"Dust Off the Playbook"

As I’ve aged, and with each passing year, I realize more and more there is much I don’t know about so many things. I guess you could say I have become very good at knowing what I don’t know. So the line of thinking put forth below is said with that immutable fact in mind—I am not sure I am right. There may be some truth to what I write; there may be none whatsoever. But, at this point, it is what is in my gut. Time will tell perhaps.

I am an airline pilot and whether I want to or not I tend to look at all things in life through that lens. As I contemplate the events of the past few months and the ravaging effects of the Corona virus on 50,000 and more of our friends and family, along with the economy, I can’t help but wonder if we (the world, the US, the individual States, cities, etc.) could have done things better. Clearly, we are all looking for that answer because we have all been reminded that this virus, or another one like it, could present itself in the future. And so the learning curve needs to be steep. We cannot undo mistakes that have been made, nor is it my intent here to call out the various leaders in our society that may have made a mistake. For the most part, this is all on the job training, and I can “forgive” most mistakes as a result of this never-seen-before-in-our-lifetime event. The thing I can’t seem to shake however, is how this played out on a macro level. There seemed to be something wrong with the overall “playbook.”

I am not a doctor, a virologist, an infectious disease specialist or even a phlebotomist that knows how to conduct a blood test. I know nothing about anything medical. But I do know operations. As I pilot I have spent my entire 30 year career thinking of the operational challenges associated with flying large cargo and passenger jets across the globe. It’s a way of thinking plain and simple. I didn’t invent any of this. I am the recipient of decades of experience by others that have come before me, and that have figured out what works and what doesn’t.

What works is having a plan—always. In aviation, that plan is subject to revision at every moment. But the key is to have a plan or a playbook that is ready and appropriate for the task at hand. It will likely change, and as operators, we must be looking for the need to change. But it all starts with a plan based on what one does know at that moment.

For example, we know that a B777 aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the night is subject to the possibility of an engine malfunction of some sort, however remote the possibility. It could be an engine fire, a loss of oil pressure, a compressor stall, or something even more catastrophic where the engine disintegrates. Regardless of the cause of the engine problem, the solution is the same—get the plane on the ground as soon as possible. How is that done when the nearest suitable runway may be as far as 2 or 3 hours away? Let’s start that discussion with a brief explanation on the underlying premise why the aircraft is allowed to be in a place where the nearest runway is 2-3 hours away in the first place.

It has do with ETOPS—Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards. It is an FAA mandated program (a plan) that requires the aircraft manufacturer and the airline to prove their capabilities to operate such flights. The pilots must also undergo special training to operate such flights. For the most part, it is the technological advances across the board in aviation that allow for this. The most fundamental of these improvements is with regard to the manufacturing of the engines themselves and the concept of Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). The engines are manufactured and maintained with such high standards that the chance one engine fails is remote. The odds that a second engine, on the same plane, on the same flight would also experience an engine failure is nearly impossible (I am bypassing all the statistical and technical info behind this for brevity’s sake). So, based on these “odds,” the leaders in the industry allow 2-engine airplanes to operate with a suitable airfield as far as 3 hours away in some cases.

The industry has pre-determined the acceptable level of risk, and a plan to make sure every flight remains within that window of acceptable risk. The pilots know at all times what their divert airport options are, they know at any given moment what the fuel requirement to get there is, they know what altitude and airspeed they will fly to get there, and they know what the weather will be generally be at their divert airport both in that moment and 3 hours later. This has all been predetermined by the flight planning function for that flight before it departs, and the flight is routed so as to make sure the aircraft is never in a position where it will operate outside of that acceptable risk window.

So back to the world event at hand. Why do I have this feeling that when this “engine failure” event hit us all, that there was no divert plan? Why does it feel as if the "divert airport" was much further than “3 hours” away? Again, this is not to cast blame at one particular politician or another. As I said, I am someone who knows nothing about anything medically related so I am reluctant to cast any stones. But I do listen and watch what leaders all across our country have said and done, and I believe that whatever the plan was, there were elements that were not clearly thought out and not communicated very well:

1. At one point (mid to late February and into March), we were being told by Dr. Fauci, et. al., that the use of masks was only beneficial if one were sick and that those of us who were not sick need not wear one. Why is it now, whether I remain at home, or fly to select international cities, I see the entire world being told they cannot enter a store if they are not wearing a mask? Why was it not important two months ago, but today it is? A few months ago I thought masks actually made more sense. If the goal was to flatten the curve, then ANYTHING that might remotely mitigate the transfer of the virus would be helpful.

2. As we began to implement the concept of social distancing, we also received a mixed message. There is strong debate as to when the concept was initiated versus when it should have started. But in any case, what I don’t understand is that when social distancing had been put forward, why was the size of the crowd even germane? For example, on March 12 2020, the State of NY banned all gatherings of more than 500 people. Huh? As if that size group was somehow the magic size to prevent the spread of the virus?

3. All this talk about testing. I get it. What I don’t get is why wasn’t the logistical plan in place already? Why did we have to figure out from step one how to use pharmacies and entities such as LabCorp to operationally implement the testing process? Why weren’t websites with this information already prepared and simply launched as part of the “playbook?” This should have been thought through already. The only unknown would have been event specific related tasks such as the virus itself and how a test might be designed.

There are other examples in my mind but I will forego that discussion here. The fact is that the world knew about SARS, Swine Flu, and H1N1. Did those that study these things on our behalf think that there would never be a pandemic? Of course not. So why weren’t the core building blocks of how to handle this already in place? I am not seeking to tag this blame on a particular political party or leader. I believe this is a situation that crosses party lines and decades. It seems to me that there was a fundamental shortfall on how our country would operationalize the solution even though a lot of it was universal to any "flavor" of virus. I am an operator, and I understand the magnitude of the solutions and the difficulty of operationalizing them. But it seems to me the playbook had not been dusted off in a while and we struggled with the decision of to which “divert airport” we should head.