

Why our political system is causing you flight delays - jaf12duke
http://blog.flightcaster.com/why-our-political-system-is-causing-you-fligh

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yardie
I think it's bullshit and a big waste of money that the government is wasting
money on overhauling ATC. Going to GPS and such definitely has its benefits
but as any pilot or controller will tell you the problem isn't the routes it's
the airports. Before you put an airplane in the sky you have to have a place
for it to land. Gates and slots are so tight they are almost inflexible. This
creates a network effect of delays in one airport cascades to others. Planes
that are late can't be cleaned and boarded so it pushes other planes waiting
for the gate to also be delayed.

What needs to be abandoned is the hub-spoke airport system. It had it's place
in the 80s when computers weren't very powerful but algorithms and processors
have improved and route optimizations would be so much better.

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Retric
I think the real problem is they don't keep sufficient spare planes ready to
roll at airports. Granted that's an extremely expensive proposition, but even
a little extra slack can greatly reduce delay propagation. As you increase
efficiency you can always increase utilization to the point where the system
becomes unstable.

Edit: I am not suggesting you need a spare at every airport, just that
increasing the quantity of spares or increasing scheduling slack time fight
delay propagation where increasing efficiency does not.

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sokoloff
Carriers live and die by turnaround time to keep their jets making money (or
at least, not losing money as quickly...) A significant part of SWA's
competitive advantage is their industry leading turnaround time.

Having every carrier have to park a standby jet (even just one), flight crew
and full cabin crew at each of their airports is going to flow pretty quickly
(and stoutly) to the ticket price. (There are duty limits for flight and cabin
crews, and being on active-standby, such as you'd need to be in order to
effectively reduce delays, counts against those limits.)

Consumers want cheap tickets. Airlines are providing that, sometimes at the
hidden expense to those consumers of delays and cancellations.

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Retric
I agree with everything you said about the cost. However, large airlines do
keep hot spares at a few locations. Low turnaround time is great, but
sometimes something major breaks and you need to be able to pick up the slack.
There are even companies who provide "generic" airplanes for this purpose.

PS: The incentives are somewhat skewed. Customers who have already paid for a
flight still need to get where they are going so they accept delays.

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dminor
Hopefully Congress gives the FAA the authority to do auctions - would be
especially cool if they used combinatorial auctions:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_auction>

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Empact
Seems there's more than one way. The other is the inefficiency of the air
traffic control system: <http://reason.tv/video/show/951.html>

