Re-Regulating the Airlines?

Constant flight delays and other frustrations require a solution.

The free high-resolution photo of people, train, travel, airplane, transportation, transport, vehicle, airline, public transport, aisle, boarding, seats, passenger, on board

, taken with an NIKON D5000 02/17 2017 The picture taken with 55.0mm, f/4.0s, 10/400s, ISO 1250

The image is released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0.

You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty free for anything you like, even in commercial applications. Attribution is not required.
CC0 Public Domain image via PxHere

William J. McGee, the senior fellow for aviation at something called the American Economic Liberties Project, takes to the op-ed pages of the NYT to argue “It’s Time to Finally Fix Air Travel.

On Wednesday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration was forced to reboot its system that alerts pilots to safety issues, grounding all air traffic in the United States. It was the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks that U.S. airspace has been entirely shut down.

My first instinct was to be impressed that someone I’ve never heard of managed to respond so quickly to something that just happened—processing the information of something that happened seemingly out of the blue on Wednesday and getting written, polished, and accepted by the nation’s most prestigious newspaper two days later. (It’s in today’s print edition but posted online last night.)

But, no, as with so many op-eds, this was the use of a news event as a hook to tout one’s pre-existing agenda:

Since the late 1970s, this country has not seen its industries as in need of governance, and so has allowed them to flounder and flail. We have neglected to adequately fund or respect our administrative agencies. The airline industry and air transportation system are ground zero for this disastrous governing philosophy, which has endured across multiple presidential administrations, under both Democrats and Republicans.

Much of the rest of the world — Europe, East Asia and the Middle East — uses more sophisticated, accurate and reliable satellite-based systems for tracking air traffic. Here, we are mired in a political fight between airlines and lawmakers over who will pay for the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, which is badly needed to modernize our air navigational system‌‌. So NextGen has been adopted in a partial and piecemeal fashion, with a patchwork of overlapping and conflicting flight tracking and safety systems.

It turns out that the American Economic Liberties Project, of which I had never before heard, is not, as I would have presumed from the name, a libertarian think tank but rather an advocacy group formed a little less than three years ago “to help translate the intellectual victories of the anti-monopoly movement into momentum towards concrete, wide-ranging policy changes that begin to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power.” The only person on their About page with whom I’ve familiar is Matt Stoller, a prominent liberal blogger and activist from the early days of the blogosphere (and it turns out that a blog post I wrote two years ago actually mentions him in context of the AELP, albeit in a quote from another source).

Still, McGee is an experienced aviation journalist and consumer advocate. That his agenda is well established doesn’t mean he’s not worth listening to. And, while I’m by no means an expert on aviation regulation, it’s hard to argue that our infrastructure generally isn’t poorly funded by the standards of other prosperous nations.

This is not just a problem with the F.A.A., but with the entire air transportation network, both the public infrastructure and the private airlines that rely on it. Just a few weeks ago, Southwest Airlines canceled nearly 17,000 flights during the busy holiday travel season as a result of an outdated personnel management system that decades of corporate management had punted on upgrading. This corresponds conservatively to more than two million stranded passengers.

By midsummer, airlines had canceled or delayed more than 100,000 passenger flights in 2022, for which, in many cases, they had sold tickets despite knowing they would be unable to staff them. This was a result of early retirement incentives offered by the airlines during Covid; despite a taxpayer bailout of $54 billion, the airlines sought to limit labor costs to favor investment compensation even though they were nearly insolvent.

The airlines have no spare capacity, and passenger loads are at record highs, which means that one failure will cascade across the system. Despite having the authority to investigate and fine airlines for unfair and deceptive practices, the Department of Transportation and its subsidiary the F.A.A. have deferred to the private sector for decades, and have done little to rearrange market incentives that lead to these problems.

The problem here is manifold and McGhee over-attributes it to deregulation. As with many other sectors, the Internet has changed the information dynamic, making it exceedingly easy for consumers to comparison shop. That, in turn, has led to a race to the bottom, because it’s simply indisputable that the vast majority of air travelers prioritize price over everything else when purchasing tickets.

Airlines have responded to this in ways that are somewhat useful to consumers, such as rewards programs, but mostly in ways that are bad for consumers: ever-more-cramped seating, ever-more-insidious hidden (in the sense that they don’t show up in price comparisons) fees, nonrefundable tickets at the economy price point, overbooked flights, etc.

Still, McGhee isn’t wrong: the airlines cut back to the bone during the pandemic, failed (at least in the case of Southwest) to invest in adequate management software, and get away with practices no other business could (like selling seats that don’t exist). It’s perfectly reasonable for government to regulate to protect consumers, who have next to no individual power in these situations.

Our existing political and regulatory system around the airlines likewise does not provide many pathways for addressing these problems. The airlines are not a consistently profitable industry, shown by their need to come hat-in-hand for a bailout at any sign of economic turbulence. Yet it is to the airlines and their executives we often defer for solutions.

The private sector is a core part of the dysfunction. Airlines for America, the industry’s main lobbying group, has consistently stated it supports NextGen in principle but has frequently lobbied against it, arguing it would require investments in upgrading equipment on aircraft. Airlines have been lobbying against the upgrades to F.A.A. satellite-based systems, often wanting to avoid making the capital investments in aircraft that comply with the new system.

I don’t know enough about NextGen to have an opinion but, given that the industry is only occasionally profitable, it’s really hard to blame management for being reluctant to shell out a lot of money for it.

Many on the right and in the industry will call for the privatization of the F.A.A. as a result of this outage. But that doesn’t get at the problems we’ve seen in the private sector that are similar, and in many cases, worse. In both the airline industry and the regulators overseeing it, we jump from crisis to crisis without solving any underlying problems. Last summer’s mass cancellations, the Southwest meltdown, numerous other airline I.T. outages, and now this F.A.A. outage show we need to rethink how we do air travel in the United States.

The airlines were initially regulated in the 1930s for many reasons, some of which should be familiar to us in 2023: The industry was unable to maintain stable profits, and Americans had grown frustrated with air travel. 

I’m a bit skeptical on this front, given that only the very rich could even dream of flying during that time period: “A coast-to-coast round trip cost around $260, about half of the price of a new automobile.” Still, the Civil Aeronautics Board did dole out routes and manage competition.

In 1978, the United States passed the Airline Deregulation Act, phasing out the Civil Aeronautics Board. The C.A.B., while hardly perfect, governed the airlines to ensure that a nationwide air network was maintained, ensured that airlines were earning reasonable profits and able to make necessary capital investments, and set cost-based fares and rules for fair competition.

Under the C.A.B., airline bankruptcies and mergers were rare, flight cancellations and disruptions were rare, airlines never needed nor requested federal bailouts, and the United States maintained a near-universal air transportation network that covered rural and lower-population regions with lower, cost-based airfares. (Nowadays, airfares in rural and smaller markets are the highest in the country.) With none of these things any longer true, and as we endure a never-ending chain of crises, it is clear that the deregulation experiment since 1978 needs to be rethought.

It’s quite possible that the pendulum swung too far. But recall that deregulation was a bipartisan project: Jimmy Carter was the primary mover but Republicans in Congress backed him and Ronald Reagan continued the momentum.

In the early years, at least, it was a booming success: new airlines emerged, more flights and routes were available, and fares dropped to the point where most of us could afford to fly. But that led to some of the problems noted before: a race to the bottom, much as had happened in the 1930s, that made profitability sporadic.

There are many possible paths to take as we begin this conversation. Public governance of our industries has not been an important area of thought for decades, but four law professors recently published an important legal textbook on the mechanics of public utility rules, including airline regulation.

One could envision a wholesale return to the pre-1978 era, with route-setting and price-setting brought back into public hands entirely. 

That, honestly, seems nuts. It makes sense to allow low-frills airlines and/or price tiering to exist so that flying is available to less affluent people. What needs fixing is transparency, predictability, and accountability.

My organization, the American Economic Liberties Project, has proposed more F.A.A. funding and  eliminating federal pre-emption, which would allow consumers and state officials to sue airlines over consumer and safety rules. My colleagues and I are, however, eager to take part in a national conversation about regulating the industry more comprehensively.

We haven’t had a national discussion for 44 years about the state of air travel. It’s time to have that discussion, rather than playing whack-a-mole with each crisis as it arises. As it stands, we are enduring crisis after crisis in this industry as if it were an act of God that a national transportation system should fail on a regular basis rather than the result of expected and predictable contingencies.

McGee is essentially advocating for turning airlines into a quasi-public utility. And maybe that is the way to go. It makes little sense to treat parts of the system, such as airline building and upkeep, as public infrastructure and the rest of it as a for-profit business but one that’s Too Big To Fail.

If, however, the goal is to ensure profitability to keep something of a steady state, it seems odd to make airlines subject to endless lawsuits.

Re-opening the conversation, though, seems reasonable enough. Alas, we’re in a particularly low period of reasonable dialogue in American politics at the moment.

FILED UNDER: Bureaucracy, Economics and Business, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Rick DeMent says:

    You can have deregulated and messy, or regulated and more expensive or subsidized. Any industry that depends on infrastructure like airports can never really be completely “laissez-faire”. Another issue that plagues airlines and other industries is if you want to have “timed to the minute” schedules or rely on “just in time inventory” schemes, the reality is any little glitch is going to throw your business into chaos. When everything is up, running, and there are no issues out of the ordinary, things work great. But small issues all too easily balloon up into big problems.

    But James is right, when you have a caucus in congress that measures success in the raw number of “job-killing regulations” that are eliminated you can’t have a serious conversation about fixing problems. Comparisons to the 1930s (or even the 70s) aren’t really helpful since there have been boatloads of innovations that have brought down the costs. Yes, deregulation made sense (and still does oftentimes) but you have to update things and in this political climate, everything is a “to the mattresses” war that is beyond simply difficult.

    There have to be rules and guardrails in some industries. Some of this will affect prices. After one trip on Sprit airline I would move heaven and earth to avoid them, the trouble is that sometimes that was the only choice for some trips or legs. In those cases, the free market was of no use to me. You can’t run an airline like a streaming service.

    The problem is there are those who feel that the “Free Market” can never be failed, it can only be failed. Some pundits were blaming the administration last December but what exactly do these critics feel should have been done? Federalize the airlines? The very business models of some airlines will guarantee that any small glitch in the system will have a cascading effect on every other scheduled flight. Only more pilots, crew, and aircraft on standby will mitigate that problem and that costs money.

    And transportation isn’t the only industry like this.

    6
  2. Jen says:

    …the vast majority of air travelers prioritize price over everything else when purchasing tickets.

    And then bitch mightily at its effects: smaller seats, less leg room, having to pay for seat selection, ignoring notifications that *without* a paid-for seat selection by choosing the cheapest seats you will be slotted into the middle seats–yes, even families with children.

    There are SO many components to airline pricing, but I continue to note that it is one place where costs have gone down. In the mid-80s, I flew from the US to Germany–ORD to FRA–on a ticket that cost ~$1200 round trip, *in coach*. I just checked and the same round trip flight would cost $774 in today’s dollars.

    I don’t know if re-regulating the airlines is needed or not. But I do wish that people understood that the “race to the bottom” in pricing you refer to has–pardon the pun–a price. Cheaper flights mean more people flying, which means much harder-to-solve problems when things go wrong as they inevitably will when there’s weather or technical delays.

    Next, what would re-regulation have meant for covid? Part of today’s problems stem from the early retirements and layoffs that happened when flight demand cratered–from pilots to baggage handlers, people found other jobs or took retirement packages. With stiffer security standards to meet when hiring, it’s not that fast and easy to replace airport workers, and pilots and flight attendants need years of training.

    2
  3. OzarkHillbilly says:

    No no… The free market and lower taxes will fix it.

    6
  4. Beth says:

    @Rick DeMent:

    You can always also have deregulated, messy, expensive and subsidized. Which is what we have in things like Air travel and healthcare.

    If there is a dumber way to do things Americans will find it.

    6
  5. MarkedMan says:

    It certainly makes sense to look at new or additional regulations as well as more stringent enforcement to the ones we have now. But claiming that deregulation has been a net negative for the consumer is just ridiculous. It took five years of scrimping for my mother to be able to save enough money for a plane ticket from Chicago to Ireland in 1955. In 1972 she took four children with her and the air fare was nearly 500 hundred dollars a ticket and that was a special chartered flight that a local travel agency put together as a cost saver. $3500 a ticket in todays dollars, $17,500 total. I just checked Aer Lingus’ site and I can get a round trip ticket for June, prime season, for $420! And if you want all that leg room and free meal and drink service, first class (now called business class) is $2100, less than two thirds the cost of a 1972 coach class berth.

    More people can afford to fly than ever before, and they do so on safer airplanes that are quieter and more fuel efficient. Flights are available to many more cities, and the vast majority are reachable by jet. (For those of us who flew in prop plane “puddle jumpers” through storms, the ability of jets to get above bad weather is no small thing.)

    3
  6. Cheryl Rofer says:

    Re-regulate the airlines – emphatically yes!

    They are an essential part of people’s movement about the country. The airlines have shown that they are not up to the task. Nor “the market.” This is a market failure of the most obvious magnitude – we can start with the preference for lower fares, which gives unsatisfactory results to all parties involved, but there’s also the question of public (and therefore regulated) terminals to service privately-owned airlines and the mismatch of funding.

    I think this latest glitch results as much from Republican refusal to fund essential government services (the FAA) as from the airlines’ not paying their fair share. But yes, as long as one party is determined to sink the government (pay attention the next few weeks until summer), we can’t talk about how to fix it.

    I should say I’ve flown under both regimes, and my family was far from wealthy when they managed to pay for me to fly to college rather than take the bus. The best was probably the early days of deregulation and frequent flyer plans, when my job provided lots of travel.

    2
  7. Jay L Gischer says:

    I think regulation in the sense of minimum standards makes sense. The FAA already does this in many areas that concern safety. Most airlines only do the minimum. Because the price competition is pretty fierce.

    Now, I don’t really know how you would regulate “get better computer systems”. As it turns out, the outage Wednesday was from the FAA’s systems – the NOTAMS system. But SWA’s outage was really about their own computer system. In either case, these issues can be mitigated by spending more money.

    3
  8. Mimai says:

    MAGA eh?

  9. Chip Daniels says:

    Its the pernicious legacy of the Cold War where every discussion about our economy tends to revolve around talking points from Communism/ Capitalism ideologies.

    Like, people talk in entirely abstract terms, as if an airline, a hospital, and the corner nail salon are all in the same basket of “private enterprise” and therefore conform to the same sets of behaviors.

    The “messiness” that people here are talking about is actually a negligible problem when it comes to nail salons- if half of them went out of business, people would scarcely notice and the market would quickly recover.

    I’m not completely sold on the idea of re-regulating airlines (mostly because I have no idea what that would even look like) but we should at least regard major industries like banking, airlines, and health care as something other than marketplace actors because they really don’t behave that way.

    1
  10. steve says:

    How do the no-frills airlines manage to cost less? By not joining NextGen, meaning they are probably a bit less safe and/or they are more likely to have scheduling issues. They are also probably overbooking a bit more. The result is a higher frequency of stranded flyers. The free market response is, I guess, that people will stop using those airlines. That is probably true of people who fly frequently or people who had a bad experience, but for people who only fly occasionally and/or dont follow these kinds fo news stories, they wont be aware so there airlines will continue to strand people. They probably do eventually go out of business, after causing a lot of problems and lot of people being hurt financially.

    This is one of the problems with market based solutions. They might work eventually, but a lot of people suffer harm during that eventual period. On the regulations side the concern is that you pass regulations that address too many issues, or the wrong ones, so you dont really solve the problem or you do so at higher cost than needed. I think that I would prefer first making the penalties to the airlines harsher and have the penalties go to those who were harmed. Right now the airlines largely decide how to make up for their scheduling issues. They offer to pay for hotels, another flight or whatever. In the moment, the consumer kind of has to accept. Instead lets make it really, really easy to sue and damages should also include significant pain and suffering damages. At some price point the airlines will decide it is worth it to schedule in a way that benefits consumers also.

    Steve

    4
  11. Dave Schuler says:

    Let’s not leave local governments out of the discussion. I don’t know how the airlines operate everywhere but here in Chicago, both at O’Hare and Midway, the airport is owned by the city and the city leases gates to airlines. There’s no actual competition. How anyone thinks they can have a market system without actual competition eludes me.

  12. Cheryl Rofer says:

    @Dave Schuler: Ah yes, multiple terminals at multiple airports will certainly clear up the problem.

    I’m finding I have to add this more often, so I will: /sarcasm

    3
  13. Kathy says:

    Perhaps a good beginning would be to reduce the number of flights and increase the number of passengers carried.

    Mutually exclusive? Not at all. Use bigger airplanes.

    A big part of all aviation problems, not just in America, is one thing that a lot of people value as much as price: convenience. Being able to fly not only at the price you want, but at the time you want.

    So there are, as an example, three dozen daily flights between NYC and LA, using mostly smaller planes like the 737 and A320. If these flights had to be on bigger aircraft, say a 787 or A330 at a minimum, you’d have only a dozen flights a day. That means you need fewer pilots and flight attendants, but you also create less traffic and require fewer slots.

    That’s not the whole solution, but a really big issue is the large number of flights offered all over. While it looks like a way to eliminate jobs, keep in mind there’s a chronic pilot shortage.

    I don’t know how’d you go about regulating this.

    Another thing is to force airlines to be accountable for cancellations. For starters, if a flight is cancelled for whatever reason, even something out of an airline’s control like weather or air traffic control issues, refunds should be mandatory to all passengers who request one.

    If a cancellation is attributable to the airline, like the recent Southwest mess or scheduling flights past the airline’s capacity, then the refund should be of at least 150% of the fare and fees paid. That’s in addition to covering additional expenses like food and lodging while waiting for a different flight, or arranging alternate transportation.

    2
  14. James Joyner says:

    @Kathy:

    if a flight is cancelled for whatever reason, even something out of an airline’s control like weather or air traffic control issues, refunds should be mandatory to all passengers who request one.

    I can’t think of a single other industry held to that standard. Wednesday’s FAA-induced calamity would have bankrupted half our carriers.

    2
  15. wr says:

    It’s not so much that airlines have to be totally regulated, but that they need to be broken up. Wall Street has initiated and cheerlead an endless series of mergers and buyouts, leaving us with a tiny handful of massive airlines. That means the current ones basically have no competition, and can be as awful as they want, and there’s essentially no way for a new company to squeeze into the market.

    For years, administration after administration has played the game that the only possible negative effect of giant mergers is prices going up — it that’s not a sure thing, then let the companies buy each other out. But actual competition — which I thought was supposed to be a ke component of capitalism — affects more than pricing…

    2
  16. Kurtz says:

    @James Joyner:

    Characterizing it generically as an FAA failure is too simple. The first question (also generic) is how often cutting budgets for regulatory agencies leads to these sorts of failures.

    But in this specific case, it appears the “FAA failure” appears to have been caused by private contractors violating procedures when working on live systems. From Fortune:

    The computer failure that prompted a halt of all US flight departures was caused when a data file was damaged as a result of a failure to follow government procedures, the Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday.

    Unspecified “personnel” were responsible for corrupting the file, which led to the outage of an FAA computer system that sends safety notices to pilots, the agency said in a statement. That triggered the FAA to order a halt to all US departing flights, causing thousands of delays and cancellations Wednesday.

    “The system is functioning properly and cancellations today were below 1%,” the agency said.

    The preliminary indications are that two people working for a contractor introduced errors into the core data used on the system known as Notice to Air Missions, or Notam, according to a person familiar with the FAA review. The person asked not to be identified speaking about the sensitive, ongoing issue.

    Notams are advisories to pilots on safety-critical conditions at airports and other areas aircraft might traverse, including everything from warnings about bird activity to runway construction.

    Like other computer systems that are critical to operating flights, the FAA has imposed procedures to ensure data aren’t damaged by technicians working on them, said the person. The file or files were altered in spite of rules that prohibit those kind of changes on a live system.

    There may be good reasons for using contractors rather than direct employees for core agency functions. E.g easier to fire/discipline, cost concerns. But I suspect the driving force for it lies in politics.

    Regardless, it stretches credulity to think that undedfunded agencies aren’t a cause.

    As always, feel free to educate me.

    1
  17. James R Ehrler says:

    @Kathy: The U.S. needs to adopt something like tha airline passenger right’s regulations of the EU.

    A discussion of this is here http://www.schengenvisainfo.com/travel-guide/flight-delay-compensation/

    I am a former HQ airline employee at several airlines post deregulation and part of the problem is that airlines in today’s regulatory environment put the externalities of their poor choices onto the passengers’ shoulders.

    Look at SW. They refused to invest in modern crew scheduling software. Who paid? The passengers on cancelled flights. If, like in the EU, SW would have to get the passenger to their destination, pay for lodging and meals and pay a fine to the passenger based on how late they were, the cost/benefit of doing crew scheduling updates vs stock buy backs would be vastly different.

    I’ve experienced the EU regs when an
    SAS flight had a mechanical and we
    missed a connection. They put us up in Oslo for a night, gave us dinner and breakfast and gave EACH of us (me, my wife and our son) a check for $800 in compensation when I filed for it after getting home.

    It is complicated in some ways because of delays due to weather and other causes outside of their control (F.A.A. issues) but there are ways to deal with that so the airlines aren’t on the hook for such events but are held responsible for issues that are under their control and the EU has led the way.

    4
  18. James R Ehrler says:

    Link didn’t work and no edit to fix formatting. Here is another try at the link. https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/travel-guide/flight-delay-compensation/

    Edit showed up so was able to fix!

  19. Michael Reynolds says:

    In 1974 – long before de-regulation – I flew myself and a cashier named Connie to Europe on what I saved from my $1.60 an hour job at Toys R Us. Charter flights were a thing, and fairly cheap.

    2
  20. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Chip Daniels:

    I’m not completely sold on the idea of re-regulating airlines (mostly because I have no idea what that would even look like)

    Indeed, this is the rub. And I would note that, at least on the surface level, “… translat[ing] the intellectual victories of the anti-monopoly movement into momentum towards concrete, wide-ranging policy changes that begin to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power” sounds like a worthwhile goal to move toward, but I’m less sanguine about the anti-monopoly movement leading the charge–though they certainly need a place at the table.

    But getting back to the rub, the problem for our government and it’s role in these sorts of questions is that we’ve been notoriously bad at controlling the swing of the pendulum on all levels–societal, capital, and governmental. In the current climate, we’re not going to become better at it, either.

  21. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Michael Reynolds: I’m not sure what your point is, other than that $1.60/hr. had a lot more purchasing power in 1974 than even $18/hr. has in a world where rent is $2000/mo. and mortgage payments are even more.

  22. gVOR08 says:

    Seems to me this should be a larger discussion about appropriate regulation, public infrastructure, and the failures of neo-liberalism/late stage capitalism. And what @wr: said. The people who wrote the anti-trust laws understood it wasn’t about prices tomorrow but about power for decades.

    1
  23. Modulo Myself says:

    The logic of being a consumer is more at fault. Overall flying is way way safer. People are complaining about serious inconveniences and the crazy nickel-and-diming that airlines are doing and the utter multi-tiered crappiness of everything. Being a consumer and having consumers is the race to the bottom. It’s no different than a country of taxpayers.

  24. Michael Reynolds says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:
    Curious as to what value you place on 24/7/365 access to all of human knowledge, plus every book ever written, every movie, every TV show, every song ever created. Mostly for free! In your pocket.

    Direct comparisons of ‘what we had’ vs. ‘what the kids have’ tend to overlook certain things. Like overnight delivery of almost literally anything produced anywhere on planet earth. Like GPS, airbags, roll-over protection, blind spot warning in cars, even the cheapest of which is a huge improvement over 1970’s cars. Or treatments and cures for various diseases. MRIs. Robot-assisted surgery. Dental implants.

    It’s a long list.

    Yep, housing is much more expensive, but the quality of housing is better than what I had. Cars, medicine, communication, what’s the cash value of just the internet? Had you asked me in 1974 I’d have paid, let’s say a quarter of what I earned.

    I have great sympathy for GEN-Z’s economic distress, but then again, this is a generation that will never be lost, never be cut off from family, never have to wait til the bank opens on Monday to get ten bucks, is far more likely to survive cancer, is far safer at work and play, and no longer dies of a whole host of illnesses including AIDS that terrorized the world at one time.

    Just saying, it’s not as simple as, ‘we had it easy, kids have it tough.’

    3
  25. Gustopher says:

    @Kurtz:

    But in this specific case, it appears the “FAA failure” appears to have been caused by private contractors violating procedures when working on live systems.

    This type of stuff can happen in any organization, public or private, and whether the people working on the problem “own” the system or not.

    Remember when Google marked the entire internet as dangerous because of a messed up config change?

    Mistakes happen. This was relatively short, and was fixed. If they do a COE (a Cause of Error report, for those not in the know — it tries to identify the systemic problems) and move to plug the gaps that made it, then I don’t see this outage as anything other than a really embarrassing and costly one-off error.

    That’s the type of thing that will periodically happen. Just as planes will periodically crash. If it’s rare, and you figure out the causes and fold the learnings into the processes, it’s all good.

    1
  26. Gustopher says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    Yep, housing is much more expensive, but the quality of housing is better than what I had.

    If you can’t afford that better quality housing, the cardboard box in an alley or living in a car is a big step down. (As is living with a lot of roommates, when a generation ago you wouldn’t have to).

    (What is better housing anyway? No lead paint? Nicer countertops? Less likely to burn to the ground trapping everyone inside?)

    Housing is your weakest example.

    But, looking at what people who cannot afford the better but more expensive have to live with is an important part of the equation.

    We might be better off with X more people dying in house fires if it means 2X more people aren’t living on the streets.

    Better cancer care for those who can afford it is great, if the cost of treatments and unchecked corporate greed isn’t pushing up healthcare costs to the point where people are being left behind to die because they cannot afford health insurance and jobs are making everyone independent contractors or keeping them part time to avoid having to offer health insurance.

    Again, we might want to look at whether better outcomes with cancer is better for society than more people getting treatment for smaller things.

    I think the youngsters are growing up into a much more broken society, where there’s less of an interest in the community and more in the well-off individual. A fancy phone doesn’t fix that.

    (As a pretty well-off individual, it’s pretty ok though)

    2
  27. Kurtz says:

    @Gustopher:

    My point was much more narrow than that.

  28. Kathy says:

    @James R Ehrler:

    I’d like to see something like the EU regulations adopted worldwide. I’m afraid, though, the very last place it would be adopted is the US.

  29. Gustopher says:

    @Gustopher: Walking back from the coffee shop, thoughts have percolated a bit.

    Society protects its in-groups.

    America started out with white male property-owners as the in-group, and expanded that to nearly all white men and their respectable wives in the post WW2 era, largely through the expansion of unions. Unions made working men respectable and gave them the power to be part of the protected in-group.

    Too many people in that in-group would rather let their own status be eroded than include brown people, people who worship different gods, people who fuck differently or single women.

    That erosion of status for even white men and their respectable wives is a large part of the problems that younger generations face.

    They can’t get a good paying job on basis of being in the in-group with their fancy pale skin tone — jobs pay n-clang wages. They can’t get a college degree without a crippling debt because public schools were defunded when n-clang started applying.

    I mean, technically that’s a step towards equality, but I’m pretty sure that when Martin Luther King spoke about a dream with black kids and white kids being treated the same, he hoped the black kids would be treated as well as the white kids were being treated.

    To get back to MR’s point — sure, smart phones are cool, but they don’t make up for losing a society where just the average schmuck made a living wage. Most people are just average schmucks.

    ETA: (Especially Millennials and Gen-Z who are especially average and schmucky. 😉 )

    (Never waste a working edit link.)

    2
  30. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Michael Reynolds: So you were just bragging about Connie going to Europe with you? Fair enough.

  31. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker: @Michael Reynolds: But for a more serious answer to your question, I’ve never been particularly awestruck by technology. Then again, I mostly use my phone only for talking and texting and only converted to cellular telephony because my ex-wife tied up our dial up phone line during the hour that schools called me for substitute teaching work (and subsequently stopped using land line phones because I couldn’t afford to pay for double phone service). And I didn’t intend for my comment to be a “what we had/what they have” comment other than to note that minimum wage jobs paid for a lot more stuff than they do now.

    But more to the point, why did you find it necessary to move the goal posts and attack my values because I’m an ignint cracker and didn’t get what your point was? (And still don’t, by the way.) So, I’ll ask again, what was the point of your original comment? Were you contesting the idea that air travel was mostly the province of your modern-day self rather than your 1974 self? If so, how does the fact that you were able to afford such a trip contest the idea offered by others on the thread? (For example, is it possible that you were able to afford that trip because you deferred another purchase?) Were you attempting to make the case that international travel was no big deal, anyone could do it? Were you staking out status as an outlier in an attempt to sway people to believe that anyone could travel internationally if they’d just stop wasting their money (as conservatives are wont to do)?

    ETA: (Because one should never waste a chance to edit) Gustopher did a very eloquent job of analyzing your current “argument.” You should consider what he said; he’s very wise.

  32. Michael Reynolds says:

    @Gustopher:

    I think the youngsters are growing up into a much more broken society, where there’s less of an interest in the community and more in the well-off individual. A fancy phone doesn’t fix that.

    Dude: Vietnam. Kent State. Mutual Assured Destruction. Watergate. Even looking gay would get you beaten. Hell, bell bottom jeans would get you beaten. The murder rate was literally double today’s. A quarter ounce of weed got you years in the joint. I don’t know what utopia you think we were enjoying in the 70’s but no one today is going to be shipped off to a jungle to die.

    Yes, housing is very expensive. Yes, wages have been flat. Yes, health care is expensive. But the generational pity party gets to be a bit much. Ask a 19 year-old today if they’d trade circumstances with 19 year-old me. I doubt you’d find many takers.

    2
  33. DrDaveT says:

    @James Joyner:

    I can’t think of a single other industry held to that standard.

    If I sign up for a cruise, and the cruise line cancels the trip, I most certainly get a full refund. And probably an offer of bonus funds if I leave my money with them and use it on a future cruise with them.

    2
  34. Lounsbury says:

    @Michael Reynolds: Broken society = he does not like some visible aspects (as is the case of every older generation looking at current social change) and lens it through his Left-Left socio-economic lens, rather than the MAGA lens.

    Simplistic generational analysis is puzzlingly deeply rooted in USA consciousness, but really it poorly rooted in econometric fact (notably properly cohort-to-cohort benchmarking including socioeconomic balance within cohort), and generally when such people right about Youth, either 70s protest, or now, it rather seems they are actually collapsing an entire age cohort into “highly verbal and visible Uni-attending cohort” of that age cohort for almost all features. It’s incoherent on economic and social terms.

  35. Andy says:

    Lots of weird, binary discussion here.

    The notion that the airline industry used to be “regulated” then was “deregulated,” and the question of whether it should be “re-regulated” is a useless oversimplification.

    Parts of the airline industry were deregulated, but other parts were not. Regulation increased after 9/11, and security was taken over by the federal government. The industry is still – and always has been – highly regulated. The appropriateness and effectiveness of that regulation is an open question.

    But it seems silly to me to suggest a return to the 1970’s when the airline market was effectively centrally planned. It’s unclear to me how that would serve the public interest, nor how it would magically make the NOTAMs system work reliably or help implement NextGen.

    And the binary about funding is also annoying. Was the FAA actually defunded? Have Democrats actually tried to increase funding for the FAA but were stymied by the GoP? Would more funding actually solve the problems?

    There’s a strong case to be made that many of the FAA’s problems are organizational, structural, and the product of regulatory capture – things money won’t magically fix.

    Instead of just assuming more money will fix everything, what needs to be done is to look at the FAA’s core functions and responsibilities, evaluate how it performs those functions, consider whether any functions should be added or deleted, and then fund the agency appropriately.

    A relevant fact is that the FAA doesn’t control everything, particularly airports. Cheryl scoffed at the notion, but the fact that Airports are generally owned and operated by state and local governments is a salient point because airports have capacity limits, airspace limits, runway limits, etc. that impact the whole system. The FAA can’t dictate where to build airports, which ones to make bigger or eliminate, etc. Hence why a problem at a single airport – whatever the cause – can cascade and fuck-up the system across the entire country.

    Again, it’s not clear to me that throwing money at the FAA will fix this unless the federal government wants to seize control of all US airports and centrally manage them, which seems like a fantasy.

    My sense is that, like it usually does, Congress has neglected the FAA, failed to provide proper oversight, and it will continue to do that until there is a crisis they can’t ignore anymore. And maybe not even then. Despite the well-known failures of the FDA and CDC on basic stuff during the pandemic, there’s basically no Congressional pressure to get them to reform. And let’s not even talk about the DoD, which just failed another audit. Clearly, what’s needed to fix the DoD is to give it more money.

  36. dazedandconfused says:

    @Dave Schuler:

    Airlines building their own airports isn’t workable. Massive chunks of land near cities are required, no airline can afford the attendant costs.

    The article makes a highly misleading assertion that the regulation that came about in the 30s was due to public dissatisfaction. True, but without the context of what the public was mainly dissatisfied with it qualifies as BS.

    The airlines were regulated due to the same reasons the railroads were, laissez-faire expansion left a trail of horrible and easily preventable accidents and the industry itself was crying for some form of regulation. Any clown who could muster up the dough to get a locomotive and some rolling stock and pay the builder of the rails for use could roll and did. The carnage was impossible to ignore.

  37. Gustopher says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    Dude: Vietnam. Kent State. Mutual Assured Destruction. Watergate.

    Vietnam: no comparison. Getting rid of the draft made things a lot better for those who have better prospects than the military.

    Kent State: government actors killing people on camera with impunity? Check. We get more of it on camera now.

    Mutually Assured Destruction: still there. Add to it a very visibly coming climate catastrophe, since we mostly ignore MAD to get the full sense of impending doom.

    Watergate: dude, we just came out of the Trump Presidency where he got off Scott free. Watergate would be a fucking dream come true. Consequences for presidential misdeeds? Oh, baby, tell me more!

    Crime is down, but different. Mass shootings and school shootings are way up.

    Things are better for queer folk, but they’re a tiny minority. As part of that minority, I’m glad that’s better.

    But the main thing is that the social contract is failing. The society’s ability or willingness to have a middle class is failing. The requirements to get into the middle class are much higher, and the rings on the ladder of social mobility are being broken.

    And we respond by redefining the middle class downwards, so people don’t realize that they are the working poor.

    Middle class is: Housing, healthcare, transportation, retirement, set the kids up for success (education, childcare), and the ability to weather an emergency or go on a modest vacation. And a little left over. Medium stable.

    Except, that’s out of reach for the vast majority of the “middle class” now, and the paths from working poor to that are basically shut down.

    But, yeah, the ability to watch cat videos, porn and q anon propaganda on your handheld device is awesome.

    1
  38. Gustopher says:

    @Lounsbury:

    It’s incoherent

    No, you’re incoherent!

  39. Hal_10000 says:

    I’m not sure how someone sees a failure of the FAA’s system and decides that’s a problem of the free market. We’ve known the FAA’s system are badly out of date for some time. That’s a refusal to fund the agency, not anything to do with regulations. As for Southwest, I think the market will punish them just fine as people shift to other airlines.

    One thing that goes unmentioned in his piece and by a lot of commenters here: safety. The US airlines have, over the period of deregulation, an unparalleled record of safety. We haven’t had a major crash in over a decade (knock on wood). The only really bad year we’ve had this century was 2001, which … uh … wasn’t a result of deregulation. I think that’s a big point against a desperate need to re-regulate.

    1