Here’s an update from the Web site of Verified Identity Pass, owner of Clear, addressing some questions about its shut-down. Lots of people are concerned about the personal and financial information that the company collected in processing members for their cards, incidentally.

From the company:

“What will happen to my personal information?

Applicant and Member data is currently secured in accordance with the Transportation Security Administration’s Security, Privacy and Compliance Standards. Verified Identity Pass, Inc. will continue to secure such information and will take appropriate steps to delete the information.

Will I receive a refund for membership in Clear?

At the present time, because of its financial condition, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. cannot issue refunds.

Clear’s Privacy Policy

Clear’s Online Privacy Policy

[Above: The Shark-O-Lounger (r)]

Just a passing thought in 102-degree weather in Tucson.

I’ve been holed up in the Sonoran desert in Arizona finishing a book. The highlight of the morning for me is to get the Times, get an iced tea, and settle into the Shark-O-Lounger (r) pool-float to read the paper for an hour before getting back to work.

Yeah, I know print is doomed, yada-yada-yada.

But can anyone tell me how I’m going to read my paper online, in the pool? Or in bright sunlight?

###

From the Web site today of Verified Identity Pass, the company behind the Clear airport lanes:

“Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.”

*********

I have followed Clear with interest since it started up at Orlando International Airport in 2005 and gradually began expanding to other airports in the years afterward. By the time it ceased operations, it had those blue-hued lanes in about 20 airports.

Here’s my take on why Clear finally failed, after hanging on for long past the time when I thought it could stay in business.   It can be summed up in three letters: T-S-A.

1. Clear’s main premise — that its “cleared” members could breeze through special security lanes without having to remove shoes and coats — collapsed when the TSA, under its former director Kip Hawley, flatly refused to approve key Clear technology, primarily a GE-designed “shoe-scanner” that would have allowed shoes to remain on feet. Hawley told me repeatedly that the machine failed TSA tests. But it was also abundantly clear that Hawley wanted no part of private-enterprise technology, privately operated, as a component of airport security — despite pressure from Congress that the badly conceived “registered traveler” or “trusted traveler” program was to be a joint federal-private enterprise venture in security. Furthermore, in Congressional hearings on the botched “trusted traveler” program that Clear was an emblem of, Steven Brill, the media entrepreneur who founded the Clear company, simply pissed off Hawley with several unnecessarily harsh statements about the TSA. That was a serious mistake. Hawley never trusted Brill.

2. The TSA torpedoed another Clear premise, that its members — who were issued biometric ID cards encoded with their fingerprints and an iris scan — would get a special wave-through at TSA checkpoints. Stubbornly, and in my opinion strangely, the TSA insisted that Clear members produce the same standard ID (drivers license, etc.) as everyone else, biometric card be damned. I questioned the TSA on that because a biometric ID card, scanned through a reader, is almost infallible proof of identity, but Hawley was dug in against it, though he never admitted so. The final hurdle for the Clear ID cards was last year, when the TSA said it might consider accepting them as ID if Clear put the holder’s photo on them, which meant recalling existing cards (and hauling in members for new photos).

3. TSA vastly improved checkpoint efficiency under Hawley’s three-plus-year tenure, which ended in January. In most airports, long waits at security were no longer an issue. (In areas where airport waits could sometimes be unexpectedly long, like Orlando when hordes of tourists suddenly descended, Clear had strong membership). The Clear card’s value was unclear — except as a kind of “head of the line” pass that put you closer to the actual checkpoint, once you cleared Clear’s superfluous separate privately run checkpoint.

4. Clear claimed it had more than 250,000 members, but renewal rates were falling as companies cut back and amid questions about the card’s real value. It was charging $199 a year for a card, though there were corporate discounts. Nevertheless, Clear was a very expensive proposition to operate. Obviously, it finally ran out of dough, having been bled to death by a federal agency that — from the very beginning — wanted no part of Clear and had no trust in the security of a badly conceived “trusted traveler” program that Congress tried to ram down its throat.

5. Just in case the message was not clear to Clear, the TSA pointedly backed out of its very slight relationship with the program last year. From the beginning, Clear members had to be supposedly “cleared” with a “security check” by the TSA before their membership could be approved and their cars issued. That “security check” was nothing more than a simple TSA check of a prospective member’s name against the terrorist watch lists. Last year, Hawley removed the TSA from that step, saying that the agency would no longer provide Clear with any kind of federal sanction whatsoever as a security program.

Incidentally, I am astonished at the amount of money that Verified Identity Pass must have burned through on Clear, including on the GE technology that never got approved, and on payroll. In airport after airport, I would marvel at the mostly unused Clear booths, staffed all day by three or four Clear employees at the checkpoints, and one or two other employees at other Clear enrollment booths in the terminals.

The TSA won.

###

From the Web site today of Verified Identity Pass, the company behind the Clear airport lanes:

“Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.”

*********

I have followed Clear with interest since it started up at Orlando International Airport in 2005 and gradually began expanding to other airports in the years afterward. By the time it ceased operations, it had those blue-hued lanes in 21 airports.

Here’s my take on why Clear finally failed, after hanging on for long past the time when I thought it could. It can be summed up in three letters: T-S-A.

1. Clear’s main premise — that its “cleared” members could breeze through special security lanes without having to remove shoes and coats — collapsed when the TSA, under its former director Kip Hawley, flatly refused to approve key Clear technology, primarily a GE-designed “shoe-scanner” that would have allowed shoes to remain on feet. Hawley told me repeatedly that the machine failed TSA tests. It was abundantly clear that Hawley wanted no part of private-enterprise technology in his operation. Furthermore, in Congressional hearings on the botched “trusted traveler” program that Clear was an emblem of, Steven Brill, the media entrepreneur who founded the Clear company, simply pissed off Hawley with several harsh statements about the TSA. That was a serious mistake.

2. The TSA torpedoed another Clear premise, that its members — who were issued biometric ID cards encoded with their fingerprints and an iris scan — would get a special wave-through at TSA checkpoints. Stubbornly, and in my opinion strangely, the TSA insisted that Clear members produce the same standard ID (drivers license, etc.) as everyone else, biometric card be damned. I questioned the TSA on that because a biometric ID card, scanned through a reader, is almost infallible proof of identity, but Hawley was dug in against it, though he never admitted so. The last hurdle for the Clear ID cards was last year, when the TSA said it might consider accepting them as ID if Clear put the holder’s photo on them, which meant recalling existing cards (and hauling in members) for photos.

3. TSA vastly improved checkpoint efficiency under Hawley’s three-plus-year tenure, which ended in January. In most airports, long waits at security were no longer an issue. (In areas where airport waits could sometimes be unexpectedly long, like Orlando when hordes of tourists suddenly descended, Clear had strong membership)

4. Clear had about 200,000 members and, on closing, was charging $199 a year, though there were corporate discounts. Nevertheless, Clear was a very expensive proposition to operate. Obviously, it finally ran out of dough, having been bled to death by a federal agency that — from the very beginning — wanted no part of Clear and had no trust in the security of a “trusted traveler” program that Congress tried to ram down its throat.

5. Just in case the message was not clear to Clear, the TSA pointedly backed out of its very slight relationship with the program last year. From the beginning, Clear members had to be supposedly “cleared” with a “background check” by the TSA before their membership could be approved and their cars issued. That “background check” was nothing more than a simple check by the TSA against the terrorist watch lists. Last year, Hawley removed the TSA from that step, saying that the agency would no longer provide Clear with any kind of federal sanction whatsoever as a security program.

Incidentally, I am astonished at the amount of money that Verified Identity Pass must have burned through on Clear, including on the technology that never got approved and on payroll. In airport after airport, I would marvel at the mostly unused Clear booths, staffed all day by three or four Clear employees at the checkpoints, and one or two other employees at other Clear enrollment booths in the terminals.

The TSA won.

###

From the Web site today of Verified Identity Pass, the company behind the Clear airport lanes:

“Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.”

###

Passenger revenue for U.S. airlines fell a stunning 26 percent in May, compared with May 2008, the Air Transport Association said today.

That’s the seventh consecutive months of year-on-year revenue declines.

The number of domestic and international passengers on U.S. airlines fell 9.5 percent, while the average price to fly one mile fell 17.6 percent — reflecting the failure (from the airlines’ perspective) of fare sales the airlines have been firing off all year.

The airlines (and the ATA, their trade group) have been blaming the swine flu scare for revenue falling off the cliff in May, but I’m not sure I buy that, not fully.

We’ll see how June works out. As I keep saying, the airlines are going to get smaller, and our options in air travel are going to shrink. Plus prices will rise, once the airlines start reducing more supply. Not a happy time ahead, not at all.

###

[Photo: Capt. G. Bruce Hedlund]

G. Bruce Hedlund, a veteran captain for a major airline, writes a personal blog called “It’s Not Just You …” His blog has the same title as a book Bruce wrote, and that book has one of the best opening lines since “It was the best of times …”

Bruce’s book-opener: “It occurs to me that, more and more, I come across instances in my day-to-day life that just do not make any fucking sense.”

Like almost every pilot I know, Bruce is a character, an iconoclast and a bear when it comes to flight safety — yours and (as pilots will always point out), theirs too. And recently, Bruce has been on a personal campaign about what would seem to outsiders to be a fairly small issue of training:

On certain aircraft (I won’t name the model because that would make it easier to identify the airline, and pilots who go public on their own are not allowed by employment agreement to name the airlines they work for), the cockpit instrumentation layout has been redesigned and modernized. This redesign is being slowly rolled out through that fleet.

No big deal, really. A commercial airline pilot is always rigorously trained and re-trained, and in this case, pilots who fly this particular model of big airliner — Bruce among them — were given a short training session, essentially a video presentation and a subsequent quiz, to familiarize them with this new and improved cockpit instrument panel design that they eventually would be flying

Bruce watched the video and passed the quiz, which was duly noted in his training record, he said, as qualifying him on the new bells and whistles. However, he was glad to be informed that before actually flying a plane with the modernized cockpit configurations, he would have an opportunity to get real-time familiarization with the layout the next time he had to report for hands-on re-training in a flight simulator (twice a year, pilots get re-trained and tested under rigorous conditions in high-tech flight simulators.)

Flying a highly sophisticated simulator is just like flying a plane (except nobody can get hurt if somebody screws up). Typically, in re-training on a simulator, instructors re-evaluate a pilot’s basic skills but also throw every contingency possible at the pilot — instant emergencies of every kind, from stalls to bird strikes. Even though he was now familiar with the display and officially listed as being qualified to go, Bruce was determined not to fly a real plane with the new instrument panel and gauges until he had made a good dry-run in the simulator and felt comfortable with the changes.

Call it an excess of pilot caution, if you will. On the one hand, pilots are men and women with psychological profiles that begin with the words, “We can make it work.” But pilots also have a bedrock contract with themselves and with others in their airplanes and in the skies. If the captain of an airliner is not comfortable with conditions he or she encounters on entering the cockpit and preparing the aircraft for flight, that captain has the absolute right to decline to fly said aircraft.

This looks good on paper, of course. In reality, there is pressure not to rock the boat (or the plane). You’ve been officially certified to take ‘er up? Well then, take ‘er up! It’s all officially certified! Stop yer complaining! (Pilots famously complain about everything).

Only a relatively small number of his airlines’ aircraft of that model have the new configurations in the cockpit, as the roll-out continues. But as I said, Bruce walked into one — and walked out again.

His objections sound fairly basic to me. He told me, “The new display changes the way basic flight information (airspeed, altimeter, etc.) is presented and, hence, how you locate the information and then interpret it. Wouldn’t you like to think that I could immediately tell you my altitude and airspeed? And wouldn’t you like to think that I could set my appropriate airspeed and altitude ‘bugs’ correctly?” (By that, he meant, instantly and virtually by instinct, not through fumbling around for a few extra seconds with unfamiliar gauges).

To his surprise, he came to work one day recently for a cross-country flight and stepped into the cockpit of an airliner with the new instrument-panel set-up. That was not supposed to happen before he’d had a go at the simulator.

So he made the proper notification to his superiors and walked off the plane. Another pilot was found to sit in the left seat.

Anyway, there is something of a sub-rosa brouhaha going on over this, and to me it’s illustrative of the pressures both airlines and flight crews face in this environment where costs for everything are being cut and keeping the schedule moving are crucial.

“No brouhaha for me,” Bruce says flatly. “I ain’t going to fly it till I see it in the simulator or on the line with a check airman. That may cause some angst in the training department, but not in my world.”

His world, of course, is that person up front flying the airplane.

As a passenger, as someone who has implicit faith in the pilot flying your plane, “That’s how you want me to feel, right?” he said.

Right. In fact, damned straight.

Here’s a link to Bruce’s full blog. And here are some excerpts from his description of the situation:

***

“…I am currently embroiled in a debate over “qualification” with my employer (a major US legacy airline). The airline has elected to modify the instrumentation of the aircraft I fly from old, “steam driven”, round gauges to a state of the art electronic display.

This new display provides me all of my basic flight information: airspeed, altimetry, rate of climb/descent, and the like. In my 24 years at this airline, I have never flown a similarly equipped aircraft. Nevertheless, last November, in my scheduled recurrent training session, I watched a short video on this new equipment and took a short quiz. At the conclusion of this quiz, the instructor told the entire class that we were now “qualified” to fly a jet with this new display. I took exception to this and immediately contacted the appropriate powers-that-be. “Don’t worry,” they said. “You’ll be down for a simulator before you’ll ever see it on the line.”

Unfortunately, that promise rang hollow. I have yet to return for my next recurrent training session and was presented with the new display just several weeks ago. Knowing full well the possible ramifications, I turned and walked off the aircraft. I advised the proper folks that I did not feel qualified to fly with such a novel and untried [cockpit display] presentation without first seeing it in a simulated environment. “Well, you’re qualified,” they said. Yes, by virtue of a check mark in a box I was, indeed, technically qualified. On a more pragmatic scale, though, I was anything but fully prepared to conduct a safe and uneventful flight.

We each must hold ourselves accountable when operating under the “qualifications” of any permit, license, or approving authority. Drunk driving or any other careless behavior predicated upon the theory of “it’ll be alright” is a dereliction of the responsibility accompanying the qualification. While my airline (and the FAA) consider me qualified to command an aircraft with a display format I have yet to actually touch, activate, and (yes) make a mistake, I beg to differ. The unwritten contract I have with my crew and my passengers expecting only the best from me holds far more import.”

###

There is absolutely nothing new in this widely distributed news story today about airlines piling on fees. Old news, rehashed.

There are several things wrong with the story, including the assertion that airlines’ see fees as an alternative to raising fares.

To the contrary, airlines jump at any opportunity to boost fares, assuming they can get away with it. Just last week, the domestic industry, acting pretty much in tandem, managed to slip in an across-the-board $20 increase in base fares.

And while fare sales have proliferated (airlines are desperate for cash), fares on many routes between mid-sized cities where competition is not great are up 40 to 60 percent in the last year.

Yes, airlines charging extra for a checked bag (for non-elite-status coach passengers paying discount fares) is an annoyance and, for a family traveling on vacation, a burden. Yes, the fee-fling has gone so far that Ryanair, the cheapo carrier in Europe, is actually considering pay toilets. (This story, rehashing old news, dismisses that as a publicity stunt, but in fact Ryanair’s chief executive Michael O’Leary says he is serious about the pay toilets; is able to circumvent EU regulations about providing public toilets, citing the precedent of pay toilets in European train stations; and is in the market for a credit-card reader that will enable the scheme to work.)

But why am I supposed to be wailing about the fact that some airlines are charging an extra $20 extra for priority seating? That is not in the same price-gouging league as charging extra to check in at the airport. In fact, it’s a very good idea, from a consumer point of view.

The AP story mentions AirTran as charging $20 for an exit-row seat with extra legroom. But US Airways and other carriers also offer customers that option — which is in fact generally welcomed by people who fly. When I fly US Airways, for example, I jump at the opportunity to grab an aisle exit-row seat with the extra legroom, for $20. I consider it a bargain, given a low fare and given that I don’t have elite-status on US Air and so wouldn’t otherwise be able to grab that better seat.

And by the way, why do none of these rehashes ever mention that Continental Airlines, for one, still serves free meals in coach? Or that that $7 sandwich you can buy on some other airline is often a very good sandwich, way better than its free predecessor?

Extra fee-revenue, which ranges up to $1 billion a year for some carriers, has not been sufficient to dig domestic airlines out of the deep hole they’re in. Across the board, passenger revenues are down sharply as demand for flying declines in a very poor economy. Business travel — which airlines depend on for most of their revenue — is down, but companies are still sending businss travelers on the road. It’s just that those travelers are now acting like leisure travelers, waiting for fare sales, adjusting schedules to fly cheap, avoiding the front of the plane except as an upgrade option. It’s now common for a budget-conscious business traveler to shop around for a better deal at a nearby airport, calculating in the cost of a rental car or even, gasp, public transportation.

SO it’s time for some people writing about air travel to smarten up, to stop rehashing old news, and to begin looking in a grown-up way at basic economics. Oil is going up, industry revenues are down, demand stubbornly resists prodding even by deep fare sales. Unemployment or other economic problems have taken away air travel as an option for hundreds of thousands of people.

There is no way the domestic air travel system can continue to operate without significant change, and some of that change, alas, is going to have to come in customer expectations. Demand is down? Costs are up? Well, the reasonable economic response is that supply must be reduced.

Reality says a smaller air-travel system, with higher fares and far fewer choices, is in our future, and perhaps for a long time to come. This will not be a popular reality.

Rather than winging about someone paying $20 extra to grab an aisle-row seat, air-travel reporters need to start evaluating the economic and political options — and the national transportation-policy realities — as our air travel system, and our beloved national travel culture, shrinks.

###

New Mexico is spending $198 million of taxpayer money (and counting) on a theme park stunt called “Spaceport America.” Gov. Bill Richardson, keeping what appears to be a straight face, broke ground today on the “spaceport,” which will provide Richard Branson’s new tourist venture, Virgin Galactic, with a facility to launch well-heeled space cadets into a suborbital ride off the back of an aircraft.

It’s $200,000 a ticket. Or $180,000 a ride on Discount Dimwit Days.

###