There's more to life than finding the perfect car, but finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop-off to off-road, and the car that hauls groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at autotrader.ca, Canada's car marketplace. Tell me about a frightening incident you've had as a pilot.
Okay, I'm going to apologize to my mom and my wife on this one. Uh-oh. I had a smoke and fumes emergency when I was departing Guam, and we thought our airplane was on fire. And when you have an internal fire, you have not a lot of time.
So we turned around, we had to put the airplane on the ground very quickly, we had a lot of gas on board. I was in charge that day, even though the other pilot was even more senior in experience than I was. But I said, okay, I'm going to do these tasks, you're going to do these tasks, and we'd separated it mentally to go take care of what we needed to take care of to get that airplane back on the ground as fast as we could. And when we reconvened, all things were done.
We had our oxygen masks on, we landed the airplane safely, and egressed the aircraft. How scared were you? At the time, you're not scared. Your training kicks in, you just start turning an automaton and doing what you know to do correctly.
That is Adam Yuhan. Today, he's a pilot for a major U.S. airline, but the emergency he described was some years ago during an Air Force flight. It was a Boeing KC-135 Strato tanker heading out to refuel a bomber midair over the Pacific Ocean.
That's why his plane had so much gas on board. Yuhan joined the Air Force in 2001, and he's still in the National Guard, training other pilots. The first time I said that I was going to be a pilot at the United States Air Force was when I was in first grade. We were walking home from school, and the three other little guys with me said, yeah, no, you can't do that, that's only for, like, superheroes.
I asked Yuhan if he'd ever had a frightening incident as an airline pilot. So, in the airlines, I've never had a real issue that I would call frightening. The safety records are true, go ahead, read the NTSB reports, you can be blown away at how few incidents there truly are. This is correct.
According to the NTSB, or National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates every civil aviation accident in the U.S., since 2010, there have been only two fatal accidents involving large U.S. carriers. Two. That's out of more than 100 million flights.
It's a miracle. It's a miracle that we can push enough thrust out of the back of this airplane to make enough air go over the wings to then make that airplane rise into the air and fly smoothly, safely to a destination, and then lower it by controlling control surfaces and making them move in certain ways that we can bring the airplane down at an exact speed to touch down and then take it to your gate. Today on Free Comics Radio, it wasn't always this way. If we go back 30 or 40 years, air crashes were not uncommon.
And now? It's safer than riding a bike, safer than driving a car, safer than crossing a street. And what can the rest of us, the people driving cars especially, what can we learn from the people who fly planes? In commercial aviation, we train ad nauseum.
There are, of course, other things that can go wrong. They just made an announcement asking for a medical professional. And we do a little safety training of our own. Release seatbelts.
Leave everything. Release seatbelts. I'm flipping out right now, even though I know it's sitting there. This is Free Comics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.
This is the second episode in our series, Freakonomics Radio Takes to the Skies. Early on, we deputized our listeners to make audio diaries of their recent airline trips. So here's a listener named Alex Polson, traveling with his infant son. Okay, so we got them all wrapped up in a blanket, rocking them now.
Pass fire in. Flip and get to sleep. We heard from Faye Walsh-Druyard, whose concern was other people's kids. There are three children sitting behind me.
I'm the age of 10, with no parent nearby, at least that I can tell. And I haven't kicked a few times. And we heard from a listener named Charlie Wood, who was just enjoying the ride. Flight attendant said it's going to be a bumpy arrival, but the way I look at it, it's kind of like a free roller coaster.
We received hours and hours of audio diaries, covering every phase of the air travel experience. People were concerned about all sorts of things. Tight connections and tight seats, lost baggage, noisy passengers, smelly food. But there was one concern that not a single person mentioned.
Getting in a crash. And that makes sense. Last year, there was only one fatal crash in the world that involved a large commercial jetliner. A China Eastern flight that killed all 132 people on board.
And that crash is thought to have been caused by a suicidal pilot. Some other crashes involving smaller aircraft brought the global total of people killed aboard commercial carriers to 174. That's for the entire year. That same number of people die in car crashes every day and a half in the U.S.
alone. Last year, there were zero deaths in the U.S. on regularly scheduled commercial flights. Private air travel is riskier.
There, around 300 people die each year in the U.S. Still, the overall progress in air safety is almost hard to fathom. So, how did that happen? Yes, you know, I'm not going to waste here, but it's really, you know, part of the pond, it hasn't been by accident.
That is Billy Nolan. And I'm the acting administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA regulates just about every aspect of civilian aviation. Airports and airlines, air traffic control, and the certification of pilots and aircraft.
Going back to the early 90s, while the rate was fairly low, we could still see, you know, more accidents than we wanted. So, we set out to create a framework which was designed to bring together the regulator and the airlines to openly share safety data and trending information. So, we set out to reduce what we call the rate of fatal accidents by 80% over 10 years. We wind up exceeding that, reducing it by 83% from 1997 to 2007.
And in 2007, we realized we wanted to expand that even more. We wanted to continue to reduce that fatality risk by 50%. In the 1970s, there was one death for every 350,000 passengers who took a commercial flight anywhere in the world. By the 1990s, that number was one death for every 1.3 million passengers.
And today, it's roughly one in 8 million. It is a great and inevitable safety record, but we will never claim victory, right? It's one that we're forever innovating, we're forever iterating to say what's next. For all the investment in safety training, which we'll get into later, Nolan says that technology has helped a lot.
You look at the amount of data coming off a modern jetliner. Let's take a Boeing 787. That's got nearly a half a terabyte of data coming off of it per flight. Are there trends that we're seeing that we can have very early indication of something that we need to address?
When you think about sensors, things like engine health monitoring, all those can be early warning or early indicators that you might need to do some sort of maintenance. Our goal is to be able to share data openly and to be able to volunteer a report where we think there are issues out there so that we can address those in an almost real-time manner. Our industry is such that with our regulator, when we see something that looks odd, we want them to know. That is Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta Airlines, one of the biggest airlines in the world.
And when a Delta pilot, for instance, does see something a bit odd... They report it, whether it was due to their judgment or their decision or not. It's a program that our employees all know. As long as they report something they see as an anomaly, they are held harmless as to whether they made a mistake or there was a judgment error.
They may wind up having to go learn from what they did and maybe take a class or receive some additional training. But we want everyone to report anything that they see. Bastian says this sort of program has been a key driver of airline safety. If you go back 30 or 40 years, air crashes were not uncommon.
It was something the industry spent an enormous amount of time collaborating together, sharing information, sharing learnings, working closely with the FAA to understand best practices and how we could have an open book with our regulator. This close relationship between regulators and industry plainly has benefits, but it can be complicated. Two of the worst crashes in recent years, one in Indonesia, the other in Ethiopia, involved a brand new airplane, the 737 MAX, made by Boeing, the big U.S. airplane manufacturer.
The FAA had certified the MAX as safe, but in both those crashes, the plane's new automation system was found to be at fault. It has been suggested that the FAA's cozy relationship with Boeing led it to sign off on the automation system before it had been fully tested. Those two crashes killed 346 people. That said, airline travel has become the safest form of transportation in the world.
It's safer than riding a bike, safer than driving a car, safer than crossing a street. So, Ed, in a given year in the U.S., roughly 40,000 people die from traffic crashes. If you look at the global numbers, it's more than a million people a year. And yet, to most people, an airplane seems a lot more dangerous than an automobile.
Can you talk about that from the perspective of an airline CEO? Well, safety is paramount, and we're proud of that. You compare that to the auto industry, obviously, you have a lot more operators, a lot more variability. And the other thing that's very different, you will not see airlines compete on safety.
We will not say that we're the safest airline in the sky. All of our airlines in this country are safe. However, autos, for many years, used to compete on safety. They used to say, oh, the most reliable car in terms of safety and other ratings.
They don't do it as much anymore, and that's one thing they've learned from the airline industry. Safety is not something we should compete on. We should collaborate on. Do you think that the average airline pilot is a safer automobile driver than the average automobile driver?
That's hard to know. I do know that our pilots also receive a tremendous amount of support in terms of technology from the aircraft itself. I'm sure they're safer flying planes than they are driving cars. We tried to find some data on whether airline pilots, when they're driving cars, are safer or less safe than the average driver, but we couldn't.
We asked Billy Nolan, acting FAA boss and himself, a former military and commercial pilot, if he had seen any such data. I don't know of any, but if I could say one thing. One of the things we look for in pilots is that sense of perception. Now, I'm not going to suggest that every pilot has perfect situational awareness, but I can certainly assert that every commercial aviation pilot has an enhanced sense of awareness because you're constantly thinking about what are the threats that could impact my flight from the time I depart to the time I land.
Weather, birds, thunderstorms, traffic, terrain, all of those things that we are forever training to and we're thinking about. Do you find that that sense of observation and awareness are more natural or learned? You know, there's a lot of assessments that pilots go through. Part of it is spatially, physically, egotural kind of testing.
And over the arc of your career, you're presented scenarios to say, how would you react? You're flying over the Rocky Mountains and what if you were to suddenly have a fire or you're trying to have a rapid depressurization? Where would you go? What would you do?
In my helicopter days, I was always looking for some place to land because if something happened, your decisions were almost immediate and you had to react. But much of that is learned. We sit down and we talk about the man-machine interface, how we work together, because a lot happens. On a flight deck, you see symptoms.
You've got instruments. You say something is happening, but you've got a whole cabin behind you. So you're receiving the stimuli all the time. And it's your ability to synthesize that and say, is there a threat?
Is there something I need to address? We do want you to have that heightened sense so that muscle and that mental memory kicks in. Describe for me, you as a pilot, whether it was military or commercial leader, the hairiest or scariest moment or flight. I was a helicopter pilot back in the day and I was flying into and out of Panmunjom.
So you're right there on the line between South Korea and North Korea. I found that always to be interesting. That could be another story for another day. Only military would say, I found that to be interesting.
But in commercial aviation, we train ad nauseum. So we try to say, okay, what could happen? What are the possibilities? What are the consequences?
What is the greatest outcome? So be it a fire, be it wind shear, microburst. We put people in the simulator and I used to be a training captain myself to the point we throw the book at them. So that muscle memory and that mental memory is there in terms of what to do.
Obviously, you saw it expressed in the Miracle on the Hudson. That ability to instinctually know what it is I need to do in the moment, right? That all comes from training. The Miracle on the Hudson that Nolan mentioned happened in 2009 on a U.S.
Airways flight out of LaGuardia Airport in New York. The plane, an Airbus A320 carrying 150 passengers, had just taken off when it hit a flock of birds and lost power in both engines. The pilots, Captain Chesley Sully Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles, were able to glide the plane into position and land it safely in the Hudson River. Everyone survived.
One NTSB member called it the most successful ditching in aviation history. Much was made of the fact that Sullenberger was a longtime Air Force pilot before moving into commercial. You don't lift one weight one time and you're the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It took him rep after rep after rep to do what he did.
It takes a lot of reps to get good at these things. Well, the same thing is when you're flying an airplane. That, again, is Adam Yuhan, another commercial pilot who used to fly military. Those stimulators, we are throwing a lot of different problems and we have to work together to get the problem done.
There just hasn't been that much airline catastrophe in the past 15, 20 years. And it's just been gradually getting safer and safer to the point where, gosh, I mean, I think it's bizarrely safe. What would you say have been the key drivers of that improvement? If you go back to the 20s and the 30s, pilot was a sky god.
They could figure anything out, right? Well, slowly but surely, they had to adjust to technological inputs like the first autopilots that came online or the ability to use navigation, like instrument navigation, not just looking out at a cornfield and going, oh, yeah, I think that's the right way. Why things just got safer is the evolution of this culture of saying, hey, technology can help us. I asked Yuhan if being a pilot has made him a better car driver.
Ha! My arrogant self would say yes. For me personally, I'm able to tap into that situational awareness and task prioritization mindset that's been beaten into me over 20 years of being a pilot. Like, I really, I've adopted that mentality.
So what would it take to bring some of the safety standards of airline travel to roadway travel? I went back to Billy Nolan for this. His FAA, by the way, is part of the Department of Transportation. In fact, it makes up around 80% of the Department of Transportation.
The airline industry has become remarkably safe, to the point where I would posit that the average person, when they get on a flight, they don't even really think about safety anymore. They think about, my seat's too small, the food is not good, and so on. So you could say that complaining is sort of a luxury of not having to worry so much about safety. If we look at automobile travel, however, we've made great strides over the decades, but not as great as one might like.
And indeed, there's been a setback during the pandemic. And there are wrinkles like pedestrians now are dying at a higher rate in the last few years than in the past. I realize there are many, many, many fewer miles flown than there are miles driven. Everybody's a driver.
Most of us are not pilots. But are there lessons to be drawn from aviation that can make driving safer? Absolutely. No, just exactly to your point.
We say aviation is the safest mode. It comes as a result of our willingness, collectively, to say that we cannot tolerate a fatal aircraft accident. When we look at the ecosystem of all things automotive, there's so much more in play, right? You've got fewer players in the aviation arena, and you've got high levels of controls around certification of pilots, certification of mechanics, certification of air traffic controllers, heavy oversight of airlines.
I can tell you I've had communications in the past with automobile manufacturers and their senior leadership in the safety space of how we work together. So I think you'll see us continually advance by the federal, state, and local level. We're all vested in that zero fatal traffic accidents, right? And when we can come together and leverage technology, we can certainly put a big hole in that big number, which is unacceptable.
I liked your answer. It was a diplomatic answer. But let me poke at a couple pieces of it, because pilots, let's say, both training, certification, recertification, but also things like sobriety tests, right, and monitoring with technology and so on. Doesn't it seem a little bit bonkers that just about anybody can get behind the wheel of a car just about any time and put the public at risk?
So you see where insurance companies will say, you know, if you've taken a defensive driver's car, here's a reduction to your premium, right? So there are some voluntary tools out there. I will say personally, I'm a big advocate of... current training my training used to be every nine months during my airline career and i knew that i was going to get put through my paces to make sure when i came out of there there was a sense of comfort on the part of the check captain that billy's ready right and so could we take some of that and see how that would work on the automotive side i think that's an opportunity for us to have that kind of conversation it was never given that we were going to get to zero fatalities in aviation right it took a lot of work as i said look at the work being done i mean i've got several you know cars and one for my one of my daughters you know it's got pre-collision warning it's got lane departure warning lane keep assistance so we're seeing technology evolve we've got a collective sense of ownership in aviation which is why we're so safe we need that same collective sense of ownership and responsibility that when i get behind a wheel of something that weighs three thousand plus pounds right the physics of it are something that people just don't always account for commercial airliners rarely crash these days but smaller and private planes still crash with some regularity i'm curious what the faa is doing to diminish that yeah it's a great point we have done a lot of work in the general aviation space we have something called the general aviation joint steering committee we have the helicopter safety team i was at oshkosh this summer 10,000 general aviation airplanes were on the ground 600 plus thousand people were in attendance and we talk about safety and it's a pretty responsible community we were saying technology that used to be the purview of airliners now some of that can move quite fast into general aviation you've got better tools you're using ipads you got better systems that have weather that have moving map displays in fact sometimes they can move even faster because we're such a heavily regulated industry and when it comes to commercial passengers but we're making every effort coming up after the break commercial jets almost never crash but there is still a risk to flying turbulence is the biggest threat to our safety i'm steven dubner this is freaking out we'll be right back i don't like our angle here am i paranoid no you're right so i don't like the tension can you tell me like what's causing this emergency evacuation well you might see it in a second i'm gonna let it go and see what you think i know i know i'm sorry that is katie truitt she used to be a musical theater performer and now she trains flight attendants at the atlanta headquarters of delta airlines training is six weeks long and much of it involves responding to emergencies right now we are inside an old plane that's been rigged up with hydraulics to simulate turbulence great so this is a command from the captain that tells us what to do oh stay down bend over stay down bend over stay down we're checking outside we're looking to see if it's safe we're looking to see what our conditions are evacuate evacuate all right so then we tell you to get up and get out which is release seatbelts leave everything release seatbelts i'm just saying i'm flipping out right now release seatbelts leave everything come this way leave everything jump inside you're gonna put your hands out right in front of you put it right out in front of you i'm jumping from here i stand there you jump from here arms right ahead there you go nicely done even though every passenger on every airplane sits through a safety briefing at the start of every flight truitt acknowledges that very few people think they'll need that information everybody thinks that our job is really to give you peanuts right but actually our job is to keep you safe that's the number one we are actually first responders in a way everything from de-escalating someone who's angry about something to you know evacuating an aircraft and we are trained to evacuate an aircraft in 90 seconds and 90 seconds for 300 people is a lot what's going on over here she's actually doing sdq this is our continuing qualification so continuing qualification means our flight attendants all have to come back every 18 months to get re-qualified to be a flight attendant yeah we actually get this real fast oh sure oh i'm so sorry pardon me isn't this more important getting a demonstration worldwide there are only around 30 full plane evacuations each year out of around 40 million flights yet another sign how safe airline travel has become if you need help from a flight attendant it's more likely because you're having a heart attack or other medical issue and that happens around 44 000 times a year we're trained to understand how to handle basic medical problems how many times in your flying career have you needed to ask for a doctor or nurse on board three or four and how many times did you get one every time i just made an announcement asking for a medical professional and there's some flight attendants running around it's not quite clear what's going on that is conor mcgill one of the freaknomics radio listeners who sent us an audio diary of a recent trip he was flying from amsterdam to minneapolis when the call for help went out his plane was already over the hunson bay in canada and there wasn't a good option for a closer airport than minneapolis the patient was apparently unconscious but luckily there was a passenger on board with medical training so we're definitely be lining up to the airport you can tell that the flight path is different than normal there's airport fire emds okay looks like they got them off it looks scary that's unfortunate when somebody goes unconscious on a plane that's a serious issue that is sarah nelson she is a flight attendant with united airlines as well as president of the association of flight attendants we're trained to jump into action give cpr revive people flight attendants do this every single day this is a big part of what they do and when there's that medical emergency we also have to be on the lookout for any security risk because we have been trained that anything that happens on the plane could be a distraction from a bigger plot the role of the flight attendant has evolved along with commercial air travel so our career was started by a brave woman ellen church who was a certified pilot and certified nurse by the way and she really really wanted to fly and so she tried to get a job as a pilot and the airlines just said no you know women don't belong in the flight deck they're too emotional and so she made the argument that passengers get sick and there should be someone in the cabin to be able to assist with that and if they fall ill they need someone to attend to that you don't want to land with dead passengers so she made the argument that flight attendants or stewardesses back then should be in the cabin to attend to the needs of what was mostly men flying for business in those days she was really arguing that flight attendants needed to be in the cabin in order to take care of the emotional men's needs so haha you know from the very beginning there's sexist tones there we were defining this job as women's work and we had to fight through all those discriminatory barriers that were put up for our job we had to quit at age 30 we had to step on a weight scale until 1993 you couldn't be married or have children and we fought for diversity too we fought for men to have the same rights on the job and we fought for the airlines to be inclusive and hire people of color as for the current functions of the flight attendant nilson says there's one constant danger to be aware of turbulence is the biggest threat to safety so a lot of people are used to choppy air where the airplane is making your coffee spill things like that we're encountering some pretty decent turbulence right now nothing that would make the news however all the flight attendants have been ordered back into their junk seats and everybody is required to have their seat belt on that is freaking radio listener brandon morrell on a flight from tokyo to chicago i've never once been scared by turbulence if you know anything about the engineering behind the planes and the wings there's no reason to be scared at all honestly the most stressful part of turbulence is making sure this glass doesn't pop over that's about the only thing i'm worried about it is true that turbulence doesn't mean the plane is about to crash but it can still be dangerous sarah nelson again severe turbulence is when there's like an air pocket that's hit where the plane is dropping very quickly there's no warning for it the plane will just drop thousands of feet and that's why you'll hear people being thrown to the ceiling hitting their head and coming down along with anything that's loose so we take turbulence extremely seriously the flight deck will often be working with atc to get reports of turbulence ahead it's something that all the pilots will report out over the pacific ocean they don't have the same kind of technology to be able to identify where that turbulence is so that is actually also more likely where you're going to hit severe turbulence if i hit a bubble in the air and the bubble burst and we collapse for a little bit that is pepper de roy he's a singer and bassist for an australian country rock band called hurricane fall in july of 2019 the band got on board an air canada flight yeah it was ac33 from vancouver to sydney with an unscheduled stop in hawaii hurricane fall had just finished playing some dates in canada we all had a pretty severe hangover and that's luke wielden a guitarist in the band it was our last night in canada and it was successful so everyone was ready for a good sleep really flight was fine until yeah we were just passed away i believe and i was away but yeah there was a sudden jolt and half the plane flew into the roof it was just shocking wielden had his seatbelt on but de roy didn't i got up went to the toilet came back was walking down the aisle sat down with no seatbelt on the plane shook a little and in an instant i just remember being back on the seat with what i thought was just a sore arm and then proved to be much more the flight attendants were awesome they immediately started trying to help people and stop people that were bleeding and that sort of stuff the most disturbing thing was that there was nothing from the pilot for like 10 minutes i was like you've got to say something man like it felt like forever i don't know how long it was really but it was a long time and i don't know you're probably busy saving our lives so you know there's that too the plane made an emergency landing in hawaii 37 people were injured the doctors in hawaii cleared de roy and his bandmates to fly back to australia when he got home he went to the hospital i was like yeah it doesn't feel right and then when the doctor showed me the ct scan with fragments of my neck floating around he's like just stop what you're doing right now put me straight in the neck race and like do not move de roy had a broken neck took me 18 months to recover turbulence is the leading cause of accidents on larger u.s commercial flights and its share is increasing that's because other types of flying accidents have become less common but there may be another reason sarah nelson again the underlying issue here is that turbulence is getting worse because of climate change the idea here is that rising temperatures are making air currents more unstable and that is essentially the definition of turbulence here's adam yuhan we can go into more specific meteorological terms but the reality is you're going through an air that is no longer as stable as the air that you just came out of and that is why even in the middle of a seemingly smooth flight a pilot will sometimes turn on the seatbelt sign it's the biggest risk mitigation strategy that we have in the airplane we don't want people to get hurt nobody wants anybody to get hurt on an airplane that seatbelt is really there to protect you because if you get turbulence hard enough it can lift you out of that seat and move you around to that airplane any way it wants to the good news is that predicting and avoiding turbulence is getting easier 30 years ago there was no way except for a forecast that was printed out and back in the day northwest airlines had these turbulence plots which were the envy of the industry now a lot of other airlines have adopted this methodology my airline has probably one of the best weather radar packages on our tablets we have a different wi-fi on board the airplane and when it's working which most of the times is we can actually see down the road where there could be turbulence issues and then we can do stuff like climb up descend go left go right navigate around it i wish if i was in person i'd show you'd be blown away by the system but what you can actually see oh my god you can see all the earthquakes that are happening in the world volcanic activity it's wild and you spin the globe around and you can see everything it's so cool you know i just got a great idea to go to the bosses with i'm gonna say we should be doing little mini documentaries and say hey this is how we do all these different things i mean they would be a hit with everybody but a lot of people would love two minute informational clips about how things work and how does all that information get onto the pilot's tablet we're set up with almost two different groups that is warren weston he is a lead meteorologist at delta airlines headquarters in atlanta we've got a division where we look at upper air features turbulence thunderstorms keeping an eye on volcanoes ozone all the different kinds of things that could interrupt a flight that's that cruise altitude the other side is more on the surface side where we're looking at weather on the ground weather at our big airport operations new york atlanta los angeles and we're doing hour by hour forecasts for those hubs just describe the screen which is a beautiful screen but people can't see it what we're looking at here is tonight's routes that go across the north atlantic ocean to europe so that's these tracks the tracks are kind of like a highway in the sky we're producing turbulence forecasts and maybe it will show hey we're expecting some turbulence along this route between 30 and 35 000 so when we take that information to the flight planner they might file their flight that night higher maybe 38 000 40 000 so that they are able to go over or around the depicted areas there are a lot of meteorologists in the world and there's a lot of information you can buy why does delta bother to have this pretty big how many meteorologists so we've got 25 meteorologists so why is that an in-house function meteorology we are looking at things a lot more tailored towards our operation a lot of the stuff that we produce those are products that they aren't getting anywhere else and what's the roi on that for the airline is it worth having 25 of you i think it is because we first of all we're a global airline so we're covering our routes across the atlantic ocean the pacific ocean hawaii routes all the domestic routes south and central america what about you why did you become a meteorologist i grew up in colorado and i would get frustrated when it wouldn't snow i wanted to go skiing and so when i would see a forecast they would call for snow and maybe we wouldn't get a little bit the young me was very interested in why is this happening why can't they get this right weston's meteorology department is one of many departments spread across a vast expanse in a building adjacent to the atlantic airport this is delta's occ or operations and customer center the person in charge is a man named greg brandner we meet up with him in a conference room that feels as serious as its name this is our ibr so incident briefing room it is built primarily as a command center for an incident if we have an incident or accident incidents and accidents do happen we have cyber threats now that happen we would stand this room up and it's built for senior leaders to come in and be able to work through the incident be briefed and then work it through till the end brander walks us out onto what looks like a wall street trading floor you could call it a trading floor because there are thousands and thousands of transactions that are taking place what do you mean whether it be a dispatch release or a flight plan being sent or if we could look across the room the maintenance coordination team could be working on an aircraft that's broke or needs to be routed a certain way can you just read down those three columns of functions first we've got the aircraft routing team airport customer service we've got catering cargo charters corporate communications corporate security both crew teams crew tracking crew scheduling we have our maintenance control manager that sits up on the bridge the reservations revenue management and system operations managers that are managing the fleets and this guy whose shoulder we're kind of looking over he's got looks to be one two three five six seven monitors at least what's he doing six monitors and one the other the seventh that's actually the phone system nevertheless a lot of video that is presented to everybody in this room a lot of information comes to them on these screens whether it be just the alerting or they can just look at things to just monitor he's got the weather you always have the weather up because it's such a driver of our operational outlook and ultimately results so yes there is a lot of video we are working hard to reduce that footprint monitors and try to present it in a more logical way i'll call it just to be clear to someone who's listening we're not anywhere near a flight tower that's a common misconception when i say i work at our operations and customer center we're not in the airport when i say if you think of it as mission control at nasa right away they go oh you work in the tower no i don't work in the tower if you've seen apollo 13 the movie mission control that's kind of way this is set up apollo 13 was one mission and we're running well over 3 000 missions a day so that's the level of detail we have to put forth for every flight every customer every day so this is our dispatch team this is our strategic planning team they're trying to maintain the schedule integrity of an irregular operation i love that description they're trying to maintain the schedule integrity of an irregular operation that describes airline business it's very complex every day has something come up no day just runs perfectly smooth we'll certainly have 100 completion factor days but that doesn't mean we didn't have to address and i'm making this number up you know 5 000 disruptions of some degree coming up after break will even more technology make airline travel even safer and will technology ever replace the humans fly the planes the real big issue is production of pilots has slowed i'm steven dugner this is freaking out radio we'll be right back okay we're talking about how airline travel got so safe and i want to get back to billy nolan acting administrator of the federal aviation administration i have to tell you my oldest i'm the youngest in a big family my oldest brother was an air force pilot oh cool yeah very cool i didn't inherit any of the uh i've asked him to explain to me over the years many times literally how it worked the physics and the engine and i can't i just don't have the brain for it there's always time the world is entirely new to pilots so you know steven you may have alternative career there well i can assure you that my eyesight alone will preclude me from that but let me ask you since you brought up the pilot shortage how do you think about that from your perspective there's a couple of dynamics in play as a result of the pandemic we have a large number of pilots who elected to retire and at the same time we didn't have at universities or flight schools the numbers that we needed right you could call that sort of a perfect storm but as a result of that we've seen a real uptake in terms of what the airlines are doing on their side they've established their aviation academies and at the same time on the government side we're producing more designated pilot examiners mr faa who certifies them right they all get a license with my signature on it so at the end of the day we want to make sure that they're safe they're ready to go there's a shortage broadly in our country a lot of it was driven by the pandemic because a lot of airline pilots retired that again is ed bastion the ceo of delta delta alone we had 2 000 pilots that we retired through an early incentive arrangement that we provided them and the amount of training that takes to bring 2 000 new pilots in and the time it takes has created a long live recovery period then you have that same ripple effect going on throughout the industry because we have a lot of pilots on the streets and the military isn't producing as many pilots these days well i'll speak to the military to civilian pipeline and that again is adam yuhon a former air force pilot who now flies for a major airline yes that pipeline's gotten smaller it's gotten smaller for a host of reasons obviously the military has had some downsizing events the real big issue is production of pilots has slowed and this goes back to the very first point that we were talking about the magic of aviation flight the magic that attracted me and that blew me away as a little kid i don't think it's out there as much as it was in the whole romance of flight and then the service aspect of wanting to be a military i think there's people who fear the military aviation thinking i don't know if i have that service bone in my body and the reality is i think a lot more people do have these kind of things that they can bring to the table in aviation and one of the things that i'm applauding is we're now reaching past the traditional communities because let's face it aviation is predominantly a male dominated sport and that is starting to be flipped on its head just a little bit and you don't make a pilot overnight you can't go to a 10-week school and have a degree in aviation and go and fly as a captain for major airline that's not how it works takes years to get there and that gets us into the economics of pilot creation because it is not cheap why would somebody pay 150 000 in student loans become a pilot when they can pay 150 000 in student loans become a lawyer and they walk out with a much better paying in the beginning pilots do make good money eventually at airlines like frontier alaska and southwest the first year salary for captain ranges from around 180 000 a year to 240 000 although typically you don't start at captain you start as a first officer or what used to be called co-pilot at the bigger u.s airlines like delta united and american first year captain salaries are in the 300 000 the problem is as adam yuhan said pilot training takes a long time and costs a lot of money this wasn't always the case and that too is connected to the rise of safety in commercial aviation in 2009 a flight out of new york new jersey operated by colgan air crashed on its approach into buffalo new york killing all 49 people on board and one on the ground the national transportation safety board determined the crash was likely caused by pilot error specifically the captain's inappropriate response to the activation of the stick shaker which led to an aerodynamic stall from which the airplane did not recover the ntsb cited several other contributing factors all related to crew or airline failures in response to this crash congress mandated that all commercial airline pilots have at least 1500 hours of flying experience until then airlines could hire pilots with just 250 hours the faa says there is no quantifiable relationship between the 1500 hour requirement and airplane accidents but the fact remains that the colgan crash was the last major commercial aviation crash in the u.s and that was in 2009 this is an astonishing safety record produced as we've been hearing today by a number of factors including advances in aviation tech i asked adam yuhan what he thinks the job of pilot will look like in a few decades the generation that's currently employed at the airlines and the folks who are just starting their journeys i think that they're going to be okay i think that there is regulation in place the contracts from the airlines to the unions a lot of those jobs are protected i don't know about after that i don't know if we're going to start seeing a single pilot operation in some how about a zero pilot operation i don't ever want to think that way because i don't know i love the idea of self-driving cars and the hyperloop but i also know because i've seen it where the machine does something that doesn't make sense when you say you've seen it what do you mean i've flown both boeing and airbus products and i've seen both of those products do something that was unexpected i've seen a system fail or a weather radar return come up and it looks nominal or not important and you fly close to it and you're getting a moderate to severe level of turbulence or you're an icing that you didn't expect and i don't know if our predictive technology is quite there yet i'm not saying it won't be i'm definitely not saying that because i do believe we will be able to figure all these things out and that's great that's progress the other thing is is your emotional response getting on an airplane where there's no voice that comes from the front i don't know how many people are ready for that i know i'm not i want somebody to be able to if the machine goes wrong can at least shut the machine off and turn it back on again control off the lead it back into correction i never want to be on an airplane without a pilot at the wheel our planes do have a lot of autonomy they are operated largely by technology and pilots are there to manage the technology and intervene as necessary but there are other companies that are developing platforms where planes can be controlled through remote operation and the argument is that they're safer i won't get on one and i think it's going to take quite a number of years before consumers will eventually be willing to get on one although a human pilot can override a confused computer the primary cause of most fatal accidents is human air this past january there was a near miss at jfk airport in new york city when two planes nearly collided on a runway delta flight 1943 was getting ready to take off that's an air traffic controller telling the delta flight to abort takeoff there was another plane on its runway just a thousand feet ahead the pilots of that plane an american airlines jet had made a wrong turn all right then uh before we get to zero pilot planes the interim step is probably one pilot planes after all technology in the cockpit just keeps getting better adam yuhan again the next generation of these airplanes it's the starship enterprise or even further along the line so you bring on this new technology that has made a safer weather radar as far superior than it's ever been before traffic collision avoidance systems ground proximity warning systems that we have the fact that we now communicate when we're flying over the ocean instead of listening to a high frequency radio that's spinning out static for seven hours you basically have a text message system with somebody on the ground which then keeps me from getting audio fatigue so i'm now less tired as i fly through the air so when something bad does happen i can react it's an interesting point about audio fatigue i guess it's a case where better technology lets you be better at doing the things that you do as a human are there other examples of technologies that you feel accentuate or highlight your human abilities one that's very very small but for instance some aircraft have what's called auto trim so trim is the basic aerodynamic 101 here is a tab on parts of the airplane that you can trim off pressure so the airplane is easier to control or maneuver well over the years they've developed an auto trim system on some airplanes where there's no button for us to actually manually manipulate the trim tab and the computer does it for us so now instead of me having to click click click click and move that trim tab as i move the stick all i do is point the airplane in the position i want it to go and it goes there now people say well that's easy yeah you're right it's totally easy but when you're flying into a really crowded airspace situation and you have weather now you have a little less to concentrate on those things do make you sort of superhuman because your situational awareness which is critical for pilots instead of being taken away your situational awareness now is expanded you know where other airplanes are you know what's happening on the runway you understand all those kind of things let me ask you this adam are pilots normal people who happen to fly airplanes or are you all sort of weirdos a little from column a and a lot from column b i think when you meet us as a whole at a party you know something was maybe a little different about that person there's an old joke how you know that a fighter pilot is at your party he'll tell you and the reality is most pilots like to talk about aviation especially when they're new and younger in the field it kind of feels like part of who we are and no matter how much we might try to deny that it's kind of ingrained in our personality also ingrained in the pilot personality from what i can tell is an absolute obsession with safety i think back to something my brother joe the former air force pilot once told me we had just had a family reunion on the east coast he lives out west and he had flown in on his own plane it is a tiny little experimental jet that he built basically a motorcycle with wings on the last night of the reunion we were all having an early dinner together in the hotel restaurant it was only around 5 30 or 6 p.m and joe stood up said he'd enjoy the reunion and now he was saying goodbye and we all said joe it's so early but you hurry he said he had several hours of flight planning ahead of him and then he said there are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots here again is adam yuhan i've done this for a long time when i was younger i sure as hell wanted people in the military to appreciate what i was doing and then when i got the airline i thought the same thing but i realized after the years ago by the best thing that can ever happen is i never make a highway reel everything went smooth i retire and i get a nice lithograph signed by my friends the reality is things do run really smoothly and that's why when people the traveling public sees the hiccup it is so eye-gougingly painful because now all of a sudden you're delayed 25 minutes and it's like think about it for a second you're hurtling through the air at 530 miles an hour going from new york to los angeles you're going to be there in less than five hours less than 200 years ago it took people 28 days or more to travel that same distance and most of them didn't make it so i think the perspective is needed and it's even needed for guys in the industry sometimes we need a little bit of that too i hate to say this because it does become a job sometimes and you forget my favorite thing about flying it's still to this day it's my favorite thing it's when it's cloudy outside and you punch through the cloud layer and you get that first blink of sun it's it's it still it blows my mind every time i do it coming up next time in the third and final episode of economics radio takes to the skies it's time to sort out the economics airlines face incredibly volatile demand and they have huge fixed costs how do airlines make their money are tickets too expensive or too cheap and what's it like to run a business where one of your major costs fluctuates wildly when you have a commodity that's as volatile as fuel and you hedge on a longer term basis it's very expensive and what about the pollution from burning all that fuel that's next time on the show until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too freakonomics radio is produced by stitcher and redbud radio you can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at freakonomics.com where we also publish transcripts and show notes this episode was produced by ryan kelly and mixed by greg rippon with help from jeremy johnston and in atlanta from evan profond special thanks to all our listeners who sent in their travel diaries and to lillian bates for helping organize them our staff also includes zach lipinski morgan levy katherine monture alina coleman rebecca lee douglas julie camper eleanor osborne jasmine clinger daria clenert emma trill lyric about it and elsa hernandez the freakonomics radio network's executive team is neil caruth gabriel roth and me steve governor our theme song is mr fortune by the hitchhikers the rest of our music was composed by luis guerra and thanks to hurricane fall for letting us play some of their 2016 song how we get down as always thanks for listening can i tell you our guests are never early so i apologize that i'm not earlier than i am no no no worries on time arrival that's my motto the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything stitcher