Contract '02 did suck, didn't it? You should talk to the guy two numbers senior to you about that one... if I'm guessing right. Nice to see another golden meatballer on here!

When the only information passengers have is route and ticket price, the airline that can scheme to have the lowest upfront price will win. Only initially, and only with very occasional travelers. Taking me as an example, I don't fly more often than 2-3 times a year, yet I've had my share of good and bed experiences with different airlines... and I'll always look for options from the airlines I had good experiences with while scanning through Kayak's results. Now, if they are much more expensive than somebody else, I'll consider the others... but I'll pay the 5-10% more to fly the ones I like. We all remember the crappy legroom, shitty entertainment options, and bad food, even if the search engine doesn't show it.

Unfortunately, you are in a quite slim minority of people who are actually willing to pay a revenue premium for decent service. The large majority of people who fly today are not. This is, unfortunately, a well demonstrated fact that every airline marketing department is highly aware of and literally testing every day with their revenue models.

Southwest is quite an anomaly - they are operationally extremely efficient (one unified fleet type, eliminating burecratic cost holes and personnel time sucks like assigned seating, etc.), and have spent decades building both their 'can do' culture and reputation for (dare I say the word) 'fairness'. I think in Southwest's case, 'fairness' is really a proxy for simple/transparent/understandable. It's sorta the flat-taxer's argument that the simplicity of the rules would pay for itself in lots of ways, even if some are hard to measure. In Southwest's case, it works, it works well, but it takes decades to build up such a thing. People who work there take a lot of pride in their jobs, and that may be hard to measure but it comes across. I have several friends who made the jump to work for them (and you lose a LOT when you jump from one airline to another), and none of them regret it a bit.

So... tell your friends to vote with their wallets and be willing to pay more for decent service, and not to give business to airlines with lousy service. It might actually make a difference if enough people do it.

At least, I hope it does....

I think you need the pricing model of the airlines explained to you. It is designed to maximize revenue per flight. Period. Fairness's got nothing to do with it. The airlines, if it would maximize revenue per flight, would beat you with dead chickens to make you more slippery so you could get on and off more quickly.

And if you think this concentration on revenue per flight is a little short-sighted, pisses off people and chases away global revenue in the long run, I'd agree with you. But please don't suffer under the delusion that any large business cares about fairness, other than as a marketing/reputation concern or perhaps coincidentally when you meet a decent human who works for them. Some businesses have simple pricing models because complexifing them, 'more fair' or not, would increase costs or reduce revenue. In the case of the airlines, they have very complex models for how much to charge at what point in time to maximize revenue per flight. The changes in the cost side based on the differential weights of passengers is extremely minor, so minor that to track it would cost far more than any 'fairness' reputational benefit you might get or slightly enhanced revenue such a weight tax would bring in.

As a matter of fact, you might get a revenue penalty, if you operate in the Domestic 48. There are more overweight Americans than not, and so the majority of people would be charged slightly more, in a way that I can guarantee would piss them off. I see lawsuits galore. And empirical evidence shows that most people buy tickets on airlines (assuming point A to B, same day & departure time, same number of stopovers) entirely based on presented price. So you might wind up driving customers away and revenue down.

In most corporate charters, the executives of the company are required to maximize profit for the shareholders - fairness doesn't enter into it. While you could argue that a corporation is made of people, and people should be decent and fair, I think you'll find that without enforcement, either via customer outrage (revenue reduction), lawsuits (cost increases), government regulation/enforcement, it doesn't happen at a planning/operational level, even if individuals on the front-lines, or their sups, try to be decent.

For what it's worth, a pax now weighs 195 pounds in the winter. Exactly. Including carry-ons. At least, that's how we do our performance calculations in the U.S. There is no realistic gain in being more precise.

Well, for what it's worth, I'm an airline pilot.

And when I commute between DC and NYC, I drive. Everything you say is true - it bothers me a lot that the industry has sunk so low, and it bothers a lot of other pilots too.

Unfortunately, our ideas don't count for much, and the reality is that the huge majority of paying people pick how to get from A to B on the basis of price alone. The amount of resources airlines bring to 'revenue management' (a fancy way of saying figuring out how much to charge for a seat) is rather amazing; they have models that adjust the value a seat will bring in based on time to departure, and they are constanly refining their models, to the point where they can predict their revenue from a given flight within +-1% pretty consistenly desipte cancellations, rasing, lowering, then rasing the price of the seat (Costs? Not so much :-/). And those finely tuned revenue models all say the same thing - people buy for the sticker price, and expect fees to be added in anyway. If you include those fees in the 'sticker price', your seat will bring in less revenue as most people order flights between A and B by sticker price, and sticker price alone. Consider it a fact.

Several airlines have tried the idea of 'all first class' - establish a brand specifically known for its top notch service, and deliver it. They have all failed in recent years, Midwest being one of the last. It seems that there are not enough people willing to pay for superior service to make a go of it as a scheduled airline. The non-scheduled operators, who charge an order of magnitude more (see Netjets et al.), on the other hand, apparently take superior service with absolute seriousness, and deliver it well - they are growing relatively robustly to fill the gap between dedicated corporate/celebrity bizjets and the becoming Greyhound scheduled operators.

I actually wish more people would think and do as you, so it was economic to run a quality airline, even if it was smaller in size. When enough people demand something, the market sometimes delivers. Enjoy your travels!

Use Macports. Manual package management is something I try to avoid - 'sudo port install matplotlib py26-matplotlib' and all the dependencies and compiling are taken care of, not to mention the ability to cleanly uninstall if you wish. Macports recently upped to v1.9.1, which now tracks which ports you requested, so it's easy to prune away orphan libraries you no longer need.

And matplotlib is a gem. It's got a ridiculuous number of plot-styles so it's remarkably flexible - if you are into GIS, look at matplotlib-basemap, which adds many map projections and the ability to plot geo data on those.

I do wonder why people would pay for the 'special' (i.e. non-free, non-community) version of ActivePython. AFAIK, ActivePython neither develops the base libraries (matplotlib, SciPy and Numpy), nor python itself. What do they add other than as a bundling service?

If the survival of each individual's genes were paramount, there would be no homosexuality and no parents killing their own children, 'cause those are pretty much dead-end paths from the standpoint of survival of the individual.

You just missed the flaw in your reasoning - you confuse an individual's GENES with the INDIVIDUAL. Consider that a parent only has 50% of their genes in a child; if it turns out that killing the child would allow for the opportunity to invest more in other children, and increase their probability of having offspring (i.e. getting more copies of your genes in circulation), it might be very RATIONAL to kill your own child from the standpoint of increasing the frequency of your genes in the population. This behavior is observed frequently in animal species besides man. Consider how violently men react to adulterous women and thier offspring - the possibility that they might have been investing resources in a child with 0% of their genes means they have nothing to lose, genetically, by offing them. The math of kin selection has been worked out quite precisely, in many different species with different mating habits, and the numbers work out; we (as in man and virtually every other species) tend to behave in such a way as to maximize the spread of our genes, regardless of whether the copies come from us or from our kin.

You mention ants - ants behave the way they do because of the highly unusual way they pass genes on - or should I say, the way most ants DON'T. In a given colony, all the future ants (and future genes) come from the queen, who has sex briefly (for a day or two) with between 1 and 10 males, and stores their sperm to produce eggs for the rest of her life. The reason so many ants work themselves to death, engage in combat to the death to protect the queen, and in general seem to not care for themselves as individuals, is they are, as individual reproducers, done. The only chance they have for enhancing the odds of their GENES being spread is by doing everything possible to protect and nuture the only possible reproducer of those genes - the queen. And guess what - the genes that influence aunt behavior in that way are the ones that have been the most successful.

Group level selection has very little evidence going for it, although in highly advanced creatures (like us), it may play a greater role than in general. You should read The Selfish Gene, and The Extended Phenotype, by Dawkins, to see the arguments about group vs. individual vs. genetic selection really hashed out in detail.

Your idea of a backup system is an excellent one - and it's already been done, in a much more reliable way! The problem with the GPS + windspeed from some ground source is that:

a) It assumes the wind at the ground station is near the wind speed and direction of the aircraft. This is almost always a wrong assumption, as the wind speed rapidly increases with altitude, and tends to cant in quite a different direction as well. For a sensor that has to be accurate within a knot or two, this is completely inadequate.

b) It assumes the GPS gives an accurate speed second by second. This is again, a poor assumption. GPS fundamentally determines position, and speed is derived from this over time, meaning it typically indicates how fast you were, a few seconds ago. For the second by second resolution you need, this is inadequate.

c) It assumes that a way, in real time, of transmitting this information, deciding which ground stations to use, what interpolative formulae to use, mixed with the GPS data, can be reliably done.

So, it's not that it's a bad idea to have a backup, just that this particular implementation of one has many features that would render it useless.

How it's actually done is as follows. On transport category airplanes, it is required that you have three independent sensors to detect airspeed. Almost universally, this is implemented the same way; a pitot tube to detect ram air pressure, and static ports to detect static air pressure. They generally have three pitot tubes, each with its own independent plumbing, all electrically heated, and hooked up to 1 of 2 independent boxes (called air data computers) that reads the two pressures and calculates the indicated airspeed, which is then signaled on two independent airspeed indicators, one on the Captain's side, one on the F/O's. The third is hooked up to a set of standby gauges that are meant to break ties in a hurry if one of the primary sources goes wonky. The static ports are easy to spot (except on American Airlines, for reasons that will be obvious), because they carefully don't put any paint near them, so you can spot them on the sides of airframes as metallic ovals, with a black paint around the edge of the oval as a 'warning', and a few small holes in the middle where the static air pressure is equalized with the outside air.

On the 737, if you look down and to the left just when you board it on a jetway, you will notice one of these pitot tubes, along with an angle of attack vane perilously close to the jetway 'gasket'. The pitot tube looks like a little forward angled wing with a tube extending along its outside edge and forward, usually with a nice, bluish sheen to the metal from being kept well above the boiling point most of the time to keep water and ice far away. The AOA vane looks like a backward slanted wing, typically cocked at a crazy angle on the ground as there is too little airflow to make it align with the wind.

One of the preflight duties of an F/O is to assure that these tubes and sensors have not been messed with, whether by an overzealous TSA inspector using them as a hand and foot hold and breaking them in the process (yes, this happened), a jetway driver snugging up the the jetway a little off the spot and mashing them (happens often), aircraft washers forgetting to remove the covers put over them after cleaning the exterior (this killed 70 people once)or a baggage cart smearing up against it and driving off, hoping nobody will notice they did it (yup, this one too!) Check out this article on Wikipedia about it - it's fairly good and pretty informative about why it's such a fundamental indicator and why pilots get cranky about it being at all abstracted away from the raw data! :-)

The radar technology used by air traffic controls is from the 50's. No GPS... Planes are still tracked by little "physical" slips of paper. The entire system has been in need of an overhaul since the 70's. Planes still use land based radio towers - waste tons of fuel due to indirect routes.

That's true. The U.S. GOVERNMENT built the best air traffic control system in the world back in the 50's, one so robust, well designed and well managed that it has been the safety and operational count leader world-wide for more than half a century despite ongoing neglect under the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations. I wonder what they could do if we actually spent some money, collected from taxes, to upgrade it? Wow. Infrastructure building. My dad always said it was cool.

Wind varies tremendously by altitude, location, and time. Wind shear accidents occurred in the past because the resolution of the wind readings at airports compared to the rapid shear of the wind gave little to no warning of how rapidly the headwind component to an aircraft was about to change. In addition, indicated airspeed is actually measured by taking the ratio of ram pressure to static pressure, calibrated to read true airspeed at sea level on a standard day. This leads to the indicated airspeed being different from the true airspeed by large amounts depending on altitude, temperature, and pressure, but many important flying 'speeds' remain at the same indicated airspeed because of the physics of flying; for instance, best angle, best rate of climb, and best glide speeds stay (approximately) at the same indicated airspeeds even though the corresponding true airspeeds vary greatly.

Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying that the current way airspeed is measured and displayed to a pilot is absolutely critical to aviation operations. It's an emergency when your airspeed indicator is malfunctioning, and it is the most direct indication of the amount of energy relative to the airstream your aircraft has. It's not something you want to muck with by putting multiple layers of indirection/abstraction (and thus additional things that can fail) between the sensors and the indicators.

The particle doesn't change its behavior to screw over the investigator.

Or, to paraphrase, Nature is subtle, but she is not malicious? ;-)

I'll clarify. One, it is NOT "strictly against procedures to be doing this, and a termination offense" to teach a fellow crew member about PBS while on duty, especially if you use a pen and paper. The no laptops thing is not a federal reg, but an airline specific policy. An example of federal regs specifying prohibited behavior in the cockpit is the 'Sterile Cockpit' rule - essentially, during critical phases of flight, non-essential conversation is prohibited. This is defined to include all flight below 10,000' MSL, taxi, takeoff, and landing.

I'll give you my personal perspective. Nobody obeys all the rules. At every company I've ever seen, people are always violating SOME rule or reg, generally not intentionally. Flying is not an exception. When you spend 10,000+ hours in an aircraft, when you know every quirk, knob, switch & controller, you get a pretty good sense of what's important and when it's important, and when it's not. When we were still in the 'learning phase' of aviation (up until the 1970's, roughly), the expertise of the pilots up front usually exceeded the expertise of the regulators by a large amount (kinda like IT today...). So, the Feds did something very intelligent - they came up with FAR 91.3 & 91.13:

91.3: (a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.

(b) In an in-flight emergency requiring immediate action, the pilot in command may deviate from any rule of this part to the extent required to meet that emergency.

(c) Each pilot in command who deviates from a rule under paragraph (b) of this section shall, upon the request of the Administrator, send a written report of that deviation to the Administrator.

This is the authority to do as the PIC sees fit. It is the entire basis of a Captain's authority - and it assumes that Captains know better than any one else how to command their craft. This has generally proven to be a good assumption - since the pilot is usually the first to arrive at the scene of an accident, he/she is highly motivated not to be in one... if you pick your pilots carefully. But to make sure that this authority is not abused...

91.13: (a) Aircraft operations for the purpose of air navigation. No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.

(b) Aircraft operations other than for the purpose of air navigation. No person may operate an aircraft, other than for the purpose of air navigation, on any part of the surface of an airport used by aircraft for air commerce (including areas used by those aircraft for receiving or discharging persons or cargo), in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.

The key words are 'Careless and Reckless Operation'. What it means is, if you fly in a careless or reckless manner, the FAA will nail you. Your actions, even if they don't specifically violate another reg, if they are 'careless' or 'reckless' - violate this one. How do you know what's careless & reckless? Well, if you have an accident, the presumption is you were careless, or reckless. These guys? They will DEFINITELY be hit for the 'careless' part. This is a catch-all - it means, at any time, your actions as a pilot can be held up to scrutiny, and if they are found to be 'careless or reckless', you are toast.

These laws were very good - it allowed pilots to experiment with how to run a plane, but held them responsible if something screwed up. Over time, best of breed techniques were discovered, spread from crew to crew, standardized by airlines, and ultimately adopted as Federal law - the FARs. Of course, accidents, once their root cause was discovered, frequently led to regulations as well. Overall, I think this was an excellent way to turn a fledgling, risky industry, into the mature and extremely safe one it currently is.

Times change. Aviation's period of discovery is essentially over. We know safe practices, engineering, weather, training... the main thing stopping aviation from being safer is cost. Accidents are so rare that to significantly reduce their rate would require a massive & expensive overhaul that no one seems significantly interesting in doing. Requiring datalinks for almost realtime updates of doppler wx radar might have helped the Air France that went in over the Atlantic - but it costs lots of money to install that. Better rest rules, so fatigued pilots aren't flying. But that would require more pilots per flight hour - that would cost more. I could go on with many more examples...

So - what cheap ways can we improve safety? Since 80% of accidents nowadays are, to some extent, caused by 'pilot error', regulating what pilots do and don't do seems like a free way to improve things. Of course, expecting human beings to follow increasingly minute rules and regs ad infinitum is... somewhat unrealistic.

An example. The procedure many airlines still use to determine if an airplane has accumulated significant icing during a taxi in icing conditions are pretty basic. In many cases, a pilot has to walk to the back of the aircraft, peer out the windows (typically at the overwing emergency exit rows) with a flashlight, and determine by eye if the wing has accumulated significant ice - a primitive, but effective procedure. A F/O who did this didn't tell the passengers who got out of his way to refasten their seatbelts when he left, and for this, he and the Captain were violated by a Fed watching a few rows away. The passengers, despite not being specifically instructed, figured out to refasten their seat belts anyway - but a reg was violated, and so was the crew. Perhaps we need a more advanced way to determine if an airframe has accumulated significant ice on a taxiout instead? You can trace all the regs about icing on taxiout to the Air Florida guys who went in out of DCA back in the 1980's. They were dopey, to be sure, but the present byzantine procedures are not much better. There is such a thing as too much regulation, or inappropriate regulation, or 'theatre' regulation (think security theatre for my meaning).

So, in summary - most experienced airline pilots know how to fly, or they wouldn't have lived that long, or people wouldn't have entrusted expensive airplanes and fragile passengers to them. You figure out how to aviate, navigate, and communicate, in that order - you run a safe and efficient ship, following best practices and conservative decision-making, following the rules and regs to the best of your ability - and then you can pretty much do as you wish. You can stare at the awesome beauty of a +60,000 foot thunderstorm, watch the Northern Lights grace the sky, amaze yourself at the vast deserts that are the American West... talk about the Yankees, or the mathematics of horizon distance, or the cute flight attendants (yes, we still have a few)... or the divorce, the loss of your son when he died in an accident, about burying your parents. In short, you are humans with lives locked in a little box in a little tube in a big sky for more than a full year of your life (8800 hours = 1 year) . You should NEVER forget your primary responsibility - flying safely. But beyond that... I think it's not any one else's business. These guys are done - but they should be. Should we now outlaw every form of electronic device in a cockpit? Non-essential conversation at all times during flight?

Let me put it slightly differently. 40,000 people die every year in the U.S.A. in car accidents, the majority caused by drivers violating rules. I suggest that any rule we come up with for airline pilots should also be applied to drivers. Since drivers outkill airline pilots, on average, by 1000 to 1, I think we need to regulate drivers more. Drivers should be randomly drug tested. All cellphones, texting, radios, TV's, GPS navigators, and non-essential conversation should be outlawed, at a minimum. Install speed regulators in cars; allow cops, at any time, to pull you over for any reason. And allow you to be banned from driving for life if you are caught driving carelessly or recklessly. If you question the necessity of such rules, please question similar rules for airline pilots. I'm not arguing no more rules are necessary or desirable - simply we should be a little more careful and thoughtful about them.

Techincally, they should also be monitoring Guard (121.50 MHz) the whole flight, and I'm pretty sure multiple attempts to contact them on Guard were made. But since they didn't bother paying much attention to the primary, they probably didn't montior Guard that well either.

There is really no excuse for both pilots completely losing situational awareness like this. They're both toast, and deserve to be.

As for the scheduling system they were going over - actually, that is probably the 'news for nerds' part. The old airline schedules were built in two units - 'pairings' and 'lines of time'. A pairing is a group of flights, typically from 1 to 6 days long, that begun and ended in a pilot domicile. The word 'pairing' was to indicate that an entire crew was 'paired' together that whole time. A line of time (or simply a line) was a month-long group of those pairings. There is a long list of legal requrements (min rest, max flight time, union contractual obligations, aircraft mx requirements, etc.) that these schedules had to meet.

Ultimately, from the pilot's point of view, these lines were published each month for the next month. Bidding was very straightforward. If you were the number 1 senior pilot in that base (technically, domicile, aircraft and status (capt. or F/O), you picked your line, and that was that. If you were #2, you picked your schedule, and got it.... unless the number 1 guy already got it, in which case you got your second choice. If you were number #300.... well, picking 300 schedules in the order you want them was a time consuming task, but the outcome was perfectly transparent. The line awards were public, so you could verify that the schedules you didn't get really did go to senior people. You can debate whether such a system is 'fair', but at least it is clear how it works, both globally and month to month.

Then, with the advent of more powerful computers, a system called 'PBS' was born - Preferential Bidding System. These systems, instead of having hard, published lines you bid from, instead only published the pairings. You expressed your 'Preferences' through a computer language. A computer program then ran, taking everybodys preferences, seniority, system constraints, etc. into account and generated schedules.

In theory, PBS sounds great. A pilot's preferences generally don't change that much month to month, so you could file your bid away and let it run automatically each month with little or no tweaking.

In practice, it's usually been highly disruptive and caused great angst for a year or two after being implemented, for many reasons:
1) The language used to express your preferences is generally designed for the programmers, not the users.
2) The results can be, to put it mildly, unexpected. When you have pre-published schedules, you have a pretty good idea ahead of time what to expect.
3) There are no month-to-month conflicts that generate additional days off, resulting in more work per pilot, a reason the airlines like them and pilots don't, on average.
4) Non-computer savvy older pilots (Captians) have a harder time getting it than younger pilots (F/O's), on average. It takes a vastly important piece of your life (when are you working? Where are you going? 28 hours in HNL or 32 hours in XNA?), and makes it tied to your comfort with learning, essentially, a primitive computer language.

I cringe when I see this, because I've done this - taught Captians while flying about PBS. So have many other F/O's. You just prioritize it where it belongs - below aviating, navigating and communicating. These guys made everyone else look bad.

A Freudian slip, perhaps? ;-)

I understand. I disagree with the death penalty as a matter of principle, but there are some people in the world who I would struggle to say don't deserve it.