Jeff Wise
Appearances
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
Well, that's a great question. It's rare and it's not rare in the sense that there hasn't been a collision, a mid-air collision between a U.S. commercial airliner and another aircraft in flight. The most recent one I could find was in the 80s. And so in that sense, it's really rare. But there have been all of these near misses reported in recent years, and there's been a lot of concern
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
You know, if you go into the pilot forums, a lot of foreign pilots think that we're crazy, that we're just cowboys and we're just very reckless with aircraft separation. So it's been a long standing issue and people have been calling out for changes for a number of years now. And so in that sense, it's not unexpected in a sense.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
Well, safety is really boring. You know, it's all about being meticulous, crossing your T's and dotting your I's and doing and going through checklists and like meticulously recording where every part of every aircraft comes from. And what you get at the end of all that hard work is nothing. Nothing happens.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
And so people will just take for granted that I'm gonna get on the plane, I'm gonna get to where I'm going. And it's so easy when you take things for granted to say, well, maybe I'll save a little bit of money. Maybe I'll cut a corner here. Maybe I'll push the boundaries a little bit there. And you can whittle away and whittle away at a system until it breaks.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
So you go from complacency to sheer terror very quickly, as we've seen here. So who to blame? Who should we get angry at? Well, you know, I'll just make one observation. It's really easy to say that the US government doesn't do anything for me. I give you all my tax money and I don't get anything.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
and you just take for granted that there's roads under the wheels of your car and you take for granted that you're safe one of the things that the us government is to provide air traffic control and the main original purpose for air traffic control was to prevent aircraft from running into each other the whole system was was spawned by this actually mid-air collision that took place in 1956 over the grand canyon and people started to think maybe we should find a way to have planes not run into each other
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
That happens, as I said, through a result of really boring hard work. And so maybe this idea that regulation is bad, government is bad, we can just, I'll just cowboy it myself. I'll just get on that plane and just through my own hard work and cowboyness, I will make this plane get to where it's going on its own. That's not how it works. And we all have to play together nicely.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
And you basically have to pay somebody that knows what they're doing to tell you how these planes can go their separate ways.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
You know, nothing. I mean, frankly, really. I mean, listen, I'm not happy about it. I think I don't think the government should be run this way by just sort of throwing people out the window, as it were. But safety takes time. And it's the years, years of accumulation, years of experience. You know, and it's I'll tell you this. It's always tempting to get rid of the expensive people first.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
And who are the expensive people? People with seniority, the people who've been doing it for a year and then you're out. You're really good. You talk about false economy, right? The idea that maybe you're saving a penny here and there, but what's it costing you? And so getting rid of the head of the FAA a couple of days ago, did that have a direct impact on what happened last night?
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
No, but it's an example of the kind of decision making that accumulated causes people to die, people to die. There's this old saying that regulations are written in blood and it sounds kind of dramatic, but it's really true. And, you know, we've seen something recently that this from all reminds me of. which is that for years, decades, Boeing worked really hard to make really good safe aircraft.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
And it costs them a lot of money. They paid a top dollar for their engineers and they kept people on and it was a real culture. And then some bean counters came in and this has been meticulously documented elsewhere, but they wanted to save money. They wanted to give more money. There's this kind of dogma.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
in American business especially, but the whole culture really, which is that the shareholder value is the most important thing. Shareholder value means that the price of our stock is the only thing that actually matters. Everything else is secondary, including customer satisfaction, passenger safety, all that stuff.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
um it's communist actually if you if you you know look go back to milton friedman in 1970 it's communist to be concerned about anything other than share price and what happens is you start you know boeing owned the aircraft manufacturing business they had to share it with airbus eventually but they had they had the goose that laid the golden egg they were safe they were safe
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
They were known as safe, period. Yeah. And you start to trim a little bit here, cut a little bit there. You know, you move your work, you move, you outsource your production, you outsource your engineering and you lose track of what the hell's happening. And all of a sudden you've got windows flying out, doors flying out.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
And it's really hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube once you've gotten away from that culture. And these guys eventually lose their jobs, but they get millions of dollars payouts and everything, so they're fine.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
Well, I got my pilot's license in 2002. And so I started to write about crashes. I wrote about the 2009 Air France 447. So about 20 years.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
You know, you can't explain it.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
Well, they say that if you see a cockroach, you don't have a cockroach. You have a thousand cockroaches. And again, we've seen we've seen near misses. You know, the warning signs have been there. And now we're finally the bill is coming due. And the entire says accidents don't happen just by bad luck. They're a result of systemic flaws. And so the system is flawed right now.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
And it takes money, I'm sorry, but if you want to get from A to B safely, you can do it cheaply and crazily and haphazardly, or you can spend the money that needs to be spent. Government is necessary here.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
Well, in my direct experience, no. I mean, I fly little planes. I fly like Cessnas and things. My experience of the U.S. aviation system is that it is full of extremely competent people who take their job very seriously and really are doing the best and have achieved incredible things. I mean, it's a miracle.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
I mean, if you go back 100 years and you said, you know, to your great grandfather, oh, we're going to be flying from New York to L.A. for a couple hundred bucks and you're like going to be almost guaranteed safety. You know, he wouldn't believe it. So overall, I have enormous faith in the system. But. There's always the there are there are risks that occur. It's always tempting to cut corners.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
It's because you don't see the danger until, you know, you've got people pulling dead bodies out of the river.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
So if I had been on that plane coming into land last night, I would have said to myself, I am essentially completely safe. They always say you're more likely to die on the road, the drive to the airport than in the plane. But I would have been wrong. We thought we were safer than we turned out to be.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
This airport is a small airport. It's very close to the city center. The FAA has been complaining for a long time that it has more traffic than it can really bear. And yet it is under constant pressure from lawmakers to add more flights because they want to get back to where they came from. for holidays and whatnot.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
In fact, this particular plane that crashed last night was flying a route that was only added last year because of pressure from a Congressman from Kansas. And this is kind of an inherently flawed dynamic, right? Where you have an airport That is being used by the lawmakers who make the all they're responsible for all the laws covering the entire country, including the entire aviation system.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
And they have reason to go like budget, you know, push the boundaries. Like, let's just add a little. Let's go a little bit beyond safe, a little bit beyond safe. You know, once you go past that red line, there's nothing to pull you back.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
Yeah, it's like, it's insane. I mean, we live in an insane world and I just, I don't, I don't know. I don't, I don't understand anything anymore, actually.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Hour 2: The D.C. Plane Crash Tragedy (feat. Jeff Wise)
Guys, it's my pleasure. Thank you.