5 Reasons Why An Edmonton-Calgary High-Speed Train Is A Bad Idea

Source: Wired.com

This week has seen yet more discussion of the on-again, off-again proposed high-speed rail link between Alberta's two largest cities. In an article in yesterday's Calgary Herald, reporter James Wood contends that a number of Alberta MLAs are once again smiling on the concept. With real estate prices on the rise along the Calgary-Edmonton corridor, some proponents argue that the longer the province delays, the more expensive the project will become. Others argue that while the time is not yet right for the province to build it, the time will come when Alberta's population will be more than large enough to support it.

The last time I wrote about the proposed Alberta bullet train was back in 2010 in an article for Alberta Views magazine. At the time I voiced cautious support for the idea, noting that some countries (notably Norway and Finland) have made high-speed rail work in spite of having relatively sparse populations along similar lines to Alberta. And I still agree that low population, the most oft-heard argument against building a bullet train, is not necessarily a reason not to build it. After all, Alberta has a similar population base to both Scotland and the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, both of which have relatively fast trains (although not, strictly speaking, bullet trains). It could work here.

Nevertheless, the more I've looked at the issue, the more I've come to think that making a bullet train between Calgary and Edmonton a priority at this juncture would be very much misguided. As a longtime ex-pat in Japan I'm a huge fan of high-speed rail, but having thought a great deal about the issue I'm forced to conclude that it makes virtually zero sense here - especially as far as Edmonton is concerned. Here are my reasons why.

1) We don't have adequate urban transit infrastructure to support it.

There's a reason why high-speed rail works in places like France and Japan, or for that matter in Norway or Sweden. All of these countries' major cities have superb urban transportation systems, which efficiently move people from residential neighbourhoods to the major downtown rail hubs, where they can connect to fast intercity trains. We don't have anything like that here. Calgary is rather further ahead than Edmonton on the urban rail front, but both cities have a long way to go before they're on par with Munich, Seoul or Oslo. If we were to build a train tomorrow, you would have people driving to the train station on the departure end - only to arrive at the other end without a car and not a whole lot of other options for getting around.

2) The proposed system would benefit Calgary far more than Edmonton.

Edmonton and Calgary are very different cities. Calgary, with its relatively compact downtown and dense array of corporate headquarters, would attract its fair share of train travellers, who would be able to get off and do whatever they need to do downtown. Edmonton, by contrast, is an enormous sprawl, with the lion's share of economic activity situated in its periphery. How many Calgarians doing business in Edmonton are going to opt for a train that leaves them downtown, which still leaves them a trip to Sherwood Park or Leduc that, in rush hour traffic, will take them nearly as long as the train trip itself? Until Edmonton invests in far better public transportation and encourages far more business in its downtown core, this is going to be a flop for Edmonton.

3) The train would kill Edmonton's airport.

Here's the other problem for Edmonton. Edmonton International Airport, while most definitely on the ascendency, is still only half the size of Calgary International, which now has its sights set on an expanded Asia-Pacific role. The latest proposals for a Calgary-Edmonton high-speed rail link hint at a stop at YYC - but notably not YEG, which would make this train little more than a glorified extension to the C-Train. Even with a station stop at EIA, it would severely endanger the progress Edmonton has made in air service development, and without one it would be suicide for EIA. After all, why would anyone use EIA when you can simply take a bullet train to YYC - and get there in about as much time (and more comfortably) as you would taking the bus to EIA?

4) There are far less expensive ways of reducing single-occupancy car traffic on the QEII.

One thing that Edmontonians and Calgarians will doubtless agree on is that something needs to be done to reduce single-occupancy car traffic on the Queen Elizabeth II Highway - as well as within the respective cities. Here's an idea. How about creating dedicated bus lanes and up-gauging the Red Arrow bus system to an hourly articulated BRT service more resembling a train? Having ridden the Red Arrow myself, I can tell you that it's a wonderful service with all the comfort you'd expect from a rapid rail system - while costing a fraction of what building TGV tracks and stations would cost. And creating dedicated bus (and perhaps carpool) lanes on that highway would significantly shorten the travel time, while reducing vehicle emissions.

There are other strategies the province could take on this front. What about a serious campaign to promote car-sharing? Both Calgary and Edmonton now have car-share co-ops. There are also new technologies coming down the pike that could, by the time a high-speed rail system is in place, make such a system obsolete, like electric driverless cars. It's not hard to imagine a megaproject like this amounting to little more than an extremely expensive anachronism.

5) What about Fort McMurray?

The Calgary-Edmonton corridor is not the only transportation vector in the province with a serious need of overhaul. While exact numbers are hard to come by, travel between Fort McMurray and Edmonton has grown by epic proportions over the past decade, and in doing so is presenting a formidable transportation challenge. Fort McMurray International Airport is now easily the country's fastest growing airport, with growth far outpacing either Edmonton or Calgary, and Highway 63 between Edmonton and Fort McMurray has quickly become Alberta's most feared roadway. Passenger rail between Edmonton and Fort Mac once existed, and the rails are still there waiting to be used. And it wouldn't necessarily need be a full-fledged bullet train. Surely something along the lines of VIA's Windsor-Quebec City corridor trains would do the trick.

Those, in sum, are my thoughts on the subject. A bullet train between Edmonton and Calgary would, at this juncture at least, be a colossal misplaced priority, in my opinion. Improving public transit in both cities would not only improve overall quality of life in both but also probably do more for the environment than a high-speed intercity rail system would, as congested urban traffic creates rather more air pollution than intercity highway traffic does. Best, in my opinion, to concentrate capital spending on that while augmenting bus service between the two cities in a manner that is well integrated with their respective transit systems.

Moreover, as an Edmontonian I fear that, as things stand currently, an Edmonton-Calgary high-speed rail system would simply amount to a train "to Calgary" that would contribute very little to Edmonton, and potentially cause great harm to the city. Given the nature of Edmonton's geographic spread and its transportation deficit vis-a-vis Calgary, it's not hard to imagine a system such as this turning Edmonton into a glorified suburb of Calgary as opposed to a thriving city in its own right.

Agree or disagree? I would love to hear your thoughts.

4 Reasons Internet Forums Still Matter for Business Communicators

Last October, in the midst of a high-profile spat between Edmonton International Airport and Air Canada over the embattled Edmonton-London service, something interesting happened that changed my perspective on digital communications. I was contacted by an Edmonton lawyer and frequent flyer who is an active participant in the popular international frequent flyer chat forum FlyerTalk under the rather sassy handle "PunishedEdmontonian". He directed me to a lengthy and animated online conversation about the route in question, which appeared to be a pitched battle between EIA defenders and hidebound supporters of Air Canada.

He later asked me if I would be willing to organize an Edmonton meet-up for forum participants at the airport. I agreed, and some two months later I was playing host to a group of frequent flyers and aviation geeks in an event that included tours of EIA's ATC tower and centralized baggage system, presentations from EIA's gurus of operations, emergency, commercial development, air service development and parking/ground transportation, and some pints afterwards with a crowd that included journalists, municipal and provincial government staffers, lawyers, IT people and other assorted provocateurs and malcontents.

All this was an eye-opener for me because as a thirty-something social media obsessive, I had all but forgotten about Internet chat forums. While some part of my brain was cognizent of the fact that they still existed, I had incorrectly assumed that their once-enthusiastic denizens had for the most part, like me, moved onto Facebook, Twitter and other 2.0-vintage networking platforms. I could scarcely have been wronger. FlyerTalk, for example, has been around since 1998 (prehistoric in Internet terms) and has grown steadily, attracting anywhere between 27,000 and 52,000 daily unique visitors and has racked up over 20 million posts. Not bad for a communication tool widely perceived as having been eclipsed!

I bring this up because, as a professional communicator, there are very good reasons not to ignore Internet forums, particularly industry-relevant ones. In addition to it simply being bad business to ignore any group of stakeholders, chat forum participants are a very different breed from the majority of social media users in the following three regards:

1. They're a great source of information.

Web forums, particularly industry-specific ones, tend to attract very industry-savvy people. FlyerTalk participants, for example, are typically people who fly a great deal (certainly far more than I do) and therefore have a great deal of perspective on airports, airlines and other facets of the business I'm in and are therefore sources of information far too good to ignore.

2. They reach a very influential demographic.

While it's true that social media is no longer the exclusive domain of the young, the gap between social media users and non-users is still very much a generational one. (A recent survey shows the typical Twitter user is a 37-year-old woman.) Not surprisingly, the average age of an Internet chat forum, particularly one like FlyerTalk, is considerably older than the average Twitter or Facebook user - and indeed I was easily one of the youngest people among the 40-some people who attended my recent airport meet-up. It therefore goes without saying that if you want to reach our society's wealthiest and most influential demographic group online (i.e. Boomers), you're much more likely to find them on a forum like FlyerTalk than on, say, Twitter.

3. Their publics tend to care a lot.

Participants on forums like FlyerTalk aren't just highly informed. They also tend to be extremely passionate about whatever they're talking about. And unlike today's social networks, these people suffer from far less of the attention deficit disorder that comes with Facebook, Twitter and the like, with threads often continuing on for days and even weeks. From the standpoint of a professional communicators, web forums are a readymade arena for networking with potential intervening publics - people who will very enthusiastically transmit your key messages to the far reaches of the intertubes. Granted you'll have to fight off those who are dead-set against whatever you're doing, but it's a fight well worth fighting.

4. They're actively moderated - and therefore usually nice.

The other nice thing about web forums like FlyerTalk is they're actively monitored by moderators who do their best to ensure civility and respectfulness. So while discussions can often get heated (and they certainly did over the Air Canada-EIA snafu), it's still a stark departure from the sort of asinine commentary you typically see accompanying an online newspaper story or, for that matter, on the social networks. It's not always above the belt, but it tends to be. And the FlyerTalk folks who attended our event this week at EIA, while many of the differed in opinion about airport business and our airline partners, were respectful to a fault and all-around wonderful guests.

In the meantime I'm off to New Orleans next week for IABC's Leadership Institute conference, and from there returning home via Chicago for three days with my sister. And as I'll be using a total of four airports for the trip (and trusting United Airlines with my luggage), I'm definitely be checking in with my new BFFs at FlyerTalk. And for my fellow Gen-Y'ers out there, you'll be happy to know they're also on Twitter at @flyertalk. That should help me ease into it!

BREAK SOMETHING EDMONTON (A Punk DIY Approach to Civic Discourse)

 

Happy Heritage Weekend, everyone! For those of you not from here, the Heritage Day long weekend is the apogee of Edmonton's glorious but cruelly short summer, that time of the year when Edmontonians are at their happiest and energetic, each one trying to outdo one another in having a "Really Good Time." As such, I couldn't think of a better time to launch my own grassroots campaign aimed at kicking civic discourse in this city up a notch. Here we go.

For those new to this blog, I've been an Edmonton resident since November of 2008 and I've somewhat grudgingly come to love the place. I say 'grudgingly' not because of any ill feeling towards the city, but because I really never had any intention of ending up here. Having grown up Victoria, B.C. I always identified myself as a west coast kid, and certainly never imagined I'd end up building a life here in central Alberta. And yet here I am, far away from granola-munchin', dope-smokin', pipeline-protestin' Van Isle with a career stretched ahead of me here. I'm an Edmontonian now. Curse you Edmonton!

But that said, I really do like my adopted hometown. As Canada's fastest-growing urban centre at the heart of Canada's biggest growth engine, there's an energy here that you don't see in many places. There's a palpable sense of optimism that big things are possible. The city's political culture is complex, defying normal left/right characterizations, and above all else pragmatic. And the arts scene here trumps experienced anywhere else in the country. The grassroots support for the arts is phenomenal, and unlike in larger centres like New York, Montreal and Vancouver, artists here actually seem to help each other rather than stick to their own factions. And as for the climate, well, it's a great place to be a creative person. As a modern dance colleague of mine aptly put it, "In winter we huddle indoors and create projects, and in summer we bring them out for the festivals." Makes perfect sense to me.

Todd Babiak, Edmonton man-crush #1

As a professional communicator in the city, I've found the PR/marketing/communications community here in Edmonton to be genuinely warm and supportive, and I've succeeded in making many friends within it, within a very short period. And this same sort of collaborative energy is very apparent within this professional community as well. The "Make Something Edmonton" campaign is a clear example of this. The campaign, for those of you unfamiliar with it, was launched by author, bad-boy journalist and quintessential Edmontonian Todd Babiak who sought to supplant the city's parade of underwhelming slogans like "City of Champions" and "Gateway to the North" with something more genuine. He coined the phrase "Make Something Edmonton," citing the city's enduring creativity and can-do spirit.

"People who are from here love the city but have a hard time explaining why," said Babiak at the IABC Edmonton "Dare To Lead" conference in May of this year. "And everyone else thinks it's a shithole." He then went on to explain that this is a city populated largely by people like me, people who never really intended to be here but ended up carving out a beguiling life in this deceptively pretty and enchanting city on the U-bend of the North Saskatchewan River. I consider that I've accomplished more professionally in my four and a half years here than I have in all of my professional career, and I very much credit the energy, openness and connectivity of the people in the Edmonton communications community who have supported me. I still dearly miss the coast, but I'm not about to move back there anytime soon.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to give Edmonton a free pass. After all, civil society, with which Edmonton is replete, is all for naught if you don't try to tackle a community's warts. And in homage to Todd Babiak and the Make Something Edmonton campaign, I would like to take this opportunity to launch my own corollary campaign entitled "Break Something Edmonton."

Now before you start sending me hate mail for inciting vandalism and wanton property damage, when I say "Break Something Edmonton" I of course don't mean that literally. The name is merely meant as a cheeky slogan that hearkens to the old punk DIY spirit as a means of breaking through a community's Gordian knots with radical, outside-the-box solutions. Everybody living anywhere has their own big pet peeves about their community, things they would desperately like to change. We all have our own personal axes to grind, be it institutionalized sexism, racism, poverty, anti-intellectualism, rampant bureaucracy, cultural elitism, potholes, dangerous driving etc. #BreakSomethingYEG is intended as a forum for such discussion as well as a space for formulating creative, DIY solutions that can help alleviate these problems.

There are only two rules to the #BreakSomethingYEG campaign. Firstly, you have to bring forward an existing problem and explain how it hinders civic live here in this city. And secondly, you have to propose a solution achievable both through lobbying and through individual actions. This is about grassroots solutions to complicated problems, so please don't bitch for its own sake without offering solutions. We're all good at complaining, but usually not as good at offering alternatives.

The river valley is very pretty. If you can get to it, that is.

With that, I'll start with my own personal Edmonton peeve, which is public transportation. To preface, this is not intended as a criticism of the Edmonton Transit System (ETS); in fact I've found the buses here to be remarkably punctual and the drivers extremely courteous. But as a system, ETS is woefully inadequate for a city of over 1 million people spread over a geographical area larger than Toronto. Unless you work in Edmonton's downtown core and live along either the very limited north-south axis of the LRT system or in the vicinity of West Edmonton Mall, with access to express buses, public transit is a time-consuming and frustrating way to get to and from work, especially in roughly 13-month period of the year when you're huddled in an unheated bus shelter in approximately 16 layers of clothing, shuffling from one foot to the other while your breath freezes and shatters at your feet.

But in actual fact my bone to pick with transit in Edmonton isn't just about inadequate service, it's about the overall public attitude towards it. In Edmonton people talk about improving public transit, but when it comes down to it it's not a priority for most, or at least among the economically privileged adults whose voices tend to dominate civic conversations. I'll never forget attending a talk by Dr. Ted Morton, who at the time was running for leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives, and hearing him talk about public transit in Edmonton. "We need to make sure we provide good transit service for those students and young people who don't have cars." To me this entirely missed the point. A "good" transit system is one that everybody uses, from 21-year-old interns to 60-year-old company directors. What about trying to actually get people out of their cars?

I'll readily admit I'm part of the problem. In my four-plus years as a working professional in Edmonton, I've mostly used public transit to commute to and from work. When I worked at Native Counselling Services on 124 Street it was pretty straightforward, but significantly less so at Merit Contractors Association out in the city's northern industrial asteroid belt. And now working at Edmonton International Airport, getting to and from work has become such a production, involving a combination of transit buses and the Edmonton Skyshuttle service (free for staff, which is nice) that I finally broke down and opted for a second car for our two-person household. So now I'm among the ranks of Edmonton's single-occupancy car army, after swearing I never would be, clogging the roads and burning fossil fuel, because the alternative is spending an hour and a half commuting to work each day in a crowded shuttle.

Every problem has a solution. (source: pcl.com)

To give you an idea of the problem, imagine you live in Edmonton's relatively low-income northeast and are contemplating taking a job in one of the new developments in the west of the city, say in the new Acheson Industrial Area in Parkland County, outside Edmonton's western boundary. By car the trip would take you about 20 minutes. By bus? Try over two hours, if you can even are get a bus connection. Not only is this a colossal obstacle for low-income people who can't afford a vehicle, but it's also a hindrance to business development on the city's energetic periphery. How much more commercial activity would you have if, for example, people had easy access to these areas from the city, and felt inclined to go for drinks in local pubs after work knowing they could stumble onto a comfortable bus thereafter? The area around Southgate Mall has boomed since the lengthening of the LRT line and the creation of a Japanese-style station/mall agglomeration there. You could have a dozen such developments around the city.

So why does the city of Edmonton, a city with one of the highest GDPs on the planet, continue to put up with a public transit system that many developing world cities would be embarrassed by? My feeling has always been that most Edmontonians don't think about it because they've never experienced what it's like to have a really good system. Many people in this city have visited London, Paris or Tokyo as tourists, but very few have actually lived and worked jobs in these places. I lived and worked in Tokyo for four and a half years, first as student and then  as a communications professional, and in all that time the thought of buying a car never even occurred to me. Mind you, Tokyo's daunting traffic and exorbitant parking fees were a factor, but the quality and quantity of subways and overground commuter trains made it totally unnecessary. And in Tokyo, everybody rides the train.

Public transit is often characterized as a liberal, left-wing issue, but pro-business fiscal conservatives also need to be concerned about Edmonton's sub-par transit system and low 11-percent rider rate (compared to 20 percent in Ottawa and 16 percent in Calgary). Already there are signs that the city's lack of user-friendly public transit is having a negative economic impact. In a recent conversation with Tom Koep, Manager of Economic Development and Tourism for Parkland County, he cited the Edmonton region's sub-par transit system as a major threat to economic growth in the city's currently thriving periphery by making it difficult for such areas to attract low-income workers.

“We need a regional transit plan,” says Koep. “So far we’ve seen a scotch tape approach, with St. Albert, Strathcona County, Leduc and Spruce Grove all developing their own systems. There are real transportation issues that need to be addressed. They're talking about building an overpass here which would cost three quarters of a billion dollars. That would pay for a hell of a lot of buses.”

TransMilenio BRT system in Bogota, Colombia (source: railforthevalley.com)

To its credit, Edmonton's municipal government under the leadership of outgoing mayor Stephen Mandel has truly walked the talk when it comes to public transit, with LRT expansion not just on the books but under construction. But there's much more that could be done in the city to encourage transit use, and at significantly lower cost than building expensive rapid transit lines. What about a Bus Rapid Transit system like that originally developed in the Brazilian city of Curitiba and now ubiquitous across South America and many other developing world cities like Istanbul, Jakarta and Ahmedabad, India? Articulated buses running on dedicated lanes along major arteries like St. Albert Trail, the Anthony Henday Highway, Stony Plain Road and so on would provide the same level of efficient service as a train system at a fraction of the cost. Ottawa has this system, with Saskatoon now set to introduce BRTs.

An even more straightforward answer would be a regional carpooling program. Why do we not have dedicated carpool lanes on the QEII and St. Albert Trail, like they do in cities like Vancouver? Carpool lanes coupled with a social media-driven carpooling program could, if done properly, significantly reduce the number of single-occupancy cars on the road. How about a social networking site dedicated to carpooling, giving Edmontonians the opportunity to both save a bit of money and do some good for the environment but also make new acquaintances and forge new business partnerships (and have good conversations) to and from work? It would strike me as fairly easy: you sign up, plug in your commute route, and meet up with people who live in your area and commute to roughly the same area you do. Besides, us grown ups are often complaining about how hard it is to meet new people. Why not do this?

Various carpooling apps, primarily aimed at parents driving kids to school, already exist, and most of which are free.The Carpool School Edition allows you to find out who lives near you and invite them to form a carpool group. You can add members of your group manually or import them from your contacts. The app allows you to manually create a schedule or generate one automatically based on your preferences. If you have a note or update for the group, you can add it in and everyone will be notified. How handy would it be to have an Edmonton-centred carpooling app designed around the needs of working professionals, drawing on your Facebook or LinkedIn contacts? Drop off your kids at school or your dog at the local Stay-n-Play, pick up a colleague at a designated point along the way, and voilà: one less car on the road.

How hard would this be? (source: beyond.ca)

So this is my #BreakSomethingYEG challenge: get out of your damn car, or find a carpooling partner. I realize this is easier said than done, but it takes a decisive shift to change deep-seeded attitudes. I will start with a call-out to anybody living in Edmonton's west end who commutes to the Nisku area near the airport. Want a carpooling buddy? I'm your man. And to anybody reading this post, I challenge you to do three things. Firstly, try taking the bus to work at least once a week. Secondly, try finding a carpooling counterpart, thereby making your trip to work (at least occasionally) a two-occupancy car deal. And thirdly, with a municipal election in Edmonton coming up shortly, press Councillors Leibovici, Iveson and Diotte on these issues - and remind them that this is not simply an issue for the city's students and "young people who don't have cars."

We may live in an oil and gas-rich region, but we all know we can't live like this forever, both for the sake of the planet and our regional economy. Let's put that #MakeSomethingYEG can-do ethos to the test and really start prioritizing public transportation, and reducing our enslavement to the single-occupancy car. We have tremendous civic energy here, as well as access to our leaders, especially now in the era of social media. If anybody can do it, it's us.

So what's your beef about this city, and your proposed remedy? Every problem has a solution, so let's hear yours!

Boeing For The Win - 787 Setbacks Reveal Industry Lessons Learned

A Japan Airlines Boeing 787 'Dreamliner' at Tokyo's Narita Airport (Source: Bloomberg)

On January 7, 2013 a battery overheated and started a fire in an empty Japan Airlines Boeing 787 'Dreamliner' jet on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport. which took emergency crews 40 minutes to extinguish. The following day a second JAL 787 experienced a fuel leak, also at Boston, leading to the cancellation of its schedule flight to Tokyo-Narita. Then the day after that, United Airlines reported a problem in one of its six 787s with the wiring in the same area as the battery fire on the JAL plane, leading the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to open a safety probe on the newly introduced jet.

Not surprisingly, global news media leaped onto the story like a rottweiler on a rabbit, fuelling rumours that Boeing's highly touted new long-range mid-capacity jet airliner was unsafe to fly. This recent bad news about the jet dubbed the 'Dreamliner' by its manufacturers is the latest in a long procession of negative PR fallout surrounding the plane, whose development production were plagued by delays, leading customers such as United and Air India to demand compensation from Boeing. In light the over two-year delay in the plane's maiden flight, which led some to dub it the 'Seven-Late-Seven', the fact that problems clearly remain with the jet could scarcely be worse for its manufacturers.

New design, new potential problems (Source: Digitaltrends.com)

Except of course that it could easily be worse. Far worse. While it was without doubt a bad week for Boeing, the problems were relatively minor ones that resulted in exactly zero deaths or injuries or hull loses. Moreover, the battery and fuel system problems, while they have yet to be resolved, are not atypical of a brand new airplane with kinks still to be ironed out, especially in one as chock-full of new design features as this one. "There’s a lot of new technology on this plane," asserted Richard Aboulafia, Vice President of Analysis at the aerospace market analysis firm Teal Group and a renowned aviation expert. “It’s a very innovative aircraft and the potential for big and small glitches has been magnified hugely as a result of this innovation.”

More importantly, however, Boeing's transparent communication surrounding the issues - and its rapid deferral to the independent NTSB clearly illustrates that the company, which together with Europe's Airbus SAS dominates the world market for large commercial airlines, has learned from the short-term oversights that have had tragic consequences in the past - and in certain cases led to the downfall of previously high-flying aircraft manufacturers.

Tragic Precedents

The Dreamliner is nothing short of a quantum leap in commercial airliner development. While superficially similar to Boeing's previous wide-body twinjets the 767 and 777,  the 787 is an entirely new creature. Unlike previous jets, whose fuselages are made entirely out of metal, the 787 is made largely out of carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic, made with 23 tons of carbon fiber. This makes the jet considerably lighter than its competitors, burning 20 percent less fuel than the similar-sized 767. So groundbreaking is the new jet's materials that existing safety inspections are entirely inadequate, as composite materials don't show cracks and fatigue like metal does. This has meant that in addition to developing an entirely new place, Boeing has also had to develop entirely new testing methods and equipment for ensuring the jet's safety.

The last time commercial aviation took such a dramatic leap forward was a full generation ago, at the dawn of the widebody jet age. And the last such leap before that was in the early 1950s, at the dawn of the jet age. And in both instances, it took massive loss of life and collapse of once-industry-leading aircraft manufacturers for the industry to learn its lessons on proper product testing.

The first jet in the biz (Source: Flightglobal.org)

In 1949 the British aircraft manufacturer de Havilland unveiled the world's first mass-produced passenger jet aircraft, the Comet 1. Based on World War II-era military engineering breakthroughs, the Comet first entered airline service with British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) on its multi-stop revenue flights between London and Johannesburg in May 1952. Subsequent orders were placed by Air India, Japan Airlines, Canadian Pacific and others. The Comet craze lasted less than two years before coming to a tragic end off the coast of Italy in January 1954 when BOAC Flight 781 tore itself apart in midair, killing all 35 people on board. Three months later, another Comet, operated by South African Airways, disintegrated in midair after takeoff from Rome, killing 21 people.

Following the second tragedy, all Comet operators grounded the planes and the British government ordered an inquiry into the plane. After extensive torture-testing of existing Comet airframes, it was discovered that metal fatigue cracks around the square windows of the planes had caused both accidents - and would invariably strike again if the problem wasn't corrected. The remaining early Comet models were either scrapped or modified, and subsequent Comet variants were constructed with thicker metal skin. But while the subsequent models performed well, the de Havilland corporation never recovered from the fallout, and was folded into Hawker Siddeley in 1960. The disasters also saw the UK eclipsed by the United States in commercial aircraft manufacturing.

The next quantum leap in civil aviation took place in the late 1960s at the dawn of the 'Jumbo Jet' age, when America's three largest aircraft manufacturers were racing for the upper hand in the development of high-capacity mid-to-long-range jets. In the end it was Boeing who defined the era with the 747, a plane that would define intercontinental air travel for nearly four decades before its eclipsing by the modern-day Airbus A380 and Boeing 777. The 747 was first flown in 1969 and entered commercial service in 1970. Having being beaten by Boeing, rivals Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas were clambering for the second-place spot with their nearly identical trijet models, the L-1011 Tristar and the DC-10.

The ill-fated Turkish Airlines jet (Source: Airliners.net)

The DC-10 story is a graphic cautionary tale of the dangers of insufficient product testing and lack of transparency regarding such issues upon introducing new technology. The plane entered revenue service in mid-1971, less than a year after its maiden flight, and in less than a year after that its fatal design flaws were already apparent to investigators. In 1972 a near-tragic explosive decompression incident on board an American Airlines DC-10 exposed a dangerous design flaw in the plane's cargo bay doors. The problem was never corrected and less than two years later it surfaced again, this time with tragic consequences, on board Turkish Airlines Flight 981, when an explosive decompression resulted in the deaths of 346 people.

Following the Turkish Airlines disaster, an airworthiness directive was issued by the US' Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and all DC-10s underwent mandatory door modifications. The aircraft continued to fly with major carriers for decades thereafter, but the plane's tainted reputation coupled with its direct competition with Lockheed's L-1011 resulted in far fewer sales than the company had originally projected. The company made a last-ditch attempt to inject new life into the model with a stretched and upgraded version, designated the MD-11, but its limited range relative to equivalent models by Boeing and Airbus saw it sell poorly. In 1996 McDonell Douglas was acquired by Boeing, sealing the latter's domination of America's civil aerospace business.

Fast forward to the present, the Boeing 787 was a full six years in the making before its maiden flight in 2009. Following its first flight, six test prototypes ran up some 4,645 flight hours in the jet. About a quarter of these hours were flown by FAA flight test crews, the agency. And while the investigation into recent problems with the jet are still underway, Boeing spokespersons have noted that the hugely popular 777 model experienced similar 'teething pains' in its first few years of operation. And this Friday the FAA formally announced its opinion that the Dreamliner jet is indeed safe to operate. And in its communication surrounding the disaster, Boeing has emphasized the rigourousness of the testing that went into the 787's development. It seems as though the 'lateness' of its introduction is now being used as a selling point by the company.

In its corporate values, Boeing states that "We will strive for continuous quality improvement in all that we do, so that we will rank among the world's premier industrial firms in customer, employee and community satisfaction." Judging by the company's swift actions this week and its communication of the issues surrounding its newest and most prized product, the company certainly looks like it's upholding this pledge.

Addendum (January 15)

Since the writing of this post, the problems with the Boeing 787 appear to have worsened. Today an All Nippon Airways 787 was forced to make an emergency landing after smoke was seen in the cockpit. Both ANA and Japan Airlines announced today that they are grounding their 787 fleets until further notice. A spokesperson for Boeing asserted that the company is fully aware of the situation and that it "will be working with our customer and the appropriate regulatory agencies."

Ways of Remembering - 9/11 and the Unfolding of Historical Memory

On September 11, 2001, 19 extremists affiliated with the terrorist organization al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial jetliners and conducted a coordinated attack on New York City and Washington, D.C. The attacks resulted in nearly 3,000 immediate deaths, including 246 passengers and crew on the four planes, 2,606 in New York City (in the Twin Towers and on the ground) and 125 at the Pentagon in Washington. In the years following this horrible tragedy, we have all been urged remember 9/11 upon each successive September 11. But as time goes by and historical memory continually twists and turns, it's equally important to reflect on how passage of time has changed our view of the calamity while enriching our 'memories' with additional viewpoints and information unavailable to us at the time.

Not the sort of thing one simply forgets.

It is said that everybody old enough to be aware of world events on September 11, 2001 (and presumably living in a connected part of the world) remembers exactly where they were when the earth-shattering events of that day took place. In my case, I not only remember the day as vividly as it were yesterday,  but I can also trace much of my current passion for writing and communication back to that dark morning in September. September 11 changed everybody in some way. In my case, it heightened my awareness of the dangers of ideological inflexibility, the value of clear and concise communication and the importance of lucid, informed and self-aware historical remembrance.

The week before September 11, 2001 was the start of my first semester of graduate studies at the University of British Columbia. I had returned home after two years of teaching English in Japan and was about to embark on an MA in Japanese History. On Friday, September 7 I taught my first seminar classes as a TA for a first-year course on Twentieth Century World History. For the following Friday's classes I was to give the students their first assignment for the term, which was to write a paper on the way in which the telling of a historical event has evolved over time, from the day of its occurrence to the present.

On the Tuesday morning when the planes hit the Twin Towers, my clock radio snapped on at 6:00 am (Pacific Time) - just as the second plane hit the South Tower. Like probably many others at that time in the morning, my first dazed thought was that I was dreaming, that this couldn't possibly be really happening. But it quickly became clear that it had to be real. I quickly went upstairs to the communal TV room at the St. John's College dorm at UBC, where at least half the residents were glued to the monitor in stunned silence. Nobody uttered a word other than a solemn 'hi' as I entered the room. Complete silence.

I may have been in one of the few job whose life was made easier by 9/11. After a few days of coming to grips with what had just happened, I was as well equipped as anyone could possibly be to lead a seminar on historical memory - and how that memory evolves over time. My work that Friday was easy. Everyone in that classroom was cognizent of having just experienced a historical event every bit as consequential as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 or the moon landing. I went on to frame their assignment along the lines of "Think about how we're talking about the Twin Tower attacks now - and how the media is talking about it. Now imagine how people will talk about it in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years - 100 years."

In retrospect, I was understating the matter considerably. I had no concept at the time of what the permutations of the 9/11 narrative even within the first decade thereafter would look like. In popular parlance, the Twin Tower Attacks became simply September 11, which in turn became 9/11, a epithet that has proved enduring thus far. What began with profound grief and an outpouring of international sympathy quickly distilled into unadulterated anger in the US - and a growing nervousness overseas as to what had been unleashed. The widely supported military overthrow of the Taliban led to the Bush administration's agonizingly long pep-rally for war in Iraq, which succeeded in evaporating much of the international goodwill the US had engendered in a space of under two years. Iraq quickly became a 'Vietnam-lite' quagmire and Bush became only slightly less loathed than Osama bin Laden. In the meantime, the biggest All-American conspiracy fest since the Kennedy assassination rose and thankfully subsided, give or take the occasional reappearance here and there.

The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the inglorious conclusion of the George W. Bush presidency saw yet another change in the zeitgeist. American and international pundits alike began speaking of 9/11 as the beginning of the end of Pax Americana, as heralded by the fallout on Wall Street and the ascendency of China and the other BRICS. Such talk has continued to characterize much of the discussion around 9/11 under the Obama administration, albeit with brief reprieves from the gloom such as that permitted by the killing of the 9/11 mastermind in May of 2011. But on the whole, since those six or seven frenzied years following the attacks, the tone of discussion about 9/11 has remained remarkably consistent - that of a tragic event that shook a nation to the core and, perhaps, triggered a slow unravelling of its once-unmatched superpower status. For the time being at least, our collective memory seems to have reached a plateau of sorts. But suffice it to say, this too will change.

How will the tone of 9/11 discussions evolve from now? It's tempting to say that the date September 11 will eventually take its place among the 'big dates' in world history like August 6, November 11 and December 7 - dates which correspond with events known to everybody but are not necessarily dates that everyone knows off by heart. Then again, the bombing of Hiroshima, the end of World War I and the bombing of Pearl Harbor all took place in a pre-Internet, pre-social media world (even 9/11 was slightly ahead of Web 2.0), meaning that 9/11 has from the very beginning been discussed in very different way from these aforementioned historical events. On August 6, 1945, the only tools available to the Japanese public was a Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper that had been reduced over the course of the war to a skeleton service (about four pages in all) and an obliterated telephone service. Compare that to the mass-tweeting in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011 tsunami and you have quite the contrast. Can digital media do for the communication of historical memory what it has done for communication as a whole? On the one hand it can vastly improve our capacity for remembrance, while on the other it can simply accelerate forgetfulness and distortion.

As a newly minted communications advisor for a major North American international airport (which 11 years ago was among those in Canada that served as a safe harbour for various stranded US-bound aircraft), this September 11 feels all the more significant. The significance of the tragedy to the airline industry was made particularly apparent during a recent conversation with my communications counterparts from Boston-Logan International Airport, the airport from which both of the World Trade Center-bound 767s departed on that fateful morning. I encourage you all to visit the airport's Facebook page, which features a 9/11 tribute every year on the day in question, which simply reads 'Boston Logan International Airport: Remembers'. The digital tools we now have at our disposal allow us to view events like 9/11 from a wide range of perspective, allowing us to enrich our personal memories of disasters with a those of others. In other words, in the age of social media, you don't have to work within an industry to look through the lens with which it sees the world. But we do often need a reminder to look in these places.

In today's connected world, we have unprecedented access to a wide range of perspectives on events like this. We have access, for example, to the social media outlets of institutions like Boston-Logan International Airport and the New York City Fire Department, which were directly impacted by the attacks. We have access to online voices for 9/11 victims and their families. We have access to religious organizations, including Islamic organizations offering their perspectives on the attacks and the forces that may have motivated the 19 extremists at the centre of the plot, as well as access to anti-religious organizations that rail against religion as being a harbinger of extremism and barbarism. And yes, we also have access to the lunatic fringe, from conspiracy theory crackpots to religious zealots of Islamic and other persuasions who remain convinced that the acts were the product of divine will. We can do more than remember. We can enrich our memories with broader knowledge.

Gone but far from forgotten.

And as we remember, it's also well worth reflecting on how the world has changed since the attacks. While the dark side of the 9/11 legacy is well known, ranging from increase in anti-Arab and Islamophobic racism the western world to a convoluted and for the most part poorly executed war in Iraq, the world is - in a number of important respects - a safer place as a result of the tragedy. The post-9/11 changes to airport and on-board security have made airline hijackings much rarer. In the 11 years following the attacks, there have only been 11 attempted hijackings of civil aircraft, of which most were quickly thwarted, with exactly zero fatalities. And while the War on Terror has had its fair share of critics, the fact that the United States has not had a single terrorist act committed on its soil since September 11, 2001 is well worth noting. And while religious extremism continues to poison life in many parts of the world, the high watermark of fundamentalist belief represented by 9/11 has been followed by a slow but palpable ebb. Osama bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda's ideology has been largely discredited and the threat of another 9/11 appears less likely than it has been in a long time. And for this we can all be extremely thankful.

On 9/11, we remember. We remember the sudden anihilation of 3,000 lives and the suffering endured by those left behind in the tragedy's wake. We remember the incredible show of courage put forth by the NYC and Washington firefighters and other emergency personnel. We remember how for a brief instant all nations save a few rogue states joined hands in solidarity with the victims and the victimized country. We remember how in an instant the world was awakened to the scale of the threat posed by international terrorist organizations. We remember all this. But as we do so, we should remember to reflect on how our views of the attacks have been influenced by the passage of time and strive to remember a bit better. Our memories may be notoriously unreliable tools, but with a bit of effort on our part we can all be a bit more expansive and reflective in our remembrance.

'Because It's There' And Other Bad Reasons for Using Twitter

These days it seems like every time I go online I see a new communications person (usually a former communications staffer with some big organization) offering their services as a Twitter guru of some kind. Everywhere you go, somebody seems to be offering seminars like 'Twitter for non-profits' or 'How to maximize your marketing reach through Twitter'. Far be it for me to pooh-pooh anybody offering such services, it does lead me to wonder if the corporate and non-profit world's current obsession with Twitter is becoming a tad overkill.

Don't get me wrong - I like Twitter a lot and find it a very useful tool - one that I'm still learning. But the current Twitter craze is reminding me in many ways of the ESL/EFL obsession that took hold in East Asia in the late-1980s and 1990s. For a time it seems like just about everybody in Japan, Korea and Taiwan (and later in Mainland China) was convinced that mastery of the language of King James and Mickey Mouse was the solution to absolutely every problem and English conversation schools began to outnumber noodle stalls and karaoke bars in Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei. At the peak of this craze, advertising for language school chains like Japan's once-supreme but now largely eclipsed NOVA bordered on the insane (and borderline sexual), featuring handsome, impeccably groomed American men bestowing magical English fairy dust on grateful young Japanese women. Who knew English was such an aphrodisiac?

This wasn't a good reason in high school and it still isn't.

The current Twitter obsession - at least among North American businesses and organizations - is not far from this. Everyone seems to want to use it, and if they are using it they want to be using it better than anybody else - or at least better than their competitors. There are currently more social media monitoring tools out there than I can name and every self-styled communications blogger purports to have some kind of 'edge' on Twitter to share with the world. But when it comes down to it, Twitter, like the English language, is a tool, and like any other tool it's not going to suit every job or every organization. And like any type of tool - be it a saw, a chisel or a shotgun, it requires a need in order to be of any use.

For an organization considering adopting Twitter as a tool, there are three obvious (at least to me) questions that its communications staffers need to ask themselves, namely

• Do I have a story to tell that lends itself to 140-character vignettes?
• Do I have important information to disseminate?
• Is there anybody else out there who is already disseminating this information effectively?
• Do I have the time and the resources to devote to the upkeep of this tool? (See last week's post on the similarities between having a dog and having a social media tool.)

These are not easy questions to answer and require a great deal of thought and research. However, the following criteria are more straightforward, namely a list of wrong reasons to be on Twitter. If you're thinking about adopting Twitter as a tool - and any of the following rationales for adopting it apply - I think it would be wise to re-examine your priorities.




Useful tools in some professions but perhaps not yours



1) Because it's there.

This old mountaineering adage holds no water when it comes to social media tools. A lot of things are there. There's Twitter, yes. There's also Foursquare. There's Yammer. There's the now completely ubiquitous and unsexy Facebook. Hell, there's your frickin' telephone! Just because it's there to be used doesn't necessarily mean that you should be using it.

2) Because it's cool.

No, it really isn't. Even if this were a legitimate reason for using Twitter, this now six-year-old digital tool lost just about any claim to 'coolness' it ever had at least four years ago. In fact it was pretty much officially declared uncool in 2008 - and is now firmly into Facebookville.

3) Because everybody else is using it.

Now this actually is cool!

Actually, this isn't true. In my own research of airport social media best practices, I was surprised to learn that Montréal-Trudeau International Airport doesn't use Twitter at all. In fact they've sized up the tool on several different occasions and each time come to the conclusion that it didn't suit their needs, and in fact would be an unnecessary drain on their resources. Instead they invested in creating a mobile app which, since it's launch at the tail end of 2011, has proven to be very popular among Montrealers. This app, coupled with the airport's old-fashioned phone hotline, do pretty much anything a Twitter feed is designed to do - without the human resources required to be constantly manning a Twitter feed. Sometimes the old tools really are the best ones.

4) I'll look like a laggard if I'm not on Twitter.

Again, not true. Unless you're in a job like mine where you're actively involved in researching what tools different companies and organizations are using, nobody is out there sussing out whether or not you, personally, are tweeting or not. And if they are they've got WAY too much time on their hands. Truth be told, if your organization is communicating well with the tools it's using, nobody is going to fixate on the tools you're not using. Really, nobody cares!

5) I need it to establish myself as a source of first resort in my area.

This may or may not be a legitimate reason for being on Twitter, but it leads back to the original point about whether a) you really do have unrivalled access to certain information and can provide it better than other organizations, and b) you have the time and human resources to devote to the task. The latter point is the undoing of some organizations that leap into Twitterstan before thinking through what they hope to achieve with it. And the trouble with establishing yourself as a source of first resort on anything is that people come to expect this of you - and failing to deliver the goods in this regard will do far more damage to your organization's reputation than not being on Twitter in the first place ever could.

6) The board of directors wants me to.

Why?

7) I like the cute birdie symbol.

I've never actually heard this articulated as a rationale for using Twitter, but it's probably safe to say it's not a good reason for doing so. Perhaps you might consider a company mascot - and hiring an 18-year-old kid to stand outside the building in a bird costume. At least the kid can go home at 5 pm and leave the bird costume at the office.


P.S. Christina Rontynen, if you're reading this post, my whole business about Twitter educators was in no way directed at you. And if you are looking for a great social media consultant and educator - and you happen to be in the Calgary area, Christina, the President of CIPR Communications and currently a digital media advisor for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, really knows her stuff. You can follow her on Twitter at @crontynen or check out her cheeky political blog (which she co-authors with her husband Peter Pilarski) at PCinYYC.com.

10 Social Media Rules I Learned From My Dogs

Source: lolsnaps.com

My wife and I are proud parents of the two most wonderful creatures on earth. Both of them came to us from A Better Chance Animal Rescue shelter in Pincher Creek during the summer of 2008 and have been with us through for very challenging but transformational years for us both. Deedee is an eight-year-old Bichon Frise/Poodle cross and Mochi is a Pomeranian/American Eskimo cross of the same age. While we've only had them for four years, these two ridiculous little love balls are so firmly entrenched themselves into my life that I can scarcely remember what life was like without them around.

As a writer, much of my output over the past few years has been crafted with little Mochi curled up catlike in my lap, with Deedee occasionally pestering me with a toy when she decides I've clearly been sitting on my ass for long enough and it's time I moved my body. While I have nothing against cats or cat people per se (and many of my best writer friends are feline devotees), I've always been of the opinion that dogs are a wise choice of companion for anyone in any creative vocation that involves a lot of sitting and typing. As a writer, it would be very easy to become completely sedentary, and dogs are probably the single best safeguard (with the possible exception of human children) against this problem.

My beloved social media consultants

Over the past couple of years I've become heavily involved in a variety of social media tools and strategies. While my pre-PR self was largely ambivalent to social media, I've since embraced it with full aplomb and found that it suits my eclectic interests, my taste for pithy, compact messaging and my borderline ADD personality. As I've become more and more enmeshed with the SM tools I use, I've come to view my blog, my Twitter feed and my Facebook page as pets of a sort, pets that need to be fed, taken for regular walks, taught new tricks, disciplined on occasion and otherwise given attention. And as a dog parent, such commitments are old hat.

While I most definitely would not advocate discrimination against non-dog owners in any capacity, I do suspect that if I were hiring a social media coordinator and I had two otherwise equally qualified candidates, I might be inclined to go with the candidate with a dog at home. (And if they both have dogs, I'd have to figure out some other way of deciding.) I would certainly be interested in hearing from the cat owners who read this blog - I know who you are - on any similar parallels to life with miniature panthers prowling the house. I can only speak to life with dogs, but the parallels between canine companionship and a thriving social media existence are undeniable.

1) It's a bona-fide commitment.

I should preface this point by saying that I in no way equate abandoned blogs with abandoned dogs. Abandoned blogs, of which there are many, merely clutter up cyberspace, whereas abandoned dogs, of which there are also far too many, are condemned to a horrible and terrifying existence that no sophisticated being should have to endure. Nevertheless, the type of commitment that's required in maintaining a successful blog or an otherwise substantial social media presence is akin to that of having a dog in your life. That dog needs to be fed, given stimulation and otherwise attended to. And while a neglected Twitter feed or blog may not poop on your rug as a statement, it's still a visible stain on your online presence.

2) Consistent daily routines work best.

Anyone with a dog in their life knows the importance of daily routines. Dogs are creatures of habit and are generally happiest when they know when to expect their walks and when to expect their meals. If you've got this in place, you can leave them alone for much of the day feeling confident that they won't get stressed and destructive. The same goes for social media. The best way to get it working for you is to be consistent in your timing and quantity of postings so that your publics follow your rhythms. Once you start skipping out on your morning Tweets and Facebook posts and things fall out of sync, you lose your two-way communication - just as skipping out on walks disrupting patterns is a great way to have bratty hounds on your hands.

3) Consistent messaging is the key.

The key to teaching dogs new tricks, as any dog owner knows, is consistency. Use the same key word and the same gesture over and over again and chances are they'll finally get the hang of it - and before long it'll be ingrained in their muscle memory. At eight years of age (firmly in middle age), Deeded is still learning new tricks, constantly challenging us to up the ante. The same rule applies to digital PR. If you want to get messages across, be it the importance of transparency on the part of construction unions or the exciting new routes offered at your local airport, consistency is key. Keep plugging away at those key words and your publics will catch on.

4) At the same time, don't be too repetitive.

If you're churning out exactly the same message ad nauseam, your audience will eventually tune out. Likewise, if you walk your dogs on exactly the same route every day and only do the same three tricks with them ever, you'll have under-stimulated and probably frustrated dogs. Keep that consistent messaging but take different approaches - an online promotion, a survey, photos and video, et cetera. This is the SM equivalent of spicing things up with your canine friends and taking an occasional trip to a beach or a set of trails you rarely visit.  

5) Don't micromanage your networks.

When dogs mingle in off-leash areas or at stay-n-play facilities, the animals invariably go through a process of sizing one another up and figuring out a pecking order. Sometimes this results in small spats between dogs, and as a dog parent it's sometimes hard not to intervene and 'tell off' a dog that's exhibiting dominant behaviour. Nevertheless, this is a natural process for dogs, which have inherited the hierarchical instincts of their lupine ancestors, and something that's best left to the dogs themselves to deal with. Such is also the way with social media publics. While you provide the structure, the only way to have truly free-flowing two-way communication is to let your people sniff each others' butts and find their natural place in the mix.

6) But do lay down the law when necessary.

Anyone who has watched The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan knows about the importance of asserting leadership with your dog and making sure you remain the Alpha. The same applies to your social media publics. When discussions get out of hand, shut it down, invite the person in question to communicate with you offline or otherwise do what you have to do to diffuse the situation and restore order to your communication networks.

7) Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries!

Dog owners know all about that fine line between giving your four-legged friend the tender loving care and attention they deserve and letting them completely dominate your life. Likewise, any social media manager who values their sanity needs to fit downtime into their life. Dogs, if permitted to do so, will very happily leap onto the kitchen table and eat directly off your plate - and once you let them do that they'll get positively tetchy when you deny them that privilege. As for social media, some positions do indeed require that you be 'on-call' when off-duty (especially anything involving crisis communication), but even in positions like that (especially in position like that), offline time is a must in order to avoid burnout.

8) Take sensible precautions and be vigilant.

Being a responsible dog owner means following municipal bylaws and taking sensible precautions like neutering/spaying and de-worming your animals, making sure they see a vet on a regular basis and otherwise ensuring the safety of your dog - and the rest of the public. In social media terms, this means ensuring you have the necessary firewalls and antivirus software in place, that staff usage policies (whatever they be) are clearly communicated and that rules are being followed. A lack of online safeguards has the potential to do great harm to your organization, just as an unhealthy and uncontrolled dog will cause great harm not only to itself but also to other dogs and potentially humans. While excessive vigilance is counterproductive, normal precautions should keep your social media activities - and life with Fido - running smoothly.

9) Have fun and be engaged.

Dogs, above all, are fun and highly entertaining animals with completely addictive personalities. While many dog behaviour experts advise against thinking of your dog as a miniature human, they do nonetheless possess wonderfully complex personalities which make them absolutely marvellous and enriching company - provided you really, truly engage with them. Likewise, the social media world is a beguiling and often amusing petri dish of human interaction. As the social media voice of a company or organization, conveying an appealing brand identity means engaging with people in a friendly and human manner. A push-only approach characterized by automaton-type posts is a waste of effort. Spirited exchanges with your publics is not only good for your company and your brand but will also make your job a whole lot more fun.

10) Old dogs do learn new tricks.

The old girl's still got game!

As I mentioned earlier in this post, Deedee, age eight, is still learning new tricks. In fact she seems to be a late bloomer in this department, like a 50-year-old human who gets fired up to return to grad school or return to a long-neglected musical instrument with a vengeance. Likewise, older audiences should not be discounted as social media publics. Recent research in the US showed that a full half of adults aged 65 and up are now online and one out of three online seniors regularly uses social networking sites. While social media coordinators still tend to view their assumed public as under 50, this is increasingly not the case - and messaging should not be exclusively aimed at younger demographics. Likewise, don't assume that your 10-year-old pooch isn't up to learning to do a figure eight or speak on command. It happens.

When Bad Communication Kills - The Korean Air Saga

Last week the Calgary Herald announced that South Korea's flagship airline was "very interested" in establishing nonstop flights to Alberta through Calgary, making YYC the airline's third Canadian destination after Vancouver and Toronto. This is hardly surprising considering Alberta's current economic ascendency, as well as Korean Air's continuing runaway success. The past decade has seen the airline emerge as one of the world's largest, most prolific and top-ranked carriers, with its resplendent new hub at Seoul-Incheon International Airport increasingly predominant among East Asia's top airports.

While few people familiar with Korean Air's recent market onslaught (or, for that matter, with the increased Asia-Pacific presence in Alberta's oil industry) would have been surprised by last week's headline, those familiar with the carrier's history might well marvel at how far it has come since it very nearly got banned from Canadian skies altogether. By the late 1990s, Korean Air had developed an unfortunate reputation for having its planes fall out of the sky. Following the airline's most recent fatal incident in 1999, when a cargo 747 plowed into the earth right after takeoff from London's Stansted Airport, the Canadian government told the airline it was considering revoking its landing privileges at Canadian airports. Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines and Air France suspended their partnerships with KAL and the US Federal Aviation Authority downgraded its safety rating - while the US military banned its personnel from using the airline.

The airline's rap sheet from the 1970s to the 1990s was indeed egregious. Between 1970 and 1999 Korean Air racked up over 700 fatalities and lost a total of 16 aircraft in a string of disasters. The most famous incident occurred in 1983 when a KAL Boeing 747 strayed off course into highly restricted Soviet airspace over Sakhalin Island and was shot down by an Su-15 Interceptor in a case of apparent mistaken identity, killing 269 people. In an incident 14 years later, an overtired captain dealing with bad weather and malfunctioning ground equipment smashed his 747 into Nimitz Hill in Guam, killing 206 out of 231 passengers. And in another alarming although non-fatal incident in the early 1990s, a domestic flight from Jeju to Daegu performed a belly-landing after the flight crew had failed to lower the landing gear.


Culture or Language....Or Simply Bad Practices?

In the aftermath of the Stansted crash, Korean Air, now threatened with the possibility of international blacklisting, enlisted the help of an official from Delta Air Lines to conduct an audit of the airline's flight operations. Since virtually all the airline's accidents had resulted from human error rather than structural problems to the aircraft or other such non-human variables, the investigation focused exclusively on KAL's flight crews, covering everything from pilots' command of the English language (the lingua franca of commercial aviation) to the airline's hiring and training procedures. It was investigations of the latter that produced the smoking gun. The firm hired to audit the airline's training procedures noted that the KAL crews were "trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country’s cultural legacy," namely a Confucian culture in which subservience to authority was considered paramount.

The 1999 crash proved to be particularly telling. The cause of the accident was discovered to be a malfunctioning attitude indicator on the captain's side of the controls, which led him to bank the jet until it spun out of control. More tellingly, it was discovered that the first officer's indicator had been working perfectly but that he had failed to inform his commanding office that he was jeopardizing the flight. Studies of the flight's voice recorder shed further light on the climate in the cockpit leading up to the crash, in which an overbearing and increasingly agitated captain had instilled such a climate of fear that none of his subordinates dared question his decisions - even in an apparent life or death situation. The audit also laid blame on Korean Air's longstanding policy of hiring pilots directly out of the ROK Air Force, a practice which exacerbated the strict hierarchical culture among KAL flight crews.

Following the audit, Korean Air announced vast, sweeping changes to its HR practices. The airline stopped hiring its pilots out of the military. Major changes were made to its training procedures, and edits were made to instruction manuals so as to reflect the unique characteristics of Korean culture. The moves were astonishingly successful. Since the Stansted crash, Korean Air has not had a single fatal accident and apart from a single incident in 2007 when a KAL 737 accidentally landed on an unoccupied taxiway at Akita, Japan, instead of the intended runway, the airline has not had a single accident of any kind.

Did language do this?

The Korean Air turnaround is a remarkable success story by any standard. How, then, was it achieved? Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, writes extensively on the Guam disaster (KAL 801). In his analysis of the accident, he contends that the Korean language itself may have hindered effective cockpit communication. Gladwell points out that the Korean language has six conversational levels indicating hierarchy; for example, you would speak differently to your father than to your younger sibling, and different still to your grandfather. In the case of Flight 801, the captain was tired and losing focus while the first officer, who was also subordinate to the captain in military ranking, could do little except 'hint' at a potential danger, and only indirectly. In other words, within the hierarchical structure of the Korean language, he had no means of yelling "You're too low! Pull up NOW!!!"

Others, however, have questioned this prognosis. In a review of Outliers in Asiance magazine, Korean-born American author Sae Park disputes Gladwell's language theory, noting that the author failed to consult a Korean speaker when analyzing the (translated) transcript of Flight 801's flight recorder. Park contends, upon further examination of the transcript, that the flight engineer (who was in fact older than the captain) was not speaking to the captain in a particularly deferential manner, and that while the first officer did refer to his commander as kijang nim (lit. 'honourable captain'), this is no different than referring to a judge as 'Your Honour' in English. And while she concedes that hierarchy rooted in traditional Korean culture (and compounded by military strictures) may well have exacerbated existing problems in the cockpit, Park argues that the notion that the Korean language contains intrinsic barriers to saving a plane in a time of crisis is ridiculous.

What, then, was the problem at Korean Air - and how did it get its act together so quickly? While a militaristic cockpit culture grounded in traditional Korean Confucianism was without doubt a major factor (a fact that the airline itself acknowledged), Sae Park also notes that by the 1990s the airline was facing a pilot shortage as a result of its rapid route expansion through the 1980s andearly 1990s - paralleling the country's explosive economic growth. While a pilot shortage may have contributed to the airline's poor safety record during that time, as it has with other airlines in the past, this situation may ironically have helped it in the long run. By the time of the Guam and Stansted crashes, KAL had already begun recruiting non-military pilots and training them in-house so as to alleviate its shortage of pilots. In the aftermath of Stansted, these already existing processes were simply made universal.

Nevertheless, the real story at Korean Air was the new standards that former Delta vice-president David Greenberg helped introduce. These included rigourous new training and testing standards and new 'cockpit culture' standards, as well as reforms to company promotion and transfer practices that put an end to placements based on connections and friendships. The airline also purchased new crash-warning systems and other technology and began hiring more foreign pilots, a move the airline hoped would both alleviate its pilot shortage and help create a better cockpit communication culture. Whatever the airline did, it appears to have worked, as Korean Air's safety record since the Stansted disaster has been virtually spotless.


Orientalism vs. Universal Best Practices

In her critique of Outliers, Sae Park accuses Malcolm Gladwell of ethnocentrism in his analysis of Flight 801 and Korean Air's onetime safety issues. While Park acknowledges that the rigidly hierarchical cockpit culture that once defined Korean Air's operations was indeed a safety liability, she criticizes Gladwell for making broad generalizations about Korean culture - and the Korean language - that, in her view, amounted to linking Asian-ness (or at least Korean-ness) with one's likelihood to crash a plane. (Call it 'Flying-While-Korean'.) "Implicitly, this logic also privileges western culture," she asserts. "The 'other' is blinded by cultural demands to the point that they are helpless to even save their own lives if it goes against their heritage, while in the west we're lucky to have the rationality to see through such false premises."

It's not just 'eastern' culture.

While Park has a point, it should be noted that modern-day best practices in cockpit communication have been arrived at through decades of trial and error and can in no way be said to be intrinsically 'western'. In fact, cultural characteristics generally associated with 'western' culture have also been implicated in fatal air accidents. In 1978, in one of the worst air accidents in pre-9/11 US history, a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 slammed into a residential neighbourhood outside San Diego after colliding with a Cessna 172, killing 144 people - including seven on the ground. While the primary cause of the crash was discovered to be a miscommunication between the PSA crew and the San Diego air traffic control, analysis of the 727's flight recorder found that the crew had been chatting informally with one another on their descent and had not been paying adequate attention to their surroundings.

One of the changes brought about by the industry in the aftermath of PSA Flight 182 was the 'sterile cockpit' rule, which required that cockpit conversations be restricted to matters related to the operation of the aircraft during critical phases of the flight - normally below 10,000 feet. While this rule is in force across the industry, it has been notoriously difficult to enforce. Its importance was highlighted once again following the crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 in 2009 where, in a situation eerily similar to PSA 182, a Bombardier Q400 commuter plane spun out of control and crashed into a residential neighbourhood in Buffalo, NY when its overtired crew were distracted by their own conversations upon descent into Buffalo. These incidents - and other like them - clearly illustrate that while excessive rigidity in an airplane cockpit is a liability, excessive formality is equally dangerous.

While excessive informality in the cockpit has been widely acknowledged as a safety hazard, none of the writings on the subject - to my knowledge - have seen fit to link this phenomenon to western or American culture in spite of the fact that virtually all the high-profile cases of cockpit chatter leading to accidents have taken place on US airlines. Perhaps Park does indeed have a point when it comes to western double-standards when it comes to behaviour and best practices. It's also worth noting that at the same time that Korean Air was subjected to FAA downgrading and restrictions on its expansion, the same restrictions were also applied to KAL's smaller competitor Asiana Airlines, which to date had had only one serious incident. Perhaps there was a modicum of ethnocentrism at work.

Whatever the case, Korean Air's near-impeccable safety record since its post-1999 reforms clearly illustrates that Korean-ness is not a liability while behind the controls of an aircraft - and that passengers flying KAL out of Calgary, or anywhere else in the airline's ever-expanding network, have nothing to fear from boarding one of its planes.