Pilot Shortage Hits Regional Airlines -- March 6, 2016; Compare Paris Public Transportation With That Of Paris

Pilot short hits regional airlines, AFP/Yahoo! is reporting. The article is "all about pay" with a few other work schedule / management / government regulations thrown in. But the gist of the article: all about pay, most of which sounded like the talk I heard 20 years while I was stationed overseas, assigned to a heavy aircraft squadron in which the pilots talked daily about whether to stay in the USAF or go to work for the airlines. The article does not mention the two 800-lb gorillas in the room:

• the demise of the feeder team (farm team, farm system); and,
• ObamaCare.

I won't talk about ObamaCare because that has more to do with the pay issue and how it affects the regional airlines in general which is the gist of the article.

The article did not mention another huge problem: the demise of the farm team for the regional airlines: the USAF.

A 20-year retiree would very likely take a "lower paying" regional airline job because his military retirement pay and medical benefits might provide the margin the pilot/family required. The military pension system is changing and I have not kept up with it, but my understanding is that active duty members leaving before their twenty years are up do have a military "pension" of some sort, albeit significantly lower.

But it would be interesting to know how the move from manned aircraft to drones in the USAF has contributed to the shortage of regional airline pilots.

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Paris Subway Expanding

Link in The Atlantic.

This is really quite an incredible story. I was stationed in Germany for seven or eight or nine years -- time goes by, I forget -- and visited Paris on a regular basis. Of all the places I've been, I would have to say Paris is our favorite city (our: my wife and me). London is my favorite 2nd big city, but the difference between Paris and London is huge. Paris is in its own league among the cities I have visited.

But I digress. The point of all that is to say that my comments about the story at the link are probably really, really biased.

In Paris, public transportation worked. Even better than London. We went everywhere by light rail / subway in Paris -- quickly and efficiently. From the linked article, it is obvious I missed a lot, but still, a great system.

Now, Paris is in the process of improving an already excellent system even more. This comes at a time when Boston is cutting back light rail services, and California's bullet train seems mired in more red tape than ever before.

When you go to the link, if you do, and if you have not had the pleasure of visiting Paris, go first to the artist's rendering of one of the passenger stations, one of the terminals. The station at St-Denis will be the project's largest train station. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, the junction is expected to handle 250,000 passengers a day. Yes, you read that correctly: 250,000 passengers a day.

For $25 billion, the French will get that world-class train terminal plus:

• four new lines
• 68 stations
• 120 more miles of track

Compare that to what one gets for $65 billion in California for the bullet train:

• lots of track; much of it currently going to "nowhere"
• some locomotives; some passenger cars
• four train stations: Bay Area, Merced, Bakersfield, Los Angeles

But look at what you get with the $25 billion in France:

• one track will connect Versailles with Orly Airport;
• another track will connect Orly Airport with Paris itself;
• a third track, most ambitious, and in some sense, most important, will provide a complete ring aroudn the city of Paris, something it has not had;
• a fourth track will connect the city to the Charles De Gaulle Airport;
• a fifth track will be another arc of track along the far outside northeast Paris; and,
• and, a six track will connect France's second busiest railroad station with the rest of the system