20080731

4 steps to better air travel

Sitting here in the Rochester airport after a difficult few days work. Not much to do except blog. Too tired to work, and my flight is delayed (again) so I find myself in the position of having copius time on my hands. Unfortunately the time is probably the most unusable and annoying variety ever delivered by man.

So my thoughts at a time like this inevitably turn to:

Why does air travel have to suck so much?

It is really an interesting question, especially when you have nothing left to do but stew about it when you would rather be home with your family, or sleeping, or lancing a boil, having a wisdom tooth extracted with no novacaine, or almost anything else.

So here is my short, unedited list of things that could be done to make air travel just a little bit more bearable:

  1. Shorten the lines. There is really no excuse to have 500 people waiting to go through security checkpoints and only 1 checkpoint out of a possible 5 checkpoints open. How about this: Whenever you have more than 50 people in line - open up another checkpoint! Less than 50, close one!
  2. Provide enough seats. Another great, non-obvious idea: At each gate, have enough seats available so that everybody who needs to get on the next flight can actually sit down!
  3. Anticipate carry-ons. Another shocking idea: Assume everybody boarding the plane has exactly TWO carry-ons of the maximum allowable size, and provide enough space for all of them! Give every passenger an assigned "storage area" that no one can steal! That way, you can drop all this goofy "seating zone" crap and simply board from the back of the plane forward!
  4. Tell your passengers what is happening. Why should you have to wait until 15min before boarding, to find out that your flight is delayed 2 hours? Did they not know the flight was scheduled? Did they lose the plane? Did they missplace the crew? Come on, we all know that SOMEONE knows way before this, that there is no way the plane will take off. How about this radical idea: SHOW, on an electronic display, exactly where the plane and crew are that are needed for the upcoming flight. Here is a hint: if the plane and/or crew are 500 miles away 15min before scheduled boarding, you probably will not take off on time!

Of course anybody who flys alot knows why these simple suggestions will not work. Money! The airlines in their infinite incompetence simply think that they will make more money treating their passengers like cattle instead of making them actually satisfied. Perhaps they are right. As long as businesses keep sending people on planes without regard to customer service (which they don't care about either) this will probably continue.

They just announced that my flight was pushed back another hour...no reason given...sigh.