5 ms·

Being fast was good for the customer too. Being able to show up a few minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart, buy a ticket, walk out on the tarmac, bo

Being fast was good for the customer too. Being able to show up a few minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart, buy a ticket, walk out on the tarmac, board, and take off is a far cry from modern air travel. The "bus" mentality, really worked in TX where the cities are close enough to have a lot of commerce/travel but far enough away that driving can take a considerable amount of time. Flight time between dallas->houston is an hour, driving is 3 hours. The problem is that with full planes, reliably buying a same day ticket is basically impossible. Add in parking/shuttles, security and and all the BS pushes the time in excess of 2 hours. Plus, its hard to guess at weather a few days out, so sometimes you know on the way to the airport that delays/etc are going to cause a flight to take longer than driving. The 5 minute faster boarding time on SW is no longer a customer service advantage when the customer has been waiting over an hour to board.

nickff 11y ago
The quick boarding and exiting times are important not because they provide a customer service advantage through convenience, but because they reduce the amount of time the aircraft spend on the ground. Time spent on the ground is basically waste from the perspective of the airline, and this is especially critical for short-haul routes where these delays add up to a significant portion of the aircraft's day. If the aircraft is flying 1 hour trips, and you can reduce turn time from 20 mins to 10, that means that the whole trip is reduced from 1hr20min to 1hr10min, which works out to a 12.5% shorter trip time for the given route. This means you can either transport 12.5% more people on this route with a given number of aircraft, service 12.5% more equivalent routes with these aircraft, or reduce your fleet size (and marginal costs) by 12.5%.
anovikov 11y ago
Down here in Europe it is still okay to call a taxi 1.5 hours before takeoff, get to the airport, buy a ticket and fly. Is American security checks system so inefficient? In Europe it normally takes maybe 10 minutes if you go the normal line or max 2 minutes if you go choose 5-10 euro fast track, plus 2 minutes to buy that fast track on a separate counter, which a bit sucks.
- superuser2 11y ago
  I don't fly much, but I've never spent more than 10 minutes waiting to be screened, 5 actually being screened. But it's really highly variable, and the downside to missing a flight is very high, so most people show up really early regardless. I gather it can be really bad at peak times.
  - astrodust 11y ago
    The security lines here, except very early in the morning, are typically 40 minutes, minimum. It's atrocious. The whole charade that taking off your shoes somehow makes people safer is insulting.
    - anovikov 11y ago
      In Europe they ask you to take off shoes only if they are suspecting something. Like, for <5% of people. I had an unlucky pair of shoes with steel parts which always beeped on the screening machine, so they always asked to take them off, but in no other case.
MCRed 11y ago
Looking at the issues you identified that reduced the advantage: - full planes (lack of supply) - parking/shuttles (airports are not efficient for the larger number of people traveling, and the very slow park-to-gate time that now exists, compared to the past) - security (this alone can add an hour and I doubt it ever adds less than 10 minutes) - "all the BS" - I'm reading this as lack of runway capacity, and generally mismanaged airports. All of those things are the result of government control over the airline industry. Security only serves the purpose of keeping people docile to the government (nothing like being porno scanned or molested to let you know whose really in charge!) and the government control allows for limitations on the number of gates, limitation on routes, etc keeping the planes full and capacity down (not enough gates, airports are not kept up to date like thy would if run by an organization that needed to keep its customers happy, etc.)

nickff 11y ago

The quick boarding and exiting times are important not because they provide a customer service advantage through convenience, but because they reduce the amount of time the aircraft spend on the ground. Time spent on the ground is basically waste from the perspective of the airline, and this is especially critical for short-haul routes where these delays add up to a significant portion of the aircraft's day. If the aircraft is flying 1 hour trips, and you can reduce turn time from 20 mins to 10, that means that the whole trip is reduced from 1hr20min to 1hr10min, which works out to a 12.5% shorter trip time for the given route. This means you can either transport 12.5% more people on this route with a given number of aircraft, service 12.5% more equivalent routes with these aircraft, or reduce your fleet size (and marginal costs) by 12.5%.

anovikov 11y ago

Down here in Europe it is still okay to call a taxi 1.5 hours before takeoff, get to the airport, buy a ticket and fly. Is American security checks system so inefficient? In Europe it normally takes maybe 10 minutes if you go the normal line or max 2 minutes if you go choose 5-10 euro fast track, plus 2 minutes to buy that fast track on a separate counter, which a bit sucks.

superuser2 11y ago
I don't fly much, but I've never spent more than 10 minutes waiting to be screened, 5 actually being screened. But it's really highly variable, and the downside to missing a flight is very high, so most people show up really early regardless. I gather it can be really bad at peak times.
- astrodust 11y ago
  The security lines here, except very early in the morning, are typically 40 minutes, minimum. It's atrocious. The whole charade that taking off your shoes somehow makes people safer is insulting.
  - anovikov 11y ago
    In Europe they ask you to take off shoes only if they are suspecting something. Like, for <5% of people. I had an unlucky pair of shoes with steel parts which always beeped on the screening machine, so they always asked to take them off, but in no other case.

MCRed 11y ago

Looking at the issues you identified that reduced the advantage: - full planes (lack of supply) - parking/shuttles (airports are not efficient for the larger number of people traveling, and the very slow park-to-gate time that now exists, compared to the past) - security (this alone can add an hour and I doubt it ever adds less than 10 minutes) - "all the BS" - I'm reading this as lack of runway capacity, and generally mismanaged airports. All of those things are the result of government control over the airline industry. Security only serves the purpose of keeping people docile to the government (nothing like being porno scanned or molested to let you know whose really in charge!) and the government control allows for limitations on the number of gates, limitation on routes, etc keeping the planes full and capacity down (not enough gates, airports are not kept up to date like thy would if run by an organization that needed to keep its customers happy, etc.)