Life by the lake.

Study is an important activity, an activity essential to our well-being and know how.

The are many topics to study. Some simple and straight forward, others more complex, requiring varying degrees of skill and even foreknowledge. The use of study to expand ones own understanding is key to finding the best solution to a problem or basically just to learn new things about a subject to broaden the level of understanding about that topic.

Study is interesting and can lead to many complex realizations about  many a topic, life, love, happiness, joy fulfillment, you get the picture. Books are the real treasures of the world, because the contain the secrets to success, and also contain the secrets to many other things.

Just ask a pencil artist about the complexities of 'seeing'. A pencil artist, will have to deal with forms, shapes, contrasts, rules of composition, color sometimes and even abstraction of the subject and all this is a process that is so complex, that it is just called an 'art'.

Indeed what is striking is not the complexities of work or study in this case, but rather the mental acuity of the individual to produce such works. An individuals mind can produce great things, all they need are the tools to do so.

The Art of making is indeed a complicated subject with competing subjects within, so complex that it is almost undefined.

Or so goes the logic.

In the time where I have put on salesman's glasses, I have seen many great things and also seen others which were not so great. Its very hard these days to put everything into a context, the volatility of the world makes it difficult to do so, yet context is often what is missing in those failed or not so great moments that I've seen. Often the lack of context was not just about being ill informed, but rather a deliberate and cold attempt at shutting out unwanted views and opinions. 'Context' was rejected.

For such is the difficulty in making proposals, we put up our best, hoping to get a responsive ear, but find that minds have been made up. Worse are all the doubting Thomases and curious coronadoes, that ask a barrage of questions, many of which are just reworded queries covering  previously answered points. There have been many times where we have seen this before.

Every time it gets no worse, we bring forth good things to be bought and sold, only to find that others dither at the point of decision and thus the 'deal' might not go as smoothly as planned, or so it seems.

The salesman's glasses are always just a means to an end.

The big question is where is all this narrative going?

You see it is easy to put these things out there but to conclude them isn't so easy. You could surmise that salesmanship is an art, but that is too easy and lazy almost. Why not do it the way BCA did, they put the art form in front of the whole enterprise, have few decision makers and work from a fixed decision made by 2 people?

It is impossible to reconcile the many competing ideas and notions. Limitations have be set in order for there to have any kind of rational decision making. Worse yet these limitations fix the solution to what will become in the end. It is called the design process and the design brief fixes all the characteristics we want, in a tangible and perhaps tentative form.

The design Enterprise that produced the Queen of our skies, is just such a thing, making light of complex situations so that goals could be set, such that engineers could go away and find the solutions to such problems. There were issues to be solved, things to be tested and ideas to be tried out. All of these works were constituted into a whole and produced the product we see today. Many man hours went into making the machine we know by those numbers, and it is a story that stands on its own 2 feet.

Perhaps the the bigger legend is not the machine or product, but the legend that made it, and made it First. It is the story of the Men and Women and the sacrifices made to bring that machine to the point where it would meet the sky. We will never have such an enterprise ever again, although there are other, similar or better. It was a new beginning in its time, and also an end of a very long, long journey and likewise, there will always be new beginnings, at new beginnings end.

The Pump and Dump scheme.

 Good Morning to the Internet, the worlds greatest invention of the 20th century.

This morning when trawling through the news, I saw several articles of mild interest, among these, the Last whalejet, more 777 retirements, a schnoze gear collapse and a lost toy on an airplane. Great, great news.

What didn't make the news was more rambling by STC of EK about his new Econoplus seating. What is the deal with econoplus anyway, I just don't get it? Pay more and get more.

Airlines, all of them are very stingy self centered businesses. Costs matter more than everything else, whilst this is all a given, the fact is that actually the Airline could not care about the levels of service, and its all vainly superficial even from a safety standpoint. You see, the industry as a whole, before this pathetic virus, was headed into its own quagmire. Their obsessions with standards and technology is just another dopamine rush too add to the coffee that they already ingested, and when I say standards, I really mean 'how to water them down'. This is not unusual for any type of industry, in fact its rather expected.

Airlines have done some really nasty things to their pax, some undeservedly, but others quite involuntarily. Those internet sagas with guitars and pax being bullied on board etc etc, is just icing for the real crimes committed to them in economy class. Those narrow shoddy seats and uncomfortable seat pitches is just more devolution of the great invention that is the modern passenger airplane.

This is what the industry has become. An undisguised, naked attempt at profiteering or rather that was what it was headed into.

Comfort is irrelevant, because it is expensive to provide it and the provider of such a comfort is indeed ill advised, except of course for a nominal fee. As a pax you pay up and shut up. Every Airline in the world operates with such vaguely similar set of rules governing their operations.

Yes Airlines are a horrible and nasty bunch, But they are not the real villains, even BCA, whose own apathy for its creations can be forgiven for its treachery.

In the 1970s economy class opened the world to more travel, its basis was cheap tickets and available seats. The cheap price of tickets did a lot to offer a means getting people across the planet in a matter of hours. This revolution in travel, made for a better understanding of who we are as the inhabitants of this puny rock. BCA made the right move, it creation enabled this and subsequently the market followed. Everyone knows this story, its the storybook playtime again.

Fast forward to today, the economy class is 'better' but better in what terms? It is easy to ramble on about comfort and setting and food, but really that is not where the issue lies. The issue is of course the ticket price. What service do you get for your ticket is less relevant than the price of the ticket itself and why is this so?

It is because of inflation.

The ticket price of yesteryear may have had a higher residual value than today no thanks to all the cost cutting and 'economies' but really the lower ticket price of today isn't what it appears to be because the numbers don't indicate this. And I really mean numbers here. In 1970, 75 dollars would be an equivalent value of what amount today? It matters not what that number is because it is certainly bigger than the integer value of 75.

Most people do not factor this into their thinking. 75 is certainly smaller than 76 and any number above that indicates a price that is more expensive, or at least that what it it appears. Factor in inflation, and the residual value may even be less than the numerical value only that you never see this, because your not looking for it. So here is the real villain, naked and unmasked.

Airlines are dumping quadjets to meet emissions targets and cutting costs to head off inflation. They are just trying to survive, because inflation does not stop. The real crooks are the Governments that won't do anything to stifle inflation because its damaging effects inflates costs for everyone, but realistically, even they can do little to stop its effects.

As for BCA, what is the point of investing new technologies and economies of scale to your platform, when all the benefits you could give to it are just wiped out by inflation and its ill effects. And who is going to believe them, especially when standing in front of their customer during a presentation? The end of the era of mass travel might just be around the corner, because if everything is equally as inflated all over, there would be no point to go to somewhere else to just get just more of the same.

Coffee machine Chronicles.

 It is all goode news all round this year, or maybe your still at the bar face first into the dark wood stain from B&Q.

Regardless, a coffee or two should add some sobering thoughts into the discourse of 2021, which by all accounts has not even begun.

The trends are simply that, Cargo is doing extremely well and much like coffee will be in daily demand for the next few months. So much so that all space available is booked, almost as if coffee bean growers couldn't grow beans fast enough. It is literally the simplest thing in the world, Everyday somebody orders a coffee, just like how the space on the newly arrived freight plane is filled up faster than said coffee can be finished.

Rates are unbelievable. 

To make coffee, some poor hack, stripes on shoulders off course, has to sit and play a rather boring waiting game. If they are a barista, the time between customers is short. Loading and unloading, takes the form of filling and emptying the portafilter of coffee ground. Much like a cargo plane, all this loading and unloading is rather quite stressful, in which the plane / portafilter is subject to the stresses of service.

The high frequency of service of the 'MADE IN CHINA' coffee machine eventually catches up to the poor thing, and unlike the drunk at bar at the start, that wood stain is going to be replaced with tilled flooring and newspaper and everybody is happy with the NEW COFFEE from the NEW MACHINE.

BUT, BUT, BUT, BUT, BUT.......

What about our poor freight plane here? Well, the story doesn't quite end there does it. You can't just stuff newspaper into the jetpipes, page 3 and all, and suddenly just buy a new aeroplane. Unfortunately, a lot of aircraft will be headed for D checks this year, and that means freighters as well. You can rest assured that rates will skyrocket if there are no planes to fly freight because they are all in the hangar. 

And what about BCA?

Is their production rate at 6 per year really helping at all? Making freighters is one thing, but closing the line at a snails pace and no due diligence in the form of a market survey or 'anything' of that sort, is just another way of saying that the business doesn't exist because 'we say so'. Kudos to the brains that brought us these exceptional cargo rates, which when passed to the consumer, will make their latte taste just that little bit more bitter to boot.

Today however, everyone is smiling, the coffee is great and the rubber is certainly not on the runway.