Unintended consequences of the TSA regulations

You'd have to be astonishingly ill-informed to believe that you could waltz through USA airport security with any recognisable knife in your carry-on luggage. TSA regulations specify:

Knives
Carry On Bags: No
Checked Bags: Yes
Except for plastic or round bladed butter knives.

Now, I'd read that as "you can have any kind of knife in your checked baggage apart from plastic knives or round bladed butter knives" but I'm a pedant; the overall guidance is clear.

A couple of weeks ago, my pal Harry turned up to San Francisco International Airport (motto: "Fogged in by design") for a flight up to Washington state. He wasn't checking any luggage, just carrying a backpack. Shortly before security he reached into the side pocket of his pack to get his passport, and while fumbling around he came across the folding knife that he'd left in there on his last hiking trip.

Crap.

Oh well, better to discover it now than later. He could have surrendered it to the TSA contractors but it had been an expensive knife when he'd bought it, and he'd had it a long time. He was damned if a TSA-contracted monkey was going to take it from him.

Not a problem! Airport Mailers are a company that allow you to mail items to yourself from the land-side of an airport. Harry walked over to the Airport Mailers kiosk and asked them for a pouch to mail his knife back.

"Sorry, we're out of pouches." Apparently they'd been out for most of the past week, and were "optimistic" of getting a delivery in the next few days, but of course that did not help Harry. Harry starts to see why there is less than enthusiastic endorsement for this firm.

Harry realises that he could just drop the knife in the "Sin Bin" box at security, but he would lose it forever and it was an expensive knife when he bought it, and has a lot of sentimental value. Pondering the problem, his gaze alights on the plants in tubs used to decorate the hall:

"Problem solved!" Harry pulls out his folded knife, palms it, and sidles to the corner of one of the planters containing a particularly bushy plant. He casually slips his hand under the leaves and gropes around trying to dig unobtrusively a hole in the soil to fit his knife.

This admittedly ingenious strategy is sadly not original; as Harry pokes his fingers into the soil, he discovers a wooden object that is indisputably a knife handle. It seems that, as he pokes around, what feels like half of the planter is taken up with buried knives.

Harry, undissuaded, finds an undisturbed corner of the planter, furtively buries his knife, and heads off to the gate. 48 hours later he's back, coming out of Arrivals. He wheels left, locates the planter, digs his knife out from the corner, and strolls off to his car. In the process he discovers that the other knife has vanished.

No doubt the TSA would posit this as a security "win", but it's not obvious that this is true. People are stashing knives all over San Francisco airport, and seem to be able to rely on picking them up again when they return. If they can manage this in a heavily-patrolled airport departures area, how effective do you think the TSA Security Theatre is at keeping hundreds of aircraft in an "allowed" state?

Weasel will find a way

After the furore last year when it turned out that UK airport shops were demanding boarding passes to save themselves VAT but not save you any money I assumed that this was the effective end of the weasel. From my recent experience at Birmingham International (motto: "We put the 'slack jaw' in 'security'") it seems not.

First stop: the bookshop, to buy some doorstop-sized illiterate literature. No shortage of supply. I present the volume to the lady at the till who demands: "Boarding pass?" with no hint of shame. I enquire whether it's actually mandatory, at which point she rings up the transaction with no further questions. 1-0.

Next stop: W H Smith, for a magazine. Avoiding the single human-manned till I opt for the self-service till. I scan the magazine for a grand total of £2.50 - and it asks for a boarding pass, and won't proceed until I scan one. I hit the "my boarding pass won't scan" button, wait a minute for the roaming attendant to punch the override and proceed on my way. But hell, I remember the huge fuss in August 2015 about this. It seems that the airport shops were content to let the hubbub die down, then go back to their old ways.

Don't let them do this! Make them pay a cost in salaried worker time for each time they demand a boarding pass. Once the average worker salary rate times delay is more than the expected VAT, they will shut up about the boarding passes and let us buy our dubious literature un-monitored and without delay. (Until 1-2 years later when some bright MBA spark spots an opportunity to re-introduce the practice, at which point we hang them from the Heathrow radar pillar as a warning to others.)

Do you have a right to be heavy?

As with many air travellers, I have in the past been forced to share a significant fraction of my seat with parts of my overflowing neighbour. As a result, I can only applaud Samoa Air's move to charge passengers by weight:

Air Samoa's rates range from $1 (65p) to around $4.16 per kilogram. Passengers pay for the combined weight of themselves and their baggage.

Samoans are famously large, ranking number 2 in the world for fraction of adults overweight. Air Samoa operates small and medium-sized planes where passenger weight is a substantial fraction of the aircraft, so they are in the top right corner of special cases. It will therefore be extremely interesting to see how this plays out.

I would expect there to be an immediate flow of heavy or luggage-laden passengers from Air Samoa to other airlines on the same routes. In parallel, of course, lighter and luggage-light passengers and families with small children would probably find Air Samoa a more competitive fare. As the cabin composition changes and the mass of passengers relative to space, it's quite possible that Air Samoa will find itself having to charge a minimum price per seat to cover its costs. Other airlines will be looking very carefully at the results - you can just imagine o'Leary of RyanAir salivating at the opportunity to offer prices "£5* to Dublin return!" with the caveat in 2 point text "(*) for passengers weighing 10lb and under".

If this spreads more widely, to the point where passengers on certain routes have no choice but to pay by weight, I can see several consequences. One is that the airport loos next to the check-in desk will be much more heavily used. Perhaps they'll need to charge £1 per person entrance as a result. Airport food will become more expensive as it becomes more expensive to check-in with food on your person or in your baggage. I wonder if airlines will need to re-check weights just before passengers board, in case they leave the heavy contents of their hand luggage with a friend before they check-in and then re-pack the bag before going through security. It's all going to be vastly entertaining.

Soon enough, surely, some large gentleman is going to sue the airlines claiming that they are (price-) discriminating against him based on his medical condition causing him to be overweight. I have no idea which way this claim is going to go, but I'm fairly sure the lawyers will get substantial fees in any case.

Still, if it means that I don't have the large rolls of fat from Mr. Smith billowing over the seat handle into my lap, I look forward to other airlines adopting this pricing technique post-haste.

If you wanted RAF SAR you should have bought better choppers

Much wailing in The Guardian today over the news that the RAF and Royal Navy will be handing over UK search and rescue to a private firm:

Bristow, a leading provider of helicopter services to the offshore energy industry, has won a £1.6bn contract to provide SAR (search and rescue) from 2016.

Everyone currently involved in the SAR industry promptly objects to the change. It's not surprising, the change is a very significant one since the RAF and RN have been providing SAR around the UK for 70 years. So why does the Government want to fix what (apparently) ain't broken?

Money is, of course, a primary driver for this - the contract is £1.6bn, for a duration apparently unspecified in the Government press release on the SAR handover. If private cover costs this much, you can bet that RAF/RN cover costs more. The real reason for this change though, and believe me it's a good reason, is buried down in the article:

However, the government has argued that it needs to act because the famous and much-loved Sea King helicopter fleet is approaching the end of its useful life.

The Sea Kings are ancient hardware. The licence-built UK design first flew in 1969 with updates such as the dedicated SAR variant HAR3 delivered in the late 1970s / early 1980s. It's being retired everywhere else in the world, and even in the UK the troop-carrying variant has bitten the dust. There's no way that the current Sea Kings can or should keep going much longer, getting increasingly expensive and difficult to maintain.

But the RAF and Navy have a much more modern medium- and heavy-lift helicopter - the EH101 aka Merlin in UK service. Why not use these for SAR? Well, where the 14,000lb empty-weight Sea King has a regular range of 764 miles and sea level cruise speed of 129mph, the Merlin is nearly 10,000lb heavier, with a 500 mile range albeit a faster cruise speed of 167mph. Cargo carrying capacity is not generally a big concern for SAR roles - as long as it can accommodate crew + around ten passengers this will cover the vast majority of rescue situations. The Merlin is too big compared to the Sea King, and it's really expensive - the RAF bought 44 aircraft for £4.65bn and even though a lot of that cost was set-up and infrastructure you're still looking at the thick end of £30M per bird.

But let's compare it against the replacements that Bristow will use: ten Sikorsky S92s and ten AW189s. The former is an up-rated civilian version of the tremendously successful and widely used UH-70 Blackhawk, weighs 15,500lb empty with a range of 600 miles and cruise speed of 174mph - a lot faster than Sea King or Merlin, slightly less range than the former but a comparable weight, and will set you back about £20M. Spares should be easy to find and running costs low. Specs on the latter are harder to find, but it looks to have a comparable speed and be slightly lighter; presumably there's something about the cost/range/speed tradeoff that makes it a more attractive option than the S92 for certain locations.

Bristow aren't exactly newcomers to the SAR role - they've been operating helicopters to the North Sea oil platforms for decades, which is a sufficiently challenging environment to prepare them well for UK SAR. It's still going to be an interesting hand-over, but there's no reason to think that Bristow will just let random yachting folks drown because of a clause in their contract.

The other nice thing about contracting out this service is that the contract should be very easy to spec out - the variables (weather, range, accidents) are very well known and well-established, and so unless the MoD Procurement idiots have been allowed to write the contract it's not unreasonable to think that they should cover all the major issues. This is not like tendering for a future fighter or helicopter where the requirements are hazy. We know exactly what SAR involves and what's reasonable to expect. If anything, I expect the contract to be too conservative and prevent Bristow from implementing innovations in kit or procedures that would let them reduce operational cost while preserving the same effective service.

A-400M: not even a bargain at half the price

Angela Monaghan, the Telegraph's "industry correspondent" clearly knows what side her bread is buttered. She writes a slavishly lickspittle article welcoming the A-400M into service at the bargain price (for the RAF) of £3.2bn for 22 aircraft:

Philip Dunne, the minister for defence equipment, support and technology, says the A400M will become the "workhorse" of the RAF's lift capability, transforming how it does business. Speaking on one of the first flights of a sample A400M at Brize Norton, he said: "It has much greater lift capacity than the Hercules it will be replacing and much greater range, so that we will either be able to lift twice as much for the same distance, or travel twice as far with the same amount of kit."

Yes, the A-400M can carry 37 tonnes of kit 3300km, cruising around Mach 0.7. This is about twice the capacity of the C-130J Super Hercules which carries 19 tonnes of kit at about Mach 0.6. So this sounds like a no-brainer - except that a C-130J will set you back about $100m with all the options, or £60m, whereas the RAF is spending over £140m per aircraft for a basic A-400M.

Comparing it to the C-17 which cost the RAF about £70m each: the C-17 carries 77 tonnes of kit 4400km at Mach 0.74. Suddenly the A-400M doesn't look like so much of a bargain in either direction.

I refer you to the inimitable Lewis Page who nailed this project back in 2010:

The UK has been able to acquire much bigger, faster, longer-ranging C-17 Globemasters from the US in recent years for acquisition costs of £70m at most. A Globemaster carries more than twice what an A400M can and costs half what an A400M does: it is four times better value for money.

He quoted RAF Wing Commander Roger Green who was similarly forthright:

There is a problematic situation regarding the A400M should it go unserviceable whilst away from a main or RAF support staging base. Because the C–130 is in service with many air forces, and both the C–130 and the C–17 are operated by the USAF, the RAF has been able to take advantage of the mutual assistance that exists between national air forces on a global basis. That is not going to be the case with the A400M and it is likely that outside Europe, RAF A400M operations will have to be supported from its main base with the concomitant operational penalties.

Mr. Page was not impressed back in 2010, and his humour is unlikely to have improved over the past 3 years.

The A-400M is a staggeringly stupid and expensive project which was conducted solely to funnel money to the European aviation industry in order that they could continue to compete with Boeing, Lockheed Martin et al. It hasn't even achieved that aim - no-one sane would buy an A-400M when the C-130J or C-17 are available, established, operated world-wide and well-supported. I don't see any of these issues covered by Ms. Monaghan in her Telegraph article. Perhaps she should consider going out and doing some actual journalism.

Want more tax? Buy more engines!

The usual suspects are out in the streets tearing their clothes at the news that Rolls Royce paid no corporation tax in the UK last year:

Rolls-Royce's annual financial statement, released in February, shows it made £1.4bn in pre-tax profit in 2012, an increase of 24% on 2011.

OK, corporation tax is on profit; there's profit, why isn't there tax? Well, it seems that Rolls Royce did pay a fair amount of tax - just not in the UK:

According to its records, last year Rolls-Royce paid £218m in taxes abroad where it said it conducts 85% of its business.

Indeed, Rolls Royce isn't selling many engines in the UK - we're not building many planes. The RAF Typhoon uses a Eurojet EJ200 which is based on a Rolls Royce design but produced by a consortium and (as far as I can tell) isn't in current production. The major airliner manufacturers are all based abroad. So it's not surprising that the sales of Rolls Royce engines are being booked abroad. The UK operation must be substantially loss-making in isolation - presumably they receive indirect revenue from the sales abroad, but not enough to generate any actual profit.

Someone needs to be given short shrift:

Chris Williamson, Labour MP for Derby North, said he had written to the chief executive of Rolls-Royce for more information.
He said: "We do need to get to the bottom of the story. All companies, irrespective of how many people they employ, have an obligation to pay tax if they are making profits here.

Well, because Rolls Royce employ a lot of people (many in Derby) and aren't selling engines in the UK, they're not making any profits here, are they? So, by your argument, the obligation to pay UK tax is negated.

Now the tax paid on profits worldwide isn't huge - £218m tax /£1.4bn profit is 15%, so I was curious about the nitty gritty of the figures as I'd have naively expected something over 20%. So I looked at the breakdown of their 2012 results. It rather looks to me that their taxation was £318m not £218m. Oopsie, BBC journalists. That's a 22% tax fraction which looks far more reasonable.

It seems entirely unsurprising to me that Rolls Royce has paid no corporation tax in the UK. They have over 20,000 people in the UK; if we assume a low average wage of £25,000 and a tax + employee/employer NI take of about £6000 per person, that's £120m contribution to the Exchequer right there, in good years and bad. This is before any local taxes on RR's substantial commercial properties, and the knock-on effect on Derby's economy - I remember vividly having to pay an unconscionable amount for a dingy hotel room with a sagging bed in Derby, and not much less for a passable Indian meal for four, when meeting with some RR folks. Good times.

Rolls Royce are one of the few UK engineering firms who actually appear to know what they're doing; contrast them with the sharks at BAE Systems if you want to see how good they really are. RR build engines at the top of the line which really perform, don't seem to overrun much and, unlike BAE, repeatedly win in a truly competitive world market. If Chris Williamson doesn't like them conducting all their sales overseas, he should be lobbying the Government to buy more RR engines. Of course, even he can see that without an actual need for those engines, the tax take would be more than offset by the engine sticker price. In the meantime, the USA is probably reaping much of the tax take from RR. You could try asking for it to be repatriated, of course. Good luck with that.

TSA abbreviates Theatric Security Always

If true (and we only have one side of the complaint), this description of a disabled man's experience at the hands of the TSA at Boston Logan airport is an appalling indictment of the natural progression of the "security as theatre" mentality of the TSA:

Normally, my episodic mutism is not really a problem
[...]
However, the [TSA] agents deliberately both prevented me from accessing writing materials, and then deliberately confiscated those materials and physically prevented me from accessing them after they saw that I was writing a protest of their actions, thereby preventing rather than accommodating my right to speech.

Sai sometimes can't speak due to a spasticity disorder, and so depriving him of pen and paper was equivalent to depriving him of the means to communicate. Absent any indications that he was a threat, since they eventually let him proceed to his flight without permanently confiscating any materials, once can only conclude that the TSA stopped him because he was "different" rather than because he was "threatening".

Picture the scene. You're a terrorist intent on bringing down a flight. You have worked out some way of bringing a plane-threatening weapon through security. So you choose to pass through a TSA checkpoint "pretending" to be unable to speak, in order to avoid drawing attention to you and your payload. *** mind blown***

Incidentally, Sai's detailed nit-picking scrupulously-detailed description of his treatment is totally consistent with his geek personality (and employment in a Mobile Internet security firm), so I'd give substantial credence to the details of his account.

Anticipated changes to TSA procedures as a result of this incident: none. I'm already convinced that their primary function is an employment scheme. They make little, if, any, positive contributions to aviation security, and if any contribution is made it is immediately outweighed by their stupid, predictable reaction to the abnormal, and their focus on creating an unpleasant travelling experience.

Conspiracy courtesy of the GRU

Too entertaining not to share, mostly because it's just within the boundary of what's plausible: why we haven't seen much of US Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton recently.

Within minutes of leaving Bahrain airspace, this report says, the C-12 Huron carrying Secretary Clinton and her US Navy Seal [sic] protectors, "without notice," deviated from their assigned flight path heading, instead, directly towards Iran's Ahwaz International Airport where, coincidentally, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had previously landed on an "unscheduled" visit.
[...]
Upon the C-12 Huron landing at Ahwaz, however, this report says it encountered "extreme turbulence" causing it to leave the runway where its main landing gear then collapsed causing it to crash.

The article quotes the Kremlin's GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye a.k.a. Foreign Military Intelligence) as the source. Obviously there's no possible motive for them to exaggerate...

At least some of the facts are verifiable: Clinton has indeed been out of the public eye for several weeks, and the cause is quoted as concussion after fainting at home, some time in the week leading up to December 16th. The SEAL commander suicide is quoted as happening on Saturday December 22nd though, which is a rather big time gap. The Army alone has 112 C-12 Huron craft so concealing the loss of one is at least plausible.

The main points that jar, though: why would a SEAL unit commander be on diplomatic protection duty, even for Hillary Clinton? Protection work is a young man's game, and Commander Price was 42. Why indeed would you need a SEAL unit? If you're deliberately landing an aircraft in Iran at a commercial airport and the Iranian military are expecting you, then if things go wrong you are already so deep in the yoghurt that even SEALs aren't going to help you. And what would Clinton hope to achieve with a covert meeting that would not be possible with an overt meeting? It's the job of a Foreign Secretary to go around the world and meet dubious people; no-one would have batted an eyelid if the existence of the meeting was public.

If Clinton was "bleeding profusely" after the crash then transporting her out of Iran and back to the US would potentially be dicey - she's 65 years old, and one's response to trauma at that age is less than elastic. However, if they managed to get whole blood in her and exclude the possibility of significant head trauma then a medevac would just about be plausible. I wouldn't have liked to take the risk of moving her far from that crash site though.

Overall this is a great example of conspiracy theories: just on the edge of plausible, some facts lining up but others forming something of a ragged edge, originating from a source with ample reason to foment trouble, and failing to answer the basic question of why all this would be so secret in the first place.

Why is helium now so expensive?

With one of the last remaining Zeppelin operators closing its doors due to rising helium costs, you might wonder why helium is so expensive in the first place when we've been happily filling party balloons with it for the past 15 years at rock-bottom prices.

As you might guess, government is involved:

Though new private helium production plants are set to come online in the coming years —including a Wyoming plant expected to open later this year — private industry hasn't been as interested in producing helium as Congress hoped. Until more companies begin producing helium on their own, consumers are left with spiking prices and tightening supplies.
Under the federal system, those prices are unstable partly because they have less to do with supply and demand than they do about the need for the government, under the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, to pay off the cost of creating the Federal Helium Reserve

Because most of the world's helium is produced in the USA (principally Texas) the US Government gets to set helium prices, and for the past 15 years those prices have been low in an attempt to get rid of the US Federal Helium Reserve - currently around 10bn cubic feet of helium. Now that the US Government has to pay off the multi-$bn cost of creating the reserve in a fairly short time, prices have to spike. Nice one.

I knew helium was produced by uranium and thorium decay, but didn't realise that many natural gas fields contain reclaimable helium. Neither did I realise that escaped helium doesn't just go up to the atmosphere - it is so light that it escapes Earth entirely. So reclaiming it from the atmosphere is out.

For those arguing for greater Government involvement in industrial planning, consider what a mess has been made of an effective near-monopoly position in helium which has no effective substitute in many of its uses.

Mitt Romney - not entirely wrong

Much fun has been had in the blogosphere with Mitt Romney's latest quote on aircraft safety:

When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can't find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes.

The context for this was Mrs. (Ann) Romney's plane being forced to make an emergency landing after smoke filled the cabin.

Ok, so the idea of roll-down windows in a pressurised plane is ridiculous. Romney's a bit of an arse. But you know what? He's actually right - it is a real problem.

Case 1: the Manchester airport fire on British Airtours Flight 28M. The plane had an engine failure on takeoff which precipitated a fire. 54 of 131 passengers perished, many from smoke inhalation.

Case 2: Varig Flight 820 arriving at Orly, France. A fire started in a lavatory, likely because of a furtive smoker. The plane landed in a field short of the runway. 123 people (all the passengers except one) died out of 134, most due to smoke inhalation.

Case 3: Air Canada flight 797 inbound to Toronto. A fire started around the rear lavatory while in-flight. The pilot managed an emergency landing but 23 out of 41 passengers died when the fire had a flash-over, most as a result of smoke inhalation.

Smoke inhalation is a serious issue in aircraft fires. You're in a narrow tube adjacent to tanks of aviation fuel, breathing recirculated air. If a fire starts, you're breathing hot, thick, toxic smoke with no exit to fresh air available. For that reason, oil rig workers have smoke hoods but they are trained to use them; I guess the view was that smoke hoods would be worse than useless with panicking aircraft passengers. Having tried them out, I can report they are effective but require reasonable clarity of mind to fit and use; and if you're claustrophobic then you're sunk.

So Romney's not exactly wrong. It may not be practical to build a pressurised aircraft with windows that open, but the fact they don't open is indeed a real problem. I guess that actual facts don't matter this close to the election, however.