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Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

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Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#31

Post by tyingq »

coredog64 wrote: post #25
CodeSheikh wrote: post #6

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…

I would wager there is more money to be "found" by streamlining operations (e.g. better boarding and overall faster gate turns) than there would be in manufacturing improvements. 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 en…

>more money to be "found" by streamlining operations (e.g. better boarding and overall faster gate turns)

FWIW, many ideas have been tried in this space. Assigned seating vs not assigned. Dual boarding through both the front and rear door of the aircraft. Charging for carry on luggage. Tons of time and motion studies. Nothing really compelling has ever come out of it, for various predictable reasons. The big one, to me, is that airlines are compelled to pack people tightly. Couple that with human behavior, and you're done. It only takes one person to hold up everyone else, because aisle space (as compared to seat space) doesn't make money.

Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#32

Post by Retric »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #29
freehunter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree. Govt regulations can become a a major road block. As much good these regulations provide for the safety of consumers, they sure can prove out to be a hurdle for innovation when ill enforced. For example, I have heard from friends doing compliance testing with FTC for new hardware and how govt appointed contractors or their own employees literally go through thick books to make sure EVERYTHING checks out. Rules…

The history of accidents from well intended people doing the wrong things even when it cost them their lives creates a very different culture. It may seem wasteful, but that mostly the mismatch between doing something correctly thousands of times and doing it correctly millions of times. You can pay attention and do a complex things correctly thousands of times, but for millions that simply does not work.

If the medical industry worked like the FAA the jobs would be boring, and ~30,000+ fewer people would die a year.

Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#33

Post by nataz »

rhino369 wrote: post #26
maxxxxx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is second hand info, so I can't personally vouch. But I heard the scanners at gates with multiple jetways (for example 35 A and B) have software that is set up to accept tickets for both flights. Not sure why you would board both flights concurrently, but may that was a desired feature. There is also likely a human error component. When you make someone manually scan 150 people they stop paying attention. They s…

My guess is that some planes can accommodate 2 jetways at once. One for first class/business, one for economy.

Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#34

Post by lmm »

coredog64 wrote: post #25
CodeSheikh wrote: post #6

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…

I would wager there is more money to be "found" by streamlining operations (e.g. better boarding and overall faster gate turns) than there would be in manufacturing improvements. 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 en…

Pilot friend told me we know exactly how we could make airliners ~twice as fuel-efficient by making the fuselage a more aerodynamic shape than a flat cylinder. But no-one wants to have to build each seat row in a slightly different shape.

Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#35

Post by pavel_lishin »

freehunter wrote: post #17
kerryfalk wrote: post #9

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.

The system may not be aware of something like boarding groups, especially since every airline does them differently.

It's entirely possible that the "check" is "is this boarding pass checksum valid.", especially given the stories of boarding wrong flights - it doesn't even flash red for "this is not the right pass for this flight".

Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#36

Post by jakub_g »

pavement wrote: post #8
joshuaheard wrote: post #3

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…

FWIW, Amadeus has been working for years and years on a migration away from IBM mainframes. The project took hundreds of man-years and it's nearing completion very soon (I mean, maybe this or next year, that's "very soon" in the GDS scale).

But as you can imagine, migrating legacy systems to new hardware with the spec "it should work as the old system" is not the most sexy job and not the easiest to recruit great programmers for.

(I work for Amadeus, but on unrelated projects - though I have friends who worked on the migration).

You can read more here for example: https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/08/04/amadeus-takes-off-wi...

Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#38

Post by Symbiote »

tdb7893 wrote: post #18
CodeSheikh wrote: post #6

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…

The airline industry is already established and low margin so it's not an easy opportunity for disruption. Combine that with heavy regulation and needing tons and tons of very specific expertise and I doubt any VC would touch most of it with a 10 foot pole

The European industry was massively disrupted in the last decade or two by budget airlines.

There's not only the western European companies, but even cheaper eastern ones like Wizz Air and AirBaltic.

Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#39

Post by jbeales »

The headline is misleading. According to the information in the article itself most of the complaints can be solved by properly training staff to use existing tech as it was designed.

One of main complaints of the article - that airline staff doesn't get passed enough information about a passenger's disability, so, for example, deaf people get met at the gate with a wheelchair, seems to be a direct result of using inappropriate, or non-standard, SSR codes. If a deaf/hard-of-hearing person is travelling, the appropriate code, (DEAF), should be used, not HI or MAAS, (if the systems allow for multiple codes, "DEAF MAAS" would be appropriate).

According to the article these SSR codes are industry standards and are entrenched in airline systems worldwide. If they were used properly, and if staff were properly trained to understand and act on them, this problem would largely be solved. This is a training & execution problem, not a technology problem.

A second complaint, that information is not passed to disabled customers quickly, (for example, hard-of-hearing passengers can't hear announcements at the airport or on the plane), is also mostly solvable by using the tech that is installed in airports today. For example: "Visual paging — when an audio page is posted in text form on screens — is becoming very easy, but it’s not yet ubiquitous." Why is it not ubiquitous? Haven't most airports, at least in wealthy countries, got some sort of a screen up at each gate that has the Flight #, departure time, weather at the destination, and all that? If announcements aren't going up there too that seems to be laziness or lack of training on behalf of the gate staff, or laziness or lack of concern in whoever makes decisions about how the software that runs those screens works.

For in-flight announcements it's harder, especially now that seat-back displays are being removed from aircraft in favour of handheld devices. It probably comes down to a flight attendant making sure that a disabled person gets told what's going on, (because he or she saw the appropriate SSR code on the passenger manifest).

The final complaint, in-flight entertainment, is ridiculous. Why isn't everything that's available on TV, (closed-captioning, described video, and whatever else I'm not aware of), available on in-flight entertainment? The tech exists, it looks like it just hasn't been installed, or has been installed but isn't activated, on aircraft. This should not even be a problem and I don't understand why it is.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not disabled, and haven't experienced these problems myself. This comment is based purely on the problems as described in the linked article.

Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

#40

Post by gregmac »

rhino369 wrote: post #26
maxxxxx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is second hand info, so I can't personally vouch. But I heard the scanners at gates with multiple jetways (for example 35 A and B) have software that is set up to accept tickets for both flights. Not sure why you would board both flights concurrently, but may that was a desired feature. There is also likely a human error component. When you make someone manually scan 150 people they stop paying attention. They s…

This is why exceptional cases require exceptional responses, especially when a human that is going to get fatigued is involved.

Don't just beep the same way every scan beeps, make a different noise. Show a large red "STOP" sign on the screen along with the problem.

When you need to alert a human to an event that only happens once in every few hundred cases, you can't be subtle.

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