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Tens of thousands of planes take off, land, and perform touch-and-goes at the Marana Regional Airport in southern Arizona every year. Without an air traffic control tower, it’s a calculated dance that requires communication by pilots.Two small planes collided in midair over one of the runways on the outskirts of Tucson last week. One hit the ground and caught fire, sending up a plume of black smoke. The remains of two people were found in the charred wreckage. The other plane was able to land, with those occupants uninjured.The collision was the latest aviation mishap to draw attention in recent weeks. The circumstances vary widely with each case, however, and experts who study aviation accidents say they don’t see any connection between them.Chatter over the airwaves has provided some clues about what happened in Arizona. A chief flight instructor who was in the air with a student that day heard the commotion over the radio: One plane was attempting a touch-and-go when another clipped its propeller while attempting to land.Erwin Castillo, who works for IFLY Pilot Training, recalled hearing one pilot scream: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! He just hit us.”It will be up to federal investigators to determine what caused the crash, a detailed process that will take months.While some observers suggest having a control tower may have made a difference, experts say not having a tower doesn’t mean the airport is any less safe; pilots just have a different set of communication procedures to follow. How many airports in the U.S. have control towers? Of the 5,100 public airports across the country, only about 10% have towers staffed by people who direct the flow of traffic. These are the busiest of airports, with complex operations and large volumes of commercial flights.For the airports without control towers, pilots rely on radio communications and the principle of “see and avoid” to ensure they can maneuver safely. The concept is drilled into pilots from Day 1 of their training and it’s applicable regardless of the kind of airspace they’re in, said Mike Ginter, a retired Navy aviator and senior vice president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association’s Air Safety Institute.He likened it to being behind the wheel of a car and practicing all the safety rules learned in driver’s ed.“You don’t have to tell the state police that you’re getting ready to drive to the supermarket to get groceries. You just go out, and you look both ways before you turn, and you turn on your turn signal and you drive,” he explained, saying there are basic tenets of safety that are ingrained in pilots.The system has worked well, considering the sheer number of planes coming and going daily from small airports and the roughly 26 million hours of flight time logged by general aviation pilots. What prompted regulation of the friendly skies? It was a summer day in 1956 when two commercial flights left Los Angeles within minutes of each otherone en route to Chicago and the other to Kansas. Flying under visual flight rules, the planes collided over the Grand Canyon in Arizona, killing all 128 people aboard. The crash site is now a National Historic Landmark.Even though U.S. air traffic had more than doubled since the end of World War II, it was this disaster that helped to fuel efforts to overhaul aviation safety.Legislation was introduced in 1958 to create an independent federal agency that would provide for the safe and efficient use of national airspace. The bill was signed within months and the first Federal Aviation Agency administrator was appointed.Responsibilities evolved, and the agency became the Federal Aviation Administration as air traffic control systems were being modernized. Are new control towers being planned? Through the FAA, airports can apply for federal grants to modernize and build air traffic control towers that are staffed by private companies and contract workers, rather than FAA staff.Nearly 180 airports nationwide are eligible for funding under the program, with most looking to upgrade existing towerssome that date back to the 1940s and others that were meant to be temporary.A review of funding awarded through the program over the past four fiscal year shows a handful of airports were awarded money specifically for site studies, environmental work and construction of new towers. That includes airports in Bend, Oregon; Boulder City, Nevada; and Mankato, Minnesota.In the case of Marana, the airport was first accepted into the program in 2019 but the coronavirus pandemic stalled efforts to get a tower built by the five-year deadline. Airport officials have said they now are on track to complete the project by 2029. Will federal job cuts affect air traffic safety? U.S. President Donald Trump issued a memo in late January to top transportation officials, ordering an immediate assessment of aviation safety following the midair collision of an Army helicopter and commercial passenger jet over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. Sixty-seven people were killed.Trump raised questions about hiring practices within the FAA, suggesting previous Democratic administrations had shifted away from merit-based hiring.Some FAA jobs have been eliminated as Trump streamlines the federal workforce and looks to ferret out waste and curb spending, but less than 1% of the agency’s more than 45,000 workers were probationary employees targeted as part of the job cuts, federal officials have said.In addition, the administration has said no air traffic controllers or critical safety personnel were fired as part of the effort. But labor and industry groups say even without cuts, air traffic control towers were already understaffed.Trump has said that he would support legislation aimed at modernizing the nation’s air traffic control system. In a letter sent to members of Congress last week, the industry group Airlines for America pushed for emergency funding for critical air traffic control technology and infrastructure as well as air controller staffing and training. Associated Press writer Sejal Govindarao in Phoenix contributed to this report. Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Patrón says all the tequila it has ever made since 1989 has been free of additives. The brand is now ready to get loud and talk about it. This week, Patrón is debuting a new additive-free marketing campaign that will run across digital, print, and out-of-home advertising in key markets including New York City and Los Angeles. The additive-free copy features lines like Our secret ingredient is that we have no secret ingredients and When tequila is this good, additives dont add anything. Since Patróns inception, the brand says it has only made tequila with three ingredients: 100% weber blue agave, water, and yeast. The few exceptions are for the brands liqueurs, including orange and coffee flavored expressions, which always include added flavoring. But even the base spirit used to make those liqueurs only feature the three core ingredients. Consumers are not going up to bartenders and asking for a tequila and soda and expecting to get a splash of caramel coloring or a sprinkle of glycerin, says Ned Duggan, chief marketing officer at Patrón, in an interview with Fast Company. We think that they want to know what’s in their tequila. Patróns additive-free campaign may reignite a debate thats been swirling in the tequila industry about the use and marketing of additives. Additives are permitted if less than 1% of the weight of the tequila, without any requirement of disclosure, according to the standards set by the Tequila Regulatory Council, or CRT, a group thats backed by tequila brands, agave producers, and distributors to monitor and certify all tequila. Common additives that are in tequila include sugars and sweeteners like fructose and aspartame, oak extract, and caramel coloring. Patrón estimates that as much as 80% of tequila brands on the shelf today use additives. [Photo: Patrón] Agave typically needs six to eight years before it is ready to harvest, but with a supply shortage and higher prices, brands have started to pull agave from the earth after just two to three years. That results in a bitter flavor, and some producers have begun to lean more heavily on additives to combat that bitterness. For aged tequilas like aejo and reposado, caramel is used to improve the consistency of the color and make it appear older, as if it had been aged in oak barrels for a longer period of time. Patrón says 61% of consumers prefer additive-free liquors, citing a global survey conducted by the brands parent company Bacardi. Retailers have taken notice too, carving out shelf space that only promotes additive-free tequilas. Some mixologists prioritize crafting additive-free tequila libations. We recognize that people are caring more and more about what they’re putting into their bodies, and also the ingredients that are in the brands that they’re putting in their bodies, says Duggan. Among the loudest proponents of additive-free clarity is Grover Sanschagrin, who along with his wife Scarlet, cofounded an app called Tequila Matchmaker. The couple had developed a program that would certify tequila brands as additive-free and then share that information with consumers who were curious to know what was in the liquor they were drinking. But last year, the Sanschagrins home was raided in Mexico, part of a pressure campaign he says was spurred by the CRTs anger about Tequila Matchmakers push for transparency. The Tequila Matchmaker app still exists for tequila reviews, but provides no information about additives. The Sanschagrins also created a new U.S.-based nonprofit called the Additive Free Alliance, which is angling to set up an independent process to identify and list additive-free brands, but thus far includes no tequila producers, only one agave-based vodka and a couple of mezcal brands. Theres a void now, says Sanschagrin. Every brand is basically saying they are additive-free and now there is no way to offer proof of that. In 2023, Patrón announced an additive-free seal, a label that was designed to appear on the brands bottles, a bid for transparency that was blessed by the CRT at the time. But that on-packaging messaging never came to fruition. I think we were a little bit ahead of the rest of the industry and the CRT ultimately requested that we not move forward, says Duggan. But that’s why it’s been so important for us to launch this campaign where regardless of whether it’s on our bottle or not, we are being forthcoming with consumers and transparent about our no additive message. A memo circulated by the CRT last year, obtained by Fast Company, told tequila producers that because additives are permitted under the 1% level, they believe there is no such thing as an additive-free tequila. The CRT ordered distillers to stop marketing tequila as additive-free, saying it was a false and misleading statement that could harm the spirits reputation with consumers. The CRT didnt respond to requests for comment. [Photo: Patrón] Sanschagrin welcomes the message that Patrón is sending with the new marketing campaign, both to consumers and tequilas regulatory body. The CRT overreached and somebody needs to check them, he says. Im excited that Patrón has decided to take this on. The additive-free movement also reflects an evolution of how tequila is produced. When tequila sales first began to boom in the U.S. in the 1980s, most were gold tequila, or mixto, a tequila made from a minimum of 51% agave and the rest from other sugars. Patróns launch, and other tequilas that have since entered the market, popularized the use of 100% agave and that claim became the aseline that consumers look for when buying any tequila north of $20. But the 100% agave claim became more difficult to stick to as tequila demand has soared. Tequila and mezcal sales now total $6.7 billion in annual revenue in the U.S. market, the second-most popular liquor category following vodka, according to the trade group the Distilled Spirits Council. Dave Karraker, president of PR consultancy Raptor Communications, says the 100% additive-free claim is a way that brands like Patrón can distinguish themselves from the crowd. How do I differentiate myself from all of these players that are adding additives, he asks. As a marketer, you’re looking for points of differentiation to lean into, that are on trend with consumers.
Category:
E-Commerce
Riddle me this: What exactly is Trello?Despite counting myself as a heavy-duty power user of the product for well over a decade now, its a question Ive long struggled to answer. Technically, Trello has always seemed to fall into that group of apps folks like to frame as project management toolsproducts like Asana, ClickUp, and Notion that do a pinch of everything and are as much note makers, info savers, and life managers as they are project organizers.But Trello in particular has always been a bit of a chameleon. Personally, Ive used it for everything from storing story ideas to mapping out my weekly newsletters and even organizing my home workouts. Part of what makes the app so powerful is its versatility. With a flexible series of boards, columns, and cards acting as its core interface, you can shape it into serving practically any purpose imaginable for yourself or your company.It seems, though, that that very same versatility may have morphed into a challenge for the product. This week, Atlassianthe business-tech behemoth that bought Trello for $425 million in 2017 and brought it into its sprawling software empireis announcing Trellos biggest pivot to date. Its essentially a total reinvention, despite the fact that on the surface, not all that much actually seems to be changing.So, here it is: As of this spring, Trello will no longer be a project management toolor whatever else you want to call it. Itll be a personal tasks app, presented as being the best all-around hub for juggling all of your important to-do items, no matter where they may originate. Notably, too, itll now be aimed at individual users, not teams, which marks a pretty big shift from its original focus.But in an appropriately Trello-y twist, the services trademark versatility isnt going anywherefor the most part. And in spite of the official new framing and all the added elements that come with it, its still up to you to decide how you want to use Trello and what you want it to be.Outside of a small subset of early beta testers, most Trello users will see its new touches sometime in April. Thats when Trellos next era will truly begin.The Trello talefrom inception to reinventionIve been spending much of this month living with the still-under-wraps new version of Trello, and Ill share some detailed thoughts and impressions about what its all about in a moment. First, though, before we can wrap our heads around Trellos present and its future, we need to take a swift trip back to its past.Trello first entered the world as a concept nearly 14 years ago, in September of 2011the brainchild of Michael Pryor and Joel Spolsky. (Pryor stuck around to lead its development post-Atlassian-acquisition until mid-2022.)From the get-go, the pair described the app as a totally horizontal productmeaning, in the words of co-founder Spolsky at the time, it can be used by people from all walks of life: Some people saw Trello and said, Oh, its Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way. Yeah, its that, but its also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact, Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people. That versatility and the tough-to-pin-down quality that comes with it was a key part of Trellos foundation, in other words. It may have initially been inspired by the engineer-adored idea of Post-It Notes arranged into columns on a whiteboard, but it was always meant to be everything to everyone, without any guardrails or specific definitions for exactly how it should be used.Trellos board-centric interface has long been the services calling card. [Image: Trello]Over time, that underlying elasticity never wavered. But Trello began to be positioned as more of a team-oriented toolthat whole project management thing. In the context of its ultimate home within Atlassian, a company known for collaboration software, that focus made senseeven if Trello did always overlap somewhat awkwardly with the organizations homegrown Jira offering.By 2021, Atlassian had introduced a whole series of new views that promised to transform the Trello experience and make it even more well-suited for multiuer productivity. You could switch away from the standard Trello boards and view your data instead in a spreadsheet-like Team Table View, for instance, or flip over to a Timeline View that put all your info into a year-long spectrum. You could even opt for a location-centric Map View built specifically with sales and service teams in mind.And thats exactly where Gaurav Kataria, Atlassians head of product for Trello since 2020 and a former Google Cloud executive, sees the service as starting to lose its way.Typically, everything tries to become the one tool to manage everything, like one tool to rule them alland typically, they tend come to become more complex, Kataria says. It has happened to every tool in the industry, Trello included.Kataria and his team decided it was time to step back and really think about what made Trello special, why people appreciated it, and where it should fit into our personal productivity puzzles.Meet the Trello task transformationOfficially, todays Trello announcement is about a fresh set of features coming into the servicefeatures that aim to make it easier to capture and organize all types of task-oriented info.But beyond the surface, the announcement is really more about redefining what Trello is for and how Atlassian, at least, wants it to be seeneven if you still have the power to shape it into something broader.We are taking a step back and staying that rather than trying to be that one tool, which is the project management tool for the whole team that can handle all levels of complexity and dependency and reporting, how about we focus on making the individual user more productive, Kataria says. Rather than being everything for everyone, lets be really useful to the one user thats using the product.The team behind Trello determined that the best way to do that was to shed Trellos murky project management moniker and frame the app as an all-purpose to-do hub that pulls in info from all sorts of other services and makes it exceptionally easy to organize. (The service will still offer its same generous free plan, which includes unlimited cards and up to 10 boards for individual usersalong with its existing premium and enterprise-level plans for companies that want to provide the service to larger groups of workers.)The centerpiece of that strategy is a new Inbox feature that exists as a sidebar to the left of every Trello board youre viewing. The idea is that its a landing pad of sorts for any type of task youre thinking abouta place for all that stuff to show up in Trello without any real effort and then be ready for you to drag wherever you see fit.The new Trello Inbox is a landing pad for all your incoming tasks. [Image: Trello]Today, if suddenly, a new idea pops into your head, you might have to first decide which board it goes into, which list it goes into, and does it go into the middle of the list or the top of the listso theres a little cognitive burden that you have to go through before you add something to Trello, Kataria says. We want to remove that cognitive burden.To that end, Inbox offers four integrations to start: Emailwhere you can forward any message to a special address to have it instantly added into your Inbox Slackwhere you can use the inbox emoji reaction () or the native Slack save-for-later feature to save any message into your Trello Inbox Jirawhere you can click a new native menu command to pull any issues from a project into your Inbox And Siriwhere you can simply ask your iOS device to add something into Trello to get it into that same Inbox view The Trello Inbox integrates with email, Slack, Jira, and Siri to start. [Image: Trello]Android support is on hold for the moment because of Googles awkward Assistant-Gemini transition and the current lack of support for third-party integrations with Geminibut Kataria tells me the team is watching the situation closely and plans to add in support as soon as it becomes possible. And in the meantime, a button on the Trello Android widget can serve as an only slightly more complex way to achieve the same end result.Atlassian plans to add support for some Microsoft-specific integrations next, but beyond that, its relying on the fact that almost every external service generates notifications of some sorttypically via either Slack or emailand so it can tap into those notifications easily via its existing integrations without requiring any additional connections or data access.We dont need to build a native integration with every tool under the sun, Kataria explains.As part of its tasks-centric transition, the service is also adding in the ability to check off a card and mark it as done from any board viewsomething Kataria says has been the companys longest standing feature request.By default, when you mark a card as done, it stays in place and just gains a checkmark indication on its cover. But thanks to Trellos powerful automation systemthe feature formerly known as Butler, for any of my fellow Trello long-timersyou can take total control of that process and set the system up to work any way you like. You might create an automation rule that instantly archives any card when its marked as done, for instance, or that moves it to a special list where finished cards are stored. The power is entirely in your hands, which feels like a thoughtful blending of the traditional Trello philosophy and its newly reshaped purpose.The user is still very much in control, Kataria says.All of that aside, what makes the setup especially interesting is the way Trello is integrating AI into all of this in a similarly thoughtful and actually useful way.Trellos finer task touchesRather than cramming in the standard and often silly write/rewrite text for me or make a list for me-style generative-AI options, Trello is opting to lean on AI solely to transform whatever you add into your Inbox into a simple, task-like summarywith a succinct title for the associated card, a single-paragraph overview of the info in its description field, and then the full text and a link back to the original item for further reference.Trellos AI is all about making info easier to managenot writing or organizing it for you. [Image: Trello]It works brilliantly well, in my experience, and makes me wish every app offered something similar. And, suffice it to say, I dont at all find myself missing the option to have the service write stuff or attempt to organize stuf for meand then, in all likelihood, having to waste my time redoing and fixing what it did. That seems to be exactly the experience the Trello team is aiming to create.The reason people use Trello is because it reflects their mind, Kataria says. We want to remain really true to that spiritthat Trello is about how people see the world, not about how they follow a certain workflow or process.(If you want, you can still add cards directly to a specific board like before, by the wayand as of this week, doing so will incorporate the same AI formatting magic present in the new Inbox approach.)Ultimately, Inbox is just another list in Trello. But it lives in that special sidebar that makes it easy to access as a single starting point for any incoming itemsuntil and unless you decide to sort and file them into a board.Inbox and its AI elements also go hand in hand with another new task-oriented Trello addition known as Planner. Trellos Planner is an integrated calendar that connects to Google Calendar (with support for Microsoft Outlook on the way soon) and lets you drag and drop tasks from your Inboxor any Trello boarddirectly into that day-to-day view. That way, you can see all your tasks alongside your agenda and plan out your hours accordingly, with the full perspective of everything on your plate.You can drag cards from your Inbox or any board directly into the new Trello Planner. [Image: Trello]Its a step forward from the tacked-on calendar elements Trello previously provided, and it ties back into the newfound goal of making Trello all about the individual rather than the team.All the previous calendar views are the legacy of trying to solve project management use cases, Kataria says. With the Planner, were really thinking about planning your day, planning your week, where youre only looking at your calendar.The approach actually reminds me a lot of Akiflow, a calendar and tasks app I wrote about last fall and have been personally using ever sinceonly, for better or for worse, Akiflow is solely a calendar and tasks app. Trello, in contrast, has the advantage (or maybe distraction) of all the board elements and the broader organizational opportunities they offer.Speaking of which, for now, at least, all of Trellos legacy elements and potential use cases will continue to be supported. Kataria hinted that certain elementslike those team-centric Timeline and Table viewsmay be phased out eventually, over time (and will certainly be de-emphasized in the meantime).But the general goal seems to be to keep allowing everyone to use Trello in whatever way they see fit, even if personal task management is now the main purpose being presented. Some actions around more complex team-oriented project management uses will now lead to gentle nudges to move over to Jira for such purposesa move thats frankly surprising Atlassian has managed to resist up until now. But everything from automations to the rich ecosystem of third-party Power-Up add-ons will remain, just with the added emphasis on Trello being the place for personal productivity.Its [still] a project, but a project thats born out of your own mind, Kataria says. Trello is so well-loved as a tool that people bend it in different ways to make it whatever they want it to become.Card-mirroring is one of the smaller but still significant touches coming into the new Trello. [Image: Trello]Only time will tell, of course, if the world embraces the services new task-centric framing or if people keep treating it as the versatile productivity power-tool its known to be. Either way, its creators seem content with knowing theyre shifting the focus to individuals over teams and presenting their best vision for how Trello can help.We are really thinking about how the world is going to change over the next decade and how we can make every individual more productive, Kataria says.Be the first to learn about all sorts of interesting new productivity treasures with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligencea single eye-opening new discovery in your inbox every Wednesday!
Category:
E-Commerce
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