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Me thinks you are quite right: back of the napkin math indicates the average flight carries 64.44 passengers. So just the Southwest flight cancellations strande
by Fezzik 4y ago
Me thinks you are quite right: back of the napkin math indicates the average flight carries 64.44 passengers. So just the Southwest flight cancellations stranded 347,976 passengers. That’s a lot of people to re-route.
- nanidin 4y agoSouthwest boards three groups of up to 60 passengers each. Every Southwest flight I have taken post-pandemic has been full. I’d bump that average up to the 120-180 range for Southwest flights this time of year.
- danaris 4y agoYeah, but they're not all in one place. If the US had a genuinely functional public transport system, I doubt there would be much problem finding seats for all or the vast majority of the stranded people on trains going to or near their destinations.
- telotortium 4y agoThere's 2 types of public transport: intra-city and inter-city. Intra-city doesn't serve the same use case as flying, and can't generally be repurposed to inter-city transport, so it should be discounted. If the US had inter-city rail that people actually used, then it would almost certainly be near capacity in a normal holiday season. Unless you assume there are a lot of extra train cars that aren't normally being used but could be taken out of storage, there's no way that it could absorb such a large influx of stranded passengers on short notice. Inter-city rail generally operates like airplanes in that only one ticket can be sold for each seat - there's no standing room on a multi-hour train ride.