Three Wednesday Items (4/11/07)

I didn’t know exactly what to do with this information that some probably missed while preoccupied with Imus, so I’m just throwing it together here.

- USA Today ran a story today about the continual threat posed by sleep deprivation to air traffic controllers, particularly in the cases of four near-fatal accidents and the worst crash that occurred in five years.

And, as noted here by the AFL-CIO

Nearly two years before the fatal crash of Comair Flight 5191, a control tower supervisor at the Lexington airport reported staff shortages that “can cost lives.” According to a safety memo filed in September 2004 and obtained Tuesday by the Associated Press, the supervisor reported the airport’s radar system wasn’t working properly but that the air traffic manager refused to call in a mechanical specialist because it would mean paying two hours of overtime..

Words fail me...

Victor Santore, Southern region vice president for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said the memo proves that staffing complaints aren’t just coming from rank-and-file controllers seeking more overtime pay.

“The FAA just characterizes it as union rhetoric, but here you have a member of management trying to warn someone that the facility is short-staffed, and nobody’s doing anything about it,” Santore said.

The FAA employed 15,606 controllers in 2002, according to (The National Air Traffic Controllers Association), but now that number has shrunk to 14,305 while air traffic continues to grow.

And the AFL-CIO article is less than a year old, by the way.

Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN) is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He is actually aware of issues pertaining to airline safety, and I’m sure the plight of the air traffic controllers is something “on his radar,” so to speak. Let’s contact him here and tell him Congress needs to hold hearings on the issues pertaining to air traffic controllers in particular and airline operations in general (he’s looking into maintenance issues at the moment).

No one wants uncertainty at 30,000 feet, do they?

- Don’t look now, but our old buddy Vlad and his friends are forming an Opec-like operation for natural gas-exporting companies, as reported in the Times of London (another way for us to “get it in the neck” on energy costs…terrific – the four countries to be included in addition to Russia are Algeria, Iran, Nigeria, and Qatar).

This chart of our natural gas imports shows that we receive substantial quantities from Algeria and Nigeria and a comparatively modest amount from Qatar (and I still say that Halliburton’s move to Dubai was intended to cozy up even more to the countries on this list but not on our import chart, namely Russia and Iran, though I’m just a filthy, unkempt liberal blogger, so what do I know?).

- Oh, and speaking of Imus (and I guess I was a bit – sigh), Smerky says that the Rutgers women’s basketball players were “anxious to be offended” (as Will Bunch notes here, and what could I possibly add to a statement like that; somehow, I'm sure that J.D. Mullane of the Courier Times will weigh in with similar comments shortly).

Here is a great post on this from The General (via Atrios) for some reality-based perspective.

On an unrelated note, I'm not sure how much posting will take place tomorrow - we'll see.