9,604 cancelled is one of the phrases being worked on this morning by senior officials. That is, Gentle Reader, scheduled jet flights by major carriers for which the Department of Transportation Security is responsible. Not the production of the jets themselves, that being a different sort of thing, mind you. Many of our citizens are also going to successfully travel for this huge travel days by aircraft without cancellation. Reports this morning are that as many as 30 million are embarked in some sort of travel adventure. That strange little man who claims to be Secretary of Transportation is the First of Something, we are not sure what.

There has been an outbreak of ‘NOT BEING ABLE TO DO THE ROUTINE STUFF” lately which you may have noticed. This is directly attributed to some sort of global response to something else which is not related to “transport’ of anything, though of course it is. The senior-most official entrusted with travel is a former Mayor from a modest mid-western town known as ‘Indianapolis.’ They have roads and holes on them like everyone else.

Some of our crowd has had some good times in that Midwestern town, but we believe all of them to have predated the tenure of the Secretary pictured in the montage above. His tenure has been marked by a lot of cancellations. That means we could insert the usual handful of footnotes up here at the “head” rather than the “foot.” We do not care if the Secretary of Moving Things is in turn one thing or another. So long as “they” are good at moving whatever it is!

That means something to the aviation-associated members of our crowd at the fire pit. Rocket spent some time in the commercial end of the jet business. He has a bunch of footnotes acquired in that trade, though they are more than we can append this morning. A lot of it stems back to the pandemic, which was the catalyst for a swath of retirements in the cockpits. That was just a natural response to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposing another set of restrictions of who could actually sit up there.

We have previously sworn our adherence to whatever official guidance comes out of there issued under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), so see no need to affirm that concept again, since our oaths have no set time limit. But when the Secretary stepped out to the slightly shorter than usual podium to inform us that aside from a few cancellations due to the hub-and-spoke architecture of airline logistics. That means flight crews may be collected at one air facility to be transported to another for further destinations.

As with everything else in the sky, this can come with trouble and advantage. Every day, FAA’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO) provides service to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.

With an airspace system as vast and complex as ours, it is helpful to have an easy-to-reference source for relevant facts and information to see if we are in trouble. The FAA can report those in different in ways. One would go like this: “9,604 cancellations is only “about a quarter of scheduled flights” that are not going where they were supposed to go. That leaves us with 75% of an ambitious holiday goal accomplished. That is sort of good, right?

Or maybe that was “nearly a quarter of all flights due for cancellation are due to staffing inadequacies exacerbated by equity goals.”

We are going to relax a bit this morning. We have complete confidence in the wisdom of a policy of hiring pilots based on some factor other than expertise at the controls of a machine with more than a million moving parts, right?

After all, what could go wrong?

2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com