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?

I’m a bit mystified why this is even being discussed… but apparently there’s a considerable safety problem at Newark’s airport. Watch this CNN story (or read this version of it) …

What jumps out at me from this story are three main points.

First, and granted I’m not a TRACON/tower controller, but it just seems flat-out stupid to have operations going on criss-crossing runways. If someone’s got to go-around, then their course is going right into the path of someone else.

Second, it’s the same story; Ray Adams raises a safety problem with the agency, and instead of taking it seriously, they put the beat-down on him. Oh, but the disciplinary action has nothing to do with his safety complaint. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

And third, the FAA puts in a tool (CRDA, Converging Runway Display Aid) that should alleviate the problems. Okay, that’s cool, I’m down with that; as I understand the theory of CRDA, it should work such that you could do these crossing-paths operations in a safe manner. BUT… on November 5th, the FAA and DOT tell the Office of Special Counsel that the FAA has implemented CRDA; but the next day, the OSC finds out that’s a lie.

From the news story…

FAA spokesperson Laura Brown said, “There was no intent to deceive anyone about what we were doing.” She added, “FAA safety officers wanted to make absolutely sure employees were fully trained on the equipment.” The FAA said it intends to have the computer system fully operational at Newark by mid-December.

Oh, I see. They didn’t MEAN to lie to the OSC, so it’s all okay.

What a bunch of bullshit. Of course they meant to get the OSC off of their backs; that’s exactly what they meant to do!

I have no problem with the agency saying “we’ve installed CRDA but cannot implement it until everyone’s fully trained, so for now it’s not up and running.” That would make sense- you can’t have people working on a system they haven’t been properly trained to use- and it’d also be the truth.

But the FAA wants everyone to think that hey, they weren’t trying to hide anything. Well, tell Ray Adams that! Tell Pete Nesbitt that! Tell the 45,000 employees of the FAA that, over 90% of the ATO says that they don’t trust the upper levels of management in their own agency!

We know the truth. The truth is that the FAA still has a long, long, long, long way to go when it comes to truly changing its ways.

The agency has been making a huge stir about the new “safety culture” and how important it is. The employees see that, and then they see a story like this one, and they see absolutely no managers paying the price for something like Ray’s suspension… and we know perfectly well that this “safety culture” stuff is a load of crap.

Now, if I hear that the managers who put Ray Adams on suspension have been forced to retire, or better yet fired, then maybe I’ll start believing that the agency is truly changing its ways. If I hear that Ray and Pete and the myriad of other FAA whistleblowers are getting a special award from the Administrator, including some serious dough and/or paid time off, for their bravery in stepping up to say “hey, this is an unsafe procedure” and continuing to say that after it’s been made clear that their jobs are at risk, then I’ll believe it.

Until then, it’s just a bunch of PR.

I’ll say this much, though- seeing Laura Brown say “we didn’t mean to lie” is at least a small improvement. Under Blakey/Sturgell they wouldn’t have even bothered to answer the question.

Concrete and cement are some of humanity’s oldest building materials. Examples of both are found as far back as the Egyptians using mortars of gypsum and lime in the pyramids 5000 years ago. We see concrete from the Assyrians and Babylonians, 3500 to 4000 years ago. They used clay as the bonding material, and of course structures built by all three of these civilizations are still in existence today.

Over 2,000 years ago, the Romans put concrete construction to excellent use; they constructed aqueducts, roads, and buildings. Some of these are still IN USE today.

Modern concrete was developed in 1756 by John Smeaton when he started using hydraulic lime, and improved by the development of Portland cement in 1824; Portland cement is still widely used today.

I mention all this, not because I’m going soft in the head, but to point something out: Concrete isn’t new. It’s not even old. It’s ancient. It’s technology, and it can be used effectively today for all kinds of things. Buildings, sidewalks, roads, and… runways.

Yes, runways. Perhaps the single most important bit of infrastructure in aviation would be the runway, and even today- after 3,000 years- the best way to build a runway is to use cement and concrete.

This bears pointing out, because on this blog I’ve questioned the FAA’s push for spending dozens of billions of dollars on “NextGen” technology that isn’t yet developed or tested or proven at all. We need to continue to develop technology, yes, but the reality is that if we want a proven way to increase our nation’s capacity for aircraft flights (and to reduce flight delays) we have a 3,000 year old technology that’s been tried, tested, and proven millions of times over. We can lay more concrete runways down.

Why bring it up at all? Because here at ZSE, and I suspect at many other facilities in the FAA, we recently received a fancy, glossy booklet from the agency all about NextGen. It is the NextGen Implementation Plan, 2009 edition, and there’s a fairly significant change to the discussion of NextGen that I haven’t seen in previous FAA communications and discussions of NextGen.

Namely, concrete. This booklet now includes “Airfield Improvements” as part of NextGen. For example, on page 18, it mentions new runways that are going to be put in to Dulles, Houston, and Denver airports; runway extensions at Ft Lauderdale, Portland, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City; and airfield reconfigurations at Philadelphia, phase 2 of the project at Chicago O’Hare, and Los Angeles’s north runway complex.

Appendix B to the plan lays out airfield development projects such as the new runways at Sea-Tac, Dulles, and Chicago O’Hare, along with new taxiways and other improvements at several other airports.

Why am I going on about this? Because it’s important for people to understand that new runways and taxiways and improvements to airfield configurations is absolutely NOT “NextGen”.

No matter how much the FAA tries to pretend that it is, this is not any kind of next-generation technology. This is technology- concrete and cement- that’s thousands of years old.

It’s incredibly dishonest for the FAA to now change course and start lumping runway/airfield improvements in with NextGen. The reason is simple- nothing provides as much immediate benefit and improvement to flight delays and airport capacity issues as a new runway does. Airfield reconfigurations and improvements (such as better high-speed taxiways, end-around taxiways, etc) can vastly improve capacity and reduce flight delays- and what’s more, they do so at lesser cost than these proposed NextGen programs.

NextGen’s planning is getting to the point where people want to know exactly what kind of benefit will be provided by all this money we’re going to throw into the program. The reality is that when you look, you have a pretty hard time finding actual numbers- but building a new runway? That provides firm numbers… concrete numbers, if you will.

And that’s why airfield reconfiguration is suddenly being lumped in as “NextGen”, even though it’s based on 3,000 year old technology. It dummies up the numbers and makes it look at though NextGen-type improvements have already had benefit.

Welcome to the FAA, folks. In our world, plain old concrete- something that the Romans used to build stuff a couple thousand years ago- is passed off as secundum saeculum artificium- “next generation technology”.

New boss, same modus operandi- lying to make things look better than they really are. That’s your FAA.

(Apologies to anyone who thinks the Latin translation stinks; it probably does, as I don’t speak or read Latin and just got the very loose translation from the internet.)

I like to occasionally brag a bit about Seattle Center (ZSE), mostly because bragging on your facility is kind of a tradition in the FAA’s air traffic control world, and partially because ZSE really is one of the best centers in the country by many standards.

Unfortunately, we’re about to receive some accolades that I don’t personally think we deserve.

Seattle Center has done the “None in a Million” trick three times already. That’s when you work a million operations without a single operational error. (For the non-ATC, non-aviation types, that’s one million takeoffs, or 500,000 takeoffs and 500,000 landings, and every airplane was kept from the others the safety distance of 5 miles laterally or 1,000 feet vertically.)

Doing a million operations without a single error is pretty tremendous. Seriously, it is; think of whatever it is that you do on your job, and now imagine doing it one MILLION times and never screwing it up. That’s the type of thing we shoot for in ATC, because let’s face it, when we do screw it up badly it’s all over the news.

We went past a million ops since our last error sometime in the past week or two, so now there’s posters up in the facility. They say “Congratulations for going ‘None in a Million’ for the Fourth TIME!”

Like I said, we don’t deserve it.

Up until a year or two ago, the safety standard was 5 miles, 1,000 feet. (In some areas of our airspace it’s 3 miles, where the planes are closer to the radar sites.) Then the standard was changed and now if you have a plane at least 4.5 miles away from another plane, well, that’s not good but it’s no longer an operational error; now it’s a “proximity event” (PE). To ensure no PEs you’d have to always have 5 miles.

Well, in our run of a million, we had 9- count ‘em, NINE- PEs.

That’s 9 times when planes got too close to one another. Oh, these events don’t count against us in theory, but in reality if you have a PE every week at work, you’re not going to last more than a month or so.

What’s more scary is that ZSE didn’t formerly have that many errors. If we were still counting by the old rules, our error rate would have quadrupled in the past couple of years.

For us to act as though we’ve accomplished something is fairly disgusting, really. Oh, we’ll probably get some kind of time off award (which I think people should donate to needy folks in the leave donor program) and maybe even some sheetcake (be still my heart!) but should we, or the FAA, be tooting our horn?

5 years ago, that many operational errors probably would have gotten managers removed from their jobs. We never got any actual justification as to why 5 miles was suddenly too much separation. I don’t think that the FAA actually did any real safety studies that showed why reducing the standard was acceptable. (If we did, I’d love to see them.)

I think, instead, that this is just another example of how the FAA came to be known as the “tombstone agency”. We get “leaders” in there who forget their institutional history, and who cut back at safety margins a bit here, and a bit more there, and here and there, until one day the rules that we used to follow are rewritten for us- in the blood of flight crews and passengers who pay with their lives.

Then we crank the safety standards back to where they should be and everyone says “gosh, we didn’t see that coming” and it’s a big fat lie.

None in a million? More like nine in a million, and as hard as this is for me to admit, but in this matter Seattle Center has absolutely nothing to be proud of.

…to hear that Laura Brown, a PR flack for the FAA, has been caught lying to the media.

Again.

And this time she’s got the nerve to not even bother apologizing for it. In fact, she compounds the first lie by claiming that she never said it.

Billy Mays, a TV infomercial star, died the other day. He had been on a flight that had a hard landing (blew out a tire or two) and reported getting whacked in the head with something when that happened. The speculation was that he had a head injury without knowing it and it might have killed him (more on that later).

In a news story appearing on TMZ.com, an “FAA spokesperson” is quoted…

The FAA is already deflecting blame for the death of Billy Mays — claiming the legendary TV pitchman wasn’t wearing a seat belt when he took a shot to the head during a rough landing on a flight he was on yesterday.

…

We called the FAA for comment, and a spokesperson told us, “The passenger needs to wear a seat belt during landing and he didn’t.”

That was June 28th at 12:58pm.

But a couple hours later, TMZ ran this story, which calls the FAA out:

Laura Brown, the FAA spokesperson who gave TMZ this quote about Billy Mays — “The passenger needs to wear a seat belt during landing and he didn’t” — now says she didn’t say it.

She now tells TMZ, “At this point in time, we cannot have any idea who was or wasn’t wearing their seat belt on the plane.”

(boldface added for emphasis- ed)

Now, on the surface, none of this matters very much. A later story has come forth and it appears that Mays’ death had nothing to do with whatever hit him in the head; he didn’t have any head trauma but did have advanced heart disease, which is probably what killed him.

And the point that people should always wear their seatbelts when on a plane, and particularly when landing, is actually a good point.

But Brown’s statement smacks of blame-the-victim. It’s apparently unverified; a couple hours later Ms Brown was backtracking on whether or not the FAA knew if Mays was wearing his seatbelt. To be fair, a PR flack is only as good as the information that they’re given, and it might very well be that Brown was originally told that Mays hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt. For that, we can forgive (but not forget!) the first lie (the statement “he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt”).

The second lie, though, is pretty unforgiveable. It’s dead-spot-on. The media source properly calls her out for it; first she said one thing, then instead of simply correcting the first statement, she claims that she never made it in the first place.

Sorry, Laura Brown, but you need to know that you just can’t keep lying to the media without it being pointed out. Even those media sources that you might not have as much regard for, like the Follies or TMZ.com, will call you on it.

It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder how on earth the FAA’s leaders can possibly underestimate the agency’s credibility problems. They get caught pulling crap like this OVER AND OVER, and then they wonder why people don’t believe anyone working for the FAA!

Laura Brown has done this to me, too. We emailed at one point and she indicated that she wanted to initiate a discussion. I had done a post talking about parallels between the Columbia shuttle disaster and the FAA and I noticed that she had worked for the review board on that accident.

We got to the point where we were going to talk on the phone and… nothing. No return of my calls, no more emails, no nothing. Now, I can see where she might decide that I’m just an angry blogger in my pajamas (like Jerry Lavey compared some email correspondents to when he used a Chris Matthews quote) and it won’t do any good to talk to me. But if that’s the case, why not say so? Why start the discussion at all?

The FAA’s credibility problems, the FAA’s corporate attitude and atmosphere… these things can be traced back to the people who’re running the agency. The FAA was well on its way down the “Best Places To Work in the Federal Government” list before I started this blog, and whether or not I and the other authors write anything here won’t keep the FAA down there.

What will keep the FAA #214 out of 216 is stuff like what Laura Brown pulled with TMZ. Odds are that they taped their conversation with her- but one wonders what it would take for the FAA’s PR department to put a stop to their PR flacks going out there and lying to the media and to the American people?

Letting that stuff go on (like Jim Peters lecturing air traffic controllers about the safety of the public and suggesting we just quit if we don’t like the FAA) or seeing Jerry Lavey continue in his job as head of internal communications when he’s such a two-faced jerk… that’s the stuff that keeps the FAA at the bottom of the list. Check back here on Thursday for a post detailing what I mean.

The FAA’s managerial types have a program called “Leading Edge”. It’s supposed to be part of their movement to keep improving the FAA. Of course, if they keep doing the same kind of stuff they’ve been doing, they’ve only got a couple more slots to fall before the FAA is officially the worst place to work in the federal government (see this post).

Anyway, one of the parts of “Leading Edge” is a blog. (Bastards stole my idea!) From back on May 5th, 2009, here’s a posting on their blog:

Starting off the morning Sr. VP for Strategy and Performance John Pipes clarified the misleading information regarding Jane Garvey being the lead mediator for talks with NATCA. She will organize and assist in setting up the talks, but experienced professional mediators will be used. All details have not been finalized. Open communication is the only way for us to become one ATO. Thanks Mr. Pipes.

John Pipes is known to be one of the type of managers that’s “led” the FAA to a point where it’s #214 out of 216 to work for. Here, he demonstrates perfectly what a lying liar he is.

Here’s the FAA’s OWN press release on the whole topic of mediation/arbitration, two weeks later:

May 20 – Mediation aimed at ending an ongoing contract dispute between the FAA and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association began Monday.

The agency and controllers union signed a process agreement May 18 to move the negotiations forward as planned. The agreement provides for extensive mediation sessions and for binding resolution of any unresolved issues, guaranteeing a new collective bargaining agreement between the parties.

Former FAA Administrator Jane Garvey leads the mediation as part of a three-member panel that also includes mediators Richard Bloch and George Cohen, who have extensive experience in mediating high profile disputes.

It is expected that the expedited mediation process will continue through early June 2009. At the request of the mediators, and as is customary with all mediation processes, the details will remain confidential until the process reaches its conclusion, although the mediators will release updates to the parties during the process.

In other words, John Pipes, Sr. VP for Strategy and Performance, was talking right out of his ass.

Now, to be fair, maybe the Senior VP for Strategy and Performance just had it wrong. Maybe someone overruled him after he “clarified” things. Maybe he’s not nearly as in charge as he thinks he is, and an even more senior person (who’s senior to the senior vice president? Does the FAA have a “super-senior vice president”?) changed the plan up. Which, no doubt, drove Senior Vice President for Strategy and Performance John Pipes nuts.

Or maybe, just maybe, the reason Pipes was telling a bunch of managers that Jane Garvey wasn’t going to be one of the mediators/arbitrators was because the group was/is freaked out by the idea. They can’t stand the notion that the former FAA Administrator, who actually worked WITH the agency’s employees and tried to listen to them and use them as a good resource, might actually be in charge of the agency’s fate in any way.

Too bad, guys.

I especially love the little bit at the end of their blog posting: “Open communication is the only way for us to become one ATO.” (How many ATOs are there right now? Can I get a transfer to the one that doesn’t suck?)

Here’s a little open communication for you, Senior Vice President for Strategy and Communications John Pipes: Were you lying when you said Jane Garvey wouldn’t be one of the mediators? Or is the FAA’s press release lying? Or were you, the guy who’s supposed to be in charge of strategy, overruled?

Because that’s pretty much the only three options I can figure. Or maybe… maybe you weren’t really lying, but you just didn’t know what you were talking about. I suppose that’s a fourth option.

In any case, Ms Garvey will be sitting in judgement of the same FAA that she left in pretty good shape… and which Marion Blakey and Bobby Sturgell did their best to ruin in the past several years when she heads the arbitration panel on Monday (June 29).

Personally, I think you have to like NATCA’s chances in that. Knock ‘em dead, guys… or, like we say in the Brougham End of Qwest Field during Sounders games…

TAKE ‘EM ALL!!!

Here’s the deal: Controllers are going to make errors. We aim for perfection, but we miss. Part of being a good controller is dealing with the situation when you miss perfection and screw things up. The best, most experienced controllers almost always catch their mistakes before they lose separation of aircraft; sometimes they don’t but usually the loss of separation isn’t very bad.

And then, every so often, we make bigger mistakes:

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A “significant error” by an air traffic controller in Memphis put two airliners too close together over Kentucky last week, leading both to take evasive maneuvers and one pilot to file a near mid-air collision report, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

Now, I don’t mean to be bagging on the person in question. Hell, I’ve had two “deals” (operational errors) myself, and one of them was even my fault. (The other was the pilot’s, but I was the NATCA VP at the time and had just been slamming the QA manager a couple of weeks prior, so when they got too close, guess who took the fall? When that guy (QA manager) retired several years ago it was one of the best things that has ever happened to Seattle Center.)

But there’s a few things I’d like to point out here. (From the same news story):

(NATCA Facility Representative Ron) Carpenter blamed the error on the inexperience of an air traffic controller still in training and on short staffing of the Memphis Air Route Traffic Control Center, which monitors high-altitude flights within a 250-mile radius. Carpenter’s union and the FAA have long been at odds over a shortage of certified controllers nationwide.

The controller involved in the incident was certified on the radar position he was working, but hadn’t completed further training for full certification, Bergen said.

Kathleen Bergen is one of the FAA’s PR flacks. She is regularly trotted out to lie for the people in charge.

FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said Tuesday that the cause of the incident was still under investigation, but the controller has been decertified and ordered to undergo retraining. The American pilot filed a near mid-air collision report with the FAA, Bergen said, which was optional.

So let’s see if I have this straight. The investigation into the event isn’t done, the cause isn’t determined yet, but they’re decertifying the worker already anyway.

That’s a perfect example of the FAA trying to look like it’s doing something to correct the problem… even though they don’t know exactly what the problem is yet.

The FAA has classified the incident as an operational error, “but it was a significant error,” Bergen said.

Look… they’re ALL significant, because they all mean someone screwed up and safety was compromised. Yeah, some of them are worse than others, but EVERY error is something that we should have avoided.

But more importantly, what I wanted to point out here is that this person they’re referring to as a “controller” really isn’t. They’re a TRAINEE. They were apparently certified on this one sector too soon and could use some more training there; thankfully, they’re going to get that, or so it sounds.

The FAA, though, regularly claims that they’ve “hired controllers”. For example, check out this quote from an FAA press release:

The FAA plans to recruit and hire more than 17,000 new air traffic controllers over the next 10 years. Over the last three years, the agency has hired 5,000 new controllers and plans to hire more than 2,000 in fiscal year 2009.

That, folks, is a damned lie. They don’t hire “controllers”. They hire TRAINEES. They’re not controllers until they’re fully certified; when they’re only partially certified, they might be authorized to work a given position on their own but the reality is that they are still a TRAINEE. They are not as experienced as a fully certified controller, and they have a higher likelihood of getting themselves into a nasty situation.

Now, many- indeed, most- of these trainees are doing a great job. Heck, even the trainee in this situation in Memphis might be doing an overall great job of progressing through training. This was probably an exception to the norm. I don’t know, I haven’t emailed anyone down there to find out. And some young, relatively inexperienced controllers are still stepping up and doing fantastic work, like the folks down in Florida a few weeks ago.

But each and every time you read a story where the FAA claims to have “hired controllers”, remember: They’re lying. They don’t hire controllers; they hire trainees. The controllers are retiring and they’re replacing folks who have decades of experience with people who have none.

And we’re short-handed, and there’s no excuse for it; we knew for years that the retirements would come. They did, and worse still, they happened faster than predicted because of the FAA’s own actions driving people out sooner than expected.

Mark Twain famously wrote in his Autobiography

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

With that in mind, consider a slide from the March 26 Core Comp briefing comparing pay for employees covered by the Core Comp Plan to some unspecified “market” (Slide #66 in the Employee Presentation and #73 in the Manager Presentation, available from http://www.faa.gov/region/aso/hrmd/sst/atnbroadcasts.htm).

This slide apparently shows what FAA employees under the Core Comp Plan are paid as the percent of some unspecified “market.” This slide would lead you to believe that FAA employees under Core Comp are overpaid by 5 to 10% relative to that unspecified “market.”

The authors must have certainly been beguiled in the arrangement of this figure. They might have even gotten an invitation for sheet cake in the AHR front office to celebrate their beguilement.

The slide is misleading, at the very least. And statistically … it seems to have been constructed to tell a specific story: Employees should be happy with Core Comp because relative to the “market,” they’re overpaid.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

There are three problems with this comparison.

First, which market is (or markets are) the basis of the comparison? There is no single national market in compensation, as recognized in the 1990 Federal Employee Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA). A common misconception is that the locality adjustments under FEPCA are determined according to cost-of-living fluctuations and other regional considerations. In fact, the adjustments under FEPCA are determined according to the cost of employment in a given area (see Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990).

“Cost of employment in a given area” means “local compensation market.” Just as all politics are local, all compensation is local. Comparing Washington DC compensation to south Alabama is improper, inappropriate, and technically incorrect in a compensation survey.

So which markets are used in this slide? On what basis is the 100% for the “market area” computed? Is it based on the average of compensation across market areas, occupations, and/or comparable organizations in the salary survey (ORC/SIRS)? The slide doesn’t say.

Beguilement and concealment. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Second, what goes into the FAA employee figures? Is it based on the average compensation across market areas, occupations, and/or organizational units?

Beguilement and concealment. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Third, if averages are used (as I suspect), they are sensitive to the underlying range of salaries and are probably skewed by a (relatively few) highly paid individuals. Throw in the K and L-bands at HQ under Core Comp, and the average pay will definitely shift upwards. Bad statistics.

A more appropriate comparison is based on the median: 50% below, 50% above for both the “market” and for covered FAA employees. Or, even better, the FAA should show the distribution of salaries for each job category relative to the market survey distributions for comparable jobs nationally. For example, I’m at the 50th percentile (nationally) according to my professional society’s bi-annual salary survey, not at 105%, for 2008.

Beguilement and concealment. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

But what else can we expect from AHR given that Core Comp was declared a success from the beginning?

More lies. More damned lies. More bad statistics.

(I owe everyone an apology- I thought I’d scheduled this post to run on Tuesday, 24 March. I screwed something up and didn’t notice until Wednesday afternoon it wasn’t up. Anyway, here it is, and there are a couple more scheduled for Thursday and Friday this week, including a killer piece that takes a good look at Core Comp by Publius.)

So the other day, I was cruising the Follies website. On the right side of our front page we feature an “RSS Feed” that’s connected to Google News; it loads up headlines and links to articles that are on the web. It searches on the terms “FAA” and “FAA air traffic control”. And no, I don’t know why sometimes those feeds work and sometimes they don’t- right now, for instance, I can only see one of them. (Anyone want to be the Follies’ webmonkey?)

ANYWAY. The other day, an article published by Aviation Week and Space Technology, which is probably THE leading news source for aerospace-industry-related information, talked about how great ERAM is coming along and it’s on time and was “almost ready for debut”.

I read the article with great interest, since my facility, Seattle Center (ZSE), is one of the first two sites to be getting ERAM. Salt Lake Center (ZLC) is supposed to be “first site”, about a week or three ahead of ZSE, and then we go live with it as well. (ZSE used to be first site for nearly everything, thanks to our isolation at the NW corner of the nation… and our awesome AF department’s ability to do a kick-butt job of working with AT to bring stuff online. I’m not sure why we didn’t get picked to be first this time around.)

Anyway, a few quotes from the article (which was datelined March 15) jumped out at me, because they were… well, they were utter bullshit (sorry, Mom):

…The agency expects within the next month to debut a new system to handle en route traffic, a project that is a crucial precursor for the FAA’s long-term NextGen plan.

The en route automation modernization (ERAM) system, developed by Lockheed Martin, represents one of the most complex and expensive upgrades the FAA has ever undertaken. ERAM is expected to begin controlling live traffic at the FAA’s Salt Lake City center late this month or early April, and at the Seattle center a few weeks later. Once the system has checked out at these two sites, it will be rolled out nationwide to the remaining 18 en route centers.

(emphasis added- ed.)

Um, nope. By March 15, ERAM had already slid to late May, at best, at both ZLC and ZSE. The very thrust of the AWST article was wrong, and the specfic “facts” they reported about ERAM’s IOC dates were flat-out wrong.

Now, here’s the deal. It’d be nice to think that most of the news media is out there actively checking up on things and instigating these stories. You know, investigative journalism, intrepid reporters who are out there turning over rocks and digging up the REAL news.

The reality is a lot different. Plenty of news is true “reporting”, but a lot of stories like the one above are actually initiated by press release or contacts from PR and “communications” people. I doubt that Adrian Schofield, the author of the AWST article, was sitting at his desk and said to himself “hey, I wonder how the FAA’s ERAM project is coming along, I should give them a call to find out”.

I think it’s far more likely that someone in the FAA (or at Lockheed) contacted AWST and said “hey, ERAM’s going awesome, we’re about ready to turn it on!” and then Adrian was assigned to write the article and started looking into it. I don’t know this for sure, but I’m guessing.

Either way, though, it’s lazy reporting… or at least incomplete reporting. The reason? ERAM isn’t ready. It’s still buggy as hell, the word is that it hasn’t yet run for more than around 30 hours straight without crashing, and they’re still finding NEW bugs in the system even while they’re backlogged fixing the old ones.

But Mr (or Ms, I suppose “Adrian” could be a female’s name) Schofield doesn’t have contacts directly into ZLC or ZSE that can give him the truth about it, so he’s got to rely upon the contacts that he does have- and they all either got it wrong or flat-out lied about the state of the program.

So Adrian knocks out the “ERAM will be ready in March or maybe April” when the reality is that at ZSE it’s already slipped to the last week of May and is likely headed for even later. I’ve heard some of the staff folks who are heavily involved say that the FAA would be lucky if we got the thing turned on by the end of June.

Now, I’m not happy about the state of reporting and analysis in our nation’s mass media. Here in Seattle, which was one of the last cities in America of this size to have two daily newspapers, we just lost one of them- the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Most newspapers are a considerably slimmed-down version of what they used to be, thanks to monster budget cuts.

This means I can understand Schofield’s inability to get at the real story- not enough time, resources, budget to really get in depth and discover the truth.

Jerry Lavey, on the other hand, doesn’t have those excuses. (You knew this was coming, didn’t you?)

In Lavey’s March 20th “AOA Highlights“, he writes glowingly about how swell ERAM is coming along and how it’s a terrific example of the FAA really getting its stuff together these days. He quotes some of the AWST piece, and then finishes with this:

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.

Sorry, Jerry, but you don’t have the same excuse as Schofield for passing along incorrect information. (Or, put a little bit more bluntly, you don’t have the same excuse for lying as he does.) You work for the FAA. Your written product appears to consist of an AOA Highlights once a week, and maybe one more opinion/musing piece you do once a month.

(Pathetic output when you consider Lavey gets paid 168 grand a year; for quite some time I cranked out 5 pieces a week for the Follies for FREE.)

And Lavey can simply call up someone at ZSE or ZLC and say “hey, I’m writing a bit about how great ERAM is coming along, just wanted to check- how are things out there in the field? Aviation Week says you’ll be up and running in March, or maybe April.”

Then someone could say “well, honestly, not great. We’ve slipped the schedule a couple of months already, we’re at the last week of May for Seattle Center and odds are that will slide further and we’ll be in June. Our staff folks and AF people and AOS guys and Lockheed are working hard, but there’s still a lot of pretty serious problems with the system and as it stands right now, we can’t let it run for more than about 24 hours without restarting it.”

“The testing stuff doesn’t work right, there’s still some problems with the DYSIM implementation of ERAM, and our controllers have to keep being ‘refreshed’ on the system, so we’ve got some training issues to go along with everything else.”

Lavey could also pick up the phone and call someone in the NATCA national office. Air traffic controllers are, after all, going to be the primary users of the ERAM system; it’s reasonable to assume that they would know something about how that system is coming along.

(And believe me, I know how incredibly stupid that sentence is in today’s FAA, but let’s play along and pretend we live in a reasonable world, okay?)

And the NATCA folks would route Uncle Jerry’s call to the NATCA guy who knows the most about ERAM, and if he even bothered to TAKE a call from Jerry Lavey (many in NATCA wouldn’t bother trying to talk to the guy since they’re not masochists like me) he would say something along the lines of “Well, Mr Lavey, from what I hear, ERAM doesn’t work yet. But I can’t tell for sure, because the FAA refuses to negotiate in good faith with the union about the impacts on the ATC workforce from the ERAM system, and if you’ll recall the FAA unilaterally kicked all of NATCA’s subject matter experts out of Washington DC and off of all project implementation teams, so we’re not officially involved in the ERAM program at all and therefore can’t help the agency get it fixed.”

Finally, Jerry might call or email ME. Believe me, he’s got my email address. And even though I think he’s crappy at his job, I’d say “well, Jerry, I’m not personally involved with ERAM, but I can get you the email contacts of people here who are directly involved and you can ask them how it’s going.” Then I’d get with a few people, let them know Lavey would be contacting them and encourage them to tell him the truth as they see it, and give him their contact information.

Instead of doing ANY of that, Lavey chooses to write his opinion piece based on the incorrect propaganda-driven bit in AWST, and turns around and tells the rest of the FAA “All is well!”

Of course, wise FAA employees pay about as much serious attention to Jerry Lavey as the people of Faber, Pennsylvania paid to ROTC cadet Chip Diller (aka Kevin Bacon).

Wise FAA employees know that the primary reason that “our major acquisition programs have been on schedule and on budget” is because the FAA “rebaselined” those projects, sometimes more than once. By “rebaselining” them, the agency simply reset the schedule and budget after it was obvious that the projects would NOT be on time and would NOT be under budget; push the schedule way out into the future, amp up the budget, and voila!

ALL IS WELL!

So the agency’s employees get to see the result of the FAA’s propaganda machine. Someone at Lockheed or in the FAA’s “external communications” department contacts AWST and passes along a bunch of bad info about the ERAM project being on time and just about ready go to, only a few little bugs to iron out. AWST publishes an article saying that. Jerry Lavey reads that article, doesn’t bother to call anyone in the FAA to actually get the truth about ERAM, and writes his own puff piece, full of goddamn lies incorrect assertions about ERAM.

And that, folks, is the ERAM propaganda machine. Lavey’s opinion blurb is based on a bad article that’s based on lies that some PR person working for the FAA or Lockheed passed along.

Does anyone think the FAA will improve its score on “honesty” whenever the next Employee Attitude Survey comes out?