United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care • Hacker News Board

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#171

Post by saryant » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 3:26 PM UTC

adolph wrote: post #141

mherdeg wrote: post #80

I don't think this blog post's headline is quite right. "Losing a child" is putting a child on BOS-EWR instead of BOS-CLE and not noticing the problem until the child's family in Cleveland calls the parents and the parents call Newark, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009... . It sounds like what happened here was "causing a child to miss a connection" (and also separately "delaying the delive…

If my luggage didn't make a connection and I arrived at my final destination without it, I would think of it as "lost luggage." Would it matter to me if it was stuck in the connecting airport or sent elsewhere? No, it did not arrive with me, the airline lost it, even if temporarily. In lay person terms, the luggage is lost--the airline lost a child, yes.

In my mind, "lost" implies that its location can't be figured out at that moment. While airlines certainly do lose luggage like that, many times the airline knows exactly where your bag is but due to operational reasons it didn't make the same plane.

Sometimes it goes on an earlier flight, as was the case with my bag last month flying IAH-LAX on United, a route where United has a dozen flights a day. If you're connecting, your first flight may have been delayed and they couldn't get the bag from one end of the airport to the other.

I'm not trying to say the situation doesn't suck but there is a certain logic, twisted it may be, to airline operations.

And I'm certainly not trying to defend United's actions in this instance.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#172

Post by incision » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 3:31 PM UTC

calinet6 wrote: post #123

stonemetal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot on HN. You know nothing about agriculture, but you see a minor set of stories and you think you're a fucking expert. What is with the create a throwaway account to insult people thing? Karma isn't worth anything why not burn it under your real username?

Frankly, HN is a better place if people value their accounts and their reputation. This is a Good Thing.

I've been struggling and failing for a minute here for a way sum this up. It's likely impossible as it's far from a simple topic.

Anyway, I tend to disagree. Reputation can do plenty to make a place worse - squashing dissenting opinions, incentivizing "gaming" of the system. I do my best to ignore these systems entirely.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#173

Post by roel_v » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 3:33 PM UTC

wooster wrote: post #164

roel_v wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for a farmer to plan which crops to plant based on rainfall predictions." It's good enough to offer insurance to farmers for when harvests will fail. This exists, I know because I (even if only at arms length) work in this field.

The insurance plans I've seen were based upon historical data, and didn't take weather forecasts into account. (My family is in farming and ranching.)

I'm not sure how these insurances are sold to end users at small scales. I'm involved in building crop harvest forecast systems to be used by insurers who insure large businesses (think multinationals) who need resources from mostly Asian and African countries for the production of their goods, e.g. palm trees. So this use case is different in scale from your example, our work is mostly in risk modeling on a large scale.

That said, if I were selling insurances, I'd want two things: data to justify or explain my rates to my customers, and data to make predictions of my own risk and/or profit margins. The two might be correlated in a highly competitive and transparent market, but I have a hunch that these insurances are not, and that there isn't a whole lot of pressure to work on a cost plus pricing model, so that these insurers can work on a value-added pricing model.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#174

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 3:38 PM UTC

gabrielf wrote: post #31

swang wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being as polite as I can say this, but how is it that when you read this article you think it is yet another, "company ignore customer story?" I think most people read this and are appalled by the fact that United is so far over on the wrong side of the line that they can't even be bothered to worry about a human being anymore. They are so far gone that no one in the system cared that a kid is alone by him/hersel…

They aren't in the business of transporting human beings, but they are in the business of transporting and storing things that are really, really important to human beings. Their financial information. Their family photos, records of who they talked to and what they said, etc. Real human beings got hurt when Yahoo handed over information about who they were talking to to the Chinese government. If you spend 99 cents…

[deleted]

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#175

Post by greedo » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 3:55 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #153

greedo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Anyone that thinks farming in the US is a matter of pulling out the almanac and hoping the rain will match expectations is naive at best. Here's the thought process a farmer goes through in deciding what to plant: 1. What's the expected market price for corn and soybean. 2. What is the cost of crop insurance? 3. What's the current rainfall estimate? 4. What's the cost of water via irrigation and the cost of…

So, context, I'm a libertarian. But, bear with me a moment. Why are subsidies bad? They "distort the market". How do subsidies distort the market? They cause overproduction of the subsidized good. Where an efficient allocation would tend to fairly precisely match demand to production (more precisely than any other known way of doing it), thus allowing the rest of the capital to go do other useful things, a subsidized…

Oh, I'm libertarian in many ways as well, but generally agree with you on farm subsidies with the exception of ethanol. I think it's criminal for us to be taking some of the most productive farmland in the world, and growing corn on it to burn in our cars. It's a net negative in terms of energy, and is almost solely due to Iowa having an inordinate amount of influence due to the timing of their primary.

Also, witness the affects of the sugar tariffs that have given rise to the widespread use of HFCS. If it weren't for these, we'd still have Coca-Cola flavored with real sugar. Instead we have to import it from Mexico...

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#176

Post by CaptainZapp » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 3:55 PM UTC

greedo wrote: post #125

CaptainZapp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, the old times of flying. When I flew from Zurich to Vienna with my sister she knew the purser of the flight. While she was immediately seated in business class I was asked if I would mind to enjoy the entire flight in the cockpit on a jump seat (yeah, I know: stupid question :) ) Even though I was in my late 20s it was a kid's dream come true. Needless to say that this was before 9/11 and that this would be comp…

I remember getting to sit in the flight engineer's seat while he took a break. My grandfather had been a Pan Am pilot, so this was heaven for me. Nowadays they don't have flight engineers, jump seats etc. All squashed up like a bus, and we wonder why they treat us like cattle.

What surprised me most - in addition to the fact that flying a plane is definitely not quite like driving a glorified bus - was the old timey manuals that actually hoged a lot of valuable cockpit real estate.

Imagine about seven quite massive ring binders on the floor on the right side of the first officer.

Today they probably have that all on an iPad. I could imagine, though and given how conservative the aviation industry is, that they still have to lug around the entire amount of paper.

That, however and admittedly, is just a guess.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#177

Post by greedo » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 3:57 PM UTC

wtvanhest wrote: post #136

chimi wrote: post #33

This is a problem bigger than United -- which has a lot of problems. This is what you get when you subsidize bad companies that need to fail. United needs to fail so someone better can take over. The moral hazards are ruining the country. I saw it recently with farmers struggling from the drought. Compare this farmer: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417774n who has acres full of hay that don't do well in the…

1st, $8b in theoretical subsidies after September 11th isn’t material when an industry has $100s of billions of debt and equity. Delta and United have about $65b alone. AIG’s bailout was $182B. 2nd, It is inexcusable for a human being to not help a young child regardless of the company they work for. However, the other stories about airlines being terrible with customer service are dumb. In general people are stresse…

To address your second point, how is it that Southwest can consistently provide friendly service? They have to deal with the same stressors that their competitors face.

Don't underestimate the importance of leadership and management prowess in how employees perform.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#178

Post by calinet6 » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 3:59 PM UTC

incision wrote: post #172

calinet6 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, HN is a better place if people value their accounts and their reputation. This is a Good Thing.

I've been struggling and failing for a minute here for a way sum this up. It's likely impossible as it's far from a simple topic. Anyway, I tend to disagree. Reputation can do plenty to make a place worse - squashing dissenting opinions, incentivizing "gaming" of the system. I do my best to ignore these systems entirely.

Ironically this may increase your reputation, as honesty and genuineness are extremely valued traits.

Most corporations fail to realize this.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#179

Post by greedo » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 4:02 PM UTC

lusr wrote: post #127

jhcoaps wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot on HN. You know nothing about agriculture, but you see a minor set of stories and you think you're a fucking expert. You have no idea if the diversified strategy has a higher expected value, or if it's just a variance play based on heat, or if different weather conditions could've affected interplay in a different way. You have no idea what the crop insurances for differe…

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot of on the Internet. You hide behind an account you just made, aggressively, lengthily and rudely responding to somebody who actually desired to contribute to the discussion without contributing much of anything yourself, without seeing the irony in any of this.

Ironic that you're not posting under a real name. And your account is only a hair over a year old.

Is it really relevant that his account is new? Or should HN put up a delay that you can only post a reply after your account has aged appropriately?

And this isn't a new thing for the internets. No one knows you're a dog...

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#180

Post by greedo » Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 4:10 PM UTC

CaptainZapp wrote: post #176

greedo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember getting to sit in the flight engineer's seat while he took a break. My grandfather had been a Pan Am pilot, so this was heaven for me. Nowadays they don't have flight engineers, jump seats etc. All squashed up like a bus, and we wonder why they treat us like cattle.

What surprised me most - in addition to the fact that flying a plane is definitely not quite like driving a glorified bus - was the old timey manuals that actually hoged a lot of valuable cockpit real estate. Imagine about seven quite massive ring binders on the floor on the right side of the first officer. Today they probably have that all on an iPad. I could imagine, though and given how conservative the aviation i…

iPads are actually being adopted in aviation precisely to get rid of all the crufty old manuals and maps.

I flew to a conference in Vegas last month on a 737 (via Southwest). Chatted a bit with the pilots and was reminded how cramped the cockpit is these days. Even with multi-function displays, there were a billion levers/buttons/knobs. How they ever were allowed to have a hyper-curious kid in the cockpit back in the day is unthinkable.