U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater is the man with the
plans this week, having delivered a series of bombshell initiatives
at the DOT-sponsored Aviation in the 21st Century conference in
Chicago.
The splashy announcements involved a futuristic collaboration
between NASA, the FAA and the Defense Department that will result
in "smart" planes that will repair themselves, space-age vision
systems that will enable pilots to see through the thickest
pea-souper and neural networks designed to keep planes from
crashing into each other.
Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of this stuff. It
all sounds great on paper. Unfortunately, that's the only place any
of it exists, on paper. There's no implementation date for these
projects, no budget and, perhaps most significantly, no
funding.
So, let's recap: In a year when airline passenger rights became
part of the national lexicon as well as a hot-button political
issue, a year when the FAA and the airlines played a seemingly
bottomless blame game about who is responsible for a record number
of flight delays, when passenger complaints about merciless
treatment at the hands of the airlines are at an all-time high, in
a year like that, our good old Uncle Sam suddenly pulls a series of
high-tech rabbits out of his stove-pipe hat that supposedly will
solve all of our air-gripes? And none of these Jetsonian solutions
has a deadline or a dollar attached? Who's kidding whom here?