Isn’t it interesting how air travel works?
You fly thousands, sometimes many thousands of miles (or kilometers), land, taxi to the gate and wait, either for a gate or a jetway. The last few steps of your journey are tantalizingly close but somehow that last piece never gets done.
Last week, it was a jetway. No jetway. So we waited for the last 0.0001% of our journey to be bridged by what in effect is a large straw on wheels to roll up to the plane. While we waited, I read United’s Hemispheres magazine. in particular, the CEO Letter, which caught my eyes because it was entitled “Eco-Skies in Action“. Nice story.
In it, Chairman, President, and CEO of United Airlines, Jeff Smisek has compiled what appear to be some striking statistics to boast about:
- reducing fuel consumption by 85 million gallons this year
- using lighter products, ground power instead of onboard auxiliary power
- improved flight planning
- investing in 150 new 737 fuel-efficient aircraft
- being the launch customer for the new Split Scimitar winglet which reduce fuel burn by 2 to 5 percent
- Headquarters in Chicago is LEED certifed
- Eco-Grants initiative gives 10 $50K cash grants to 10 local environmental organizations associated with employees
- and the list goes on
And this was going to be our post for this week.
Until.
Until what? Until we noticed this posting on the FlyingClean website. In this post, which we encourage you to read, we see a story behind this story. Now we’re not saying that United should NOT be recognized for the work they are doing. Of course they should be applauded for their efforts.
But – and this is where the connection to project management comes in – it’s important to look behind estimates, specs, requirements and other numbers like that to get the real story.
Here’s the key snippet from that posting:
“And the real story for United Airlines, is that they are actively and aggressively fighting a plan in the European Union that would reduce pollution on all flights going in and out of Europe. This plan would save 200 million tons of carbon pollution from being emitted into the air in one year. By comparison, all the activities United outlines in its “Eco Skies” project are aimed at achieving a reduction of 828,750 tons of carbon pollution in one year. In other words, United is blocking a policy that would achieve carbon reductions 240 times greater than the current goal it is touting.”
Personally, I think part of the problem is that carbon pollution is measured in such large numbers that average laypeople can be satiated by what sound like gigantic sums, like 85 million gallons or 828,750 tons. In this case that ‘s 0.83 million tons, when we’re dealing with hundreds of millions of tons when it comes to airlines – because they’re such a carbon fuel-intensive industry.
In any case we think this is a good reminder that when it comes to information presented to us as project managers, whether it’s sustainability info like this, or an estimate for refurbishing a machine part, or a vague requirement from a customer – that it’s our job to push back, dig deeper, and validate the information, otherwise we are working with bad input.
Beware! As our blog post photo shows… Garbage In – Garbage Out.
