If it works and the people are happy with the service and cost, why mess with a good thing? Why risk giving up a known working entity for the risks inherent in underbid and underperformed contractor work?Resisting thread jack...fighting urge...can't maintain..aaahhhh!By back door I didn't imply nefarious. I meant creative/imanagive. Obviously, co-opting an existing helo operation was the easiest least expensive way to stand up what was at the time essentially an experiment.
How can it be better? The obvious is cost. That is why bid it out and see how the state stands up. But it may be made better in other areas as well. Competition fosters innovation. For every government contracting horror story you can bring up there is a government failure in execution cost or fraud. Full accountability in government? Really?
Don't look now but many traditional government services thought the eternal purview of government has been privatized. We have a private fire department in my state. Several cities with traditional fire departments still contract for medical or ambulance service. Even in the UK all their rescue and some LE helo operations are contract. I think Canada may be going that way too.
Clearly the MD system is top rate and it appears the peeps like it. So I can't imagine anyone being afraid of open competition. It should stand on its own.
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The SHOW: Airlines still a "good gig"??
- Thread starter A4sForever
- Start date
Sometimes the magic of the free market isn't all its cracked up to be. The MSP aircraft give dual-pilot IFR service to austere locations. The DPIFR is damn near unheard of in private aeromedical services. Their aircraft are also way bigger and have more equipment than any private air ambulances I've seen.
There is also something to be said for patient safety in removing the profit motive. They are making their go-nogo decision completely independent of any corporate concerns. Some air ambulance companies are better than others in this regard.
Back to the thread at hand....if you're helo guy, stay helos. If you're a tiltrotor guy who doesn't have a lot of fixed-wing time already, you are either going to have to pay your dues as a contractor somewhere or go back to helos.
There is also something to be said for patient safety in removing the profit motive. They are making their go-nogo decision completely independent of any corporate concerns. Some air ambulance companies are better than others in this regard.
Back to the thread at hand....if you're helo guy, stay helos. If you're a tiltrotor guy who doesn't have a lot of fixed-wing time already, you are either going to have to pay your dues as a contractor somewhere or go back to helos.
Nothing that the MD program offers, such as dual piloted IFR, can't be written into an RFP. As to profit motive somehow being inconsistent with safety, Nav Canada, Canadian ATC, is a contractor service, UK airports and airport security are private companies. Hey, I am happy for all you MD residents. But listen to yourselves. You are so in the tank for that particular program you make it sound like any successful government program simply can't be improved upon. All the smart guys are government employees, and for profit operations are inherently less safe than government operations.
And I don't understand the compulsion by many to try and contract out everything.
I work with contractors every day and have overseas as well, if you think government isn't accountable or doesn't do right by your money you obviously haven't worked with a lot of contractors. Many contractors have zero accountability and can simply walk away or refuse to do the job if they no longer want to. At least government, especially first responders and military, not only have an obligation to do the job but are ultimately accountable to the people and not a corporation or and owner.
There was a tragic accident a few years ago with one of the Maryland state helos and the state took measures to improve the safety of their helicopter operations as a result. They are one of only a handful of air ambulance operations in the country that now meet most, if not all, of the FAA's recommended safety measures for air ambulance operations to include two pilots and terrain avoidance systems among others. All of those measures were implemented due to public and state government pressure and backed up with funding. That is public accountability, and all things that very few private ambulance services have done.
Fire and rescue services are still overwhelmingly civil servants, one fire department a trend does not make. Frankly I don't want profit being the primary motive for first responders whether they be medics, firefighters or SAR. What works in Ireland and the UK probably doesn't mean it will work here, the UK's main maritime rescue service volunteers and nowhere near as good as a Coast Guard. And the UK's experience with contracting out 'traditional' government services hasn't exactly been smooth, you can ask the RAF about their tankers if you want but half of those are flying charters right now. Finally no, Canada is not going that way.
If it ain't broke.... Simply put it meets the standard set by Dr Cowley over 40 years ago and it remains the only system of its kind to provide the service it does for every citizen in the state of Maryland. So why should Maryland give a contractor, whose main purpose for being is to make money, a chance to fuck it all away? No thanks.
Ask my father-in-law, who retired as chief of air traffic control in the Vancouver region, about Nav Canada and you will likely get a swift punch to the gut. He despises them and their lowering of standards and thinks an accident like the one that happened over Switzerland is just a matter of time.
As for your fixation on insisting a contractor can do better or even should do the job in the first place, where do you draw the one between what we contract out and what we don't? A red line for me is first responders, they should be public servants directly responsible to the public and not a corporation or owner. Period. A private company is always going to look for ways to make money and the temptation/option is always going to be there to lower standards in order to make more money. That temptation is not there for a government owned and operated system. I don't care if the Brits or Irish are contracting out SAR, I don't want to rely on for-profit company to pluck my ass out of the ocean if I am unlucky enough to end up there.
And yes Virginia, in the world of air ambulance operations non-profit operations are far more safe than for-profit ones.
The whole urge to privatize everything is an article of faith among many. The government is supposedly inherently worse and more inefficient at everything than the private sector. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, but the answer is that it just depends. Sometimes it does a better job, and even a more efficient job. Sometimes it may even be less efficient, but the nature of a certain task demands or at least lends itself to being done by a public servant, or the mission being split appropriately between public and private. For example, MSP does most of the accident scene work in MD. Private companies do most of the inter-hospital transport work, i.e. the government does the high risk work requiring high-value equipment, and private companies do the routine work and has become commodified. Think about whether you'd like to contract national defense wholesale to contractors.We only contract out certain functions (and even those have some issues sometimes).
To join this back up with the original thread, though, I'd probably take a private HEMS job over MSP, simply because the pay at MSP doesn't keep up with the domiciles in the eastern part of the state, and I wouldn't want to live out in the sticks at one of the bases in western MD. A lot of the guys at MSP do their mandated four years and take their factory course and AW time out to the oil rigs.
To join this back up with the original thread, though, I'd probably take a private HEMS job over MSP, simply because the pay at MSP doesn't keep up with the domiciles in the eastern part of the state, and I wouldn't want to live out in the sticks at one of the bases in western MD. A lot of the guys at MSP do their mandated four years and take their factory course and AW time out to the oil rigs.
Blackadder
New Member
While the motives (and quality of service) of Nav Canada may be suspect . . . "profit" is not one of them. Technically, they are not a "contractor" because they "own" air navigation services in Canada. According to law (specifically the Civil Air Navigation Services Commercialization Act ) Nav Canada is responsible to provide those services previously provided by the Gov't of Canada but are not an agent of the government (i.e. the government is not responsible for Nav Canada's actions). The Gov't of Canada set up Nav Can as a non-share (i.e. non-profit) corporation and sold all the air navigation assets of Transport Canada to them. The government has no ownership interest in the corporation (actually, no individual or group of individuals owns Nav Can) nor does it provide funding. It's a very Canadian thing.
I won't argue about relative accountability between the private sector and government. Both can be bad. The private sector is bound by a legal contract that sets both performance measures and non compliance penalties. It is all about the contract. The government? Get past the military and you have plenty of poor performing organizations that can't be fired or easily improved due to civil service rules, political interests or institutional momentum.
I agree public safety organizations should generally be government operations. I am not for privatizing everything. I am for competition.
I agree public safety organizations should generally be government operations. I am not for privatizing everything. I am for competition.
FYI...for the USN types interested in going to Delta, I believe Delta still allows you to convert your SDB jacket to Delta spec. I'm thinking about doing this since my 15 year old Delta jacket is pretty much toast...had to do a quick repair job on the last layover...
NOTE: Please disregard my bad hair in the first pic...I'm having a bad hair day (obviously)...time to get the wig busted (again)...
NOTE: Please disregard my bad hair in the first pic...I'm having a bad hair day (obviously)...time to get the wig busted (again)...
I believe we do...I'd have to check.
Dig into that PS check a bit.
The current commercial EMS helicopter system is *the most dangerous* and *unsafe* segment of commercial aviation. If there was ever a commercial aviation segment that needed an ALPA type union this is it. It is purely driven my commercial operations (read "profit") and little to do with "service" or "lifesaving".
MDSP is the envy of for profit EMS and is the European model - ADAC in Germany, etc. They are a well organized, self preserving public safety program.
If you are a helo guy, go get your commercial airplane ratings, your ATP, etc and go do honest work of the airlines (like MadDog did) so you don't end up in a soul-less corporate job you hate with a bunch of dishonest self serving people, and you wind up at 51 wondering how you got into your awful job that you can't afford to leave because you have a kid with a serious life threatening illness who needs your insurance.
Go do what you love and fly. Whatever the cost.