Quote:
Originally Posted by beachmouse
(Post 25410235)
I do think the other day's BA accident at Las Vegas shows how silly to dangerous the proposal to get rid of ATC is. While the pilot has to spend 100% of his efforts on Aviate with the engine fire situation, ATC has his back at a very busy airport, handling the crucial Communicate in the situation, calling out emergency services, closing runways, and quickly telling two planes that had been cleared to land that they needed to go round NOW. Take away someone else having Communicate in this kind of scenario, and you can easily end up with Tenerife 2: Las Vegas Electric Boogaloo. It's darn dangerous to have a large jet stopped in the middle of a runway of a busy airport, and you need a strong system in place to create time and space around the stopped plane ASAP.
|
I know he's done this in the past, but has he made this argument again recently? I'm now blissfully out of the loop, having avoided GTL and Ben for a couple of months now.
GTL's failure to understand the complexity of life outside loyalty programs and credit cards is pretty appalling to me. His stand on ATC illustrates that for me.
I don't know that many pilots, especially commercial pilots, would back his stand. Although I'm not a pilot, I was the passenger on a small Cessna many years ago on a flight from New Orleans to Lafayette, and because the plane was small and the engine was loud, all of us wore headphones with mics in order to communicate in the cabin--literally, you could not talk to the person next to you, you'd only see their lips move even if they shouted.
A side benefit of that experience, however, was listening to the air traffic control handoffs during this relatively short flight. You're always in somebody's airspace and they want to know who you are and what path you're going. We were a small plane on a short trip, but when you multiply out the world's airspace and the number of planes in it, I think the complexity of the problem reveals itself.
And I'm reminded today of a little bit of knowledge I gained on that terrible morning when the planes hit in NYC, DC, and Pennsylvania: there were 5000 planes in the air that had to be brought down immediately. I'd never stopped and thought about how many planes were flying at any one time before then. It seems GTL still hasn't.
GTL is clearly not a dumb guy, but as I've said before, there's one less really smart guy when he's in a room than he thinks there is. Some of that is just due to his philosophical bias: if you just let individuals do what they want to do, everything would be better. That bias ignores the complexity of life, from air traffic control to the need for some sort of government regulation of business to protect consumers (I'll concede that the "sort" is fairly open to debate) to the interplay between the generosity of an airline's FFP to the overall operation of the airline.
As I've also said before, I'm happy when he sticks to pushing credit cards because I surely would not wish to live in the world constructed on his philosophical beliefs.
