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My buddy Eric Berman writes about how badly the major airlines have screwed up their recent pricing changes where they charge for checked bags and nickel and dime you on every bit. For what its worth Eric is a former exec at Expedia which I think qualifies him as an expert on aspects of the travel industry. The main point is that there were totally different ways to position this- “we aren’t going to charge you for stuff you might not use”. They sort of successfully did that with most of the changes in in-flight meals. Considering how bad they were I haven’t minded that they don’t provide them anymore as long as I can bring my own food on. What scares me about the checked baggage thing is that the result will be even more people competing for the limited overhead space, and many of them will be infrequent travelers with huge over-packed bags. This could easily turn into a mess with 15 minutes of extra boarding time which would quickly cost the airlines more than they are saving in the first place.

Meanwhile Signal vs. Noise writes about how Alaska Airlines did some smart research to redesign the check in area in Seattle with a projected savings of $8 million this year. Alaska has actually been doing this kind of thing for years- a very long time ago they were one of the first to put kiosks in the Seattle airport. Back then I was flying them a lot and it was great to walk from the parking garage and be able to hit the kiosk right away (before you got up to the full mess of the check-in area) and it would print out your boarding pass with the gate # right there. No milling around looking for the right place and the frequent Alaska travelers got to skip the whole mess.

Its things like this (as well as my recent experiences flying from Washington DC back to Seattle) that put Alaska Airlines in the “new airline” camp. They may have been around for 80 years or so but mostly they still behave more like Southwest and JetBlue than like an old-school airline (American, United, etc…)

From the Church of the Customer blog about how a crew on Southwest treated a passenger’s birthday with a “cake” and some singing. JetBlue and Alaska Airlines are a bit less goofy, but still have a great focus on customer service too. I haven’t flown Virgin American yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

Meanwhile the big old guys that treat you like crap are begging for more government handouts and protection. These guys made $6 billion profits last year, but still they want us to cover over any rough spots for them (while they treat us like crap). This would be a great time to let the economic principle of “creative destruction” play out. Business failures are painful, but with every business failure is an opening in the market for a new more capable player to really do well.

Elliot.org brings us more stories of how American Airlines is manipulating the system to avoid having to pay bump-fees. The only thing is, this isn’t some new tactic created since the bump penalties were recently increased- they have been doing this kind of stuff for over a year.

Just keep in mind- this is an organization that is only still in existence because we bailed them out- $15 BILLION in tax-payer dollars were given to the major airlines, and they still treat their customers like crap who have no other options. If we let more of the “old guard” go out of business rather than bailing them out, it opens up more space for the newer service-oriented (yet typically less expensive) airlines to thrive which would be a great thing all around.

Southwest has posted a cool time-lapse video of the construction of one of their new airplanes.

I hope I don’t offend anyone from Illinois (or Steven Colbert), but that paint job is a bit of an eye-sore. But the whole video is very cool.

Joel writes on outsmarting your airline. I do this all the time- use FlightAware and other services to tell when your incoming flight is actually arriving. Also as a pilot I have access to aviation weather and flow control information and I’ve often checked up on them when the airlines claim a flight is delayed due to ATC flow-control or weather. I’m estimate is that for the major airlines like American, United and Northwest, about half the time they claim delays due to ATC or weather its a lie. Which is not to say that the gate agents are telling a lie themselves- they may not know, but someone at the airline is. More often than not the cause is bone-headed airlines that have scheduled 50 of their own flights to take off or land at the same moment at one of their hubs, which is just inexcusably bad management.

An interesting contrast in airlines is our trip out to Minnesota two weeks ago. Outbound we flew Northwest. I just missed taking a photo of the gate sign showing our “departure time” as 10 minutes in the past. The flight was late (ok, it happens, no big deal) but they never bothered to try to keep people informed or update the displays anywhere.

Our return flight was on Sun Country, one of the newer-style airlines. The contrast was amazing- the return flight was also late. But they made announcements every 10-15 minutes keeping us updated on the status, they frequently updated the board with a projected (and fairly realistic) new boarding and departure time, and even suggested that people call ahead if they having someone picking them up to warn about the potential delay. It was the model of good customer contact through proactive honest communication.

I just don’t believe that its that hard for an airline to keep passengers and gate crews informed of what is really going on- heck, I was in Bend Oregon the other day being picked up by a friend in a small Columbia aircraft and could track his arrival with better precision than Northwest or the other guys would ever communicate to their customers. Travel can be complicated and stressful and if these big airlines would spend 10% of what they spend creating ads showing the beautiful travel experiences, on actually giving a better experience, people might not hate them so much. Instead they are just lazy and take the short cut of telling deliberate lies to try to placate their captive audience. Lets be clear- if it were not for government subsidies, the old guys would have already been out of business by now in a classic case of good capitalist “creative destruction” and there would be more room for the new guys like Sun Country, JetBlue and Southwest to replace them with good service.

Dave posts about some great airline experiences and it doesn’t surprise me that the airlines involved are Southwest and Jet Blue. There is this great opportunity for up and coming airlines that emulate these guys to take over and provide a great, efficient air travel system for our country. The main thing holding this back is the lobbying efforts of the old guys. The old guys grew up under the old system of regulated air travel and while they adapted once the industry was deregulated, they never figured out how to escape the trap of their old business models that were based on charging 10x fares to last minute and business travelers compared to everyone else. They also appear to be stuck in a fundamentally hostile management/labor relationship and the combination results in the bizarre poor service that we all see.

There was a thing on the radio yesterday about a movement to create a passengers bill of rights. This appears to be driven by people who are focused on the incidents where they have been trapped in airplanes sitting on the ground for 5+ hours. My feedback would be that there are some good ideas in this movement, but they are missing the bigger picture. Passing new rules that protect passenger rights is putting a band-aid on the gushing wound. What we need to do instead is to stop subsidizing the old-style airlines and let the bad ones fail. In the mean time we need to provide good customer information on how the airlines are doing and try to remove some of the restrictions that are holding them back. I understand Southwest still deals with some bizarre rules about flights into and out of Texas, and if you look at the pain that Virgin America went through to get permission to fly in the US, its just a shame. Another great move would be to pursue a more consistent energy policy that helps the airlines have more predictable fuel prices. One of the cornerstones of Southwest’s strong business performance over the past decade is that they did a great job of locking in fuel prices before they went swinging all over. In theory the government could be helping provide this kind of stability for the whole industry and even making it available to new entrants in the market.

Kevin Garrison writes a good article on AvWeb about Aviation delays and debunking the myth the airlines have put forth that small aircraft are the cause. This from the perspective of someone flying one of the big jets for a major airline.

Two things are worth noting. The first and most important is that the pilots for the big airlines are not the guys at fault in this situation and are usually sympathetic to fighting the con job their management are trying to pull off. These guys have been the biggest victim of the management incompetence of the major airlines as they have tried to deal with the shifts in their wacky business models. Their work conditions get worse, they get screwed out of their pensions, and meanwhile they feel like they are being encouraged to lie to their customers.

The second is that he points out the real cause of these traffic screw ups- the major airlines for some reason tend to schedule just about every airplane they are flying to take off and leave at the same time.

Now, it may make the schedules look clean at your major hub to have every arrival at 3pm and every departure at 4pm. I bet its even easier on the scheduling software. But its not going to actually work. Unless of course your aim is to intentionally make sure passengers miss their connections so you can avoid having the pay the bump-fees. Hmmm…

So just a reminder. Next time you are out on a taxiway in a line of 20 airplanes waiting to take off. Its not the little-guy holding you up. Its unlikely that we are taking off from the same runway and when we do, we tend to slip in between the jet departures (since we can often take off quickly and turn out of the departure path to get out of the way). Anytime there are 20 jets stacked up other than some major issue with the runway, its a clear sign that the folks running the airline you are flying couldn’t figure out how to coordinate schedules to spread things out a bit in a more sensible way. For organizations responsible for billion dollar machines flying through the air, this stuff should be pretty basic.

Some time back I posted suggesting that Google do a version of Google Maps with aviation charts. It looks like Sky Vector has done a pretty good job of this, although (for now) its only the VFR charts. I have to assume that whomever created this is local since they mention their favorite $100 hamburger destination is Friday Harbor, but the site has no data that I could find on the actual people involved.

In any case, good work, and I hope the site does well.

I finally discovered my talk on Maximizing Performance in Aircraft Engines available for your viewing pleasure on the web.

I’d forgotten how embarrassing it is watching a video of yourself… Also, sorry about the feedback at the end.

Slate has an article about how the airlines are seeing record profits while service is at an all-time low. I’d just like to add a few notes to the article.

The article points out that customers can blame others for their misery- the FAA, the TSA, and the weather. Except as far as I can tell the FAA air-traffic system is overall working really well. The airlines try to hype how much of a problem it is, but that is mostly because its their favorite excuse and they hope to make a grab to get other users of the airspace (small airplanes, other carriers) out of their way. As for the weather, it can sometimes be an issue when there are actual big storms, but its not the sort of thing that a well-run airline couldn’t accomodate for. Plus, I’ve caught airlines lying numerous times about either FAA traffic issues or weather as an excuse for late flights. If you are a pilot its not that hard to hear the gate agent blame one of those two for a delay, go sit down in your seat with a laptop and a wireless connection, and check for actual flow-control notices and/or weather issues. So far my experience is that about 50% of the time its a straight-out lie. I’m not saying that the gate agent knows that its a lie, but someone at the airline is spreading false information to pass the blame.

But the article’s main point is true- most people believe this stuff, so the airlines manage to dodge the blame for their mismanagement.

Of course to call it mismanagement in the technical sense would imply that its poor business for the company involved. The amazing thing with the screwed up situation with this industry is that the companies have managed to position themselves so that not only do they make big profits while treating the public like crap, but we also subsidize them to the tune of billions of dollars to do it. I guess when you put it that way, maybe it should be written up as a nice Harvard Business School Case Study “how to treat your customers like crap and make billions”.

My favorite example is what I realized American Airlines is doing with overbooking in my little incident with them. The article points up that the load factor (filled seats) has risen from 66% to 78% over the past decade. Handled correctly this is a good thing for everyone because it results in a more efficient economic system. The catch is that there are supposed to be protections in the system against the airlines pushing it too hard in their favor.

If they overbook an airplane and have to bump you, they owe you some money. So if they do it too much, they start to lose money. Except that American has realized that by causing passengers to miss their connections, even when its 100% the airlines fault, they get out of the bump fees. Everyone misses the flight they were booked on and winds up on the next flight, but with no rights to any compensation. The airline gets all the money from filling every seat in every flight, working their bizarre pricing schemes to maximize the pennies they wring out of every passenger.

And THAT is I guess what you would call good management. Hand out those big bonuses!