6 ms·

Depends who you think the asshole is in this situation? Airports? EU? Belgium? Lufthansa? Brussels Air?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jdavis703 5y ago
The buck stops with the airlines. Many airlines have been accused of colluding with “free market” ticket prices. Surely they could also enact a gentleman’s agreement not to “steal” each other’s slots until travel demand is back to 2019 levels?
- lstodd 5y ago
  The issue is keeping crews from forgetting how to fly the aircraft. Or do you want another round of 737MAX because noone actually flown a plane in 6 months, since it was considered somehow better for enviroment?
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    The 737 Max crash wasn’t because of scarce flight hours. It was caused because the training procedures didn’t train pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure (and ultimately because MCAS itself was flawed). Has any transportation safety board cited flight hours as a cause in any of the crashes?
    - lstodd 5y ago
      The thing is, guys who actually knew what's a runaway stabilizer condition feels like managed to cope. It's the ones who didn't didn't. Somehow I think this is actually related to the hours flown. Not entirely, but should we take these chances? edit: Okay, that was exaggerated. Still, without regular practice the only thing there will be is more of perfectly avoidable crashes. We cannot trade people lives for some theoretical reduction in emissions.
      - jdavis703 5y ago
        How common of an event is runaway stabilizer on a commercial flight though? Of course it happens, but rarely. If we’re talking about practicing for rare events a few hours of simulator time that puts pilots through various crises would be more useful than 100 hours of uneventful flying.
    - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
      > It was caused because the training procedures didn’t train pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure I disagree only in that the focus should be at a higher level. Boeing was so focused on making sure that the 737MAX would be the same type rating as the 737, despite it having very different handling characteristics, that they developed things like MCAS which made it kinda-sorta like a normal 737, the only way that would succeed is if things like "MCAS failure" did not exist and therefore did not require training. It's not that they didn't properly train people on MCAS, it's the fact that MCAS shouldn't have existed in the first place.
- AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
  > The buck stops with the airlines Why though? I'm not a fan of government intervention in general, but, when the system colludes to accidentally create perverse incentives (flying empty planes) I don't see an issue with the government stepping in to make the situation less perverse (no flying empty planes) while maintaining reasonable equity (right of first refusal seems like a simple solution to that).
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    I’m not saying the government shouldn’t regulate this (they should!). What I’m saying is the airlines are the ones ultimately dispatching these flights. Why do we all say “oh we can’t do anything about the tragedy of the commons until the government steps in?”
lordalch 5y ago
I'd say this is essentially an instance of the sequential monopolization problem and imperfectly aligned incentives due to a difference in the shape of each party's cost/demand curve. The classical example of sequential monopolization is a car manufacturer and a local car dealership. The manufacturer wants to sell a large number of cars at a fixed price, while the dealership would rather sell a smaller number of cars so that they can maximize their margin on each sale. Airports want high numbers passengers to maximize retail/parking/etc revenue (in which they have a monopoly), but don't directly care which flights are more profitable or how much the passengers pay for airfare as long as they fill the airport. Airlines are maximizing a different demand curve, in which most of their profit comes from a small number of profitable routes while most other flights are slightly unprofitable. Their biggest incentive is to prevent competition on those premium routes, which they can do by monopolizing flight slots. Sequential monopolization is a high-energy state for a market; absent other forces/regulations, it would be more profitable for the two companies to merge or otherwise form a partnership that looks more like a vertical monopoly. All that said, we only care about this because of the negative externalities created by the current equilibrium, both in the carbon cost of air travel and the massive taxpayer subsidies for airport construction that are wasted then that airport's takeoff and landing slots are inefficiently allocated. So, I'd say one possible solution would be to tax the airlines for the carbon used by all flights, perhaps at a penalty rate for flights above some amount of kg-per-passenger-mile.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

The buck stops with the airlines. Many airlines have been accused of colluding with “free market” ticket prices. Surely they could also enact a gentleman’s agreement not to “steal” each other’s slots until travel demand is back to 2019 levels?

lstodd 5y ago
The issue is keeping crews from forgetting how to fly the aircraft. Or do you want another round of 737MAX because noone actually flown a plane in 6 months, since it was considered somehow better for enviroment?
- jdavis703 5y ago
  The 737 Max crash wasn’t because of scarce flight hours. It was caused because the training procedures didn’t train pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure (and ultimately because MCAS itself was flawed). Has any transportation safety board cited flight hours as a cause in any of the crashes?
  - lstodd 5y ago
    The thing is, guys who actually knew what's a runaway stabilizer condition feels like managed to cope. It's the ones who didn't didn't. Somehow I think this is actually related to the hours flown. Not entirely, but should we take these chances? edit: Okay, that was exaggerated. Still, without regular practice the only thing there will be is more of perfectly avoidable crashes. We cannot trade people lives for some theoretical reduction in emissions.
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      How common of an event is runaway stabilizer on a commercial flight though? Of course it happens, but rarely. If we’re talking about practicing for rare events a few hours of simulator time that puts pilots through various crises would be more useful than 100 hours of uneventful flying.
  - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
    > It was caused because the training procedures didn’t train pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure I disagree only in that the focus should be at a higher level. Boeing was so focused on making sure that the 737MAX would be the same type rating as the 737, despite it having very different handling characteristics, that they developed things like MCAS which made it kinda-sorta like a normal 737, the only way that would succeed is if things like "MCAS failure" did not exist and therefore did not require training. It's not that they didn't properly train people on MCAS, it's the fact that MCAS shouldn't have existed in the first place.
AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
> The buck stops with the airlines Why though? I'm not a fan of government intervention in general, but, when the system colludes to accidentally create perverse incentives (flying empty planes) I don't see an issue with the government stepping in to make the situation less perverse (no flying empty planes) while maintaining reasonable equity (right of first refusal seems like a simple solution to that).
- jdavis703 5y ago
  I’m not saying the government shouldn’t regulate this (they should!). What I’m saying is the airlines are the ones ultimately dispatching these flights. Why do we all say “oh we can’t do anything about the tragedy of the commons until the government steps in?”

lordalch 5y ago

I'd say this is essentially an instance of the sequential monopolization problem and imperfectly aligned incentives due to a difference in the shape of each party's cost/demand curve. The classical example of sequential monopolization is a car manufacturer and a local car dealership. The manufacturer wants to sell a large number of cars at a fixed price, while the dealership would rather sell a smaller number of cars so that they can maximize their margin on each sale. Airports want high numbers passengers to maximize retail/parking/etc revenue (in which they have a monopoly), but don't directly care which flights are more profitable or how much the passengers pay for airfare as long as they fill the airport. Airlines are maximizing a different demand curve, in which most of their profit comes from a small number of profitable routes while most other flights are slightly unprofitable. Their biggest incentive is to prevent competition on those premium routes, which they can do by monopolizing flight slots. Sequential monopolization is a high-energy state for a market; absent other forces/regulations, it would be more profitable for the two companies to merge or otherwise form a partnership that looks more like a vertical monopoly. All that said, we only care about this because of the negative externalities created by the current equilibrium, both in the carbon cost of air travel and the massive taxpayer subsidies for airport construction that are wasted then that airport's takeoff and landing slots are inefficiently allocated. So, I'd say one possible solution would be to tax the airlines for the carbon used by all flights, perhaps at a penalty rate for flights above some amount of kg-per-passenger-mile.