Ask the pilot

I know, I know, we've been through this before. It's fish in a barrel. And here I am calling off my self-imposed moratorium on security discussions after hammering this topic for most of last summer. But the madness has become patently abject, and people need to realize they are subsidizing it. More than 2 million Americans experience the carnival of airport security every day. An apparatus that big takes a lot of dough to keep it running. First, our taxes pay for the salaries of thousands of airport screeners, and for all the many overpriced accouterments demanded of a bureaucracy. Then come the trickle-down costs of delays, missed flights and broken appointments, along with the intangibles of widespread tension and anxiety. Last but not least, every dollar fed to the TSA furnace in a bid to keep shampoo off airplanes is a dollar that could have been spent more effectively elsewhere in the security chain. The bill for that one comes later, possibly in the guise of catastrophe.

Not that Americans hold a monopoly on bad ideas. Starting Nov. 6, all airports in the European Union will implement a liquids and gels program almost identical to ours. The size restriction will be 100 milliliters, and containers will need to be in placed in plastic bags. "A new threat to aviation security has emerged: liquid explosives," reads a briefing bulletin from the Association of European Airlines and Airports Council International.

This is bad news for Europeans, and even as that bulletin plays fast and loose with the truth -- this "new" threat has been known about for more than a decade -- why do I have a feeling E.U. authorities will not bungle and botch things as badly as we have? Of everything there is to criticize about airport security in America, it's not the regulations themselves that bother me most but the manner in which they're applied. Five years after Sept. 11, the average checkpoint in this country remains a jerry-rigged jumble of rickety tables, clattering plastic buckets and guards barking orders to swarms of confused fliers. And the idea that a trained representative of the TSA, whose job it is, allegedly, to protect fliers from criminals and terrorists, would haggle over the absence of a plastic bag tells you all there is to know.

End of rant. That moratorium on all things security is hereby reinstated. If you're tired of reading about it, I'm tired of writing about it.

Speaking of tiredness, we turn to something completely different -- a scandal of sorts involving JetBlue, one of the country's most popular upstart carriers. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal broke a story purporting that in 2005, the New York-based airline had conducted an unusual series of experiments on pilot fatigue, without the knowledge of paying passengers.

"Without seeking approval from Federal Aviation Administration headquarters," says the Journal, "consultants for JetBlue outfitted a small number of pilots with devices to measure alertness. Operating on a green light from lower-level FAA officials, management assigned the crews to work longer shifts in the cockpit -- as many as 10 to 11 hours a day -- than the eight hours the government allows. Their hope: Showing that pilots could safely fly far longer without exhibiting ill effects from fatigue." Customers on these flights were not aware of the tests.

The Journal exposé quickly exploded through the blogosphere and was picked up by media around the world, sparking outrage over the idea of passengers being used as guinea pigs by an airline looking to cut costs.

"Passengers would be shocked that this was going on," remarked the always incendiary David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association. "When travelers buy tickets on commercial flights, they don't expect to be test pilots themselves."

That's an effective sound bite, but in truth this story is sorely overblown, and it completely misses the point with respect to crew fatigue. Fatigue is a legitimate and troubling issue, and has been for years, and the newspaper is correct in pointing out the FAA's existing eight-hour maximum on cockpit time. (Long-haul flights beyond eight hours' duration carry one or more relief pilots.) But cockpit time isn't the problem. The problem is mostly one of "duty time" -- for pilots that includes not only those hours at the controls but hours spent waiting out delays and long breaks between scheduled departures -- and its corollary, layover time. In these areas, bargaining agreements and/or company rules typically go above and beyond what the government requires, though still there are loopholes.

On a given workday, a pilot might log only two hours on the flight deck. I doubt that would raise the ire of bloggers or garner a snort from Stempler. Except, those two hours might come at either end of a 15-hour duty stretch that began at 5 a.m., most of which was spent waiting out weather delays or killing time in the terminal. Or a pilot might have packed eight full hours of flying -- with five, six or even seven legs -- into that same span. Twelve-, 14-, even 16-hour shifts are possible, containing anywhere from zero to eight-plus hours aloft.

The ultimate horror is something called a "continuous duty" or "stand-up" layover. A crew signs on at, say, 9 p.m. and flies a short leg, arriving at 11 p.m. The next leg isn't scheduled until 7 o'clock in the morning. The crew "stands up" until then, technically on duty the entire time, either trying to catch a nap at the motel or slouching around the airport crew room.

Notice I say "motel" and not the Marriott or Hyatt, as this is chiefly a scourge of commuter and regional carriers. Crews at larger airlines tend to have it considerably better, but they too are hardly immune from duty-related stress and exhaustion. Short layovers sandwiched between long days of flying are not uncommon.

Those layover sandwiches are called "rest periods" in industry and FAA parlance. If a crew goes off duty in Chicago at 9 p.m. and signs on again at 6 a.m., that's a nine-hour rest period. Legal minimum rest can be as short as eight hours. That doesn't sound terribly abusive, until you start subtracting the time spent doing post-flight paperwork, standing on the curb in freezing rain waiting for the hotel van, driving to and from the airport, scrounging for food and so on. Eight hours is now five. As I've recommended in this space before, the most productive step regulators could take is eliminating transit time from what it considers "rest." In fairness to a pilot and his passengers, that rest clock should not begin to tick until the minute he latches the door of his hotel room, and should stop ticking no later than the minute he checks out.

That will never happen. Because it introduces ambiguity into how long a given layover might actually last, airlines can't work with it. And whether in spite of or because of this, the FAA has spent the past two decades procrastinating, legislating minor changes while commissioning study after study.

It's somewhat amusing, and frustrating, to hear so much howling over JetBlue's on-the-job research trials. I'd have no problem with a crew at the controls for 10 or 11 hours, so long as the pilots were adequately rested and the duty period reasonable. (If at some point the FAA considers slackening the eight-hour cockpit rule, it will need to reduce duty limits concurrently.) But although JetBlue doesn't seem to be guilty of endangering the public, it is more clearly guilty, based on what the Journal tells us, of underhandedness. It's easy to understand why the airline wasn't eager to disclose the program to passengers. The nuances of duty time, flight time, etc., would have been lost in translation, leaving people to envision droopy-eyed, half-awake pilots at the helm.

But precisely for that reason, it was a terrible move not to secure more explicit consent. JetBlue ought to have made sure the FAA knew exactly what it was doing, top to bottom, and figured out a way to package the tests palatably to customers. An on-board brochure, perhaps, might have done the trick, emphasizing that a third pilot was on hand at all times -- as indeed was the case. Secrecy and silence were a recipe for scandal, fomenting yet more negative sentiment among a public that already dislikes and distrusts airlines.

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