Monthly Archives: December 2011

Dealing with In-Flight Passenger Requests

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Remember the primary job of every pilot-in-command: fly the aircraft.

Phoenix MapYesterday, I had a rather unusual charter for Flying M Air. I needed to take two men on an aerial survey of commercial properties throughout the Phoenix area.

A Full Workload

For two hours, we flew low (about 300 feet AGL) and slow (about 50 knots) over building rooftops. While this may have been too low to need to worry much about traffic, I did have to keep an eye out for obstacles, such as towers. And because some of these properties were within Class D and Class B airspace, I had a lot of radio work to do.

As you might imagine, I had a pretty serious workload.

Yet ten minutes into the flight, it appeared that my under-prepared clients expected me to know the street addresses of individual buildings that we flew over.

For those readers who are not pilots, I may need to point out that finding the street address of a building you’re flying over is not easy. The address is not painted on the roof. The street out front isn’t labeled on the pavement.

Yesterday, we covered an area 26 x 33 miles in size. That’s over 800 square miles. It would not be possible to know the names of every single street — and recognize them from the air! — in an area that size.

Foreflight Street MapYet, believe it or not, I tried to accommodate them. I had my iPad with me and Foreflight software running. I had the Street Map displayed and was zoomed in far enough to read street names. When they asked, I attempted to read off the street name beneath us. I left it for them to try to get a number of the building. I did this for about 10 minutes.

And then I realized that what they wanted me to do was far beyond my duties as a pilot.

A Pilot’s Duty

Aviate, navigate, communicate. Those are my responsibilities, in the order of importance.

Aviate = Fly the aircraft. That means not only keep it in the air safely, but avoid hazards like other traffic and obstacles.

Phoenix Terminal ChartNavigate = Go where you need to go. That means knowing where you are, where you need to go, and how to get there. It means following the instructions of air traffic control. In my situation, it also meant keeping track of the airspaces I needed to fly in: Deer Valley Class D, Scottsdale Class D, Phoenix Class B, Chandler Class D, Phoenix Class B (again), and Deer Valley Class D (again). Certain rules apply in these airspaces and I needed to abide by these rules so I needed to know when I was nearing or in these spaces.

Communicate = Talk to air traffic control or other aircraft. Communication is required in controlled airspaces. Not only did I have to talk to towers to legally enter their airspace, but I needed to tell them what I wanted to do while I was in there. I had to acknowledge and respond to their instructions and traffic advisories.

If any one or two of these duties had been light — for example, if we were cruising point to point at 100 knots 500 feet AGL instead of flying low and slow in an area with potential obstructions or if we were flying in the middle of nowhere where navigation and communication weren’t a factor — I may have been able to provide them with more of the information they wanted. But with the heavy workload I had to deal with, adding another complex task — one that clearly required me to remove a hand from the controls and eyes from outside the cockpit — was far more than I could handle safely.

Indeed, if I had continued to try to provide this additional information for them, I would have put our flight in danger.

I was smart enough to realize this and I simply stopped providing address information. Instead, I mentioned street names that I knew as we flew over them. I let them deal with figuring out where we were.

Pressure on the Pilot

You might wonder why I even tried to meet this client request. After all, it seems like a no brainer. I was pretty busy doing what had to be done. Why add more to my workload?

The answer is easy: pressure to please the client.

All pilots feel this pressure. The client is paying for a service. We feel a need to please that client by providing every bit of service he requests.

But this is wrong. So often, client requests are unreasonable or unsafe. The pilot-in-command is responsible for the safe operation of the flight. The pilot in command has the authority to say no to any request he or she thinks would jeopardize the safety of the flight — or, for that matter, get him or her in hot water with the FAA.

As the owner/operator of a charter business, I may feel more pressure than a pilot who has no real stake in the profitability of the business or the ability to get repeat customers. In other words, I may feel more pressure to make clients happy. But should I? Of course not! I need to be a pilot when I’m in the air. I can be a business owner when I’m on the ground.

Client Shortcomings

In all honesty, I was a bit peeved with the clients. These guys were almost completely unprepared. The only legible map they had of the survey areas was an image on an iPhone with limited scalability. They didn’t have a GPS. They didn’t even have a camera. Either tool would have helped them get the location information they needed on their own. I’ve taken plenty of survey clients out on flights in the past and they’ve always been very prepared to track their location and take notes along the way.

How could I have made the situation better? I could have told them point-blank that I would not be able to provide exact street addresses during the flight. I could have recommended that they get a street map that they could mark up while we flew. I could even have refused to depart unless they had the tools they needed to get locations on their own. But I didn’t do any of these things. I was on the ground, wearing my business owner hat after prepping the aircraft for a 2-hour charter that had already been paid for in full. I wanted to complete the flight.

To the clients’ credit, after I stopped providing street names, they didn’t press me for them. I think they realized that my hands were already full. They took some notes and spent a lot of time just looking. At the conclusion of the 2-hour flight, they seemed happy enough with the results.

But I know they could have gotten a lot more valuable information — and made the cost of the flight more worthwhile — if they’d been better prepared.

Two Points

There is a moral to this story. Two of them, in fact.

  • A pilot needs to prioritize his workload in flight. The first three items must be aviate, navigate, and communicate. If doing all that doesn’t take up all of the pilot’s attention, additional tasks to meet passenger requests may be added.
  • A client needs to be fully prepared for an aerial survey mission. That means coming with maps, GPSes, cameras, or any other equipment that will help him get his part of the mission done. In addition, he needs to communicate, in advance, with the pilot to learn about the limitations of the flight.

Sometimes, when I read accident reports, I wonder whether the accident was caused by a pilot doing something other than his primary duty of flying the aircraft. While it’s great to be able to meet all the needs of a paying passenger, conducting a safe flight and getting back to base in one piece is far more important.

I’d love to hear other stories about handling client requests beyond the call of duty. Use the comments link or form for this post.

Interesting Links, December 7, 2011

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Here are links I found interesting on December 7, 2011:

Shop Smart for Services: Avoid Dealing with Middlemen

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I cannot stress this enough.

As usual, I’ll use a story to illustrate my point. I’ll try to keep it brief.

The Flight

Today, Flying M Air did a 2-hour charter for two men from Texas. They’d come to Phoenix to do a rather unusual aerial survey. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to go into details of what it was all about, but I can say that it required me to fly low and slow over a bunch of commercial properties all over the Phoenix area.

The flight was booked last minute in an odd way. I got a call from a local airplane charter company who told me that these two guys had shown up to charter a helicopter — which the airplane charter company did not have. Could I take these guys on a survey flight? I spoke to one of the clients, got a few quick questions answered — including their weights, which I needed to calculate a weight and balance for the flight — and told them my rates. Then I hung up and got ready to meet them at the airport in less than two hours.

I was just leaving when my phone rang. It was XYZ Company (not their real name), which I wrote about at some length here. The short version is that XYZ is a booking company that markets itself as a provider of aviation (and other) services but doesn’t own a single aircraft. Instead, it hires third party companies (like mine) to provide the services,

The XYZ person on the phone told me they were sending two clients to me. She then proceeded to describe the job I’d booked directly with the client.

I told her I’d already booked it with the client and that the client was going to pay me with a credit card at the conclusion of the flight. I was trying hard to keep XYZ out of it. It didn’t matter much to me — I’d get paid the same amount whether they were involved or not — but I simply don’t like the way XYZ does business. But the caller told me that the client already had credit with XYZ and that XYZ was willing to pay me for the 2 hours of flight time up front with a credit card.

I didn’t want the client to pay me and still be on the hook with XYZ, so I took the payment. I then called the client and told him what had transpired. He seemed happy enough.

I went to the airport and did the flight. It was far from an ideal setup. For some reason, the client expected me to know the addresses of the buildings we flew over. As if flying a helicopter 300 feet off the ground while watching for obstructions and other traffic and talking to an airport control tower wasn’t enough of a workload for me. They were completely unprepared to get the location information they needed — hell, a handheld GPS, which I could have provided with enough notice, would have been a real handy tool.

But the client seemed satisfied with the flight. It was a nice day to fly and I was paid up front. So how could I complain?

The Lesson to Be Learned

I do, however, want to use this story as a lesson to folks shopping around for services — perhaps for holiday gift-giving.

There are several points to be made about what transpired. Although these points deal specifically with XYZ, they also apply to similar organizations that act as booking agents for services:

  • XYZ Company makes money off every flight it books. It typically marks up my services by 30%. So yes, if you bought an hour of flight time from me, it would cost you $545. But if you bought the same hour of flight time with XYZ in the middle, it would cost you about $700. In today’s story, these guys spent $300 more than they could have for the same service.
  • XYZ Company does not give refunds. For any reason. If you need to cancel a flight, you get a credit for the amount you paid. You have one year to use it elsewhere. Since I don’t (usually) take payment in advance, when you book with me, you don’t need to worry about refunds or credits. So if XYZ had been unable to book the flight with me, these clients would probably be stuck with a credit.
  • XYZ Company charges a fixed price for the service you say you need. So if you want 2 hours of flight time, you’ll pay for it up front. If you fly only 1-1/2 hours, you’re out of luck since they don’t give refunds. But because I charge charter clients based on actual time flown, if they fly less than expected, they pay less than expected. In fact, I typically overestimate flight time so folks feel good when the final cost is less than they thought it would be.
  • XYZ Company can’t be relied upon to get a reservation handled correctly. This is a classic example: they booked an airplane when the client clearly needed a helicopter! These guys flew in from Texas for this survey — imagine if there weren’t any helicopter charter operators available to do the flight on such short notice. They would have made the trip for nothing. Another time, they booked a 5-hour survey flight for a client that required landing illegally in a wilderness area (which I was not going to do). And I can’t tell you how many phone calls it takes to arrange a flight for a client with XYZ in the middle. Right now, I’m waiting for a yes/no answer on a flight they’ve called me about four times already — and I still don’t know if it’s going to happen.

Yet time after time, people turn to companies like XYZ, relying on a middle man who knows nothing about the provider’s capabilities or operations. The chain of communication is never properly established, services are misrepresented, clients and providers get unpleasant surprises at job time.

And the buyer of the services is paying a 20% to 40% premium.

What are they getting for this extra cost? Well, they don’t have to call more than one company that appears in Google’s search results.

You see, that’s how these companies get the calls. They buy up domain names and Google AdWords. They set up generic websites for local helicopter tours or airplane tours or balloon rides or skydiving. You search and they come to the top. You look at their site and you think they’re some big adventure travel company with airplanes and helicopters and hot air balloons all over the country. You call and they assure you they can help you. So you stop looking and let them do the work.

Is that worth 30% more than you could pay?

If you think so, fine. Like I said: it doesn’t affect me. I get paid the same amount, whether you book through me or them.

But in a day and age when everyone is so hot for deep discount deals like the ones Groupon offers, it seems so very strange to me that people would be willing to give money away to a middleman just because he knows how to dial a phone.

Interesting Links, December 2, 2011

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Here are links I found interesting on December 2, 2011:

Interesting Links, December 1, 2011

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Here are links I found interesting on December 1, 2011:

  • U.S. Senator Fires Open Letter to Carrier IQ – Al Franken to the rescue! Let's see if he can get some answers.
  • Stanislaw Burzynski’s public record – "…not only do we have the right to question Burzynski’s “miraculous” treatments, but an obligation to question them." I cannot agree more. PLEASE help expose this quack for what he is.
  • Play the Lottery? Don’t Bet On It – "Time magazine has some financial advice for you. The only problem is, if you follow their advice, you are nearly 100% certain to lose money. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think this is the sort of advice Time (or anyone) should be doling out." It's not you, Ted. I agree wholeheartedly.
  • How to disable Carrier IQ on Apple iPhone – Easy to follow instructions for turning off Carrier IQ access on an iPhone. Slight but easy to figure out modifications make it work on iPad, too.
  • Gingrich Gave Push to Clients, Not Just Ideas – "Newt Gingrich is adamant that he is not a lobbyist, but rather a visionary who traffics in ideas, not influence. But in the eight years since he started his health care consultancy, he has made millions of dollars while helping companies promote their services and gain access to state and federal officials." And exactly who is surprised by this?
  • The personal computer is dead – I think Steve Jobs said some of this. But Zittrain goes on to argue that we need to take control of the situation. Sadly, there are too many apathetic sheep in the world to take control of anything these days.
  • The Sovereign Debt Train Wreck – This well-written and easy to understand article paints a dismal picture of the current economic situation.
  • On Girls/Boys Novelty Kits – Kudos to Edmond Scientifics for reading the writing on the wall — and acting on it.
  • Science kits … for girls – It's time to stop gendering our world.
  • NeverWet: Nanotechnology for Your Airplane – This seems almost too good to be true. What EAA is suggesting is covering the aircraft with a coat of this stuff to repel moisture and dirt and prevent the accumulation of ice. Not sure how that would help a desert-based aircraft like mine, but I'm sure there are plenty of other uses for it.
  • Translation From Corporate Jargon Doublespeak to English of Carrier IQ’s ‘Media Alert’ – Translation by John Gruber. I can't wait to see how this all plays out.