Blog: Airplanes

Airlines are regularly measured on their on-time performance - how many of their flights arrive on time - and various other metrics, but less often is there a discussion of failure modes, the ways in which the system most often breaks down. In software engineering this is a common thing to evaluate. It's great if a piece of software runs fine most of the time, but we need to look carefully at when it breaks down and why.

One terrible failure occurred on New Year's Eve in Austin, when bad weather at Dallas forced a flight from San Francisco to Dallas to redirect to Austin. The flight had already been delayed in San Francisco, and as it waited in Austin, American's managers decided to let flights from Austin take off ahead in order to keep more of the schedule on time. As a consequence, the passengers on the delayed Flight 1348 had to sit for eight hours with toilets overflowing, no food or water, and other nightmares.

This is an extreme example of American Airlines' most common failure mode. When a plane is delayed, factors often pile up more and more to make it even later. They have cut staff so close to the bone that any delay causes a shortage of the personnel needed to get the plane to its destination. Last week, I was on a flight from San Francisco to New York which had to wait about 30 minutes for a minor maintenance fix. This is common for flights, but then once we were ready we had to wait another 40 minutes just to get a crew to push the plane off the gate. Then when we arrived in New York an hour late, there was no gate crew ready for us on the other end either. This has happened to me countless times on American and much more rarely on other airlines.

In addition, the focus on on-time performance in the statistics leads managers at American to often prioritize delayed flights behind later flights that aren't delayed, as happened in Austin with Flight 1348. This improves the stats but often at the cost of very unhappy passengers who endure huge delays. A few years ago, I was on a flight from LA to JFK which had to wait three hours on the ground in New York due to no available ground crews. After we had waited an hour or so, the pilot announced that we would have to wait longer because international flights were landing and American was prioritizing them ahead of us since they had to turn around and take off again. A simple delay kept growing and growing.

The article explains, "After years of cutting staff, carriers are less capable of handling crises - from not having enough telephone reservationists to handle calls, or extra bodies to empty toilet tanks, to spare pilots and flight attendants to help out when delays stack up. Congestion in the air and at airports exacerbates the messes caused when storms hit." Again to compare to software engineering, computer science usually analyzes the worst case running time of an algorithm first and average running time second. It's too bad airlines don't do this. I'd like to see airlines publish statistics on the number of delays that compound into additional delays due to staffing problems. Maybe then they would have an incentive to be more flexible. In the meantime, I'll fly JetBlue over American, which at least in my anecdotal experience, seems much more able to mobilize to overcome problems rather than letting them spin out of control.

To: Ralph Richardi
Sr. VP of Customer Services
American Airlines

Dear Mr. Richardi,

I have been a loyal American Airlines flyer for many years. Since 2001 I have flown American one to two times a month, usually on transcontinental flights. The wide selection of flights from New York and the value of AAdvantage miles cemented my loyalty.

However, in August I decided to try JetBlue after an AA ground operations snafu at BOS delayed my flight for over an hour (a weather hold delayed us for 15 minutes; once it was lifted, we had lost our push crew and had to wait a full hour until someone could push us off the gate). I found JetBlue's employees to be friendly and eager to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible, and their efficiency made up for the lesser value of their loyalty program. But I kept flying American when, not infrequently, no convenient JetBlue flight existed. Until yesterday.

I flew AA 242 on January 21 from LAX to JFK. We landed a few minutes early at 10:09. After a bit of taxiing, the captain announced that there were no available gates and we would have to wait 45 minutes. A half hour later he told us it would be at least 45 more minutes. As that deadline came and went, all he could say was that he had no new information. Around 12:20 - over two full hours later - we finally pulled into a gate. And it took another hour more to receive my luggage. Mine was not the only flight so delayed; nearly every other arrival that night had to wait at least an hour.

While this delay inconvenienced me, it completely devastated the young woman sitting next to me in business class, whose sorrows I overheard as she tearfully spoke to friends and family on the phone during our two-hour wait. Upon the first announcement with the 45-minute estimate, she frantically called the friends she was supposed to meet, including a young man she was clearly looking forward to seeing, only to find out that he was not going to wait for her. As the minutes stretched into hours she realized that she was going to miss the entire evening, and spent the rest of the long delay in tears, crying to a friend and arguing with her mother. I couldn't help but overhear that she had used a family member's hard earned miles to upgrade to business so she could sleep on the plane and have the energy to spend the night socializing.

I know that airline delays are often inevitable and American has to keep costs to a minimum to compete in today's cutthroat environment. However, the insufficiency of the JFK ground crew completely ruined this young woman's trip and ensured that I, for one, will seek other airlines for my future travel needs. Miles may be useful, but being guided in and out of gates when necessary is much more so.

Sincerely,

David Alpert