I think the frustration comes from airlines not being able to accurately predict what the impact of a delay will be for the schedule for the remainder of the day, following day. They always hope they'll be able to recover some of the schedule with fast turnarounds.
On a recent trip (when I encountered issues on every leg — cancellations, delays, missed connections, you name it), it is clear that airlines are incentivised to not communicate delays until it is clear the delay can't be recovered. In one case, at the airline's hub, the airport displays were showing a 2 hour delay and their app showed on-time departure (to the point I had to go and ask which source to trust). Having been a frequent flyer in the past I was able to determine that the delay was likely (but airlines can swap in equipment at hubs and mitigate the delay).
Once you do have a delay the ripples are complex to handle. You have some passengers that were meant to connect to other flights. You have some that won't travel at all die to the cancellation. You then have 100+ people who you somehow have to accommodate in the coming days when flight loads are hopefully already 90+%.
To be fair to my airline, their app was actually great at offering me a rebooking option the following day when my flight was cancelled. Unfortunately, the option I selected resulted in a non-direct flight with a transfer time that was impossible in reality (shouldn't have been offered in my opinion). I was literally rebooked 5mins after they declared the flight cancelled, skipped the queues back in the departure area (I don't think the local service agents even knew about the app) and drove home to my family for an extra night.
Because making prediction and being wrong is way worst then not making one.
Plus, imo, they dont know what exactly will happen. There is likely whole bunch of negotiations and replannings going on in background with unsure results.
Worth noting that one of the most high profile uses of Mechanical Turk was in September 2007 to review satellite imagery in a massive crowdsourced effort to find missing record-setting aviator Steve Fossett.
The effort failed to find any areas of interest and the missing aviator was found the following year by a hiker. I wonder if there was any analysis after the fact to understand if the imagery actually provided any hints regarding the eventual crash site.
> Amazon's search effort was shut down the week of October 29, without any measurable success. Major Cynthia Ryan later said it had been more of a hindrance than a help. She said that persons purporting to have seen the aircraft on the Mechanical Turk or have special knowledge clogged her email during critical days of the search, and for even months afterward. Many of the ostensible sightings proved to be images of CAP aircraft flying search grids, or simply mistaken artifacts of old images. Psychics flooded the search base in Minden with predictions of where the aviator could be found. One man from Canada was particularly persistent with daily calls to Ryan. Ryan noted that every message, letter, or phone call was taken seriously, which swamped the USAF specialists assigned the task of reviewing every one of them without regard to apparent plausibility. In retrospect, the crowdsource effort was "not ready for prime time", according to Ryan
freely available satellite/aerial images in 2007 were in no way high resolution enough to identify such a tiny airplane, and in many places, they still aren't.
There is an official European Union goal to achieve 100% Gigabit network coverage for all European households by 2030. While it does not exclusively specify fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), fiber is the primary technology utilized to meet this standard, which requires networks to deliver speeds of 1 Gbps and above. It is underpinned by Regulation (EU) 2024/1309, known as the Gigabit Infrastructure Act (GIA).
I live in Ireland. 10+ years ago I used to the travel to the US quite a bit (5-10 trips a year). The majority of the time I would fly via a major EU hub like AMS or CDG even if there was a direct flight from Ireland.
The reason? Other factors that were important to me!
Examples:
- cost optimisation. I could fly business within company budget rules.
- flight time. I highly valued longer flight times between Europe and the US west coast so I got a proper night's sleep when flying east-bound. Doing connections on the east coast often meant quite short transatlantic flights that arrived very early in the morning. Much harder to manage the jetlag.
- Product offering. Some of the routes from AMS and CDG had much newer planes and cabins.
- Airline alliance loyalty. Given the travel pattern it meant sense to pick an alliance that delivered some value. Irish airlines didn't have much to offer and were much more expensive for a worse end to end product.
Having chatted with friends who have gotten stuck in elevators, you definitely should care about total travel time.
In one case, the building was still being commissioned and it took a while for anyone to even realize they were stuck (could spawn a whole discussion about launch processes in itself).
Not all businesses want to pay the premium for that level of redundancy. Businesses with lower margins want resilient service at a lower price point. With AI and contributed shift to cloud, the demand for lowering TCO for a greater share of the larger pie becomes greater.
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