
Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities - kynthelig
https://backchannel.com/airlines-are-letting-old-technology-abuse-their-customers-fc67011b4bdf
======
adam_gyroscope
Disclaimer: I built airline reservations systems with ITA Software.

I don't recall there being a minimum character count for SSR codes, but in
legacy reservations systems (and the passenger name records (PNR) that contain
these SSRs) there's for sure a max. Airline reservations systems never met a
fixed-width format they didn't like, and the reason is that for a long, long
time the unit of storage for a PNR was a block on disk and disk space was
precious, so every few bits (literally bits, not bytes) counted. Those
constraints have persisted through the ages.

Upthread someone wondered about disrupting this industry. It is expensive
(there's a lot of moving parts) but it's basically engineering and
integration, with the integration being the far harder part. For example, to
participate in the airline networks (the networks that send messages to other
airlines to handle cross-carrier booking, talking to GDSes, control departure,
speak to DHS, etc) you need to understand the meaning of various airline
protocol messages. These messages have unclear semantics; one airline may
regard message A as meaning "create a ticket for this passenger" while another
airline may regard the same message as "create a reservation for this
passenger" which are two different things. The only way to know what these
messages mean is to get on the phone with each airline and ask. The
documentation is wrong and outdated; the meaning of those messages is the
outcome they have to that specific airline and not anything else. Oh and the
network connection you send these messages over is a VPN that you need to
agree to setup with the carrier you want to talk to. Airline messaging is the
reason most modern reservations system can only handle small airlines, since
getting the semantics, routing, and other details of airline messaging
requires too many humans and too many business relationships.

Additionally, switching reservations system can kill an airline. Most airlines
operate with a day or less of cash reserves so if the switch to a new res
systems stops operation of the airline for any amount of time you could kill
the airline. There's no incentive big enough to switch to a new res system
since the rewards are not immediately revenue-impacting.

~~~
uncoder0
I know a guy with the last name 'Tester' that had to have a gate agent book
their flight every ~10 minutes until their flight departed because the
reservation system in production would delete any reservations with the last
name 'Tester'.

Thought it was a fun story related to the immaturity of reservation / booking
systems.

~~~
naravara
>I know a guy with the last name 'Tester' that had to have a gate agent book
their flight every ~10 minutes until their flight departed because the
reservation system in production would delete any reservations with the last
name 'Tester'.

Jesus. Given that one of the Senators from Montana is named Tester, I would
have thought someone would have been up the FAA's ass to get up their asses
about this.

~~~
uncoder0
I think it was isolated to international flights on a non-us single carrier.
Maybe the Senator from Montana has just been lucky?

------
heartsucker
Slightly off topic, but this is hardly the biggest blunder of the airline
industry. A company I worked for last year absolutely tore them apart in a
talk at 33c3.

In short, information like your address or passport number is easily
accessible, and while it wasn't in the talk (I think), we were able to recover
plaintext credit card numbers during the research.

[https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...](https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carmen_sandiego)

------
stinky613
Speaking of tech failings among airlines... Can anyone tell me what the hell
the ticket scanning machines at the gate are doing? In the past week United
sent a French woman 2,000 miles in the wrong direction; even though her flight
had changed gates, when they scanned her ticket at the (now incorrect) gate it
did a normal 'OK' beep and let her through. What in the world is the point of
scanning scanning tickets at the gate if it isn't even checking to make sure
the ticket matches the flight?

~~~
speedyapoc
Almost certainly human error.

Anecdotally, I had a standby ticket recently when my seat was reassigned to a
paying customer, although I still had a boarding pass for that seat. I was
halfway down the jet bridge before the gate agent realized that my ticket had
been revoked.

I imagine it's second nature for gate agents to let passengers through, and
one lapse in judgement can cause the United incident, despite the software
showing that the ticket was invalid.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I bought a gift card at IKEA in Shanghai for 100 yuan once. Shortly afterward,
I visited IKEA in Palo Alto and asked a cashier how much was on the card. She
scanned it and reported a hundred dollars. I asked her to confirm that, which
she did, and then she offered me a "receipt" of the scan, which I accepted.

The printout correctly showed that the card contained 100 CNY. I've thought of
IKEA ever since as a store where the cash registers are smarter than the
cashiers.

~~~
Scoundreller
Is the cashier "dumb" if their screen reported $100?

~~~
thaumasiotes
It didn't, though.

------
grecy
From experience I can say the Telco industry is exactly the same.

It would not surprise me to find any industry that has been around 40+ years
will be the same - they want to spend time and money doing what they do, IT is
seen as nothing more than an expensive nuisance.

Love them or hate then, that's why for example Uber & Telsa are so
"disruptive" \- they are focusing on the IT and the "Thing" (taxis / cars) is
virtually second best.

~~~
notthemessiah
"Exactly the same" only if you ignore everything about them that isn't
consumer facing. Telcos are high-profit margin regional monopolies, whereas
airlines operate at the margins and are fiercely competitive. Perhaps the only
thing that can be said about them being similar is that they are high barrier-
to-entry industries.

~~~
grecy
I meant "exactly the same" in the sense of the article - "letting old
technology abuse their customers".

These old industries are dinosaurs in "the age of the internet" and have no
clue what they are doing with regard to IT / Systems.

------
CodeSheikh
Perhaps a disruption in airline industry is needed. Maybe one of those mega
tech billionaires (Bezos, Musk, Page/Brin etc.) can pay more attention to this
market and see investment opportunities. Such disruption would need to go
beyond airlines and go towards plane manufacturers level. The fact that there
are so little aircraft producers in the world, so monopoly actually starts
from there and flows downwards at airline levels. Computing (for simulations),
manufacturing such as advanced composites and 3D printing have advanced enough
to streamline aircraft manufacturing. Heck it feels like we just ignored
commercial airline market altogether and jumped straight to the commercial
space market. If we have an advanced tech to go space exploring then I am sure
we can bring significant changes to the crumbling airline industry.

~~~
freehunter
Not likely to happen. It is a very expensive and difficult process to get a
new airframe FAA certified to carry commercial passengers, which is part of
why the Dreamliner took so long to be delivered. Couple that with basically
zero margin for airlines and you have a perfect storm of "it's really
expensive to make a new plane and no one will pay for it if you do".

There's a reason you see so many 20+ year old CRJ-900s and MD-80/90s at the
airport. Airlines literally cannot afford new planes, and aircraft makers
can't get new airframes through the regulator process easily enough. Boeing
struggled to get fly-by-wire to pass FAA regulations, how do you think they'd
fare trying to replace aluminum with 3D printed plastic?

~~~
pdelbarba
The GA industry is running up against the same problems. Go to your local
flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s
Cessnas/Pipers. Recently there has been some push back against the FAA's
certification programs due to the fact that MEMS systems are inherently more
reliable instruments than gyroscopes powered by engine driven vacuum pumps.
This resulted in some legislative changes and now you can (IIRC) replace many
gages in old aircraft with newer electronic variants and not need a
Supplementary Type Certificate (basically like getting your car re-titled to
replace the tape deck with a CD player).

tl;dr: It's basically become apparent that too much safety is killing people.

~~~
Shivatron
> Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of
> 1970s Cessnas/Pipers.

This neatly illustrates why:
[http://i.imgur.com/Un22IYK.png](http://i.imgur.com/Un22IYK.png)

It's not just certification, either. Product liability accounts for a large
part of this increase: "Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for
each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per
plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988."
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalization_Act#Product_Liability_Costs))

~~~
pdelbarba
Yea, I'm really comparing two disparate issues here. The aircraft cost, for
previously certified airframes, ie. the C172SP, as opposed to an SR22 or
something, is almost entirely liability liability inflated while avionics are
more heavily driven by certification.

This is why the experimental market is doing so well right now. No need to pay
for either :P

------
ofek
As a wheelchair user (Spinal Muscular Atrophy) I can tell you the article left
out one of the worst things airlines do. From what I can tell, they offer crew
absolutely no training on how to handle electric wheelchairs (very brittle and
expensive). I've flown ~22 times in my life and 10 times they completely broke
my chair; stripped joystick, tire came off twice, cut wires (how?),
electronics fried by some unknown liquid, etc. This has happened with AA,
United, AirTran, and Delta.

edit: I should also mention that I even cover the chair in multiple layers of
bubble wrap.

I wish I could just bring my chair next to everyone else. The standard seats
are difficult to sit in for long flights.

~~~
Caligula
I am also in a electric chair. Flying is a terrifying process. My cringe
seeing the luggage folks carrying the chair onto the conveyor belt.

The worst part is that its not even bad that the chair breaks, its bad that at
the destination your stuck immobile with a 300 pound device.

I rarely travel for this reason. The other is that a attendant/family member
is required to come or your not allowed on the flight. I accept this but it
still sucks.

------
xexers
The airport in Doha, Qatar is a silent airport. There were no announcements
over the PA. It was an amazing experience!

I find the PA systems to be an assault on my ears and I often wear ear plugs
in airports and on planes. I'd prefer silent airports. I suppose that'd be
great for the deaf but not so good for the blind.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
It just won't matter for the deaf, right?

~~~
lazyasciiart
It will matter to the deaf in a good way, because the airport will be set up
to ensure that all information is communicated without using audio.

~~~
vermontdevil
Exactly this.

I've had to scramble and barely make to another gate when they announced a
change without making any visual updates. I only caught on when I noticed
everyone being gone. (I was reading a book at that time).

I've had friends who missed flights because of these last minute changes. Even
subscribing to text alerts is a hit or miss.

------
tropo
The non-disabled people have it bad enough.

Consider being 7 feet tall. You may split your head or get a concussion at the
door or from things that hang down. The seats are too small; you'll have to
sit with legs folded up and knees by your chest. You can't stand up in the
restroom.

Consider being 4 feet tall. Your knees are on top of the seat. As your legs
hang off the end of the seat, pressure on your upper calves is painful. You
might be tempted to relieve the pain by kicking the seat in front of you.

Consider being 500 pounds. Your neighbors will be terrified. You might
actually injure them. It has happened, causing nerve damage. You might injure
yourself.

------
jbeales
The headline is misleading. According to the information in the article itself
most of the complaints can be solved by properly training staff to use
existing tech as it was designed.

One of main complaints of the article - that airline staff doesn't get passed
enough information about a passenger's disability, so, for example, deaf
people get met at the gate with a wheelchair, seems to be a direct result of
using inappropriate, or non-standard, SSR codes. If a deaf/hard-of-hearing
person is travelling, the appropriate code, (DEAF), should be used, not HI or
MAAS, (if the systems allow for multiple codes, "DEAF MAAS" would be
appropriate).

According to the article these SSR codes are industry standards and are
entrenched in airline systems worldwide. If they were used properly, and if
staff were properly trained to understand and act on them, this problem would
largely be solved. This is a training & execution problem, not a technology
problem.

A second complaint, that information is not passed to disabled customers
quickly, (for example, hard-of-hearing passengers can't hear announcements at
the airport or on the plane), is also mostly solvable by using the tech that
is installed in airports today. For example: "Visual paging — when an audio
page is posted in text form on screens — is becoming very easy, but it’s not
yet ubiquitous." Why is it not ubiquitous? Haven't most airports, at least in
wealthy countries, got some sort of a screen up at each gate that has the
Flight #, departure time, weather at the destination, and all that? If
announcements aren't going up there too that seems to be laziness or lack of
training on behalf of the gate staff, or laziness or lack of concern in
whoever makes decisions about how the software that runs those screens works.

For in-flight announcements it's harder, especially now that seat-back
displays are being removed from aircraft in favour of handheld devices. It
probably comes down to a flight attendant making sure that a disabled person
gets told what's going on, (because he or she saw the appropriate SSR code on
the passenger manifest).

The final complaint, in-flight entertainment, is ridiculous. Why isn't
everything that's available on TV, (closed-captioning, described video, and
whatever else I'm not aware of), available on in-flight entertainment? The
tech exists, it looks like it just hasn't been installed, or has been
installed but isn't activated, on aircraft. This should not even be a problem
and I don't understand why it is.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not disabled, and haven't experienced these problems
myself. This comment is based purely on the problems as described in the
linked article.

~~~
douche
> (for example, hard-of-hearing passengers can't hear announcements at the
> airport or on the plane)

You don't have to be hard-of-hearing to struggle with that. A PA system that
actually worked would be lovely at most airports. I can't remember a time when
I was waiting at a gate and could actually hear what the gate attendants were
announcing; it's either completely silent, like their microphone isn't even
on, or it's distorted so badly by the garbage equipment and accoustics that it
just sounds like the teacher in Charlie Brown.

If I were older or less mobile, I'd be even more incensed by the way airports
seem to have such a penchant for putting up blatantly false gate information
more than about 45 minutes before the flight is scheduled for takeoff. The
last three times I've had to connect somewhere, I've gotten off my incoming
flight, looked up the gate for my next leg, power-walked a half-mile or more
to the opposite end of the terminal, _or_ had to leave and go to a different
terminal - only to get there, relax for a few minutes, and notice that the
gate information has changed and now the gate is two or three away from where
I started, and I've got to burn tire to get back there.

~~~
jbeales
douche 10 minutes ago [-]

>> (for example, hard-of-hearing passengers can't hear announcements at the
airport or on the plane) > You don't have to be hard-of-hearing to struggle
with that.

That's the thing about accessibility improvements. They often improve the
lives of everyone, or at least many more people than the improvements are
meant to improve life for. For example: if you have to push a stroller, or are
carrying a lot of things, through a heavy door, you can use the button meant
to open the door for wheelchair users. You can probably even hit it with your
hip if your hands are full.

------
saagarjha
> For the first time last fall, the US Department of Transportation drafted
> regulations related to captions for in-flight entertainment.

This can't come quickly enough.

------
joshuaheard
This and all the stories in the news show that the airline industry needs some
serious updating.

~~~
pavement
For whatever reason, mainframe systems are so deeply entrenched, that all of
the major Global Distribution System [0] providers seem to have their legacy
systems wrapped in modern "serialization facades" to produce the XML or JSON
that gets consumed by external systems.

There are probably a hundred ways to rationalize why. Inertia, lock-in,
obstinate grey breards refusing to retire and holding infrastructure hostage
until they die... , _if-it-ain 't-broke-don't-fix-it-even-when-it-is-broke_,
"we can't afford to stop the world for your cargo-cult modernization rewrite,
sonny...", too big to fail, on and on...

It's a pretty weird situation, but by my estimate, it's probably going to
require totally new airlines rolling their own systems from scratch, in
parallel isolation, next to the huge legacy carriers as they continue to
operate, in order to transition, modernize and unseat the current technology.
That seems to be the way things work in industries this big.

Fast food, banking, telecommunications. All of them have examples of modern
upstarts that are now world-wide staples, simply because they started from
scratch with more modern efficient systems, as they continue to co-exist
alongside dinosaurs that still haven't gone away.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system)

~~~
jakub_g
FWIW, Amadeus has been working for _years and years_ on a migration away from
IBM mainframes. The project took hundreds of man-years and it's nearing
completion very soon (I mean, maybe this or next year, that's "very soon" in
the GDS scale).

But as you can imagine, migrating legacy systems to new hardware with the spec
"it should work as the old system" is not the most sexy job and not the
easiest to recruit great programmers for.

(I work for Amadeus, but on unrelated projects - though I have friends who
worked on the migration).

You can read more here for example:
[https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/08/04/amadeus-takes-off-
wi...](https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/08/04/amadeus-takes-off-with-
containers-and-clouds/)

~~~
mrout
> it's nearing completion very soon (I mean, maybe this or next year, that's
> "very soon" in the GDS scale).

On whose scale is this or next year not very soon?

------
fulafel
We have to drastically reduce air travel to cope with global warming and
excess CO2. It's pretty unethical to fly more than a few times a year. CO2
injected into the upper atmosphere causes 2-3x warming vs ground level CO2
emissions.

~~~
triangleman
I believe the spectrums of IR absorbed by CO2 are already fully saturated, so
that there is very little effect, if any, of increased CO2 levels in the
atmosphere.

~~~
fulafel
You're right, I misremembered. The 2-3x warming effect is due to other
atmospheric effects ("radiative forcing") and nor direct effects of the
emitted co2.

End result is the same however - the same fossil fuel is much worse when used
in air travel than on the ground.

