an pilot, not a controller, and not a transportation expert. She is President & CEO of the nonprofit 
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