Aviation Conspiracy Newsletter #479........................................................................May 4,  2008 Past newsletters can be accessed at: http://pages.prodigy.net/rockaway/ACNewsmenu.htm  If you want to get the newsletter sent to you every week, sign up to AviationWatch. Bill Mulcahy rockaway@prodigy.net

Quote of the Week:  "The FAA has been pounding it into the inspectors for the past several years that the customers are the airlines, not the flying public," comment from FAA inspector, Gabe Bruno, who was removed as the FAA's top man in Orlando after he questioned the priorities of higher ups

FAA Whistleblowers Expose New Corruption!!!

As Bill Sees It (Editorial): March 2008 Video Of Southwest Inspection Scandal That Exposed FAA Corruption!!! The exposure of corruption in the FAA management continues today, but it all began with Southwest Airlines inspection story in March of this year. FAA Whistleblower Claims Plane Mechanics Not Properly Certified!!!  FAA management is STILL punishing lower echelon inspectors for doing their jobs correctly!!!  The latest FAA corruption is a story from Florida about a recently retired FAA official who blew the whistle to congress on FAA management's intimidating inspector's to go easy on the FAA's "customers," the airlines!!! Now Gabe Bruno is saying that plane mechanics got FAA approval simply by paying for the certification. Why not? It certainly "fast tracks" the process, which is something the FAA has always been good at doing, especially when they want to expand an airport. Anti-Heathrow Expansion Candidate Wins Mayoral Election In London!!! This seems to put another nail in the "third runway" expansion plan for Heathrow Airport. However while the new mayor opposes Heathrow expansion he does what almost all other politicians do when their constituents demand action on aviation noise, they say they will move over somebody else. In the case of  Boris Johnson wants to build another major airport "east of the Thames (River)" While I think it's nice that politicians are finally seeing the insanity (with the help of outraged voters) of having major airports located in the hearts of major cities, I don't like their solution of spreading the noise and the global-warming air pollution to quiet rural areas in need of jobs. Personally I would rather have a nuclear depository located near me than an airport. New York Environmental Group Appeals To Sen. "Chuck" Schumer On Airspace Redesign Scheme!!! Good luck getting this aviation expansionist rat to care about people on the ground. The only thing "Chuck" cares about is expanding airports, protecting favored communities and of course his false environmentalist public relations image. Corrupt News Media Help While Schumer is helping dump more aviation pollution on New Yorkers he is busy getting local New York news media to promote him as being concerned with helicopter noise in the Hamptons, Long Island. This only goes to show that the media is corrupt as the rotten politicians they help promote. Schumer, along with congressmen John Hall and Maurice Hinchey refused pleas to get an environmental assessment on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's plan to build a 4th major New York City airport (Stewart Airport) in upstate in the upstate town of Windsor. Yet the local news media constantly promote Schumer, Hall and Hinchey as environmentalist politicians and never miss a chance of showing them getting "green" awards from obscure environmental groups !!! 

   

New York Environmental Group Wants Sen. Schumer To Oppose Airspace Redesign!!! As I believe you are aware, “Quiet Rockland” is an organization based in Pearl River, New York. Our organization acts consonant with the interests of thousands of citizens in Rockland County and elsewhere. All of us continue to be threatened - directly and adversely affected by the FAA’s “NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign” ( “Airspace Redesign”, or “Redesign” ). We are New Yorkers, voters, and your constituents. We are also therefore directly affected by your actions as an elected official and United States Senator. Our dependency on your stewardship is augmented by an anomalous condition which finds your NY-Senatorial counterpart running for an even-higher office this year. We are again asking you for your personal attention and help, and your response is vitally important.We are concerned that to our knowledge you have yet to publicly and forcefully oppose the FAA’s planned Airspace Redesign. You have recently taken to the media to denounce the failed Bobby Sturgell administration of the FAA, which we clearly appreciate - a position with which we clearly agree. As I think you know, Quiet Rockland has taken the same position. To that extent, you and we are on a common pursuit. However, we understand that you have also recently taken to the media to support further aviation industry expansion and airport expansion. Specifically, you have articulated your opposition to flight caps at Kennedy and Newark Airports. See, e.g.and read full letter below: http://www.newsday.com/news/local/transportation/ny-lifaa145649777apr14,0,6581335.story
http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/Summer_air_pain_to_hit_new_heights/12238.html 

FAA Top Man In Florida Removed After Raising Safety Concerns!!! ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Federal Aviation Administration's former top man in Central Florida claims when he raised safety concerns about unqualified mechanics, the government turned on him and retaliated. Gabe Bruno was removed as the FAA's top man in Orlando after he questioned the priorities of higher ups, Local 6's Tony Pipitone reported. Bruno said he insisted the FAA track down and thoroughly retest about 2,000 mechanics licensed through an outlaw school at Sanford-Orlando International Airport. The school gave passing grades to anybody willing to pay for them, Pipitone reported. "So, what you have is a real potential for having unqualified people working on these air carrier aircraft," Burno said. The issues he warned about included improperly trained mechanics, FAA coziness with big airlines and a lack of effective maintenance oversight, Pipitone reported. Pipitone said Bruno's examples included the grounding of Southwest and American Airline jets in recent weeks, crashes of a Chalk's Ocean Airways seaplane in Miami in December 2005 and an Air Midwest jet in Charlotte in January 2003. In all, there were 41 dead, blamed in part of the FAA's failure to oversee or pursue lapses in maintenance programs, Pipitone reported. "The FAA has been pounding it into the inspectors for the past several years that the customers are the airlines, not the flying public," Burno said. http://www.local6.com/news/16144687/detail.html 

London's New Major Wants "Alternative" Airport Built Instead Of Heathrow Expanded!!! Boris Johnson's (pictured on the left) victory in the London mayoral election fight could resurrect calls for a new airport in Kent and pitch him into conflict with council chiefs in the county. Johnson ousted Ken Livingstone to become the new mayor, giving the Conservatives further cause for celebrations after a day in which they triumphed in the local council elections. The potential source of conflict in Kent lies in Johnson’s belief that Heathrow airport’s expansion plans should be abandoned and alternative plans for a new airport at the Thames estuary be reconsidered. Earlier this year, Johnson said: "What we don’t want to do is entrench a planning error of the 1960s by further expansion at Heathrow. We should look at whether there’s a solution to the east in the Thames Estuary." Four options for airports either onshore along the coast or on floating islands were rejected by the Government in 2005. However, Johnson believes the UK could learn from other countries who have relocated major airports. http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kol08/article/default.asp?article_id=41085 

  

                               @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@     

                                                    Important Aviation News Stories This Week

Quiet Rockland Asks Senator Schumer To OPPOSE The FAA's "NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign"
As I believe you are aware, "Quiet Rockland" is an organization based in Pearl River, New York. Our organization acts consonant with the interests of thousands of citizens in Rockland County and elsewhere. All of us continue to be threatened - directly and adversely affected by the FAA's "NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign" ("Airspace Redesign", or "Redesign"). We are New Yorkers, voters, and your constituents.

(Media-Newswire.com) - Below is a Letter from Quiet Rockland:

Dear Honorable Senator Schumer:

As I believe you are aware, “Quiet Rockland” is an organization based in Pearl River, New York. Our organization acts consonant with the interests of thousands of citizens in Rockland County and elsewhere. All of us continue to be threatened - directly and adversely affected by the FAA’s “NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign” ( “Airspace Redesign”, or “Redesign” ). We are New Yorkers, voters, and your constituents. We are also therefore directly affected by your actions as an elected official and United States Senator. Our dependency on your stewardship is augmented by an anomalous condition which finds your NY-Senatorial counterpart running for an even-higher office this year. We are again asking you for your personal attention and help, and your response is vitally important.

We are concerned that to our knowledge you have yet to publicly and forcefully oppose the FAA’s planned Airspace Redesign. You have recently taken to the media to denounce the failed Bobby Sturgell administration of the FAA, which we clearly appreciate - a position with which we clearly agree. As I think you know, Quiet Rockland has taken the same position. To that extent, you and we are on a common pursuit. However, we understand that you have also recently taken to the media to support further aviation industry expansion and airport expansion. Specifically, you have articulated your opposition to flight caps at Kennedy and Newark Airports. See, e.g.:

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/transportation/ny-lifaa145649777apr14,0,6581335.story

http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/Summer_air_pain_to_hit_new_heights/12238.html

Please be aware that we, affected citizens and your constituents, summarily reject the aviation expansion which you might consider further championing. Aero-mercantile expansion is wrong for New York and wrong for New Yorkers. We want the straining of the system to stop, now. We want no further over-scheduling of flights. We want no further over-saturation of skies. We want no more runway incursions and near-misses. We want no more air traffic controller fatigue, demoralization and understaffing at the hand of the FAA. The solution to current travel difficulties is to stop placing even more planes on the runways and at the airports which cannot hold them in the first instance, Senator Schumer. The solution is to cap the number of flights-per-hour at a number consonant with the physical limitations of the airports. This will surely have the incidental benefit of improving each airport’s on-time flight percentage if they want to continue to measure success that way. More importantly, it will keep us safe and unharmed.

Through the Redesign, FAA seeks to introduce new low-altitude flight patterns over densely-populated residential communities throughout the New York metropolitan area. This change has already been partially effected in regions south of us, an implementation which the FAA already made sure to ram through before the GAO audit report on the Redesign issued. FAA next seeks to effect this same change for jumbo-jet arrivals into Newark Liberty International Airport. Though couched in what we believe is an illusory time-savings-per-flight rationale, the Redesign is simply another quest to add incremental capacity to area airports and pump more money out of the sky. Yet this FAA quest decidedly puts area residents, your New York constituents, in harm’s way, in the path of low-flying and sometimes defective and under-inspected aircraft.

Sometimes they even arrive out of gas. See, e.g.,

http://menendez.senate.gov/newsroom/record.cfm?id=296304,

and

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/04/continentals-75.html.

“In some cases flights approached Newark so close to empty that they received priority landing clearance, effectively allowing them to jump the line to avoid running [totally] out of fuel”. Avianca Flight 52 crashed while landing at JFK Airport after running out of fuel, in 1990.

In a hearing regarding the FAA before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, April 17, 2008, thankfully webcast for all of us to see and posted at http://appropriations.senate.gov/, our new-found hero to the south Senator Lautenberg ( D-NJ ) asked Inspector General Scovel about the I.G.’s investigation of “low–fuel landings” at Newark Airport. Mr. Scovel referred to a “disturbing situation”. While Year 2005 saw 44 “minimum and emergency fuel declarations” for Newark arrivals, Year 2007 found 151 minimum and emergency fuel declarations.

In other words, the already-unacceptable number tripled and almost quadrupled.

In other words, as of Year 2007, a Newark arrival runs low on fuel on the average of almost once every two days.

Would you want even one of those fuel-depleted sputtering planes over your house? God forbid if one of those planes crash-lands to change Chestnut Ridge forever, it will be a result of aero-mercantile excess and airport over-expansionism – the bad collective decision to run the airspace, airports, airlines, and resources beyond their limitations, beyond what they can handle. A low gas tank and an over-stacked runway are really the same problem. Why doesn’t our society and government simply suck it up, and act and live within its means? Please take a stand to stop the straining of the system. The people who bought houses in Chestnut Ridge did not bargain to live on an airport runway. Yet they are the very constituents you are bound to protect, and they and we look to you to do so.

The real experts can further weigh in. The new proposed Redesign flight paths will strain the subject airports beyond their physical limitations, as virtually all of the air traffic controllers with personal knowledge of those airports will attest if you ask them. We can bring those ATCs to you, if you have not already spoken with them. They can attest to the multiplicative dangerous possible outcomes of an over-taxed airport combined with low-fuel jumbo jet arrivals.

Additionally, the Redesign eliminates long-established noise-abatement procedures, and threatens to harm our environment and thereby ruin our quality of life. Those facts are already amply briefed in multiple federal court litigation files and otherwise.

The real reason for which the new flight paths are being implemented and considered, and the real reason for aero-expansionism generally, is the resultant economic benefit to the airline industry, its executives, and its and their compensation and bonus structures. See, e.g.:

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/04/07/daily70.htm

Keeping more planes in the air per unit time, makes these aero-mercantalists more money, period. We want your assurance that you are not even sympathetic to their crassly- and unabashedly-commercial enterprise. With all due respect, Senator Schumer, voters and citizens should have rightful and serious concerns about why any public official would support harmful air-oversaturations and flight-overschedulings. Why would any elected official pursue aero-mercantile expansion at the expense of the health and safety of the very constituents who put the official in office, and who gave that official their trust to foster their well-being while in Washington? Our government and our representatives should never put money before people. We ask that you please carefully reconsider, and clarify to us, your own position. We want your unequivocal assurance that you put people over money.

Senator Schumer, we want you to protect us, your constituents and fellow citizens, on the ground. We do not want you to at all be perceived by anyone as fostering the paychecks and bonuses of aero-mercantile executives, at our expense. We want you to reject airport over-expansionism, and take a firm and unequivocal stand against the NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign. That is what your constituents want, and I can bring you thousands of them too, if that’s what you want to validate the point.

Specifically, we believe that the permanent institution of flight caps at NY-area airports is an appropriate and correct method to protect our safety, our health, and the environment. We ask that you please provide us all the information and data which you may be utilizing as your basis to oppose the Newark Airport flight caps, so that we may further respond to it. We believe that flight caps would reduce and perhaps totally eliminate any FAA-claimed need to implement onerous new Redesigned low-altitude flight patterns which would otherwise put us at physical risk, generate unacceptable noise, and adversely environmentally impact our residential communities. We want the Redesign to wash away with the imposition of the Newark Flight Caps, and we want you to support the Newark Flight Caps and airport flight caps generally. We await your reply.

Respectfully submitted,


John J. Tormey III, Esq.
Quiet Rockland