As an author, I pay pretty close attention to discussions about copyright and royalties. And aviation industry folks should be very afraid too since the Feds at the U.S. Copyright Office’s Copyright Royalty Board are trying to sink Internet Radio broadcasting with huge fee increases much the way the FAA is after business and general aviation with fresh sources of cash.

And sitting in the wings watching the action closely on the broadcast side too are a few large media companies waiting to pick up the pieces, just like the airlines are doing to business aviation.

Small Businesses at Work

Internet Radio stations are traditionally small businesses run by radio junkies who devote their lives to building music libraries and playing tunes to listeners around the world via their broadband link.

These broadcasters truly do march to the beat of a different drum as Thoreau said. They also march in front of plenty of listeners, 10 million at last count through some 10,000 different stations. You can almost hear the cash registers going “ka ching,” at the big media companies that would like to see these annoying little businesses evaporate.

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A few months back, I mentioned that things were about to turn ugly for the summer travel season. Scott McCartney at the Wall Street Journal seems to agree.

Now you all know how much delight I take at poking fun at Chicago’s hometown airline United whenever they give me the ammunition … which is pretty often. 

Scott McCartney’s column this morning was way funnier than anything I could ever write about the UAL behemoth, especially since he focused on expatriate Chicagoan and radio host Scott Simon.

I had to share a few lines from McCartney’s story. They’d be even funnier if they didn’t paint such a sad picture of the airline …

United lost National Public Radio host Scott Simon’s luggage on a flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas last week. After filling out paperwork in Las Vegas, Mr. Simon was given a phone number and email address to contact the San Francisco baggage office — with the caution that San Francisco never answers the phone or responds to email.

More than 30 calls later, Mr. Simon, an elite-level frequent flier on United, has yet to reach a United baggage official in San Francisco, or learn anything about the fate of his baggage, which includes irreplaceable items after adopting his second child in China. Calls to the airline’s main toll-free line haven’t yielded any information, either. American Express Co. is also trying to track down information, a service for its platinum customers, but hasn’t gotten through to United, either.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Mr. Simon said. “I know they are overworked, and it seems they have decided the best way to avoid more work is to not answer the phone or respond to email.” He likened the baggage office to someone deeply in debt who simply stops opening bills that arrive in the mail.

A spokeswoman for United says the airline is trying to find Mr. Simon’s lost bag.

Technorati tags: United+Airlines, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Jetwhine

I was in Paris this year to attend the awards dinner for Aerospace Journalist of the Year in the Business Aviation category. Although I was not the ultimate winner in the category – that honor went to Fred George of Business and Commercial Aviation – I am very proud to have been included on the short list with so many other writers I’ve followed over the years.

Since these awards unfortunately seem to garner little attention within our industry, I’m pleased to share the names of all the winners here.

I was most impressed during the award ceremony when AIN’s Thierry Dubois accepted his award for the Best Technology submission. Dubois, a Paris local, made an passionate speech about the need to remember the number of international journalists killed or taken prisoner as they carry out their work.

Pretty interesting fellow Thierry is.

Hopefully I’ll try and snag him for an interview here at Jetwhine to talk more about aviation and journalism.

A week sure flies when you’re having fun. I just returned from the Paris Airshow where among other things, I had an opportunity to fly Dassault’s new Falcon 7X. More on that later.

If you’ve never been to Paris, you might be thinking the Paris Airshow is no more than a European version of AirVenture or NBAA.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Paris is a business show, a place where commercial and military aerospace builders and buyers meet to sign multi-billion dollar contracts. It’s a place where the men all wear suits and ties despite the sweltering ramp at Le Bourget Airport.

This year, however, it was clear that business and general aviation were having a significant impact on the event as Cessna and Dassault announced huge orders, in addition to the round of airline orders everyone expects. Just about every GA manufacturer was represented as well.

I’ll share a bit more of the look and feel of the show in coming posts. But for starters, you can catch much of the airborne events at AIN TV. Pay special attention to Day 4, Pod 3 when you can watch the incredible thrust vectoring system of the Mig 29.

And there is no denying the incredible airwork preformance by the A-380 demo team you’ll also see at AIN TV.

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Most of the time I find myself constantly juggling a series of stories trying to decide which is the most important to write about here on Jetwhine.com. Today though, the decision was easy.

About 10 this morning the DHL folks dropped off a box filled with my new book, a Professional Pilot Career Guide published by McGraw Hill.

It’s the second edition of the volume and a vastly expanded version of the text that speaks as a resource to anyone who has ever considered flying for a living.

Opening this kind of package around the office invoked a pretty special feeling for me. Sure my ego soared because there was a four-color cover with my name on it inside, but I think it was also about realizing that the hundreds and hundreds of hours of work it took to build this book were worth it. 

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It really pains me to say something good about United Airlines when I look back at the history of lousy service I’ve had from them over the years, from canceled flights, to unexplained delays for mechanicals.  Probably too, it’s the indifference at the hands of their customer

Photo by Shane Stoffregan

service people I often find so irritating. And I fly from their main hub at ORD.

In the grand scheme of things though, I guess most of us don’t expect much out of any airline these days, except perhaps Southwest, where they always seem to offer a simple, friendly service for a decent price.

OK, so reading a another blog entry about bad airline service is about as interesting as reading a headline that says meteorologists are usually wrong. 

Let me surprise you a bit.

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When Joe LePore and Jan Paladino – the two U.S. Legacy pilots, where released from house arrest in Brazil late last year, everyone wondered if they’d ever be called back to testify.

And let’s face it, we’ve all wondered what we’d do if we were in their places when our presence was demanded in a country with a system of justice so different from our own. Would any trial, could any there be fair?

The two pilots were indicted last week and charged by the Brazilian Federal Police with being responsible for the mid-air collision over the Amazon that claimed the lives of all 154 people aboard a Gol Airlines Boeing 737. Four Brazilian air traffic controllers were also charged in the tragedy although the final aviation safety report detailing any probable cause is not yet complete.

Some members of Brazil’s Camara dos deputados, the equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives, expressed outrage Wednesday at a hearing in Brasilia on the accident where Embraer employee Daniel Bachman testified. Bachman, the Brazilian-born son of two Americans, was a passenger on the Legacy.

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In all the years I’ve been regularly flying airplanes above 10,000 feet, I’ve never experienced high-altitude/hypoxia training beyond reading the section of the Flight Training Handbook and hearing a few lectures about the dangers of what might happen if the air should rush out of the cabin up high.

After what I experienced this week, I’m convinced every pilot who flies at high altitude needs better hypoxia training than the regs require for a checkout to comply with Part 61.31 (g). Even a trip to an altitude pressure chamber is not enough.

I spent a few days this past week on assignment for Aviation International News at Flight Safety’s DFW training center for a hands on demonstration of that company’s hypoxia training curriculum.

I ran into an old friend – Dan MacLellan – who happens to be the center manager there. Gil Schnabel, the center’s assistant manager and Larry Schuman FSI’s director of special training made all the pieces come together for this trip.

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