21–30 of 138 posts
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.
This and all the stories in the news show that the airline industry needs some serious updating.
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…
It's just a difficult problem to solve. Many capable organizations have tried in earnest, including one Google bought for $700M. Thus far, the non TPF solutions can only scale to medium sized airlines.
It's not impossible, it's just a huge investment, and the payoff is lower than other potential uses of the same money. That's why all previous efforts stalled.
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 airl…
This and all the stories in the news show that the airline industry needs some serious updating.
For example, part of the reason the US is so far behind on credit card technology (just getting around to adopting EMV) is because the US was the first country to widely adopt credit cards in the first place and there's a lot of inertia.
In the airlines case, they were one of the first industries to computerize. Now they're stuck with the mainframes. Same thing happened in banking.
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 airl…
What most people don't realize is that an airliner is a $40-240 million dollar investment that needs intensive regular maintenance. Nobody gives a shit if you can shave 100lbs off the weight of the fuselage if you also have to replace the entire thing during every D check.
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 th…
I was wondering about that too. I once did the same thing. Went to gate 35A instead of 35B, scanned boarding pass, a person even looked at it. Nobody noticed until I saw the sign right above the door with the gate number so I turned around. What are they scanning and what are they looking at?
There is also likely a human error component. When you make someone manually scan 150 people they stop paying attention. They should have some kind of error message, but if it looks like other error messages (like the ask about emergency exit message), it's possible the human confused the error and cleared it.
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 airl…
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-900…
tl;dr: It's basically become apparent that too much safety is killing people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just a guess but I fly a _lot_ (~40 flights so far this year). My guess is that the software probably did its job, the gate agents are often just automotons and don't really check anything other than your boarding zone.
Even then, I often board with my coworkers who have higher status than me. If we're sitting next to each other and he's in group 2 but I'm in group 6, I'll generally board with him anyway and no one seems to care.
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 airl…
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-900…
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 airl…