Calling Passenger Smith: Has Aviation Backed Itself Into a Corner? (part one)
Covid vaccines are incompatible with Flight Safety. Don't look, don't tell.
Read Part Two here.
Note: For ease of reading and brevity, I have split this article into two. See the notes at the bottom for an additional commercial recap of some major industrial moves that occurred in parts of the airline industry that are relevant underpin to the points I make below. You can take or leave the additional information as you please. I structure this article in this way in case what I write is too long for some readers.
Aviation is :
a recession sensitive industry;
a highly reactive industry;
capital intensive;
an industry that has learned from lessons that are always written in blood, sweat or tears.
This can manifest in lagging decision-making and lack of innovation, as well as flat out cut-throat opportunism when an external situation arises. Covid falls into the latter.
Covid has presented circumstances that airlines have taken as an opportunity to instigate and accelerate varying levels of internal re-engineering to greater or lesser degrees and it has also exposed that airline management loyalties run upwards into higher layers of the G3P structure and do not extend downwards into their people or customers. Covid has put aviation labour power on the floor and the industry has worked hard to exploit that as part of its re-engineering. Such opportunities are rare.
The modern school of aviation management shows that it takes the path of least resistance i.e. it looks for the easiest, quickest or cheapest solution. Sometimes, this means it does nothing in the hope that no one else notices a problem or says anything about it. Silence enables bad things to happen.
The “aviation industry” is not an abstract entity. It is full of people actively doing things to other people. A lack of care could spell doom for some or all of the people in the industry. It has happened before (see 737 MAX).
The book of “Lessons in Aviation” is written in blood and bound in burnt skin.
Overview of the players in aviation
The aviation industry largely comprises, in simple terms:
Manufacturers (Airbus & Boeing plus supply chains) who are integrated Military Industrial Aerospace Defence Security entities;
Airlines and other “operators” plus their supply chains;
Organisers and Regulators. International Civil Aviation Organisation - National Governments (laws) - National Regulators (law, policy & practise) e.g. UK CAA, USA FAA;
Unions with collective bargaining power (BALPA for UK pilots, mostly Unite for Cabin Crew);
Training organisations (L3 being a major player). Pilots get trained at various private flight schools and pay massive sums for their own training then largely become indentured labour of an airline. Airlines are generally not responsible for the pilots’ training costs by design (AKA cost externalisation). Cabin crew are generally trained by airlines when they join;
Airport and infrastructure providers plus their supply chains.
Airlines, regulators and unions generally work together to control the airline industry within a territory and ultimately enable airline corporate agendas. They are all linked by a shared vested interest - money. I will illustrate this in more detail in another article.
Political policy shut down the world, not a respiratory disease with a low IFR
The government shut the country down on a zero evidence basis (see NPIs having no effect on the virus, anywhere). This is the root cause of aviation income loss.
The government then told everyone that three things would restart the aviation industry:
mass testing;
Covid-19 gene therapies; and
Vaccine Passports.
Only those three things would re-enable the mass movement of citizens. Mass testing is a fallacy and is a deliberately created income-generating ecosystem for others in society. No such testing policy has ever been implemented for any infectious disease in the history of mankind. These three forced policy options went directly against prevailing, long-standing advice issued by Dr. Chris Whitty himself in 2018 on epidemic management1, and the corporate interests and state agents running Event 201 who issued Policy Making and Policy Distribution statements2 under simulated pandemic conditions of their making.
Aviation income slashing drives predictable industry behaviours
The political policies that have “managed” Covid have cut income from every single party on the list above, including the regulator. In their circular income paradigm, the only way for all of them to survive is to get money back into the industry via the resumption of flying by the fastest means possible i.e. the path of least resistance.
Regulator - UK Civil Aviation Authority
The one party that should exist outside of this circular money paradigm is the regulator, yet it is fully embedded within it and therefore shares the same financial strategic objective of those it regulates. Think about that. The UK CAA is a public corporation whose income comes largely and directly from its charges to the industry it “regulates”. Therefore, its existence is directly tied, in the same direction, to everyone in the industry and it is therefore dependent on that industry. It runs its own pension scheme which needs income from the industry in order to meet its obligations.
Department for Transport - Global Travel Taskforce (GTT)
The UK CAA falls under the remit of the UK Government’s Department of Transport, which comprises the Global Travel Taskforce (GTT). Its report, pages 13 and 14, covers safety in travel. These points are vague and are essentially irrelevant to virus control i.e. humans don’t control an aerosol respiratory virus, as all the data and evidence shows.
The GTT has essentially ignored science and medicine and engaged the nation and the travel industry in theatre, much like the DfT has done since 9/11 forcing outbound UK passengers to limit to 100ml of fluids (for supposed anti-terror reasons). A British investigative documentary showed that this was pure theatre, admitted as such by politicians.
Pages 17 and 18 of the GTT report lay out the future of travel. Note, the UK Government is referencing a lot of other parties with which it co-ordinates. This is “blame shift” and “defence by consensus” i.e. if the “strategy” the UK has pursued is shown to be the junk that it is, it can defend itself via the consensus “decisions” that were taken together with all those parties. That other nations have instigated their own independent policies (for better or worse) shows you that external consensus at or within the borders of a single nation is not required. This means that any nation can take its own position based on whatever it wants and work out the pros and cons for itself. Hong Kong and China are perfect examples. Foreign airlines flying into those places either go (and totally conform to Chinese rules) or they don’t.
These last two pages show that the UK has always been hellbent on getting Vaccine Passports (Digital IDs) in place in the absence of any evidence that they serve the gross or net interests of citizens.
Here’s an industry whose money was cut off by bad politics. More bad politics told that industry what to do to get its money back:
test;
fill in paperwork;
take gene therapies; and
carry Vaccine Passports.
Guess what? That’s exactly what the industry has implemented in the absence of evidence that any of it works to stop or influence an aerosolised respiratory virus with very low Infection Fatality Rate (below 0.15%).
Most of the airlines in the UK have taken the King’s shilling in the form of bail out loans and thus are beholden to the Government. Ever wonder why easyJet and BA’s judicial review died a death? They got a lot of government cash after they threatened legal action. To negotiate one must have leverage. A successful negotiation is when you get something that you want for equal to or less than you are willing or able to give.
Shit rolls downhill and so does bad politics and ignorant conformance
The aviation industry took what it thought would be the quickest path back to getting its cashflow up and running again: it did what the government told it to do. But everything the government was doing simply slowed life down. The industry did not critically analyse Covid-19 gene therapies. If it had, the best it would have come up with is a big fat “unknown”; the worst it could have come up with is “possible risk to business and safety in the short, medium or long term”. Trust me, some airlines have had this flagged to them expressly.
Major airlines encourage, coerce or mandate their air crew to take Covid-19 gene therapies. Even the supranational aviation body, ICAO, pressed for aircrew to take them as soon as they were deployed, in the absence of even a partial understanding of the actual or possible risk benefit associated with them.
The UK CAA formally issued a statement very early on in 2020 that pilots were “allowed to take” Covid gene therapies and have considered them as nothing more than any other vaccine. There have been no changes in its medical rules or procedures in this regard. Being “allowed” to do something is not being told to do it, nor is it an endorsement of any kind, especially when one understands where responsibility lies in flying. It doesn’t lie, in this situation, with the CAA, airlines or government or gene therapy manufacturer. Responsibility lies solely and squarely with each pilot. End of. All the liability lies with pilots as well.
Most UK pilots have dosed themselves at least once, probably twice. Views from the inside have been revealing. Like medics, many pilots may have:
swallowed the manufactured fear narrative;
been scared of losing their jobs due to industry collapse from lockdown etc;
conducted next to zero critical analysis of fundamental aspects of the “pandemic” and the obvious corollaries;
not undertaken data and evidence based risk analysis of the virus and gene therapies;
not read what they were taking before they took it;
not thought properly about the risk profile of what they were taking;
not thought about how what they were taking may or may not actually fit into what they should or should not do in the context of their flight licences;
not thought about how what they were doing may or may not fit with UK and possibly international air law;
not considered chain of responsibility and liability in terms of what they were taking and what it might do;
ignored the reality that:
few UK pilots have been unable to work as a direct result of not taking a gene therapy (and this is likely open to legal challenge);
UK passengers have been able to travel without having to take gene therapies.
Now, consider possible common drivers of the above points. I posit that they are:
ignorance;
fear;
loss of income/money/change in living standard;
narrow, partially informed self-interest.
No one has formally forced or mandated UK pilots to dose themselves until relatively recently (see Appendix: Virgin Atlantic) so all these pilots did things to themselves by their own volition. The reasons why are irrelevant and there exists a minority control group who are living proof that there was a successful and different way of dealing with the situation.
The real job of a pilot is not - as many pilots and non-pilots think to some degree - to follow rules.
The real job of a pilot is to effectively game rules and systems to achieve an optimum balance of safety, commercial outcome and welfare. This is manifest when the chips are down and shit hits the fan but it applies all the time.
Covid has shown that pilots are massive rule followers, may lack creative thinking, and have failed to apply critical thinking that they supposedly exercise in the flight deck to a situation that is fundamental to their role as the final arbiters of real-time flight safety.
These shortcomings are measured, in Covid and in flying, in absolute terms.
Appendix
This appendix is intended to give you, the reader, some degree of airline level context in terms of how airlines have brutalised their staff. Consider what the following would mean for the wider situation and how it affects the individual victims of this brutality.
Remember, what follows is largely about politically instigated deprivation.
The first cut is the deepest
The first slash of the Covid knife cut into aviation and the wider travel sector, which reacted internally at first, then externally.
Airline management comprises mixed actual managerial competence. One must specifically define “competence” in order to judge it. If it is defined as “maintaining margin at all costs”, then airline management is still probably only semi-competent. If it is defined as “achieving reasonable returns while maintaining consistent service and good internal relationships with the workforce” then Covid has definitely proven airline management to be incompetent.
Internally, many if not most airlines attacked their people by slashing wages, forcing unpaid leave and sacking staff. They used the fear of the unknown threat of the external environment to put labour power on the floor and made the labour force take the biggest bite of the Covid sandwich, which was filled with a mixture of genetically modified organisms, scare stories and company propaganda. Unions essentially enabled this and so did politicians, despite some amusing but transparent theatrics early on.
easyJet
Peter Bellew, easyJet COO, reacted instantly to Covid with his readymade Operation Burn Them All Then Dance On Their Bones. Within weeks of the pandemic starting to restrict travel, he tabled to staff a comprehensive decimation of their (but not his) terms and conditions, based on nothing but fear and hearsay that no one heard anyone other than him say. He evidently had a plan in the drawer, ready and waiting. He promulgated fear and unbacked assertions into face-to-face staff meetings via useful idiots further down the food chain. One leaked video did the rounds of a crew manager who was unqualified to independently understand the financial nature of the business, telling cabin crew staff that easyJet was then literally financially against the wall and that there was no option but for staff to sign in blood on Bellew’s thin blue line. “Blue” because it would have essentially begun to turn, forever, easyJet into RyanAir, which was Bellew’s previous employer.
This was Bellew’s moment of greatness. He probably licked his lips and tasted something mealy. Fortunately, easyJet employees stood their ground and Bellew was internally and externally humiliated and shown up for what he really is - someone who has to copy speeches from the Irish Taoiseach because he lacks the ability to write his own and is too tight to pay someone skilled in speech writing to write one for him. Despite this, LinkedIn still shows him in position. See definition of “competence”. easyJet staff still took big hits but on better terms and the airline is still operating and recruiting again. This very fact shows that Bellew was lying upfront. His timing utterly sucked. Sadly, he’s now learned that lesson so caveat emptor when the outbreak of weaponised smallpox that Gates told us was on his cards occurs.
A lesson for eJ staff is that life moves in circles and if Grange Hill taught our generation anything it’s that the tactic of “Just say No!” is remarkably effective. Some business book taught me that just asking “Why?” as many times as possible before then saying “No!” can be even more effective because you get to hear five layers of bullshit and lies before you know you’re right to say “No!”.
TUI
To the credit of TUI’s Pilot Manager, what was seen externally of TUI UK’s handling of the uncertainty around Covid seemed genuinely caring, honest and protective. Even if the final result was less than savoury, people had been taken along an unpleasant journey while being treated relatively well in comparison to the bigger players who were richer than TUI.
Virgin Atlantic
Virgin retreated from Gatwick entirely and sacked staff via a process that some people subjected to it have described as essentially opaque and uneven. What it has now done is recruited crew back on to worse new joiner contracts that stipulate that they MUST take Covid-19 gene therapies as a condition of employment. They also forced some existing staff onto new contracts with the same gene therapy stipulation when they made internal moves from one aircraft fleet to another. Thereby, Virgin Atlantic is, to my knowledge, the first UK airline to have privately mandated Covid-19 gene therapies for flight crew by way of contractual terms and conditions. I predict that situation is not going to end well for someone, but it’s unlikely that you will get to hear about it. I don’t know if Virgin Atlantic management knows what Boeing now knows about holes, paper and wind (see below).
British Airways
The first internal company address of the CEO to the staff told them that people would lose their jobs without, at that point, any financial justification of why, despite there being no bankable certainty of how Covid was likely to play out. No time for cuddles in Covid-19! There was God’s work to be done in bringing forward a decade’s worth of cost base re-engineering. Its already retiring 747 fleet was fully axed and A380s were parked up. It then set about working out how, by threatening to sack lots of employees, it could use overt fear to manipulate staff on an ongoing basis. It did this by issuing formal redundancy notices for an excessive number of employees. In the end, ~250 pilots from the bottom of the seniority list were sacked (these were the pilots with the greatest flight training debts) and many more cabin crew. About 300 pilots including the ex-747 fleet pilots were suspended from active duty and all the other working pilots were made to pay 66% of those ex-747 pilots’ wages out of their own pockets for up to two years. That’s a lot of money. The Sun (see link) misreported the details of this pay cut. Meanwhile, those ex-747 pilots were fully able to work (including flying) anywhere they wanted. How’s that for Universal Credit/gardening leave? The remaining pilots were subject to further massive and permanent compound wage cuts of at least 20% of basic pay for two years, which included the money they were paying to the other pilots.
BA had also pursued a fire and rehire policy that met with theatrical resistance from Huw Merriman, BA staff and a few other opponents. However, BA got its way and has indeed fired and rehired pilots and cabin crew to its significant advantage.
When under increasing fire for multiple bungles, then CEO, Alex Cruz, even got the airline’s name wrong on national television (“British Airlines”?). Having served his purpose as a hatchet man, he was made to walk the plank.
Note: it is neither common practise nor generally a corporate requirement to wear a high-viz vest in an office environment, which is why no one else in the background is wearing one.
They say timing is everything in aviation and that’s true. Thanks to a captive union, massive pay cuts and a redundancy programme were “negotiated” in the airline and timed to complete less than a month before Sunak’s furlough programme came in that would have applied to airline staff and made an across the board difference to the whole structuring of pay cuts and staff take home pay throughout Covid. Eventually furlough was accessed but the the airline could have accessed the scheme from its start but chose not to.
"A whole bunch of interventions were called for, like screening at airports and banning travel, which are utterly useless - as close to utterly useless as makes no difference.”
Countries, international organizations, and global transportation companies should work together to maintain travel and trade during severe pandemics. Travel and trade are essential to the global economy as well as to national and even local economies, and they should be maintained even in the face of a pandemic. Improved decision-making, coordination, and communications between the public and private sectors, relating to risk, travel advisories, import/export restrictions, and border measures will be needed. The fear and uncertainty experienced during past outbreaks, even those limited to a national or regional level, have sometimes led to unjustified border measures, the closure of customer-facing businesses, import bans, and the cancellation of airline flights and international shipping. A particularly fast-moving and lethal pandemic could therefore result in political decisions to slow or stop movement of people and goods, potentially harming economies already vulnerable in the face of an outbreak.
Ministries of Health and other government agencies should work together now with international airlines and global shipping companies to develop realistic response scenarios and start a contingency planning process with the goal of mitigating economic damage by maintaining key travel and trade routes during a large-scale pandemic. Supporting continued trade and travel in such an extreme circumstance may require the provision of enhanced disease control measures and personal protective equipment for transportation workers, government subsidies to support critical trade routes, and potentially liability protection in certain cases. International organizations including WHO, the International Air Transport Association, and the International Civil Aviation Organization should be partners in these preparedness and response efforts.
Virgin are not the only airline in the U.K. to mandate jabs via an employment contract.