11 ms·
Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities
- stinky613 9y agoSpeaking 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?
- tyingq 9y agoThat 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.
- freehunter 9y agoMistakes 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".
- kerryfalk 9y agoThis 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.
- freehunter 9y agoEven 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.
- qeternity 9y agoI have my friends do this when they travel with me. I tell them that if the gate agent says something, tell them you have a peanut allergy and need extra time to wipe the seat down. That line has worked every time.
- skyrw 9y agoSo what you're saying is that you are an inconsiderate asshole.
- sctb 9y agoNo matter what we're replying to, it's not OK to post like this.
- ben_jones 9y agoThat's not a life hack thats deliberately lying to someone whose job requires them to accommodate you to sometimes great degrees. Like not serving peanuts to those around you.
- xaqfox 9y ago"tell them you have a peanut allergy and need extra time to wipe the seat" Another often overlooked travel tip is that you can park in handicap spaces to save walking 10 extra feet.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoSuch abuse is why genuine, life-threatening allergies get trivialized in the public mind.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI 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?
- rhino369 9y agoThis 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 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.
- nataz 9y agoMy guess is that some planes can accommodate 2 jetways at once. One for first class/business, one for economy.
- rhino369 9y agoThat is definitely true. 747's often have several.
- gregmac 9y agoThis 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.
- douche 9y ago> When you make someone manually scan 150 people they stop paying attention Bingo. This is not really a job that people, in general, are any good at. If there was an automated turnstile that didn't suck, that'd be a great place for one, so they could focus on the exceptional cases instead of being lulled to sleep by the happy path.
- speedyapoc 9y agoAlmost certainly human error. Anecdotally, I had a standby ticket recently when my seat was reassigned to a paying customer, although I still had a boarding pass for that seat. I was halfway down the jet bridge before the gate agent realized that my ticket had been revoked. I imagine it's second nature for gate agents to let passengers through, and one lapse in judgement can cause the United incident, despite the software showing that the ticket was invalid.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 9y agoI bought a gift card at IKEA in Shanghai for 100 yuan once. Shortly afterward, I visited IKEA in Palo Alto and asked a cashier how much was on the card. She scanned it and reported a hundred dollars. I asked her to confirm that, which she did, and then she offered me a "receipt" of the scan, which I accepted. The printout correctly showed that the card contained 100 CNY. I've thought of IKEA ever since as a store where the cash registers are smarter than the cashiers.
- Scoundreller 9y agoIs the cashier "dumb" if their screen reported $100?
- thaumasiotes 9y agoIt didn't, though.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoI'm really surprised a Chinese bought IKEA card could be used in the USA anyways. These things usually rent transferable between countries.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
- codegeek 9y agoAround 2005, they scanned my boarding pass and let me board a wrong flight. I didn't even check the gate properly as I was in a hurry but I found out only when I got to someone's seat asking him to leave because it was "my" seat.
- casta 9y agoIn my experience, when I tried to board the wrong flight, the scanner served its purpose making an alerting sound and making sure they'd prevent me from boarding on the wrong airplane. This was with Delta (both my intended flight and the mistaken one.)
- nhf 9y agoDelta's IT is pretty decent for a large airline. Their scanners have little built in receipt printers. If you scan the wrong boarding pass (e.g. first leg of your flight boarding the second leg), it'll make the connection and pop out a little receipt telling you where to go. If your seat gets reassigned at the last minute or you get upgraded, you get a receipt giving your seat number.
- javiramos 9y agoFunny- this exact same thing almost happened to my sister a ~week ago. She boarded the wrong airplane (although the scanner beeped without any errors). Luckily, after sitting in the plane for 5 minutes, she realized that she had boarded the wrong plane. Her flight had changed gates.
- caseysoftware 9y agoWhich gets at the real question.. what is the scanner actually checking? From the numerous comments here, it's not matching the boarding pass to the flight or gate. Is it just boarding group? Is it that "yes, this is a valid ticket" or something else entirely? Seems like an easy way to "disappear" - basically book a fight going somewhere, look around until you find a flight with open seats (Southwest would be best as no assigned seating), and then... poof?
- dzdt 9y agoCabin crew is supposed to do a headcount as well, so there is a good chance you get booted at that point.
- stinky613 9y ago> Which gets at the real question.. what is the scanner actually checking? That's the question that's been nagging me since the day I read about this particular mistake. I wonder if there are any active public subreddits of airline workers; somewhere where I could hear a first-hand account of what those scanners are checking.
- ska 9y agoIs 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?
- lucaspiller 9y agoI 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.
- ska 9y agoInteresting. This may also be region/carrier specific I suppose. I've seen some pretty old looking consoles in smaller airports.
- joering2 9y agoGates 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.
- stinky613 9y ago...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
- joering2 9y agoIf you suggesting or thinking the screens are somewhat connected or talk with the same system that the gate scanners are running on, then that's incorrect. Totally separate rail.
- lucaspiller 9y agoI was flying from Dublin once. They scan your ticket before security and at the gate, and use some sort of facial recognition to identify you in both places. One woman was stopped as she entered the aircraft, as the attendent checking tickets saw that the flight on her ticket was for the day before!
- uxhacker 9y agoIn Europe they are meant to check the name on the boarding pass against an id such as a passport. I believe that the reader just shows your name. I also think what the readers do is update the system to say that you are on that flight. This is for revenue reasons. Tickets can be issued by other airlines, and the revenue is not counted until you are on the flight. Also in Europe the system matches you with your luggage. This is a security measure.
- pdelbarba 9y agoIt's also for manifest reasons. They need to have information on who and what is in the aircraft to calculate takeoff distance, power, flap settings, etc. and to account for everyone in the event of an accident or someone at CBP getting bored.
- mseebach 9y agoI've was once "rejected" by the gate-machine when I accidentally gave them an old boarding pass - however, this was on EasyJet, an airline which actually runs on 21st century software.
- josemrb 9y agoI've built a few systems for low-cost airlines in South America. There shouldn't be a lot of difference with bigger airlines around the world. The boarding software usually checks that: - The boarding pass is valid (checksum) - The flight state is correct e.g. 'boarding' and 'open' - The passenger did check-in - The passenger haven't boarded yet More advanced implementations can match the gate with the flight, this is optional. The beep usually is a response from the reader indicating that the code has been read successfully. The result of the operation is displayed in a screen and the attendant has to read it and act accordingly.
- kalleboo 9y ago> The beep usually is a response from the reader indicating that the code has been read successfully. In Japanese domestic terminals, the gates are definitely more advanced - they play a different chime depending on your frequent flier status.
- joshuaheard 9y agoThis and all the stories in the news show that the airline industry needs some serious updating.
- tyingq 9y agoThere 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.
- pavement 9y agoFor 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
- tyingq 9y ago>There are probably a hundred ways to rationalize why 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.
- CodeSheikh 9y agoPerhaps 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.
- tyingq 9y agoIt's not an easy problem to solve. A very capable organization, ITA Software, was able to rewrite the shopping part. They failed, however, on delivering a new tech reservations system. Not for lack of money or talent either. Google bought them for $700M.
- freehunter 9y agoNot 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-900s and MD-80/90s at the airport. Airlines literally cannot afford new planes, and aircraft makers can't get new airframes through the regulator process easily enough. Boeing struggled to get fly-by-wire to pass FAA regulations, how do you think they'd fare trying to replace aluminum with 3D printed plastic?
- pdelbarba 9y agoThe GA industry is running up against the same problems. Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s Cessnas/Pipers. Recently there has been some push back against the FAA's certification programs due to the fact that MEMS systems are inherently more reliable instruments than gyroscopes powered by engine driven vacuum pumps. This resulted in some legislative changes and now you can (IIRC) replace many gages in old aircraft with newer electronic variants and not need a Supplementary Type Certificate (basically like getting your car re-titled to replace the tape deck with a CD player). tl;dr: It's basically become apparent that too much safety is killing people.
- heartsucker 9y agoSlightly off topic, but this is hardly the biggest blunder of the airline industry. A company I worked for last year absolutely tore them apart in a talk at 33c3. In short, information like your address or passport number is easily accessible, and while it wasn't in the talk (I think), we were able to recover plaintext credit card numbers during the research. https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carmen_sandiego https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...
- grecy 9y agoFrom experience I can say the Telco industry is exactly the same. 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.
- notthemessiah 9y ago"Exactly the same" only if you ignore everything about them that isn't consumer facing. Telcos are high-profit margin regional monopolies, whereas airlines operate at the margins and are fiercely competitive. Perhaps the only thing that can be said about them being similar is that they are high barrier-to-entry industries.
- grecy 9y agoI meant "exactly the same" in the sense of the article - "letting old technology abuse their customers". These old industries are dinosaurs in "the age of the internet" and have no clue what they are doing with regard to IT / Systems.
- mrout 9y ago>Telcos are high-profit margin regional monopolies Only in the US. Outside the US we have competition law.
- uxhacker 9y agoThis did happen in Europe with a RyanAir and EasyJet. They used a system called OpenSkies that was far cheaper to operate. It lacked lots of the of connectivity that the old systems have to Travel Agents and other Airlines.
- losteric 9y agoThose companies are "disruptive" because they keep pushing boundaries and experimenting with new ideas. They are willing to gamble and lose, or even just spend money on an experiment with no known ROI. Kinda like Bell Labs of old. The stock market has trained the older enterprises to stick with consistent returns. Don't rock the boat, don't mess with the cash cow.
- saagarjha 9y ago> For the first time last fall, the US Department of Transportation drafted regulations related to captions for in-flight entertainment. This can't come quickly enough.
- jbeales 9y agoThe 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.
- douche 9y ago
- fulafel 9y agoWe have to drastically reduce air travel to cope with global warming and excess CO2. It's pretty unethical to fly more than a few times a year. CO2 injected into the upper atmosphere causes 2-3x warming vs ground level CO2 emissions.
- triangleman 9y agoI believe the spectrums of IR absorbed by CO2 are already fully saturated, so that there is very little effect, if any, of increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
- fulafel 9y agoYou're right, I misremembered. The 2-3x warming effect is due to other atmospheric effects ("radiative forcing") and nor direct effects of the emitted co2. End result is the same however - the same fossil fuel is much worse when used in air travel than on the ground.
- mrout 9y agoThat's just stupid. There's way more to be gained by restricting cattle and cars than planes.
- fulafel 9y agoWe have to it on many fronts, all the slices of the pie are small. Subdividing categories until you can say "this is too small to matter" is self deception. You just did it to the transportation sector :) Air travel is growing exponentially, trend needs to be reversed: http://reports.weforum.org/travel-and-tourism-competitiveness-report-2015/files/2015/05/fig1-1.4.png http://reports.weforum.org/travel-and-tourism-competitivenes...
- mrout 9y agoAir travel will slow down when tickets get more expensive as fuel costs rise as we reach peak oil.
- xexers 9y agoThe airport in Doha, Qatar is a silent airport. There were no announcements over the PA. It was an amazing experience! I find the PA systems to be an assault on my ears and I often wear ear plugs in airports and on planes. I'd prefer silent airports. I suppose that'd be great for the deaf but not so good for the blind.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoIt just won't matter for the deaf, right?
- lazyasciiart 9y agoIt will matter to the deaf in a good way, because the airport will be set up to ensure that all information is communicated without using audio.
- vermontdevil 9y agoExactly this. I've had to scramble and barely make to another gate when they announced a change without making any visual updates. I only caught on when I noticed everyone being gone. (I was reading a book at that time). I've had friends who missed flights because of these last minute changes. Even subscribing to text alerts is a hit or miss.
- adam_gyroscope 9y agoDisclaimer: 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 block on disk and disk space was precious, so every few bits (literally bits, not bytes) counted. Those constraints have persisted through the ages. Upthread someone wondered about disrupting this industry. It is expensive (there's a lot of moving parts) but it's basically engineering and integration, with the integration being the far harder part. For example, to participate in the airline networks (the networks that send messages to other airlines to handle cross-carrier booking, talking to GDSes, control departure, speak to DHS, etc) you need to understand the meaning of various airline protocol messages. These messages have unclear semantics; one airline may regard message A as meaning "create a ticket for this passenger" while another airline may regard the same message as "create a reservation for this passenger" which are two different things. The only way to know what these messages mean is to get on the phone with each airline and ask. The documentation is wrong and outdated; the meaning of those messages is the outcome they have to that specific airline and not anything else. Oh and the network connection you send these messages over is a VPN that you need to agree to setup with the carrier you want to talk to. Airline messaging is the reason most modern reservations system can only handle small airlines, since getting the semantics, routing, and other details of airline messaging requires too many humans and too many business relationships. Additionally, switching reservations system can kill an airline. Most airlines operate with a day or less of cash reserves so if the switch to a new res systems stops operation of the airline for any amount of time you could kill the airline. There's no incentive big enough to switch to a new res system since the rewards are not immediately revenue-impacting.
- ofek 9y agoAs a wheelchair user (Spinal Muscular Atrophy) I can tell you the article left out one of the worst things airlines do. From what I can tell, they offer crew absolutely no training on how to handle electric wheelchairs (very brittle and expensive). I've flown ~22 times in my life and 10 times they completely broke my chair; stripped joystick, tire came off twice, cut wires (how?), electronics fried by some unknown liquid, etc. This has happened with AA, United, AirTran, and Delta. edit: I should also mention that I even cover the chair in multiple layers of bubble wrap. I wish I could just bring my chair next to everyone else. The standard seats are difficult to sit in for long flights.
- Caligula 9y agoI am also in a electric chair. Flying is a terrifying process. My cringe seeing the luggage folks carrying the chair onto the conveyor belt. The worst part is that its not even bad that the chair breaks, its bad that at the destination your stuck immobile with a 300 pound device. I rarely travel for this reason. The other is that a attendant/family member is required to come or your not allowed on the flight. I accept this but it still sucks.
- tropo 9y agoThe non-disabled people have it bad enough. Consider being 7 feet tall. You may split your head or get a concussion at the door or from things that hang down. The seats are too small; you'll have to sit with legs folded up and knees by your chest. You can't stand up in the restroom. Consider being 4 feet tall. Your knees are on top of the seat. As your legs hang off the end of the seat, pressure on your upper calves is painful. You might be tempted to relieve the pain by kicking the seat in front of you. Consider being 500 pounds. Your neighbors will be terrified. You might actually injure them. It has happened, causing nerve damage. You might injure yourself.