Last weekend my wife was stuck at the airport in Dallas — not DFW, but the smaller Love Field, the home of Southwest, the airline that accounts for almost all the traffic. That’s a shame because my wife could have used some options with other carriers. Southwest, you see, was having mechanical troubles.
Or, perhaps, mechanic troubles.
After years of wrangling for a new union contract, it seems a cadre of the wrench-and-screwdriver set came down with a case of hyper-punctilious adherence to the safety manual. The airline’s chief legal counsel Mark Shaw described it as an unlawful effort “to negatively impact Southwest’s operations by writing up maintenance issues that are not based on safety issues and historical practice.”
Pish-posh said the head of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, Bret Oestreich. He told his members: “Doing your job as a licensed Technician is not illegal.” There is no evidence that he either winked or nodded when he wrote, in bold: “You, as a federally licensed Aircraft Maintenance Technician, have an obligation, to ensure aircraft upon which you work only carry passengers in an airworthy condition.” According to the Chicago Business Journal, such vigilance has included grounding a plane “because of a malfunctioning tray table.”
The whole thing reminded me of “Brazil,” filmmaker Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece, a tragicomic take on totalitarianism. The movie draws a dystopia ruled by brutal paper-pushers, a triplicatocracy one could call it.
In one scene, the hero’s HVAC goes bonkers. He resigns himself to wait for days, maybe years for the government repairmen to show up at his apartment. And then who should appear, but an independent heating and cooling technician, a notorious criminal who contemptuously rejects paperwork. He fixes the problem, but before he can make his escape, the government mechanics, one of them played with gleeful menace by a leering Bob Hoskins, unexpectedly arrive. They push their way in to look for evidence of unauthorized and thus unlawful air conditioning repair.
“Have you got a 27b-6?” the hero demands in desperation. It pulls them up short. Hoskins’ partner gets reduced to barmy convulsions. “Now look what you’ve done to ‘im!” After fighting over the missing form, Hoskins, defeated, gives in and drags his deranged sidekick out. “We’ll be back,” he growls. “We’ll be back.”
I last thought of the 27b-6 a few years ago when Charles Murray wrote a book encouraging citizens to thwart the regulatory state through large-scale civil disobedience. To keep the authorities from picking off rule-breakers one by one, Murray advocated setting up legal defense funds to pay their attorneys’ fees. Such funds would be “unquestionably subversive,” Murray wrote. “They will openly be trying to pour sugar into the regulatory state’s gas tank.”
I was always convinced Murray had it wrong. The way to flummox a regulatory system isn’t to break the rules and then do a rope-a-dope in hopes prosecutors wear themselves out pummeling you. Instead, the savvy strategy is to bury the system in its own paperwork, to be more officiously bureaucratic than the bureaucrats, to be ever-ready to demand regulators provide you with the obligatory 27b-6.
It is an oddity of the regulatory world that it functions only because it gets enforced flexibly. Southwest can only keep its fleet flying as long as the mechanics bring a certain reasonableness to their jobs. But of course, all that reasonableness and flexibility, as favorable as those characteristics may sound, merely facilitates the growth of government and all its rules.
Such were my deep thoughts at Reagan National’s Terminal B pick-up lane well after midnight as I waited for my wife’s long-delayed flight. My regulatory-policy musings were interrupted here and there by the policeman committed to enforcing the curbside lane rules. He yelled at me more than once to get my car in gear and make another loop around the airport.
I had the good sense not to ask him for a form 27b-6.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
