Have you read all the hubbub about the re-classification of
public use airports? How about the
stories of airshows being cancelled due to the sequester? If you’re a pilot and you’re moderately aware
of the world around you, then surely you’re familiar with both. But what do these things have to do with
conservative pilots and contract negotiations?
That’s a great question.
Pilots: It’s true; the clear majority of pilots, commercial
pilots in this case, are conservatives.
Well, they are until their contract expires. Because of this, if you’re a conservative,
and you work for the airlines, you’ll usually find yourself in good company in
the cockpit. Yet, if you’re a true
conservative conversing with others gets tough around contract time.
When negotiations start between “the company” and the union,
pilots who were once card carrying conservatives become possessed. Sounding like MSNBC commentators, their
voices change, they begin to act strange, and their logic disappears. Ironically this is also when pilots believe
they are at their smartest. For anyone
with a basic knowledge of economics, this period can by trying. Not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t
suggest the horribly flawed notion of re-regulation as the solution to all ills. Yes, it is in the season of contract
negotiations that bad ideas flow as easily from the mouths of pilots as bad
business decisions rain down from management.
Meanwhile, hilariously bogus confrontations between the
union and “the company” are repeated like folk songs. My favorite, which I’ve heard repeated by
someone from every airline at some time in my life (I’m not kidding) is the one
that goes like this, “Well, the union told them if they (the company) want to
use scabs or contract workers to break a strike, then they should remember that
the union represents the truck drivers, the loaders, maintenance workers, and
the rampers and nothing will move if they do”.
It’s the strangest thing to experience.
Everyone who repeats it believes it.
At any other time of the year, your cockpit cohort would
offer needless lessons on the free market.
But the day contract negotiations open, the same person speaks with the
accent of a New Jersey dock
worker, talks of Jimmy Hoffa Jr. like he’s family, and extols the virtue of the
government mediator who is rumored to have sided with the union.
Fortunately at some point in time, usually the last hour
before pilots go on strike, the union decides it has successfully put on the
appearance of supporting its cash cows and it folds. Simultaneously the company,
deciding it has paid enough cash under the table to insure union concessions, puts
forth a last minute offer that includes a seven percent pay raise in exchange for
two more days of work from each pilot.
Carefully worded to make crews feel they have won even though they have
not, the brave new agreement is eagerly accepted by pilots. The next day, they go back to being
conservatives fighting the good free market fight.
Airport Reclassification:
Have you been reading about the FAA public use airport reclassification program? Although it has been going on for a while
now, I can’t say that I’ve seen a single article that accurately described its
purpose. When I first heard about it, the
article was so vague it seemed it could only be on purpose. Therefore I called around asking questions
until I ended up with Bill Dunn at AOPA.
So began my next lesson.
Bill was nice to talk to.
Taking time out of his busy day, he humored me right up to the point my
questions required answers. Then it
turned into a “catch the greased pig” contest.
By the time I was able to get him to understand I was concerned about
the program because we owned a public use airport, he was talking to me the way
TSA talks to passengers in airports; doing
his best to make me feel small.
Apparently, I was supposed to know exactly what NPIAS was about even
though that was the reason I had called. My goal was to get answers. When he
couldn’t, or didn’t want to provide any, I began to get that feeling you get
when someone is about to sell you out.
What was my primary question? How do airports like ours get representation
in this reclassification effort? His answer,
“You don’t need to be involved because your airport doesn’t receive government
funding. AOPA’s only concerns are with
airports that receive government funding and that they continue to get funding
because that is what the NPIAS is about, spending; who gets the federal
dollars?”. He then gave me examples, one
of which was largely a commercial airport that had decided to go ahead with a
multi-hundred million dollar project; a project for which I knew the demand was
no longer projected.
When I said I felt the smaller airports still needed some
representation in this program because I was sure that at some point down the
road, somehow these new rules would be used in a manner that would affect us
all, he laughed me off as someone who had no idea how government worked. Oh well, at least he was honest. AOPA is only concerned about spending (money)
and making sure spending doesn’t stop.
As I hung up the phone, I thought about all the government funded
airports I knew of that had wasted millions of dollars in upgrades or expansions
that were not needed; expansions often supported by the left hand of AOPA as
the group’s right hand pulled in millions by playing the “help us help you
fight user fees” game.
Now ask yourself,
why does the government want user fees? I’ll
tell you why; so there’s more money to spend; spending which, by Bill Dunn’s
words, AOPA supports. It kind of reminds
me of “the union vs. the company” song and dance. Something just isn’t right here.
Airshows: Oh the poor
airshows, victims of the sequester, right? No. If you’ve been keeping an eye
on aviation news over the past week, you’ve surely heard all the stories of
airshow cancellations due to the military pulling their support because of the
sequester. But, let me ask you this;
when someone says airshow, do you think of KC-135 fly-bys or do you think of a
Pitts trailing smoke or the growl of a P-47 as it seems to lumber by even
though it is going faster than the P-51 behind it? My guess is that most of you, and rightly so,
thought of the later. So how then did we
end up in the position of having to cancel airshows when the military pulled
out?
Sadly, it’s the same reason as the previous two examples. We have lost our way and we have decided to
ignore the cost of everything. We have
not been minding our own store. Somewhere
along that path our event coordinators and attendees (us) forgot, or better yet
chose to ignore, that when you suck from the government tit, you die by the
government tit.
For as long as I can remember, when an event touted profits
after a day of military fly-bys, I could only quietly chuckle in
disbelief. Once upon a time I even
expressed these concerns to the people who ran a very large and “successful”
event held nearby. When I said that an
airshow is not a display of modern military aircraft, I was told the show couldn’t
survive without them. That’s when I said
we were all paying for those planes (taxes) and I asked what happens when we
can’t pay for them anymore; when the government backs out?. Less than fifteen years ago I was laughed at
for that statement as if I were from another planet. Today the answer to that question is the canceling of airshows that were high on government spending.
So what do these three things have in common; pilot
contracts, airport reclassification, and airshows? "Every pilot is a conservative until their
contract expires" pretty much says it all.
When people are not true to their convictions, if members of society willingly remain economically ignorant so they can claim plausible deniability in their quests for short term gain, and
when groups raise money on the fear of new taxes while promoting uncontrolled government spending, something is horribly wrong with a society. In short, they are pieces of evidence in a crime of self destruction.
Despite what many claim, all of these issues could easily be resolved were people willing to face reality. Instead, our citizens are actually electing to live in
a fantasy world, willingly ignoring the most basic laws of nature, society, and
economics while picking and choosing to participate in only the thoughts and actions that make them
feel good. Then when things go
predictably wrong, everybody acts surprised and wounded.
Is that you? No? Are you sure?
Do you believe you are for the free market yet find yourself
able to make dozens of excuses for being a proud union member? Have you ever felt overcharged at an aviation
event but because it was helping your cause you never bothered to consider how
much tax dollars, your money and the money of others, it takes for our military
to operate “for free” at airshows? And
are you sick and tired of the out of control spending by our government but
when it comes to your airport, you’re both willing to accept and looking for
every dime of government funding you can get?
I know very few people who can deny all three. Yet, I’m inclined to believe most will try. Politicians, lobby groups that abuse our trust, and other persons or groups in positions of leadership are
not the roots of our problems; they are mere symptoms, reflections of the
citizen base. The next time any of us
feel the urge to point the finger of complaint, we would do well to ask ourselves how it is we
could demand anyone, in DC for example, to act in an honorable and principled fashion when we
ourselves cannot?
"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates