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Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia to trial new method of tracking planes

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  • #46
    So we spend $1 per ticket.

    The total profit for the airline industry... thats ALL AIRLINES COMBINED throughout the world... last year is expected to be around 19 billion. The projected total industry profit for 2015 will leap ahead to 25 billion if fuel prices remain low. Europe and Asia are expected to make a net profit of just over $4 per passenger. Middle East just over $7, and Latin America and Africa $3 and $2 respectively.

    How is your 3 billion, or $1 per ticket, looking now? Pretty pricey if you ask me!

    I'm absolutely gobsmacked that someone who is so intent on increasing safety thinks that its viable to whack a $300 consumer device on an aircraft and run with it. There's a damn good reason that development costs are so high, and thats to ensure that your 'solution' doesn't cause more problems than it solves. And, quite frankly, one problem would be more than it solves.

    If you want to put it on an aircraft, you better be able to damn sure prove that, under all circumstances, it cannot interfere with existing equipment, causes NO additional drag or fuel burn, and cannot overheat throughout the entire operating envelope of the aircraft. Can it be done? Of course it can. But it ain't gonna cost $300 per unit.

    I have no doubt that this sort of tracking is in our future. But its time to stop being naive and just saying that it should be done immediately, and that the costs aren't significant. They ARE significant, and this implementation needs to be done carefully, with due consideration to the benefits vs the significant costs to an industry that is only just recovering.

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    • #47
      The plume of a rocket kills radio coverage. Perhaps that has changed?
      Live, from a grassy knoll somewhere near you.

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      • #48
        Originally posted by MCM View Post
        So we spend $1 per ticket.

        The total profit for the airline industry... thats ALL AIRLINES COMBINED throughout the world... last year is expected to be around 19 billion. The projected total industry profit for 2015 will leap ahead to 25 billion if fuel prices remain low. Europe and Asia are expected to make a net profit of just over $4 per passenger. Middle East just over $7, and Latin America and Africa $3 and $2 respectively.

        How is your 3 billion, or $1 per ticket, looking now? Pretty pricey if you ask me!

        I'm absolutely gobsmacked that someone who is so intent on increasing safety thinks that its viable to whack a $300 consumer device on an aircraft and run with it. There's a damn good reason that development costs are so high, and thats to ensure that your 'solution' doesn't cause more problems than it solves. And, quite frankly, one problem would be more than it solves.

        If you want to put it on an aircraft, you better be able to damn sure prove that, under all circumstances, it cannot interfere with existing equipment, causes NO additional drag or fuel burn, and cannot overheat throughout the entire operating envelope of the aircraft. Can it be done? Of course it can. But it ain't gonna cost $300 per unit.

        I have no doubt that this sort of tracking is in our future. But its time to stop being naive and just saying that it should be done immediately, and that the costs aren't significant. They ARE significant, and this implementation needs to be done carefully, with due consideration to the benefits vs the significant costs to an industry that is only just recovering.
        based on your position, we should do away with all extra charges then cuz it will interfere with profitability. i get it: you're a pilot, and profitability directly affects YOUR bottom line. the rest of the non-industry dependent folks in the world aren't that concerned. it could be done without telling anyone anything.

        people are sick and tired of corporate mopes whining and crying about profit and bonuses and shit like that. humans were NOT meant to fly making safety a HUGE part of operating a company that flies people.

        do a little reading on how industry FIGHTS with regulators about every stupid thing. read up on how governments have resorted to "negotiated rule-making" to appease the wall street whores and corporate execs who are TRULY more concerned about profit than safety. then come back and talk about costs of safety.

        obviously, tracking devices will NOT prevent an MH370 or AF447. they will prevent the 100's of millions spent finding the crashed aircraft, the risks involved in deep ocean searches and so on. suppose mh370 is never found. what then? we will never be able to determine what happened and will not be able to prevent it from happening in the future.

        perhaps to you, 300 lives is not worth all that much and because it's so rare that 300 folks simply disappear, it's not worth spending the money.

        as for being 100% sure that anything will operate on an aircraft at all times, be serious MCM. nothing on the aircraft works 100% of the time. every component fails at one time or another, including the humans sitting up front, who apparently fail more often that the electro/mechanical components, often leading to, well, you know. the SPOT tracker is a simple device that has been in use for years and works pretty damn well. my friends have used one for 3 years on a motorcycle, exposed to all sorts of elements from freezing to boiling, has been vibrated to hell on dirt roads for tens of thousands of miles and is still working just fine.

        the real problem with industry is that they will take the guts out of SPOT, and charge $1,000,000 for it, just like they do with microwave ovens, the navy does with toilet seat and hammers, etc etc.

        oh and as for your last sentence, you perhaps missed my entire point: the added fees pay for the whole thing NOT the poor struggling industry. (maybe if they stopped passing out multi-million dollar bonuses like candy they wouldn't be struggling so much...)

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        • #49
          Originally posted by MCM View Post
          I have no doubt that this sort of tracking is in our future. But its time to stop being naive and just saying that it should be done immediately, and that the costs aren't significant. They ARE significant, and this implementation needs to be done carefully, with due consideration to the benefits vs the significant costs to an industry that is only just recovering.
          MCM, I know your figures are sound (Although the US market for 2015 is expected to yield over $15 profit per passenger). And even with off-the-shelf technology, implementation and certification of a new tracking system would come with significant cost. And it would be hard to argue for an expensive fix to an extremely rare problem. But two things to consider...

          Firstly, profits are not affected if the fix is funded by a surcharge. A $1 surcharge is not going to affect passenger volume or bottom line. The fact is, most of the rise in revenue lately is coming from ancillary revenue: all those fees we are being charged beyond the airfare itself. If you can successfully fee people for the purpose of profit, you can also fee them for safety improvements. The airline doesn't get that extra $1 as revenue, but it doesn't cost them anything either.

          Secondly, how rare do these occurances need to be to make them insignificant in terms of cost? We have seen several very costly search operations in the past five years. All of them politically necessary and also very important to improving aviation safety. I don't know the answer, but it would be interesting to compare the costs of these operations against the costs of introducing contiguous tracking technology, especially taking into account public subsidies and/or surcharges that would accommodate the process. I wonder if it actually would make economic sense, or at least be far less economically senseless than we might imagine. To say nothing of the social contract to provide public safety from the commonwealth...

          And one last thought: as societies throughout the world are propelled into global capitalism and widening wealth disparity exacerbated by the hyper-demands of the information age, I think mental illness is going to become more and more of a factor in society. This tells me to expect more mental illness* and malice in the cockpit (or just outside of it) in the coming years. I hope I'm wrong but "rogue" pilot events and other forms of hijacking may not be quite as rare in the near future as they are now, especially in nations with weaker security provisions. I think the rationale for contiguous flight tracking may be coming into being.

          *keeping in mind that I categorize religious fanaticism and acts of terror as mental illness.

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          • #50
            based on your position, we should do away with all extra charges then cuz it will interfere with profitability. i get it: you're a pilot, and profitability directly affects YOUR bottom line. the rest of the non-industry dependent folks in the world aren't that concerned. it could be done without telling anyone anything.
            Absolute crap. Thats not my position, and never has been. My position is one of not naively saying that we should just spend more and more money fixing small problems simply because they exist, but that it needs to be done with cost-benefit analysis and a due regard for industry profitability. Why? Because an unprofitable industry is an unsafe industry.

            Airlines that are struggling to make ends meet cut corners to stay in the game. That is a major safety concern.

            I strongly advocate for aviation safety. But I'm not silly enough to think that there is a bottomless pit of money that we can delve into whenever something new pops up. We have finite financial resources that have to be managed to provide the best safety outcome we can with what we've got.

            The paying public are simply NOT prepared to keep forking out more money, even if we say its in the name of safety. They just aren't. You can keep adding surcharges, but that will shrink the industry and make it even more difficult to maintain standards. We know this because the public are willing to accept these cheap, questionable operators without issue. People who would otherwise not be able to afford to fly are more than happy to get on these dodgy operators. They accept that there will be aircraft accidents, just as there are road accidents. They don't expect aviation to be accident-proof.

            perhaps to you, 300 lives is not worth all that much and because it's so rare that 300 folks simply disappear, it's not worth spending the money.
            If you can show me how the 3 billion will save 300 lives, then lets talk.

            the added fees pay for the whole thing NOT the poor struggling industry.
            The problem I see is that the industry is so tight at the moment that a surcharge wouldn't be able to be fully passed on to the public. I know $1 doesn't sound like much, but if it were that simple we would have a seatbelt surcharge, a tarmac congestion surcharge, an ILS surcharge... and then the airlines would make their profits after that. You can't do that - its all part of the ticket price.

            A $1 surcharge is not going to affect passenger volume or bottom line.
            Sadly I think that a surcharge like this would quite possibly affect passenger volumes and bottom lines. Its pretty clear to me that we aren't able to fee them for the purposes of profit (even $15 a passenger is really not that high when you consider the costs of capital in aviation), so I'm not sure how we do it for the purposes of safety without having an impact. Maybe I'm wrong, but it'll be a brave regulator to try it.

            When margins are so tight that you can only squeeze $4 per passenger out as profit, then the passengers really aren't prepared to pay that extra dollar, as small as it sounds, and no matter what the reason.

            as for being 100% sure that anything will operate on an aircraft at all times, be serious MCM. nothing on the aircraft works 100% of the time.
            Thats true. But there's also very little on the aircraft that I'm prohibited/prevented from turning off if it does fail. You want to put a device on the aircraft that is unable to be turned off if it starts interfering with systems, or catches fire, it has a much higher standard to meet.

            As for your last point Evan - what is contiguous tracking going to achieve in the hijack case, other than making it easier to find the aircraft afterwards? How is it making it safer? Wouldn't it be better spending the money on mental health programs for crew, and better aviation security?

            I'm sorry, but I just can't see the global travelling public being willing to accept surcharges to fund aviation safety in this way. Contiguous tracking will happen, but there's more pressing issues to spend our safety dollar on at the moment, that will save lives.

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            • #51
              Originally posted by MCM View Post
              When margins are so tight that you can only squeeze $4 per passenger out as profit, then the passengers really aren't prepared to pay that extra dollar, as small as it sounds, and no matter what the reason.
              I'm not sure I agree. Again, the industry has rebuilt itself into a (marginally) profitable business by going rock-bottom on airfare and slipping in a litany of seemingly small fees that add up. Banks use the same model. Why? Because most people are careless with small purchases. A lot of consumers will do price comparisons on large purchases and then use the out-of-network ATM to take out the funds, ignoring the $3 fee as a fact of life. Charities have clued in to this, often soliciting a small donation added-on to the total of a large purchase.

              Now, consider this: when I make an online ticket purchase using a credit card, I am now seeing a €1 fee for that option. Will I pay it for the sake of convenience? Of course, it's a fact of life now. So I purchase a $457 ticket, of which $200 is airfare and $257 are fees, taxes and surcharges. Will I pay $458? Without a doubt. Anybody would. Because I still make the purchase, it doesn't affect the airline's bottom-line profitability.

              As for your last point Evan - what is contiguous tracking going to achieve in the hijack case, other than making it easier to find the aircraft afterwards? How is it making it safer? Wouldn't it be better spending the money on mental health programs for crew, and better aviation security?
              Yes, definitely, mental health programs and better security are the more effective ways to improve safety before the fact, especially in preventing hijackings. But we are talking about after-the-fact location of evidence needed to complete an investigation. Take for example TWA Flt 800: What if it had never been found? There was most likely a dangerous issue with center tank vapours and FQIS wiring. Evidence of this was found. Because it was found, inspections and design and procedural changes were made, and other improvements such as nitrogen replacement systems were advanced. So that hindsight method of improving safety is also important. If these planes go unrecovered, hidden threats can perpetuate and reoccur. The question, I suppose, becomes: which is more sensible, to spend enormous amounts of money on large search missions that might be very rare over a decade or to add a surcharge to fund better tracking options that would diminish that possible expense? Either way, the public is ultimately going to pay for it but the latter option might be the lesser amount. That all depend on the unknown and unpredictable course of future events...

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