91–100 of 138 posts
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Is the beep notifying "correct pass for this flight" or is it just notifying "code read successfully" and the agents job is to check that the ticket matches their flight?
I changed my seat once after getting a boarding pass, and at the gate the scanner raised an error - so yes it does seem like there is some actual checking done.
Disclaimer: I built airline reservations systems with ITA Software. I don't recall there being a minimum character count for SSR codes, but in legacy reservations systems (and the passenger name records (PNR) that contain these SSRs) there's for sure a max. Airline reservations systems never met a fixed-width format they didn't like, and the reason is that for a long, long time the unit of storage for a PNR was a blo…
I know a guy with the last name 'Tester' that had to have a gate agent book their flight every ~10 minutes until their flight departed because the reservation system in production would delete any reservations with the last name 'Tester'. Thought it was a fun story related to the immaturity of reservation / booking systems.
Jesus. Given that one of the Senators from Montana is named Tester, I would have thought someone would have been up the FAA's ass to get up their asses about this.
Disclaimer: I built airline reservations systems with ITA Software. I don't recall there being a minimum character count for SSR codes, but in legacy reservations systems (and the passenger name records (PNR) that contain these SSRs) there's for sure a max. Airline reservations systems never met a fixed-width format they didn't like, and the reason is that for a long, long time the unit of storage for a PNR was a blo…
Was this true in 2001? How did they make it through the post-9/11 shutdown? That was about two full days without flights, then a few more heavily limited.
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In the early systems and I think that has changed the PNR used to be the hash of physical memory location of the booking. Even back in 2002 most of the software used to deal with reservations was written in Assembler. I don't know if that has changed.
The six-character confirmation code you get when you book? That was the block address on disk of the start of your PNR.
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I know a guy with the last name 'Tester' that had to have a gate agent book their flight every ~10 minutes until their flight departed because the reservation system in production would delete any reservations with the last name 'Tester'. Thought it was a fun story related to the immaturity of reservation / booking systems.
>I know a guy with the last name 'Tester' that had to have a gate agent book their flight every ~10 minutes until their flight departed because the reservation system in production would delete any reservations with the last name 'Tester'. Jesus. Given that one of the Senators from Montana is named Tester, I would have thought someone would have been up the FAA's ass to get up their asses about this.
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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…
The shared gate agent computers are built from an industry-standard OS image (8 years or so ago this was Windows XP SP2, and not SP3, never SP3).
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Gates changes soo often it would be truly impossible to have the scanner check if you boarding correct plane. The mess would be disaster. AFAIK, the scanner only checks "okay this is the airport you supposed to be inside within 48hours timeframe". That's all.
...and as the gates change the changes are reflected on screens displayed throughout the airport; it's not like the correct gate information is only stored in the minds of the employees working that day
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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…
Plenty of large successful businesses run on razor thin margins, however the airline industry is not lean. The internal waste is immense. Source: Had an airline for a client, saw how sausage gets made
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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.
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TSA would be the part to disrupt, and it's not like that was ever rational to begin with—people aren't likely to realize or admit it's mostly a scare tactic to fill jobs.
But as I mentioned, it's subject to heavy regulation and most of their job description in mandated by the government. Where the money is might be selling hardware to the TSA but that's probably a big risk