Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
backchannel.com
Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
1–10 of 138 posts
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#2Speaking 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 the gate if it isn't even checking to make sure the ticket matches the flight?
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#3This and all the stories in the news show that the airline industry needs some serious updating.
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#4Speaking 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…
That wouldn't be a global issue. Airlines each implement their own gate area boarding pass reader software.
So that's a airline specific design decision. It could be that for United, the beep indicates a valid boarding pass of any type, but a display shows the flight info...and the matching is manual.
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#5This and all the stories in the news show that the airline industry needs some serious updating.
There is no reason the SSR codes shouldn't work as a solution. This is less about underlying tech, and more about specific effort to use it correctly to solve the issues.
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#6Perhaps 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 airline levels. Computing (for simulations), manufacturing such as advanced composites and 3D printing have advanced enough to streamline aircraft manufacturing. Heck it feels like we just ignored commercial airline market altogether and jumped straight to the commercial space market. If we have an advanced tech to go space exploring then I am sure we can bring significant changes to the crumbling airline industry.
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#7Speaking 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…
Mistakes like that can happen, since it depends a lot on the gate agent to check the information, usually at the same time they're helping people gate-check their luggage or print new boarding passes or work with standby passengers. That's the reason every flight I've ever been on has the flight attendant say "This is a two hour flight to [city]. If [city] is not your destination, please disembark now".
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#8This 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 until they die... , if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it-even-when-it-is-broke, "we can't afford to stop the world for your cargo-cult modernization rewrite, sonny...", too big to fail, on and on...
It's a pretty weird situation, but by my estimate, it's probably going to require totally new airlines rolling their own systems from scratch, in parallel isolation, next to the huge legacy carriers as they continue to operate, in order to transition, modernize and unseat the current technology. That seems to be the way things work in industries this big.
Fast food, banking, telecommunications. All of them have examples of modern upstarts that are now world-wide staples, simply because they started from scratch with more modern efficient systems, as they continue to co-exist alongside dinosaurs that still haven't gone away.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#9Speaking 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…
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.
Re: Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
#10Speaking 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?