Issues

The New York Times just reported (like an hour ago – call me lightning fingers!) that tomorrow United Airlines will start charging passengers flying on their cheapest tickets for the first checked bag:

United Airlines said Thursday that it would begin charging many passengers on Friday to check their first bag, joining American Airlines in assessing a $15 luggage fee for passengers flying on the cheapest tickets.

It wasn’t that long ago that American announced the policy on their own airplanes, in an effort to recoup some of the costs of operating an airline in a sluggish economy with skyrocketing fuel prices.

While I certainly understand the sentiment (“we’re screwed! our costs are going through the roof and our revenue is not growing!”), there’s only so much to be accomplished by introducing “gotcha” fees to travelers.

The only way that’s going to work as a long term strategy is if the budget airlines follow suit, and I think companies like Southwest are savvy enough not only to avoid the $15 surcharge, but to use it as good fodder for advertising.

I’m attending the excellent Future in Review conference this week in sunny San Diego. This year’s theme focuses on climate crisis, and at least two companies are present that offer carbon offsets that travelers can take advantage of.

TerraPass has calculators for various flying scenarios and offers products to balance emissions. They leverage three types of projects: clean energy produced by wind power; farm power such as dairy farm methane digesters; and landfill methane capture.

EcoVerdance takes a different approach. Their primary method of carbon-dioxide reduction involves the purchase and donation of Accele-Gro-M, a plant growth enhancer that’s applied in developing countries with the help of non-governmental/charitable organizations.

The EcoVerdance folks have provided an entire year’s worth of registered carbon credits for each Future in Review participant, which means this reporter is covered for the next 364 days.

So, I’ve got that going for me…

Remember when the TSA had their big snafu about not letting a MacBook Air through security?

The official guess from the TSA blog was that the MacBook probably didn’t make it through because it looked significantly different under an X-ray than any “normal” laptop. Screeners are trained to look for irregularities in objects, since that’s usually when something nefarious is going on.

It looks like the folks over at the blog recently got their hands on an actual MacBook Air and ran it through a machine to see if their theory was correct — it looks as though they were right.

The post comes complete with a video. If you’re curious, go check it out.

In case you’ve missed it over the past few days, the TSA had a bit of a PR snafu when they prevented Michael Nygard from catching his plane because he was carrying a MacBook Air.

It ended up all over the blogosphere (as you would expect) rather quickly.

Over at Blog Business Summit I called on the TSA to respond on their own blog, which they finally did yesterday (and I’m sure they did it just because I asked them to).

The upshot? That TSO’s (the people working the X-ray machine) are trained to look for irregularities. Given that the MacBook Air with a solid state drive X-rays like practically no other laptop, it’s not surprising that it would cause some surprises.

Go read their post for the full response.

Have you heard about this?

There’s a company called Verified Identity Pass that operates a service called “Clear,” which, for a hundred dollars per year, gives travelers a “biometrically encoded identification card.” This card lets you use the adult equivalent of a Disneyland Fast-Pass lane.

The New York Times noted a few days ago that both Washington Dulles and Reagan National will have the system up and running in “a few weeks.”

What is Clear? Their web site describes the service and the premise behind it:

It’s basic risk management: someone who is pre-screened is less likely to be a threat than someone who isn’t. That’s the simple premise behind Clear. By participating in the government’s Registered Traveler Program at airports Clear Members will spend less time in security lines.

Essentially, the bet is that pre-screened people (who can prove they’re who they say they are) are less likely to pull anything while traveling. My guess is that they’re right.

It’s a little bothersome to me that it costs $100 per year (and a lot of privacy) for the ability to fly a little faster. But I guess the alternative is to have the government running a system like this…

What do you think? It is better to have that data in private hands or in the hands of the government? And are you going to sign up for Clear?

For those of you who aren’t aware, The New York Times keeps a travel blog called JetLagged, which today has a piece that rips into the TSA:

If you are someone who suspects that what is billed as “aviation security” is often more show than substance, you are not alone. In fact, you are part of what Nixon aides used to call the “silent majority.” The security bureaucracy seems to think that as long as it is seen as doing something, and so long as another terror attack does not occur, the public will at least feel secure enough not to insist that it do whatever needs to be done actually to make us secure.

I won’t spoil the post for you, but the gist of it is that the TSA is all hat and no cattle. Myself, I’ve often complained about the way that buying expensive airline club memberships can speed you through security.

What sense does that make? If security is something that we all have to go through, why do rich people fly faster?

But I suppose that’s just me being jealous.

This has been a rather poor summer in terms of cancellation and delays. If you are flying soon, and the thought of a cancelled flight or some time on the tarmac makes your skin crawl, this might help: rankings and results for the major airlines’ delays and cancellations.

The best of the pack: Southwest, with only 0.1% of their flights cancelled and over three quarters of their flights on-time. The worst? Northwest Airlines, with over 50 times as many cancellations. The next best after Southwest, Contentinal, has 1.0% of their flights cancelled. Something to remember next time you fly the friendly skis.

I’ve written about several posts recently about planes spending an obscene amount of time on the tarmac, occasionally without AC or with overflowing sewage. But how often does something like this actually happen?

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 0.0005 percent of flights, or 36 out of 7.2 million, experienced tarmac delays of over five hours last year. Not too bad; about the same chance as being struck by lightning. Looks like the airlines are actually doing astonishingly well.

Except that the statistics are grossly inaccurate. It turns out that there are several loopholes to reporting delays. For example, if a flight is diverted to or from another airport, it is reported as “diverted” not delayed. If the flight ends up being cancelled, it is reported as “cancelled”, not delayed. And there are a few more. Representative Jean Schmidt estimates that when this loophole is closed, the actual number could go up tenfold. Even then however, a 0.005 percent chance isn’t that bad. I just wish they would give us more peanuts.

Last week, 50 passengers on Comair Flight 5637 from JFK airport spent four hours on the tarmac. That wasn’t the worst part however. The air conditioning wasn’t working, and the plane grew hot to the point where it came to be a health risk.

David Ollila, a passenger aboard the flight, taped the situation, including a confrontation with the pilots, and a 4-month old baby being fanned by her mother as she grew increasingly uncomfortable. Ollila stated that airline employees need to be able to make intelligent decisions given individual situations, particularly when people’s (and infants’) health are at risk.

It seems like every post I write these days is about some sort of horrific delay or sewage mishap. But I think this one takes the cake. 400 passengers spent 7 hours stranded on a Cathay Pacific Airways jet at San Francisco International Airport this Tuesday. Passengers boarded the plane around midnight, then spent 3 hours waiting on the tarmac without being told what was going on.

Around 3AM, the PA system and the lights went out. At 7:30 AM, the flight was cancelled due to equipment failure and the passengers were allowed to leave. While the airline claims the evening was similar to a well-stocked slumber party, passengers told a markedly different story. Passengers claim not only was there a lack of food, but a complete lack of communication by the airline.

A transatlantic flight on Continental Airlines became a little uncomfortable for the passengers as raw sewage spilled out from the toilets in the middle of the flight. Passengers had to hold their noses and deal with raw sewage flowing up and down the aisles for several hours.

A computer outage this morning lasting from 9AM to 11AM, EST, caused nationwide delays for United Flights lasting up to two hours. Some planes were forced to sit on the tarmac full of passengers for an hour and half while the issue was sorted out. Most of the delays were only about 20 to 30 minutes, and the United delays did not affect other airlines flight times. United is still trying to figure out what caused the computer outage, and why there were no back-up systems in place.

If you flew this past weekend, I feel sorry for you. Particularly if you were flying on Friday, when the national on-time arrival rates for the seven largest airlines at the top 10 airports dropped down to: 69 percent, Continental, 67 percent, United, 65 percent, Southwest, 62 percent, Northwest, 59 percent, American, 57 percent, Delta, and 36 percent, US Airways. Essentially half of all flights nationwide were delayed Friday.

The cause of the massive nationwide delays was an air traffic control computer failing in Atlanta in the morning. By the early afternoon, delays began to pile up to several hours on other airports such as Kennedy, La Guardia, Newark, Boston, and Philadelphia.

So far this year, almost 25 percent of domestic flights have arrived late. This is the worst track record in 13 years. While some problems, such as rough weather, cannot be controlled, some causes for delays can be fixed.

James C. May, president of the Air Transport Association, has been lobbying for the FAA to improve the air traffic control system, saying “The consequences of Congress not acting aggressively to make difficult choices on a next-generation air traffic control system are going to be even more extraordinary delays.”

Andrew Speaker, now infamously known as the TB patient, claimed today that CDC did not warn him against travelling. Local health officials claim that they told Speaker he was in fact contagious, just not highly contagious. What is most troubling about this is that local health officials were not allowed to prohibit Speaker from flying even if he had been contagious.

Additional questions have been raised about the fact that Speaker crossed the border from Canada into the United States in a car, even though border officials were told Speaker posed a risk and were to contact health officials immediately upon re-entry.

Andrew Speaker, now infamously known as the TB patient, may end up facing civil, if not criminal charges, according to legal experts in the medical field. So far there are no reports of any other passengers on his flights becoming infected, which makes the possibility that he will be punished low.

However, based on similar cases where HIV patients who knowingly infect others, flying while you know you are infectious may result in civil lawsuits if it leads to sickness, and possible manslaughter charges if there are any related fatalities. Just in case anyone still doesn’t get this: do not fly with an infectious disease.

Airline passengers on five international flights may have been exposed to an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis. The flights were Air France Flight 385 on May 12 to Paris from Atlanta, which was the longest and more important flight, and Paris to Athens on May 14; Athens to Thira Island May 16; Mykonos Island to Athens May 21; and Athens to Rome May 21. Anyone on any of these flights needs to check in with local CDC officials immediately.

The man knew he had tuberculosis when he boarded the flight from Atlanta on his honeymoon, but was unaware of how serious the strain was. This goes as a strong reminder not to ignore health warnings when flying.

Federal officials are still trying to track down all passengers on those flights.

One 7:05 AM flight from NY to LA and is expected to arrive 10:03 AM. The other is expected to get in at 11:28 AM. Both are on American Airlines. The difference? The first set of times are from 1997, the other is from 2007.

No, planes are not getting slower. In fact, they are faster. But, with all the recent anger of delays, some airlines have taken to the habit of planning on being delayed, and setting their arrival time based on a planned delay, What’s the advantage of this? The Department of Transportation gives their ratings based on whether or not flights ARRIVE on time. So if you add an extra hour, you’ll get in on time, and be rated low for delays, even if every flight you fly is delayed an hour.

The President and CEO of the Air Transport Association, James C. May, testified before Congress today on the state of airline carbon emissions.

May was adamant that air travel is carbon efficient; it is responsible for only 2 percent of US carbon emissions while driving over 3 billion dollars in economic activity daily. He called air travel, “the greenest form of mass transportation.”

However, May also asked Congress to take the lead on making the industry more environmentally accomodating. May asked Congress to provide more environmental research funding for NASA and the FAA, as well as to support the International Civil Aviation Organization’s environmental efforts, and to provide funding for modernized air traffic control systems.

Great news for airlines; many of them have emerged from serious financial problems and are now expected to start becoming profitable again. However, this may not be particularly good news for fliers this summer. Much of the predicted profitably comes from the fact that your flights this summer will be more crowded than ever. Also expected are more fees as airlines continue to bring up their bottom line:

Seat assignment fees: carriers such as AirTrans Airways, Southwest Airlines, and American Airlines are planning on charging for reserving seats with more legroom, reserving seats in advances, or changing seat assignments.

Checking bags: as flights get fuller, fuel gets more expensive, and the weight of the average American continues to increase, carriers are trying to decrease the amount of baggage weighing down the plane. Spirit Airlines and Skybus are already planning on charging per bag; expect many more carriers to start doing the same.

Fuel fees: British Airways is increasing its tacked on fuel fee by $6, starting today. Expect other airlines to follow as gas prices rise during the summer.

Standby fees: Northwest just added a $25 standby fee, with other airlines considering adding a standby fee.

Fees for everything: RyanAir, a low-cost European carrier, charges fees on just about everything you can think of. Skybus, the new American low-cost carrier, plans to do the same.

Good news for Frequent Fliers of Delta Airlines. The formerly beleaguered carrier officially emerged from bankruptcy today after nearly a year and a half in Chapter 11.

The airline not only dealt with bankrupty but a potential employee strike and an attempted hostile takeover, prompting many people, such as myself and my father, to unload their Skymiles for fear that Delta may not have been long for this world. Today’s news indicates that the airline is in fact healthy, and not going anywhere.