Rob Mark

An Airplane Geek for All Seasons

January 27, 2017 by Robert Mark

Jetwhine

An Airplane Geek for All Seasons

00:00 /

An Airplane Geek for All Seasons

I’ve always found keeping up with the demands of social media to be work, quite a bit of it actually. But I think Scott and I also see the work as a necessary effort. Who else is going to dig between the cracks of the aviation industry for stories you won’t hear anywhere else?

Blogging specifically, is an effort that’s come to feel a bit like AirVenture to me. We work to create great content, but what really keeps us going are the people our work brings us together with.

(left) Take this guy, Micah Engber.

We met after Micah, an avid listener to The Airplane Geeks, another growing chunk of social media I’m part of, sent a question about the Kestrel single-engine turboprop project at the old Brunswick Naval Air Station near his home in Maine. Micah mentioned that his 77-year old mom Harriet listened to the show too and in my inimitable way, I managed to stick a shoe-covered foot in my mouth with a comment about her being the oldest listener we’ve ever had … or something like that. [Read more…] about An Airplane Geek for All Seasons

Encouraging People to Replace Us

December 1, 2015 by Robert Mark

Encouraging People to Replace Us

Finding young people to grab the reins from us old guys in aviation is a bit like the weather … everyone talks about why we need to do something, but not everyone is clear about how to actually make that happen. Certainly doing nothing is the wrong answer. So what can we do to increase our odds of connecting all the right people together?

At the recent NBAA convention, the association offered a number of us an opportunity to mingle with a hundred or so officially named Young Professionals who’d volunteered to listen to us more-experienced (secret code for older) industry folks detail how we started while also delivering a bit of unsolicited advice for job seekers.

The NBAA team was spearheaded by the association’s Sierra Grimes with Brett Ryden from Southcomm’s Aviation Pros.com leading a group of his editors who together created an hour’s worth of practical education at the show’s Innovation Zone. The panel was evenly split between ladies and gents … myself, Jo Damato from NBAA, Sarah Barnes from Paragon Aviation and Textron Aviation’s senior VP of Customer Service Brad Thress. Our moderator was writer Lowen Baumgarten.

Stage members spent a few minutes detailing their experiences, but since we were there to answer questions, I was antsy to interact with the audience. Over the course of the hour there were perhaps seven or eight good ones, but I wanted more. I probably shouldn’t have.

Reality kicked in for me about 20 minutes after we began as I realized that some of what a number of young people had told me the night before was really true … networking is not an innate skill, not even close. I’d seen this kind of thing before too. Universities apparently assume graduates automatically absorb networking skills out of thin air I guess. Luckily NBAA and AviationPros and a few other organizations have made the effort to fill those voids. [Read more…] about Encouraging People to Replace Us

AirVenture 2015, Jetwhine AND a Free Lunch?

July 13, 2015 by Robert Mark

Ed Note: We’ve had such a great response to the story that I’m sad to say we’ve run out of slots for lunch. Do send along an e-mail if you’d still like to connect at AirVenture to grab some Jetwhine/Airplane Geeks buttons.

Long before Jetwhine and the Airplane Geeks Show, there was the EAA Convention and Fly-In, first organized in 1953 founded by Paul Poberezny and a few other dedicated aviators. AirVenture in Oshkosh has been an annual celebration of things that fly ever since.

The convention was the first airshow I ever attended as a kid back in 1965 when it was simply known around Chicagoland as the Rockford Fly-In, held at Rockford Airport (KRFD) west of Chicago Back then, the show wasn’t the nation’s largest airshow as it’s become today.

That was 50 years ago this summer for me and it still seems like just a few years ago that someone let me lose on the airport with a pair of orange paddles and showed me how to guide the airplanes to parking in the grass at RFD. Each night I’d arrive home exhausted with a brain exploding with enthusiasm and a thousand ideas of where I’d eventually fit as a grown-up. So much for history.

A Little Camaraderie?

Despite the woes of our industry, what makes AirVenture valuable to anyone with even the remotest interest in anything that flies are the people you’ll meet … somewhere between 500,000-600,000 attend each year. The variety of new and old aircraft, not to mention thousands of unique add-on products are cool, but it’s the people I see again each year, as well as the new ones I meet that keep me coming back. [Read more…] about AirVenture 2015, Jetwhine AND a Free Lunch?

At United Airlines, Does Making Money Trump Safety?

March 2, 2015 by Robert Mark

At United Airlines, does making money trump safety?

A recent Aviation Week article quotes United CEO Jeff Smisek saying, “We’re going to run the airline for profit maximization …” That made me wonder a bit.

Then I noticed last week’s Wall Street Journal story in which the airline strongly chastised its pilots for cockpit safety issues the company warned could lead to an accident. United’s tone throughout the story made it appear the company had just uncovered a scorpion’s den of safety violations created by a bunch of rogue pilots who cared little about the safety of their millions of passengers.

But there’s another side to the story and calling it eye opening is a bit of an understatement.

After reading the WSJ story broken by Andy Pasztor, I began receiving a series of intriguing documents from some United pilots that again made we wonder if United is too focused on money, so much so in fact that the company might be avoiding responsibility for financially-focused policies that appear to already be undermining safety at the airline. (Note: this story was edited after it posted to correct an error in my referencing the NYTimes, when the story should have mentioned The Wall Street Journal)

While some readers might assume the information I received was simply a reaction to the company’s indictment of its pilots, it now actually seems to be the other way around. Among what I received, was a letter from a pilot member of Local 12, the Chicago council of the Air Line Pilot Association penned by their local safety officials. They were considerably more blunt about the problem at the airline. “[At United] economics trump safety,” they said. Pilots told me that their training at United, once the envy of the aviation industry, has deteriorated to become more of an industry joke. [Read more…] about At United Airlines, Does Making Money Trump Safety?

Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?

February 11, 2015 by Robert Mark

Jetwhine

Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?

00:00 /

Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or just read the text of the show below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.

I was thinking the other day about my early days as a working flight instructor. I remember hanging out with a bunch of other instructors at Palwaukee airport grousing about how we’d live on the 5 bucks an hour we could get paid for sitting in the right seat of a Cessna 150. Then one day we heard about this guy on the airport who was willing to instruct for free … zero, zip, nada … just because he loved flying so much. He had another job so he didn’t really care about the money. I can tell you … the rest of us instructors didn’t much like this idea of a competitor undercutting our prices.

There was a lesson about pilot wages that I took from this experience after one of the other guys told me not to worry about that instructor. “Hey,” he told me. “The guy may get a few students, but don’t you think they’ll be paying him what both his students AND that instructor believe he’s worth?”

Hmmmm. I never forgot that.

So on to today’s topic … the lousy pay at the regional airlines. Why does it continue, many people wonder?

First a bit of context. Most of the regional airlines provide service to more than one major airline. Because there are only a few regional feeders to deliver service to the few majors we have left in this country, the business has become pretty cut-throat. That means those regionals will do most anything to keep costs low and that means … you guessed … keep wages low.

So let’s compare Envoy, the old American Eagle carrier, with the mainline pilots at American Airlines just to see how different the groups are.

You may have heard recently the American mainline pilots — represented by the Allied Pilots Association — just signed a new contract, one that gives them an immediate 23% pay hike and 3% annual raises after that. Not bad, but then American Airlines pulled down some serious profits the past few years including a windfall off the drop in fuel prices. [Read more…] about Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?

« Previous Page