Planes, Profits, Peril (and Why Flying Sucks)

0:00 I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you. It's. Time for you and me to stand up for ourselves. Welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where we deconstruct word salads. Today we're talking about the airline industry, unfriendly skies, profits over safety and the race to the bottom. I'm your host Lola Michaels, joined by our black box brainiac Ezra Saeed. Hi, Lola. Hi, everybody. And frequent fire Cam cruise. Hi, everybody. You can find all our episodes on our website, unwashedun-ruly.com. You can also look for our podcast wherever you find your other podcasts.

0:45 Just type us into the search engine. You can also rate and review our episode and if you have any questions, you can reach us at contact at unwashedun-ruly.com. If you've done any air travel lately, you know the vibe. Pure calculated chaos. Unaffordable airfare. Long lines, delays, cancellations. Terrifying near misses. Understaffed air traffic towers. For nearly 50 years, the American airline industry has been a playground for monopoly capitalism. In this episode, we're tracing the industry's descent from a regulated public utility to an oligarchy of anarchy.

1:25 It started with the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, which promised to democratize air travel. In reality, it handed the keys to the BIG4 carriers. Now Delta, American, United and Southwest control 80% of the sky. Airline carriers have mastered the art of socializing their losses and privatizing their profits, using bankruptcies to shred union contracts and demanding taxpayer bailouts the second the market dips. The structural route was set by the biggest union busting attack in modern history in 1981. When the Reagan administration crushed the Padco strike by firing over 11,000, striking air traffic controllers and shackling their leaders, the government sent a chilling message that safety isn't a public service, it's a cost to be minimized. That neoliberal strategy has trickled down into every cockpit and hanger.

2:18 Regional pilots making poverty wages, maintenance being outsourced to the lowest bidder, workers being squeezed for a leaner bottom line while passenger safety is compromised. The airline industry today is one of the most despised industries for good reason. As passengers, we endure a system where our discomfort is the business model. Crammed into shrinking seats on jam packed planes while being nickeled and dimed by junk fees for amenities that used to be standard, the lack of reliability and the misery of flying are the predictable outcomes of a system that prioritizes stock buybacks over basic rights.

3:00 Let's start off talking a little bit about what motivated us to do this episode, besides the fact that Ezra is obsessed with airline crashes. We started to talk about this after the incident at LaGuardia Airport in March when an Air Canada Express flight collided with a Port Authority fire truck crossing the runway. We also kind of curious about another tragedy that hasn't been talked about very frequently from last year, January of 2025. And that was when the American Airlines flight collided with a military helicopter in midair over the Potomac River. And it just seemed like we needed to answer this question about whether or not flying under this administration and with everything that's being torn apart and ripped to shreds is going to get a lot worse.

3:46 Well, I got obsessed with air travel and air safety beginning about 2025 years ago because I found it a good way to address my fear of flying. When I was younger, I had No Fear of flying. And then suddenly, I don't know, something clicked in my brain and I would ever I would get inside an airplane, I would start thinking gravity will win. Gravity will win, which is true, by the way. You realized as an adult that you were a mortal. I think I did. I think I became more conscious of my mortality. And so I started really obsessing over why planes crashed and why they don't. And I actually found the more I learned about why airline crashes happen, the more my fear of flying subsided.

4:32 Would you say that watching plane crashes soothe you? It's more that once you understand what causes accidents to happen and the fact that it's notwithstanding all the chicanery that happens by the government and by the airline industry, it actually is a very safe mode of travel and why planes crash. Once you get a sense of that, it does soothe you in the sense of you when you understand something and you're more capable of dealing with your fear of it. Yeah, that actually makes sense, even though I was trying to make fun of you. I've been thinking about this a lot lately because recently the TSA went a few months without getting paid. And I think even now they're they're still only receiving partial paychecks. So that was pretty crazy and obviously made air travel a nightmare.

5:19 And the administration's response to this was to send ICE into airports, and ICE was pretty much just arresting people that they suspected of being immigrants and creating more chaos at an already chaotic situation. So, yeah, we've been talking about that a lot lately. So not just the airplanes themselves, but air travel and the air industry. And of course, you know, I've, I've always got my eyes on the Tik Toks. And there's a steady stream of people getting into fights, people getting kicked off of planes and an occasional debuting of a seat that makes everybody crash out because it's horrific. So since the airline industry is a good barometer of the dystopia we live in, I think it's something we all kind of keep our eyes on.

6:00 So one of the things that is kind of critical to get off the agenda whenever you're talking about what happened to the airline industry and where we are today is deregulation. Everything changed with airline deregulation in 1978. And we will talk a little bit more about what the period of air travel looked like before 1978, you know, from the period of propeller planes to the jet age. But I think it's important to look at how the industry wasn't this cutthroat survival of the fittest race that we see today. And a lot of experts point out that the airline model operated much more like a regulated public utility. So from 1938 to 1978, the Civil Aeronautics Board treated flight as essential infrastructure. And so during that time, the government controlled all major aspects of the industry.

6:49 The government regulated routes. It regulated fares, which new airlines could enter, mergers and acquisitions. It had authority over schedules. I'm not saying it was the golden age. There were a lot of accidents and problems and air travel was definitely for well to do passengers in terms of affordability, but there was definitely a different standard of service and safety regulations and a lot more stability. So Fast forward 1978, everything changed with deregulation. This was a major bipartisan project. It was signed by President Jimmy Carter, championed by Senator Ted Kennedy and economist Alfred Kahn.

7:30 Basically they argued that the government regulated system was they called it a cartel and that removing price and route controls would spark massive competition and ticket prices would go down and it finally air travel would be like affordable for the average person. And they kept on projecting this image that there would be 200 competing airlines and you know, that they would all be trying to provide improved and efficient and cheaper service. Now instead, when we look at what we have today, we've inherited this landscape of monopoly capitalism at like the most naked, where you have just a handful 4 dominant carriers which have like hollowed out regional service, crushed union wages, weaponized junk fees, and our infrastructure is completely brittle and kind of prone to these failures. So how did we get here to this unreliable and miserable system we have today?

8:27 Well, let me begin by pointing out a couple of things. One is the fact that airline travel today is safer than it was before 1978 has nothing to do with deregulation. People will point to that and say, oh look, deregulation help that. It did not. Fundamentally, the reason airline travel is today safer is because the technology has massively improved. If you look at most accidents, most accidents, not all, they're the result of a chain of events. And usually the decisive parts of that chain is human error. So the introduction of better technology that canmore remove the potential for human error is the fundamental reason why air travel has become a lot safer.

9:10 And in terms of it being a cartel, OK, it was a government cartel, whatever it is today, a different kind of cartel. It is a cartel of half a dozen corporations who basically have the entire flying public by the short hairs and can do to them whatever they want to do. I think it's also important to look at the time when the deregulation happened. This was a period of the 1970s where you really had the mass deindustrialization of America taking place and the dollar had lost. Its a good chunk of its hegemony. It's still hegemonic, but it had lost a good chunk of it when they went off the gold standard a few years earlier. It was coming off the defeat in Vietnam. And this was a way to basically, in their mind, shift the responsibility of travel off the government and off the idea that the government should care about this as a public utility to a bunch of private companies that somehow are going to be self regulating and be regulated at some level by the FAA. But basically, the fundamental thing was safety and air travel was just going to become the province of the free market. And with that came a race not to the top, but to the bottom. And The funny thing about it is all these companies that want to do regulation and fought for it kept talking about the free market and laissez faire and

10:43 let's let the market decide who wins and loses. But every goddamn time the market went against them, let's say 911, the Great Recession during COVID, they came like a bunch of snorers to the government with their hands out saying give me taxpayer money, save our industry. In other words, all this talk about laissez faire and the market and letting it all work out. It's basically profits are privatized and losses are socialized. It's socialism for the bourgeoisie. So that means that taxpayer dollars are already subsidizing the airlines. But without the regulation that used to be there, right.

11:23 And and and one last thing I think about the driving down a prices. Well, there's two ways you can look at it. One, prices were already on the way down and traffic was already increasing before deregulation, so it simply continued A trend that was already there. Second of all, yeah, you can say it is cheaper, but all the things you used to get as part of the package of buying an airline ticket, like assigned seating, like luggage, a meal, a drink, all these things are now extras. So they nickel and dime you. And I'm not sure how much cheaper it is at the end of the day, once you take in all this stuff and suddenly you find yourself probably spending a large chunk of money. I mean, the way these guys would have it is if they could they just strap you to a wing and ship you off. It's a total bait and switch.

12:15 And you're right about the price question because, well, first of all, the euphemism that they call this is unbundling, which is basically like all the things that you used to get for free, we now charge you for. And this is actually how the airlines made a lot of money, right? Like in 2023, they made $33 billion from these fees. Like the baggage fees selection, onboard amenities? Yeah, even stuff that seems like logical, it's like, oh, you bought the ticket? It's like, do you want to sit down on the plane? Do you want to breathe? Do you want to bring a bag on the plane? It's like, yeah, of course. I'd like to, like, sit down on the plane and breathe air and bring a bag, Yeah. It's Do you want an extra inch of space?

12:58 Since the 1980s, the average distance between seat backs has shrunk from 35 inches to around 28 on most carriers. It's become like almost like a meme that gets asked around. Is it impolite to lean your seat back? That was never a question before. One of my favorite parts of doing this episode is discovering that air travel wasn't always so miserable. It was as luxurious as they say it was. So back in the day, like you said, the seats were bigger. They reclined farther. In the 50s, some airlines introduced seats that reclined completely into beds. Also, it was common for there to be a lounge where you can kind of stand up and walk around, grab a drink from a bar.

13:44 So yeah, the planes have changed so much over time and flying has changed so much overtime. I was reading this article about an airline that had a piano player. Like they legit had a piano on the plane and they would have like, music entertainment. So you can like, hang out in the lounge and smoke your pipe and like, listen to live piano. They also, like Ezra was saying, food was a big deal on planes. In the 1930s, Pan Am actually started putting stoves onto planes. So there was an oven on the plane where they would cook for you live, man, and they would bring carts down the aisle where they would carve roast beef or ham in front of you. In the 50s, American Airline came out with a cookbook that was popular because people wanted their food to taste like airline food.

14:29 So yeah, it was super, super luxurious. Another thing that you guys mentioned is that it was more expensive. Like it wasn't really for commoners to have this experience. It like I read something that was like a ticket from Chicago to New York was equivalent to what is almost like $2000 today. So it was super expensive. You were paying a lot for this experience. But yeah, dude, it was fucking chill. And before World War 2, most air flight attendants were guys. But then after World War Two, it became all women. And then that also became a selling point because like during price fixing, the way that the airlines would appeal to you was through amenities. So one of the things they would offer is a bunch of hot ladies and like, airlines became the Hooters of the sky.

15:13 And they would hire young women with a certain body type. They would give them skimpy outfits. There was an American Airlines executive flight that was only for men. And one of the ways they would try to encourage and recruit women to take these jobs is by telling them that they would get a husband in no time. And like, within three years, you'll be married girls. And the emphasis really shifted from safety to service because during the early days of flying, airline flight attendants actually had to be certified nurses because, you know, it was like an acknowledgement that this was like this dangerous, crazy thing and they were part of keeping it safe. And then all of a sudden, the skills went from being somebody who could handle an emergency and, like, provide medical assistance to somebody who could, like, make you a nice drink, you know, somebody who looked really good in a pair of heels. So yeah, there became like, this shift away from safety and more towards, like, this elegant service. And.

16:13 Yeah. But I also do want to make a point that it used to be very oppressive to women because it used to be that if you gained over a certain weight, you could not be a flight attendant. If you got married, you could not be a flight attendant. Men were, as you said after the Second World War, were basically out of the industry as flight attendants completely, but it really was also highly sexualized, highly objectifying, and very oppressive to women. Of course, if you fit within their criteria could be very glamorous, but you had to be absolutely sure that you never stepped outside the bounds of the criteria A. 100% super, super oppressive and even if you fit the model, it was really stressful and oppressive. One of the things that I read is that they would measure your weight, waist and your bust and your hips, and if you didn't fall within the measurements, you would get suspended until you did or you would lose your job. We talked a little bit about shrinking seats. Every year.

17:10 You hear they're like taking an inch here, taking an inch there, taking a centimeter here. Didn't you show me something a few weeks ago where they were going to propose standing seats? Oh yes. This is the latest nightmare. They are proposing standing seats. One of the companies that's been linked to it is Ryanair and Ryanair is a European airline. And they're saying that these standing seats would be for flights that are two hours or less. And essentially you're like kind of like leaning onto this seat back and there's like a little thing on your crotch. So this is going to be really great for men. I particularly they're going to love it, but they're they're trying to say that this is going to be pricing wise comparable to bus fare.

17:51 So they're talking about flights that are like 9 bucks, but you have to stand up. And the people are rightly going crazy about this online. And I have some comments here if you guys want to hear what the plebs are saying about these new designs. Dumpling dot delight under score UK says completely dystopian and scary. This is tragic. Wellin is its surfboard says I'm telling you now so you're not surprised in the future. Just in case, if you let this happen and pay $9 for these seats, in a few years all the coach seats will be standing and you will be paying full price. Sitting will be only for the wealthy. Just a fair warning. And I have to say, I kind of agree with the sentiments of this post. Yeah, totally. I don't think I was exaggerating when I said if they could get away with it they just strap you to a wing.

18:36 And this is the perfect post that's in line with that, Ezra the Joe Joyner says. What if we dehydrate the people down into tiny sponges and then when we land, put them in water to expand them again? That's brilliant. That's that's just that's. Brilliant. Yeah, and another seat design that has made the rounds online that's connected with Airbus is this double Decker seating. Have you guys seen this where one person sits on a second row and then there's another row beneath them? It sounds miserable. Yeah, it sounds miserable. And all of the comments are exactly as you would guess. Ryan Gromida says going to be farting on everyone. So sorry. And the next comment says pink eye for everyone. So yeah, people are not excited about this. And one of the, one of the interesting things I've noticed is that whenever these things drop, they don't drop in correlation with any airline in particular. It's just kind of like vaguely like people are thinking about this.

19:28 So I almost feel like it's a like it's a temperature check. You know, they're kind of doing a soft launch, seeing what people will say, seeing if people will accept it. And while I hear all of this negative talk about it and like this complete rejection, I fear, I fear in my heart that if they come out with the standing plane that people will buy it just because people are so desperate, Everybody's so broke that they'll just like take what they can get that fits within their budget. So I think if they make the $9 standing seat, people will buy it unfortunately. Yeah, that's how capitalism grounds you down. Yeah, I remember seeing the standing seat stuff from as far back as over 10 years ago they've been floating this around for. A while, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the CEO of Ryanair back in 2012 had an interview where he mentioned standing seats. So yeah, it has been.

20:13 Around, yeah, this is, it's been around for a while. I think this time around they really will implement it and yeah, people will buy it because it is cheaper and people, whether in the US or in Europe, are just trying to get by. You still need to travel. Yeah, people don't have a choice. Yeah, Well, definitely in the US there's no other options for like high speed travel whatsoever. And the other thing is whenever these conditions have become so miserable and so deplorable, there's always going to be fights on airplanes and like quote UN quote, unruly passengers or whatever. And it's like we just dealt with a three hour delay, the cancellation, you know, all these things like, and you're trying to get to emergency family situation and then there's weather things and then you're losing money on top of it, like, yeah, so. Flying.

20:58 Flying is like a psychological challenge, and a plane is essentially a flying powder keg. We have to be around strangers. We're expected to be still and be quiet and to share our space. We have to be around people we disagree with politically. One of the interesting things I saw was there's all of these studies that show that arguments and fights spike around political events. So around Brexit, there was a bunch of fights on UK planes in the US, there's it was a bunch around the election. So just like being around a bunch of people tightly that you don't know and that you don't agree with stresses people the fuck out. Another thing that I saw that was interesting is there's a psychological impact to having to walk through first class.

21:41 And there was like an increase on the number of fights where people have to walk through first class in order to reach their seat. Because it just pisses you off to see what you're not getting. And like this big, beautiful, wide seat and you're going to go to your little fucking box that you got to sit in. It's so terrible. But we all have to be civil. Oh yes, I know. So to add insult to injury, the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy has a message for the American people and it's you look disgusting when you travel on a plane and you act like a God damn animal. So his message is not that the airline should do better, but the passengers need to do better. The airline companies are allowed to treat you like shit and you should have a smile on your face while they do it. If you check out the Department of Transportation, there is a list of questions that you can ask yourself as a passenger to decide what are you doing to make flying better. Do you guys want to hear some of these beautiful questions? Affirmative.

22:36 Let's let's think deeply about this. This is on the list. Are you helping a pregnant woman or the elderly with placing their bags in the overhead bin? I'm really short so it's actually really hard for me to put things. Well, you know what? Maybe you should wear taller shoes. And that's the perfect segue for our next one. Are you dressing with respect? So you pajama pants, hoodie wearing hoes fix it up. We need makeup, we need dress pants, we need Blazers. This this going around like a like a schlub, not under this administration the next. One, it gets so wrinkled. Yeah, Are you keeping control of your children and helping them through the airport? All these poor parents don't have it fucking hard enough. Are you saying thank you to your flight attendants?

23:19 Next one, are you saying please and thank you in general? These are legitimate questions on the website. And I want to play this clip for you of Sean Duffy giving this message to the American people about how disrespectful that it is that they dress so poorly to travel and how they should really try to do a little better. I think again, I, I call this just maybe dressing with some respect, you know, whether it's a pair of jeans and A, and A, and a decent shirt, I would, I would encourage people to maybe dress a little better, which encourages us, encourages us to maybe behave all a little better. Let's try not to wear slippers and, and, and pajamas as we come to the airport. I think that's positive.

24:00 If we can help someone as we're getting on the aircraft that might need some help putting their bag in the overhead bin and you're a little strong or a little buffer you can lift in, you know, stand up and, you know, offer to grab that bag and put it up for someone who's having a more difficult time and common courtesy and civility, I think is going to work well. I love learning about manners from the US government the. Airline companies squeeze every single penny they can, and the government's message to you is to suck it up. Well, because of the fact that Ezra has looked at so many plane crashes in the course of history, I want to go over some of the questions about safety and accidents. And I feel like there's a lot of safety improvements that have happened over the last several decades, but that are mostly reactive. Like, they're only implemented after a tragedy happens and usually after, like, something that makes the status quo, like politically or financially untenable. So what are some of the, like, aviation regulations that have been written in blood?

25:02 Like which ones have been historical turning points that the industry really learned from? I think there's, if we were to do this, you could go on for a very long time. So I kind of chose 5 or so crashes that I think have made air travel considerably safer over the course of time, where in some cases, I think some of those you could argue could have been seen in advance and some of them really were a reaction to something that they just didn't understand until it happened. So the first one that comes to mind is the beginning of the jet age, which is post World War 2. Before that, basically all civilian planes were propeller planes and propeller planes only travel to a certain altitude.

25:48 And so pressurization of the cabin was either non existent or very minor. And when you have, when you think about pressurization of the cabin, think of it this way that when you fly above let's say 10,020 thousand up to 30,000 feet, the oxygen is very thin. You have to pressurize the cabin so people can breathe. When you pressurize the cabin, it literally increases the cabin from the inside because you're putting in air. It's like swelling. Exactly. And then when you depressurize, it decreases. And so the metal fatigue that happens to the body of the plane is very real. There was a real race after the war to introduce jets as opposed to propeller planes to the market.

26:29 And one of the things you have to bear in mind is Britain after the war was a definitively declining empire and they saw the race to introduce the passenger jet as something that could boost their position in the world. So the de Havilland Comet was introduced in the early 1950s. It was a sleek, beautiful looking plane, but it's started suffering from some very strange accidents where it would disintegrate in mid air, which is not something that should normally happen to an airplane. Yeah, that's wild. And what they discovered was the way they designed planes before the jet age is the windows were really big and a square.

27:11 So you can look out the window because it's a beautiful sight. You know you're flying. Well, if you ever study Roman architecture, one of the things that stands out out is the arch. Like if you look at a Roman aqueduct, it's a series of arches and the aqueduct is above it. And why? Why arches? Because they can withstand pressure and weight. Square windows cannot square windows. Basically, you start getting these fatigue cracks into the body of the plane and every time you pressurize and depressurize, pressurize, depressurize, pressurize, depressurize, at a certain point that little cracks become bigger and literally the plane starts disintegrating in midair, which is.

27:54 Terrifying. So. So is literally the shape of the windows. It was literally the shape of the windows, and it's why to this day windows are Oval. They're arches. Oh man, that's so crazy. So that was what year was that? The real discovery was in 1954 and that was the basically the death of the de Havilland Comet and the death of Britain as a player in this game. Womp womp. There was another crash between two airplanes, 2 passenger planes in the US in 1956 where they hit each other midair, which is kind of terrifying, but also almost unheard of. And it and what they used to have before this crash was basically fly by sight. You're flying almost like you would drive, you're looking out for traffic and you're going and it's like a big air, Big Sky with room for everybody.

28:43 Well, not really. If you have two planes that are in the same altitude over the same region, they're going to hit each other. And when they do, they crash. And, and so that was the end of fly by sight. And that was something they genuinely learned out of that. You know, the Big Blue sky is not big enough to allow for things like. That to happen, that's why they have, that's why they have car lanes on freeways. So the next one that I picked was it's known as the Tenerife or Tenerife how you say it, in the Canary Islands airport disaster in 1977. And this was I think to this day, the biggest loss of life in airplane crashes outside of 911. And what happened is there was some kind of military attack on one of the Canary Islands bigger airports.

29:29 And so they diverted all these planes to a much smaller airport in Tenerife that includes like the giant 740 sevens. Now, that airport wasn't really designed to handle that much traffic and there's really there's only one runway. And so to take off, planes have to cross the runway. And so air traffic controller gave a Pan Am plane, 747 permission to cross the runway. And air traffic control was not like you can argue was not as clear. But the KLM plane, which is a Dutch company, was not given permission to take off. But the captain interpreted what was said to mean you can take off. And there was a lot of fog. And so he just went into the take off role. And as soon as he cuts through the fog, he sees the Pan Am plane right in front of him.

30:15 He tries to take off really quickly to avoid it. That doesn't make it and something close to 600 people die because both planes basically crash into each other. That's so sad. The copilot kept asking the captain, did we really get permission to take off? And the captain says it's my plane, I'm taking off. Damn. Wow. Jesus basically saying I interpreted as permission. I'm taking off. I don't care what you know, Be quiet. And yeah, also don't question my authority. The lesson they learned out of that is this is idea of crew resource management and I know that there's a lot of work still to be done on this, but the idea being the captain is not a God that. The other people have veto power.

30:57 Or or. Checks and balances or something? Exactly. I mean, a captain is, at the end of the day, the captain, whoever has control, has control. It's not a democracy. But it was to encourage the Co pilots and the flight engineers and other crew on the plane to be able to speak up and tell a captain shut up. We did not get permission to take off. Double so. We're not taking off. Yeah. So that's that's why we have captains who listen sometimes, sometimes round windows, lanes in the sky, Yeah. Yeah. And the lanes in the sky is also maintaining contact with ATC and being rerouted from one ATC to another to another to another, so that you are informing air traffic control of your location, your altitude, your speed. And then if air traffic control tells you to go up a certain amount, go down a certain amount, you know you want to follow that direction.

31:52 So let's move into some of the completely preventable accidents and collisions. And there are plenty of them, like some of these engineering failures. Or, you know, that's just one part of the story. But then you have monopoly capitalism with its fangs, which is degrading labor and outsourcing these key parts of maintenance, basically to increase profits. That means limited oversight, cutting corners on training, and that has led to really fatal disasters. One of the ones that we wanted to take up here was the 1979 crash of American Airlines Flight 191 at O'Hare. So this is one year after deregulation. What I heard from about this crash is that the company was trying to save like 200 man hours per aircraft.

32:38 And so they tried to develop some maintenance procedure that used a forklift to remove the engine and the pylon as a single unit. And it caused all the structural damage that led to the engine ripping off the wing during takeoff. So this was one of the ones that was like really clearly completely preventable. Yeah, it's exactly what you described. The engine manufacturers and the manufacturers, the plane came up with a procedure to safely take off the engine, to do repair work on the engine. And you are supposed to remove in a multi step process the engine from the pylon and then remove the pylon from the wing. And then you do the repairs and then you and you're supposed to put them back on step by step in a very careful way. Certainly not a goddamn forklift. Forklift.

33:30 Yeah, let me guess, using the forklift was probably cheaper and faster than doing it the correct way. It was definitely cheaper and faster, but American Airlines, in their infinite wisdom, kept the engine and the pylon connected to one another and just guided it down off the wing on a goddamn forklift, did whatever work they needed to do on the engine, and then guided them both back up on the wing with a forklift. And then tided back on. So when that plane was taking off in 1979 from Chicago O'Hare Airport, if the engine had simply fallen off the wing, this was a 3A3 engine plane. If the engine had simply fallen off the wing, it's difficult, but completely recoverable. That plane could fly on 2 engines no problem.

34:12 Or at least make a safe landing, yeah? Yeah, you know, you wouldn't continue to fly. You come back for an emergency landing, but you you should be able to make it just fine. But but that's not what happened. What happened is the engine, rather than just falling off the wing onto the ground, flipped over the wing and in the process sheared a whole chunk of the top of the wing and with it all the hydraulics. Now, what are the hydraulics? The hydraulics are what controls the plane. And so when a pilot turns left, it's hydraulics that tell the plane turn left, left or turns right. It's hydraulics that tell the plane to turn right. And so when that happened in the flight voice recorder, you could hear the captain tell the copilot, I've lost all my displays.

34:54 It just cut off. He cannot see. He was blind, basically. He had no displays. That's because he's sitting on the left and it was on the left side that the engine ripped off. The copilot could still see his displays and it's going up for a few seconds. It's still climbing and they're going through the checklist of what you need to do to fly with two engines instead of three. And then suddenly the plane starts banking to the side and they are trying like hell to bank it to the other way so they don't lose control of it. But they were dead. They were literally dead. There was nothing they could do about it because they lost all control of the plane and it banked and it crashed and it was completely full of fuel. Everybody on board died. And I believe one person died on the ground, possibly more. And it was horrifying, beyond preventable. It was basically these companies trying to save a buck. Yep.

35:46 I think it's really scary too, because over the last several years you've had more and more aircraft maintenance being out outsourced. Like 70% of heavy maintenance for the major US airlines is outsourced to 3rd party providers. And these third party providers are known for cutting corners. And really they see it as like give it the cheapest seal of approval and then let them go on their way. And then without any thought about passenger safety or long term integrity of parts. And so when you have a company that is basically open to like checking boxes without these verification systems or they're using bad old parts or uncertified parts, I mean that really that is a life or death situation.

36:30 Yeah. And a lot of times you'll hear people complain that it's to foreign companies and foreign countries or they're bringing in foreign workers that are cheaper. I just want to make a point that being an American maintenance person does not make you a better maintenance person than being a maintenance person in another country. The real critique is whether it's in the US or abroad, and there are a bunch of these companies in the US, It's not just abroad. They are looking for the cheapest way to maintain maintenance of their aircraft. And that does necessarily mean you are cutting corners. You are falsifying records and you are doing everything you can to make the airline company happy. And what the airline company wants is those planes running back and forth with no interruption. And I just want to underline the example we gave did not involve any foreign workers or any offshore anything. These were American maintenance workers that were forced by the company to massively cut corners to repair an engine. And there's a lot more examples, but I want to give one more and that's the Alaska Airlines crash in the year 2000, January 31st, 2000.

37:42 This was a plane where the engines are in the back of the plane by the tail, and there's a horizontal stabilizer back there. That basically is what tells the plane to go up and down and it responds to the commands where the pilot sits. There's a thing called a Jack screw. That Jack screw basically is what holds that tail together and holds the flaps that go up and down that determine whether the plane is going up or down. A lead engineer at Alaska Airlines 2 years before that crash named John Leotine, like expressly went to the FAA to complain that Alaska Airlines were cutting corners in terms of lubricating or replacing the Jack screw.

38:27 And he pointed to that particular plane that ended up crashing as an. And so like the Jack screw, like the integrity was damaged or it was. Well, it hadn't been damaged yet, or it was probably. Overused. He can't see the Jack screw. You have to take take the tail to see the Jack screw. But again, you go to the manufacturer's instructions. They say that the Jack screw needs to be lubricated every 500 flying hours and the Jack screw needs to be replaced every 7200 flying hours. And he's pointing out that is not happening because to lubricate you have to take the tail components apart. I mean again it takes. Hours, which is pay, Yep, wages. And maintenance and and hours, etcetera. Yeah.

39:11 And he was basically driven out of the industry, not just out of his job, but but out of the industry. The FAA did not only do nothing to protect him, they went along with Alaska Airlines in altering the rules regarding the Jack screw. So I said every 500 hours it needs to be lubricated. Alaska Airlines requested and received approval from the FAA that it can be lubricated every 2500. Wait, what? But isn't like the manufacturer the only one who has the authority to make that determination considering the? FAA No. No. The manufacturer says this is what we came up with the FAA.

39:51 Based on science but. Yeah, based on our manufacturing practice and that's what we think is safe. And the FAA, no, they have the authority to change that. And so they went along from 500 to 2500. That's kind of the point about the maintenance, repair and overhaul. You need quality control systems. You need internal processes for all of this equipment and repair. I think this is such a good illustration about how the FAA works with these airlines, to be honest. Oh yeah, that'd be exactly. And we'll come back to that in another example. And then in terms of changing it, they agreed with Alaska Airlines to raise that from 7200 flight hours, it has to be changed to 9500 flight hours.

40:33 Oh, that's crazy. How that's so wild? So what happened? So Alaska Airlines was flying to close to LAX and perfectly normal flight, clear skies, the kind of flight that a pilot can do with their eyes closed, and then suddenly there's a bang and they cannot control the plane. That's because the Corkscrew had broken and the flap on the back pushed in One Direction, which basically is forcing the plane outside of their control. From the moment that happened, they were dead because there was no way they were going to bring that plane to the ground safely. There was one point and just want you to imagine the horror of this, both as a passenger but also as the crew. The only time they could really maintain control of the plane was when they inverted it upside down South. Wait with passengers inside of it. Yes.

41:22 Oh my God. Dude. So just for anyone who says, oh, this sounds familiar, this is because the film Flight with Denzel Washington was loosely based on this accident and which was based on the Jack Screw failure. But you'll see in the movie actually, that he inverts the plane. That's like one of the famous scenes from the movie. But but he lands it or or it's a controlled crash. Whereas in this case, and I just want to give credit out to the pilots because at a certain point they must have realized they were doomed and instead of flying into the LA, they stayed out in the water so that when they crash they take nobody with them. That's really sad. And yeah, it's one of the most horrifying crashes because they were up in the air for a long time before that plane crashed, and it was entire, like, beyond preventable.

42:12 So when we kicked off this episode, Ezra, you were talking about human error and accidents, and I want to talk a little bit about pilots here, but mostly focusing on the deterioration of working conditions for pilots. In the early 2000s, I think is when it started to come to our attention that the starting salaries for pilots at regional airlines was like poverty wages at the time. In the documentary Capitalism a Love Story by Michael Moore in I think it was 2009, there was a whole segment on pilots dealing with fatigue and how entry level pilots had to like rely on crash pads because they couldn't afford a home where they were stationed. They were just in a completely unstable situation.

42:52 So I was kind of curious what it looks like today. So I looked at the 2026 statistics for pilots and the average regional first officer earns approximately 62,000 to 90,000. Then you factor in $100,000 in flight school debt and the skyrocketing cost of living in base cities. Yeah, $60,000 ain't shit that I'm really surprised. Yeah. One of the things I wanted to talk about are the regional pilots in particular, these regional pilots for these regional airlines have become kind of the backbone of what's called the hub and spoke system. So they're often connecting the basically they're flying like 5 or 6 legs a day in this very congested air space with minimal turn around time.

43:39 And these regional airlines have acted as a kind of low cost buffer for the major carriers. And so all this grueling work has been offloaded to this workforce of the regional pilots. So this is going to lead up to a discussion about Colgan Air Flight 34 O 7, which was operating at the time as a continental connection. And that was the crash in 2009 that a lot of people might remember when the plane crashed into a house in Buffalo while it was approaching the Buffalo airport, crashed into a house and killed all 49 on board. So before we talk about what led up to that crash, I want to hear from some of the pilots from Colgan Air, which was one of these regional airlines.

44:25 This is a clip from a 2010 PBS Frontline documentary called Flying Cheap. I really highly recommend it and both of the regional airline pilots being interviewed for this documentary flew for Colgan Air around the time of the big crash. No 8910 flights a day. It gets to be a very long day. While FAA regulations limit pilots to 8 hours of actual flight time a day, pilots may be on duty for up to 16 hours a day, but that doesn't mean a big paycheck. We are only paid when the doors closed and the engines are running.

45:07 As soon as we block out of the gate, we close that door. That's when we start. All the time we're walking through airports, eating lunch, reading a book while we wait for airplanes standing at the gate, You know we're not paid for that time. We may be on duty for 80 hours a week and get paid for 20 of it. If we're lucky. They said safety was a priority. A lot. In my experience, however, on a day-to-day basis, being on time and and completing the the flight was much more important, much more important. What happened if you were tired or sick or both sick and tired and you called in and said I can't do this trip, what happened then?

45:55 I was actually one of them that claimed fatigue. At one point I had a number of 16 hour duty days in a row. Full 16 hour. Full 16 hour days and I swear to God that this is true. Our vice president of operations got on the phone with me and said, well, you know, are you? You're going to be stuck in Hyannis Port. You're going to be stuck in Hyannis for the night. If you claim fatigue right now, wouldn't you like to get home? We can, you know, shorten your duty day for you. Instead of saying you showed up at 5:40 this morning, we can say you showed up at six and that'll give you that extra 20 minutes to take that flight back to Albany. So to be clear, he was offering to falsify the records so that you would appear to have flown a legal FA sanctioned day when you didn't or weren't. Correct.

46:45 The saying around the company has always moved the rig and that just kind of told me that they were willing to kind of push the bounds. Why were they pushing? Because if we didn't move those airplanes, they didn't make any money. Your life is in their hands when they're flying you around, and this is how these companies treat these people. I mean, flying used to be like being a pilot used to be a prestigious profession. What happened? It's deregulation. I mean, before deregulation, the major airline companies had to service the small regional areas. And once you had deregulation, the major airline companies, through mergers and what have you, you know, they're going to fly the lucrative route that are going to make the most money, and they're going to have regional subsidiaries fly the small routes that make less money.

47:35 And for them to be profitable, they have to be cutthroat. In this case, we're focusing on the pilots because of the Colgan Air disaster. Now mind you, when you were buying a ticket for that flight, you were buying a ticket, as far as you knew, for Continental. That was one of the most surprising things to me. On your ticket is a big, big. In big lettering, it says Continental, and then in tiny, tiny lettering it says that, oh, you're actually flying with this subsidiary. But when you're buying the ticket, nobody tells you that. Yeah, no, you're buying a ticket off Continental's website or whatever website you're using. You're thinking if you're flying Continental, but anything that basically has an express after it is one of these small regional airlines. And you know, like I said, we're focusing on the pilots, but you can also imagine what the maintenance is like and everything else.

48:22 And the reason we're focusing on the pilots is because in that flight, we can come back to the details a little bit. The the crash was pilot error, but it was pilot error produced by this ridiculous fatigue that these guys are are being put under. Bear in mind, when these guys are on a leg, they have to find their own housing. The company is not putting you up in a hotel. If you want to sleep in a hotel, you got to pay for it out of your own time. That, to me, is so, so criminal. Like, yeah, executives get housing all the time. I mean, it's not like these people don't have to also pay rent on apartments if they're making 60. $1000. A year they're barely able to live somewhere and then they have to pay for a H3 or four nights a week on top of that.

49:03 And it's utterly criminal. So if we want to talk about the crash a little bit, what happened is the plane was landing. As they're landing, the plane got issued A stall warning. The plane was telling the pilots you're going a little too slow, you need to speed up because of the aerodynamics. And so there's a stick column and what you're supposed to do is push so you can gain some speed. What the pilots did was pulled, which reduced. The opposite. Right, which made a bad situation worse. And so you can talk about potentially training blah blah blah, but the reality is if you listen to what they were talking about as they were landing now, the first thing I want to say is when you're taking off and when you're landing, the only conversations that should be happening between the pilot and copilot should be related to the operation of the airplane.

49:50 They should not be talking about anything else. However, throughout the flight and during the landing, the first officer, Rebecca Shaw, who was 24 at the time, mentioned that you made $15,800 in the previous year and that her pay was about $16,000. She talked about how she was in a dispute with the airline over $200 in back. Pay. And she had a second job. She had a second job at a coffee shop. Yeah. Well, she was in flight school. Yeah. There's a. Fucking pilot who has to have a second job. She talked about how she was exhausted, how she was sick, ready to be in a hotel room. That's a that's in a quote from her. The captain, who I believe made $50,000 a year at that point, talked about how he commuted from Florida, was sleeping in the Newark crew lounge.

50:39 Not in a hotel, not on a bed, but on a couch in the crew lounge. Yeah, no human being can work under these conditions, and whatever the company saves is paid for in the blood of their customers. And their pilots and the pay has gone up since 2009 like you mentioned 60,000 to 100 as opposed to what it was in 2009. But that's not because the company suddenly got heart and decided, oh, we should pay them more. It's because there's a shortage and there's a shortage of pilots because there's like an understanding this isn't the high paying job that it used to be. You know, and Marxism, there's this terminology called labor aristocracy where you are part of the labor movement, but you're in sort of the top tier of it.

51:22 And there are certain people that should be in the labor aristocracy. I don't want my pilot while they're flying the plane to be worried about their mortgage payments. I don't want the air traffic controller to be worried about their mortgage payments. I want them to be worried about only doing their job. Amen to that. Yeah, no hunger pains please and and a restful night too. And I would extend that to the mechanics. I want the mechanic of airplanes to have the confidence to say that's not an air worthy plane, it can't fly. But guys, don't forget about the poorest CEO's who need another yacht in their fleet. And, and yeah, Colgan Air went out of business after that crash, but the people at the top of Colgan Air made out with a shit load of money whether it went out of business or not.

52:03 Continental can just wash his hands because they say, oh, we just outsourced to this carrier. Yeah. So this was 2009. This Buffalo crash was very, very big deal in terms of exposing pulling the cover off of the regional airlines and some of the questions of poor pilot pay. I think one of the things that you mentioned, Ezra, about the shortage, that part of that was during all these crises that they had like 911 and COVID and stuff like that, they asked for voluntary departures. And so all these pilots departed during that time, and then they didn't implement any retraining or rehiring programs for several years because they were worried about their profits and didn't know what direction the industry was going in.

52:46 Yeah. I mean, I think we have a clip here from Chesley Burnett, Sullenberger the third. Our listeners may know him better as Sully. He was the captain along with First Officer Jeffrey Skiles, who who safely brought down AUS Airways plane that had taken off New York and then suffered a bird strike, a very rare bird strike in both of its engines and they safely brought down the plane into the Hudson. No fatalities. There were some, a couple of serious injuries but no fatalities. Yeah, the miracle on the Hudson, don't they call it that, the miracle on the Hudson to set this up? Sully is considered a hero who in 2009 was then asked to testify after the Buffalo crash on the situation of pilots. And it's just so incredibly revealing what he says. I'm not only proud of my crew, I'm proud of my profession. Flying has been my lifelong passion. I count myself fortunate to have spent my life in the profession I love with colleagues whom I respect and admire. But while I love my profession, I do not like what has happened to it.

53:58 I would not be doing my duty if I not did not report to you that I'm deeply troubled about its future. Americans have been experiencing huge economic difficulties in recent months, but airline employees have been experiencing those challenges and more For eight years. We've been hit by an economic tsunami September 11th. Bankruptcies, fluctuating fuel prices, mergers, loss of pensions and revolving door management teams who have used airline employees as an ATM have left the people who work for the airlines in the United States with extreme economic difficulties. It is an incredible testament to the collective character, professionalism and dedication of my colleagues in the industry that they are still able to function at such a high level. It is my personal experience that my decision to remain in the profession I love has come at a great financial cost to me and to my family.

54:59 My pay has been cut 40%. My pension, like most airline pensions, has been terminated and replaced by a PBGC guarantee worth only pennies to the dollar. While airline pilots are by no means alone in our financial struggles, I want to acknowledge how difficult it is for everyone right now. It's important to under score that the terms of our employment have changed dramatically from when I began my career, leading to an untenable financial situation for pilots and their families. When my company offered pilots who had been laid off the chance to return to work, 60% refused. Members I I attempt to speak accurately and plainly, so please do not think I exaggerate when I say that I do not know a single professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps. I am worried that the airline piloting profession will not be able to continue to attract the best and the brightest. The current experience and skills of our country's professional airline pilots come from investments made years ago when we were able to attract the ambitious, talented people who now frequently seek professional careers elsewhere. That past investment was an indispensable element in our commercial aviation infrastructure, vital to safe air travel and our country's economy and security. If we do not sufficiently value

56:30 the airline piloting profession and future pilots are less experienced and less skilled, it logically follows that we will see negative consequences to the Fallon flying public and to our country. I just think it's so, so emblematic. You have this this American hero that everyone lauded, and there was a movie with Tom Hanks made-up after him, and he's sitting here testifying. I don't know how many people have heard this clip except for a little piece of it from Michael Moore's movie, but you know this is the reality. His 40% pay cut pension? Gutted. That's shocking that somebody who's a senior, a veteran pilot can have his pay slashed like that. Later on in the hearing, he says in aviation, the bottom line is that the single most important piece of safety equipment is an experienced, well trained pilot.

57:20 Yeah. And earlier I said, and I stand by it, that flying has become much safer because of automation, because human error is whether by the pilots or by the air traffic controllers or some combination of thereof, is the single biggest cause of plane crashes. The flip side of that is no computer can do what Sully did and and Skiles did. No computer that we know of that exists today, maybe in the future, can take a plane with no engines and landed safely in the Hudson. That was human skill. So on that, I want to talk a little bit about air traffic control obviously because that is what's considered a dispensable, disposable workforce. Apparently the air traffic control system, the infrastructure, is dangerously outmoded and crumbling, and the crisis in the control towers is probably the most visible scar from the war on labor.

58:14 It goes back to the 1981 smashing of PAT coworkers. So that was the air traffic controllers union and at the time Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 striking pat coworkers and this was considered the death knell for the US labor movement. It also completely reengineered the idea of air safety infrastructure. This year there were several near misses based on controllers being on the brink of physical exhaustion. So if you just look at some of the statistics, at the start of the year 2026, FAA reported a deficit of 3500 fully certified controllers. So the workforce is at its lowest level in decades. At critical facilities, 41% of controllers are forced into grueling 10 hour shifts and six day work weeks. In the first quarter of 2026, there was a 61% surge in near mid air collisions compared to 20/19, with controller workload being cited as the dominant factor in nearly every incident. It's it's utterly insane.

59:17 And we began this episode by talking about the LaGuardia crash where Air Canada Express hit a fire truck on the runway, causing, I think the pilots ended up being being killed in that crash. That was air traffic controller error. And it was because they were incredibly understaffed. And you had one, you had a total of 2 air traffic controllers running the whole of La Guardia at that time. This isn't some tiny little regional airport. This is, you know, it's insane. It's it's insane, La. Guardia in one of the largest cities in the world. Yeah. Yeah, so we talked about the labor aristocracy and how the pilots should be there. I would also put air traffic controllers into that category. This is a really, really demanding job with crazy high consequences.

1:00:04 And something really scary happened in 2025 at the Newark airport in the air traffic control tower. All the screens went blank for 90 seconds. And 90 seconds might not sound like a long time, but this was completely terrifying to the people who work there to be blind and have all those planes in the sky. The results of that could have been catastrophic. And the way that this occurred is actually because of cost cutting. In this episode, we've talked a lot about why incidents occur, if they're a result of human error, if they're a result of mechanical failure, or if this is something that's within our control. And what happens here is that for many years, the air traffic control station for Newark was located in Long Island, and all the radar equipment and everything is in Long Island.

1:00:48 But the FAA decided to move that station to Philadelphia to save money. So all the air traffic controllers are now in Philadelphia for Newark. So instead of moving any of that radar equipment, what they did is created a system to relay that information from Long Island to Philadelphia. So when that blackout occurred, it wasn't actually the radar failing. It was the connection between Long Island and Philadelphia that went out. So Wall Street Journal did this great interview with air traffic controller named Jonathan Stewart, and he talks about that day in Newark. He talks about his experience in Newark and how the workload became so extraordinarily high after that incident.

1:01:28 So what he talks about in this clip we're going to play is how after that incident occurred, the air traffic controllers, they had to start anticipating A blackout. They couldn't allow a blackout to occur again. So in addition to doing things through their traditional digital method, he had to start using a pen and paper method in order to track the planes. So if there was another blackout, he would still be able to keep people safe. So doing this job is already like playing 3D chess at 100 miles an hour. So adding another layer of work just created even more fatigue in an industry where people already pushed to the brink. So it just raises the level of danger. So if we can go through these clips, I think they're really illuminating about what the air traffic controller experience is.

1:02:10 So I had been working for in the operation for roughly 3 hours ish at the time of the incident. Typically I try not to work myself or anyone else longer than two hours. It's just been my experience that after that 2 hour mark, your mental acuity begins to diminish a little bit because you it's fatigue, you get tired. In my mind, if we are expected to lose radar, there is an operational advantage or a necessity to use a combination of the two to effectively separate aircraft and to ensure that were you to lose radar and radios again that you're not going to have a catastrophic of that. So all that said to say, yes, you, you, you do have a certain way to do it.

1:02:55 The way I did it was the way that worked for me that increased my workload, which led to me having a close call. So a nose to nose situation. The amount of trauma that they deal with, even from something like a blackout, you know, is, is really, really extreme. And the amount of stress that they have to handle. And then what, being completely short staffed and knowing that the buck stops with you and that if you don't show up to work, then there's going to be a massive death toll basically. I mean, obviously I don't need to tell anyone here that the amount of money that's being spent every single day on killing Iranians and Palestinians, the amount of money that's spent and you could do a massive hiring. We need massive hiring of air traffic controllers and a massive investment in the crumbling system of air traffic control.

1:03:42 Like that's just obvious to anyone. Bear in mind, we're coming off a year where the Trump administration under tech bro Elon Musk got rid of a whole bunch of FAA safety inspectors and regulators. So these are all disasters waiting to happen. And it's really testament to the dedication of these men and women who have one of the hardest jobs that is imaginable. So since we're talking about greed and criminality, I want to talk about Boeing next. Particularly, I want to talk about this 737 Max crashes back in 2018 and 2019. That was Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29th, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10th, 2019.

1:04:30 But I want to talk a little bit about Boeing first, because Boeing was very much considered the gold standard of American industrialism. It kind of helped to revolutionize global travel. And then, of course, you have the Clinton era, and that was a period where Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. It was 1997 and safety and precision just went out the window, went out the the square windows, not the round windows. And this was when Boeing moved its headquarters away from its manufacturing base. It shifted to being shareholder focused. They started to create this culture of of quote, UN quote bean counters, you know, the bureaucrats and the financiers who are obsessed with cutting costs.

1:05:12 And so they started to pivot to stock buybacks and cost cutting where safety was kind of like seen as this barrier to efficiency. So I was looking at buyback fever. And just for some context, buyback fever and Boeing was between 2013 and 2019. And Boeing used its cash to repurchase its own shares on the open market, which artificially inflates the stock price by reducing the supply of available shares. And during those six years, Boeing spent $43.5 billion on the buybacks. It represented 100% of its total profits during that period. And that money could have been funding an entirely new modern airplane from scratch.

1:05:55 Instead, Boeing chose to save money to basically Jerry rig the decades old 737 airframe and turn it into the Max lane using this secretive software called MCAS. MCAS to basically hide the instability from the pilots. And that was the software that malfunctioned and drove 2 planes into the ground and killed a total of 346 people. Yeah, the 737 is a venerable old plane introduced in the 60s. It's a great plane. I don't like even calling it the 737 Max. I just going to call it the Max because I don't want to associate it with that plane. And what happened is, well, first of all, I think you're right to point to the McDonnell Douglas buyout merger in 97.

1:06:42 Because anything you read about Boeing in the last 20 years or more will tell you is that something has changed in the culture of the company where engineering has gone out the window in favor of what you called it. The bean counters and the guys who are basically involved in financial chicanery of one kind or another to just make more money as opposed to obviously it's a company that wants to make money, but you're making money because you build some of the best planes in the world. And So what happened is in the early mid twenty 10s, Airbus, which is a European conglomerate that competes with Boeing, announced that they're introducing a new plane called the A321 Neo.

1:07:23 Now what you have to know is the A320 and the A321 are the competitors to the 737. They're the Airbus competitors to the 737. And this is going to matter in a minute where this the 737 was introduced in the 60's, the A320 was introduced in 1987. And the reason that matters is when the 737 was introduced, the size of the engines were smaller. And so the clearance, the high clearance of the 737 is lower than the A320 or 321 when it was introduced in 1987, where the size of the engines were bigger with an anticipation by Airbus that they would get bigger still as time progressed. So the 321 neo was going to introduce this new powerful engine that was going to give it a much longer range. They could put it on the 3:20 because it's clearance from the ground was higher than the 737.

1:08:22 So what Boeing did in response was RIP up any plans to build a new plane and instead said, we're going to take the venerable old 737 and we're just going to stick new engines on it. Now, there's more to it than that, but fundamentally, that's what it comes down to. So the problem with that is if you just stick the engines on the way they're usually are on, they are so heavy and so big on that wings, they're just going to scrape the ground. You literally cannot do that. So you had to move them forward on the wing and up a little. Well, that changes the aerodynamics of the plane. It makes the plane fly differently and you. Can't just move things all around the plane Willy nilly any way you want.

1:09:06 Yeah, it'll fly, just it's going to change the aerodynamics of the plane and especially when it's taking off. Remember the landings and the takeoffs are the most dangerous parts of a flight. When it's taking off, it has a tendency to pitch the nose up, which is can be dangerous because if your angle of attack is too high and it's just a couple of degrees we're talking about here, it's not massive. It can cause you to lose airspeed and possibly stall. So to fix this hardware problem, they wrote up a software that they had already been using in some military aircraft called M Cast, but they did it differently. And what M Cast was supposed to do is when it senses that the plane was pitching up more than it should, it's supposed to buy software, pitch the nose down a little bit.

1:09:49 So that's what Boeing was doing, but I don't want to just put it on Boeing here. What was the FAA doing while all this was happening? Because this was a multi year process, the FAA knew everything Boeing was doing and signed off on it. The FAA was in on this from the beginning because their whole shtick was we need to basically compete with Airbus in Europe. And they had this whole system where certifications and tests of systems were to be done by Boeing engineers. In other words, the FAA wasn't going to inspect anything Boeing was doing. They're just going to take their word for it. This is like the cops investigating themselves. Right now, what were the airlines doing?

1:10:30 The airlines were like, we're either going to buy an A320 Neos, or if we want us to keep with Boeing, we don't want a new plane. Because if you produce a variant of an existing plane, you can basically just have an iPad session and then you can fly it. Whereas whereas if it's a new plane, you have to go through a whole system of training, including flight simulation and all this stuff. So everybody from Boeing to the FAA to the airlines themselves, we're in on this in the sense of just give us something, damn it, something that we don't have to train for it. That's easy. Yeah. Quote UN quote. Exactly. So then too much fanfare. The 737 Max is an is announced, then it's flying fine for a few months and then Lion Air in Indonesia crashes on October 29, 2018.

1:11:17 As Lola mentioned, you have to also understand that there was a lot of fucking racism on this. Everybody ignored that crash and the reason they ignored it is because it is true. Indonesia has a bad record with planes and maintenance. Then a few months later, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 3 O2 crashes. Now Ethiopian Airlines has an excellent record. It's the second crash and you couldn't just ignore it anymore. And so the truth finally came out about this Jerry rigged thing. And here's what was happening. Nobody told the pilots that there was a software system. The pilots, even when they did the iPad training, had no idea that the software system existed or how to turn it off. So what happened with both of these flights, and it became more sort of clear with the Ethiopian Airlines flight is the plane is taking off the nose is is actually not pitching high. It's actually under control.

1:12:15 It's actually flying normally. But M cast kicks in. And remember this is a plane just taking off. So it's not too far from the ground and it's full of fuel. And if M cast pitches the nose down, the pilots try basically to retake control of the plane to pitch the nose back up so they can keep taking off. It works for a few seconds or a minute and then the dam system kicks in again and it pitches the nose down. But they didn't know enough. They didn't know that it was. They didn't even know the software existed. They had no idea what was happening. So they wouldn't have any idea how to like disable it at any point. And so every time they take back control of the plane, it lets them for a few seconds and then it pitches the nose down.

1:12:55 And every time that happens, you're losing altitude. You're losing altitude until you finally crash. They must have been freaking out because they don't even know why that's happening. No, planes don't do that. There was no problems with the engines. There was no problems with, you know, no engine fellow or anything. Nothing. As far as they were concerned, they died not understanding what the hell was happening. Wow. And it's really devastating because if you look at some of the details from the crashes, the pilots are in this complete tug of war with the system. You know, like you were saying, it's like 20 times it with Lion Air. They're trying to pitch up and it keeps pitching down and they have no idea what's going on. And it's just, it's so incredibly devastating. But then of course, what's even more devastating is the cover up that happened.

1:13:40 Yeah. And, and I've seen many documentaries on this and I got to tell you there are a lot of them are kind of wanting because they'll talk about the criminality of Boeing, but a lot of them give a pass to the FAA. They were aware of what was going on and it's their job to regulate and make sure this stuff is safe. The FAA was aware that Boeing was putting engines that are were too big to put in the normal place onto the wings of those planes. And FAA knew FAA didn't do it at any of their own inspections or any of their own carry out any of their own tests on the plane. They just took Boeing's word for it. And the airlines didn't want any inspections. That's the other thing. The airlines did not want any inspections because they didn't want to have their pilots go through training.

1:14:21 Yeah. And the Federal Aviation Administration, it is the primary body that's responsible for Civil Aviation safety in the US It's under the Department of Transportation. And there's a revolving door between the FAA and the airline executives. Like you said, the companies perform their own safety certifications. It is a a loyal partner to the airline oligarchs. And so sometimes you'll hear like, oh, the FAA used to operate under this dual mandate because the so-called dual mandate was to oversee aviation safety and promote the aviation industry. And then they modified it slightly so that they weren't quote UN quote promoting the aviation industry, but they still do. The FAA has become I thought you were. Going to say they remove the other part. Exactly.

1:15:08 I mean, it seems like it because the FAA has become so captured by monopoly interests. It is completely corrupt and there's really no checks and balances. You mentioned in the introduction the crash in January 2025 where the military helicopter hit, crashed into a civilian airplane. The National Transportation Safety Board or NTSB, which is a whole other department whose main task is to figure out why planes crashed. Basically their final report on that was furious or as furious as a bureaucrats can be toward the FAA. Because what their main complaint was, the FAA has known for years and years and years that the vertical clearance between civilian planes and military helicopters that are flying this route is too small and an and there were so many near misses and an accident is bound to happen and did nothing.

1:16:03 That's the FAA. No, I'm sure there are people in the FAA that are adamant and devoted to the safety and things like that, but a lot of them just got fired by the Trump. Administration. And and and his tech bro Elon. But as an institution, as an agent agency, it really does see itself as promoting American aviation, even if that dual mandate no longer exists. It on paper. In reality it does and. I wish the US government cared about helping me as much as it cares about helping very rich companies. That's not why the US government exists. The US government couldn't give a flying fuck about you or me. Clearly. So final question, is there a way to make airline travel reliable and safe and affordable?

1:16:47 Is there a solution under capitalism? What do you guys think? Well, while I was researching this, not every country does it like the US And when I say every country, I mean like Western capitalist countries. There are many countries with nationalized airlines or airlines that are treated as Public Utilities. So I think that's one way we could approach it differently within capitalism. I can think of things and it mainly involves the workforce is stronger unions. I mean, one of the one of the dichotomies is the unionization rate in the airline industry is actually slightly higher today than it was pre 1978, but the power of the unions is far lower than it used to be. Just to give you a small example that I think was a turning point, in 1997, American airline pilots went on strike and Democrat Bill Clinton broke their strike because pilots in the airline industry falls under the National Railway Labor Act, which basically allows the government to force them back to work.

1:17:51 So in a certain sense, it captures the contradiction here. They fall under the RLA, the Railway Labor Act, and can be forced back to work because at a certain level it is seen as a public utility, but it's not treated as a public utility. It's treated as basically go out and make as much money as you can for the corporations. One of the things the airline Workers Union should be demanding is RIP up the RLA, get rid of it. I think you need unions that are willing to fight. And we've been talking a lot about the pilots and rightly so. But I want to focus a bit on the mechanics, which is the one area where unionization is the weakest among airline workers. And part of that is because of things like outsourcing to cheaper labor or cheaper areas.

1:18:42 But there has to be a drive to unionize these mechanics. And they have to have the right and ability to say, I'm not going to do it this way. This is wrong. This plane is not air worthy. I'm not going to check it off to let it fly. They have to have the the ability to do that and know that the union will back them up. And one of the ways to do that is what's called industrial unionism. You have a situation right now where the pilots have a union, the flight attendants have a union, the mechanics have. I don't know actually. It's not a union, it's multiple unions. Fuck that shit man. There should be 1 union of airline workers, from the pilots to the janitors, the cleaners who clean the planes from the top to the bottom, 1 union.

1:19:29 And when one walks out, you all walk out. And when one goes back to work, you all go back to work. And that is an exercise of power. And it also, while at the same time I'm saying, I think Pilot should be part of the labor aristocracy. It'll cut against the certain arrogance that comes with that. Yeah, the divides. You are part of the same union. That includes the mechanics, the cleaners, the flight attendants. You're all one union. Yeah, I think that's what's so criminal about a lot of the leadership of the airline unions, because the world economy can't function without air transport and they. We have so much social power, but the leadership of the airline unions is always letting the government and the airline carriers call the shots, and that includes on safety and everything else.

1:20:13 We we heard Sully speak about a 40% pay cut. No union should be agreeing to that. And that's kind of why I feel like the airline industry is such a clear expression of how deeply irrational the capitalist system is that, I mean, I, I agree with you that stronger unions and control of safety and and stuff like that. But it just feels like you need a completely different economic system that's based on centralized planning, that's under a workers government so that you don't have airline travel under the grip of private owners and the profit motive essentially. I agree. But one of the ways to get there is for the workers.

1:20:54 And in this case we're talking about airline workers to have a sense of their power, right? Because that's not going to just happen having a workers government. It's not going to just happen having workers with a sense of their power. That requires a leadership that's willing to say no and we're going to challenge. Fight back and fight back. And it's really when workers have a sense of their power that they can then look beyond their immediate environs or the social system that they're in and say, well, if we run this shit, why don't we just run the whole of society? As an aside, they keep talking about how AI is going to take over everybody's jobs. I mean, I don't believe it, but leaving that aside, one of the most useless jobs that it can happily take over is that of ACEO. The easiest amongst all jobs.

1:21:40 Really. What does a capitalist actually do? Seriously. I mean as they as if they can train a a. Robot to. Lay people off, then we're ready to go. So Ezra, do you think that we are on the verge of a another potential crisis in the airline industry? Yes, and I think it has to do with the war in Iran as we're recording this. God knows what will happen tomorrow. Talks between the US and Iran have predictably fallen apart, and the wise leadership of Trump has announced that in response to Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz, he's going to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, you can make fun of it and we should, but what he's saying is I am cutting off all oil supplies coming out of out. Of the Yay Make America great again. And, you know, I saw the speaker of the Iranian parliament issue a tweet saying if this happens, Americans are going to be nostalgic for $5 a gallon gas.

1:22:37 And I think that's, I think that's true. God, just kill me now. Yeah, so all the airline ticket, airline tick travel is about to get 1000 times more expensive too, Yeah. Or there's going to be fewer people flying, which means more layoffs and and another fucking another fucking bailout. Another bailout and then maybe sucking up more small companies or something like that. So more mergers and acquisitions. So Cam, given that you went, you dug into like how airline travel was before, what would have been the plane that you would have wanted to go on before deregulation? So TWA used to do a little thing called an accent tour.

1:23:18 And on this accent tour they had a theme based on a country. So for the British accent tour, the stewardesses would dress up as wenches and they would give you beans and toast. And because it's called an accent tour, I must imagine that the flight attendants are pretending to have accents, otherwise it wouldn't be good. So I have to imagine how great the Asian flights were with those stewardesses hitting those Asian accents. And who knows, they might have had some Swahili tours where everybody did blackface because it was the 50s and you don't know exactly what's happening that you know, what those hunkies are getting into. So yeah, I'll take the accent tour. Thank you. You wouldn't. You wanted to go on the accent tour with the. Yeah, you don't want to see you don't see the accent tour.

1:23:59 Oh, they also had one that was based on an English hunt. And over the loud speakers they would play dog barking and like, like whistles and stuff. Don't you want some calming dog barking ambiance on your airplane ride? It's nuts. All right, so who did we punch up to in this episode? So my punch up is for the executives of these airline industries who don't give a shit about safety, people are dying, who don't give a shit about their workers making living wages, who don't give a shit about the the Wellness of their workers at all, and just the most greedy, despicable people in this country. Or some of them. So yeah, fuck the airline executives. I agree with Cam.

1:24:42 I would just add to that. Also, punch up to the FAA, which has been in bed with these executives in promoting the most unsafe practices. I would punch up to both parties because deregulation was a Democratic project, the Democratic Party and the crushing of PATCO was Republican one. The industry does not belong to one party. This is actually a very bipartisan attacks and both parties have created the crises that were in of lack of reliability and horrible, miserable, crappy passenger experience and safety problems and they're all in each other's pockets. Do make sure to help somebody put up the luggage over.

1:25:25 There, well say thank you. If you we all said thank you, then you know that's a solution to everything. Make sure to say thank you to ICE as they're deporting you out of the airport. Yeah, sure. Guys, can I say how lovely it was to do this palate cleanser episode where merely hundreds of people die rather than entire classes across the globe? What a nice break we had from the serious stuff. It was considered a palate cleanser episode. These are Ezra's bedtime stories, so thank you for sharing. But. We don't love anybody who doesn't love us. Thanks for listening to Unwashed and Unruly. It's our 20th episode birthday so we can almost buy a beer legally.

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