Debating driver vs. pilot fatigue

Debating driver vs. pilot fatigue Washington Notebook

By Eric Kulisch

   It's interesting to observe how the Obama administration and certain public safety groups argue so strongly for new hours-of-service regulations for truck drivers, ostensibly designed to reduce fatigue and crashes.
   But fatalities involving large trucks continue to decline despite ever-growing truck and automobile volume on the nation's roads and highways. Rules limiting the amount of time a driver can work and spend behind the wheel each day were modified in 2005. The industry bellyached at first, but has adjusted to the new rules. Trying to knock down daily driving time from 11 to 10 hours, and make other changes to drivers' weekly schedules, will require huge expenses to hire more drivers and buy more equipment.
   I find it ironic that we've had a handful of incidents lately with air traffic controllers falling asleep in the tower because they are working overtime shifts and the force is understaffed. How is it that there are not reasonable work limits on air traffic controllers when they have the lives of so many people in their hands?
   Now, after the public embarrassment from these incidents some of the late night shifts are being augmented. And the regulations will probably be rewritten.
   It seems to this observer that addressing exhausted air traffic controllers perhaps should have been a priority at the Department of Transportation instead of trying to tinker with work limits for truckers that aren't broken.

Logistics conferences skirt immigration issue
   The National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America and Cargo Network Services, an airline industry group, recently held their annual conferences at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort outside Phoenix.
   I love this spot. The hotel is very relaxing, with beautiful grounds and soothing American Indian background music piped through the halls.
   But it's interesting that neither group paid much attention to the furor over passage of an illegal immigration law one year ago that had many municipal governments, including the Los Angeles City Council and the Denver Public Schools, implementing travel bans and economic boycotts.
   The controversial law makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and gives police the authority to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Critics said the measure opens the door for Hispanics to be harassed regardless of whether they are lawfully living here.
   An NCBFAA spokesperson said the situation was discussed at lower levels but never brought to the board. A CNS representative said the organization wrote a clause in its contract with the hotel giving it the right to back out if the political climate got ugly.
   Maybe some of the uproar has died down because a federal district judge has blocked enforcement of several parts of the law.

Maritime security expo strikes out
   The Maritime and Transportation Security Expo has been going downhill for awhile. Now it's become a farce. There were only about 80 people at the May 4-5 event held in the cavernous Baltimore Convention Center.
   A small hotel conference room would be better suited for such a turnout. If nothing else, that would make it easier to understand the speakers because the acoustics would be better — no echo.
   The conference agenda at this event has always seemed like an after thought to the primary goal of bringing in exhibitors, mostly technology companies trying to sell software or hardware with homeland security applications. But it helps to have a good lineup of topics and speakers to bring in traffic for the expo.

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   Panels appeared thrown together without much oversight. Most of the speakers on the panels gave perfunctory, disjointed presentations that failed to enlighten the audience. Perhaps they didn't care because those who assembled the panels didn't make them care.
   The program didn't even indicate which rooms some of the breakout sessions were held.
   Conference organizer E.J. Krause & Associates used to hold the event in the depressing Jacob Javits conference center in New York and then switched to Long Beach, Calif., for a couple of years. Several hundred people attended the conferences in New York in 2007, down from a couple thousand three years earlier.
   The Maritime Security Expo could be a victim of a saturated logistics conference market, or the fact that nobody needs any more security systems. But if that's the case then it needs to give people a more compelling reason to attend.
   So far it has failed to do that.

Osama bin Laden reference
   The timing of the Maritime and Transportation Security Expo was appropriate, coming three days after U.S. special forces killed the world's most wanted terrorist in Pakistan.

Porcari

   The Navy SEAL unit that took out Bin Laden is the same elite group responsible for rescuing Capt. Richard Phillips of the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama in 2009 from Somali pirates. The Navy sharpshooters shot the pirates at night through the window of a bobbing, covered lifeboat where Phillips was being held hostage.
   Responding to an audience question about the potential use of armed guards on commercial vessels to deter pirates, Deputy Transportation Secretary John Porcari said, 'I will point out that SEAL Team 6 is now available. And they have a hell of a track record.'

Pork directors?
   I recently went back to watch part of Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin's keynote address at the annual Trade Symposium in mid-April.
   The archived recording also included subtitles. At one point when Bersin talked about importers in the old days taking paper forms down to the Customs house, the company that produced the webcast wrote that they were delivered to the 'pork director.'
   Was that a Freudian reference to corruption of some kind?
   It also transcribed his use of the word COAC (which stands for Commercial Operations Advisory Committee) as Co Act.
   Chalk it up to novices not familiar with the subject matter.