On March 23, an Air Canada flight from Montreal to New York City’s LaGuardia Airport crashed into a fire truck. Such an accident is not supposed to happen as air traffic control is supposed to assure separation at all times. It turned out that there was only one guy doing both air control (separation of aircraft in the air) and ground control (separation of aircraft and vehicles on the ground) at LaGuardia at the time of the accident. The poor guy, who is recorded saying “I messed up,” reportedly had to finish his shift after the accident because there was no one to replace him.
I have not flown since before the pandemic started and I do not plan to fly again because I do not trust the ability of air traffic controllers and pilots and mechanics who have been infected god knows how many times with SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses to be able to do their jobs properly.
Unlike most air passengers, I have seen the inside of a control tower and know a little about what it takes to be an air traffic controller. Based on this slight knowledge, the combination of COVID-related brain damage and understaffing means that I am no longer certain that flying commercial, which is the safest way to fly, is all that safe.
Sure, people will cite statistics and claim that it’s safe while alleging that I am some sort of anxious hypochondriac control freak. But most of those statistics are from before the pandemic started. What we know in the current pandemic era is that people are sicker and that they are going to work sick. When they can no longer work, they are not being replaced in a timely manner so there is rampant understaffing.
This understaffing comes on top of the years of wage suppression, diminishment of working conditions and loosening of regulations that are endemic to our neoliberal governments. I can’t know exactly how unsafe it is to fly, but I also don’t want to find out. I am not interested in relying on vague hopes that the airplane was assembled and maintained properly and that the pilots and air traffic controllers are not sick and have not lost their minds.
The collision between the Air Canada flight and the fire truck at LaGuardia killed two Air Canada pilots, Mackenzie Gunther and Antoine Forest. Gunther was from Peterborough, Ontario, and Forest was from Coteau-du-Lac, Quebec. In the aftermath, Air Canada released a video of their CEO, Michael Rousseau, in English only even though Forest was clearly a Francophone who had not only died at work but who had worked for a bilingual company that is required, by law, to provide services in both official languages.
The reaction to the English only condolence video was swift and predictable. Rousseau had previously been cited by the French language press for not being able to speak any French. English Canadians (hereinafter referred to as “Anglos”) predictably claimed that Quebec was overreacting and that the whole affair was as an example of Quebec’s obsession with language.
I am not a fan of the some of the excesses of the Office quebecois de la langue francaise, but the Anglos are, as usual, missing the point. Every Francophone Canadian can tell you stories about what it’s really like to try to receive services in French from government organizations that are legally obligated to provide those services in both official languages. Anglos who have never had any trouble receiving services or information in English cannot understand what it is like to always be on alert that your supposed right to something in your own language is fictitious.
That the CEO of the officially bilingual, federally regulated national carrier, which is required by law to provide service in both official languages, cannot find a way to provide condolences in French to a Francophone pilot is obscene. Antoine Forest died on the job and his Anglo boss, a man who makes millions of dollars a year because of the work of pilots like Forest, gave a wooden address in a language that members of Forest’s own family might not understand even though those family members had every right to expect to be spoken to in French.
Anglo supremacy, which is dependent on the waning power of the United States, will end sooner or later, and one hopes, for many reasons, that it will be sooner rather than later.
Forget Chinamaxxing. I want to be Spanish.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is the only western leader with a spine. He's the only western leader who can see past his nose.
Any self-respecting middle power with an ounce of self-preservation should condemn the American-Israeli attack on Iran.