I have found Alaska airlines to be the most comfortable that I had
experienced. I don't get the impression that they are cutting corners. That
doesn't mean they're not -- only that is far too obvious with some of the
others.
One of the major corners has been the treatment of airline mechanics,
especially with the contracting out of some work. I am surprised that far more
accidents do not happen.
Louis Proyect wrote:
> There has been an epidemic of airliners falling "mysteriously" from the sky
> in recent years. The best known incidents were TWA 800 which went down over
> Long Island Sound and the Egyptian plane that supposedly was brought down
> through the suicidal act of a pilot.
>
> Yesterday Alaskan Airlines Flight 261 fell 17,000 feet into the Pacific
> Ocean, 20 miles from Los Angeles. The crew had reported a problem with the
> stabilizer trim before it crashed.
>
> I don't like air travel very much. Went I went out to Los Angeles a week
> ago, the American Airlines plane I had a seat on was delayed for an hour
> because of mechanical difficulties. The explanation for this rash of
> airline accidents can be found in the Marxist analysis of the declining
> rate of profit, which affects heavy industry with high fixed capital costs
> most of all. When fixed capital can not be reduced, variable capital--ie.,
> working people--must be squeezed.
>
> There was an excellent series of articles in the New Yorker Magazine in the
> 1960s about these problems, which was forcing competitors to invest
> billions in "air-buses" without any assurance that their investments would
> be profitable. Like many articles in the classic New Yorker, it was an
> indictment of capitalism without using the word.
>
> Excerpts from an article in today's NY Times spells out some of the
> shortcuts Alaskan Airline has taken in order to satisfy Wall Street
> investors anxious for upbeat quarterly returns:
>
> >>The airline, a subsidiary of Alaska Air, based in Seattle, carried 13.1
> million passengers in 1998 and now serves 41 cities in the United States,
> Mexico and Canada. The airline has more than 9,200 employees and its 1999
> sales were $2.08 billion.
>
> While it has faced criticism and sanctions from the Federal Aviation
> Administration for maintenance practices, the airline had not had a fatal
> crash in more than 25 years until yesterday and is a perennial favorite
> among customers.
>
> Alaska Airlines is owned by the Alaska Air Group, a holding company that
> also owns Horizon Air, a smaller carrier. According to the company's
> history, Alaska Airlines traces its roots to McGee Airways, which started
> service between Anchorage and Bristol Bay, Alaska, in 1932. The airline
> took the name Alaska Airlines in 1944 and grew through mergers and
> acquisitions, including that of Jet America Airlines, a carrier based in
> California, in 1987.
>
> The only two fatal incidents in its history were in 1971, when faulty
> instrument readings caused an Alaska Boeing 727 to crash into a mountain
> outside Juneau, killing 111 people, and in 1976, when a plane overran a
> runway in Ketchikan and a passenger died of a heart attack.
>
> The airline has occasionally run afoul of the federal authorities. Last
> August, The Seattle Times reported that Federal Aviation Administration
> records showed that Alaska Airlines flew two of its MD-80's more than 840
> times in 1998 and 1999 without having done proper maintenance on them.
>
> The planes were allowed to fly despite falsified maintenance checks that
> included work by an Alaska Airlines supervisor who was "not appropriately
> certified, properly trained or qualified to do so," the paper quoted the
> agency as saying. According to the agency, the airline released a an MD-80
> for service in October 1998 despite 10 occasions in which maintenance work
> was performed out of sequence and with incomplete final checks.
>
> In a separate proceeding, the F.A.A. proposed a $44,000 fine against the
> airline last June for violating maintenance procedures. The fine has been
> suspended while the agency awaits the outcome of a grand jury investigation
> into charges that managers at Alaska's maintenance base in Oakland approved
> heavy-maintenance checks that were never performed, according to the
> Seattle Times.
>
> In 1985, the airline paid a $300,000 fine for violating federal safety
> rules.<<
>
> All these problems are related to "deregulation", a policy that has been
> applied across the board to the trucking, railroad and airline industry. It
> has produced harried operator and maintenance crews. In exchange for profit
> returns that Wall Street brokerage houses can smile on, we get smack-ups on
> Amtrak and airplanes falling out of the sky. Deregulation is not a
> right-wing plot. One of the most forceful advocates is Ted Kennedy, who
> believed that Joe Six-Pack was getting cheated out of affordable air
> travel. I guess neglect and stupidity about air travel runs in the Kennedy
> family.
>
> Meanwhile, as the body count mounts in accidents of these kinds, the two
> party system responsible for forcing deregulation down the throat of the
> American people share equal blame. I doubt if the families who lost loved
> ones will ever be adequately recompensed (how could they, no matter the
> cash award), but the real justice would be a sentences of life imprisonment
> for the scum running American industry and finance and their puppets inside
> the beltway.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
