USA venter den perfekte tsunami om 15 år.... CNN

 

Begrepet den perfekte stormen kjenner vi. Men den perfekte tsunamien er mye verre. Den kommer når mangel på flygere og et antikvert jernbanenett møtes samtidig, om 15 år.....(Red.)

A high-speed passenger train in a February test-run in Cerhenice in the Czech Republic. It's not the kind of sight you'd expect to see on America's slower and archaic railroad network. 

Can anybody here fly a plane?

Flying is a miserable experience for most people, with shrinking airline seats, cascading flight cancellations and stressed passengers getting on one another’s nerves.

But it can always get worse. The US Regional Airline Association warned Congress this week that the airline industry is about to face a “tsunami” of pilot retirements -- at a time when the country already lacks sufficient person power in the cockpit.

More than half of pilots currently flying will hit the mandatory retirement age of 65 within the next 15 years and there aren’t enough younger aviators to make up the shortfall. The problem is already so acute that more than 500 planes belonging to regional airlines are sitting idle with no one to fly them. While there are record bookings right now, many airlines have still not fully restored the schedules they flew before the pandemic because of staffing issues. One of the reasons why there aren’t enough pilots is that the cost of getting trained — on top of the price of an undergraduate degree — can reach $200,000, meaning a lifetime of paying off loans.

This is not the only post-pandemic problem afflicting the airline industry. A flurry of near incidents on airport runways and taxiways has been attributed to an erosion of skills and perception caused by pilots’ loss of flying hours during Covid-19.

Outside the United States, a pilot shortage may not be such a big deal. In Europe and Japan, fast, affordable and reliable train networks can make a journey just as easy and more pleasant. But that option doesn’t exist stateside. Apart from the lucrative east coast line connecting Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston and a few other networks, most of the iron roads that once brought the US together and drove its expansion have disappeared. There are long-distance cross country routes and sleeper services, but they can take days owing to the distances involved and the priority that freight trains have on the tracks. Such services are also pricey. So many medium-sized US cities rely on the regional airline network to get passengers to big-city hubs where they can connect to the main national and international flight networks.

There are periodically plans to build high-speed rail in the US. President Joe Biden, a famous train buff, splashed out an unprecedented $170 billion in his $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, but much of that will be used up by repairing the aging track and tunnels of the northeastern corridor line. There are plans to build multi-billion dollar private rail projects from cities like Los Angeles, linking Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver in the northwest. But nothing is certain; ambitious big-spending projects have foundered in the past.

There’s also often a philosophical opposition among certain politicians to rail travel — almost as if it’s an un-American way of getting from A to B in a nation where the fabled road trip is a rite of passage and where air travel reduced a vast landmass to more manageable proportions.