As an airline pilot, the current oil situation affects me more than it does most people. Sure I hate spending more money to fill up my vehicles, but it goes further than that.
I decided to spend some more time looking into the situation and trying to stay plugged into the “THINK” and the “PULSE” out there about rising prices and I’ve discovered that its sort of like walking into a room full of worried and pissed off people who all KNOW the answer. On http://www.airlinepilotcentral.com, a popular web forum for airline pilots, there are many threads of multiple pages consisting of opinions on what is going to happen over the next many years to the airline industry. It is analagous to the modern 24 hour news concept in that you have a split screen, each side consisting of a talking head, both with impressive credentials, years of experience in their fields, and both say COMPLETELY opposed conflicing information that just sounds so damn right. Yet any fool can step back three feet and say, “Hey, if the left side guy is right, then what the right side guy is saying just can’t be right”. “And if the right side guy is right, then that refutes the guy on the left side”. Its simple. Then I got to thinking further about it and I began to wonder if this is related at all to this seemingly new 50/50 voting situation we’ve got these days. Bush/Gore, Bush/Kerry, Obama/Hilary, and possibly McCain/Obama. It seems that the results of these polls now days are all right down the damn middle. Both sides sound so good, yet both cannot be correct. There is no doubt in my mind that if you plucked a random set of intelligent folks about the country, told them a set of specific problems, and gave them potential solutions (or even asked them to create their own solutions – thats even better than providing them solutions), you’d find a much more uniform result in what solutions were favored. So where does it break down?
Anyway, back to the airline industry, visiting these forums, and reading pieces in USA Today (the official newspapaer of the airline pilot – you know what I am talking about) and the Wal-Street Journal, again you see diametrically opposed opinions. The facts are the facts and it is my opinion that NO ONE KNOWS THE FUCKING ANSWER!!!
These are facts:
1. The airline industry will continue on (it will change a good bit).
2. There will always be a place for commercial aviation. Sure, people can teleconference, talk on the phone, fax and e-mail, but there will always be a need to “move the meat”.
3. Airliners will continue to burn Jet-A for a multitude of years to come.
4. There will be two pilots in every part 121 airplane for years to come.
5. In time, the cost will be passed to the passenger one way or another. (Source: common knowledge of business)
Here are the opinions:
1. Oil will continue to rise.
2. The oil bubble will burst in short time and prices will fall.
Since these opinions are based on a factual set of curcumstances of which no one completely understands (sort of like a Ouija board – no one really knows who is responsible). Also its like when a public speaker tells the crowd that “someone in here this evening came to me and said ‘whatever’”, no one can refute it can they? Could be someone in the room, but its someone else. Can you pin point anyone and say, “YOU said it”? If that person said “No, I didn’t say it”, ten it must be someone else still.
There is certainly some artificial price inflation going on as regards oil futures. Using my example of the public speaker, “Well if someone said that, there could be merit to it, maybe I should go and check it out”, etc. But who actually said it?
Could the media be a similar affect? “Prices are expected to hit $200 dollars per barrel by peak of travel season”. Well, they’ve obviously done their research, why, its CNN!!! So, bets are placed (futures purchased) on the oil going up by the peak of travel season. Its sort of a self fullfilling prophecy.
Anyway, what will happen will happen. I haven’t decided to be a pilot my whole career, but I am doing it right now and ever since this whole oil debacle really hit (2 months ago) I’ve felt a real weight on my shoulders whilst following these social forums, reading everyones rants. Talk about a rollercoaster. I read a positive post and I say to myself “Cool, maybe there is hope here. I can really see all that going on and agree with that”, then a couple replies down I read another post and I say “Damn, we’re all doomed to die a painful death.”. Did anything really change at all in the 2 minutes it took me to read the posts? Did reality really make a 100% direction change? No! Its just opinions. In reality, speaking of facts, NOTHING has changed about my job in the two months since this whole thing unfolded. I still fly the same plane, over the same routes, etc. Sure, hiring stopped everywhere. I guess that is a change, but nothing changed with ME.
Time will tell. No one is really in control (at least soley). Airline managements everywhere are all licking their finger, sticking it up into the breeze and looking to see what everyone else is doing about it.
In closing I will make one last comparison. I recently read a Southwest Airlines internal publication (I was jumpseating and the captain let me take a look at it) and I read an article that one of the reasons that they’ve been so successful in their fuel hedging is that they have three people assigned to the task of determining when to hedge and how. Other airlines have assigned large commitees to the task. If you ever want something to either happen very slowly or not at all, assign a commitee to it. With the number of people increased, the diverse opinions and takes on a given set of facts will be vast and hence agreement more difficult to lock down. Does anything ANYWHERE not slow down the more people involved? I dare you to name a single thing! “Gooooooooooodddddd mmmmmooooorrrrrnnnninnnngggg, MMMMMrrrrsssss. Smmmmiiiitttthhhhh” says the kindergarten class. The stadium takes an hour to empty out. Traffic is bumber to bumber all around the planet right now for the huge volume of people out there. And yes, even the airplane will fly slower full of people than it would with just a few. The family wants to take a cruise? Good luck with that one! My point here is that with this oil situation a result of such a vast array of people it will take a long time to sort out and no one knows where it is going to go because no one is soley responsible. So opinions remain only that!
One piece of stable information created by a single person (yours trully) is that I will continue to show up to work until they tell me not to show up anymore. What will come will come and I’ll just have to face it when it does. At least then I’ll be dealing with facts and not opinions!