Our Union: Structured for Success
By Capt. Tim Canoll, ALPA President
After decades spent blasting it, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett has lately decided to invest billions in the U.S. airline industry. “I like airlines because they just ‘got a bad century out of the way,’” he is quoted saying by CNBC’s Squawk Box.
While this view is decidedly subject to interpretation, the notion of factoring in the past to determine how we structure the future is not. Through the aperture of experience, airline pilots evaluate data to identify and mitigate risk and maximize safety every day—to the benefit of passengers, crews, and cargo.
In collaboration with regulators and management, airline pilots perform their jobs within highly sophisticated structures—physical, economic, and professional. The resulting confluence of past lessons and future opportunity has helped ALPA capitalize on new approaches to help build a successful future for our members and our industry.
ALPA’s Air Safety Organization (ASO) embodies this spirit to advance our members’ positions on safety, security, and pilot assistance. You can read in this issue about ALPA’s ASO and how this group of dedicated pilot representatives works on behalf of the union (see page 21).
For example, working with industry, labor, and government, ALPA participated in a stakeholder effort to improve airline pilot training, qualification, and flight experience requirements for new-hire first officers. Based on four high-profile fatal airline accidents during a six-year period in the United States, industry stakeholders together urged Congress to pass the Airline Safety and FAA Extension Act of 2010.
Since the passage of the law, which led to science-based flight, duty, and rest rules, as well as improved training, qualification, and flight experience requirements for first officers, the United States has not experienced a single passenger fatality due to an accident on a scheduled U.S. Part 121 passenger airliner. ALPA will remain firm that these proven, life-saving regulations stay in place during the upcoming FAA reauthorization. Please join ALPA’s Call to Action to make clear to Congress that any weakening of these regulations will increase risk.
It’s a similar story with the FAA’s 2016 data revealing that unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are showing up more frequently in airspace shared with passenger airliners and cargo freighters. ALPA is deeply involved in all elements of the UAS issue, protecting our profession and calling for safety to remain paramount even as manufacturers and commercial operators push hard for greater airspace access.
In both the United States and Canada, ALPA is working with regulators and informing the public of the risk UAS pose and their role in ensuring safety. To this end, our union supports Transport Canada’s recent action to limit the use of UAS near areas that could jeopardize aviation safety and to require the application of a unique identifier to recreational UAS. ALPA continues to maintain that UAS registration, starting at the point of sale, is a necessary safeguard.
Likewise, our union is working to advance safety by calling on Transport Canada to apply science-based flight- and duty-time regulations to all airline pilots regardless of the size of the aircraft they fly and to do so as quickly as possible, rather than allowing up to four years for airlines to comply.
As the U.S. administration works through the FY2018 budget, one of the key factors upon which ALPA will evaluate it is how well it supports aviation safety. We will maintain ALPA’s long-held policy that any plan to “privatize” the U.S. air traffic control system must not undermine safety.
The same essential structure informed by past experience holds true far beyond aviation safety. In all aspects of ALPA’s work—safety, security, pilot assistance, representation, and the future of the profession—our structure is built for our members’ success. For more than 85 years, the architecture of our efforts has been designed and dedicated to advancing our members’ goals and their vision for the future.
