Innovations to Reduce Airline Delays? Giving Passengers Better Information Would Be a Start.
I have relatives on the West coast, and every fall my family has a conversation about whether to fly out there for Christmas. It typically ends when someone (usually me), contemplates aloud the lines and the possibility of getting stranded by a blizzard. Moving people through airports is a problem that badly needs an innovative solution. Where is it in President Bush's proposals last week to reduce airline delays ?
The holiday season fixes - opening up military airspace for the Thanksgiving weekend, putting a moratorium on non-essential FAA maintenance projects-make sense but they're band-aids. I'm skeptical that much will come of the proposals to double the fines for airlines when they overbook flights. Even if the airline lobbyists don't kill the idea, bigger fines are unlikely to stop the practice; as Robert Goodwin, managing vice president with Gartner, points out, it will merely shift the point at which the airlines' financial models determine it's unprofitable.
Revamping how air traffic is managed - a multibillion billion technology transformation to satellite-based navigation called NextGen - would be a major innovation. It would enable more flights to be in the air at once and to fly more directly to and from their destinations (the E.U. is working on a similar project). Henry Harteveldt, vice president and principle analyst with Forrester Research, observes we're still managing air traffic the way we were doing it in the 1930s, designing flight paths based on communication with ground-based radar. But full deployment is years away (starting now with the most congested airports and rolling out through 2015 and beyond), and it depends both on Congress funding it and the airlines making the necessary investments in new instrumentation.
The most interesting idea is the government's congestion pricing proposal. Making the airlines pay more to fly during peak periods would theoretically encourage more flights, with discounted rates, at less popular times of day or at secondary airports. But the devil is in the details. Passengers have choices now. You can avoid crowds and sometimes pay less by flying at odd times or by driving an hour to another airport (personally, I try never to connect through O'Hare). But mostly that's not convenient, and passengers make pretty rational tradeoffs. Even if they complain about them.
Congestion pricing is only going to work, however, if passengers have better information on which to base their choices. Airline pricing would need to be much more transparent. Technology could make it easier for us to compare not only flights and our choice of dates, times and airports (still a klugey process), but also modes of transportation (it's generally cheaper, and door to door just as fast, to take the train from Boston to Manhattan). Mashups that map airline delay data with time of day, passenger loads and weather conditions could change how we plan trips-and force the airlines to compete on price and performance.
Perhaps the power of the market could even force some radical rethinking of how the airlines move people from place to place. What do you think?
Print
The holiday season fixes - opening up military airspace for the Thanksgiving weekend, putting a moratorium on non-essential FAA maintenance projects-make sense but they're band-aids. I'm skeptical that much will come of the proposals to double the fines for airlines when they overbook flights. Even if the airline lobbyists don't kill the idea, bigger fines are unlikely to stop the practice; as Robert Goodwin, managing vice president with Gartner, points out, it will merely shift the point at which the airlines' financial models determine it's unprofitable.
Revamping how air traffic is managed - a multibillion billion technology transformation to satellite-based navigation called NextGen - would be a major innovation. It would enable more flights to be in the air at once and to fly more directly to and from their destinations (the E.U. is working on a similar project). Henry Harteveldt, vice president and principle analyst with Forrester Research, observes we're still managing air traffic the way we were doing it in the 1930s, designing flight paths based on communication with ground-based radar. But full deployment is years away (starting now with the most congested airports and rolling out through 2015 and beyond), and it depends both on Congress funding it and the airlines making the necessary investments in new instrumentation.
The most interesting idea is the government's congestion pricing proposal. Making the airlines pay more to fly during peak periods would theoretically encourage more flights, with discounted rates, at less popular times of day or at secondary airports. But the devil is in the details. Passengers have choices now. You can avoid crowds and sometimes pay less by flying at odd times or by driving an hour to another airport (personally, I try never to connect through O'Hare). But mostly that's not convenient, and passengers make pretty rational tradeoffs. Even if they complain about them.
Congestion pricing is only going to work, however, if passengers have better information on which to base their choices. Airline pricing would need to be much more transparent. Technology could make it easier for us to compare not only flights and our choice of dates, times and airports (still a klugey process), but also modes of transportation (it's generally cheaper, and door to door just as fast, to take the train from Boston to Manhattan). Mashups that map airline delay data with time of day, passenger loads and weather conditions could change how we plan trips-and force the airlines to compete on price and performance.
Perhaps the power of the market could even force some radical rethinking of how the airlines move people from place to place. What do you think?
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
