AS Cubed (AS3) in Indy – Rubber Sole

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Indianapolis — Well, the weather outside was frightful on opening day and the mix of participating organizations changed once again, but nonetheless a sense of purpose and optimism held sway over the delegates, vendors and association executives working the 2002 Aviation Services and Suppliers Super Show. For the three-day run that started March 26, a smaller, more-concentrated AS Cubed gave upward of 402 vendors an opportunity to work for the business of about 1,200 delegates roughly split between members of two trade groups: the National Air Transportation Association, which represents general aviation businesses; and the Professional Aviation Maintenance Association, primarily comprised of aviation maintenance technicians from across the spectrum of flying.

Now this is a different sort of event than most — no, make that all — of the events that AVweb covers. Conventions of organizations like AOPA, EAA and NBAA usually include other organization's events piggybacked onto the main sponsor's location and facilities; but only one organization gets its name on the exhibition. AS Cubed is an event name in and of itself —  jointly organized and controlled by a board comprised of NATA and PAMA board members.

Running in parallel with AS Cubed are the annual conventions of PAMA and NATA, which means two separate schedules of events, workshops, professional development seminars and the like. At times, it can be a little disorienting for the first timer.

Nonetheless, the three events ran smoothly and efficiently for the two organizations and their members. Yes, attendance improved slightly while (and) exhibitor numbers suffered slightly — but exclusively not for the same direct reasons we generally hear for explaining a reordered reality in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Last year's AS Cubed, for example, included a third organization and its members, artificially boosting trade-show participation and total registrations.

This year, those vendors and their members are busy supporting their military clients' needs for aviation fuel services around the world — and the group had already decided against a repeat of its 2001 participation, according to AS Cubed organizers. But AS Cubed still drew 402 exhibiting companies — most of them showing their wares in smaller booths than a year ago.

NATA reported about 600 registrants, as did PAMA, putting total attendance above the 1,200 mark — up slightly from last year. And that seemed respectable attendance at a time when many of PAMA's 5,000 members are on furlough, or worse, from their airline jobs and many NATA members are still grappling with new realities — new demands and the carryover of losses brought on by last year's day of national tragedy.

And coming just beyond the six-month anniversary of 9-11, AS Cubed could hardly have been better timed for two battered segments of the aviation community. They used the time to deal in necessary discussions about the current state of affairs and a still-clouded future for two diverse populations whose livelihoods remain chained to actions and reactions they can barely conceive and have only hopes of influencing.

For many in general aviation, hearing that PAMA boasts of 5,000 members — among its best numbers in years — might lead the uninitiated to believe that the association carried the bulk of its clientele on its membership roles. But in the world outside the neighborhood FBO or major aviation service company, the airline industry employs the bulk of the 180,000 people licensed to perform aviation maintenance in the U.S. "Clearly, we have lots of room to grow," said a smiling Brian Finnegan, president of the association for the past three years.

Finnegan had plenty to smile about during AS Cubed last week. A job fair included in the trade show for the first time this year helped boost attendance from around the region — which, with Chicago, Louisville and Memphis, relatively easy drives from Indy, encompassed a lot of airline operations employing thousands of maintenance techs. "We've got United here and in Chicago, the FedEx operation here (formerly the U.S. Postal Service's operation), FedEx in Memphis and UPS in Louisville. This has been a good location for us."

After staging an experimental maintenance competition last year, PAMA organizers, led by John Boomhower, pulled off the association's first full-fledged Maintenance Olympics. The competition pitted teams from airlines and GA maintenance shops in a series of events judged on the basis of time and quality against a theoretical task of getting an airplane moving within 20 minutes of when the horn sounded. With spectator bleachers, colorful signage, teams in matching uniforms and other athletic trappings, the event provided a touch of color and spectacle not normally associated with trade shows. Only cheerleaders and color commentators were missing from the show as the competitors safety-wired fasteners, flared tubes, connected connectors to cables and fixed other problems in their allotted time. The winners: the Bombardier Business Aviation Services from Indy; the Maintenance Craftsmen of Orlando, a team of Delta Air Lines technicians who came on their own; and Mid-Coast Aviation's team.

"Now that we've got this going, we'd like to figure out whether we can expand participation by organizing some regional qualifiers," Boomhower told AVweb. Ultimately, the organizing volunteers would like to bring in 16 teams from the qualifiers and stage a Sweet 16 NCAA basketball-style championship event that ends with the championship matches on the final day of the convention.

Aside from the team competition, PAMA actively supported its members in other ways during the show. Among the more cutting-edge programs the association unveiled was a partnership with AirLog Imaging LLC to digitally archive and organize maintenance personnel records for technician members. "We believe this type of program will have some benefits downstream as new and different requirements come to bear," Finnegan noted. Given the current state of flux on security issues, Finnegan's may have been one of the understatements of the convention.

Under the AirLog/PAMA partnership program, technicians can use AirLog's "MxTx on CD" — or Maintenance Technician on CD — to archive certificates, education and training records, logbook and other signoffs organized by year, pictures of work, tool inventories and more. The CD includes software for viewing, enlarging, searching, exporting and printing the contents. "The program allows the user to locate information about his or her employment activities and maintenance work history in seconds by viewing the exact records on CD," explained Mike Head, president of AirLog imaging.

AirLog has a similar program aimed at archiving and organizing aircraft maintenance records that should appeal to aircraft owners from across the spectrum — particularly for those flying high-use iron or particularly old aircraft with decades worth of history on inspections, repairs and upgrades scribbled onto hundreds of pages of equally elderly paper logs.

Meanwhile, the program represents another step forward by PAMA in support of its members, from Finnegan's perspective. "PAMA's alliance with AirLog Imaging represents the highest level of professional record keeping," Finnegan noted. "You know, that's our leading task, supporting the professionalism of our members."

To that end, PAMA is preparing to move into new digs at Washington National Airport (DCA) where it can tap into a pool of maintenance students from the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) and fulfill a goal to headquarter PAMA on an airport. A side benefit of the move is lower costs than available in the corridors of lobbying organizations across the Potomac River in D.C. proper — always a welcome turn of events for any small association in search of ways to better stretch its members' money.

"Meanwhile, we keep having to make the decisions on what we can afford to do among the many things we'd like to do for our members," said Finnegan. "And we keep working to grow our membership in order to improve our position for all maintenance technicians."

Smart Cards encoded with fingerprint data, digital security camera systems, online criminal-background checks, checkpoint-control hardware. There's a scary new order of business nibbling around the edges of aviation that makes civil-liberties oriented, free-spirited general-aviation practitioners wince. At times, from some angles, the trend seems to be steering private flying in a direction only an Air Transport Association member could love: forcing general aviation into a system of security checks and checkpoints equal to airline travel in inconvenience and uselessness.

That said, some of this stuff is coming, regardless. So, who can blame nimble entrepreneurs from scrambling for a slice of the pie?

For example, Honeywell USA showed off a new product called CryptoCam, a wired or mobile camera designed for control by a PC while remotely monitoring a location for the owner. And to complement the CryptoCam, the developers, Eastman Telebell International and CryptoTelecom, showed off its CryptoServer, which allows encrypted control and receipt of camera signals from multiple units — with data stored digitally, on- or off-site.

But beyond the Big Brother aspects, other companies offered solutions for problems not yet specified but considered. An example: NATA's new Compliance Service program called SkyGuard, which provides companies with a system of hardware and software for producing a smart identity card encrypted with a fingerprint. Put the SkyGuard card in a compatible reader, have the subject lay an index finger on a reader, and the software pulls up a photo of the person to whom the card was issued.

For the person controlling access to an aircraft or facility, the match between the fingerprint and the photo provides positive identification. Developed by Sagem Morpho Inc., the process of creating the cards takes only a couple of minutes — inclusive of encoding the fingerprint, capturing a digital image of the subject and printing out the encoded smart card.

Of course, nothing we've seen nor heard of yet passes the foolproof standard. But technology like this will certainly add a measure of assurance that the crew or passenger or mechanic is who they claim to be. Before that person gets a SkyGuard card, they need to pass a criminal background screening being implemented for workers and more sensitive airports.

And that's where InterSearch comes into play. A participant in the same program, InterSearch can provide the background checks employers need for the new federal rules covered by the SkyGuard program. Additionally, potential employees themselves may want to use InterSearch's services to check their records — maybe to be sure an old driving citation was expunged as it was supposed to, or to be sure that their record doesn't incorrectly tag them with the acts of another person of the same name.

All of this effort is in the name of making skies and travel safer — a laudable goal, to say the least. The fact that none of these steps — as well as many other, scarier ideas proposed — would have altered the events of 9/11 seems not to daunt the proponents at all. The fact that many of these ideas treat general aviation users like uncaught criminals and will add to the expense and inconvenience of flying more efficiently than on human mailing tubes seems to bother too few in the halls of power.

Although the nation enjoys a color-coded threat-level warning system, there seems no assessment available to gauge the relative threat of private airplanes. All we hear is some generic claim that small airplanes are terrorist tools awaiting only the embrace of the insane. Now while unable to speak for any other pilots, as a fairly consistent rule the people who occasionally fly with me are well known to me; one hundred percent of the time, I know who packed my bags— and I even know that no unseen strangers in the baggage bowls of some airline facility will ever handle them. From my domicile to my wheels to my wings; maybe— and this isn't frequent— some ramp denizen will help me make the bags' transition from one vehicle to another.

The only thing completely outside my control when friends fly with me is knowledge of their frame of mind. That's the same challenge for every screener working every checkpoint of every airport in the world. But since we typically visit for some time before boarding my aircraft, my opportunity to weigh the frame of mind of my fellow flyers runs much deeper than that poor checkpoint employee, who may need to make that observation and decision a couple hundred times per hour.

So, you be the judge: Just what level of threat do I represent to the public? Can't really say, can you. Now you might find this heartening or frightening, but you should know that one segment of the aviation community plans to suggest that by fencing in our airports, adding checkpoints between us and our own aircraft, and by adding control towers at every private field, they can answer that unassessed threat they presume I present.

Make sense to you? These ideas aren't exactly drawing cheers from the heart and soul of the general aviation community, either— and that's why one of the meetings of the NATA/PAMA/AS Cubed event brought together the ad-hoc security committee of the General Aviation Action Coalition (GAAC). By the text received in my office, the American Association of Airport Executives (AAAE) hasn't yet differentiated the distinctions between airport and aircraft security.

NATA president Jim Coyne called for the impromptu gathering of the ad hoc group together at AS Cubed to discuss responses to the AAAE draft proposal. Heavy hitters from the major aviation alphabet groups responded and attended the Indy session, with many flying in for the meeting and returning to their D.C.-area offices as quickly as possible to report to their bosses.

The pending responses the group developed basically start and end with some common sense. "After all," quipped one association executive, "none of us could ever remember an airport hijacking. And most of the hijackings we do know of didn't actually start at an airport. So we need to differentiate between airport security and aircraft security.

"But before anybody offers ideas on anything, wouldn't it make sense to first develop an assessment — a threat assessment that says private airplanes are this or that dangerous, or, as many of us suspect, hardly a threat."

With many speakers sounding common themes, the GAAC ad hoc group developed four points for discussion with other aviation groups, lawmakers, security officials and administration members in a position to influence the tone of what next happens.

First, develop a threat assessment for general aviation — determine what needs protection and what needs safeguarding and what's useless fodder for public consumption. Next, differentiate between protecting airplanes and protecting airports. As one general aviation association official told AVweb: If you add all the obstacles you want to legal access, that only means that the determined terrorist will first become a legal owner before using a private plane. "Whether you buy or build, nothing you can put between the owner or crew and an airplane could prevent a violent act," the association official noted.

Third, the general aviation community concurs with one point in the AAAE draft: No money should be diverted to security projects from funds taxed and earmarked for airport and infrastructure improvements. "We in aviation can't afford to neglect advancing safety and capacity in the name of security," noted one of the group who attended the ad hoc panel's meeting.

The remaining talking developed by the group involved asking airport sponsors to seek restraint from lawmakers interested in showing their anti-terrorist chops by doing something — even if it's wrong, or meaningless or, worst of all, harmful. "Proposals to create individual identity cards, special access or clearance procedures, or to implement specific local requirements on users from far away, serve only to illustrate why we have a single FAA, why our forefathers instilled in the United States Constitution a single clause that gives the United States government sole responsibility for regulating interstate commerce. It would be a major problem to coordinate 50 different sets of rules, but we have local mayors and other bodies who seem determined to handicap their own access with rules that could total in the thousands in terms of variation and permutation."

Plenty of common sense has been offered to help in the need for some action. For example, AOPA and other groups have advocated the designation of state identity cards or drivers licenses as suitable for use as a photo ID to confirm a pilot's identity The NATA SkyGuard program moves ahead into the realm of identifying flight crew to charter passengers and at airports away from home.

But the wilder ideas just keep coming — many from corners that stand to benefit from the federal embrace of their idea. As one wag suggested, few would benefit more from the AAAE draft's suggestion for 4,900 new towers than the Contract Tower Association.

Imagine, if you will, needing a special access procedure for your home field, so the ramp guys can confirm to a higher authority that it was really you who showed up with the keys to your airplane and flew off on a trip requiring your home field to perform a special pre-screening so that at your destination field the contract controllers — another interest group in their own right — can check to make sure you properly cleared your departure airport before they allow your landing.

Almost sounds like someone is encouraging us to sell our birds and travel by human mailing tube, doesn't it? And who would benefit from that? It's a cinch that America's economy and freedom of movement would not. Until it's harder to rent a Ryder Truck than it is to board an airplane, who can say any of this effort means anything.

NATA members got to take their turns around a race track; PAMA members and supporters boogied to good old rock 'n roll while raising scholarship fund by sampling spicy chili brewed by a couple dozen exhibitors; awards presentations and Olympian competitions made for one of the aviation community's most interesting and entertaining events.

No, it wasn't as strong in some ways as a year earlier; in other ways, vendors exhibiting seemed to have few complaints about the business they wrote during the trade show. And the delegates themselves seemed happy to see others in their fields and hear how they are surviving the unique struggles of recent months.

In other words, AS Cubed was another example of what the aviation community does so well so often: flock together as birds of a feather for some mutual feather fluffing. Clearly, the folks attending this year's gathering recognize the challenges they face; they spent much time conversing about how best to cope. Equally clear was that NATA is running as strongly as ever, as evidenced by a treasurers report that put the association near its goal of having two year's worth of operating funds safely tucked away. And also apparent is the uphill climb facing PAMA's Finnegan and his staff of six as they work to improve on their services and membership strengths after years of struggling against financial problems.

If tough times can truly bring out the best in people and groups, what AS Cubed showed positively is that aviation faces some still-tough times — and that these two groups are working their hardest to do the best for their constituencies.

See you again next week from Lakeland and the opening of Sun 'n Fun.