Ones and Zeros

It is sitting quietly beside me in its padded box right now.  Turns out the instrument was defective.  There was no installation error in the plane.  As aviation mechanics don’t work on weekends, Monday is the soonest chance for re-installation.  Then, I’ll do a check flight where I get to be a test pilot and verify it works when reinstalled in the working airplane.

I don’t feel much in common with Scott Crossfield or Chuck Yeager though.  This will be a perfectly normal VFR (visual) flight.  I’ll just also be checking that the directional gyro:

1. spins up correctly
2. turns when it is supposed to
3. turns the correct amount
4. doesn’t turn when it isn’t supposed to
5. and both its heading and the heading bug can be adjusted correctly.

I’ll check it against the magnetic compass.  After all, the directional gyro was once called a gyroscopic compass.

Then, I get to fly with my instructor a time or two, and reschedule my checkride.

In 1990, Mike Godwin, the first staff counsel to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) observed that as any form of online debate continues the probability of one party comparing another to Hitler or the Nazis becomes certain.  This is now known as Godwin’s Law.

The generally accepted corollary is that the side of the debate that brings the Nazis into the discussion loses and that the debate stops.

The health care debate is reached Godwin’s Law conclusion some time ago now.  It’s high time to move on to actual substantive discussion and legislation.  If the free market were able to curtail insurance company abuses, then it would have happened sometime in the last three or four decades that people have been pointing out our health care crisis.  This recognition of reality has to be a starting point for discussion.

There’s Fed Chair Ben Bernacke saying we’re past the recession.  Meanwhile Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says that we’ve got a long way to go.  They’re both right.

It all depends on what the meaning of the word “recession” is.
As usual Paul Krugman puts it clearly.  The recession is over but there’s a shortfall of unused people and unused economic resources (shut down factories and unused equipment).  It will take some time to get those people and equipment back into use.

Recession is basically defined as declining GDP.  Yet most of use don’t mean that when we use the term.  We mean that we know of too many people who lost their jobs, that we’re worried about our job, and that we see stores and businesses closing.

The economy has to keep expanding to keep us all growing economically.  Some 50,000 jobs need to be created each month nationwide to maintain a normal job growth rate.  Right now we’ve lost around 8% of GDP since late 2007/early 2008 when Bush was telling us we’re fine economically.  We seem to be basically flat right now - neither growing nor shrinking much.  We’re not technically in a recession.  But we’ve got a lot of people, equipment, buildings, and factories either completely idle or underused. In the case of people, they’re either unemployed or we’ve got top chefs, accountants, and engineers making burgers.

It will take some time to grow our way back to “normal”.  So the recession is over, but that doesn’t mean much for us day-to-day.  There’s nothing wrong with the honest work of flipping burgers for those accountants and others above, but it would be better for the economy if highly trained people were working where they could use their training.

This isn’t just a US problem.  The world shipping fleet is 12% unused. That rate used to be a around 0.1%.  Consumer demand has dropped off a cliff and goods don’t need to be shipped from producers to consumers.  Since jobs in one place  are connected by shipping to purchases in other places then we’re all in this boat together.

That’s what USA Today says.  They could have written an article about the government keeping little-used roads and highways in business, or little-used bridges, marinas, or waterways.  We have long accepted that part of the government’s job is ensure a good transportation system.  Airports are a part of that, even those airports that don’t get commercial airline jets.  Just as little used highways and roads  - that are also supported with federal grants - are also a necessary part of our transportation system.

The article quotes people involved in commerial airline travel (Mesa Air, Air Transport Association) and those complaining of small airplane traffic over their houses.  (Houses that were built long after the airport was a going concern.) These quotes are neither unbiased nor fair.  They could have gotten quotes and information from several general aviation sources and failed to do so.

So here’s some actual facts I’ve gleaned from the reports on the FAA website:  There are about 14,000 airports in the US.  Around 1000 of them have at least some small level of passenger service, 390 of them are primary airports, and only 139 of them are the major airports.  These facts alone help us understand the delay problem.  Better location-finding technology (aka NextGen) won’t counter the fact that a single runway can only handle 60 or so airplanes/hour at best and that even large airports don’t have more than a few runways.  With the airlines hub-and-spoke systems there’s a very large demand on a very small number of airports.  Add in that all the airlines want to schedule flights at the same time and you have a recipe for delays.  Funding for small airports doesn’t factor in here at all.

The article says that, “around 2000 airports get grant money from the FAA”.  But the article doesn’t mention that the lion’s share of that funding goes to the 390 primary airports.  In 2009 funding those 390 get 849.4 million or 53% of the total funding.  Another 7.5% of 2009 funding goes for cargo facilities at the leading 116 cargo airports.  Most of those cargo airports are also one of the 390 primary airports.

So about 60% of the funding that the USA Today says is for smaller airports actually goes to large airports used almost exclusively by commercial airlines and large cargo operations.  Not counting the cargo operations, the 390 airports get an average of 2.1 million in 2009 for improvements.  Most of that goes to the larger airports in that list.

Of the remaining 2009 funding, 268 million goes to states to allocate to their airports as they see fit as block grants.  But 408 million or 25% of the total funding are grants directly from the FAA to airports.  These go to 2032 different smaller airports and average $201,034 per airport.  This isn’t quite the boondoggle portrayed in the article.

USA Today also talks about how few planes land each hour and make it seem like all smaller airports are underused.  They’ve been selective in their examples and omitted all those smaller airports that are well used.  They talk about a few little-used airports in the Washington DC area and omit Gaithersburg, Fredrick, Leesburg, Manassas, Winchester, Bay Bridge, and the others that are well used.

It’s true that many small airports stay open with help from local taxpayers.  Local taxpayers also help support their roads by paying for maintenance, plowing, and repaving.  Local tax breaks are necessary since airplanes are pretty mobile after all.  Airports that have taxes found that their based aircraft just moved to a place with lower taxes.

Airports are often now found in residential areas. Those airports were founded when that area was quiet farmland well outside any residential or city area.  If you buy a house next to an airport, don’t be surprised when there’s airplanes.

Airports, the article says, are often only 20 miles apart.  This is true in some parts of the east, and more true in parts of the northeast and mid-atlantic areas.  This is rarely true in the west.  Most small airports were built because the local town wanted to have one for business or safety reasons.  I.e. there was a a reason for it.  Airports close every day, fewer new ones open.  If an airport has no reason for existence, it will close and be used for something else.

USA Today apparently wants us to become outraged that 7.5% of a airline ticket price goes to the AIP (Airport Improvement Program).  This is the about the same percentage of tax you pay at the gas pump for your car’s gas.  That tax goes to the the highway fund which also funds all those little-used roads.  USA Today omits that a much larger percentage of tax on aviation gas - used only by small airplanes - goes to support the FAA too.

The article also says that general aviation is underused.  Well, only at the airports they used as examples.  The go on to say that 66% of private aircraft flights are personal or recreational.  They don’t mention the percent of people driving on the nation’s highways are making personal or recreational trips.  Nor do they mention the percent of boating trips using publicly-supported marinas are personal.  Only in aircraft is this an issue.  Why can’t we take a flight for fun or to see a friend?  Have you never taken a drive in the country for fun?

The article’s authors also dispense with the actual non-recreational uses of general aviation that include pipeline inspection, medical flights, small freight (those FexEx packages from Amazon), check clearing flights, photography, and more.  There’s a safety factor too.  On the Gulf coast after Katrina small aircraft into small airports were key in helping after the storm.

If you resent your perceived under-utilization of general aviation airports you do have an alternative.  You can learn to fly and take advantage of general aviation.