Ask the pilot

Earlier this fall, only days after Northwest Airlines mechanics began striking, one of the carrier's jets blew four tires on landing. This struck me as a too-eerie coincidence and I considered canceling an upcoming trip with the airline. Then I read your column about landing gear snafus and realized the incident probably wasn't the smoking gun I assumed it was. No sooner had I calmed down when I stumbled across this scary-sounding exposé. So, I give up. How serious are the effects of labor troubles at an airline -- and a bankrupt airline at that?

At heart, this is two questions -- both of them popular of late in the traveling public's consciousness: 1. Is it safe to patronize an airline that is operating in bankruptcy? 2. Is it safe to patronize an airline that is missing a key component of its operational workforce?

My answer to both questions, including a combination of the two, is yes. It's a conditional yes handicapped by an asterisk or two, but it's still a yes.

If you're ticketed on a bankrupt company and have reservations, as it were, remember for starters that air carrier reorganizations are nothing new. Three of the world's 10 largest airlines, including two of the top three -- Northwest, United and Delta -- are currently operating under court protection. Looking back 20 years or so, each of the following mainline carriers also underwent the trauma of Chapter 11, some more than once: Braniff, Pan Am, Eastern, Continental, TWA, America West, US Airways. Add to that list a score of smaller and midsize contenders, from Midway to Hawaiian to ATA. Not all of these airlines emerged alive from the bankruptcy tunnel, but neither did any of them suffer a serious fatal accident while reorganizing.

The Federal Aviation Administration ratchets up the oversight of any struggling airline, dispatching extra inspectors and subjecting the company to stricter and more frequent safety audits. And it's imperative to bear in mind how much an airline stands to lose should an accident occur. Crashes are damaging enough during times of boon and profit, but exponentially so when the red ink is running; a disaster attributed to negligence or malfeasance could demolish a carrier's reputation and all but seal its fate. The destruction of flight 103 over Scotland in 1988 is widely cited as the beginning of the end for the fabled Pan Am. In 1996, the crash of a ValuJet DC-9 into the Florida Everglades was traced to the illegal transport of oxygen canisters, mistakenly loaded aboard by a subcontracted support company. ValuJet was so vilified that it had little choice but to reinvent itself, at great risk and cost, and begin again as AirTran. For household names like United, Delta or Northwest, such maneuvering would be immensely more challenging and unlikely to succeed. The specter of a crash is not taken lightly, and while the tangible effects of insolvency might manifest themselves through the disappearance of onboard snacks and pillows, you'll have to trust me that all the proper screws, fasteners and inspections are accounted for.

As one might expect, a bankruptcy filing can impart a severe blow to employee morale, but even the most demoralized workforce typically retains enough dignity to not play fast and loose with other people's lives. No employee, unless he or she is a sociopath to begin with, is apt to let labor relations get in the way of safety. At least intentionally; the rotten karma that tends to metastasize in such circumstances makes this one of those things that are impossible to quantify.

In 1994 I was a captain for a Northwest Airlines regional affiliate based in the Northeast. That summer, after weeks of foreboding rumor, we ran out of money and declared bankruptcy. The company bounced my biweekly $1,100 paycheck on my birthday, refused to issue a new one and demanded I come to work anyway. Morale imploded, employees were owed thousands from bad checks, and the outlook for company survival was bleak at best. About a month later Chapter 11 turned into Chapter 7 (liquidation). The police came into the hangar with padlocks, and that was that. There were some of us who finished out our tenure unpaid for several weeks of labor. Through it all, nobody vandalized property, made shoddy repairs, threw tantrums or showed up for work drunk -- though there was every opportunity, if not reason to. (My own worst crime was the playing of loud music, despite repeated dirty looks from passengers, over the plane's cassette-deck public address system, intended for use with the prerecorded safety briefing. When it grew clear that we were headed for the unemployment line, the Clash's "Career Opportunities" was a logical choice.) We had no accidents.

The ongoing situation at Northwest is unique, possibly even unprecedented, in that the Minneapolis-based giant is battling not only a Chapter 11 filing but a work stoppage action as well. A week ago at the Seattle-Tacoma airport I encountered a phalanx of picketing mechanics, some of them wearing sandwich boards asking, "Is It Safe to Fly Northwest Airlines?"

You already know what I think, so let's ask somebody else. "I spent 80 hours aboard company jets last month," says Michael [surname withheld], a senior Northwest first officer. "Do you think I'd have done that if I were worried about the state of our aircraft? It's not an easy time right now, but with increased vigilance we're able to keep our standards adequately high." Whether or not the strikers are fighting for a just cause is not the issue. The issue is the cheap, manipulative and frankly inviting use of fear as a protest and bargaining tool.

"The offenses highlighted in that news story," Michael adds, referring to the article linked to above, "aren't serious transgressions. It looks bad to the layperson, but if you ask me, this only proves that increased scrutiny is working." It's never exactly a good thing for the FAA to discover infractions, but in the context of a bankruptcy and labor disruption, minor violations keep an airline on its toes, even as they risk being spun by the media as dangerous scandals.

Looking at things as rationally and objectively as possible, is it a riskier bet to patronize an ailing, strike-addled carrier than a solvent and stable one? Probably, but on such a level of statistical insignificance that it's not worth canceling your trip or suffering undue angst. Bankruptcy is a cause for concern; an understaffed maintenance department is a cause for concern. To step back a column or two, the same goes for outsourcing, counterfeit parts circulation, and the threat of young, overly aggressive airlines that take liberties with training and operational standards. These all are problems that need to be addressed, because they indeed render a given airline less safe than it would be under more ideal conditions. But -- readers stop me if you've heard this riff before -- less safe does not equate to unsafe.

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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