A lot of people who read this column spend their days looking for the next safety threat to their airline, their flight, their maintenance shop or so on, focused on the micro level. I guess my contribution is to look for broader safety threats to the industry, a macro view. Let me see if I can describe such a threat that many may not see coming.
We got a glimpse of the gathering storm recently with the LightSquared debacle in the United States. This is a political disaster of epic proportions that I don’t want to get in the middle of, but I’ll try to summarize the situation. Basically, a really big company spent billions of dollars getting government approval to deploy a new wireless mobile broadband network in a frequency band near the global positioning system signal space. On paper, the company thought it worked, but when tested with existing receivers in the real world, it didn’t. Politicians and lawyers probably will spend the next decade figuring out what went wrong and …
