In the midst of the financial meltdown that has frozen credit lines, slowed movement of capital through the system, brought massive financial and insurance firms to their knees and prompted the largest infusion of government action since the New Deal, journalists are asking themselves, “How could we have been so blindsided?” For the coming national air traffic meltdown, we’ll say in advance: “We told you so.”
We are not alone. Newspapers, books, magazines, Web sites and blogs are filled with warnings. Governmental agencies, airlines, air traffic controllers, unions, pilots, software developers, computer programmers and airplane owners have been registering alarm for more than a decade.
What have we gotten from the organizations that are supposed to keep our systems running and keep our citizens safe? Nothing. Not even good lip service.
Our airline system has been allowed to deteriorate to the depths of a third-world country. Imagine a civilized and technologically advanced country allowing its air system to perform in the range of around 50 percent on-time departures and arrivals. Our entire airline infrastructure flirted with those levels for much of last year. The New York airspace is still operating at just about those levels today.
Our airline system now operates with the efficiency of the 1960s’ Italian train system. Schedules serve little purpose. Arriving on time, making connections and getting checked luggage are a form of air-travel roulette. Politicians have refused to deal with the impending problems and have been negligent in maintaining our system.
With the enormous portions of our economic system predicated on a well-functioning air transport network, the continued deterioration of the airspace infrastructure and the air traffic control personnel is a transportation time-bomb ready to explode.
Financial journalists were caught a day late and a dollar short when it came to clarifying the coming financial system lockup. Many of them were even more bewildered because this financial demise took place in full daylight.
According to Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post:
Marcus Brauchli, The Washington Post’s new executive editor, who was the Journal’s top editor until this past spring, says no policymaker who followed those papers, the New York Times, the Financial Times and CNBC, could have been unaware of the explosive growth of derivatives that embedded debt across the financial system.
Still, he says, “I regret that when I was at the Journal, we didn’t keep the focus on some of these questions, including the possible moral hazard posed by the structure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are really difficult issues to convey to a popular audience . . . You do have an obligation as a journalist to push important issues into the public consciousness.”
Let’s pay attention to our air transportation limitations and the failure of our government and its regulatory organizations to keep the airline and air traffic system running properly. We have an air traffic system that is jerry-rigged with stopgap solutions and computer patches that will eventually collapse.
Quite simply, our government is not doing its day-to-day duties to maintain the US air transportation system and build an infrastructure for the future.
