New legislation proposed to block inflight phone use

by Grant Martin on

It seems that people are sorely divided on whether airlines should or should not allow mobile phones to operate while in-flight. The technology and means to implement it are now available, and many carriers in the EU are starting to offer the service from the skies. Many US airlines are following suit given legislation that was passed a few weeks back permitting it.

And in all likelihood, we will be using mobile phones in the skies within a few years. Too many business people need the technology while in-flight and I’m sure are willing to pay dearly for it. That money that they bring is what will motivate the market’s development.

Don’t think that America is going to go quietly though. Several lawmakers including Jerry Costello, the chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee have recently proposed a bill to block mobile calls while in flight, calling it the HANG UP act, “Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace”. The law would essentially block carriers from allowing passengers to make calls while in flight.

It’s a quaint idea and one that I personally wouldn’t mind seeing passed (admittedly, loud talkers drive me buggers), but in the end I think Costello’s efforts will be in vain. At some point, I suppose that we old codgers have to buck up and accept change.

New website: Delaycast

by Abha Malpani on

A new website called Delaycast has just gone into beta. As the name suggests, it’s a website that forecasts flight delays so that you can optimize your travel time.

Run by analytical professionals with a strong base in statistics, they run historical flight performance details into advance predictive mathematical models to understand flight delay patterns. Like this they predict future flight patterns basis the airport you are flying from and the time of your flight.

So (as I understand) Delaycast will give you the odds of your flight being on time or getting delayed, calculated from historical data. These odds are useful when booking because you can keep in mind the chances of you being delayed, missing connections, and the possibility of unintended stay-overs. Sounds like they use some math version of Probability(?)

The estimates are based on historical data and you can only search delays basis airports (not flights). They project 4-5 months in the future, and of course, since they are estimates, there are chances that their predictions don’t hold through. To add to that, understandably, they do not take into account “in the moment” delays that could happen while you are flying: weather delays, or technical difficulties that might occur on the day.

In my mind, the main causes of flight delays are: 1) weather 2) technical difficulties in air 3) late take-off due to technical difficulties 4) not being able to land because of issues at destination airport 5) reputation of airline. Other than the reputation of the airline, none of these factors are taken into consideration at Delaycast.

So, all in all, it’s surely a novel concept that provides a service if you take it into account when booking flights. However, everything can change on the actual day of the flight, so how useful is it really?

Here we go again: Saturday night stay may be required

by Iva Skoch on

I thought the annoying Saturday night stay rule was largely a thing of the past. I guess it is not.

The NY Times reports that–because major airlines struggle to offset oil prices–they have begun changing limits on cheaper coach fares, increasing the minimum days required between departure and return and, in some cases, adding a requirement of, you guessed it, a Saturday night stay.

Back in 2000, competition from low-cost carriers forced the major airlines to start dropping the limits. Until then, the Saturday night rules were in place specifically to discourage business travelers from buying the cheapest fares, which airlines then referred to as leisure fares. Business travelers do not usually want to spend a Saturday night – meaning, in effect, an entire weekend – on the road.

The Saturday night rule must be one of the stupidest rules in the world of travel. That, along with the pricing of air tickets. Yes, the one which makes it more expensive to fly anywhere directly, although flights with layovers are twice as long and require twice the resources.

An analysis of the Airline Quality Report

by Grant Martin on

The annual Airline Quality Report (AQR) was published today by Dr. Dean Headley out of Wichita State University. Big deal, you say, airlines continue to suck. You’ve got that right. Distill the 60 page document down to its roots and you’ll find that the industry scored its worst ranks of all time in the history of the twenty year study.

Overall quality of an airline was taken as a weighted average across factors of the airline being:

  • On Time
  • Denied Boardings (overbookings)
  • Mishandled Baggage and
  • Customer Complaints

The lower a carrier scores, the worse its performance. Let’s take a look at the data:

  • Southwest Airlines had the best on-time performance with 82.4% of flights on time, while Atlantic Southeast, Comair, American and American Eagle had the worst records at 66.9%, 67.3% and 67.4% (tied) respectively.
  • Atlantic Southeast, Comair and Skywest had the most denied boardings at 5.43, 3.32 and 2.73 passengers bumped per 10,000 respectively, while jetBlue, Airtran and United had the best at 0.04, 0.21 and 0.40.
  • Skywest, and American Eagle lost the most bags, at 17.95 and 17.38 bags lost per 1,000 passengers each. Conversely, AirTran and Northwest lost only 3.63 and 5.26 bags per.
  • 2.07 out of 1000 passengers complained about United Airlines, while only 0.19 in 1000 complained about Mesa.
  • Balanced, AirTran had the best performance, while Atlantic Southeast had the worst.

Ranked, the airlines stacked up as follows

  1. Airtran
  2. jetBlue
  3. Southwest
  4. Northwest
  5. Frontier
  6. Continental
  7. Alaska
  8. United
  9. American
  10. Delta
  11. US Airways
  12. Mesa
  13. SkyWest
  14. Comair
  15. American Eagle
  16. Atlantic Southeast

Other interesting things to consider

  • The top three airlines are all Low Cost Carriers (LCCs). The best legacy carriers were Northwest, Continental and Alaska.
  • Airtran, American Eagle, Atlantic Southeast and Mesa actually improved from 2006 to 2007. It’s just that the other airlines did so poorly that it dragged the average down. Atlantic Southeast, for example, was already poorly ranked, it was just less poorly ranked this year.
  • It’s important to consider weather and hubs into the equation. Hawaiian Airlines, for example, received excellent results last year, but that’s partially because they fly in near-perfect weather and everyone is always happy when they are on vacation in Hawaii (so they won’t complain). Compare that to American and American Eagle, both of whom have hubs in Chicago. On-time rankings were considerably worse for New York based carriers
  • 17.95 bags per 1000 may seem bad, but that’s really only 1.795%

So what does this tell us overall? Well, as we concluded earlier, not much. You have to consider that there is some noise in the data that comes from increased media coverage and oversight on the airline industry. Now that you know that there is a survey, you’re going to have a higher chance of complaining on your next flight, right?

The data will crawl around from good to bad to worse all over the place and we can analyze it until we turn blue. What’s important to take from this data is that there aren’t any large anomalies. Contrary to what you’ve been thinking, Delta employees haven’t completely given up on us and complaints have not skyrocketed. jetBlue did not lose an outrageous number of bags last summer for no reason.

At the very least, we can thus find solace in this normalcy.

Yuck. Fetus found in Continental airplane bathroom

by Grant Martin on

I’m still kind of grossed out as I write this. Yesterday, Continental Airlines janitorial employees found a human fetus in a lavatory bathroom after a flight between New York City and Houston had deplaned. It was almost an hour after the passengers had left the aircraft and cleaning had commenced before the workers found the fetus in the lav trash.

At that point authorities couldn’t track down the woman for questioning as she may have already connected through another flight, so the FBI is now involved and digging through the passenger manifest, trying to locate the mother.

Still, not the sort of thing that you want happening on your aircraft or in your lavatory, much less something you want to hide from the authorities. Hopefully the mother is ok.