Sky High Sabotage: Major Airlines Are Using TSA to Shut Down Competitor | Hacker News Reader

Sky High Sabotage: Major Airlines Are Using TSA to Shut Down Competitor

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77 pointsrokkitmensch71 comments

> When speaking internally to employees, American Airlines has explained their lobbying against JSX as a competitive response to the carrier which offers consumers a more compelling product.

That is... painful to read. "Lobby the government to make a competitor's life harder" just feels so absurd when they could (and should) compete on the actual offering.

regulatory capture is of course harmful to public welfare, but it's also extremely profitable, so wherever you find regulation, you'll find that regulatory capture is a high priority for the regulated businesses

they're almost always successful because they both know more and care more about the field being regulated than anyone else does

And if you find no regulation in areas where consumers are being harmed it can often be even worse. Personally I don’t think regulatory capture is an argument against regulations - but perhaps I’m reading too much into the statement.

your claim seems to be that merchants can harm consumers more without the government's help than with the government's help; that is, that when the government attempts to help merchants harm consumers, the government's help is not only ineffective but actually counterproductive, instead having a protective effect

stated thus, the thesis seems both implausible on its face and empirically falsified by abundant historical evidence; not only does history contain such egregious counterexamples as the great leap forward, chernobyl, the opium war, and the congo free state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#/media/File:N... but also abuses less serious in degree but far more numerous and long-lasting, such as the british raj's regulation of the consumers of thread and yarn https://www.sgbgatelier.com/world/2019/11/21/5-ways-imperial..., the predatory pricing in mining companies' so-called company stores, and the recent intentional addition of allergens to many food products in the usa

so either you have not put much thought into your position or i have sorely misunderstood your intent

The fact that you can choose big examples of government-organized harm doesn't mean that there was not also a lot of non-government-organized harm. Sometimes the latter is more difficult to count precisely because it is more distributed.

you seem to be arguing against a strawman position that nobody actually holds or could plausibly hold

Regulation in governmental policy is not a mathematical theory that can be discarded with a single undesirable result. It's a complex human interaction that isn't a matter of regulate all the things or none of the things.

Recently a HN post reposted a discussion that solving a problem isn't rewarded, and successful regulation suffers that exact problem. Regulation is so widely successful in so many areas, people form these naive beliefs that we can just eliminate it all and we would be fine. There are so many examples of it working fine in society in completely invisible ways because it's working.

This is not to say that all regulations are perfect - more that we should be discussing how to identify failures and form working and improved regulations not discussing a frankly silly outright removal of all regulations. Regulatory capture is certainly one of the things to try to prevent.

you, too, seem to be arguing against a strawman position that nobody actually holds or could plausibly hold: that 'regulation in governmental policy is a mathematical theory'

by contrast, i was arguing against the position you actually stated, 'if you find no regulation in areas where consumers are being harmed it can often be even worse'. there is no historical case with no regulation in areas where consumers are being harmed that is 'even worse' than the great leap forward or the congo free state. you don't seem to be attempting to defend that position, or to clarify it; i suppose that means you agree that you were incorrect?

you seem to be attempting to distract people by posting a bunch of wishful-thinking nonsense that isn't relevant to the issue we were discussing, thus changing the subject. while that may be a good rhetorical strategy for rallying a political base, it's a terrible way to figure out the truth of a complex matter

Competing on the offering is hard (REALLY hard when it comes to airlines). Lobbying the gov't is pretty easy, all things considered.

This again ...

This happens once every decade at Lovefield.

(I've lived in Dallas my entire life and am in my 50s).

About once a decade, a new "business travel" airline starts flying at Lovefield.

They get a waver to fly because they remove enough seats from the plane so that it gets classified as a business airline and/or charter plane. Or their seats are only first class, which gets a different designation. Etc

And then, if they gain any traction - AA and SW find a law/regulation to put them out of business.

This isn't the first time, and it won't be the last.

I’ve had some colleagues take this flight from HOU to DAL or vice versa, and they love it. The flights show up these days in SAP Concur, but in my experience have always been just out of reach of “policy” which creates exceptions and alerts in our corp t&e bureaucracy. I travel quite a bit and would jump at the chance if the fares were only $30 less.

Combined with the devaluation of flyer miles and loyalty programs, JSX is in a great position to bridge the gap until we get a train

Pay the thirty dollar delta yourself? Charge it to your own card and only expense the allowed amount?

Do you remember the names of any of them?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_Airlines

Thx!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braniff_International_Airways

The Dept. of Homeland Security (of which the TSA is part) is central in most increases in federal power since 2001. The government will certainly chose to back the option which give them more power in an even case. But this case is stacked because of the powerful corporations and lobbies that are protecting their moats.

FTA:

> DOT planned to put JSX out of business at the behest of American, Southwest and ALPA. But that had to be done publicly and more public comments in opposition were filed than DOT has ever received before. The TSA does not have to operate under the same sort of sunlight – we don’t even get to know what they propose.

I sometimes sometimes wonder what the airline industry would look like if America had meaningful high speed rail.

In this case the same airlines are killing efforts for high speed rail between the major Texas metros. AA and SWA would lose out if an efficient rail alternative existed.

Get rid of the TSA. Security theatre belongs off broadway, not at airports.

The only (small) benefit of the TSA is standardization. Prior it was all contractors with varying rules and enforcement.

Keep the standards, and throw the rest? Seems like a slam dunk, outside of the theatre lobby.

Do you think anybody should be able to bring whatever they want onto a plane?

https://reason.com/2021/11/19/after-20-years-of-failure-kill... ("After 20 Years of Failure, Kill the TSA") | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29286418 (November 2021 thread)

https://web.archive.org/web/20181009074941/http:/oversight.h... ("Airport Insecurity: TSA’s Failure to CostEffectively Procure, Deploy and Warehouse its Screening Technologies")

https://www.oig.dhs.gov/taxonomy/term/5 ("Office of Inspector General DHS TSA Reports")

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/reassessing_a... ("Bruce Schneier: Reassessing Airport Security") | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699339 (June 2015 thread)

> The TSA blog carries constant reports of weapons confiscated from people who forgot to remove them from carry-on bags. But the Homeland Security Red Teams in the 2015 test actively concealed forbidden items just as real criminals and terrorist would. The result was that "TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints."

> Two years later, a Red Team test at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport achieved the same 95 percent failure rate to detect explosives, weapons, and illegal drugs. Repeat national tests in 2017 also went badly, "in the ballpark" of an 80 percent failure rate.

> In fact, the DHS Inspector General has long been a thorn in the TSA's side, compiling a still-growing collection of critical reports. In 2015, the TSA grew so upset with the criticism that it went so far as to classify some findings as "sensitive security information" in order to suppress distribution.

I was recently amused at an airport security check in a major US airport when a TSA uniform explained to a person in the line next to me that US citizens can qualify to skip the security lines. I chuckled at what somebody might make of that without further explanation. I finally worked my way up to the screening gate where the person ahead of me presented their gold-star drivers license as an ID; the person behind me only had to present their boarding pass.

I have gone through the checkpoint with somebody who presented a photo id that was printed on an inkjet printer. Meanwhile, my holographic state-issued ID was subjected to four different tests.

The rules differ between major US airports. They differ between lines at the same airport. They differ between people in the same line at the same airport.

So it seems to me that some people already can bring whatever they want onto a plane. Which means that everything else is, in fact, theater.

I think the pre 9/11 safety protocols, with the sole addition of the new locking cockpit doors, is plenty safe.

This was all really we needed to do. It's so frustrating what travel has become

Sorry of. There are limits, it has to be yay big. Can't be too heavy. But those limits are (usually) administrated by the airline. Otherwise if it is legal then bring it. The reality is, if you want to bring something nefarious into a plane, you can do so. TSA mainly stops law abiding people and stupid people. And an enormous cost in time and money and safety.

The TSA misses 60-95% of guns in security tests. That's approximately $10-$11 per flight that you pay for at most a 40% reduction in guns on the plane (assuming they're even able to find intentionally concealed firearms at the same rate as the base chance). Most guns that make it through are never used or intended to be used for violence on the plane, totalling to well over (unclear if it's closer to 1x or 100x too small) $250m for every gun which was caught which might have on average prevented 1 gun-related crime in the air.

Their other stats aren't much better. For the equivalent of $250m worth of effort, there are thousands of better uses of your time and money.

And today, right this second, you can bring high-powered un-extinguishable bombs onto a plane [0]. That comic is written in jest, but it really is trivial to kill a lot of people with common household devices and chemicals, including those allowed on planes. The world carrys on because most people are at least halfway decent, not because the TSA saves us.

[0] https://xkcd.com/651/

We were fine before the TSA.

It was created in response to 9/11, which is not what I would consider being "fine". Regardless, that doesn't answer the question. Please answer the question.

While the loss of life of ~3k people, once, is regrettable, it is by no means an event worth the response that has occurred. Sometimes, you are just unlucky, and we aren't going to reconfigure entire systems at enormous cost when it is unlikely the event will happen again. It is very hard for people to internalize this. "Do something!" and what not. Armoring flight deck doors would've been sufficient to prevent a recurrence. Instead, the TSA spends ~$8B/year and employs ~60k federal workers. For 3k people who died once.

Conversely, there are ~40k-50k gun deaths annually in the US, and we do nothing, despite that being a much greater risk than an air transport terror attack.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

Armoring flight deck doors has also killed at least ~400 people so far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

Again, sometimes you are unlucky, wrong place at the wrong time. If we replaced pilots with full autonomy, and people died from edge cases/tail risk events, would we bring back pilots? There is no way to get to zero risk. Derisk when you can, accept the remaining risk.

I agree. I think it speaks to the trend to attempt to find technological or bureaucratic solutions to what are fundamentally social problems. More of these problems will crop up as society shifts from high trust to low trust.

60,000 decently paying jobs? And we might have some marginally better security? And every other country has more or less the same process in place? These sound like good things to me.

I'd rather the money spent on the TSA were spent on other programs that produce value for society, like funding the child tax credit, or school lunches, or more teachers to reduce class sizes, or repairs to roads, or public health care, or public education so more people can get degrees, or programs for the homeless, or treatment programs for addiction or mental health crises, or anti-domestic-violence programs...

Not all 'jobs' are of equal value to society

The ONLY response to 9/11 that has done anything is the change in cockpit door construction and procedure. Everything else is completely worthless. I know this sounds nuts but I really do not care if someone sneaks a tiny hooker pistol or a swiss army knife onto a plane, they're not going to be able to do anything other than piss everyone off and get beaten to a pulp by a bunch of people who had their travel plans interrupted, should they decide to do a terrorism.

Also, fun fact, the TSA doesn't actually care about any of this. They're mostly concerned with large bombs and have lobbied to not have to chase after every pair of nail clippers but the flight attendants union has successfully counter lobbied to prevent this. They don't want to be stuck in giant metal tube trying to convince 200 irate people to pay $5 for a can of Fanta and to sign up for the latest credit card if anyone is armed with so much as a spork.

You've already gotten a very clear answer:

The TSA:

1. Expends a lot of money, and a lot of passenger time;

2. Without producing any benefits.

Thus, eliminating the TSA is pure upside.

Your question is irrelevant to the topic, because the TSA does not oversee what people bring on airplanes.

I just had a flight with JSX cancelled because of this, it's sad.

Regulations are written in blood, but this one just looks like it's written in green.

Are you sure this is related? JSX is selling tickets like normal, and the article says nothing about any actions taken, only that the TSA hasn't made public it's plans yet.

So far they've had to pull out of a few airports when FBOs stop hosting them, mostly without explanation. The same FBOs that allow part 135 operators, some owned by the majors, to run. Seems related.

JSX operates under a regulatory loophole that allows them to bypass TSA security and hire significantly less experienced pilots. It is easy to find articles with very different opinions on JSX than this one.

I would ask why a company operating the same planes and more total flight hour than a competitor should be able to bypass the same security requirements and hire pilots with half the flight hours. Same goes for Skywest Charter.

The rules they work around, in Part 121, were made stricter 15 years ago because of the Colgan crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407#Legacy that killed 49 people on the aircraft and one on the ground.

European airlines hire pilots with even fewer hours, but have similar accident rates.

There is still significant oversight for anyone operating aircraft commercially, and it doesn't seem like this poses a significant risk from that perspective.

If you're going to cite the "less experienced pilots" in the Colgan crash as the reason the FAA increased the flight hour requirement, it seems responsible to mention that the pilots in that crash satisfied the higher requirement too. (EDIT: I see you have now acknowledged this in a different reply. Thanks!)

Going by the statistical value of life, crash risk now contributes a truly negligible amount to the cost of flight. We shouldn't accept additional burdensome flight safety rules without quantitative arguments that they pass a cost-benefit test.

That's directly in the source I quoted, to be fair: "(This rule would not have influenced the crew in this accident, as both pilots held ATP certificates and had more than 1,500 hours of experience.)". This requirement was added after the Colgan crash, as a direct result of it, though.

This isn't about new regulation, it is about a company attempting to avoid existing regulation. I am sure you'd agree removal of regulations should go through the same sort of cost benefit analysis, and that regulations should be applied fairly to all parties.

> I am sure you'd agree removal of regulations should go through the same sort of cost benefit analysis

Definitely not. We should err toward freedom. If you don't have good reason to think that the benefits of a regulation outweigh the harms, it should absolutely be repealed.

Of course, in this particular case I think the cost-benefit analysis has been done, and the 1500 hour rule is net harm.

> and that regulations should be applied fairly to all parties.

Not in the way you mean. I think if we have a bad regulation that is applied arbitrarily to one of two competitors, the afflicted party should lobby for the regulation to be removed from themselves, not for it to be applied to their competitor. If someone can find a legal way around a bad law, they should do it. I want taxis to be more like Uber/Lyft, not the other way around, and I don't think Uber/Lyft and its drivers should be punished for the harm inflicted to taxi drivers (if any) by bad rules.

Then I have to disagree with you a bit. Freedom for an individual to risk their own life is fine - I don't want to legally compel anyone to take medicine that will save their life, or prevent them from taking supplements or diets that will kill them. This is a different category of freedom. Failures of air safety in manufacture, maintenance, and operation can and do kill innocent parties on the ground in crashes and in the air in collisions. This is not even so rare, in civilian aviation outside the US. And that is not even considering questions about the risk awareness of passengers.

This isn't even my field, and it was not hard to find https://rmas.fad.harvard.edu/pages/chartered-private-aircraf..., which led to https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/StatisticalReviews/Pages/CivilAv...

In 2022 (per 100k flight hours), part 121 carriers had .112 accidents and .006 fatalities; part 135 carriers had 1.096 accidents and 0.103 fatalities; and general aviation had 5.336 accidents and .945 fatalities.

JSX's model was 10 times more likely to be in an accident and 18 times more likely to be fatal than major airlines. This was in line or better than any other year I looked at back to 2008, which is the earliest data the NTSB had.

Before I dug into the data, I was willing to accept this regulation might be have been an overreaction that should be relaxed. Having dug into it, I have come to the opposite conclusion, and I think that the FAA should remove the regulatory loophole JSX operates under.

> This is a different category of freedom. Failures of air safety in manufacture, maintenance, and operation can and do kill innocent parties on the ground in crashes and in the air in collisions.

The vast, vast majority of airline deaths are from people who are employees or paying passengers. "This could conceivably hurt a third party" is, when unquantified, a blank check to regulate anything. All activities have non-zero risk to third parties.

> JSX's model was 10 times more likely to be in an accident and 18 times more likely to be fatal than major airlines. This was in line or better than any other year I looked at back to 2008, which is the earliest data the NTSB had.

You're missing the part where you actually quantify the benefit. That involves taking the accident rate, computing an expected chance of death per passenger per flight (or mile or whatever), converting to dollars using the statistical value of life (~$10M in the US), and comparing that number to the ticket price. You'll find that for the major airlines it's <$1 per flight.

Just ask: how would you know when it was no longer worth it to spend more to drive the risk lower? Any argument of the form "this activity is 10x more dangerous than another activity" is incomplete if you don't know what the appropriate level of danger is for the other activity.

Part 135 is not a "loophole."

As an admitted non-expert, the loophole part seems to be in the interpretation of a 30 seat limit on charters under part 135, along with the Part 380 "public charter operator".

As someone who travels a whole lot - I love the idea of this service being accessible. But I dont think its good for the environment to be encourager more smaller planes to fly - fewer larger planes seem better for the environment - even if you ignore carbon, those emissions are not free.

I’m pretty sure normal people want as many first class passengers flying on shitty airlines as possible, because better their money than yours paying for the cheap tickets you want.

It's interesting that the airlines are fighting back against the intrusive searches that the TSA does. I always assumed the TSA was the revenue protection branch of the major air carriers. That's why they need to match the name on your boarding pass to your government ID; a secondary market for airline tickets would cost the airlines revenue. (Imagine that instead of "no cancellations" you could just give the ticket you no longer want to a friend. That's basically the same thing as stealing the CEO's yacht!) The security function of the TSA is just to provide the illusion that they do something. In the 2000s when the TSA was introduced, people were scared that they were going to be the next building demolition squad every time they got on a flight. Some fancy looking machines and long lines make it feel like someone's doing something. But it's all a disguise for their actual function; revenue protection.

So now an airline comes along and says "yeah that's all security theater, we do a background check, pay our own guy to check your ID, and just have you walk through a metal detector", and they're mad about it? It was their idea in the first place! Be careful about voting for the "leopards eating people's faces" party... they might eat your face too.

> people were scared that they were going to be the next building demolition squad every time they got on a flight. Some fancy looking machines and long lines make it feel like someone's doing something

I mean the only negative news I hear about planes is Boeing’s QA issues. When was the last terror attack on a plane?

Is it possible the metal detectors are actually working and not just security theater?

Or are other changes like a locked cockpit door the real reason consumer confidence in flying is high (only brought down by Boeing engineering issues)?

> Is it possible the metal detectors are actually working and not just security theater?

The results have been consistently poor over a long period of time. Just one example: https://web.archive.org/web/20181009074941/http:/oversight.h...

It's possible that they are doing something for sure, but also possible they're just a tiger rock.

What is a tiger rock?

Simpsons reference. A rock that keeps tigers away. “You don’t see any tigers around here do you?”

And here is a clip of the relevant scene, from the episode "Much Apu About Nothing" (1996), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw

Quoting from its IMDB entry at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0774432/characters/nm0810379 :

Lisa : Dad, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers.

Homer : Uh-huh, and how does it work?

Lisa : It doesn't work. It's just a stupid rock.

Homer : I see.

Lisa : But you don't see any tigers around, do you?

Homer : Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.

Physically and visually impressive, but unlikely to get up and do anything

The TSA misses substantial fractions of weapons at checkpoints per internal testing. What this means is that approximately no one is attempting to blow up or hijack planes, otherwise they would be successful, as the test show 40+ percent of weapons will make it through screening checkpoints.

It used to be twice that. They improved to only missing one third.

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