Skip to main content

Why commercial aviation sucks

The big problem that faces commercial aviation is not greedy airlines. Airlines are profit-making businesses like any other: they exist to make money, which is why you are able to purchase a plane ticket at all, so be grateful for a free market providing this essential service that enables much of modernity.

No, the big problem is that customers bitch and moan about tiny seats that are too close together, being nickel-and-dimed for everything, flight cancellations and delays, checked bag fees... and then proceed to reveal their actual preference for the lowest available fare. And are seemingly unable to connect the dots between these things.

This is why I'm not all that broken up about Spirit going bankrupt: competition in a market overwhelmingly dominated by the price-conscious buyer primarily serves to drive down prices, not to create options or provide differentiation for segments of the market, and the last thing we need in air travel is lower prices. Here's what the drive to cut ticket prices does for:

Comfort: Ideally, coach would be like premium economy or domestic first class: seats with substantial armrests and legroom, and that recline far enough to allow one to sleep on long-haul flights. We could have that world if everyone were willing to pay 30% more to fly (roughly, based on those seats consuming approximately 50% more space each, minus reduced overhead for fewer passengers and less weight).

Instead, premium economy is 2x coach fare, and business/first 3-4x, and all the profit is made in the front of the aircraft from people like me who cannot tolerate long-haul flights in coach and are consequently forced to subsidize the low fares of everyone else instead of being able to sit comfortably in a better main cabin.

Reliability: While paying a premium to fly in business or first can address comfort issues, it doesn't do anything about reliability: all cabins share equally in delays and cancellations resulting from bare-bones logistics in an industry with meteorological and mechanical wildcards. I literally cannot pay for greater reliability at any price. I'm stuck with the same logistics that make the cheap fares in the main cabin possible.

I can't count how many times I've had travel significantly disrupted by a problem with some flight nowhere near either my departure or destination city that then cascaded through a system with no slack built-in to absorb cancellations that take an aircraft out of service.

All of this is downstream of most passengers wanting to pay the absolute lowest price to get from point A to point B. The most infuriating thing about this isn't the status quo, however stressful it makes the act of traveling given the high chance of disruption, but rather how few people seem to understand how intimately connected their behavior is to the things they supposedly hate about air travel. I understand the problem, and am willing to pay more than the bare minimum! But it takes a much larger portion of the market to adopt the same stance for anything to change. Until then, flying commercial will continue to suck.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal arts and civil society

Proponents of broader college attendance subsidized by the public treasury and disconnected from any concrete investment in an individual's marketable skills often make the claim that a liberal arts education is critical to the foundation of civil society. And they are probably right in that very specific claim, as it is hard to imagine this country's governing institutions having been founded by people who did not have a grounding in the liberalism of Locke and Burke. But not only is their claim insufficient to support either the social structure they advocate or fulfillment by the institutions they intend to deliver it, the problem with the idea of universal liberal arts is that it doesn't actually work the way its proponents idealize it. The evidence is all around you that the factory college model does not produce better citizens more capable of empathy or critical thinking, or a broader understanding of civics. Instead, it produces and promotes shallow thinkers with s...
1 comment
Read more

Sequels

"Sequel." A word almost synonymous with "apprehension". In the case of beloved movies, a sequel is often highly-anticipated but also feared because the history of sequels is so mixed. Let's look at a few case studies. The Godfather (1972) → The Godfather Part II (1974) This is the most basic kind of good sequel: another great story, filmed solidly, to follow up a great original. It's actually a bookend to the original, with the scenes divided between Vito Corleone's back story and those chronicling Michael's downfall, but it qualifies as a sequel in the most basic sense that it continues the story begun in the original film. While the first movie satisfyingly ended with Michael symbolically becoming his father despite his protestations to Kay in the first act, from the perspective of the combined saga (let's just do the right thing at the beginning and pretend Part III had never been made) it merely foreshadows his irreversible destruction of t...
2 comments
Read more

Routing layer security on the public internet is hopeless

I have mostly come to the conclusion that trying to secure the routing layer of the internet is hopeless. Protocols like DNSSEC impose pretty significant costs on service providers and clients/recursive resolvers, and at the same time don't provide any substantive security guarantees that I'd be willing to rely on. I still want end-to-end security—confidentiality and integrity, in particular—of the data stream, something provided by TLS and support systems around TLS (e.g., certificate transparency). DNSSEC doesn't even try to give me the one thing I'd really like out of the routing layer, which is privacy: it provides a base level of integrity...and that's it. "Securing" BGP in a similar way would be worth even less, because routing decisions at that level can't even really be checked by clients as they don't have the context to understand why paths are configured with particular costs, nor do they know where state-level actor ...
2 comments
Read more