
Flying for Thanksgiving - janvdberg
https://bert.org/2018/11/18/flying-for-thanksgiving/
======
AshleyGrant
Flying on Thanksgiving Day is a joy. I've done it twice now. The ATL
concourses are practically empty. It is a bit strange to see the flight boards
almost empty on a Thursday morning.

I do bring $5 Starbucks gift cards for the entire crew of every flight I'm on
to thank them for having to work on a day when most of the country is with
family. It's not much, but it's something. The folks flying on holidays are
low on the seniority list, so they're generally working that day because they
have to, not because they want to.

~~~
rtb
Why $5 Starbucks gift cards and not $5 cash?

~~~
thrower123
I hate gift cards. "Here, rather than crassly giving you actual money, I've
spent that money on this company scrip that you can only use in one place.
Aren't you excited?" Great idea, just brilliant. I'll add it to the stack of
worthless iTunes cards and cards for restaurants that don't have a franchise
within 500 miles...

~~~
guru4consulting
totally agree with you. And some visa gift cards charge you monthly fee after
activating them!! I had few cards that I forgot to use, and their value became
$0 after a year. And I am also concerned about the environmental damage caused
by millions of plastic gift cards.. all the way from sourcing, manufacturing,
transporting and disposing them. And to certain extent, it forces over-
consumption behavior. I got 2 kids, and always got too many BabysRus/ToysRus
gift cards. I am either forced to use them or re-gift/exchange them with
others. In the end, the cards always get used by either myself or the others.
If unavoidable, then you can at least print/send an e-gift card.

If it's plain cash, I can just deposit them without buying anything. For these
reasons, I always wrap cash in an envelope with a personal hand-written note.
Have been gifting this way to teachers, postmen, home-cleaners and no one has
complained so far. When my friends/colleagues try to gift for any occasion, I
always encourage them to gift cash.

~~~
leetcrew
> to certain extent, it forces over-consumption behavior

isn't gift giving itself over-consumption? at least among peers, the other
person would have just gotten the item themselves if they actually needed it.

> When my friends/colleagues try to gift for any occasion, I always encourage
> them to gift cash.

presumably you exchange gifts with these people on some sort of regular basis.
if so, isn't this just a net zero transfer? may as well just not give gifts.

------
ankit219
I discovered this about three years back as well. India has quite a few
holidays when you are required to travel to your home with two major festivals
- Diwali(Oct/Nov) and Holi (March). Since, it is important for people to be at
home for these festivals, they would book early, or take costly flights, or
alternate flights. With my parents being flexible, and understanding about how
I love them even when I am a day late to be at home, I ended up booking the
flight on the festival day, rather than before.

Cue and Behold. An empty airplane, with a total of 30-40 people in an Airbus
320. I got upgraded to business class for free. There were no lines for
boarding. The plane took off on time, landed on time, and all of us could
sleep in peace (or do whatever it is people do on planes).

From that time, if I am going home for a festival, it will be the day of the
festival.

~~~
billfruit
Sry to be pedantic, and I do agree with your insight on travelling on
Holidays. But I just want to say India is a pretty diverse country, so
Holi/Diwali aren't necessarily the major holidays in many parts/sections of
the country/population.

~~~
ankit219
That is true. And I am in no way generalizing my experience with whole of
India. But, in my experience, I have seen less crowds on Holi and Diwali. And
taking flight has not failed me till now.

------
kevindong
Growing up, my Chinese family didn't really celebrate Christmas. Consequently,
we would always travel for family vacations on Christmas day. Christmas day
flights were generally slightly cheaper than non-Christmas day flights, which
was nice.

\---

I also like how the writer asked for the daily number of unique users but got
bandwidth usage instead.

~~~
js2
If it wasn’t for your people, my people would starve on Christmas.

[https://www.npr.org/2017/12/25/573415894/why-do-jewish-
peopl...](https://www.npr.org/2017/12/25/573415894/why-do-jewish-people-eat-
chinese-food-on-christmas)

:-)

~~~
desdiv
Believe it or not, this topic of "where do Jews eat on Christmas" actually
came up in a light-hearted way during a Supreme Court nominee hearing:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tku61sKhPGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tku61sKhPGo)

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
I wouldn't believe it if you had told me before but thanks for sharing that
tidbit! Having worked a few Christmas and Christmas Eve nights at Chinese
restaurants in the past, I appreciated it.

------
coziestSoup
Anyone else struck by the promptness of the Dept. of Technology here? Always
nice to see things just like this working.

~~~
dandare
It's 20 days in the UK. [https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-
request/how...](https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request/how-
to-make-an-foi-request)

------
polpo
_The SSID for the WiFi at SFO is called “#SFO FREE WIFI”. It’s named as if
someone has a wireless hotspot in their backpack running on a battery pack
trying to steal the login information for your bank._

I had the same reaction the first time I saw the WiFi SSID at SFO. “Surely
that can’t actually be the name of the official WiFi here. Let’s let it keep
looking for networks...”

~~~
kiallmacinnes
I've seen lots of airports etc use this pattern. I've always assumed it's
because # sorts before most everything else according to the ASCII code, so
their SSID will show at the top of the list.

~~~
theandrewbailey
I thought it was a case of hashtag-itis.

~~~
sdenton4
Nah, pretty sure I remember seeing that airport WiFi ssid at sfo long before
hash tags were a thing...

------
Jeremy1026
15 TB of data went through SFOs WiFi on Nov 26, 2017. To me that is the
biggest takeaway. That is a lot of data, even for there being a ton of people
flying through.

~~~
_asummers
Assuming a podcast is 50MB, that would be 300k podcasts. If I'm about to jump
on a flight, I may download 4-5, which would put that at about 60k people. I
just found an article saying 53 million people flew through SFO in 2016. If we
distribute those evenly (unreasonable, but ballparks it), we get just under
145k passengers / day.

Obviously web pages and mp3s are much lighter than a typical podcast, so this
isn't the best methodology. 15TB is a lot, for sure, but on the busiest travel
day of the year, I can rationalize it.

~~~
Rapzid
I see extremely few people listening to anything that's not in-flight
entertainment on flights.

I bet it's mostly kids watching youtube videos.

~~~
chrisseaton
That’s funny - I almost never see anyone using inflight entertainment screens
any more. People are always watching Netflix or listening to something
instead. And I think my view is supported by airlines starting to remove those
screens because they’re not being used.

~~~
ghaff
Depends on the airline and the plane. If anything, I would have said there was
a trend toward in-flight on-demand programming at no charge. It's increasingly
delivered over WiFi but, in my experience, there's usually a screen as well.
Admittedly, my experience is mostly limited to United (trending toward on-
demand) and JetBlue (just free DirectTV AFAIK).

~~~
chrisseaton
> toward in-flight on-demand programming at no charge

Huh? I've never ever seen a charge for inflight entertainment, and I fly
United all the time. Maybe different routes, then.

~~~
ghaff
United charges for DirectTV [https://www.united.com/CMS/en-
US/travel/Pages/DIRECTV.aspx](https://www.united.com/CMS/en-
US/travel/Pages/DIRECTV.aspx)

On the planes where there's on-demand programming (on your tablet or the
seatback), that's free. I mostly bring my own and have never paid but I assume
they're phasing out the paid option.

------
peteretep
I feel like Google flights would have given you the same data by showing that
flying on the day of Thanksgiving is way cheaper. Just a guess, though.

~~~
telesilla
Cheaper doesn't always tell you "least busy", especially when planning ahead.
I'll have the misery of flying the day before Christmas this year and the
flight itself was peanuts but I'm not looking forward to the airport
situation.

------
mnutt
Given that Thanksgiving 2016's bandwidth is unremarkable, maybe Thanksgiving
Sunday of 2017 had some sort of external factor, like weather-related flight
delays? Though I didn't find any news specifically calling out flight delays,
this was the closest and pretty vague:

[https://abcnews.go.com/US/sunshine-us-fog-flight-delays-
west...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/sunshine-us-fog-flight-delays-west-
coast/story?id=51388432)

~~~
mnw21cam
Agreed, just looking at a single year at a single airport could be showing
some kind of external factor, like weather, operating system updates just
released, etc. Would need to repeat for multiple airports and years to get a
robust conclusion.

Not that I think the conclusion is wrong - it just isn't robust.

------
udayrddy
That is a lot of effort and nice analysis, but concluding the story based on
the WiFi data usage is a weak support because 1\. Flights get often delayed
most, during the long weekend days 2\. Because it is a holiday season, people
like me assume the security clearance line gets busier than the regular days
and reach the airport 90 minutes earlier (45 minutes earlier on a non-holiday
trip) 3\. November it is, places might have covered with snow or fog (SFO
might be an exemption)

I think it would have been a great support to your analysis if the peak is
measured on passenger count or unique devices connected to the wifi.

------
peteretep
I had the joy this year of flying across Europe on New Years Eve. NYE
fireworks across Germany (I think it was Germany) were truly spectacular from
the air.

~~~
liotier
Really ? I remember seeing the big 14th July fireworks in Cannes from an
aircraft on the Nice landing approach - I found it disappointingly small...

~~~
peteretep
You don’t really see individual fireworks so much as the entire landscape
ripples with light

------
rajman187
Begging the question has nothing to do with raising a question, it's a type of
logical fallacy. And it's also annoying to see misused. /Pedantry

~~~
LanceH
I could also just be a phrase which means just what it seems to mean. Maybe
you could point me to the book of allowable phrases. If he used it to describe
another logical fallacy, that would be wrong, but in this case it's just a
couple words that make sense and also have some other meaning in some other
context.

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
The words only make sense because he's likely heard it in the context of the
logical fallacy. The words don't "make sense" without that. The couple of
words that he'd be looking for would be "begging me to question" or "raises
the question."

~~~
Dylan16807
Try "begs for the question".

Then remember that the word "for" is _often_ omitted after the word "beg".
"beg your pardon". "beg forgiveness".

Taking the phrase as written, outside the idiom for a logical fallacy, the
grammar is perfectly adequate.

------
Bahamut
I sort of discovered this myself when looking for flight prices about 4 months
back around this week (flying from the US). I happen to have the whole week of
Thanksgiving off from work due to it shutting down that week every year
(supposedly not guaranteed but has been given every year since instituted), so
I was looking to take advantage of it to travel - I settled on the UK, but
picking good days/times to fly was a challenge. I knew that generally early
morning/late night flights were cheaper if I could get them in general, but
one thing I noticed was flights were expensive the Saturday before to fly out,
and expensive the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving to fly back.

I settled on flying out the Friday before Thanksgiving, and flying back on
Black Friday for a savings of about $200-300. My flight to the UK though was
completely full, in part owing that SFO is a major United hub whose employees
take advantage of flying standby whenever they can. I’ll be a little surprised
if it is full going back though.

------
deadprogram
Oh man, how I love data! Good work on this post.

~~~
Plastikdusche
Very cool approach indeed, but there's also this ;)

[https://www.flysfo.com/media/facts-statistics/air-traffic-
st...](https://www.flysfo.com/media/facts-statistics/air-traffic-
statistics/2018)

~~~
aaronbrager
That data is only monthly

------
lathiat
I planned a holiday to the USA last year with my wife. Intentionally planned
our trip to Disneyland (1 of 3.5 weeks) to avoid school holidays etc.

Accidentally planned to attend the week of thanksgiving. Fortunately realised
before my flights were booked and changed it to the week after.

Near miss :) apparently it’s one of the busiest weeks for Disneyland. And many
families end up taking the entire week off not just thanksgiving? I had no
idea and found that crazy but there you go :)

~~~
ghaff
Although not universal, a lot of companies give the day after Thanksgiving off
as well as Thanksgiving itself. (And, typically, not a lot gets done on at
least the Wednesday afternoon as well.) So it's a pretty common week for
families (and others) to take off.

------
gumby
The weird thing to me about flying on Thanksgiving (I don't observe it) is how
sorry the air staff is for me "of you have to miss out on fly on
thanksgiving"). While they have to _work_ on that day and apparently it
matters to them!

Since it matters to them I thank them for their concern. But it's really
simply an easy day to travel if I have a reason to.

------
jmspring
Friends and I, for years, used to go to Vegas for thanksgiving -- late 90s
until mid 2000s. The change in travel patterns and when people flew was
interesting.

The reason for vegas - multiple people from different areas that mostly had
direct flights to Vegas.

These days, I tend to pick areas that are quiet and relatively easy to get to
-- a lot of those have been exploring the Sierra or remote parts of the coast.

------
Xcelerate
This reminds me: I procrastinated and haven't booked my Christmas ticket
yet... Bay Area to Atlanta — anyone got any tips? I think Google Flights is
the best way to find the cheapest ticket, but if there's something else out
there I'd be glad to know!

~~~
potench
Anecdotally, use the brave browser to look for hotels and flights. Since it
blocks tracking I’ve heard you will see lower cost flights (I’ve also heard
the converse that searching with iPhone/safari may result in higher prices.)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/9gkcow/brave_br...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/9gkcow/brave_browser_is_best_for_booking_flights/)

~~~
laken
This is quite an ancient myth of flight pricing, and I'd love to see it die,
but alas it will not. Your cookies and/or browser fingerprint has basically no
effect on flight prices.

In addition, the "proof" provided on that subreddit has quite a few problems:

A) That route is priced ridiculously anyway, and they are looking at Delta,
who always price ridiculously. Delta doesn't care about price-conscious
shoppers, so they have virtually no incentive to try and segment fares based
on browsing history, etc.

B) They're looking at a third party flight aggregator. These are the WORST
ways of buying flight tickets. They're decent for _finding_ deals, but 9/10
times, the airline's website sells it cheaper, and the airline's website gives
you more benefits anyway (as you're the buyer and/or owner, not the online
travel agent).

C) Furthermore, these online travel agents cache flight lookups _very_
heavily. My guess is that the search with TOR routes to a different edge
server with a different cache. API calls to the airlines are extremely costly.

The best way of getting a cheaper flight has nothing to do with your browser,
so don't worry about it. The best ways of saving money are based on _when_ you
buy, and of course what airline. Don't buy on a weekend, and try not to fly on
one either. Holidays are similar, except it's not a bad idea to actually fly
ON a holiday, but not around one.

~~~
potench
What about using a vpn to change your geo to try and get geo-based deals? This
website appears to have some proof of this approach working:
[https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/07/how-to-
ge...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/07/how-to-get-cheaper-
flights-by-using-a-vpn/)

------
lisper
Never attempted travel at Thankgiving, but for about 15 years running we would
fly home on Christmas day after visiting family in Portland Oregon. We would
leave in the evening, after a full day of festivities. The airport was like a
ghost town. It was awesome.

~~~
dawnerd
Pdx is like a ghost town most days depending on the time. I think it’s what
makes the airport so nice.

------
ForHackernews
> I don’t know the backstory of why most FOIA requests end up with data being
> formatted in the worst way possible

It's malicious compliance. They're required to give you the info, but they
aren't required to make your life easier.

~~~
jhauris
I assumed they used PDF because it's a more stable format that is harder to
accidentally modify on receipt. They may also need to store it on their end in
case they need to prove what they provided, and provide some level of forgery
prevention or detection.

------
jrnichols
As someone that is working in an airport on Thanksgiving, this is accurate.

and SFO's free wifi ssid really is kind of creepy.

i'm also amazed still at just how slow and awful a lot of AT&T wifi still is.
They should be ashamed of how slow it is.

------
didgeoridoo
Great post. Is there any resource out there to help non-technical journalists
process poorly-formatted FOIA data dumps? (Either a how-to guide, or by
directly helping out with ETL pro bono)?

------
dandare
TIL about ghostscript's txtwrite function. A dawn of a new era!

------
telesilla
I like to fly international on the afternoon of Christmas day - I get to have
breakfast with my family then arrive in another continent to look forward to a
stress-free New Years.

------
rpm33
Thanksgiving and Christmas - best days to fly. Especially if you are not
seeing family either of those days.

------
iammart
Really enjoyed reading this, thanks for the post!

------
saifsadiq1995
so many numbers !!!!!

