Category: aviation

Railtrack in the sky, at war!

To expand on something I wrote as a comment, one of the things I hate about wizard privatisation schemes and especially “total outsourcing” or whatever is as follows. The FSTA deal for the RAF’s new jet tankers is especially awful and exemplary.

Here’s the idea. Rather than buy the aeroplanes and do the job, we’ll buy “what we need” – a guarantee of however-many flying hours and tonnes of offloaded fuel where required. This will be awesome, because the availability is guaranteed. At the same time, the PFI contractors get to (supposedly) charter out the planes when not needed, which makes them money. This pays some of the costs and therefore it’s meant to be cheaper.

Guarantee, you say? What guarantee? What are these planes that never ever break down? Why can’t the RAF just buy some of them? Well, of course, they will break down but there’s a contract that says Airtanker will give the MOD a refund if they miss a slot. What good the refund is if you crash in the sea is left as an exercise to the reader. Obviously, they won’t just accept it, they’ll argue bitterly and sue everyone, and if Airtanker can’t airtank, does anyone imagine that the Treasury solicitor will find any money there in receivership?

You’ve seen this story, you’ve lived it – it’s Railtrack. Everything was ponies because contracts. It didn’t work, it cost more to litigate the disputes than it cost to build actual trains, and when it fucked up, there was no money to pay out the compo. It’s the Treasury’s attachment to the myth of immaculate compensation that’s doing the work here. As Bob Dylan sang, they say everything can be replaced…

And this thing is costing £14bn for 11 planes, that sell for vastly less to the airlines. Well, say the PFI panjandrums, that does include every sheet of toilet paper used by the ground engineers, and all the fuel. But this is precisely the problem. How confident are you that their cost accounting is honest? You can’t really control it. How do you audit the price of jet fuel 20 years hence? There’s a reason why the Americans have the phrase, to sell someone a bill of goods.

Closer to home, think of one of those guys in the Tottenham Court Road flogging computers. If you take the pricier option, of course, I’ll throw in a bag and some USB sticks and an airbomb and that neat little fart-robot. The margin is on that stuff. If you take it you’re a sucker. It’s a similar process to the one I described here. Ryanair works by disaggregating its price, Airtanker and friends by aggregating it, but the point is the same – moving economic activity from the domain of competition and of legibility into that of monopoly and of mystery.

Both have the effect of destroying information and therefore efficiency. This is why taking railway maintenance back in-house saved money at Network Rail.

Update: I forgot to include this. US healthcare is basically completely think-of-a-number, nothing has a single price.

Don’t read this, read them!

Good NYT piece is good – working through the effort to arm Syrian rebels, with Saudi and Qatari money, Croatian surplus warstocks, and Jordanian airlift. Inevitably, the kit is moving aboard Il-76s. This time out, though, the aircraft are Jordanian (and occasionally other) military aircraft that sometimes operate as “Jordan International Air Cargo”, a nationalised freight line.

I don’t have much to offer except that it’s great to see the method applied, and it’s fairly common in that part of the world for an air force to have a semidetached heavy lift operation. Libyan Air Cargo operated their air force’s An124, Maximus is the UAE’s version of the same idea.

Awesomely, someone’s virtual-radar box on Cyprus collected the data. This seems to be well reported, so I’m not going to make a special effort. Hugh Griffiths of SIPRI is anyway involved.

The drone that didn’t crash

David Axe has a good piece on how vulnerable drones are to any kind of organised air defence.

“The predominant use of RPAs [Remotely Piloted Aircraft] over the past decade has been passive [intelligence] collection coupled with air-to-ground strikes in permissive airspace,” Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis tells Danger Room. “There’s very little about their current capabilities — from their speed to their maneuverability to the range of visibility afforded to operators — that encourages operators to arm or employ them for air-to-air engagements in defended airspace.”

I thought I’d use this as a hanger to discuss a point I wanted to make in a row on Crooked Timber a little while back. Basically, it’s possible to deduce how much the Pakistani government really supports the drone program by looking for clues. Supposedly, the Americans just fax them a list and presume that they agree if no objection comes back.

However, we very rarely hear of a drone colliding with another aircraft over Pakistan. (In fact, the only cases I can think of were in Afghanistan, in airspace the US Air Force controlled.) Neither, so far as anyone knows, does the Pakistan Air Force (which is quite large, has modern aircraft, radars, and command-and-control systems, and did well against India and also in engagements with the Soviets during the 80s) treat them as unidentified contacts and intercept them for identification, still less shoot them down. Pakistan has carried out some very large military operations in the same places where the drones operate, using their air force, their army’s helicopters, which would tend to work in exactly the same air space as the drones, and indeed their own surveillance drones.

How did they manage? The answer is one word: deconfliction. Deconfliction is the process of planning air operations (peaceful or warlike) so that they do not conflict with each other. The fast jets have to keep out of area Z below 15,000 feet before 0650 so that the army helicopters can transit through it safely, while the drone has to stay above the close air support planes’ killbox and below the refuelling tanker’s high altitude towline pattern. It’s basically what air traffic controllers do, but completely vital if you want to use air power without this happening.

Now, as far as anyone knows, the US doesn’t object to Pakistani operations on the NW Frontier. Quite the opposite. This implies that the CIA is also deconflicting its drone flying programme to facilitate Pakistani operations.

It’s possible that both parties fax (fax!) each other tomorrow’s flypro, they never reply or acknowledge it, but the air-tasking cell on both sides acts on the information. It is certain, however, that they are cooperating, because of the lack of regular drone-Mi8 helicopter collisions, drone/fighter intercepts, etc.

A brief inquiry into the nature and consequences of think-of-a-number pricing

Inspired by this weekend’s story that you now pay a transaction fee to fly Ryanair even if you use a Ryanair credit card, which is apparently a thing that exists even if it sounds like it shouldn’t, I have been thinking about their business model. It is not what you may think it is.

This is one of those stories where there’s a business school whiteboard version, and then there is reality. The whiteboard version goes like this: they disaggregated all the service elements formerly bundled into the airline ticket, and priced them. As a result, through the wonder of revealed-preference, we know that people value some of them enough to pay for them separately. You then repeat the words “Southwest Airlines” several times, and ponies!

The cynical version starts off like this: ok sunshine, you expect me to believe a single write operation on their OLTP system costs £6? Seriously. If FR’s IT was that dreadful, they wouldn’t be able to run an airline.

Now, here’s the clever bit. Fares are prices; people mostly pick their carrier on fares. This is of course the point of running a low-cost airline. In case you doubt that low headline fares are the attribute of selection here, look at their website or adverts or airport presence. It says “The LOW FARES airline” everywhere.

You can’t choose to fly FR and be handled by some other company, so once passengers pick them, there is no competitive pressure on the fees. By transferring things from the headline fare into non-fare fees, part of the business has been removed from the domain of competition and moved into the domain of monopoly.

Now, as a rule, if something is more monopoly-like, do we expect its price to contain more or less margin? I think we know the answer to that one.

This may also create an opportunity for tax-dodging. Imagine a company that puts the IT systems that do its check-ins and credit card processing into a subsidiary that lives in, say, Luxembourg. You could move income from the operating business into the subsidiary. I have no idea if FR does this, and finding out would involve reading their report and accounts. Reading financial filings is something I do if people pay me, like enduring carols, riding, making PowerPoint slides, and going to Dubai.

However, they’re the airline that charged all its flying training candidates £50 to read their CVs, and then charged everyone who paid it by credit card another £50 three months later to “reconsider”, so…

Upshot! Disaggregating bundled products does not necessarily increase competition. In fact, it can actually transfer economic activity from the competitive sector to the monopoly sector. This creates opportunities for think-of-a-number pricing.

Think-of-a-number pricing is pricing that has no necessary link to economic reality, and is only constrained by a vague sense of plausibility. It is what happens when your electricity company decides to “estimate” your usage between two actual readings and sends you a gigantic bill, in the hope you’ll just pay it rather than calculating how much power over how much time that means and explaining to their call centre that this would have required quite an impressive industrial-grade circuit, and that a standard residential supply would have burned out in a giant blue flash, and as you aren’t speaking from beyond the grave, repeatedly threatening to change provider…until the enemy cracks and settles for a modest increase in the monthly payment.

Unlike normal prices, think-of-a-number prices convey no information whatsoever, other than the fact you’re being ripped off, which is only of use if you have alternatives. The informational function of prices is kinda important for the whole edifice of economics, and is the entire basis for the notion that tax-funded spending is by definition inefficient, so this is a non-trivial point.

From a business, rather than economic, point of view, this of course means that disaggregation creates margin.

In the last analysis, though, something very interesting is happening here. Weirdly, if you bundle all the services and sell them for a single sticker price, like a proper airline, they have a real price! Because, after all, you still compete on fares, so you need to keep costs down. The IT department has to contribute to the competitive effort. But if you break them out, they don’t, and because of think-of-a-number pricing, economic information is destroyed! And, as no competitive pressure is involved once you’ve sold the ticket, it is inevitable in a profit-maximising firm that an element of think-of-a-number pricing will happen!

And we have an existence-proof that people do actually behave in the way this requires, buying on headline price and then submitting to think-of-a-number pricing: it’s called Ryanair. Now, we could also go on to discuss their user experience design and the notion of “cooling out the mark”, but this blog post is long enough.

ask the experts

Interesting PPRuNe thread on airports. Unsurprisingly for an aviation forum, if there is anything like consensus, it’s for Heathrow. Unsurprisingly, there’s one single, hyper-boosterish Borisland proponent, possibly even a sockpuppet. Surprisingly, the experts have some really wonderfully crazy ideas.

Why not build two more runways at LHR, not just one – putting the fourth between the existing two. It does mean knocking down and replacing Terminals 1, 2, and 3, and the West Base too.

Why not accept that LHR expansion is always going to be politically difficult, and instead build a new four-runway hub airport further west, by demolishing either Maidenhead or Reading?

But the winner for my money was the suggestion of building two more runways at Heathrow, without demolishing Sibson, by removing the reservoirs, which would be replaced by an enormous polythene bag in the Thames Estuary. If this proved expensive, the runways could be built on raised piers (in fact, a series of flyovers) over the reservoirs, which implies some sort of giant aircraft-carrier style lift to get the planes up and down from ground level.

Someone else suggested cutting one of the main runways into two shorter ones, but then that would be silly.

the intersection of Leveson and political plane-spotting

So, the Southern Investigations wing of the Murdoch scandal just woke up again. It seems that Jonathan Rees, the guy whose business partner in the dodgy detective agency run by moonlighting cops got axed to death and the cop investigating the case took his place before he went to jail as a kiddy fiddler – that guy – you know, says the News of the World hired his firm to watch the then head of the Met, Stevens.

Because of the killing and the planting evidence on the lady and a lot of other stuff, the Met was trying to spy on Rees’ firm at the time, by planting an undercover cop with them. As the firm consisted entirely of undercover cops, this has a distinct taste of The Secret Agent about it.

Anyway, the cop, Derek Haslam, isn’t happy and is in fact suing the Met. Haslam claims that News International were spying on Stevens in order to exert influence on him. This isn’t too crazy, as we know Rees’ long term customer at the News of the World, Alex Marunchak, had Rees’ business follow Dave Cook, the detective investigating the Morgan case, using News vehicles. He also says Rees was hired to spy on, well, Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, and John Yates, who of course was one of the cops who decided there was nothing worth investigating. And he ought to know, as he was in place up to 2006, when he suspects his computer was hacked.

Now Rees claims the surveillance was directed against a rogue group of cops, at the wishes of the Met leadership, and that’s why there was a police informer placed within his company. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he even believes it. A lot of the people involved are obviously beyond anything as obvious as allegiance. Rees is probably going to try and rebrand himself as one of the victims.

Here’s something interesting, though. Rees:

“We were given instructions and an allegation that he [Stevens] was using a Met police plane from Biggin Hill to see his mistress in Northumbria.

“Now we did organise a surveillance team because it’s what the News of the World wanted and we had team in Northumbria and here, but he never showed so whether the allegation is true or not, who knows.

“The allegation was that he was using…a Metropolitan police federation plane bought by donations from charity, and the petrol, the fuel, to travel up to Northumbria to see his mistress. You can see why people wanted…that story.”

A Met Police plane? This reminded me of something. In October last, in the full flight of the scandal, the Torygraph reported that the Met was operating some fixed-wing aircraft secretly. Supposedly, the two Reims-Cessna 406 were platforms for communications interception, which sounds more like the slack-dozen of RAF and Army Air Corps Islanders that operate from Northolt and elsewhere.

More to the point, as the paper put it, the planes had never been mentioned to the Met Police Authority or as far as I can make out, anyone else. Even more to the point, their registration with the CAA was rather unusual. A nonexistent leasing firm, based at a not-my-address mailbox firm. One of the names is a cop, and then there was the bent copper turned fake Scottish laird..but that’s the Torygraph’s scoop.

So here are the aeroplanes registered to “Nor Leasing”. G-BVJT, serial number 0073, and G-TDSA, serial number 0096. JT has been with “Nor Leasing” since 1995. The names associated are Peter Bennett, Richard Gray, John Charles Carnt (that’s the copper), Stephen Frank Herbert, Mark Evans, and Andrew Jay. SA was registered to “Nor Leasing” in December 2008. Names associated are William Johnson and Mark Evans. So there’s a common mode, even if he’s probably not the Sky News guy.

A footnote: Rees described the aircraft as a “Met Police federation” one, which may be interesting or may just be garbled or possibly sarcastic.

so where will that airport end up?

The key point in the airports row is, I think, that the technocrats can rule options out but only the politicians can rule them in. For example, the industry, the air traffic controllers, and the transport planners are keen on Heathrow, but it’s politically difficult. On the other hand, the planners, the controllers, and the industry hate Boris Island, but it has to be on-the-table because of the politicians.

The aviation technocrats would be sort-of OK with a fenland/south Midlands project (Cublington, Bedford, Alconbury etc) although the ground transport ones wouldn’t, but the politicians won’t rule it in. The civil service and ATCers like Gatwick and the industry would have it, and the transport planners would probably prefer Stansted but could tolerate Gatwick. But each of those have a political veto attached, although the Gatwick one runs out in 2019.

If you want some really exciting proposals, the parliamentary debate on the 1971 report is a classic; let’s do nothing, and concentrate on vertical take-off airliners, which can land at King’s Cross or in the Surrey Docks! Thanks, Bow Group. Why not build the airport on Thorne Waste, near Doncaster? You could clear customs and immigration in your high-speed train racing northwards on its dedicated LGV. Thanks, south Yorkshire Labour MP! Why not build it at Speke Airport in Liverpool, because transatlantic sea passengers used to get the train from London? Thanks, Eric Heffer (for it is he)! Why not build it near Bristol, because…well, Concorde is being built at Filton, and we’re willing to put up with the noise out of sheer boosterism! Thanks, Brissol MP! Sadly, the MP who suggested developing Ronaldsway on the Isle of Man was joking.

I’ve already come out for a flying airport, as I consider the floating one to be insufficiently ambitious. Giant kite-balloons suspend the structure high over…whereever seems convenient, while also generating electricity. Meanwhile, a fleet of Fairey Rotodynes shuttles passengers and freight from city-centre airports up to the platform. Clearly, I should at least get a hagiographic interview with the Evening Standard out of this.

More seriously, I suspect that the final answer will be “muddle through to 2019 and build at Gatwick”, because this minimises the number of potential vetoes, especially if things can be arranged so as to put the decision-point behind the next election. This implies doing something in the meantime, very probably going mixed-mode at Heathrow and revising the various treaties with the communities round about. This will mean more whoooosh for John McDonnell’s constituents, but it’s not like the Tories care, some more whooosh elsewhere, but also that the Tories can claim to have both not built a third runway at Heathrow and also to have provided more capacity there.

Hello to all that – Syria, Sudan, and his Lordship

OK, so the Syrian air force drops these things – large, light alloy containers stuffed with shrapnel and low explosive, with a canister of much higher explosive in the middle, probably delivered from a helicopter or a tactical airlifter. Here’s an odd historical point.

a two gallon drum with a cylinder containing about two pounds of an explosive called ammonal that looked like salmon paste, smelled like marzipan, and when it went off, sounded like the Day of Judgement. The hollow around the cylinder contained scrap metal, apparently collected by French villagers behind the lines…the canister could easily be heard approaching and looked harmless in the air, but its shock was as shattering as the very heaviest shell. It would blow in any but the deepest dugouts; and the false teeth, rusty nails, cogwheels and so on went all over the place

That’s Robert Graves speaking. The Germans were lobbing them at him from a sort of wooden mortar. I’ll leave speculating about how two pounds of high explosive and very low velocity (one of his brother-officers shot at them with his rifle and regularly exploded them in the air) dug into the earth that much to Erik Lund.

But a more recent war used a very similar weapon. During the 2000s version of the Sudanese civil war, itself an episode in a much longer conflict, the Sudanese air force was in the habit of dropping similar improvised weapons in bulk quantities from its Antonov-12 tactical transports over villages in Darfur. The tactics were to drop the bombs, relying on the SLA either not being on the spot or not having any air defence, and hope that the blast, shrapnel, and fire would force the civil population to flee. Once fleeing, they would be a target for light cavalry (the janjaweed), and anyway they would probably flee to a refugee camp, which meant that they would be somewhere else and their land could be given to somebody else.

C.J. Chivers, who is on the scene and knows more than I do, thinks that this weapon is a sign of desperation – the Syrian air force is struggling to keep up serviceability rates on its attack helicopters and fighter-bombers, he thinks, and therefore it’s losing.

Lord Trenchard, the creator of the RAF as an institution, apparently said that his two pillars were Cranwell and Halton. One to create an officer corps and a strategic doctrine (and to train flying instructors), one to train craftsmen who would eventually finish their terms of service, stop maintaining the RAF’s planes, and instead build them in the aircraft industry.

So, we can unpack Chivers’ report a bit. If they can’t maintain the aircraft, even though the types in question enjoy a huge supply of parts, this implies that people aren’t turning up to work. Specifically, the skilled working class/lower middle class created by the great technologies of the mid-century. They’re on strike, or on the run, or on the other side, and without them an air force lasts about 40 hours between overhauls.

In that case, it would indeed make a lot of sense to use the An-12, the donkey of the sky, as much as possible. But then, it always makes sense to use the An-12.

I’m not so optimistic, although the logic does make sense. Jamie Kenny makes an interesting point that the world’s air arsenals have been designed for many years, since the Soviet thinkers’ late-70s notion of the scientific-technical revolution that Andrew Marshall nicked for the Pentagon, to wage war through improved guidance and control. Even the 5,000lber is GPS guided.

But what if what you want is the airpower theory of, well, Trenchard’s heirs? Destroy their houses, and their version of the city. (Class is really deeply inherent in airpower thinking since Douhet.) That way, either they’ll give up, or they’ll be forced out to fight, or at least they’ll be driven into the refugee world, which is a way of creating a de-facto partition. And this is precisely what the Sudanese air force specialised in. Separating the guerrillas from the people through air terror on a class basis.

What do I mean by that? It’s been well pointed out that the supposedly racial distinction in Sudan was no such. Rather, it was one of religion, of place, of class, and of self-identification. Further, if you decide to bomb out a rebel district, some of the people will flee to the rebels and some the other way. Legibility is often thought to facilitate violence, but violence is also a way to force people to take sides and therefore to define identity.

The Sudanese leaders found out, though, that separating the guerrillas from the people cuts both ways. It could also mean that the refugee cities became a new organising base. In Syria, they are close to the borders with Lebanon and Turkey, close, in another sense, to the world. The whole story is well reported in this NYT piece. So, perhaps C.J. Chivers is right, or perhaps Assad is heading for a long, but losing fight.

Of course, if he’s right on another score, and the rebels are getting anti-aircraft weapons, it might not be so short.

Birthday present bomber

Paul Klee’s students apparently celebrated his 50th birthday by dropping presents through his (flat) roof at the Bauhaus from a Junkers aircraft. An interesting story, although Mark Brown doesn’t pick up on it (Rowan Moore does here but only superficially).

Junkers was the home-town industry of Dessau by then, which is probably why the students were able to arrange the stunt. It’s mildly interesting that Marcel Breuer wanted Junkers to fabricate the alloy tubes for his furniture, but it’s more interesting going the other way.

Hugo Junkers started out working on gas heating systems and two-stroke engines, first as a product of the industrial R&D departments that emerged in Germany before anywhere else and that would later become the key manifestations of J.K. Galbraith’s technostructure, and later as an entrepreneur in his own right. He was the first to build an aircraft entirely out of metal, in 1915.

This was a crucial invention. It combined changes in metalworking and metallurgy with others in structural engineering and aerodynamics. It also meant that aircraft would no longer be craft products of varying quality, like the German fighters of the late first world war, but genuinely industrial ones. Stressed-skin construction would also mean that aircraft would no longer have external guy wires to heave their structure taut, and therefore that their wings would be aerodynamically clean.

In some ways, this would make the original design of the aircraft more important, and its production into a question of mass-producing metal components on standardised machine tools. But that could be overstated. When BAE set about converting the Nimrod MR2s built in the late 1960s to MRA4 standard, they found to their consternation and the Ministry of Defence’s financial horror that the new wings, cut identically on computer-controlled machines, matched the old blueprints but none of the actual aircraft, which had been fabricated mostly by hand. Aircraft still occupy a niche on the scale of industrialisation, rather less mass produced than cars or computers, rather more so than ships.

Of course, the Bauhaus was all about trying to mass-produce the change you wanted to see in the world. So was everybody. As Adam Tooze pointed out, mass production and product design were also part of how the Nazis wanted to escape the uneven economic development of Germany in the 1920s, along with the genocidal imperialism, of course. And it didn’t quite work, as so many of the Volksprodukte remained stubbornly pricey, as the Bauhaus’s had.

As well as aircraft, Junkers wanted to mass-produce buildings, and in fact he did. If you bought their planes, they could also sell you prefabricated hangars to park them in, and that was also how Hugo Junkers made a living between 1933 and 1935, after the Nazis expropriated the company. They had big plans for it, and it grew to enormous size as part of the nationalised Hermann Göring Werke (and part of the man himself’s corruption-empire).

Specifically, they liked three aircraft designs from Junkers – only one of which dates from the company pre-1933, the Ju52 trimotor airliner, which was produced in huge numbers for transport. Then there was the Ju87 dive bomber, the Stuka, the only war aircraft that deliberately screamed at you as it dived in a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk dedicated to violence. When it did so, it was often being filmed, in order to convince Germans at home and everyone else abroad of German power.

In fact, even by 1939 it was rather dated, but it was cheap to build and packing the numbers of front-line bombers with them spoke to the aspirations of pro-Nazi politicians, the fears of the general public, and the empires of airpower bureaucrats everywhere.

It also had a successor, the Ju88, much closer to Hugo J’s vision of a rake-thin streamlined rocket ship.

It’s not too much to say that the hope of a Nazi future rested on it. The air force procurement plan for 1941 foresaw a mammoth build-up to challenge British and US industry, and the Junkers industrial complex began to spread across Europe in search of enough aluminium alloy. In fact, Nazi plans for Norway and the Balkans were heavily determined by the needs of the Ju88. And the Ju88 design was meant to trump the advantages Rolls-Royce and North American Aviation had, by being a multirole combat aircraft before its time, a masterpiece of product design.

Of course, it didn’t work. It wasn’t big enough to make a strategic bomber, it was too big to be a decent fighter, and its high performance made it dangerous as a close-support dive bomber (the role of the Ju87 and interestingly, also of the very first Junkers). They lost and the plants were eventually bombed out to make sure of it. Not only them: the town of Dessau was destroyed to 80% on the night of the 7th March, 1945 by RAF Bomber Command.