Radio, Amateurishly

Preface In real life, I actually do live on the side of a hill overlooking the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Southern Transcon, one of two primary rail routes between Los Angeles and Chicago. For over a quarter century I've heard the rumble of diesels and the rattle of steel wheels on steel rails as freight trains carried goods across the continent, Metrolink trains whisked commuters to and from their places of work, and the Amtrak Southwest Chief carried passengers on a two-day journey between Union Station in Los Angeles and Union Station in Chicago. Years ago the BNSF built a storage track alongside the transcon that can be seen from my house, and from the bottom of the hill on Esperanza Road just before one makes the left turn at Fairlynn to go up the hill. Growing up, my daughter Emily found the sight of unstaffed, unmoving trains to be unnerving, exacerbated by a ghost train story that she read in elementary school.  Sometime after Emily reached adulthood and moved out ...

  On March 12, 2021, an in-cockpit conversation was heard on the San Jose tower VHF frequency, the apparent result of a stuck mic. Heard, and recorded, over the radio was what sounded like a member of a flight deck crew, known only to be an unidentified employee of Southwest Airlines, going off on a diatribe about his intense dislike for California's Bay Area and its people. For revealing what at least some of Southwest's employees really think of their customers, the recording is disheartening. The air transport industry is a service industry, where the customer is nominally king, but it's a service industry where the supply side is dominated by a few big players who behave as though they don't feel much pressure to compete for their customers' business. For the public who have grown accustomed to airlines who treat their customers like anything but the king, this latest incident, and Southwest's somewhat uninspired response , feels like more of the same. Mayb...