Bryan:

When Americans visit Europe, they see a lot to like: Charming boulevards, delicious food, and historic cities that feel safe.  When Europeans visit the U.S., it’s not so pretty: While major American cities are impressive, their inhabitants can be more than a little scary even after the sharp decline in crime rates.  From an American or European tourist’s point of view, Europe seems not just more aesthetic than the U.S., but more hospitable.

He argues that American tourists see the quaintest and nicest parts of Europe, while most Europeans live in less appealing suburbs, and those who live in the attractive urban centers cannot afford to enjoy it much. Meanwhile, European tourists see some of America’s grungiest places (“NYC and SF are basically uglier, scarier versions of the premiere European cities”) but avoid the attractive suburbs where most Americans (happily) live.

“Europe is a better place for most people to visit,” he concludes. “But America is a better place for most people to live.”

Tyler, with a dig at modernist architecture:

Bryan gives some good reasons why America is better for 37-year-olds with young children, namely lots of living space and easy shopping.  But I view much of Western Europe as better for the elderly, if only because it requires less driving and they are more likely to live close to their children and perhaps also they receive more respect.  Western Europe is probably better for children too, for reasons related to safety and health care”

My alternative view is that Americans rate European life so highly (in part) because the buildings from previous eras are so striking and attractive.  If all of the U.S. looked like U.S. postwar construction, the country would still impress more or less as it does.  If all of Europe looked like its postwar construction, Americans would be less likely to admire European policies and political institutions.  Yes I know about Lille, and contemporary Spanish architecture, but in reality most Americans would think of Europe as some kind of dump.

What do you think?

But Ms. Zuckman said that only support personnel, such as in finance and operations, were asked to work on the clunkers program.

“Nobody is being ordered to do anything; we weren’t asking air traffic controllers to leave their posts. We’re using budget and accounting people primarily,” she said.

“It was made clear that no core mission activities of the FAA are to be affected by this effort, especially as they could relate to air traffic operations.”

A union spokeswoman confirmed the account Friday.

“Air traffic controllers are not being asked to do this,” said Alex Caldwell, a spokeswoman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

Basically, the actual story doesn’t live up to Hot Air’s scare headline. You don’t have to think that Cash for Clunkers was a good idea (I don’t) to think it’s a bad idea for federal support personnel to spend a few days helping to clear a backlog that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

Unless something develops in this story, there’s nothing to see here.

There are already aviation buffs out there saying “oh please, oh please” — if only to experience an approach that would rival runway 13 at Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak airport.

Today I have an item on National Journal‘s Transportation Experts blog — have a look.

[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid said the corporation “would market the U.S. around the globe as a tourist destination.” Reid told reporters earlier in the week that the bill could create 40,000 new jobs in the U.S. [B.S.--ed.]

Initially the corporation would receive $10 million in federal funding from money collected from travelers under the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) system currently being established by the Department of Homeland Secretary. After Fiscal 2010, the corporation would have to raise matching contributions to qualify for additional federal funding.

Radley Balko comments that “this is all because tourism is down, due all the money we’ve spent on post 9-11 efforts to make it more difficult for foreigners to come here.” (Reason piles on, too.) I’m sympathetic to that line of reasoning — want to talk about winning hearts and minds around the world? Then try making it not so much of a hassle to get through our ports of entry. But the numbers just don’t back Balko up. According to a 2008 report (with data up to 2007) from the Department of Commerce, after dropping off sharply post-9/11, foreign tourism began to rebound (not from every country, but a slight upward trend is clear). It wasn’t until after the financial crisis last year that foreign arrivals began to tank year on year, continuing to post steep declines in the first part of this year.

The fact is, regardless of the effectiveness of U.S. border security policies, the downturn in tourism is primarily due to the current economic contraction, not post-9/11 security procedures.

Now, whether it’s helpful for the government to get involved in the tourism marketing business is something else altogether. But I guess with all the work the administration has done to discourage U.S. companies to bring tourist dollars to places like Vegas, it might as well make up the balance by bringing in some foreigners.

It would be irresponsible to get ahead of evidence [in the AF447 investigation], but important factors are emerging. First, some experts blame global warming for the increased severity and frequency of hurricanes (most of which originate at latitudes within 5 to 15 degrees of the equator). Second, the flight appears to have passed through a band of equatorial megastorms. Finally, levels of turbulence in such storms are being investigated in the crash. Perhaps the memorial service in Paris will be recognized as the first for airline victims of global warming.

Hat tip to Cafe Hayek.

Opening statements by Babbitt and Porcari have been posted on the committee’s website.

I’m not on the Hill today, but I am watching the hearing’s live webcast. I’ll bring you aviation-related highlights of the hearing throughout the day, so refresh this post for the latest updates. Stay tuned!

Babbitt

11:43. Interesting item from Babbitt’s testimony: “I have worked with members of Congress on major aviation safety issues, including one of which I am most proud, ‘One Level of Safety.’ I led this project in 1993 while I was president of ALPA. This program resulted in required regional carriers to operate under the same rules and at the same level of safety as their major carrier counterparts.” Of significant relevance given the attention paid to small-lift provider safety standards in the wake of the NTSB’s Colgan Air crash hearings.

11:48. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) was principally responsible for torpedoing the confirmation of Robert Sturgell, former president Bush’s FAA nominee. He’s much happier with Babbitt today, about whom, when he slips up and says “if you are confirmed, he adds “if you’re not it will be a miracle.” Lautenberg asks about the New York / New Jersey / Philadelphia airspace redesign. Would Babbitt put a hold on the redesign until frontline air traffic controllers ha had a chance to weigh in? “I’m not exactly certain where that process stands at this time,” Babbitt replies. “On a personal basis, I would really like to solicit input from all the stakeholders in that area. . . . I think it’s very important that [controllers] have input in this process.”

Lautenberg then raises a parochial concern that is more than parochial, given the airport’s role in the system: reported controller shortages at Newark Liberty International Airport. “Can you assure us that the Newark tower will be staffed to the volume of performance we require there?” Babbitt: “It’s my hope that every tower in this country will be staffed and manned to the highest degree.” He refers to the “bubble of controllers being in a similar age, a band of age” who are going to retire soon. (And already are.–ed.)

11:53. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), the committee’s ranking member, asks Porcari about alliance antitrust review. “The [alliances] are very important for the competitive landscape in America.” (Especially her home-state airline American and its Oneworld immunity application.–ed.) Will he move expeditiously to makes these review decisions? “I fear another merger mania if we don’t have these kind of opportunities for competitive alliances that put off the need for mergers,” she adds. Porcari replies that he will move fast, and that in his current Maryland role as an overseer of Baltimore-Washington International Airport, “I am a party of record in favor of [the Oneworld immunity] application.”

KBH next turns to Babbitt to urge him to make the NextGen basket of air traffic control improvements his highest priority. “It is one of our highest priority,” Babbitt replies. “There is an industrywide task force that is looking at what do the users actually want,” and, he continues, there are existing technologies that will allow us to begin implemention right now. (Yes, he used the word “begin.”) Babbitt describes how some airlines are already using continuous descent approach to save fuel and reduce their local noise footprints. “We have this technology,” he says, but we need to find out where we can deploy it strategically — “where we can get the biggest advantage in reducing delays.”

12:02. “I have some concern with the slowness of the deployment of NextGen as far as the FAA is concerned,” Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) says. “The most important thing we can do is to work with ths stakeholders — meaning the airlines — to come up with a plan that works for them,” Babbitt said. It’s an expensive transition: the costs for transition can be as much as $800,000 per airplane — a very expensive undertaking. We have to convince airlines of the return on capital investment, Babbitt emphasized.

Porcari

12:08. Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) speaks up for general aviation, which he describes a $150 billion industry, big in his home state, and a big export industry. But it’s in big trouble right now. (This might be part of the reason why.–ed.) He urges Babbitt to work with the general aviation industry (“I’m sure you will”). He also hopes that user fees won’t be part of the picture for general aviation when it comes to funding air traffic control:  “General aviation’s going to pay its share, but it doesn’t want to be penalized or paid for on a transaction basis.” Brownback also hopes that Babbitt will continue to support the Essential Air Service, to which Porcari pipes up that it’s more of a DOT program than an FAA program. He adds, “I recognize that it is an economic lifeline to many communities.”

12:13. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) is concerned about the “stunning disclosures” regarding Colgan Air Flight 3407 (see more here). Do we have “dramatically different standards in cockpits on commercial planes”? Babbitt returns to his opening statement, citing the introduction of One Level of Safety, prior to which there were literally two different standards for regionals and majors. Dorgan presses, however, a bit harshly: “Do equivalent standards now exist and are enforced?” Babbitt is not agitated as he replies, “They exist and are enforced. The reality is, when you’re hiring a pilot at a major carrier, you’re going to get someone with 5000 hours walking through the door.” Someone getting hired at a regional carrier will have far fewer hours. That’s a simple fact of life in the airline industry.

Dorgan says he will address this issue more in hearings later this summer, along with the issue of flight crew fatigue. Then he concludes. “We have not had consistent leadership [at the FAA]. . . . This is an agency that requires a lot of attention.” (I didn’t think Sturgell was the right man for the job, but it’s a little ballsy to criticize a leadership vaccum at the FAA while your party blocks a nomination in order to wait for a Democratic president.–ed.)

12:21. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) inquires about the cooling-off period between working for an airline and going to work for the FAA. “We covered it pretty well in the internal review team,” Babbitt responds. “There’s a pretty good balance.” Knowledge of an airline’s operations is a good thing, he said. The sweet spot is knowing when too much knowledge of an airline becomes a liability. “The answer,” he adds, “is the second that safety of flight becomes an issue.”

Shortly after this exchange, at 12:30, the hearing adjourns as the senators rush to the Senate floor for a vote. What a difference in tone a party switch makes!

Then, Brown links to a James Fallows post reporting on a GAO finding that the “U.S. Air Force, which runs the GPS satellites, has not managed to get new ‘IIF’-model satellites ready in time to replace the ones that are wearing out.” Brown: “So, we’re going to eliminate the system that GPS made obsolete, just in time for the GPS system to become unreliable. I assume the thought that the left hand of the government doesn’t know what the right is doing pops into your mind also.”

This reminded me of a new article by Jonathan Last about the natural process of knowledge decay in institutions. He documents the $92 million process of reconstructing the formula for “Fogbank,” a substance included in late-Cold War nuclear warheads whose formula had since been lost to history. Knowledge is lost, distorted, housed in human capital. Think of what happens when the admin in your office who’s been there for twenty-five years retires. No matter how much she writes down, she still takes away (and does not replace) a vast amount of institutional memory and knowledge.

And when you’re dealing with an institution as large and complex as the U.S. government, these kind of gaps are bound to happen frequently. The FAA thinks, “GPS, it’s a great system, let’s make it the basis of air traffic control.” (This is not a post on merits of Next Gen, FYI.) The Pentagon doesn’t bring a replacement for the current GPS system on line fast enough. And the OMB, eager to find redundancies in the federal budget, cuts the GPS back-up without knowing about delays in deploying its successor system. This is natural in giant institutions. We should probably be more surprised when systems actually work.

[O]ur results suggest that inter-regional spread occurs by a different mechanism, where air travel may be an important mode of long-range dissemination of influenza. We find that the effect of airline volume on regional influenza spread is largely based on travel in November. Though influenza activity is highest between January and March, initial regional seeding of infection may occur earlier. Our results suggest that for a non-pandemic year, travel during the Thanksgiving holiday may be central to the yearly national spread of influenza in the US. Similarly, we found that international airline travel influences the absolute timing of seasonal influenza mortality.

The flight ban in the US after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent depression of the air travel market provided a natural experiment for the evaluation of the effect of flight restrictions on disease spread. The importance of airline activity was highlighted by the delayed peak of influenza in 2001–2002 following the period of reduced flying activity. This finding is further validated by the absence of a similar delay in influenza activity in France, where flight restrictions were not imposed.

Thus, even though air travel is a major agent in spreading flu, by the time infections peak, the virus has already been seeded around the country and the world.

Matt interviewed John Brownstein, and their discussion is available at the Middle Seat Terminal blog post.

For more: yesterday’s post.

The outbreak and rapid spread of the H1N1 swine influenza virus in Mexico and now the United States puts policymakers and business leaders in a difficult position vis-a-vis air travel. Pandemics exploit all the virtues of the air travel boom of the past few decades — a system that transports people and goods for travel, commerce, and economic opportunity suddenly becomes a primary agent of deadly disease. It’s the downside risk of international economic and cultural integration. Such integration still pays handsome benefits, however, and the risks can be mitigated by a multilateral public health infrastructure poised to go into action.

We are now in a critical moment for U.S. and World Health Organization (WHO) policymakers and the international aviation industry. To declare a pandemic right now and impose travel restrictions (as the U.S. and WHO have not done) might overstate the threat from swine flu and excessively impair travel to Mexico and U.S. border regions. But this outbreak appears to be unusually aggressive, with high mortality, suggesting that policymakers should nip it in the bud regardless of the cost to the travel industry. As the first case was reported in Europe, EU authorities issued travel advisories for the United States and Mexico. The danger to the aviation industry from either an over-aggressive response or from a widespread pandemic is high. In April and May 2003, at the height of the SARS epidemic in Southeast Asia and Canada, air traffic in the Asia-Pacific region dropped 45 and 51 percent, respectively. U.S. carriers with extensive routes in Asia — Northwest and United, especially — also suffered. This is an even worse problem in a recession, in which the prospect of future growth after an epidemic-related contraction is limited.

Part of the problem for policymakers is that U.S. citizens are inexperienced with pandemic response procedures. We are used to frequent and easy travel, not only by air but also locally, for work, school, or recreation. With deadly infectious diseases like smallpox and polio eradicated, we have become lazy. Less than half the number of people for whom the annual flu vaccine is recommended get it. Activists play on fear to spread the unproven belief that ingredients of children’s vaccines can cause autism, and their success in misinforming the public is correlated with a spike in pediatric measles infections (Megan McArdle referred to parents who decline to vaccinate their children as “twee BoBo sociopaths“). Our cities are unaccustomed to quarantines. How would you react to an order to stay indoors except for essential business? Would you obey it? The discipline of disease control is honed over time and cannot be immediately adopted with success. Moreover, the scale of the United States is also unsuitable for a concerted public health response. It’s one thing to isolate SARS in a tiny enclave like Hong Kong (which is extremely vigilant, at any rate) or on an island like Taiwan (unconscionably prohibited by Beijing from receiving WHO support during epidemics, by the way).

Whether or not this swine flu outbreak becomes an epidemic or a pandemic, policymakers and airline industry leaders need to be prepared for the dark side of global integration. Preventing the spread of epidemic diseases should be at the top of any government’s list.

Further reading:

• ICAO guidelines for handling communicable diseases
• IATA information and statement

[Image]

This is the barrier where the sole road into Gibraltar crosses the airport’s runway. (The airport terminal is in the background in this photo.) The road and walkway are closed during the few times a day when a plane is landing or taking off. I case you can’t see clearly, the signs say:

AIRFIELD AHEAD
Pedestrians are to keep within the white lines.
Please cross quickly.

ATTENTION
Litter can cause aircraft accidents.
Put your litter in the red bins.
Keep the runway clear.

It’s a bit surreal walking across an active runway. Gibraltar is a great aviation destination. Below the fold are a few photos from the terminal, through which my traveling companion and I departed the Mediterranean coast and returned to London.

I walk across the runway into Gibraltar. The Rock is the first (and last) thing you see in arriving in the territory, by land or air.

Well-tanned and leather-skinned sun-seekers queue up in the tiny terminal lobby for the Monarch Scheduled flight home to Britain.

The Rock and the airport's apron are visible from the comfortable outdoor observation deck atop the terminal, giving the airport a charming mid-century feel.

British Airways flight from Gatwick arrives at Gibraltar. I flew back to Luton a little later on a Monarch 757.

• The Airplane Geeks podcast with Max and Court
• A guest post on the Cranky Flier
• An IAG podcast with Addison Schonland

The Dutch Government is to scrap from July 1 its air passenger ticket tax, first dubbed the ‘eco’ tax when it was introduced against major opposition by aviation and local industry last year. The controversial departure tax, which ranges from 11 to 45 euros, is blamed for a steep decline in passenger traffic at the main Dutch airports, particularly at Amsterdam Schiphol.

The tax was billed as a “green tax,” meaning that it was intended to raise the cost of flying sufficiently to deter passenger travel — and hence greenhouse gas emissions — on the margin. It apparently did this swimmingly well, better than I would have expected:

Schiphol Airport, Europe’s fifth biggest in terms of passenger enplanements, recorded a drop of 430,000 passengers in February, a 13.7% fall against the same month a year ago. The number of locally boarding passengers fell by 17.7%. The number of transfer passengers, who were exempted from the tax, declined by 8.5%.

As the story notes, this tax was not levied on transfer passengers in an attempt to keep KLM and its Schiphol hub competitive with airlines based at Paris, London Heathrow, Frankfurt, and Copenhagen. Since transfer passengers make up a huge share of Schiphol’s business, the surcharge would never have made much of a dent in the Netherlands’ aviation carbon footprint. The fact that transfer passengers were exempted and that the tax is pulled just when it seems to be working vindicates the complaints that it is a “revenue grab.”

The suspension of this tax also illustrates a tax problem. In an age of free movement across jurisdictional boundaries, tax competition is heightened, especially in areas like the low countries where a competing, lower-tax airport may be just a short drive away. “The airport operator along with Dutch carrier KLM had previously warned that potential passengers would try to avoid the tax by flying from airports across the border in Belgium or Germany,” the story report. “The Belgian Government has already abandoned a proposal to introduce a similar tax.” Unless the EU or a larger jurisdiction is going to impose a charge like this one, countries that impose it on themselves in a global downturn are making an economic death wish.

See my previous posts on the Dutch travel tax here, here, and here.

[H/T: Cranky]

It was also a pleasure to meet and see folks from the aviation media community — Richard Velotta from the Las Vegas Sun, Victoria Day from ATA, Lori Ranson from Flight, Bill Swelbar of the Swelblog, Holly Hegeman of Plane Business, and Joshua Freed of AP.