The FAA Follies

I’ve missed this kind of thing- a superb post at Don Brown’s “Get The Flick” for you to scope out…

It should be fairly obvious that the Follies is on a bit of a hiatus. I apologize for not updating anything here.

I’ve actually got two good posts that are mostly done, but held back on them for a variety of reasons, mostly sloth on my part.

Anyway, I’ll get at this site soon. Sorry to all. After 3+ years of blogging on the agency 3 to 5 times a week, I got tired.

ERAM is still all screwed up.

I suppose that’s not really news to people in the FAA, but some of you might not have heard about it.

I’d like to point out once again that several months ago, the FAA’s propaganda machine bragged about ERAM and how great it was and how it was about to go into regular use in the field facilities. They said, in March 2009, that by April 2009 ERAM would be in regular use controlling traffic in Salt Lake City Center and Seattle Center, and then rolled out to the rest of the nation’s enroute centers.

The recently-retired Jerry Lavey talked about this in his column back at the time, saying…

The article also notes that “the $2 billion ERAM effort is on schedule and within budget — something of a rarity for a major FAA modernization project.” (Emphasis mine) I must take issue with that last part. It is indeed a rarity when compared to major acquisition programs in the past, but recently all of our major acquisition programs have been on schedule and on budget, including ERAM, as the article notes.

The reality of the FAA is that Jerry was lying. The FAA has been lying for years about major acquisition programs. The FAA has been making it LOOK like programs were “on schedule and on budget” by simply moving the goalposts and “re-baselining” programs, extending the (new) deadlines out into the future and redoing the budget figures, whenever a program slipped.

I spent some time talking the other day with a guy who’s quite involved with the ERAM project here at ZSE. He has told me in the past of the problems with the program; his opinion is that right now, the best thing to do would be to more or less junk it completely and start over. There might be a few things useful enough in the remnants of what we have that we could work with it a bit, but mostly it needs so much re-writing that it’s probably easier and better to start from scratch.

When an acquisition project like this gets into trouble, especially a super-huge-deal-backbone-of-the-system type of project like ERAM is, things become a huge political deal. I’ve heard that the Program Office for ERAM is in desperation mode; they know that they look like crap because the thing doesn’t work right.

I’m hearing that Salt Lake Center (ZLC) is supposed to take another crack at going 24/7 with ERAM soon. People involved in the program have a betting pool on how long it will run before errors and problems force them to fall back to the present system, with most of the guesses being that it’ll last over a day or two (they’re starting it on a weekend to lessen the strain on the system) and then by midday Monday, even though the test calls for it to be up and running, they’ll have to fall back.

I’m hearing that there’s probably memory leaks in the program- remember how every so often you had to shut down your computer and restart it when you had Windows 95 or 98 on it, because it got slow and buggy from memory issues? Same deal, only with the air traffic control computer. Niiiiice.

Finally, I’ve heard that the Program Office is now dictating to Seattle Center and Minneapolis Center that they cannot run any tests or do anything that might put any strain on Salt Lake’s test (Seattle and Minneapolis Centers’ airspaces are adjacent to Salt Lake Center’s). Even though, in theory, ERAM is supposed to run just fine with other centers also running ERAM (after all, in the end, everyone’s going to be on it) the reality is that they’re afraid it’ll break and they want everything possible to make it look like the test is going okay.

So let’s review. The program that was supposedly about to go live last spring is still in test mode. People intimately involved say it still isn’t trustworthy. The political animals are out and they’re scamming tests to make it look like it works when the reality is that it doesn’t.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

You’re going to read a bunch of hype in the political news about how yesterday’s election was a huge, huge deal for the nation. People will tell you that it signifies a giant shift in public opinion, that it means the nation hates the policies that President Obama and the Democratic Party have been putting forward, and that it proves the Republicans have their mojo back.

Don’t believe the hype.

The win by Republican Scott Brown, a teabagger type in Massachusetts (which is said to be a fairly liberal) state, is due primarily to a couple of factors.

First, Brown definitely outworked the Democrat, Martha Coakley. Between the primary and Sunday, Coakley held 19 events. Brown held 66. When you hold three times as many rallies, speeches, and so forth as your opponent does, you’re outworking them. She ran a crappy campaign and frankly, she deserved to lose. Only at the last minute did her campaign recognize the danger and start working hard, and by then it was too late. (Kind of reminds me of how Hillary Clinton took things for granted, and deservedly lost.)

Second, despite what you’ll read about how incredibly liberal Massachusetts is, remember- this is a state that elected Mitt Romney their Governor, for crying out loud. (Granted, he ran much further towards the middle than he did when he was running for the Presidential nomination.) They’re not afraid to be a bit different and elect a Republican now and again.

Third, and perhaps most importantly… the Boston Democratic political machine was even lazier than Coakley was. By and large, they didn’t do anything to help her out. Why? Because she beat the Boston-area chosen candidate in the primary (Mike Capuano). The machine didn’t do diddly of their normal stuff- no fundraising, no GOTV (get out the vote), no phonebanking, no nothing.

The reality is that the old saying about all politics being local was true this time.

In a way, this result is a good thing. It greatly lessens the importance of that turncoat slimebag Joe Lieberman; now that he’s not the 60th vote in the Senate any more, who cares if they piss him off? He’s totally dead meat in the 2012 election (assuming he is stupid and arrogant enough to run again instead of retiring).

In fact, the Democrats would be wise to take a page from the Republican playbook and bounce Lieberman right out of his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. They should either give him the crappiest committee assignment they can think up, or better yet, assign him to zero committees at all and tell him if he wants a slot he should get it from the Republican pals.

Naturally, because the Democratic leadership are a bunch of weenies, they probably won’t do this. (Can you imagine a truly bold, gutsy, brave Democratic party in today’s world, led by guys like LBJ and Sam Rayburn? Healthcare would be done months ago.)

The result also gives the Democrats a built-in excuse; now they can propose endless numbers of popular policies and watch the Republicans filibuster them over and over, thereby taking the blame for stuff not getting done.

The Democrats are paying the price for their lack of boldness. People voted hugely for change in 2008. For Pete’s sake, we elected a BLACK GUY for President. That’s pretty huge for a nation where, about two generations ago, black folks couldn’t drink from public fountains, or sit in certain restaurants, or walk down the street in many states in our country while holding hands with a white person without risking their personal safety.

President Obama has been too careful. He needs to be bold again. He needs to step up. He needs to propose even MORE liberal and progressive policies and then negotiate back DOWN towards the middle with the Republicans, instead of starting at a moderate position in the vain hope that it’ll result in “bipartisanship” (how’s that worked out so far?) and winding up with wishy-washy policies that aren’t much of a change.

While this election has more to do with local factors than national ones, it still holds both warning and opportunity for the Dems. Let’s hope they recognize it and take advantage.

So the airline and aviation industry has been taking it- POW- right on the chin lately. The fuel price shock, when oil rose to around 150 bucks a barrel in 2008, and then the economic downturn have added up to most of the airlines scrambling to cut capacity and farm out their operations as much as possible.

Looking at everything through a negative mindset isn’t smart, though, and one thing that this does offer us is a tremendous chance to catch up and get ahead of the power curve in one big area- air traffic controller staffing.

Sadly, the FAA is blowing their golden opportunity.

A quick history- about 4 years ago, controllers started retiring en masse. Angry at pay cuts, the lack of a negotiated contract, and the general treatment of FAA employees, they started walking away from their jobs in the biggest numbers seen in three or more decades.

The FAA scrambled to hire replacements. The agency thought it wasn’t going to have a problem, since they had over 3,000 people on their list of eligible-to-be-hired graduates of college ATC programs; unfortunately, it turns out that those college graduates knew how to read. They had kept up with the fact that the FAA had slashed pay over 30% and was treating their new hires like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe.

They read reports from their fellow new hires about FAA officials going to Oklahoma City and telling the ATC trainees at the Academy (most of whom were making poverty-level wages and not getting per diem while living temporarily in a city hundreds or even thousands of miles away from home or their final permanent duty station) that they were lucky to have a job and if they didn’t like how things were going, they could just quit.

And guess what? Many of those 3,000+ college kids told the FAA to stuff it and didn’t even bother applying for the job.

The FAA then turned to hiring ex-military controllers, but there’s only so many of those, so the geniuses in charge started hiring people straight “off the street” to be controllers. Nothing wrong with OTS hires (I’m one!) but what this meant was that the college graduates who DID apply and get hired were now pissed off, because they’d spent tens of thousands of dollars on the FAA’s word that doing so was the only way they could be eligible for a controller job.

So now you’ve got an incoming workforce that’s being treated like crap who’re also angry from being lied to, and you’ve got a bunch of experienced guys who’re so disgusted that they’re retiring in droves.

And since the FAA wasn’t hiring a trainee until the journeyman controller actually left the job, and since it takes anywhere from 1 to 4 years to be fully trained, and since a significant portion of those trainees would go on to wind up washing out of training, we wound up with a staffing shortage.

We’re still critically short of controllers in some facilities, but as I said, traffic levels are down, down, down.

And that, folks, is the golden opportunity. If the fuel price shock and economy tanking hadn’t happened, we’d be utterly screwed right now from a lack of qualified controllers.

Instead, we’ve got a nice little chance to reverse the errors of the immediate past. We can keep hiring lots of new trainees and do a good job of getting them through the program. We know massive numbers of our workforce are eligible to retire in the next several years (6 years, 3 days for me, but who’s counting?) and it would make perfect sense to hire their replacements NOW, ahead of time, so we don’t fall behind like we did before.

Right? Right?

Naturally, that’s not what the FAA is doing. Instead, I’m hearing stories of the FAA contacting people just a week or three prior to their academy reporting date, telling them that they’re not going to be hired after all. (This after the folks have made all the necessary arrangements to quit their jobs, move out of their place, and trek off to the middle of the country for several months for initial training.)

At Seattle Center we’ve been told we saw our planned incoming student number for 2010 go from being 40, to 20, to 10, and now it’s down to just 2 people.

And this is happening nation-wide. The FAA, rather than being smart and getting ahead of the problem, is scaling back hiring dramatically.

We’re blowing an awesome chance, a golden opportunity, to finally fix the ATC staffing issue.

I had resisted writing about Jerry Lavey’s retirement, mostly because I was afraid that he might change his mind and not retire. That, and there’s not much point in writing about it; far more important is what the person who follows Lavey chooses to do with their job. Lavey’s been enough of a target for us (okay, me) here at the Follies over the past few years.

But then I had to hold my nose while reading several versions of “Your Two Cents”, where they kept running these wonderful, nice emails about what a great guy Lavey was and how much they enjoyed his writing and how sad they’ll be to see him go.

I submitted this email. Surprise surprise, they didn’t run it. I wish I could say that I’m shocked, but I’m not.

All of the well-wishers with nice things to say about Jerry Lavey’s retirement are kind people. I too wish him well in retirement.

In fact, I’ve been eager for him to enjoy retirement for years now.

Mr Lavey was a perfect example of what’s wrong with the FAA’s higher levels of management.

He treated me with contempt and refused to engage in a dialogue about FAA issues unless it was on HIS terms.

I have heard from countless other controllers the same thing; they’d email him and a conversation would start that ended with Jerry telling off the controller and refusing to listen to them or acknowledge, in any way, that their concerns might have a shred of validity.

He refused to LISTEN. With the sole exception of “Your Two Cents”, the FAA’s communication venues (many of which Lavey was given credit for helping to begin) are one-way venues that hew strictly to the “party line”.

Even YTC has only started airing dissent in the past 18 months or so, and it’s still heavily edited and not a true free speech forum. (I dare you guys to run this note unedited and prove me wrong… I’d love to be wrong this time!)

Lavey’s writing was occasionally great reading, but if you’re the head of internal communications for an agency that consistently ranks as one of the worst federal agency workplaces on issues like trust in upper level management, valuing input from the workers, and internal communications… you probably suck at your job.

I hope he is happy in retirement. I hope that whoever replaces him can actually do the job at a mediocre level. It’ll be a big improvement.

I do mean this. Jerry Lavey, despite being terrible at what he did, is just as deserving of being happy as any other human being. I hope he is. I think he was terrible at his job, lazy and deliberately dismissive of anyone who dared criticize him, but I hope he’s happy in retirement. Odds are he will be, now that he doesn’t have to deal with people like me.

Just in case you’re one of the few folks who is interested in FAA issues and hasn’t heard of this… be sure to watch ABC news tonight. They’re running a story on the ATO’s big manager pow-wow in Atlanta.

FWIW, every single supervisor that I’ve talked with at ZSE has said the Atlanta meeting was a huge waste of time and money. Many of them also thought the St Louis conferences were a big waste of time and money.

A couple of links to the story:

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/conversation-diane-sawyer-brian-ross/story?id=9402832
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/party-time-faa-critics-question-million-gathering/story?id=9390933&page=1

So there ya go. Tune in tonight!

Don Brown scolded Marion Blakey the other day. She said that the US should follow France’s example and get some government money to the aerospace industry.

Don thought that was pretty hypocritical of her. I think he’s wrong, and that we can go ahead and do that; it’d be fine with me.

Of course, I think we should follow France’s other examples, and move to a new paradigm of employee benefits:

• 40 days of paid vacation a year
• 12 paid government holidays a year
• 35 hour work weeks
• No overtime

We’d probably have to hire at least 15 or 20 percent more air traffic controllers than we have now, but I’m okay with that.

Seriously, Don’s right. Marion Blakey is the worst kind of political hypocrite; she just says whatever will benefit her at the time, no matter what, and she has no problem harming the nation to do it.

When it comes to paying your employees, getting them time off and holidays and so forth, she’s perfectly happy treating them like crap and cutting their pay and telling them they’re just lucky to have a job- completely the opposite of how European nations look at employees. But when it comes to the possibility of government money, hey, sure, let’s follow Europe’s example and throw around several billion dollars! Woohoo!

There is yet another hero in the FAA. The agency won’t say so; instead, they’re continuing to stick to their guns and say that he’s a problem child, that his disciplinary issues don’t have ANYTHING AT ALL to do with the safety issues he brought up, and that beyond that they can’t talk about it.

They are, of course, worthless scumbag liars.

Ladies and gentlemen, read about Ray Adams, Newark Tower.

But two years ago, Adams began seeing disturbing things from his perch, including near-crashes at the airport’s dangerous runway intersections and pilots befuddled by changing flight operations.

He saw too much for the liking of the Federal Aviation Administration, which booted Adams from the control tower and tried to keep the same landing patterns at the runway intersections. Adams said he was put on administrative leave and later suspended on a trumped-up charge that was filed after he raised concerns about flight patterns.

Last month, Adams was vindicated and the FAA lambasted by U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which sent a report to President Obama.

It’s stuff like this that makes us so skeptical about the FAA’s claimed switch to a “safety culture”.

I’ll believe that when Ray’s punishment is reversed and expunged from the record, he’s recertified to his job, he’s given backpay, and most importantly when all of the FAA officials- supervisors, operational managers, facility manager, hub manager, regional manager, and whichever senior vice president they’re talking about in the story- when every one of these people is either fired, retired, or if retained by the FAA is made (via harsh punishment) to clearly understand that what they did to Ray was WRONG.

The guy stands up and says “hey, this is unsafe” and almost loses his job for it. And later, what do we find? That it’s unsafe.

He’s a hero. We need more heroes in the FAA, more whistleblowers, more people to stand up for what’s right.

And do you know what the most depressing thing about this episode, and every other one like it is?

The whistleblowers- the brave folks standing up and getting a beat-down for it- are never managers. They’re always the worker bees.

The FAA talks incessantly about leadership and taking a bold stand, yet we have seen absolutely zero of that from within the management ranks. Why do you suppose that is?